Stanford Today
Edition: March/April, 1996
Special Section: Creative Writing
WWW: Tending a Legacy

TENDING A LEGACY
Mary Page Stegner on Life & Work

By Diane Manuel

Up a long, narrow road, through a white gate, past a water tank that students built more than 50 years ago, the single-story home is settled on a hilltop with an expansive view. The walkway that leads past bordering pyracantha bushes is uneven, some might say lopsided.

It was here, on Sunday afternoons, that Wallace Stegner used to take a break from his writing to come out and putter, chipping away at the resistant ground and laying bricks, one by one.

“They’re pretty unprofessionally done,” says Mary Page Stegner, laughing. “I don’t know why Wally thought he could do it. And as he got older, he probably shouldn’t have.”

Three years after her husband’s death, Stegner continues to welcome visitors who come to talk about his literary legacy. For 59 years she intercepted his phone calls while he wrote, and edited his short stories while he waited nearby in his favorite Danish modern chair, and today she has assumed a new role with pride and good humor.

Mid-morning sun highlights Stegner’s delicate face as she leans into a comfortable semicircular sofa that has seen its share of upholsterers over the years. At her back, floor-to-ceiling windows provide a vista of distant hillsides dotted with madrone and dry grass. They are the hills where she and her husband rode horses with their son, Page, the hills Robert Frost loved to climb whenever he came West for a visit.

“Robert used to walk up and down over there,” Stegner says, pointing beyond the wooden deck that encircles a massive live oak. “He could never eat before his talks to students. He just walked, and then had a raw egg, beaten up.”

Katherine Anne Porter, Malcolm Cowley, Frank O’Connor and Bernard DeVoto numbered among the other literati of the day who were frequent house guests. And on weekend evenings, the Stegners regularly opened their doors to fellows from the Creative Writing Program who came for the bountiful food and conversation.

The Stegners had been wintering in Santa Barbara in 1945 when the accomplished 36-year-old author and Harvard professor was offered a position teaching fiction and American literature at Stanford.

“We came up and were interview-ed by people in the English department, and Wally decided not to return to Harvard,” Stegner recalls. “So we had a few of our furnishings packed up and sent out from Cambridge, and we never went back. I guess we were people who made up our minds pretty quickly.”

Wallace Stegner outlined several stipulations and the university agreed: He was to receive a full professorship with tenure, and a guarantee of no committee work and no morning classes.

“He always needed the mornings to write,” Stegner says. “I was here to answer the phone and take messages while he worked, and he would come in from his study about 11:30 to shower and shave and have lunch, and then tear down to Stanford for a 1 o’clock class.”

Within a year of his arrival, Wallace Stegner realized that the young GIs in his fiction-writing classes had stories that needed telling. At dinner one evening at the home of R. F. Jones, chair of the English department, he sat next to his boss’ brother, Edward H. Jones, a Greek scholar and physician.

“Ned and Wally got talking, and Wally told him these young men had lots to write, but they were married and some had children,” Stegner recalls. “He said they needed
a place where they could write and talk, like a coffee house in Europe.”

The conversation intrigued Jones, and he asked Stegner to send him a letter, spelling out exactly what he’d like to see in a program if he had the money.

“Wally didn’t know anything about Ned, but he wrote to him. And he very quickly got a letter back saying, ’Well, I would like to fund that.”

So was born the Creative Writing Program, with a $75,000 grant from the English chair’s brother, who also happened to be a Texas oil man.

Although many observers thought of it as a fellowship program for fiction writers, Stegner says her husband lobbied for funding to support poetry fellows, as well. They were taught by Yvor Winters, an exacting poet, critic and professor of American literature.

Mary Page Stegner, who had an interior decorating license, furnished the Jones Room in the library with a specially built oval table imported from Denmark. Twelve fellows could be accommodated around it, and the critiques quickly took on a distinctive energy.

The work of one or two fellows was discussed at each session, and Stegner says there were no taboos regarding subjects. Whenever her husband ran into a passage that made him blush, he simply asked the writer to read his or her own work.

“He often made the women in the program read their own writing out loud because some of them were quite profane and sexy,” she recalls. “I remember someone said to him once, ’Isn’t it embarrassing to have women in the class?’ And he said, ’You can’t embarrass these women.’”

The workshops were “a Socratic kind of class,” and Stegner says her husband often took in stories he was working on, to get his students’ responses.

But the Pulitzer Prize-winning chronicler of the American West valued his wife’s comments above all others, acknowledging in one published interview that she was “the only critic on earth who is both friendly and severe.”

A former West Coast editor for Houghton Mifflin publishers, Mary Page Stegner also had edited the annual O. Henry collection.

“I loved the short story form, but I found that my love for it vanished a bit after reading hundreds of them,” she recalls. “People would beg you to read their manuscripts, but then if you happened to have some criticism, it became difficult."

Stegner says she and her husband had known a lot of couples where both spouses were writers, and had seen the strains that were exerted on those marriages.

“Fortunately, I didn’t want to write. As the old saw goes, every good writer needs a good wife - or, nowadays, needs a good husband. You really have to have someone to protect you.”

So, while her husband worked in his studio in the mornings, Stegner polished Bach fugues at her Baldwin baby grand or practiced the violin, which she played for a number of years with the Stanford Symphony Orchestra.

“But whenever Wally was at a point where he wanted to have me read his work, I was always ready to drop whatever I was doing,” she recalls. “I didn’t say, ’Well, to-night or maybe tomorrow I’ll look at it.’

“I tried to be perfectly honest, and if I thought he had put an extra paragraph on the end of a story, I would just say, ’Do you think that’s a good thing?’ ”

Of her role as critic-in-waiting, she adds, “It was always best to ask a question, because that way there were no battles. We’d discuss it, and then he’d have to take care of it.”

After writing in the morning and teaching afternoon classes, her husband would devote the evenings to reading his students’ work, Stegner says. It was a schedule that, over time, began to take a toll on his creative energy, and when anti-war demonstrations swept the campus in 1971, he opted for early retirement.

“We were both opposed to the war - very much so - but Wally didn’t like the way students were trashing the campus, and he didn’t like the fact that they didn’t come to class. He decided he didn’t have to teach, and he said there was no point in teaching when people weren’t coming to class.”

In later years Wallace Stegner would be quoted as saying that “the Writing Program just kept me from writing.” In the 22 years following his retirement, he completed two of his best known works - Angle of Repose, which won the 1972 Pulitzer, and Spectator Bird, winner of the 1977 National Book Award. In 1987 he published his only novel set in academia, Crossing to Safety, which he considered his most personal work.

Today Mary Page Stegner is working her way through the boxes of letters that have arrived since her husband’s death, and responding to the many requests she gets for photographs and biographical material. She has been involved in the preparation of a biography of her husband that is scheduled for publication by Viking Penguin next fall, and she stays in touch with editors of two volumes of tributes that currently are being compiled by the Sierra Club, Stanford University Libraries and Yolla Bolly Press.

Stegner also carries on the work and financial support she and her husband provided to such groups as the Sierra Club and Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. Together the Stegners had rafted the Colorado River, camped under the vast Southwest sky and fought exploitation of the environment wherever they found it, including their Los Altos Hills backyard.

As she captains that legacy, tending the delicate cymbidiums that flower on her patio and keeping a sharp eye on developers in the surrounding hills, it’s clear there’s a firm hand still at the helm. ST