Crossing to Safety
Bannon, Barbara A.
OLD-FASHIONED WAYS OF KNOWING CROSSING TO SAFETY Wallace Stegner Random House, $18.95, 277 pp. Barbara A. Bannon This is Wallace Stegner's first novel since Recapitulation in 1979 and it is...
...The Los Angeles Times gave him the Robert Kiroch Award in 1980 for his lifetime literary achievements...
...Sid's father despised anything but money-making but left him a fortune with which to achieve whatever he wanted...
...630 There are scenes of New England that make one want to take off immediately...
...Where Stegner is so convincing right from the beginning, is in giving us each of these four as individuals yet making perfectly clear the attraction that draws them all closer and closer as loving friends...
...Stegner writes of starry-eyed and pretty desperate young academics in the 1930s as if he had been one of them, and undoubtedly he was...
...As their relationship deepens, so does Sally and Larry's perception of the very real problems the other pair faces...
...Barbara A. Bannon This is Wallace Stegner's first novel since Recapitulation in 1979 and it is one of his finest and most moving...
...But before this we have had one brief introductory 1970s chapter that lets us know what life holds in store for them is not always what they had hoped for...
...Friendship has been a lonesome subject for a long time, yet could any of us really exist without it...
...Part of those literary achievements has been his career as a teacher of writing, during which he has helped countless young writers find their own talents...
...Charity, as her name suggests, comes from an old, deeply intellectual, but thoroughly warm-hearted New England family...
...When Stegner, who was born in Lake Mills, Iowa in 1909, writes about earnest, anxious, desperately caring, very young academics in the Depression years of the 1930s, he is obviously writing about something he experienced himself...
...Three of his short stories have won O. Henry prizes...
...His Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943) was a stunner...
...That sense of place is essential every step of the way here in terms of what it has brought into the lives of Charity and Sid, Sally and Larry...
...On the surface they have little in common...
...Under pressures such as these, bitter rivalries and feuds flourished even more, if possible, than they do in today's academia, and Stegner can be pretty funny about these, ruefully so, when he wants to be...
...Meeting in Madison, Wisconsin in the thirties, where Sid and Larry are on their first teaching assignments, Charity and Sally both pregnant, they begin the start of a deep, lifelong, loving friendship...
...Stegner dedicates the novel to his wife, editor Mary Page Stegner, "for more than a half century of love and friendship, and to the friends we were both blessed by...
...The jacket of Crossing to Safety displays a glorious picture of golden autumn leaves and a winding road...
...Yet it would be a mistake to try to personalize Crossing to Safety too much...
...Sally is an orphan of Greek background...
...Stegner began his own teaching career at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and that is where he introduces us to the young Sally and Larry, Charity and Sid...
...He knows how to let us see, little by little, however, as Sally and Larry perceive it, what the blight of Charity and Sid's marriage is, and what it will come to mean in time to all four of them...
...But his major characters, Charity and Sid, Sally and Larry (who narrates the story), however fictional they may be, are achingly real and very believable...
...It may tell you quite a lot about yourself...
...Stegner's first novel, Remembered Laughter-, was published in 1937...
...It is such an old-fashioned way of looking at things as to be downright iconoclastic...
...Not the least of this novel's interest is not only the fictional story it has to tell us, but what it tells us about Stegner himself...
...Also try, some day, examining the background of that friendship...
...Nor does he portray everything as wine and roses...
...What Stegner has dared to do is show us over the years how love grows and deepens between two husbands and wives from the Depression years of the 1930s to the early 1970s and how love grows and deepens, too, among the four of them as friends, with never a hint of either man lusting after the other's wife...
...There is a wonderful sequence on Florence, Italy, that could only have been written by someone who had known and loved the place enough to wake his wife up in the middle of the night, as Larry does, and carry her to the window to see the carrier en route to market...
...And it is marvelously conveyed by Stegner...
...However deep and enduring their loving friendship, Sally and Larry, Charity and Sid, are mortals...
...He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for Angle of Repose and the National Book Award in 1977 for The Spectator Bird...
...Larry, who comes from the Southwest, has no money at all, but he will make it first, selling a story to the Atlantic in his initial teaching year...
...Among his nonfiction has been The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard De Voto...
...A lot of things will happen here, but the most important of all remains Stegner's ability to keep us, his readers, caring...
...No one .could write a novel like this without drawing on deep personal experience...
...Just try...
...And it is going to find an awful lot of readers out there who will recognize joyously that there are other people besides themselves who value true friendship this deeply...
...All those pot luck suppers, the rallying around each other in childbirth, the growing fear as the time approached when contract renewals would or, more likely, would not be made, these must have been part of Stegner's own experience...
Vol. 114 • November 1987 • No. 19
