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Arthur De Wint Foote, the real-life counterpart of Oliver Ward in Angle of Repose.)
Stegner made a conscious effort to, in his words, “interpenetrate the past and present.” In several essays he has stated that his goal was to do for the West what Faulkner had done for Mississippi: discover “a usable continuity between the past and present.”
What hatched, after three years, was a novel about time, about cultural transplantation and change, about the relations of a man with his ancestors and descendants.
Because of his disease and because his wife has abandoned him, he has reached a major crisis point in his life. “It would be easy,” he thinks at one point in the novel, “to call it quits.” But he is a survivor,
His crisis leads him to the need to find a direction for his shattered life. That direction is provided by finding out about and trying to understand his grandparents,
Before I can say I am, I was.
Remember the one who wanted to know where you learned to handle so casually a technical term like “angle of repose”?
The angle of repose, or critical angle of repose,[1] of a granular material is the steepest angle of descent or dip relative to the horizontal plane to which a material can be piled without slumping. At this angle, the material on the slope face is on the verge of sliding. The angle of repose can range from 0° to 90°. The morphology of the material affects the angle of repose; smooth, rounded sand grains cannot be piled as steeply as can rough, interlocking sands. The angle of repose can also be affected by additions of solvents. If a small amount of water is able to bridge the gaps between particles, electrostatic attraction of the water to mineral surfaces will increase the angle of repose, and related quantities such as the soil strength.
And what a collapse is coming to that whited sepulcher of a reputation! Mene mene tekel upharsin.
Mene mene tekel upharsin.
Words written by a mysterious hand on the wall of Belshazzar's palace, and interpreted by Daniel as predicting the doom of the king and his dynasty. The incident is described as follows: Once when King Belshazzar was banqueting with his lords and drinking wine from the golden vessels of the Temple of Yhwh, a man's hand was seen writing on the wall certain mysterious words. Frightened by the apparition, the king ordered his astrologers to explain the inscription; but they were unable to read it. Daniel was then summoned to the royal palace; and the king promised him costly presents if he would decipher the inscription. Daniel read it "Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin" and explained it to mean that God had "numbered" the kingdom of Belshazzar and brought it to an end; that the king had been weighed and found wanting; and that his kingdom was divided and given to the Medes and Persians (Dan. v. 1-28).
I am impressed with how much of my grandparents’ life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships.
“I Love to See Her Slipping Down a Stair.”
“God damn, you kill me. How’d it really happen? Acthident?” “Bone disease.”
Lyman to Al
Susan Ward came West not to join a new society but to endure it, not to build anything but to enjoy a temporary experience and make it yield whatever instruction it contained.
It does not become a historian to smile.
Stimmung.
German: mood
When Oliver returned, Susan was still by the fire. She had been thinking unhappily how far out of the conversation Oliver was, just as he had been out of it during his one evening at the studio with Augusta and Thomas. How limitedly practical his talents were!
Freed from anxiety about her friend, Susan was more open to knowing her husband. She discovered in him unexpected capacities. He could make or fix anything from the broken handle of a carving knife to the sinking props under the veranda.
Without making anything of it, even being a little embarrassed by it, he could assemble a bouquet of wildflowers with a careless effectiveness that put her own most painstaking arrangements to shame. He had a touch with plants: everything he brought home from the woods grew as if it had only been awaiting the opportunity of their yard.
Georgiana Bruce,
Brook Farm
Brook Farm, also called the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education[4] or the Brook Farm Association for Industry and Education,[5] was a utopian experiment in communal living in the United States in the 1840s. It was founded by former Unitarian minister George Ripley and his wife Sophia Ripley at the Ellis Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts (9 miles outside of downtown Boston) in 1841 and was inspired in part by the ideals of Transcendentalism, a religious and cultural philosophy based in New England. Founded as a joint stock company, it promised its participants a portion of the profits from the farm in exchange for performing an equal share of the work. Brook Farmers believed that by sharing the workload, ample time would be available for leisure activities and intellectual pursuits.
She could not have bought a new pair of shoes since Brook Farm.
Brook Farm failed in 1848 following a fire that was designed as the residence of 45 residents. The utopian society was crippled by debt.
Mrs. Elliott bothered Susan because for all her ideas she was not genteel; she delighted Oliver because she was as odd as Dick’s hatband.
The West of my grandparents, I have to keep reminding others and myself, is the early West, the last home of the freeborn American. It is all owned in Boston and Philadelphia and New York and London.
Home is a notion that only the nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.
ohne Büstenhalter,
Bralzess
What bothers me is that Oliver thinks you’re better than he is, some sort of higher creature. He thinks what you do is more important than what he does. I don’t deny you’re special. You’re both special. But I’d hate to see you discourage him from doing what he’s special at, just so you can coddle some notions about dirt and culture. Do you follow me?”
He trusted people (Grandmother thought too much), he was loved by animals and children and liked by men, he had an uncomplicated ambition to leave the world a little better for his passage through it, and his notion of how to better it was to develop it for human use. I feel like telling him to forget Deadwood. There never was anything there for a man like him.
I suppose in a way we deserve the people we marry.
Almost before she had stopped screaming and pulling at his hard whip arm, she felt shame. It was his physical readiness, his unflusterable way of doing what was needed in a crisis, that she most respected in him: it made him different from the men she had known. In remembering the episode years later, she makes a veiled acknowledgment of the respect that at the time, upset and sulky, she begrudged.
He is the silent character in this cast, he did not defend himself when he thought he was wronged, and he left no novels, stories, drawings, or reminiscences to speak for him. I only assume what he felt, from knowing him as an old man. He never did less than the best he knew how. If that was not enough, if he felt criticism in the air, he put on his hat and walked out.
“Look at her picture,” I said. “What’s in that face? Hypocrisy? Dishonesty? Prudery? Timidity? Or discipline, self-control, modesty? Modesty, there’s a word 1970 can’t even conceive. Is that a woman I want to show making awkward love on a camp cot? Do you want to hear her erotic cries? Is that a woman to snicker at because she was a lady, and fastidious?”
I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can’t go home again.
My mother died when I was two, my father was a silent and difficult man: I grew up my grandparents’ child. As those things went in Grass Valley, I also grew up privileged, son of the superintendent of the Zodiac and grandson of the general manager. Every child I played with came from a family that worked for mine.
Instructing me, especially in moral matters, she used to shake me by the shoulders, slowly and earnestly, looking into my eyes. It was as if she were trying to yearn me into virtue, like Davy Crockett grinning a coon out of a tree.
Probably she nursed a secret conviction, which she would have suppressed as Unworthy, that in marrying Oliver Ward she had given up her chance to be anything more than the commercial illustrator she pretended she was. That sort of feeling would have grown as she felt her powers growing.
Mary Cassatt,
American artist. Known for paintings depicting the bond between mothers and children.
Isabel Archer
The protagonist of James' Portrait of a Lady.
One of the charming things about nineteenth-century America was its cultural patriotism–not jingoism, just patriotism, the feeling that no matter how colorful, exotic, and cultivated other countries might be, there was no place so ultimately right, so morally sound, so in tune with the hopeful future, as the U.S.A.
mozo
Boy
His eyes were on hers as if he were concentratedly bending something. “I just blurted it out,” he said. “I’m just a big green boy too honest for his own good. I’m not smart enough to play these poker games with grown men. I don’t know when to keep my mouth shut profitably.”
“Is it fate?” she said, more bitterly than she intended. “Is it just bad luck? What is it? Why are you always having to take a stand that hurts us or loses you your job? Doesn’t honesty ever get rewarded?”
It did not occur to her, apparently, though it occurs to me, that he was more frustrated and sore than she was, and mainly for her sake. She thought he was unfeeling.
“I never can keep Western places straight,” Augusta said. “Tombstone–really, what a name! Is that where Oliver is, too?” Her interest was false; she did not care where Oliver was. Susan read in her half-flippant exclamation every sort of half-contemptuous dismissal: anyone who was associated with the West, and in particular Oliver Ward, brought a new tone to Augusta’s voice, the tone she used for troublesome tradesmen, tedious women, boring men.
Ah. Augusta's words have painted her the bitch I thought she was.
She saw in his face that he had contracted the incurable Western disease. He had set his cross-hairs on the snowpeak of a vision, and there he would go, triangulating his way across a bone-dry future, dragging her and the children with him, until they all died of thirst. “I believe you’re confident,” she said. “I know I’m not.”
This was the place where for a while Grandfather had everything he had come West looking for-the freedom, the active outdoor life, the excitement of something mighty to be built.
It makes me melancholy to see him so youthful and girded with determination, ready to mount and ride off into the future more than eighty years ago.
The glowing campfire with rude humor painted The ruddy tints of health On haggard face, and form that drooped and fainted In the fierce race for wealth
From Dickens in Camp, Bret Harte
