Westward, Oh

The narrator, Lyman Ward (based on the New Humanist Norman Foerster), is a retired professor and amputee who has moved into his deceased grandparents’ home in Grand Valley, California, to study and write about their life. Ward retraces their meeting in New York and their early years at various mining camps across the West, and how their “union of opposites”—East and West, “a romantic and a realist,” woman and man—survived despite professional failures, miscommunication, and moral failings, and whether anything more than mere survival in marriage is possible.

The answer to that first question is a sometimes-fragile sense of duty informed by tradition. When Oliver Ward’s venture to build a dam and irrigate a section of western Idaho fails (like his other, earlier ventures), Susan is crushed by her sense that she has given up her home on the East Coast and the future of her children for nothing. When Susan loses a child because she was distracted by the amorous attentions of an employee who became a family friend, Oliver shuts his wife out from his life. The two remain married but live lives of “quiet desperation,” like particles on a slope at an angle that is just horizontal enough from them not to begin rolling downhill—an angle of repose.

Were the Wards a modern couple, they would have divorced; but convention—which is another word for civilization for Lyman—held them together. But what, if anything, could have restored their relationship, not just prevented it from dissolving? The answer to this question is not academic. Lyman’s own wife, we learn early in the novel, left him shortly after he had the lower half of his leg removed. She has betrayed him in a much deeper way than his grandmother betrayed his grandfather, and now, having been rejected by her lover, she wishes to see Lyman again. He refuses but also senses that he may wish to see her at some point. Early in the novel, Lyman admits that there is “too much of Grandfather in me.” After immersing himself in his grandparents’ lives, he sees that forgiving his wife in a way that his grandfather never forgave his grandmother may be the key for such a restoration.

“I lie wondering,” Lyman writes, “if I am man enough to be a bigger man than my grandfather.”

The marriage of Susan and Oliver Ward is a microcosm of an earlier America that Stegner contrasts with a 1960s version represented by Lyman Ward’s son, Rodman, and Ward’s assistant at the house, Shelly. Rodman is a progressive technocrat who believes in the power of data to explain and solve all of the world’s problems, and who looks with bemused condescension at his father’s interest in his obscure, mildly accomplished grandmother: “Rodman, like most sociologists and most of his generation, was born without the sense of history. To him it is only an aborted social science,” Lyman muses. He continues:

The allusion to the birth of Athena from the skull of Zeus, but also the birth of Sin from the head of Satan in Paradise Lost, is, of course, intended.

Unlike Rodman, Lyman’s assistant Shelly has no “blueprints” for a future society, but she is happy to support those of others. A moral relativist who thinks Lyman’s grandmother’s view of fidelity was a “hangup,” she considers joining a hippie camp that promises to create “a new sane healthy world within the shell of the old”—a world without marriages, money, property, or class distinction, and that does not pollute the environment.

The problem with such “beautiful thinking,” Lyman tells Shelly, is that it “ignores both history and human nature.” In cutting themselves off from history, rebels develop a delusional sense of their own importance, which leads them to miscalculate their chances of success. “Civilizations grow by agreements and accommodations and accretions,” Lyman tells Shelly, “not by repudiations. The rebels and the revolutionaries . . . [t]hey’re always trying to reclaim a tropical jungle with a sprinkling can full of weed killer. Civilizations grow and change and decline—they aren’t remade.”

What’s interesting here is that Lyman admits that revolutionaries are sometimes necessary to correct civilization’s errors to keep civilization healthy. He tells Shelly that such figures are sometimes “eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant, but they get swept down and absorbed.” Stegner makes a similar comment in his essay on “The Writer and the Concept of Adulthood.” The writer, Stegner remarks, is just as “responsible” as a priest or a public servant; the difference is that he is “responsible not to a tradition or a church or any sort of social stability and conformity, but to his personal vision of truth. . . . His vision and the integrity with which he pursues and promotes it are elements needed for a larger and more humane synthesis, which in the nature of things will again harden and will need once more the services of iconoclasts.”

The difference between the revolutionary and the writer, however, is that the former, in his pride and ignorance, aims to burn the old way to the ground, while the latter aims to correct it.

The other problem with revolutionaries, for Stegner, is that their historical ignorance cripples their ability to recognize the errors of the present and leads them to mistake any thwarting of desires as evil. We need “a sense of history,” Lyman writes, in order to know what you can’t do, “what you have to accept,” which can only be learned by studying the lives of others: “Somewhere, sometime,” Lyman writes, somebody taught Shelly “to question everything—though it might have been a good thing if he’d also taught her to question the act of questioning.”

Because of his high view of tradition, Wallace Stegner is sometimes labeled a conservative. One recent writer even called him “a visceral conservative.” But he was a classical liberal and a conservationist, committed to social justice. In 1945, Look magazine published a volume of photographs of minorities; Stegner provided the text. The point of the volume, according to the editors, was “to present an objective treatment of individual minorities” to counter “a growing wave of intolerance and prejudice” during World War II. The book is neither “reactionary nor radical,” the editors wrote, but “forthright, fact-finding, liberal.”

Stegner’s anecdotes of the lives of individual immigrants, and other religious and ethnic minorities, are largely that, even if also selected to demonstrate his argument that underlying “all our prejudice, racial or religious or cultural, is fear—the fear of being swamped, overrun, changed, or converted or diluted.” He writes of Jewish boys chased off a South Boston beach, Filipinos slapped for looking at a white woman, Japanese evacuated to detention camps, segregated African Americans lynched in the South. While it is easy to demonize Southerners for their racism, Stegner writes, “None of us is so different from . . . the unreconstructed Johnny Reb.”

The Mid-West burgher who will talk to you in the most liberal terms about the necessity of giving equal opportunities to Negroes, Mexicans, Filipinos, Chinese, or Japanese—and will vote the way he talks—may show a chink in his armor when Jews or Catholics are mentioned.

For Stegner, America does not have “a Negro problem” or “a Jewish problem” as much as it has “one national problem of how to integrate all our diverse cultures or peoples into one society.”

Prejudice, in other words, is a deep-seated evil, and Stegner’s problem with 1960s progressives—beyond misunderstanding all limitation as oppression—was that they were often unable to recognize their own capacity for evil. In the novel, both Rodman and Shelly view Lyman’s grandmother as a comic figure, mildly mocking her writing and her morals, unaware of their own mindless judgment of her as somehow inferior to them.

In the end, only Lyman Ward experiences some sort of enlightenment. Despite his physical limitations, his life seems much larger than the lives of either Rodman or Shelly. Lyman remarks at the beginning of the novel that “as a modern man and one-legged man, I can tell you that the conditions are similar. We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair.” But that doesn’t mean we are without hope. If we are to avoid complete self-destruction brought on by a callow and ultimately self-centered re-ordering of society according to “data” and power relations, we must begin by looking to the past which, if nothing else, offers a partial freedom from the limited choices and wrongheaded questions of the present.

Micah Mattix is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and associate professor of English at Regent University.