Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West.

• Author: Neuman, Janet C.

A MAN, A PLACE, A COMMUNITY OF WRITERS

In an essay entitled Hearing Silence Western Myth Reconsidered, Marilynne Robinson writes, "From my memory and my experience, I conclude that the true, abiding myth of the West is that there is an intense, continuous, and typically wordless conversation between attentive people and the landscape they inhabit, and that this can be the major business of a very rich life."(1) Lucky for us that the conversations between the western landscape and Wallace Stegner--indeed the business of a very rich life--were far from wordless. Stegner's last book a collection of non-fiction essays, takes us on a three-part tour of western writing. Although the essays contain little new material and reflect themes and subjects familiar to Stegner's fans, the collection is unique in that it brings together in a single place the elemental components of Stegner's attentive and articulate conversation with his landscape.

The collection begins with a section labeled Personal. It contains three close-to-the-bone essays that are the most revealing and heartfelt in the book, illuminating Stegner's own experience of the West. Then he moves on to Habitat, a collection of five essays describing the unique physical context of the West and reflecting on what the geography, climate, and history do to westerners' visions, expectations, and myths. The collection is rounded out with eight pieces grouped together under the heading of Witnesses. Three of these final eight essays explore Stegner's own sense of what it means to be a western writer, the other five delve into the work of others, further developing the theme that where you come from shapes who you are and what you have to say.

The title for this collection, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, comes from the same "hobo ballad" that gave the title to Stegner's first major work, The Big Rock Candy Mountain.(2) Stegner tells us that both titles represent the mirage, the fantasy, the dream of something-for-nothing that has so often been the lure of the West.(3) But he also acknowledges that underlying the mirage is an unquenchable optimism and incorribility of spirit(4) which in the end is what this collection, and Stegner himself, stand for.

In eulogizing Stegner after his death last April, University of Colorado law professor Charles Wilkinson called him "the greatest intellectual influence on the American West in the 20th Century."(5) Stegner's academic and literary awards and achievements were many, including a Pulitzer Prize for Angle of Repose(6) in 1972 and a National Book Award for Spectator Bird(7) in 1977. Dean of at least two generations of accomplished western writers, he founded and for many years directed the writing program at Stanford University.

Stegner's productive writing career lasted well over fifty years. It lasted from the years when, "there was a great deal about the West ... that was not getting into literature, or not finding responsive readers if it did,"(8) to a decade in which, it seems, no one can get enough of the West, whether it is western furniture or western literature. Long before the myth of the West started appearing in Better Homes and Gardens, long before Edward Abbey and John McPhee and Marc Reisner started writing about the ruination caused by excess in inhospitable terrain, Stegner was warning the West with forceful eloquence to slow down, set aside, and live sustainably. The essays in his last collection illuminate that message. In Where the Bluebird Sings, Stegner returns again and again to two familiar themes: first, that landscape unifies and informs the lives and literature of the American West; and second, that the western landscape is, after all, a dry and fragile place that cannot endlessly bear the insults of resource exploitation so characteristic of its history.

A Man

As we begin to read, the title's mirage is the furthest image from our minds. The first three essays are so clear, so alive, so perfectly rendered in their description and detail that we have no doubt about their absolute truth and veracity. it is hard to believe they were written some fifty years after the actual events they depict. But, as Stegner himself says in the first essay, Finding the Place: A Migrant Childhood, "[Those] years ... were the shaping years of my life. I have never forgotten a detail of them."(9)

Although the opening essay describes a migrant childhood full of moving around the West in search of his father's big chance, Stegner admits that what really shaped him were the nonmigratory periods, the longer pauses between the moves. These were the years from age five to eleven in Eastend, Saskatchewan and from twelve to twenty-one in Salt Lake City, Utah. In those two places he "stayed long enough to put down roots and develop associations and memories and friends and a degree of self-confidence."(10) In fact, he says that his years in Salt Lake were "the happiest years I ever knew or ever will know."(11)

Stegner tells us in exquisite detail how he grew up western, becoming attuned to the distance and space, the clear air, and the sharp smell of sage. Commenting that he has "never understood identity problems," Stegner explains that "there is something about exposure to that big country that not only tells an individual how small he is, but steadily tells him who he is."(12) In Letter, Much Too Late, Stegner also credits his mother with the resilience, grace, and strength to create a home and family in the face of her husband's constant movement. It is apparent that he believed that her emotional rootedness shaped the boy and eventually the man as surely as the physical facets of his western childhood.

Last in the personal essays is Crossing to Eden. Another gem, this essay is a short, finely wrought piece about a special spot in the Uinta Mountains of Utah. Again, the lucid evocation of ancient detail is breathtaking. We are in this place as if it were today, even though Stegner's visit was in 1923. This piece, aside from being a simple poem-like gift of beauty, is a variation on a favorite theme of Stegner's--the importance of preserving wilderness. After sharing with us the sensory pleasures of mountain air, bountiful trout, an ice-cold swimming hole, and an other-worldly view, he concludes that "[t]he best thing we have learned from nearly five hundred years of contact with the American wilderness is restraint, the...