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
- What is the meaning of the title, Crossing To Safety?
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.
- 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
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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