Crossing To Safety by Wallace Stegner (1987)

In the space of one day, narrator Larry Morgan tells a story of the history of friendship and marriage. The main characters are Morgan, his wife Sally, and Sid and Charity Lang. The novel moves from the present through the past in a long series of remembrances. As the story opens, Larry and Sally, now in their late 60s, have arrived at the Lang's Vermont retreat, Battell Pond. They have come from their home in New Mexico to see their close friends Sid and Charity, who is dying of cancer. As the Morgans settle in for the night in one of the guest cabins, Larry as narrator takes us back to the beginnings of this great friendship, which began in Madison, Wisconsin, during the Depression. From this point, the novel moves between the present day and the past, and using the relationship of the Langs and the Morgans, Stegner defines the value of long friendship and the tribulations and the blessings of love over time.

Biography of Wallace Stegner

Wallace Stegner was born in 1909 and died in 1993. He traveled much of his youth throughout the American and Canadian West, and many of his works contain autobiographical aspects of his early family life and childhood. He also has written histories of the northern plains, biographies, and various essays. He attended the University of Utah and Harvard, and in 1945, he became Director of the Stanford Writing Project, a position he held for twenty years and which, under his influence, turned out many important writers. He garnered many awards and recognition for his work over the years, but his crowning achievement was winning the Pulitzer Prize for Literature with his novel Angle of Repose in 1971. All his life he was politically and socially active in environmental conservation, especially in the American West.

About his novel Crossing To Safety, he says

I wrote it as sort of a memoir more for Mary [Stegner's wife] and myself than for anything else, and I wasn't at all sure I was ever going to publish it. Those people were our very close friends, and at the same time they had some problems which were very personal; and an honest portrait of them as honest as I could make it… But it was, really, in a way that no book of mine has ever been, an attempt to tell the absolute, unvarnished truth about other people and myself. Inevitably I found myself inventing scenes and suppressing things, and bringing things forward in order to make the story work because I guess my habits are incorrigible; but my intention, at least, was the utter, unvarnished truth… And also, I suppose, I had the muleheaded notion that it ought to be possible to make books out of something less than loud sensation. I was trying to make very small noises and to make them thoughtful… (Stegner: Conversations on History and Literature by Wallace Stegner and Richard W. Etulain, xi-xii)

Book discussion questions for Crossing to Safety

1. What is the meaning of the title, Crossing To Safety?
2. This is a story of four people and their relationships. Discuss each main character (Larry, Sally, Sid, and Charity) and their various relationships with each other.
3. On page 250 (Penguin edition), Sally says, "youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness." Discuss her words in terms of the characters in the novel aging. What about in terms of your own life?
4. Charity explains her dying with Sid, Larry, and Sally. "Dying's an important event," she said. "You can't rehearse it. All you can do is try to prepare yourself and others. You can try to do it right" (290). Discuss these ideas in terms of Charity's need to control things and also in terms of your own perceptions of dying.
5. Near the end of the novel, Larry thinks the following, "If we could have foreseen the future during those good days in Madison where all this began, we might not have had the nerve to venture into it" (340). Consider this thought, and then read from page 339 to the end of the book and discuss your ideas about the relationships in the novel and also about your own life and relationships.

Web Sites

• Central Washington University Geography and Land Studies – contains biography, list of works, critical assessment, and links to other Web resources.
  http://www.cwu.edu/~geograph/wallacestegner.html
• Montana State University, Bozeman, Department of History and Philosophy - includes brief biography, bibliography, and quotes.
  http://www.montana.edu/stegner/
• Tribute to Stegner which appeared in High Country News shortly after his death.
  http://www.hcn.org/1993/may03/dir/profile.html
• Stanford Today Online, March/April 1996, “Tending a Legacy: Mary Page Stegner on Life and Work” – speaks of Stegner’s home and academic life.
  http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/stanfordtoday/ed/9603/9603mps01.html

For further information about Stegner, read:

• Wallace Stegner; His Life and Work by Jackson J. Benson (1996, Viking Books; ISBN: 0670862223)
• Stegner: Conversations on History and Literature by Wallace Stegner and Richard W. Etulain (1996, U. of Nevada Press; ISBN: 0874172748)

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House of Splendid Isolation by Edna O'Brien (1995)

Set in modern, strife-torn Ireland, the novel examines relationships through war on several levels. Most obviously is the ongoing conflict of the IRA and terrorism, which is, in a basic form, aimed at freeing Ireland from the controls of England. The other war is much more personal, as O'Brien notes, "a war of the heart." The protagonist Josie O'Meara is an elderly lady living in her large and lonely house in the country. She has survived her husband who was killed in IRA fighting. Through flashbacks, we learn that her husband was a violent and cruel man. We learn also that over the years of their marriage, she slowly managed to gain and maintain some degree of self-respect and hence survival. The novel centers around IRA terrorist McGeevy who hides in Josie's house. When he breaks in and informs her that he will be hiding out, she is aware of two conflicting emotions—she is fearful of the terrorist, yet she is emboldened by his presence. Between them develops a deep understanding of life, loss, and purpose.

Biography of Edna O’Brien

Edna O'Brien was born in western Ireland in 1936 in a rural Catholic farming community. In 1952 she moved to London where she raised her two sons. Since 1986 she has taught creative writing at City College of the City University of New York. She is a recognized writer, receiving the Kingsley Amis Award (1962) and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (1990). O'Brien has written over twenty works (novels and short story collections) including Johnny I Hardly Knew You (1977), The High Road (1988), The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue (1989), Time and Tide (1990), House of Splendid Isolation (1995), and most recently the novel Down by the River (1997). Among her half-dozen collections of stories are A Scandalous Woman (1974), A Fanatic Heart (1984), and Lantern Slides (1990). She has also written stories for juveniles, stage plays, television plays, and screenplays, and has been a contributor to magazines such as the New Yorker, the Ladies' Home Journal, and Cosmopolitan.

About her writing about war (in the house, land, heart) in her novel, House of Splendid Isolation, she says,

I certainly think they're [the Irish] more turbulent. They're more turbulent by disposition and by language. And their history has made them suffer a hell of a lot. I have written about strife between mother and child, between husband and wife, and, in "House of Splendid Isolation," between two parts of the same country.

An IRA man told me once, "When you're shooting, you don't feel. But when you've shot him, you do feel, because half of you hopes you got him, and the other half hopes you didn't. Because we're all Irish under the skin." That to me was a story about war.

War, whether it's between man and woman, or different parts of a country, or different nations, is always, always more complicated than just the two sides. It is that I want to write about. It's the dilemma and conflict within the obvious dilemma that matters. It would be impossible for a writer with any awareness at all about the human psyche and the human condition not to write about wars, whatever locale they are. Because people do disagree with each other; they do sometimes forgive one another, and then they re-disagree with one another. Life is not a placid pool; it's a raging, storming sea, which we're all in. And maybe I, being from the race I am, pay more attention to that than to the gentler aspects. But then, that's my fate. (http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/olv2n3.html)

I do not see into male sensibility as clearly as into female. This is not unusual; very few writers have made the gender leap, with the exception of Rabelais, Joyce, Flaubert, and Tolstoy, who indeed wrote as convincingly about women as about men. No woman writer has achieved that. In the case of House of Splendid Isolation, I wanted to write about an IRA soldier, not from perceived opinion of him, but to explore his thinking, rationale, conflict, ruthlessness vs. idealism, etc. and for this I saw many prisoners who talked to me openly. The character of McGeevy is more rounded, complex, and probably truthful than any of my former male characters. (http://www.bookwire.com/HMR/Review/tobrien.html)

Book discussion questions for House of Splendid Isolation

1. What is the IRA? O'Brien makes reference to 1916 several times throughout the novel in connection with the Irish Nationalism. What is the significance of this date and the events that took place?
2. Describe the relationship of Josie and her husband, James. How did he die?
3. Why does McGeevy act as he does toward Josie after he breaks in? Why does he save her when she has gotten lost in the fog? Why does he come back to her house at the end?
4. Describe Josie's feelings about McGeevy and about the IRA.
5. On page 232 (Penguin edition), O'Brien writes,
   

   But to be close in body or bayonet is not enough. To go in, within, is the bloodiest journey of all. Inside, you get to know—that the same blood and the same tears drop from the enemy as from the self, though not always in the same proportion. To go right into the heart of the hate and the wrong and to sup from it and to be supped. It does not say that in the books. That is the future knowledge. The knowledge that is to be.

   Discuss this passage in terms of Josie and James' relationship, McGeevy's and Josie's relationship, and the larger issue of Ireland and the IRA.

Web Sites

• The last of a three-part chronological series on the author covers the time House of Splendid Isolation was written and contains an excellent discussion of the book.
  http://www.literarymoose.info/literature/obrien_edna-chapter-3.html
   
• This biographical essay includes observations on various aspects of the author's writing style.
  http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/eobrien.htm
   
• A transcript of The Book Show interview reveals much about the author's attitudes towards writing, Ireland, and life in general.
  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/olv2n3.html

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The Memory of Old Jack by Wendell Berry

On this page:

Discussion Questions  | Web Sites

Jack Beechum is the focus of this third-person narrative. The novel, one of the "Port William membership stories," is set in Port William, Kentucky, in 1952 when Jack is 92 years old. The narrative takes place over the chronological period of but a day; however, the present tense narrative is punctuated by Jack's reminiscences of the major events in his life. As Jack's life unfolds throughout these flashbacks, his character and his impact on the history of the town and its people reveal Berry's final message. This is at once a story of Jack and his life and times, but also the effect one man's life has on those around him.

In an interview with Jordan Fisher-Smith, Berry comments on the power of our histories.

Well, if you didn't