Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety is an extraordinary novel about the enduring friendship of 4 people over an extended period of time, a quartet of contrasting personalities who seem to compliment each others strengths & weaknesses to create an odd but memorable congruence.

It may not be Stegner's finest novel, that honor going to Angle of Repose but it is a book that has charmed me substantially over two very enjoyable readings & which involves 4 rather intelligent young people who meet while at the University of Wisconsin & form a bond that lasts a lifetime.


How many books include a kind of credo & then chart how it is lived up to over the years? Early on we learn that the two couples have sought to "leave a mark on the world", only to reflect many years later that "the world has left marks on us", with one member, Larry intoning...

Life chastened us so that we now walk on canes, or sit on porches, where once the juices flowed strongly and now feel old, inept & confused. All of us, I suppose could at least feel grateful that our lives have not turned out harmful or destructive.

I give headroom of a sort, for foolish & green & optimistic as I was, and lamely as I have limped the last miles of this marathon, I can't charge myself with real ill will. Nor Sally, nor Sid, nor Charity--any of our foursome. We made plenty of mistakes but we never tripped anybody to gain an advantage, or took illegal shortcuts when no judge was around. We have all jogged & panted it out the whole way.

Larry & Sally are said to have straggled into Madison as western orphans, where the Langs (Sally & Sid), from old-moneyed New England backgrounds, "adopted us into their numerous, rich, powerful, reassuring tribe, wandering into their orderly Newtonian universe, a couple of asteroids captured within their gravitational pull, fixing us into their orbit around themselves."


Within this idyllic foursome, the driving force is quite definitely Charity, someone with an almost supreme sense of order, acting as a martinet, at times almost like a drill sergeant, planning each day's calendar, including hikes, mixed-doubles tennis, card games & other social activities but always it seems with the complicity of the other 3 characters in Stegner's novel.

While Charity represents a most controversial figure, someone who is a commanding presence & very often the center of attention, the other 3 appear to fill in gaps in the personalities of each other, a group dynamic that is most interesting to watch unfold.

A dinner party becomes a place of reckoning, when after dinner, as coffee & brandy are served, Charity places a record on the phonograph, ordering the assembled to "all sit for a few minutes & just digest & listen!" When one member, Paul Ehrlich fails to do so, Charity bristles & mutters Shhhhhh! & he appears forever flushed from their small community of academics & their spouses, especially when after the quiet time, Charity calls for square dancing & the Ehrlichs decline to participate.

Later, Larry wonders if antisemitism in some residual way had anything to do with the ousting of the Ehrlichs. It is suggested that at this time English departments functioned as "high, serene lamaseries where the elect lived in both comfort & grace", provided of course that they took heed to play by the rules & observe the customs of the inbred community of scholars.

Over the course of 40 years together, it is said that these people are "a hangover from a quieter time who have been able to buy quiet & distance themselves from industrial ugliness." They are academics residing in New England, living a genteel life, living "behind university walls part of the year & in a green garden the rest of it."

For, in summer they continue to cluster together, sharing drinks & tennis, sailing, hiking & good books in Vermont. In describing the Langs, Charity & Sid, it is stated that:

Their intelligence & their civilized tradition protect them from most of the temptations, indiscretions, vulgarities & passionate errors that pester & perturb most people. They fascinate their children because they are so decent, so gracious, so compassionate & understanding & cultivated & well-meaning.

But they also baffle their children because in spite of being to most eyes an ideal couple, they are remote, unreliable, even harsh. They have missed something & they show it. Why? Because they are who they are. In nearly 40 years, neither has been able to change the other by so much as a punctuation mark. And, another consideration, a personal & troubling one, our lives have become so very twisted together but I am their friend and I respect & love both of them.

Stegner's novel mentions Cicero's De Amicitia (Concerning Friendship) on more than one occasion and Crossing to Safety, with an early tribute to a Robert Frost poem invoking the words "Crossed to Safety", is very much about the deeply connective bonds of friendship.

Beyond that however, it is the prose Wallace Stegner employs that cause this slow-moving narrative of transitions rather than transformations to be so memorable. Larry & Sally "hitched their wagons to the highest stars we could find" and for them, the bond of friendship with Charity & Sid Lang carried them along quite well. Indeed, one could do much worse.


It has been said by biographer Jackson Benson that Wallace Stegner's "greatest creation was himself, a good man who always did the best that he could, someone who cultivated the qualities of kindness, consideration & curiosity." These qualities come keenly alive in Crossing to Safety.

There are a few places where I feel the novel lags a bit, among them when the couples spend time together in Tuscany, with some prose that seems tedious, loaded with far too many references to obscure artists. In spite of a few reservations, I recommend the novel very highly to those who haven't already found their way to it.

*Within my review are 2 images of the author, Wallace Stegner, while the 3rd image near the end of the review includes Wallace & Mary Stegner with Phil & Peg Gray, close friends of the Stegners, the character of "Charity" in Crossing to Safety having been patterned after Peg Gray.

“I could give all to Time except – except
What I myself have held”
Robert Frost

Turn to the first page and there lies the first challenge in this book. What is that I have held that time cannot take away? My memories? My friendships? My relationships? My worthiness?

Rather than a continuous narrative, the novel is more like a memoir, an eclectic collection of memories. It is also allegedly semi-autobiographical. So how much of it is authentic? The characters seem pretty real and probably based on real people. The setting and the scenery are also so vivid and palpable, like my own memories yet I have never been there.

The story is encapsulated within a parenthesis, starting with the “worthy life” and ending with death.

But we all hoped, in whatever way our capacities permitted, to define and illustrate the worthy life. Followed by a summary of the “worthy life” of the four main characters: With me (Larry) it was always to be done in words; Sid too, though with less confidence. With Sally it was sympathy, human understanding, a tenderness toward human cussedness and frailty. And with Charity it was organization, order, action, assistance to the uncertain, and direction to the wavering.

Towards the end of the novel, there is a short exposition on death, where Stegner is possibly projecting his own views through Charity, on the nature and the meaning of death.

There’s no decent literature on how to die. There ought to be but there isn’t. Only a lot of religious gobbledygook about being gathered in to God, and a lot of biological talk about returning your elements to earth. The biological talk is all right,I believe it, but it doesn’t anything about what religion is talking about, the essential you, the conscious part of you, and it doesn’t teach you anything about how to make the transition from being to non-being.

It’s the fear of cancer that hurts, and there’s a whole library of palliative medicine that can help us over that.

It’s as natural as being born

I’ve had a wonderful life. I’ve loved every minute. (Probably Stegner. But then again not everyone is as fortunate. Some have less than wonderful lives.)

So I’m trying to do it right. So how do we die right?

There’s even a monarch butterfly which appears In the middle of Charity’s speech on death and seems rather symbolic.

As interesting as the themes may sound, the narrative events in the book are mundane and unexciting, except for one or two. How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Yet life, beauty and passion emanate from its pages, thanks to its core of four characters.

Sally was an angel and almost perfect. Charity was fascinating, larger than life, but flawed. She was a control freak, sometimes to the point of being fatuous. Yet Sally and Charity stuck together like twins despite their different backgrounds and personalities. Larry and Sid were more similar in personalities. Both had a kind of quiet strength, but the biggest difference between them was their response to Charity. Larry obviously had issues with Charity’s peremptory manner, although he was mostly gracious in submission. Charity got under Larry’s skin. She was both an irritant and a fixation. Sid, on the other hand, was completely under her thumb. She controlled him from beginning to end. His growth was somewhat stultified by that. His life was a paradox of being full yet unfulfilled. Still, there was a kind of magnanimity about him.

Every piece of fortune that enhances me seems to diminish him, though he never fails to warm me with his admiration. He makes me feel bigger and better than I am, and somehow, in the process, manages to lessen himself.

Apart from this quartet of friends being individuals, they also functioned as a pair of couples. Charity and Sid Lang were clearly the more fortunate couple with almost a Great Gatsby kind of feel. But there were undercurrents in their relationship, which kept them from having a more intimate and loving one like Sally and Larry Morgan. The two couples are extremely close. So close that Stegner saw the necessity to dispel the sexual tension. The possibility of a swinging relationship, or even same sex relationship, was laid out on the table and was immediately dismissed. So it is pretty clear that we are looking at pure friendship.

What I am sure of is that friendship-not love, friendship-is as possible between women as between men, and that in either case it is often stronger for not having to cross sexual picket lines. Sexuality and mistrust often go together, and both are incompatible with amicitia.

And there was the strong bond between the two couples. The more financially secure Langs, unhesitatingly and unreservedly provided for the Morgans.

In circumstances where smaller spirits might let envy corrode liking, they declare their generous pleasure in our company and our good luck…We have been invited into their lives, from which we will never be evicted, or evict ourselves.

There is a revisionist theory, one of those deep-psychology distortions or half-truths that crop up like toadstools whenever the emotions get infected by the mind, that says we hate worst those who have done the most for us. According to this belittling and demeaning theory, gratitude is a festering sore. Maybe it is, if it is insisted on. But instead of insisting on gratitude, the Langs insisted that their generosity was selfish, so how could we dislike them for it?

Another theme in the novel was about how plans are made in life but nothing is certain.

You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.

Stegner seems rather playful in this, his last novel, taking liberty in strewing his own thoughts throughout the book. There are numerous art references which I can’t help thinking that are his own interests. From poetry to literature, from music to art. He even has a cheeky passage on the art of fiction.

…you’ve got the wrong idea of what writers do. They don’t understand anymore than other people. They invent only plots they can resolve. They ask the questions they can answer. Those aren’t people that you see in books, those are constructs. Novels or biographies, it makes no difference. I couldn’t reproduce the real Sid and Charity Lang, much less explain them; and if I invented them, I would be falsifying something that I don’t want to falsify.
- I thought fiction was the art of making truth out of false materials.
- Sure. This would be making falsehood out of true materials.

Whatever the method, the novel is highly readable because of its honesty and authenticity.

Henry James says somewhere that if you have to make notes on how a thing has struck you, it probably hasn’t struck you.

Well, color me thunderstruck! and driven almost speechless by the beauty of this story. Yet I so much want to share with somebody else the experience, to pay it forward from that friend here who first brought the name of Wallace Stegner to my attention to the next reader who is yet unfamiliar with his work. This is the last published novel of the author and, understandably, it is about an artist looking back at a long and often difficult journey, trying to separate the fluff from the grain of wisdom, to single out what is important from what is trivial.

Leave a mark on the world. Instead, the world has left marks on us. We got older. Life chastened us so that now we lie waiting to die, or walk on canes, or sit on porches where once young juices flowed strongly, and feel old and inept and confused.

There are few positive things to be said about getting old. Time robs us of our health and energy, the things we can comfortably do get fewer and fewer. We can either get cranky, the ‘get-off-my-damn-lawn’ type of bitterness, or we can cross over into a more gentle landscape, one that I can only describe as ‘grace’ , a place of mental peace and kindness. I hesitated a little to use the term ‘grace’, since I am not a religious person by any metric, but this is simply the best single word description of what this amazing book is all about: perspective.

Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making, to be buried and eventually exposed again for the puzzlement of creatures of later eras. Seen in either geological or biological terms, we don’t warrant attention as individuals. One of us doesn’t differ that much from another, each generation repeats its parents, the works we build to outlast us are not much more enduring than anthills, and much less so than coral reefs.

Larry and Sally Morgan, Sid and Charity Lang : two young couples who meet in Madison, Wisconsin in 1937, in between an economic recession and a world war. The Morgans come from the West Coast, both orphans from poor families, both convinced that hard work will see them through the lean times. The Langs come from the East Coast, from old banking and academic families, educated in prestigious colleges, convinced they would bring the light of civilization to the still uncouth Midwest. They have in common their youth, their love of the written word and two temporary positions as teachers at the Madison university. Some unknown chemical reaction, some electrical spark takes place when they first meet. The two couples become instant friends, despite their different backgrounds.

And so, by circuitous and unpredictable routes, we converge toward midcontinent and meet in Madison, and are at once drawn together, braided and plaited into a friendship. It is a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds as in marriage or the family, it is held together by neither law nor property nor blood, there is no glue in it but mutual liking. It is therefore rare.

Rare and precious, this amicitia is described in glowing, charming details in flashbacks by Larry, the one who is about to become a successful novelist. It’s probable that the novel has autobiographical elements included, but I’m not really interested to separate fact from fiction in Larry’s account. I believe there is even an interview with Stegner where he dismisses such pursuits as futile. All fiction authors use and mold their personal experiences into something else, into something that preserves the emotion, the message and not the factual:

You break experience up into pieces, and you put them together in different combinations, new combinations, and some are real and some are not, some are documentary and some are imagined ... It takes a pedestrian and literal mind to be worried about which is true and which is not true. It’s all of it not true, and it’s all of it true.
[found it! in the afterword]

I am glad I remembered this interview, because one of the things that make this novel so special is the way Stegner breaks the fourth wall in order to discuss the art of the novel, the condition of the artist, culture in general in counterpoint with his discourse on de amicitia

Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what? Who appoints them as mouthpieces? If they appoint themselves, as they clearly do, how valid is the commission? If Time alone makes masterpieces, as Anatole France thought, then great writing is just trial and error tested by time, and if it’s that, then above all it has to be free, it has to flow from the gift, not from outside pressures.

or, in another place:

Beyond a basic minimum, money was not a goal we respected. But we all hoped, in whatever way our capacities permitted, to define and illustrate the worthy life. With me it was always to be done in words; Sid too, though with less confidence. With Sally it was sympathy, human understanding, a tenderness toward human cussedness or frailty. And with Charity it was organization, order, action, assistance to the uncertain, and direction to the wavering.

These are just two examples of the kind of debate Larry and Sid, Sally and Charity and the rest of their friends liked to discuss on moonlit walks on the campus or during impromptu parties of booze, classical music and philosophy. And there’s a gem like these, an aphorism or a debate point on every other page, making this novel one of those that you can pick from the shelf later, open at any page and let your mind fly off at a tangent. In the beginning, most of these flashbacks deal with youth, with expectations, with the desire to change the world for the better ( But Sid also loved books, had earnest, high-minded ideas and a passion for poetry, felt that each individual should try to leave the world a little better than he found it. ) . After Madison, and after several hard knocks that would have crumbled a less honest friendship, the scene moves to Vermont, an idyllic lakeside estate where additional themes of family ties, nature preservation and couple dynamics are introduced. The one thing that remains burning brightly on every page is the same amicitia

There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.

Beside being a novelist and a teacher of literature, Stegner was also an eminent conservationist, fighting to defend natural scenery from industrial, commercial and mass tourism exploitation. Unlike some other less accomplished writers who use a sledgehammer to drive their opinion home, he is subtle, even discreet, in his crusade, letting us experience the joy of forest track or starry sky above a quiet lake through the eyes of his characters. Yet their enchantment is unmistakable.

A dirt road, the road I walked this morning, burrows along the hillside under overhanging trees – sugar maple and red maple, hemlock, white birch and yellow birch and gray birch, beech, black spruce and red spruce, balsam fir, wild cherry, white ash, basswood, ironwood, tamarack, elm, poplar, here and there a young white pine. Being her mother’s daughter, survivor of many a hike with bird, flower, fern and tree books, Charity knows them all.

So we have here a beautiful friendship, peaceful landscape, stimulating conversation, ordinary people going about their ordinary lives, working hard at their jobs, sometimes successfully, but more often without recognition, dealing with family issues and personal trauma , fighting sometimes, drifting apart at other times, fitting in society instead of taking the world by storm. Is it enough to make a good novel out of their lives?

How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? Where are the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power? Where are the speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognize ourselves in fiction?

Larry, or Stegner, breaking that fourth wall again, eh? Indeed, as I find myself struggling to articulate my impressions, the things that are closest to your heart are the most difficult to talk or to write about, to strike the correct balance between self-pity and self-indulgence, to find the universal in the ordinary. ( Amicitia is a pure stream. Too many ppm’s of pity might make it undrinkable. ) . Which brings me back to the healing influence of Time, that flowing sand that rounds out our sharp edges and polishes our surfaces until they shine like gemstones, putting the spotlight on the important stuff.

We weren’t indifferent. We lived in our times, which were hard times. We had our interests, which were mainly literary and intellectual and only occasionally, inescapably, political. But what memory brings back from there is not politics, or the meagerness of living on a hundred and fifty dollars a month, or even the writing I was doing, but the details of friendship – parties, picnics, walks, midnight conversations, glimpses from the occasional unencumbered hours. Amicitia lasts better than res publica, and at least as well as ars poetica. Or so it seems now. What really illuminates those months is the faces of our friends.

There is a lot more to the novel than the bits and pieces I took out for my review here. Like I said before, pick any page, and you will probably find something worthy of a new discussion. There is also enough drama in the lives of the Morgans and the Langs to satisfy those readers who demand more titillating bits in their literature. I left these out in order to avoid major spoilers. I do want to make a couple more observations before closing up shop. One is about the role of art as the best ‘fossil’ to describe our society, our selves to future archeologists, as the universal language that disregards physical, racial or language borders and brings us closer together. It comes as the Morgans and the Langs take a one year sabbatical from university to visit Florence, that Renaissance extravaganza that still acts like a magnet to any true person of culture:

Anyone who reads, even one from the remote Southwest at the far end of an attenuated tradition, is to some extent a citizen of the world, and I had been a hungry reader all my life. I could not look up at the Arno without feelings of recognition, as if, somewhere off downstream, the river drained into the Rio Grande. I knew names, books, some of the art. I was myself the product of ideas that had been formulated right here.

Everything we think or feel today is probably not so different from what the men and women of sixteen century Tuscany experienced, and we will probably recognize it in the eyes of a figure from an old allegorical painting.

My second note is a very sharp and focused rebuke of the modern habit of assigning a hidden, repressed sexual drive to everything we do or read. I subscribe fully to the point of view expressed by Larry Morgan here:

We live as we can, we do what we must, and not everything goes by either Freudian or Victorian patterns. What I am sure of is that friendship – not love, friendship – is as possible between women as between men, and that in either case it is often stronger for not having to cross sexual picket lines.

And finally, instead of simply recommending the novel to you, I will wish everybody to have in their lives a friendship as beautiful, as true as the one captured within these pages.

Our hands were out the window, our necks craned for a last look at the people who above any other two on earth made us feel good, wanted, loved, important, and happy.

>>><<<>>><<<

Two Adams and two Eves, an improvement on God’s plan, and one I recommend to Him next time He makes a world.

This is a well written and very subdued story; there are no revelations or culminations.

It is about friendship and marriage over a lifetime and how it evolves, changes, and adjusts. The novel is very character based and concerns two different couples who become close friends. They are both very literary and they meet while teaching at a small college in the mid-west. Most of the settings, captured splendidly by the author, are either in the mid-west or at a lake in northern Vermont that is surrounded by lush forests, streams, and mountains.

The central theme would be the  controlling personality of Charity. She orchestrates the lives of the people surrounding her. For example, after dinner she promptly has a musical appreciation interlude where she has everyone listen to classical records. She is running the life of her spouse and becomes disappointed when the goals she has set for him have not been met. I found Charity obnoxious which is a tribute to the author’s ability to project this character type. I have met this type of personality (control freak) at times in my life and feel it is you who are responsible if you let others control your life and daily agenda.

One main issue I had with this story was children. When we first meet Charity and Sid at the beginning in the small mid-western town, they have two young children with one on the way. There is scene after scene of picnics, parties, and skating with our two main couples, but no children. It is like the author made the children invisible, like a background prop. I believe the author was unable to incorporate the children’s lives into his story. This happens over and over again in the narrative with children way off in the distance. I was left wondering if these people ever did anything with their kids! Given that the story is very realistic it is a failure on the authors part to weave the lives of the children of the two main couples into the story.

Does it seem ironic that a book I’ve awarded a full pentad of stars is also the cause of great frustration? Not when I tell you that my problem has nothing to do with the novel itself, but rather in conjuring the right words to do it justice. You see every account I run through my head makes it sound more boring than it is. I guess I should just start by telling you it’s about two couples who met during the Great Depression. Sid and Charity Lang live well on inherited wealth. Larry and Sally Morgan struggle in comparison, but have inviting prospects in the groves of academe. While Larry and Sid were junior colleagues in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin, their wives met at a mixer that led to the alliance. Despite the generally hard times, the two couples shared lots of laughs and slathered layers of glue on to their friendship. Hard knocks ensued and health became an issue, yet the ties stayed intact. But nothing much happened you’d call sensational. In fact, the dearth of drama was something that Larry himself hit upon early in his narration:
n  

How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? Where are the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power? Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognize ourselves in fiction?

n
But would a failure by those measures be so bad? I’m lucky in that most of the people I spend time with are pretty fully evolved. (That includes GR friends, I say in the least unctuous tone possible.) Their deviations from the norm are more subtle, and all the more fascinating for how well I can imagine them playing out in my own outwardly conventional world. Stegner was a master observer of more nuanced traits. When he profiled characters (as was the case in about 90% of this book), depth was a foregone conclusion. Charity, with her outsized personality, was the natural ringleader. Larry was the most accomplished, and in his role as narrator, the closest to all-knowing. Sally had the oldest soul, the most empathy, and the biggest shoulders for a heavy load. Sid, the wealthy scion, turned out to be the most conflicted – a would-be poet and dreamer sometimes at odds with Charity’s agenda and will.

I’m hardly a Stegner expert with this being only my second sampling (Angle of Repose being the first), but he strikes me as the wise litterateur who makes most other writers look bush-league in comparison. Every page has a reminder that his wording is superior, that his insights are better written and, for that matter, better conceived. Here are a few short examples to illustrate the writing and to hint at the thematic core.

Larry, having been dealt another blow:

n  Accept? I get tired of accepting. I'm tired of hearing the Lord shapes the back to the burden.n

Tenure hopefuls sharing a bit of dark humor:

n  You hear what the dean said about Jesus Christ? Sure He's a good teacher, but what's He published?n

I can’t remember which character said this, but figure it might as well have been Stegner himself:

n  Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn a man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else -- pathway to the stars, maybe.n

And another one that could have come directly from Stegner, maybe from a master class in writing:

n  Drama demands the reversal of expectation, but in such a way that the first surprise is followed by an immediate recognition of inevitability. And inevitability takes careful pin-setting.n

Speaking of writing classes, Stegner was evidently very good as a teacher. Students such as Wendell Berry, Larry McMurtry, Thomas McGuane, Ken Kesey and Raymond Carver speak to that. I always wonder, though, if Lesson #1 is to first become brilliant. In a way it doesn’t matter, craftsmanship vs. innate intellect, since to me Stegner had both. And speaking of pin-setting, the closing scenes he built towards featured plenty of drama even if most of it was subcutaneous.

This was the last book Stegner wrote, published at the age of 78. It was paced well at 368 pages, but I’d have happily read more had he cared to stretch it into an epic. The span of history was wide, from their early days in Madison to their elder years at the Langs’ summer home in Vermont. But most of the intervening decades were skipped. Maybe Stegner’s time and energy for a longer book were running out. Besides, he likely said all he intended to say as it was. It made me think that part of the wisdom we gain as we age comes in recognizing what truly matters: the people around us and the ways we connect. This book was a great paean to mature realizations.

Since I finished reading this book about three weeks ago, I've thought a lot about what its central subject actually is. The friendship between two married couples, with different expectations and backgrounds, over decades is certainly there. But in a sense it feels as though that is the surface, and that there are deeper, less obviously expressed themes throughout the book.

One, it seems to me, is a slow examination of what makes up charity. The dominant female character is Charity, wife of easy going Sid, mother of many children (6?), driving force in all their lives. Charity bubbles with friendliness and generosity when she and Sid meet Larry and Sally, and intervenes to make their lives easier in hard times, always pushing aside thanks.

But she is ruthless in her determination to get her own way, especially controlling of Sid and her family. She is vital, vibrant, wilful. Not kind, which to me must be part of charity. There's no evident warmth in her relationship with her children, we don't see her with them, although having a large family is one of the things she says as a young wife that is most important to her.

Late in the book, the husband of one of Charity and Sid's daughters refers to Sid as being a captive husband, and we are led to see that the husbands are all captive to their wives in some way, Sid from unwillingness to stand against Charity; Larry because his crippled wife, Sally, depends on him. Poor Sally is made to suffer not only a terrible child birth, but polio that leaves her crippled and in irons. The love between Larry and Sally is much gentler, and sustains them both despite their losses and deprivations.

I'm not sure why the terrible child birth is inflicted on Sally as well as the polio. It seemed very unfair, and unnecessary, to give her a double whammy like that. Polio alone establishes her as dependent, though her determination to live a good and loving life give her such strength that it's clear she wouldn't want to be classified as a victim.

Stegner said at some stage that hard writing makes easy reading. Every word is chosen and placed with care, and stylistically I agree that this is easy reading. But this story of people who live unspectacular lives, is also hard to read.

Again, to quote Stegner: 'Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus'. In Crossing to Safety we live with the characters as they acquire their scar tissue, right till the very end.

We had an excellent book club discussion, one of the best.

Obit for Stegner at:
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/15/obi...

I'm so very glad to have been introduced to the writing of Wallace Stegner (by a remark in Dani Shapiro's latest book, Inheritance, citing Stegner's novel Crossing to Safety as one of her favourite pieces of writing). After reading this novel, I see exactly what she means. What an incredible story about love and friendship! And all done with a delicate and refined touch that is so carefully attuned to the nuances of human feeling. I am now hankering after another Stegner novel--but which one should I tackle? Not a bad problem to have...

"Кто смеясь, кто улыбаясь, кто преисполняясь чувством превосходства, мы подошли к двери."

Иду в ногу с отечественным книгоизданием: прочла роман Уоллеса Стегнера "Останется при мне", пер. Л. Мотылева.
Я сразу скажу, что мне и "Стоунера" читать было невыносимо, но сравнения с ним меня вымораживают: "Стоунер" ужасно печальный, но идеально сделанный текст про несчастных юродивых, а здесь какое-то месиво, а не роман; извините.

Номинально это campus novel: пожилой преподаватель (успешный литератор) и его жена (больна) едут в гости к такой же пожилой семейной паре (он - неуспешный литератор и успешный педагог, она - тоже больна, но до сих пор крайне авторитарна и амбициозна), с которой они on and off дружили с университетских времен. Профессор довольно кстати вспоминает, как они все познакомились, как тусили, как рожали детей и публикации, строили домашний очаг и ходили в поход. Ненадежный рассказчик, масса мутных чужих воспоминаний ("вот, значит, как я представляю себе, как она познакомила его с родителями", штооо это вообще) и классических пересказов пропущенных десятилетий в диалогах за чашкой чая, кругом ошметки жизней, академических карьер и красивых пейзажей. Жена профессора, как я уже говорила, больна; первую половину книги проницательный читатель прилежно ждет Большого События, Перевернувшего Нашу Жизнь и Сломавшего Нашу Дружбу, и, в целом, дождется, но роман все равно не об этом. И я затрудняюсь сформулировать, о чем.

Я честно прочитала аннотацию, что отчасти это история про женские архетипы - одна нежная, другая заноза в заднице, и что, мол, автору повезло с женой, которая сочетает оба этих качества, а вот его героям приходится мучиться, для чистоты литературного эксперимента. Ну, допустим. Но все равно этому тексту очень не хватает продуманного центрального стержня, которое бы собирало эти вкрадчивые живописные сценки в что-то, похожее на устойчивое здание, а не на пирамидку, которую мой сын построил из всех самых любимых игрушек, а потом радостно расхерачил двумя руками.

Возможно, автор нарочно наимпрессионистил нам красивого; меня, должна признаться, дико бесил русский перевод, сильно мешавший сосредоточиться на былом и думах. По одной только сцене похода, без шуток восхитительной (ненавижу походы!), видно, что писатель Стегнер очень даже, но общее впечатление -- "ой, роман сдавать через три месяца, а у меня столько мыслей накопилось".

UPDATE: I just completed a re-read of this marvelous novel. It lived up to everything I had experienced in it the first time around. What a remarkable writer. Still want to give it more than 5 stars.

When I closed this book and laid it aside, my hand was shaking. The shaking was coming from deep inside my body and soul, where Wallace Stegner had infused me with words and images that caused me to tremble with recognition.

Stegner understands relationships and he also understands the part of the individual that is never given away to anyone else. He paints that so clearly that you see yourself in it as if it were a mirror. If you cannot see elements of your own marriage in this portrait, you can surely see elements of the marriages you have observed up-close and personal. If you have ever had a friend who lifted you and held you when you would have otherwise fallen, and felt the obligations that accompany such a love, you will recognize that friendship as well. You can feel the bond and the tense pull against it equally.

Lastly, Stegner understands time, inevitability, fate. He sees the struggle and recognizes it as belonging to each of us.

“You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. but within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.”

As organized and controlling as Charity is, she cannot control death or any of what will come after. It is the ultimate fallacy that she believes until the end that she has done that. At the end of this tale, what I know for sure is that Sid will survive and he will have to make his own decisions over which Charity can no longer exercise control. And in doing that, he will feel both his loss of her and his freedom from her in equal measure.

Stegner prefaces his book with a quotation from Robert Frost’s poem, I Could Give All to Time. It provides him with a title for his book, but more than that, it echoes its theme. The things in life that are most precious to us are the intangibles, the things we can barely identify ourselves, and the things no one can possibly rip from us.

I could give all to Time except – except
What I myself have held. But why declare
The things forbidden that while the Customs slept
I have crossed to Safety with? For I am There,
And what I would not part with I have kept.

I spent several hours reading and re-reading this poem today, and wondering why I never sat with it before, to digest and devour it, but only admired it in passing, with Frost always being such a favorite poet of mine.

I find it difficult to put into words the impact this novel had on me as I read it. I loved every single, carefully chosen, word. I walked the hills of Vermont, danced to the late night records, felt the intensity of the love between these people, and understood the relationships they had forged, in ways that boggled my own mind. It is an immediate addition to the “favorites” folder. I strongly recommend it to any and all readers.

My sincere thanks to Elyse who put this wonderful author on my radar. I cannot wait to read Angle of Repose!

This was a tad too far on the wholesome side for me.  I was expecting it to be a quiet novel, but there was little there into which to sink my fangs.  Not even the hint of a bad egg.  Rating is based on my own taste preferences, nothing more.  The writing is wonderful.  Family and friends, these are the people with whom you live your life.  Make the most of it.

Una novela maravillosa. Sin tener nada que ver ni por temática ni por estilo, me ha fascinado de la misma manera inexplicable que lo hizo Stoner, el famoso libro de John Williams. Con una exquisita sencillez, ambos autores consiguen conferir a unas vidas sin especial atractivo ese encanto extraordinario que las convierte en el objeto de un relato conmovedor e inolvidable.

La novela es la insuperable respuesta a una pregunta que el propio autor se hace:

n   “¿Cómo hacer un libro que cualquiera quiera leer a partir de unas vidas tan apacibles como éstas? ¿Dónde ésta la vida de lujos y despilfarros ostentosos, la violencia, el sexo retorcido, los deseos de muerte? ¿Dónde los odios, las ambiciones políticas, la sed de poder? ¿Dónde la velocidad, el ruido, la fealdad, todo lo que nos hace quienes somos y nos hace reconocernos en la literatura?” n

“En lugar seguro” es una reflexión sobre la escritura y el arte, una exaltación de la cultura y la naturaleza, un precioso canto a la amistad, al poder de la voluntad, al trabajo. Una historia sobre cuatro personas buenas y generosas que, equivocadas o no, nunca pretendieron hacer ningún mal y sí buscar la felicidad de los que los rodeaban. Cuatro personas que llegaron a vivir en un paraíso como dos Evas y dos Adanes y en el que no faltó ni la serpiente ni la expulsión.

n   “(la amistad) Es una relación que no tiene una forma establecida, no hay lazos ni obligaciones, como en el matrimonio o la familia, y no son la ley, ni la propiedad, ni la sangre quienes sostienen la unión; no hay en ella más adhesivo que el aprecio mutuo.” n

El eje de la novela es Charity, una de esas mujeres fuertes y decididas que le tocó vivir una época en la que las de su sexo tenían muy difícil (más) desarrollar su potencial. En vez de eso, Charity erigió su reino matriarcal desde el que dirigió la vida de cuantos la rodeaban viviendo vicariamente de los éxitos profesionales de Sid, su obediente y dependiente marido que, obligado por su mujer a abandonar sus pretensiones artísticas, no consiguió estar a la altura requerida en el mundo académico que le fue adjudicado. También Larry vivió una vida dedicada a su mujer, Sally, después de que esta contrajera la polio (una enfermedad que debería bastar para enterrar, metafóricamente hablando, claro, a todos y a cada uno de los antivacunas que por ahí pululan). Aun así, con mucho esfuerzo y trabajo consiguió cierto éxito tanto en su labor editorial como en su oficio de escritor.

n   “Sospecho que lo que tanto hace enfadar a los hedonistas cuando piensan en los entusiastas del trabajo es que, sin drogas ni orgías, las personas que alcanzan sus metas nos lo pasamos mejor.” n

No es esta una historia de dolor y sacrificio, todo lo contrario. Habla de pactos y alianzas, de conciliaciones y adaptaciones, de comprensión y paciencia, pero, sobre todo, de un amor que prevalece gracias al respeto y la admiración que todos se tienen y al enriquecimiento que tales relaciones supone para sus propias vidas por encima de cualquier defecto, dolor o circunstancia adversa.

Una gran novela.

The stars I gave this book are for the writing quality. It is very good writing. The author was very good at metaphor, and a carrying the metaphor throughout the book. I also like his blunt analogies.

The author paints a picture by jumping from present to past, to not-so-far in the past, back to the further-back past, back to the present, etc. It's kind of interesting. I'm not sure I like it, but I guess I don't hate it either.

The story itself, was kind of boring. I'm not even sure what the book is about, exactly. Yes, it's about the relationships of two couples, but nothing really happens in the book. Even at the end. The book doesn't really have an ending, and only has a very limited amount of resolution. The resolution that is there only resolves an issue that was brought up in the last chapter.

There were also a few pieces of the story that were left out or never explained. I suppose the author did it on purpose but I couldn't figure out his reason.