Wallace Stegner and the Great Community

Wallace Stegner and the Great Community

Wendell Berry recalls receiving a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford in 1958 and preparing for it by reading Wallace Stegner’s early fiction. Stegner’s first novel impresses and intimidates him with its assurance, while the story collections become Berry’s first serious lessons in how a skilled writer uses the short-story form. Before they meet, Stegner has already become his teacher through example. At Stanford, Berry finds that Stegner is neither magisterial nor theatrical. Handsome, carefully dressed, reticent, and respectful, he speaks to students without performing for them. His manner reflects his belief that thought requires solitude, quiet, and the “great community of recorded human experience.” A teacher, in this view, does not proclaim final truth but leads students into a vast community where both teacher and student are liable to error. In the seminar, which includes Ernest Gaines, Ken Kesey, and Nancy Packer, Stegner listens closely as students discuss one another’s work and even accepts their criticism of his own writing. He offers praise where it is deserved, practical help where needed, and encouragement without flattery. His authority comes not from institutional rank or assertion but from authentic membership in the community of writers and thinkers. Berry especially remembers feeling ashamed of his own inability to work after believing he had finished a novel; Stegner’s unspoken expectation teaches him that excuses are of little use to a writer. Berry argues that Stegner’s teaching was valuable partly because it refused false assurances. He did not encourage students to imagine themselves already accomplished, prescribe a doctrine, or try to make “Stegnerians” of them. He concentrated on workmanship and the particular work before each writer. His restraint becomes, for Berry, a form of courtesy: toward the art, which must be learned and transmitted carefully, and toward students, who need help but must find their own ways. Though Stegner declines credit for former students’ achievements, Berry believes many owe him much, even if no exact measure of a teacher’s influence is possible. A teacher must work in faith; a student can offer only testimony. Berry’s sense of himself as Stegner’s student deepens after he leaves the university, teaches for a time in a large city, and returns with his family to his native Kentucky county. There he becomes a regional writer, learning the dangers of treating a region merely as raw material for literature and thereby reinforcing its exploitation by others. Living and writing within one’s own place demands greater care, loyalty, and watchfulness. This experience leads Berry to recognize Stegner as a writer who struggled similarly to live and write in his own region. In Wolf Willow and The Sound of Mountain Water, Stegner confronts the West’s history, literary history, fantasies, threats, and meanings. He becomes not merely a writer about the region but a defender of it against exploiters and destroyers. Berry praises his historical humility, his sense that memory and historical honesty are duties, and his refusal to condescend to his people or landscape through quaintness, fantasy, or picturesque stereotype. Stegner’s range, intelligence, and craftsmanship make him re-readable: his work yields new surprises in form, thought, and relevance as a reader’s experience grows. He avoids both the limitations of regionalism and the narrowness of idiosyncrasy, opening literary possibilities for younger writers in the West and elsewhere. Against metropolitan contempt for regional writers, exemplified by a newspaper’s dismissive misnaming of him as the “Dean of Western Writers,” Stegner stands as a westerner whose writings and civic acts faithfully represent his region. Berry most admires that he has done so without self-promotion, relying instead on the quality of his work and the integrity of his citizenship.

By Wendell Berry · First published 2019 · Genre: Literary Essay, Literary Criticism, Personal Essay · 3,945 words

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IN THE SPRING of 1958 I received notice that I had been given a Stegner Fellowship for the next school year at Stanford University. I assumed, properly enough, that I was going to be dealing with people my own age who would know a great deal more than I did. Clearly, I needed to prepare myself.

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literary criticism · American literature · environmentalism · conservation · community · place-based writing · rural life · Western United States · land ethics · regionalism · nature writing · cultural criticism

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