Literary Ruralism (Part XIII): Attachment to Place in Stegner's Angle of Repose

I have been very taken with Stegner's Angle of Repose, which I began listening to on audio book back in late July (I've had a few interruptions).  If you don't know the book (and I didn't until it appeared on my son's high school reading list), here's how wikipedia describes the 1972 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction:

58-year-old retired history professor Lyman Ward is the narrator of the book. He is a divorced amputee with a debilitating disease that is slowly "petrifying" him. The text of Angle of Repose is transcribed tapes of Ward dictating what is to become the biography of his grandmother, Susan Burling Ward. The dictation begins on April 12, 1970 and continues through the summer. Fiercely independent, Ward lives alone at the Zodiac Cottage, the house where his grandmother spent the last decades of her life and in which he spent time as a child. "Because of his disease and because his wife has abandoned him, [Ward] has reached a major crisis point in his life...His crisis leads him to the need to find a direction for his shattered life. That direction is provided by finding out about and trying to understand his grandparents..." 

Aside from his scholarly work which consists of composing a biography from his grandmother's letters, published writings, and newspaper clippings, Ward spends his time on daily exercise, conversing with his summer secretary (Ada's daughter Shelly Rasmussen), and watching baseball with the Hawkes family. In addition, a major theme for Lyman Ward is fighting off intrusions into his life by his son, Rodman, and Rodman's wife who are skeptical of his self-reliance and, according to Ward, wish to send him to "...the retirement home in Menlo Park".

So many passages of this fabulous novel present western themes, e.g., spatial isolation, frontier justice, dramatic mountain scenery, and reading it has reminded me of how I, having moved to California 19 years ago, have become a westerner in a way I had not expected.  Here's a passage that so beautifully captures the rural theme of attachment to place, of having a "home place," that I decided to excerpt it here:

I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. I have done it, coming back here [to his grandparents cottage, where he was raised, in Grass Valley, California]. But it gets less likely. We have too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places. I doubt that anyone of [the narrator's son] Rodman’s generation [born in the 1940s] could comprehend the home feelings of someone like Susan Ward. Despite her unwillingness to live separately from her husband, she could probably have stayed on indefinitely in Milton, visited only occasionally by an asteroid husband. Or she could have picked up the old home and remade it in a new place. What she resisted was being the wife of a failure and a woman with no home. 

When frontier historians theorize about the uprooted, the lawless, the purseless, and the socially cut-off who settled in the West, they are not talking about people like my grandmother. So much that was cherished and loved, women like her had to give up; and the more they gave it up, the more they carried it helplessly with them. It was a process like ionization: what was subtracted from one pole was added to the other. For that sort of pioneer, the West was not a new county being created, but an old home being reproduced; in that sense our pioneer women were always more realistic than pioneer men. The moderns, carrying little baggage of the kind Shelly called “merely cultural,” not even in traditional air, but breathing into their space helmets a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that) are the true pioneers. Their circuity seems to include no atavistic domestic sentiment, they have suffered empathectomy, their computers hum no ghostly feedback of Home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived!

Interestingly, here Stegner is not writing about how the west became Susan Burling Ward's home (though that is an important theme of the novel), but how, through the early years of her marriage, she was able to return from time to time to her parents' home in upstate New York, near Poughkeepsie, a place called Milton.

Another theme of the book is a tension between East and West.  Susan Burling Ward has a passionate desire for her son, spending his formative years in Boise canyon, to return to the East, to be educated in a good Eastern college.  Even in the Idaho territory, he has an English governess to prepare him for this.  Yet at the same time, Susan Burling Ward (like I) has fallen/is falling in love with the West.
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