Angle of Repose

Key Takeaways

Wallace Stegner’s 1971 novel. Lyman Ward, a retired historian confined to a wheelchair, works through his grandmother’s letters and reminiscences to write about her marriage: Susan Burling Ward, an Eastern illustrator and writer, and Oliver Ward, a mining engineer whose career carries them from New Almaden to Leadville, Mexico and an irrigation scheme in Idaho. Kyle read it in 2026 and rated it 3 stars.

• The angle of repose. An engineering term for “the angle at which dirt and pebbles stop rolling,” which Lyman takes as his question about the marriage: “how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them.”
• Culture against competence. The thread Kyle marked most often (“Competence vs culture,” “Capability over culture,” “Competence over class,” “Class vs capability”). Susan wishes Oliver “were more competent in cultivated conversation,” but it is his “physical readiness, his unflusterable way of doing what was needed in a crisis” that she most respects. Mrs. Elliott tells her plainly: “He’s not a type you were trained to understand.”
• The West was reproduced, not created. Lyman argues that women like his grandmother carried the East with them: “for that sort of pioneer, the West was not a new country being created, but an old one being reproduced.” And “contrary to the myth, the West was not made entirely by pioneers who had thrown everything away but an ax and a gun” — it ran on “continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships.”
• Premature, not mistaken. Oliver tried to do “by personal initiative and with the financial resources of a small and struggling corporation, what only the immense power of the federal government ultimately proved able to do.” His “clock was set on pioneer time.”
• Preparing to live versus living. Susan’s Idaho house is a place where “so much of their lives would have to be spent in the hard preparations to live.” Kyle’s note: the difference between the perpetually dissatisfied and the perpetually content is whether they are “making preparations to live” or simply living.
• The Doppler Effect of memory. Lyman wants to hear his grandmother’s life “as it sounded while it was passing,” not as he hears it, “a sober sound of expectations reduced.” The reminiscences she wrote in old age are “conditioned by the Doppler Effect.”
• Justice, not mercy. The marriage survives Susan’s lapse but never recovers: “He never forgave her… She broke something she couldn’t mend.” Lyman, abandoned by his own wife, calls himself “a justice man, not a mercy man,” and ends the book wondering “if I am man enough to be a bigger man than my grandfather.”

Connections

• Train Dreams and Housekeeping — read the same year, and both are also about the inland Northwest frontier and the people it wore down. Kyle liked Angle of Repose more than either of them.
• Lonesome Dove and East of Eden — the two Western family epics Kyle ranked above it.
• Henry Adams — Lyman sets his “angle of repose” theory of history beside Adams’s attempt to apply “the second law of thermodynamics to human affairs” (The Education of Henry Adams).
• Frontier — the book’s argument about who actually built the West.
• Recommended in the replies to @moseskagan’s “What historical fiction should I read next?” thread on X, April 2025 (the thread); the full list is on Historical Fiction Recommendations (Moses Kagan’s Thread).

Highlights

• My thanks to J.M. and her sister for the loan of their ancestors. Though I have used many details of their lives and characters, I have not hesitated to warp both personalities and events to fictional needs. This is a novel which utilizes selected facts from their real lives. It is in no sense a family history

• I am much of what my parents and especially my grandparents were-inherited stature, coloring, brains, bones (that part unfortunate), plus transmitted prejudices, culture, scruples, likings, moralities, and moral errors that I defend as if they were personal and not familial.

• Even places, especially this house whose air is thick with the past. My antecedents support me here as the old wistaria at the corner supports the house. Looking at its cables wrapped two or three times around the cottage, you would swear, and you could be right, that if they were cut the place would fall down.

• I would have them understand that I am not just killing time during my slow petrifaction. I am neither dead nor inert. My head still works. Many things are unclear to me, including myself, and I want to sit and think. Who ever had a better opportunity? What if I can’t turn my head? I can look in any direction by turning my wheelchair, and I choose to look back. Rodman to the contrary notwithstanding, that is the only direction we can learn from.

• If there was no longer any sense in pretending to be interested in where I was going, I could consult where I’ve been.

• Fooling around in the papers my grandparents, especially my grandmother, left behind, I get glimpses of lives close to mine, related to mine in ways I recognize but don’t completely comprehend. I’d like to live in their clothes a while, if only so I don’t have to live in my own.

  Kyle: What do we hide from buried in the halls of memory?

• This present of 1970 is no more an extension of my grandparents’ world, this West is no more a development of the West they helped build, than the sea over Santorin is an extension of that once-island of rock and olives. My wife turns out after a quarter of a century to be someone I never knew, my son starts all fresh from his own premises. My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents’ side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings.

  Kyle: Transitional Generation: In some generations, we live through time while in most, time lives through us.

• Rodman is a great measurer. He is interested in change, all right, but only as a process; and he is interested in values, but only as data. X people believe one way, Y people another, whereas ten years ago Y people believed the first way and X the second. The rate of change is therefore. He never goes back more than ten years.

• That’s Rodman’s idea of history. Every fourth-rate antiquarian in the West has panned Lola’s poor little gravel. My grandparents are a deep vein that has never been dug. They were people.

• Yet do remember the letters you used to get from isolated miners and geologists and surveyors who had come across a copy of Century or Atlantic and seen their lives there, and wrote to ask how a lady of obvious refinement knew so much about drifts, stopes, tipples, pumps, ores, assays, mining law, claim jumpers, underground surveying, and other matters? Remember the one who wanted to know where you learned to handle so casually a technical term like “angle of repose”? I suppose you replied, “By living with an engineer.” But you were too alert to the figurative possibilities of words not to see the phrase as descriptive of human as well as detrital rest. As you said, it was too good for mere dirt; you tried to apply it to your own wandering and uneasy life. It is the angle I am aiming for myself, and I don’t mean the rigid angle at which I rest in this chair. I wonder if you ever reached it. There was a time up there in Idaho when everything was wrong; your husband’s career, your marriage, your sense of yourself, your confidence, all came unglued together. Did you come down out of that into some restful 30° angle and live happily ever after? When you died at ninety-one, the New York Times obituary spoke of you as a Western woman, a Western writer and artist. Would you have accepted the label? Or did you cling forever to the sentiment you wrote to Augusta Hudson from the bottom of failure in Boise Canyon-that not even Henry James’s expatriates were so exiled as you? We shared this house all the years of my childhood, and a good many summers afterward. Was the quiet I always felt in you really repose? I wish I thought so. It is one of the questions I want the papers to answer.

  Kyle: Memories I want and then memories I can’t have

• If Henry Adams, whom you knew slightly, could make a theory of history by applying the second law of thermodynamics to human affairs, I ought to be entitled to base one on the angle of repose, and may yet. There is another physical law that teases me, too: the Doppler Effect. The sound of anything coming at you-a train, say, or the future —has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds. I have neither perfect pitch nor a head for mathematics, and anyway who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates. But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne. I don’t find your life uninteresting, as Rodman does. I would like to hear it as it sounded while it was passing. Having no future of my own, why shouldn’t I look forward to yours? You yearned backward a good part of your life, and that produced another sort of Doppler Effect. Even while you paid attention to what you must do today and tomorrow, you heard the receding sound of what you had relinquished.

• Except for her marriage she would have been a respected part of what, marrying whom she did, she had to leave behind. I think her love for my grandfather, however real, was always somewhat unwilling. She must unconsciously have agreed with his judgment that she was higher and finer than he. I wonder if there was some moment when she fully comprehended and appreciated him? I wonder if there was a time when the East and all that Edith Wharton gentility had been lived out of her as surely as the cells of her girlhood had been replaced in her body?

• But that was after she had reached, or appeared to have reached, the angle of repose. I can remember her as Susan Burling Ward, an old lady. It is harder to imagine her as Susan Burling, a girl, before the West and all the West implied had happened to her.

• My grandfather, long before your grandfather Trevithick knew him, before he put on weight and fell in love with flowers and learned to take his consolation from a lonely bottle, was an indefatigable worker. He often rode a horse a hundred miles a day, four hundred miles in a week, accepting the testing that such journeys implied. Despite bad eyes and migraines, he used sometimes to work all night on maps and reports. When he was making an underground survey of the New Almaden mine he stayed underground for twenty hours at a stretch. He would not understand, any more than my grandmother would, this weakness that yearns for a motherly bosom and a pair of warped gentle hands.

  Kyle: Hard work doesn’t soften the blow of old age nor accustom us to its frailty.

• The air is so crisp it gives me a brief, delusive sense of health and youth. Those I don’t have, but I have learned not to scorn the substitutes: quiet, plenty of time, and a job to spend it on. On the long desk my grandparents’ lives are spread out in files and folders, not as orderly as I would like them, and not fully understood, but waiting with a look of welcome.

• “They made a mistake,” he said. “I found out just the other day. There’s nothing wrong with the optic nerve. I’m astigmatic, farsighted, plenty of other things, but all I needed was these.” She found him boyishly engaging. Maybe she felt motherly. She said, “So now you can go back to Yale.” “I’ve lost two years,” said young Oliver Ward. “All my class is graduated. I’m going out West and make myself into an engineer.”

• I am impressed with how much of my grandparents’ life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships. Contrary to the myth, the West was not made entirely by pioneers who had thrown everything away but an ax and a gun.

• I am looking back more than a century, but I think I hear the same tone, or tones, that she did: the sound of the future coming on for the girl of twenty-one, the darker sound of the past receding for the woman of eighty-four.

• On that minimum contact they came together; it is as if you should bond two whole houses together with one dab of glue. Within a week he had left for California, and for nearly five years they did not see each other again. Clearly he went with the notion of “proving himself”—that was Grandfather’s character-and stayed on a long time because he had as yet no proofs. Clearly, though, he wrote to her, and she replied, for the reminiscences speak of the “understanding” that gradually established itself between them.

• I had stopped my chair at that exact place, coming out, because right there the spice of wistaria that hung around the house was invaded by the freshness of apple blossoms in a blend that lifted the top of my head. As between those who notice such things and those who don’t, I prefer those who do.

• “Because I’m not,” I said. “I tell myself I’m writing a book about my grandmother, and I am, too, but I sit up there sometimes and let my mouth go into that tape recorder and it gets all mixed up with Grandmother’s biography. I’m always saying things that would offend my relatives. Sometimes I might even say things that would offend yours. Plus a lot of stuff that would embarrass me if I played it back.”

• I really would like to talk to somebody about my grandparents, their past, their part in the West’s becoming, their struggle toward ambiguous ends. Of all the available people, I suppose I would most like to talk about them with Rodman, because next to me he has the largest stake in all this.

• No letters between my grandparents have been saved, and as I said, Susan’s early letters to Augusta do not mention Oliver Ward. To teach me how one evening’s acquaintance ripened into a tacit engagement through five years of absence, I have only the reminiscences, written in Grandmother’s old age, and I don’t believe in them.

• Grandmother implies that he won her over by his cheerful confidence, so that an understanding gradually grew up between them. I doubt the understanding, and I doubt Grandfather’s confidence. What did he have to be confident about? Trapped for three years in that litigated tunnel, he must have known that if it was ever finished, a junior engineer without a degree would emerge into the old barren sunlight beating on the old sterile mountains, and that if he wanted a chance at Susan Burling he would have to emerge with more than experience.

• I suspect that Susan’s skin was like the river, chilled by gusts of uncertainty, pebbled with the gooseflesh of anticipation. She knew his intentions; he had warned her.

• “Doesn’t it seem to you odd-it does to me-that you wouldn’t ever have mentioned this man’s name to me?” “I didn’t know he was going to become so important.”

• She bent her head to gnaw on a knuckle. “What about your art? What about everything we’ve worked for?” “My art isn’t that important. I’ll never be anything but a commercial illustrator.” “You know that’s utterly wrongheaded!” “I know I want to marry him and go where his career takes him. It won’t be forever, but it may take some time. He’s not flashy, he’ll take a little while to establish himself. I can go on drawing. He wants me to.” “In some mining camp.” “I don’t know where.”

• “In this,” said Susan, as if in a novel, “I can consult no one but myself.”

• Susan’s resolution did not weaken. Maybe she was trapped-she had given an impulsive promise, and promises with her were binding. But I think she had been stirred by Oliver Ward’s masculine strength, by his stories of an adventurous life, by his evenness of disposition, by his obvious adoration. I think she was for the first time physically in love with a man, and I like her courage in going where her emotions led her.

• Susan Ward came West not to join a new society but to endure it, not to build anything but to enjoy a temporary experience and make it yield whatever instruction it contained. She anticipated her life in New Almaden as she had looked forward to the train journey across the continent-as a rather strenuous outdoor excursion.

  Kyle: Most pioneers who went west realized they would have to build everything.

• The stage leveled off into what seemed a plain or valley. She leaned to see. Ahead of them, abrupt as the precipices up which little figures toil in Chinese paintings, she saw a wild wooded mountainside that crested at a long ridge spiky with conifers. She pulled the curtains wide. “But my goodness!” she cried. “You called them hills!” He laughed at her, as pleased as if he had made them by hand. “You permiscus old consort,” she said, “you deceived me. Don’t tell me anything. I’m going to watch and draw my own conclusions.”

  Kyle: Love at first sight

• She wanted to shake him. “You great… Why couldn’t you have told me?” She saw his eyebrows go up. His eyes, as they did when he smiled, closed into upside-down crescents. Young as he was, he had deep fans of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes that gave him a look of always being on the brink of smiling. And now he was smiling. He was not going to be sullen. They were past it. “I was afraid you’d be sensible,” he said. “I couldn’t stand the thought of this place sitting here all ready for you and you not in it.”

• Remembering nights when Ella Clymer had sung to them at Milton, Susan all but held her breath, waiting for the rush of homesickness. But it never came, nothing interrupted this sweet and resting content. She put out a hand to touch Oliver’s hair, and he captured it and held the fingers against his cheek. The bone of his jaw, the rasp of his beard, sent another great shiver through her.

• And if she thought of Augusta, as she probably did, she would have poulticed the bruise of abandoned and altered friendship with healing herbs gathered from all the literary gardens where she habitually walked: parted as they were, each was fulfilled in another and nobler way. When I catch Grandmother thinking in this fashion I shy away and draw the curtains, lest I smile. It does not become a historian to smile.

• Grandmother made not the slightest concession to the places where she lived. I have a photograph of her riding a horse in something that looks like a court costume, and another taken at the engineer’s camp on the bank of Boise Creek in the 1880s, with a home-made rowboat at her feet and a tent pitched in the background and her third baby on her shoulder, and what is she wearing? A high-necked, pinch-waisted, triplebreasted, puff-sleeved, full-length creation of dotted swiss or something of the kind. And a picnic hat. In that baldest of their bald frontiers, at the very bottom of their fortunes, she dressed as if for a garden party.

• Speak for yourself, Grandmother. I think you are putting into Grandfather’s head attitudes that were never there. He understood well enough that a mining engineer was a Westerner by profession. He was not slopping around in that steaming mine ten hours a day, and mapping its labyrinths in his spare time, and studying engineering texts and government reports after you went to bed, just so he could give it all up and go back to an East coast barren of every mineral except maybe asbestos. You commented often enough how ambitious he was, how hard he worked to make up for the handicap of an aborted education. I think he didn’t stress what your future was likely to be, because he was tender of your homesickness, but he understood it well enough. What he didn’t fully understand, because he was always absorbed in his job, was how dreary long the days were for you, how lonely and how isolated and how strange.

  Kyle: Cultural lack of communication

• With two swift motions she pinned him. She made one unsmiling tickling poke at his exposed navel and laid him back in his box. No nonsense with that fatherless mite, who already seemed to have learned some of Lizzie’s stoicism. He took what life handed him and did not complain. Susan had heard him cry only five or six times. There was something tragic about Lizzie. Was it a disastrous marriage or the betrayal of a good girl? For Lizzie was a good girl-Grandmother was not so genteel as to deny it, however Georgie was fathered. But once when she had asked Lizzie if it would help her to talk about her life, Lizzie had only said briefly, “Best not get into it.” Thousands of miles from friends or kin, with no husband to look after her, she bore her life patiently. When she worked she often sang to Georgie, sounding entirely happy; but once, starting to sing him to sleep, she started “Bye Baby Bunting,” and stopped as if someone had knocked on the door. She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into. Yet she was much liked by the Cornish women who came visiting, and apparently needed no other company, was less obviously lonely than Susan. Susan wondered if her own discontent was a weakness or if it was only a manifestation of greater sensibility. Was there something gnarly and tough about working-class people that kept them from feeling all that more delicately organized natures felt? If Georgie died, would Lizzie be prostrated, apathetic, and despairing, as Augusta still was, or would she rise in the morning, supported by some coarse strength, and build her fire and make breakfast and go on as before?

  Kyle: The durability of women - like Myrtle Reynolds

• With his legs outstretched before the fire, he seemed to ponder. Finally he said, “Kendall wants to make him my assistant.” “Oh, good!” But he did not answer, only cocked his eyebrow, and so she said, “It would be good, wouldn’t it?” “Good for supper parties. Not for the mine.” “Why, what’s the matter with him?” “He’s too soft.” “He’s too cultivated.” “I wasn’t talking about his culture, I was talking about his capacities down the mine.” He unlaced his fingers from across his chest and showed her the back of one hand. What in the candlelight at supper she had thought a smudge at the base of the thumb was a scraped, swollen, discolored bruise. “See that? If I didn’t have that, he’d probably be dead.”

  Kyle: Competence vs culture. Pat and Helen Thompson’s struggle was more between kindness and control.

• She sat quietly. She did not doubt Oliver’s judgment of Starling, not now. She was only rebellious against the conditions of their life, which excluded, except perhaps in positions of control such as Conrad Prager had, men sensitive enough to appreciate the finer things. She knew without any question, no matter what he said, that Oliver’s act had been heroic; but she still wished he were more competent in cultivated conversation.

• What did he say? I am utterly unable to guess. He was not one to much under any circumstances. He was too concerned about her safety and comfort to be very pleased that it was to happen in that mining camp, and too pinched economically to be pleased it was to happen so soon. But he was too much in love not to be awed and grateful at what she had done for him, or what they had done together.

• It made me feel like crying to hear them speak of it. “We do not forget,” they all said, “but they have no place for us when we return. We must be reconciled, for what we left behind us can never be ours again. We have lost our life in the East-we must make a new life for ourselves here.” They were charming women, well-bred, gentle, and very adaptable. They would go anywhere in the world where their husbands’ businesses made it necessary, and make a home. But I fancied in all of them a lingering sentiment for the old home, a pathetic sense of being aliens in the new. I am determined not to share their misfortune. I should feel lost if I thought this country would see me old.

  Kyle: The Founding Transience of the American Frontier

• It seems absurd to talk so much about an experience common to all women-but I think it one of the strangest feelings-that double pulse, that life within a life…

  Kyle: For many, if not most mothers, that “double pulse” never goes away, even in death (e.g. Lionel Thompson)

• Leaving, Mary Prager held their hands and hoped they would be spared the footloose life common to the profession. Why should they ever leave New Almaden? He could be manager here one day; he had a great opportunity to succeed without making his wife into a wanderer.

  Kyle: National Transience

• She cast her bright enameled blue eye on Georgie, known as Buster because he busted everything within reach, and told dismayed Lizzie that he was destructive because his latent tenderness had not been appealed to. Boys should play with dolls, to teach them care for others and to stimulate their later parental responsibility-brickbats and tiles they would find for themselves.

• She was always one to clean her desk. Work, progress, and the inviolability of contract, three of the American gospels, met and fused in her with the doctrines of gentility and the cult of the picturesque.

• Nothing but kindness, really, for nearly a year. Yet she couldn’t quite like him, and she knew no one who did. So nearly a gentleman, Mr. Kendall was, so fatally not one.

• Down in this oppressive darkness and oppressive air he had stayed for fifteen, twenty, twenty-four hours at a stretch, while she sat in the cottage and felt how lonely she was. Even as she hopped and stumbled beside him, laughing a little at her own clumsiness, she felt gratitude for the big warm hand on her arm, and she knew an appalled pride in what he could do.

• They waited. “Well, Susan,” said Mr. Prager, “what’s your impression of life in the mines?” “How can I say?” Susan said. “There are wonderful pictures, if one had the skill. I’m afraid they’re beyond me. But I wouldn’t have missed it, not for anything. Oh, those men with candlelight shining off their eyeballs, and that awful cavern of a place where they work, and that tapping through the rock as if men buried alive were trying to make others hear! I suppose I shouldn’t find it so picturesque. It’s awful, really-isn’t it? They seem so like prisoners.” “Prisoners?” said Mr. Kendall rather sharply. “They hire out for wages, they get paid according to what they produce, they get their pay every Saturday.” He laughed a short laugh. “And drink it up before Sunday.” He made her afraid that somehow, indulging her sensibility, she had put Oliver in the wrong. “I didn’t mean they were enslaved,” she said. “I only meant… working underground, in the dark…” “Some of the Cousin Jacks in this mine have been underground for four generations,” Kendall said. “Your husband is underground a good deal himself. We all are. Don’t let your sympathies get so enlarged you tie him to the porch.”

• “The mountain is still talking to you,” Prager said. “Are they-have they set off the blasts down where we were?” “Not till the end of this shift,” Oliver said. “Those were probably in the Bush tunnel.” “And some prisoners in there are shoveling up money,” said Mr. Kendall.

  Kyle: Culture vs craft

• “What have I done, you say.” “Yes. Why should he turn against you?” “What have I done,” he said, tapping his teeth with the pipestem, elaborately trying to remember. “Well, I made him a more accurate survey than the mine’s ever had, I saved him from making a big mistake with that hoist machinery, and redesigned it so it works, I improved the pump station in Bush tunnel.”

  Kyle: Capability over culture

• “But what if he calls down?” “He’ll only do it once.” “Oliver,” she said earnestly, “why do we even try to stay?” “Because I’m still learning something,” he said. “I’m getting a lot of good experience, and an engineer’s capital is his experience. Also I haven’t got any other job lined up. Also you like it here, and you’ve still got some drawings to do.”

• Yet how would she get close to those lives to draw them? She had lived in New Almaden nearly a year and had seen only its picturesque surface. “You run along, Susan,” Oliver said. “No use to get upset. This is what you might call run of the mine.”

• “The map! You aren’t going to finish that!” “Oh yes I am.” “But why? After all he’s…” “For my own satisfaction,” Oliver said. She understood at once that on that point he was immovable. She could argue, he would not argue back. But he would complete the map which he owed no one, which he had done on his own time, for experience, and on the day they left New Almaden he would drop it on Kendall’s desk-no, not that far, he would mail it to Mr. Smith or Mr. Prager, more likely. She could not understand that stubbornness in him which led him to punish himself. But whatever he was, he was not small, and that she took pride in.

• Gone, and as painful now as the thought of a stillborn child. Sentimental? Of course. Riddled with the Anglo-American mawkishness about home, quicksandy with assumptions about monogamy and Woman’s Highest Role, buttery with echoes of the household poets. All that. But I find that I don’t mind her emotions and her sentiments. Home is a notion that only the nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend. What else would one plant in a wilderness or on a frontier? What loss would hurt more? So I don’t snicker backward ninety years at poor Grandmother pacing her porch and biting her knuckle and hating the loss of what she had never quite got over thinking her exile. I find her moving.

• He can go to a good Eastern school, and then to Yale or Boston Tech, so he won’t suffer from growing up in an out-of-the-way place. Oliver, thee absolutely must work on cement!” Still smiling, squinting his eyes to crescents in the brightness, he said, “I intend to. In my spare time. Without any expectation of getting rich. Don’t get your face fixed for that mansion right away.”

• Perhaps he remembered holding her by that ankle while she hung over the waterfall above Big Pond. Perhaps he thought, though I do not believe that he did, that on that picnic afternoon of his courting he might just as well have put his hand on the pan of a bear trap.

• Mrs. Elliott turned on her a pair of faded, slightly bulging blue eyes that the wind had filled with tears without blurring their sharpness. “Go where your husband’s work takes him. Make him feel that what he can do is worth doing. Take your child along and let him eat his peck of dirt. He’ll be all the better for it, and he might have an interesting life. So might you. You won’t always live like a lady, but that won’t hurt you. You can help your man be somebody, and be somebody yourself. He ought to leave all this dealing and promoting to somebody like Elliott who can’t do anything else.”

• “Stuff. You’re furious. But I’m very sure I’m right. Your husband hates promoting cement. His interest was in solving the problem of how to make it. He’s got the head for doing important things.” “I believe I appreciate him almost as much as you do.” “I wonder if you do,” said Mrs. Elliott, not in the least downed, “He’s not a type you were trained to understand.”

• A freckled hand was laid on her arm. “As long as I’ve already made you mad, let me tell you the rest of what I think.” Susan moved her shoulders very slightly, looking straight ahead. “You’re an artist and a lady,” Mrs. Elliott said. “Sometimes I’ve wondered if you weren’t maybe just a little too much of both, but my views may be peculiar. And it has nothing to do with being fond of I am fond of you, though you wouldn’t believe it right now. What bothers me is that Oliver thinks you’re better than he is, some sort of higher creature. He thinks what you do is more important than what he does. I don’t deny you’re special. You’re both special. But I’d hate to see you discourage him from doing what he’s special at, just so you can coddle some notions about dirt and culture. Do you follow me?”

• I tell him I am proud of his genius for construction, but he says he has no genius for anything, he just never knows when he is beaten. If he is beaten finally, I have made up my mind that I shall try to come home.

• End of dream number one, which was her dream, not his. It came and went within six months. Others, better at the talkee-talkee, would later take his formula, which he characteristically had not patented or kept to himself, and tear down the mountains of limestone and the cliffs of clay, grind them and burn them to clinker, add gypsum, and grind and roll clinker and gypsum together into the finest powder for the making of bridges, piers, dams, highways, and all the works of Roman America that my grandfather’s generation thought a part of Progress. The West would be in good part built and some think ruined by that cement. Many would grow rich out of it. Decades later, over the mountain at Permanente, not too far from New Almaden, Henry Kaiser would make a very good thing indeed out of the argillaceous and calcareous that Oliver Ward forced into an insoluble marriage in the winter of 1877. My feelings about this are mixed, for it would have made me uneasy to be descended from Santa Cruz cement. If Grandfather had got his backing, neither he nor Grandmother would have become the people I knew. I can’t imagine him a small-town millionaire, or Grandmother a prettier and more snobbish Mrs. Elliott, a local intellectual remembering her great days of contact with some equivalent of Margaret Fuller.

• There was no reason Oliver Ward should not have been, except character. Pioneer or not, resource-raider or not, afflicted or not with the frontier faith that exploitation is development, and development is good, he was simply an honest man. His gift was not for money-making and the main chance. He was a builder, not a raider. He trusted people (Grandmother thought too much), he was loved by animals and children and liked by men, he had an uncomplicated ambition to leave the world a little better for his passage through it, and his notion of how to better it was to develop it for human use.

• Probably Susan consoled herself with the thought that she brought at least one good thing home: her baby. Perhaps she also had in some private corner of her mind the satisfaction of knowing that in spite of marriage, motherhood, and economic uncertainty she had not ceased to exist as an artist.

  Kyle: How do we exist? As our profession?

• It is odd to think, as I sit here in Grandmother’s study imagining a future that is already long past, that I have walked that Lahaina beach with Marian’s grandchildren, and found them, as they perhaps found me, only pleasant strangers. Irrationally, at the time, I couldn’t help thinking that because their grandmother’s life was briefly entangled with that of Susan and Oliver Ward, we owed each other something more than casual politeness.

  Kyle: What we owe each other

• I find it hard to make anything of Grandmother’s parents. They take me too far back, I have no landmarks in their world. They were Quaker, kind, loving, getting old, simple people but by no means simple minded. They probably thought their daughter more talented and adventurous than anyone could be. I can’t see them as individuals, I can only type-cast them, a pair of character actors with white hair and Granny glasses. Leave them as a sort of standardized family welcometight clutch of hugs, tearful kisses, exclamations, smell of orris root from Great-grandmother’s hair, scamper of Bessie’s feet in from the kitchen -she here too!-calls to the barn for Father to come, Susan’s home.

  Kyle: The obscurity of time.

• At seven in the morning it is quiet in the house, quiet in the yard, quiet across the pine hills. The freeway is a murmur hardly louder than the chiming hum that millions of pine needles make in a little wind. I roll to the door and out onto the porch that Grandmother referred to as the piazza.

• Occasionally I have these moments, not often. There is nothing to do but sit still until they pass. Tantrums and passions I don’t need, endurance is what I need. I have found that it is even possible to take a certain pleasure out of submission to necessity. That have I borne, this can I bear also.

• I wonder what Grandmother would have done with such a husband? Answer: She would never have got mixed up with him in the first place. I suppose in a way we deserve the people we marry.

• “I’m not writing a book of Western history,” I tell him. “I’ve writ ten enough history books to know this isn’t one. I’m writing about some thing else. A marriage, I guess. Deadwood was just a blank space in the marriage. Why waste time on it?” Rodman is surprised. So am I, actually-I have never formulated precisely what it is I have been doing, but the minute I say it I know I have said it right. What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That’s where the interest is. That’s where the meaning will be if I find any.

• “A marriage,” I say. “A masculine and a feminine. A romantic and realist. A woman who was more lady than woman, and a man who was more man than gentleman. I don’t give a damn if he once saw Wild Bill plain. He couldn’t have, anyway, because Wild Bill was killed at least a year before Grandfather blew into Deadwood. I’m much more interested in quirky little things that most people wouldn’t even notice. Why, for instance, did he send the Christmas presents he did from Deadwood-a bundle of raw beaver pelts and an elk head the size of a goodsized woodshed? What would he do that for? It’s as nutty as Shelly Rasmussen’s nutty husband sending her twenty-four canaries.” “He did?” Rodman says, delighted.

• “Never mind. Augusta’s husband, you know. Fragile and a little effeminate and very cultivated. Grandfather was something totally dif ferent. What held him and Grandmother together for more than sixty years? Passion? Integrity? Culture? Convention? Inviolability of contract? Notions of possession? By some standards they weren’t even married, they just had a paper signed by some witnesses. The first dozen years they knew each other, they were more apart than together. These days, that marriage wouldn’t have lasted any longer than one of these hippie weddings with homemade rituals. What made that union of opposites hold them?”

• “I don’t like trouble, not about anything that small. I’ve got too ugly a temper when I do get mad, so I try not to get mad.”

• The horse tottered, strained, was dragged forward, the buggy crawled painfully upward. Susan sat white and trembling, hating his cruelty, hating the pain and exhaustion of the sick beast, hating the heartless mountains, the brutal West. Just at this point in Grandmother’s reminiscences there is a somewhat high-flown paragraph: The mountains of the Great Divide are not, as everyone knows, born treeless, though we always think of them as above timberline with the eternal snows on their heads. They wade up through ancient forests and plunge into canyons tangled up with watercourses and pause in little gem-like valleys and march attended by loud winds across high plateaus, but all such incidents of the lower world they leave behind them when they begin to strip for the skies: like the Holy Ones of old, they go up alone and barren of all circumstance to meet their transfiguration. I can’t help reading that as more than a literary flourish; I want to read it as a perception of Western necessity, something deeper than scenery. Something must have told her, as they dragged over the summit and down to English George’s, that character as well as mountains had to strip for the skies. She must have known that a Thomas Hudson, despite his urbanity, uprightness, and delicacy of feeling, would not have got that dying horse in motion fast enough to save them, or got it on over the summit to the place of help. Almost before she had stopped screaming and pulling at his hard whip arm, she felt shame. It was his physical readiness, his unflusterable way of doing what was needed in a crisis, that she most respected in him: it made him different from the men she had known. In remembering the episode years later, she makes a veiled acknowledgment of the respect that at the time, upset and sulky, she begrudged. Even her prose strips-she does the rest of that trip to Leadville in a half dozen lines. I am glad I have forgotten what I said to my husband in that moment when he saved our lives, and I hope he has too. The horse died after we got to English George’s, and there we hired another, or the remains of one, and he died the day after we reached Leadville. Oliver paid for both-and how much more the trip cost him (both trips) I never knew. But that is the price of Romance. To have allowed his wife to come in by stage in company with drunkenness and vice would have been realism. That was written years after the event, and is conditioned by the Doppler Effect. That day in June 1879, they came down off Mosquito Pass silent and constrained, she scared and sulky, he worried and somewhat bruised in spirit at being thought a brute. Or I suppose that is what he felt. The fact is, I don’t know. He is the silent character in this cast, he did not defend himself when he thought he was wronged, and he left no novels, stories, drawings, or reminiscences to speak for him. I only assume what he felt, from knowing him as an old man. He never did less than the best he knew how. If that was not enough, if he felt criticism in the air, he put on his hat and walked out.

• Perhaps she had been remembering the New Almaden cottage, so much better than her expectations, and so had built up expectations of this cabin that it could not support. It took an effort to conceal her disappointment. Yet as she looked around she had to admit that a log house was picturesque, and a house with a welcoming fire on its hearth was touching. She summoned back for her inner eye the image of the peaks rimming the world outside. “It’s charming. I can hang curtains around the cots. We’ll be snug. How will we cook?”

• The cabin was full of the smells of coffee and bacon, and she shook the covers, flapping away greasy odors, while she watched Oliver fork the bacon onto a tin plate and crack eggs into the grease. He did it with one hand, cracking the shells against the edge of the and then opening them upward with his long limber fingers until the insides fell out. She saw them solidify in the pan like golden-hearted, frilly edged flowers. “Can you ride today?”

• She loved the way his eyes rested on her, she thought he had a strong, masculine, unflighty sort of face. He looked like a contented man. And she was a contented woman, or would be as soon as she could get Ollie out.

• Liquor is a terrible temptation to lonely men cut off from their wives, or fighting for success they cannot attain. It is exhilarating to see someone like Frank determined to stand above it. On the other hand, Oliver tells me, he is manly to a degree, and only a little while ago had to put down a bully who presumed to think Pricey, with his English accent, amusing. The bully suffered a broken jaw, and is not yet quite able to speak again. Can you imagine knowing, and liking, a man who engages in fist fights? Yet here at least they are something a man of honor cannot entirely avoid.

• “I saw him riding that old Minnie mule along the road the other day with his nose in a book,” Frank said. “Mule could have stumbled and tossed him down a shaft, he’d have gone right on reading. Maybe he’d have wondered why it got dark all of a sudden.”

• One morning a knock came on the door, and Susan opened it to see a stout, bright-eyed, self-assured little lady standing there. Helen Hunt Jackson, sent to her like a valentine by their mutual friend Augusta. As a literary lady married to a mining engineer, and resident in the West, Mrs. Jackson could hardly have been more reassuring to Grandmother. If Helen Hunt of Amherst, Massachusetts, was not lost when she became Helen Hunt Jackson of Denver, then why should Susan Burling of Milton, New York, lose her identity now that she was Susan Burling Ward of Leadville? The two were intimates within fifteen minutes.

  Kyle: Recurring theme of “losing yourself” in womanhood.

• With King was a large good-natured man named Thomas Donaldson, chairman of the Public Lands Commission, and in the two months that their camp was pitched there it drew a stream of celebrities. Where did they spend their evenings? Grandmother’s cabin, naturally. She was a lamp for every moth that flew. In her single room whose usable space was hardly fifteen feet square there assembled every evening an extraordinary collection of education, culture, talent, eloquence, reputation, political power, and intellectual force. There was no way to keep the two cots curtained off; they were always being exposed to serve as sofas. I doubt that Grandmother was offended to have her bedroom once again invaded; she was never more stimulated in her life. Braced for dutiful and deprived exile, ready to lie in the rude Western bed she had made, she found herself presiding over a salon that (she told herself more than once) Augusta’s studio itself could hardly have matched for brilliance.

  Kyle: A gatherer of people and culture.

• King said, “I call the jury’s attention to the way in which speculation has become supposition, supposition certainty, and certainty accusation. It’s a lesson in the workings of the expert mind, which can go from a hunch to an affidavit, and from an affidavit to a fee, within minutes. With great authority the expert says what is not necessarily so.”

  Kyle: The “death” of expertise

• She wished he had not taken off his coat, hot as the cabin was. With his brown corded forearms and his sunburned forehead he seemed one fitted for merely physical actions, like a man one might hire to get work done, not one who could devise policy and direct the actions of others. With a sad, defensive certainty she saw that he lacked some quality of elegance and ease, some fineness of perception, that these others had. It seemed to her that he sat like a boy among men, earnest and honest, but lacking in nimbleness of mind.

• Having only one hand, and having that in a dozen things, he has no other to hold out. I’m the one to pity. I’d prefer to be honest but I’d like very much to be rich. It’s a precarious position.”

• She was watching King, who now smiled at her out of the corners of his eyes. “It’s quite simple,” he said to Mrs. Jackson. “You pick men you would trust with your life, and you trust them with the Public Domain.”

• But he didn’t close up. In a moment he said, almost as if he sensed a clash coming on and wanted to avoid it as much as she did, “If I listen I might learn something. I won’t learn anything listening to myself.”

• She slid out of bed and sat on the edge of his cot. His arm curled to hold her there, and she bent and said quickly into his neck, behind his ear, “Will thee forgive me?” “Sure. What for?” “For wanting to make thee over. I’m a foolish woman, I’m too much in love with talk and talkers. Talk isn’t that important. What’s important is thee. Thee is dear to me.’”

• “Maybe. I hate all this lawing and claim jumping and swearing to false affidavits and all this playing expert in a game where both sides are crooked. It’d be nice to do a job that just expanded knowledge.” “Thee could, I know thee could.” She lay still, then she said, “That’s almost the first thing thee ever said to me.” “What are you talking about?” “I was drawing in the library at the Beaches’. Thee said ‘It must be nice to do what you like and get paid for it.""

  Kyle: Regrets over passion vs. profession. Pat Thompson was constantly feeling underestimated relative to what he was capable of.

• “Please,” I said. “You’ve been taking courses in these jargon pseudosciences that my son teaches. If I extrapolated, as you suggest, the resulting sex scenes would be mine, not hers. She valued her privacy, she would never in this life have extrapolated. Neither would I. I would no more extrapolate in public than I would go to the bathroom on the parlor rug.”

  Kyle: What’s real vs what we can surmise.

• She’d either have to trail around boarding in the nearest town, or go back to Milton.” “So I suppose she wouldn’t let him take it.” “She wouldn’t have put it that way. She was worried about her child, she wondered if he’d ever have a secure home to grow up in, I suppose she wondered how she’d get along herself, without anybody artistic and intellectual to talk to. So they debated and hesitated a couple of days, and then when Grandfather was offered the managership of the Adelaide mine, he took that instead. That way, she could go on planning an expansion of the cabin, to be ready for her child and next summer’s guests. It isn’t quite Living Theater, I guess, but it’s the sort of thing her life was made of.”

• “He let her lead him by the nose. Was he sort of soft?” “He was no good at the talkee-talkee,” I said. “He loved his wife and child. He had just been, for a Victorian, exceptionally well loved. It wasn’t an easy decision. It could have gone either way.”

• She had finished the Louisa Alcott blocks and had no other contracts for the moment. Without planning it, she found herself beginning a novel about her grandfather, the Quaker preacher who by his abolitionism had got the whole Milton meeting set down. Writing books about grandparents seems to run in the family.

• 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. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places. I doubt that anyone of Rodman’s generation could comprehend the home feelings of someone like Susan Ward.

• When frontier historians theorize about the uprooted, the lawless, the purseless, and the socially cut-off who settled 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 country being created, but an old one being reproduced; in that sense our pioneer women were always more realistic than our pioneer men. The moderns, carrying little baggage of the kind that Shelly called “merely cultural,” not even living in traditional air, but breathing into their space a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that) are the true pioneers. Their circuitry 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!

• It gave her a miser’s pleasure to watch the pile of manuscript grow. Her grandfather’s life absorbed hers.

• Lightly she said, “Well, so now we’ll say good-bye to Daddy’s elk Tell it, ‘Good-bye, Daddy’s elk, tomorrow we’re going on a train to live with Daddy. Daddy will meet us where the train stops, and we’ll through the mountains to our house made out of logs, and when I’m a little bigger I’ll have a pony and go riding with Daddy or Frank or Pricey, and away off in the mountains where the flowers grow higher than the stirrups we may stop to rest sometime and see an elk like you carrying his antlers into the timber, or hear an elk like you bugling from away-way up the mountain.’ Can you tell him that?” “That’s too much.” “Then just say, ‘Good-bye, Daddy’s elk.’” “Good-bye, Daddy’s elk.” “Will you like seeing your Daddy again?” “Yes.”

• Oh, now I feel myself coming to life, too! I can hardly wait to get back there and make a home in that wild beautiful place.”

• Oliver squeezed her hands and dropped them. Very quietly he knelt down beside Ollie in the cinders and snow. She saw how unfrighteningly he moved, how reassuringly he came down to the child’s size. The love in his face could not have been misunderstood or undervalued. He had always been that way with the child. Even when Ollie was an infant, he would see his father across a room and chortle and beam and kick and hold out his arms. She had been faintly jealous of that baby love affair-her child took her for granted but loved his father with a passion. Now, watching them meet gravely in the blowing snow, she saw that there was going to be no period of reacquaintance such as she had had to go through last November. After two years Ollie might not know his father, but he trusted him instantly.

• My mother died when I was two, my father was a silent and difficult man: I grew up my grandparents’ child. As those things went in Grass Valley, I also grew up privileged, son of the superintendent of the Zodiac and grandson of the general manager. Every child I played with came from a family that worked for mine. Grandmother deferred to my father, seemed almost to fear him. Certainly she assumed the blame for the taciturnity that made him formidable to deal with, and certainly she saw in me a second chance to raise up an ideal gentleman.

  Kyle: We are the product of those who DON’T raise us as much as we are the product of those who DO raise us.

• She came before the emancipation of women, and she herself was emancipated only partly. There were plenty of women who could have provided her the models for a literary career, but hardly a one, unless Mary Cassatt, whom she apparently never met, who could have shown her how to be a woman artist. The impulse and the talent were there, without either inspiring models or full opportunity. A sort of Isabel Archer existed half-acknowledged in Grandmother, a spirit fresh, independent, adventurous, not really prudish in spite of the gentility. There was an ambitious woman under the Quaker modesty and the genteel conventions. The light foot was for more than dancing, the bright eye for more than flirtations, the womanliness for more than mute submission to husband and hearth.

• One of the charming things about nineteenth-century America was its cultural patriotism-not jingoism, just patriotism, the feeling that no matter how colorful, exotic, and cultivated other countries might be, there was no place so ultimately right, so morally sound, so in tune with the hopeful future, as the U.S.A.

• He was tall, fair, sober, shabby in his worn field clothes, and he slouched as he rode. He could not have been pompous like Don Gus tavo without laughing. He had to be himself-nothing spectacular, nothing gorgeous or picturesque. Just, as she had more than once said in her letters to Augusta, her plain boy. But it was on his skill and judgment that everything hung. Having doubted him through the picturesque hour of departure, she now saw him go with a quick, strong rush of love and pride.

  Kyle: Competence over class

• I fear I am a strange creature, my two great loves are of such different kinds. When Oliver is away from me I miss him and am restless until he returns, but isn’t it strange, his absence makes me think so much more acutely of you.

• Propped by bolster and pillows, shoeless, stockingless, corsetless, clothed only in her shift, she was asleep in the big carved bed. She had been looking through her journal, rewriting incidents and observations into coherent paragraphs for her article, but the siesta hour, the shuttered dusk, the trance of quiet that held room and house and city, had been seductive. The notebook was flat on her stomach, the pencil had fallen from her slack hand.

• The horseplay of his entrance had meant nothing. She saw now that he was tired, disappointed, and grouchy. He moved his shoulders as if shrugging off a persistent insect.

• For the moment, all her disappointment was frozen into quiet. Almost carelessly she said, “So you’ll have to turn in a bad report.”

• “Why! Because! A million reasons. Because I work so well here. Because it’s beautiful. Because we could all be together in a pleasant house. Because it would have given thee a chance to show what thee can do.”

• She turned and saw him sitting on the bed, still feeling criticized. And he would not bend, that was what made her so resentful. He would not defend himself or justify himself. When she questioned him, wanting to be on his side, wanting to help work out a future for them both, he acted as if she were accusing him of deliberately, out of some stupid notion of honesty, throwing away their chance. His honesty was not stupid, that was not what she meant at all. Only…

• “I have to do what I have to do,” he said. She stood at the mantel, and after a moment she said, “Yes. And all of us have to take the consequences.” Now she touched him. His head came up, his stare was full of disbelief and resentment. He heard, registered, acknowledged, what had come out of her mouth, but he would not answer. She would have liked to be comforted for hurting him, but he would not bend, and they spent the evening in bruised silence, one-word questions, monosyllabic answers.

• The evening before they were to leave they went early to their room, where Oliver worked at his field notes and his geological map that corrected the map of Kreps; Susan got out their bags for packing, and dumped them onto the bed. At the bottom of one carpetbag were her Colorado riding clothes, never used since she had packed them in Leadville. As she shook them out, there rose out of their wrinkles the smells of horse and woodsmoke, the styptic odors of spruce and bitter cottonwood, the witch hazel smell of willows. She stood holding the divided skirt to her nose, caught by recollection as strong as pain.

  Kyle: Memories as real as any physical stimuli.

• There is only one passage in her third Century article to indicate that she sometimes forgot the romantic color of what she was seeing, and let her mind brood on the fact that this picturesque road led nowhere but back, and back to what? Not even the meager stability of Leadville.

• “How art thou remarkable? Let me count the ways. Hmm? She’s been out in the unhistoried vacuum of the West for nearly five years, as far from any cultivated center as possible. What does she do? She histories it, she arts it, she illuminates its rough society. With a house to keep and a child to rear, she does more and better work than most of us could do with all our time free. She goes to Mexico for two months and returns with a hundred magnificent drawings and what amounts to a short book-she writes as well as Cable and draws better than Moran. She has been over Mosquito Pass in a buckboard and across Mexico by stage coach and saddle horse, she has been down mines and among bandits, places where no lady ever was before, and been absolutely unspoiled by it. There isn’t a roughened hair on her head.

• “Nobody made you but yourself,” Thomas said. “I also suspect the hand of God-no other hand could be quite that sure of itself. Now tell us what you’re writing, in those hours when lesser people sleep.”

• Angrily she stared at him. He stood before her filled with an idiotic confidence, a county-fair Moses with his sleeves rolled up, ready to smite the rock. If he didn’t throw away his foolish staff and quit dreaming, he would humiliate her and himself, and justify every doubt her friends had ever had of him.

• She saw in his face that he had contracted the incurable Western disease. He had set his cross-hairs on the snowpeak of a vision, and there he would go, triangulating his way across a bone-dry future, dragging her and the children with him, until they all died of thirst. “I believe you’re confident,” she said. “I know I’m not.”

• “We don’t sell land, we sell water rights and water. The more settlers come in, the greater the need. That’s when we’ll build the dam and lengthen the canal line clear to the Snake. Here goes the canal, along the edge of the mountain here, right across the drainage. The whole valley’s under the ditch.”

• Do you know what that means?” “I know what it sounds like.” He waited. “It sounds like a country without life, people, schools, anything” “It sounds to me like a country with a future.” “And no present.” “The impatience she created in him troubled her, and yet she had to resist his enthusiasm. For her own sake and the children’s sake and for his sake she had to be sensible. But she smiled, trying to express love even while she blocked his way; she felt that she begged, that he could not insist if she made it clear how much the prospect appalled her.

• “Do you think superintending a mine is safe?” he said, and laughed so unpleasantly that she wanted to cry. “Didn’t Almaden or the Adelaide teach you anything?” “Yes,” she said, looking down. “So did Mexico. How easily something can go wrong-always goes wrong!” “Sue, I know this scheme. I made it up, I surveyed it, I laid out the plans. It’ll work.”

• Wearily she looked up, let her eyes meet his stubborn blue ones. “Well, go in to your meeting tomorrow and see what they say. We can’t settle it now.” “There’s no point in talking to Pope and Cole if you aren’t willing.” The flick of their eyes meeting and breaking apart again. “Suppose I wasn’t,” she said. “What would you do?” It took him a few seconds. Then he answered steadily, “Stay here, suppose. Get some sort of job. Pick apples. Hire out to John.” The ghost of Mrs. Elliott was whispering to her. She took her throat in her hand and swallowed against the pressure of her fingers. “You know I wouldn’t stand in your way or make you… give up what you want. Could you run it from out there and come back here for -between whiles? Like Conrad and Mary?”

  Kyle: Mrs. Elliott is critical in understanding this relationship (pg. 187-188)

• But she had already given in. She knew that sooner or later, this fall or next spring, she would be packing up her children and her depleted collection of household goods and going West again―not, as at first, on an adventurous picnic, and not with a solemn intention of making a home in her husband’s chosen country, but into exile.

• With the help-it isn’t really that-of a good-natured clumsy town girl, I have been able to establish a routine of work in the mornings. I am writing another Leadville novel, being poor in experience and having to make do with what is at hand. In the afternoon when baby is fed and put down, and Ollie has gone up for his nap, I come out here to read, and write letters, and listen to the dry lonely rattle of wind through the cottonwood leaves.

• It is strange to find ourselves people of consequence. My old boy has sold them all on his dream. I am sure they all hope to get rich out of him, or richer-some shareholders in the company are the Irish millionaires I mentioned. There has been a considerable land boom already, and the land office is doing-I just realized where the phrase comes from-a landoffice business. Oh, couldn’t you and Thomas homestead a claim and lay the foundations for a western place of visitation? Quite seriously, it would be a profitable thing to do, and on “desert” or “timber-culture” claims there is no residence requirement as there is for a homestead. You need only have someone make minimal “improvements,” as they are called, and wait. Don’t you want to join us in the making of a new country? Have you no impulse to see the banks of the Snake? Or is that one of those horrid Western names that put you off?

• I wish I could make you feel a place like Kuna. It is a place where silence closes about you after the bustle of the train, where a soft, dry wind from great distances hums through the telephone wires and a stage road goes out of sight in one direction and a new railroad track in another. There is not a tree, nothing but sage.

• Canyon gate and creek and city were no more than a scribble on the great empty page across which Oliver hopes to write a history of human occupation. He stopped the team and we looked at it a considerable while. It was good for me to see it as he first saw it when he came down from the Coeur d’Alene and was struck by his great idea. Oliver knew, in that quiet way he has of knowing, that if I once saw it I would feel about it as he does. It is a great idea, difficult of accomplishment but not impossible. I have become half a believer, and though I cannot say I am fully reconciled to the life it will lead us, I am no longer fearful of failure.

• You must know, having had it from the beginning, what a happiness it is to have one’s husband completely contented in his work. O. has always handled his jobs conscientiously and well, but I think his heart was never in a job until now. He works all day, and at night buries himself in the history of irrigation, and reports on systems in Persia, India, China, everywhere. Reading aloud to him the other night when he had a headache, I came across a quotation from Confucius that made us both laugh, it so perfectly expressed Oliver. Ward. Confucius said, “I find no fault with the character of Yu. He lived in a mean low house and expended all his strength on the ditches and water channels.” Oliver at once painted the whole quotation on a board and nailed it above the door of the canyon shack, like an epigraph at the beginning of a chapter.

• I have heard publishers, lamenting their hard life over Scotch and soda, complain that they must read a hundred bad manuscripts to find one good one. Having practiced the trade of history, I feel no stir of sympathy. A historian scans a thousand documents to find one fact that he can use. If he is working with correspondence, as I am, and with the correspondence of a woman to boot, he will wade toward his little islands of information through a dismal swamp of recipes, housekeeping details, children’s diseases, insignificant visitors, inconclusive conversations with people unknown to the historian, and recitations of what the writer did yesterday.

• The failure of our money frightens me-it is what I feared, or half feared, all along-but for the summer I like the canyon much better than Boise. I would rather be picturesquely uncomfortable than comfortably dull. The camp consists of a shack, a cook tent with a “fly” over our table, Wiley’s and Frank’s tent on the beach, and an abandoned miner’s cabin downriver, where John sleeps. The shack used to be the office, but as Oliver says, you don’t need an office to mark time in, and so now it houses the four Wards and Nellie Linton. “A mean low house,” etc-and don’t we wish we could expend all our strength on the ditches and water channels!

• As a practitioner of hindsight I know that Grandfather was trying to do, by personal initiative and with the financial resources of a small and struggling corporation, what only the immense power of the federal government ultimately proved able to do. That does not mean he was foolish or mistaken. He was premature. His clock was set on pioneer time. He met trains that had not yet arrived, he waited on platforms that hadn’t yet been built, beside tracks that might never be laid. Like many another Western pioneer, he had heard the clock of history strike, and counted the strokes wrong. Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.

• I can visualize them pretty exactly, because a little later Grandmother drew her three men in that posture for a series called Far Western Life-the best things she ever did, I believe, better even than the Mexican drawings. I saw them described in an art history the other day as “beautiful examples from the golden age of woodcut illustration.” This picture she titled Prospectors, and she captioned it with a verse from Bret Harte:

  The glowing campfire with rude humor painted
  The ruddy tints of health
  On haggard face, and form that drooped and fainted
  In the fierce race for wealth

  In their hour of disspiritedness, the haggard face and form that drooped and fainted were authentic enough. They had worked hard and hoped hard, and their disappointment was as great as their expectations had been. But the money motive demeans them. They were in no race for wealth-that was precisely what disgusted Grandfather with the mining business. They were makers and doers, they wanted to take a piece of wilderness and turn it into a home for a civilization. I suppose they were wrong-their whole civilization was wrong-but they were the antithesis of mean or greedy. Given the choice, any one of them would have chosen poverty, with the success of their project, over wealth and its failure.

  Kyle: The west was, truly, the fiercest race for wealth

• “At least you can use the winter for more planning,” Susan said. Across the fire he sent her a slow, narrow-eyed smile. “We’re already oversupplied with that. There’s one thing we can do through the winter, though.” “What?” “Wait.”

• Have you ever built a house with your own hands, out of the materials that Nature left lying around? Everyone should have that experience once. It is the most satisfying experience I know. We have been as fascinated as children who build forts or snowhouses, and it has made us the tightest little society in all the West. We are not the kind of ideal society that gathers around you and Augusta in the studio, yet we are not without our ideal aspects. A Brook Farm without a social theory, and a melting pot Brook Farm at that: a Chinese cook, a Swedish handyman, an English governess, three Eastern-American engineers, two children, and a lady artist. I have watched with admiration how you two first created a place for yourselves in New York and then molded and shaped it within a world of art and ideas. Let me tell you how it is done in primitive Idaho.

• They were ten miles from town, and town was only a little territorial capital twenty-five hundred miles from the springs of civilization and amenity. Their visits and their visitors were few. They all preferred the high pastures, the canyon, and the mountains to the town, whose fluctuations among mining boom, railroad boom, irrigation boom, and statehood boom were too much like their own recurrent fevers of hope.

  Kyle: Always a boom

• “He loves to be read to. It isn’t that he doesn’t like reading. He just has difficulty recognizing words, even when he’s had them over and over. It’s as if he’d never seen them before.” Dyslexia, says my 1969 overview. The poor kid was a dyslectic eighty years before the condition will be discovered and named. Wordblind, and the son of my grandmother.

  Kyle: Misunderstood disadvantages

• It is an effort for me to imagine my way backward from the silent father I knew to the boy in Boise Canyon. Like my grandfather, he was not a man of words, and it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers. Grandmother herself may have made that mistake. I have heard her say, in her rueful voice with its overtone of regret, what a brave, manly little boy he was, but I never heard her say how sensitive he was. Yet I think he must have been. But though it is from her letters that I get that impression, I think she herself never understood how deep he ran, any more than she understood his difficulty with reading. It was his capacity for feeling that she should have attended to: by failing to comprehend it, she probably contributed to his silence. Feeling, more than manliness, drove him across the bridge against the warnings of his conscience-a horrified sympathy for his mother’s pain, a sense of fatal responsibility in his father’s absence. He was not a disobedient child. He simply overflowed obedience on a flood of emotion, and he had some of his father’s readiness in a crisis. I see him going down that rough canyon pushing his mare as his father always pushed a horse.

  Kyle: Reminds me of Will Laney during the Indian attack

• He wondered if the mother he adored and thought himself unworthy of was still crying for pain.

• There sat Susan Burling Ward, tired-eyed after a day’s drawing, dragged-out after a day’s heat, and tightened her drowning-woman’s grip on culture, literature, civilization, by trying to read War and Peace.

• And outside the silent house, the silent moon-whited mountains, the vacant moon-faded sky. No cry of bird or animal, no rattle of hoofs among stones, no movement except the ghostly flash along the surface of the river, no noise except the mutter of water as muted as rumination. Her mind was still moving with the turmoil of Tolstoy, and the contrast between that crowded human world and her moonlit emptiness was so great that she said aloud, “Oh, it’s like trying to communicate from beyond the grave!” 1970 knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead. But Susan Ward in her canyon was pre-refrigerator, predishwasher, pre-airplane, pre-automobile, pre-electric light, pre-radio, pre-television, pre-record player. Eyes too tired to read had no alternative diversions, ears that craved music or the sound of voices could crave in vain, or listen to Sister Lips whistle or talk to herself.

• Some delay, somebody he had to wait a long time to see. Perhaps even some success. He had more than earned it. He had turned down four different offers, one in the governor’s office, to stick to his great scheme, and she had been loyal, had she not? She had supported him and encouraged him and believed in him and put up with what her support cost her.

• Alone, contented with himself and the world, he bellowed in a way to make her smile. As soon as he had sung the melody through, he instantly sang the same verse in the bass, as if trying to sing harmony with himself, and she was reminded of the guides Augusta had told her about, who sang two notes up into the ceiling of the baptistry at Pisa, and let the roof fuse them into a fat round chord.

• He sounded like a boy from whom something has been expected, and who has disappointed himself and everybody else. She moved to put her hand on him in comfort, but he turned away and pulled the headstall over the mule’s bending ears. His hand spatted haunch, he walked around Susan as if she had a diameter of ten feet and took the bridle into the shed and brought out the oat can. She heard the disgusted breath whistle through his teeth as he bent to pour the oats on the ground.

• The promptness with which he turned down toward the shack made her want to scream after him. What are you upset about? Why should you act as if you’re angry with me? She felt as empty as the mountains. After eleven years, she wanted to say after him. After eleven years you finally prove to me that Augusta was right.

• For I find that it bothers me to wait it out with them. I don’t want to follow Grandfather on his trips to the post office, where there is nothing but a letter for Grandmother from Augusta Hudson that rubs into his raw conscience the realization of his wife’s exile, or a check from Thomas Hudson that reminds him, with barbs, how he is supported. I don’t want to drift with him up to the territorial offices or the Coarse Gold. I don’t want to watch him accept drinks from men who offer them half out of personal liking and half out of alertness to evade what he may ask of them. Neither do I want to take any of those long train rides to New York, where General Tompkins periodically got a fire going in some handful of damp financial shavings. I don’t want to watch them blow hopefully into one little smudge after another until it went out. I don’t want those depressed rides home, six days long, carrying each time a bigger accumulation of failure. No wonder he spent most of his time in the club car.

• What bothers me most is to watch the slow corrosion of the affection and loyalty that have held Oliver and Susan Ward together. I am ashamed that he hits the bottle when he gets low, I hate the picture of Grandmother sitting in the canyon house, a sulky, sullen dame, worrying half spitefully that he may fall off the bridge coming home, or show himself sodden and sottish before the children. And feeling, too, the profoundest, most hopeless pity, wanting to help and having no notion how. She knew that drink must be an almost irresistible temptation, even while she expected him, if he was a man, to resist it.

• Miserable, both of them, everything hopeful in them run down, everything joyous smothered under poverty and failure. My impulse, and I hereby yield to it, is to skip it all, to document not one single miserable hour until a day in November 1888. That day the post office finally produced a letter with the seed of change in it.

• “And what do you and the children do?” “It doesn’t matter what we do! I’d be happy anywhere if I thought you were working and … satisfied with yourself. I can support the children. Haven’t I been doing it?” It was not the thing to say. She knew it, but could not help saying it. The steady, heavy stare of his eyes told her that he resented her and hardened himself against her, and the moment she saw his reaction, she resented him.

• “If that’s what it is,” she said, close to crying, “if you think I’m a bossy managing woman, it might be better if I took the children away somewhere and never came back.” He was exactly like a balky mule. She could see his hind quarters settle and his ears lie back. Aghast at what she had said, more than half afraid she meant it, she stared into his frowning face. “That’s what I mean by pushing and pulling,” he said. He walked away from her and sat on the table, looking out the window down toward the bridge and Arrow Rock. He talked to the window, or to her reflection in it. “You’re a lot better than I am,” he said. “You think I don’t know that?” In the glass his eyes found and held hers. “You think I don’t know what I’ve put you through? Or that I don’t care? But I tell you, Sue, I’m not going to do any better because anybody, even you, is hauling at me. I’m doing my best right now.”

• “If a promise means anything, I have to make it to myself,” Oliver said. “Then if I break it I’ll be harder on myself than you’d ever be. But I can imagine breaking it. If I’m out somewhere by myself, thinking how you’re all God knows where and the canal’s shut down and the company broke and all these years blown away like trash, I’m going to feel low a lot of the time. I haven’t felt any other way since I can remember, practically. I don’t feel any different now, just because of a letter from Major Powell. If somebody comes by when I’m feeling that way, and takes a bottle out of a saddlebag, I might help him kill it. If I did, I’d probably ride straight into the nearest town and get some more. I know myself that well.”

• “Questions such as what?” I said. “Such as, Was she really thinking of leaving him, or are you guess- “I’m extrapolating.” “Ah,” she said, “right on the rug. Shame on you.”

• “Really?” I was surprised. The Zodiac is very real to me. To her it is not even a memory, it is only some decaying buildings and a boarded-up entrance and a lot of rusting cable and iron overgrown with weeds.

• The shaft was always full of gulps and sobs way down in the dark where the pumps sucked water. They went twentyfour hours a day, seven strokes to the minute, like a slow, heavy pulse. The old Cousin Jack who tended them always spoke of them as “she,” but I never stood there between the timbers hanging onto Grandfather’s hand without thinking of them as somehow part of him. They had his sort of dependability. It was as if I could feel them beating in his hand.” Shelly was looking at me with her head on one side. Her eyes, which are normally a cool skeptical gray, warmed nearly to brown. “You liked him a lot.” “I suppose I liked him-trusted him-more than I’ve ever trusted anyone.” “I think he must have been a lot like you,” she said, still with her head on one side and that smiling look of speculation on her face. “He understood human weakness, wasn’t that it? He didn’t blame people. He had this kind of magnanimity you’ve got.”

• Why then am I spending all this effort trying to understand my grandparents’ lives? What am I talking and organizing all this for? Why do I hire this girl to make my talking real by typing it off the tapes? Why do I drive my drifts and tunnels toward the hidden lode of Susan Ward’s woe? Is it love and sympathy that makes me think myself capable of reconstructing these lives, or am I, Nemesis in a wheelchair, bent on proving something-perhaps that not even gentility and integrity are proof against the corrosions of human weakness, human treachery, human disappointment, human inability to forget?

  Kyle: Ultimately, both class AND competence, can’t stop human failure.

• I have thought about all this. How could I help it? Forgiving I have considered, though like my father and grandfather before me, am a justice man, not a mercy man. I can’t help feeling that if justice is observed, mercy is forever unnecessary. I don’t want her punished, I want no eye for an eye, I hope I don’t gloat over her misfortunes. I just can’t feel about her as I once did. She broke something. I know no way of discounting the doctrine that when you take something you want, and damn the consequences, then you had better be ready to accept whatever consequences ensue. Also I remember the terms of the bond: in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, till death do us part.

• Grandmother, I want to say to Susan Ward as she nurses her grudge through the winter of 1887 and into the spring of 1888, and finally decides to take Nellie and the children off to Vancouver Island while Oliver leads a party into Jackson Hole-Grandmother, take it casy. Don’t act like a stricken Victorian prude. Don’t lose your sense of proportion. Ask yourself whether his unhappy drinking has really hurt you, or your children, or him. Don’t get impatient with the man’s bad luck. You risk too much. Naturally Grandmother didn’t hear my warning blowing backward out of the fog of consequences that is her future and my past. She was not a brooder, but she had had her disappointments and her grievances and her anxieties, and she believed in the aspirations, refinements, and pretenses of gentility. She had watched her hopes recede, had had her pride humiliated. Her ambitions for her children seemed certain to be frustrated. The life she had given up lay far off and far back in time, unbelievable as a mirage. She had a reputation and enjoyed a certain fame, but all by mail, all from a distance, or else among the ladies of Boise whose opinion she did not choose to value.

• Imagine her feelings. The First Lady of the Land had stolen her place in her friend’s heart, a place she might still occupy if she had not married exile and failure. If it gave her a mournful pride to know her dear ones valued in such high places, it only made all the more insufferable the worry she felt every time Oliver went moodily into town.

• They started again, pulled up through the shallowing gulch until it flattened out onto the sagebrush plateau. The wind, blowing erratically from the west, moved in the sage and chilled their warm skins. She burst out, “And yet he must be exposed to cultivated people somehow, he must see plays and hear operas and go to galleries and listen to good talk! He mustn’t grow up as silent as his father!”

  Kyle: Class vs capability

• She sat so close to Frank that their arms brushed when they moved, and she was acutely conscious of every slightest contact. Looking down that steep perspective to the little drawing at the bottom, she said, still in the tone of bitterness, “There lie the most wasted years of our lives.”

  Kyle: Privilege left her feeling entitled to eventual success.

• Her mournful preoccupation was both compulsive and somewhat theatrical, half false, for through it she took alert notice of the name he called her by. He had always called her Susan; before strangers, Mrs. Ward. But she did not turn. “Sue, it’s not for me to tell you this, but he’s had to sit through six years of nothing but disappointment.”

• She said to the bulge of her knees under the long white dress, “Frank, what am I going to do? I can’t trust the children’s future to him. He’ll go on trying and trying, and failing and failing, and the will control him. The more he fails the more his … weakness. .. children will grow up like Willa Olpen’s, they’ll be savages! I’ve tried, you know I’ve tried.”

• Grandmother says she submitted to that separation; I think she created it. My only evidence is the letters to Augusta, and those are careful. They mention Oliver only in the most matter-of-fact way, and they mention Frank Sargent not at all. She was absorbed in her children and herself, like a widow mending a torn life.

  Kyle: Despite Pat Thompson’s harshness and, I’m sure, it just a few feelings, Helen Laney never felt this way about him. How could that be?

• Oh, Augusta, how I wept when I read that telegram with all its enthusiasm instantly renewed and all its hope as intact as if we had not spent these six years-seven, nearly-pursuing disappointment. I wept for joy that Oliver’s hope is revived, and for bitterness that it was so long frustrated, and for grief that years of failure have left scars we may never be able to forget. Do you understand me? I hope you do-completely. I should not like to be understood only partially, and yet that is the way I understand myself. And I wept for fear, too -fear that hope may be dashed again as it has been dashed so many times.

• I sup pose her letters must have suggested that now, with the canal going forward and his anxieties removed, he might promise her never to give in to his weakness again. I suppose he would have ignored any such suggestion. Love her and admire her and respect her he did; let her manage him he would not. He was as stubborn as a post, and in his way as word-blind as my dyslectic father.

• Susan sat with her hands tight in her lap, knowing she should force some enthusiasm, however false. While she held herself apart in Victoria he had driven himself every spare hour to prepare this place for her-the place they had sketched and erased and redrawn through dozens of shut-in evenings in the canyon. She knew with precision, to for wept a decimal point, what he hoped to make it, and she could have the premature trees and the transplanted yellow rose that had put out its first blooms the summer Agnes was born. Yet the exposed yard, a scab on the sagebrush mesa, made her feel like weeping in another key. In homesick hours she had dreamed of the soft dry wind of this valley, but she had dreamed it clean, not with these dust devils that whipped across skinned land, and the haze of dust that she supposed arose from the ditch construction along the edge of the mountain. She had dreamed the valley clean and wild, not made ugly with such raw beginnings as this. So many years must pass before it could be made into anything beautiful or civilized, so much of their lives would have to be spent in the hard preparations to live. The canyon house had been one thing, a temporary camp. This house was where she would spend the rest of her life.

  Kyle: The primary difference between those who are perpetually dissatisfied and those who are perpetually content is whether they are “making preparations to live” or just simply living.

• His look, bright blue, direct, fully comprehending, warned her off. He refused to be put in the position of defending himself or justifying himself or taking any oath. He did the best he knew how, his look said. He was himself, for better or worse. He did not grant her the supervision of his habits. “You married me,” his look said. “Maybe that was a mistake. But you didn’t marry what could make out of me. I wouldn’t be much good remodeled.”

• As she walked from room to unfinished room making pleased or judgmental noises, she was resenting her husband’s wordlessness, she smoldered with grievance that he would not submit to talking their problems out. It was harder to get words from him than it was to get gold from rock. He tortured her with his silence. What did he mean, bringing Frank back on the project? Was he testing her? Tempting her? Was he so dense that he did not feel the undercurrent in his house? Why don’t you come out with it? she felt like saying to him in anger. I’m sure you think there’s something. Why don’t you say it, so I can tell you there isn’t?

• I shall go on writing the personal history of my grandmother, following Bancroft’s advice to historians: present your subject in his own terms, judge him in yours. Actually, I’d just as soon leave out the judgment entirely. I don’t feel at ease judging people. And I’d just as soon let her present herself: her letters from the Mesa are among the longest and fullest she wrote during that long half century of correspondence.

• The finished section, so far hardly more than a half mile, sweeps in a great curve around the shoulder of the mountain, eighty feet wide at the top, fifty at the bottom. The twelve-foot banks slope back at the “angle of repose,” which means the angle at which dirt and pebbles stop rolling. Down the bottom of the ditch fifteen horsemen could ride abreast, without crowding. It was good for me to see it all the other day, in company with the gentlemen from the London syndicate, and to be reminded how all of it is owing to my old boy’s imagination and his refusal to be beaten.

• And so I live an interim or preparatory life. Oliver is bent upon making these thousand acres of ours into something that all men can look at and be inspired by, a sort of pledge of what the country can do when it has water. His goal, he told me the other day, is to make something as near as possible to Querendero, one of those grand Mexican estancias at which we stayed when we rode back from Morelia. He will fence our thousand acres and push his improvements clear to the fences-wheat, lucerne, timothy, wild pasture, orchards, berry patches and gardens. He swears he will have a rose garden that will make me forget Milton. He will make father’s roses look like a posy bed! He frightens me, he is so willing to stake everything we have. But when I raise objections, he tells me I can see only what is in front of my nose.

  Kyle: Drive

• Faith! Faith! he tells me. Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains. When this pioneering enthusiasm takes hold of him, he is not my wordless husband at all. A few days ago, in the last of the Indian summer weather, we rode around the whole place so that he could show me what he wants to do with each part of it. We have kept most of the poplar lane alive, with great effort, by means of the windmill and hose cart, but some of our “grove” has perished. Until we get water from the Big Ditch we must get our results mainly out of native, resistant things, Oliver says. The slope of the mesa will be our wild garden, planted to wild syringa, wild clematis, and buck sage, which has a yellow flower that Nellie admits is almost as handsome as furze. This will cover, some day in the future for which we live, the “upright” of the great step. The “tread” will be covered with grass.

  Kyle: Pioneer spirit

• “Come on, you little whortleberry,” her father said. “You go tell Nellie she wants you. Tomorrow you can ask Hallie up for the fireworks. I brought back a whole saddlebag full.” “Goodie!” Betsy said. “Can I shoot off a rocket?” “Maybe. Depending on how good you are all day.” “Oh, I’ll be very good,” Betsy said. “I’ll be the best. Can I shoot off more than one?” “You wouldn’t want to be a pig.” “Yes I would.” She hung onto his hand and swung by it. “Not you,” he said. “There’s less pig in you than in anybody around. Now how about those lessons?” She swung a last swing all around him and ran out, but she had barely let go before Agnes had wrapped herself around his leg and put her two feet on his boot. He carried her around a few steps that way. Her upturned face was a baby replica of the strained face of her mother. “I’m not a whortleberry,” she said. “Well it’s news to me. How would anybody know? You look like a whortleberry.” “I look like a girl!” “You look like a blue-eyed whortleberry to me. Or a whortle-eyed blueberry?”

• Unyielding, stiff in his hands, she cried into his face, “Oh, how could I help it! Eight years of exile, eight years of living on hope. For what? Till now it’s been all right, I could put up with it, I had faith in it… .” Her voice gave out, she was hung up on his eyes. He let go of her arms. “Did you?” he said. “What? What do you …” Very still, he stood before her. His face was weathered like a cowhand’s, his fingers hung half closed at his sides, constricted by their calluses. Almost whispering, he said, “Did you? Did you have faith in it? Did you have faith in me?” As if he had slapped her, she stepped back. “That’s not fair!”

• “I should have taken those papers down myself, I knew how important they were to all of us. I just let myself get too busy, I was going too many ways at once. I’ve got no excuse. But this general business of trusting people, I don’t know. I doubt if I can change. I believe in trusting people, do you see? At least till they prove they can’t be trusted. What kind of life is it when you can’t?”

• Utterly cut off, sunk into the West, cut off behind arid hills, she lay thinking backward to another piazza and the smell of other roses. It was hard to believe that they no longer existed, not for her-the old house of her great-grandfather sold to a surly farmhand grown up, the vines of the porch now screening his evening relaxation, the kitchen “fixed up” by his vulgar and ambitious wife. No home there any longer, parents dead, Bessie wronged and ruined, herself adrift in the hopeless West, Thomas and Augusta farther from her in fame and associations even than they were in miles. To sit with them just one evening, an evening such as this! To sit with them even here, on this barren piazza! She acknowledged that all her preparations in this house had had them in mind. When it was ready, when they could be induced, she would offer herself to their love all over again, in her new setting, and prove to them that her years of exile had changed her not at all.

  Kyle: You should WANT to be changed.

• She could see in his eyes, in the tasting movement of his lips under the mustache, that he felt the blame she could not help laying on him. But she could not make herself smile, or lay a hand on his arm, or send him away with an injunction to enjoy himself.

• Frank had not only seen that, he had been one of the avengers. Perhaps his hand had knotted the rope or lashed the horse from under or cut the body down. It chilled her to think of. And yet in her present mood she was half inclined to think manly rage a better response to wrong than the self-blame of a man who trusted too much and then refused to condemn.

• I wouldn’t be surprised, that is, if she was tempted. To flee failure, abandon hopelessness, disengage herself from the stubborn inarticulate man she was married to, and the scheme he was married to, would have been a real temptation. And of course, in 1890, for Susan Burling Ward, utterly unthinkable.

• Then for a time she heard him walking up and down the veranda, slow and steady on the tiles, thinking the bleakest thoughts, no doubt, looking into the lightless future. Poor fellow, poor fellow! to see everything come down, every hope and ambition destroyed. She half sat up, impulsively ready to go out to him and hook her arm in his and walk out his failure with him.

• Part of my uneasiness comes as a direct result of living my grandmother’s life for her. For the last few days I have been studying the Xeroxed newspaper stories that finally arrived from the Idaho Historical Society, and though they do straighten out for me some facts that I have never until now understood, they also raise some questions that are disturbing. There is some history that I want not to have happened. I resist the consequences of being Nemesis.

• One result of throwing away all the maps of human experience and the guides to conduct that a tradition offers, and flying by the seat of your moral or social pants, is that you fly into situations that are absurd or pitiful, depending on how indulgently one looks at them. My own indulgence is wildly variable. Witness this afternoon.

• Somewhere, Sometime, somebody taught her to question everything-though it might have been a good thing if he’d also taught her to question the act of questioning. Carried far enough, as far as Shelly’s crowd carries it, that can dissolve the ground you stand on. I suppose wisdom could be defined as knowing what you have to accept, and I suppose by that definition she’s a long way from wise.

• “You’re judging by past history.” “All history is past history.”

• Is that such a success story? Why not try a new way? Or look at your grandfather. Is this manifesto so different from the come-on he wrote for the Idaho Mining and Irrigation Company, except that he was doing it for profit? He was trying something that was pretty sure to fail, wasn’t he? Maybe it wasn’t even sound, maybe that sagebrush desert might better have been left in sagebrush, isn’t that what you think? All that big dream of his was dubious ecology, and sort of greedy when you look at it, just another piece of American continent-busting. But you admire your grandfather more than anybody, even though the civilization he was trying to build was this cruddy one we’ve got. Here’s a bunch of people willing to put their lives on the line to try to make a better one. Why put them down?”

• “Why? Because their soft-headedness irritates me. Because their beautiful thinking ignores both history and human nature. Because they’d spoil my thing with their thing. Because I don’t think any of them is wise enough to play God and create a human society. Look. I like privacy, I don’t like crowds, I don’t like noise, I don’t like anarchy, I don’t even like discussion all that much. I prefer study, which is very different from meditation-not better, different. I don’t like children who are part of the wild life. So are polecats and rats and other sorts of hostile and untrained vermin. I want to make a distinction between civilization and the wild life. I want a society that will protect the wild life without confusing itself with it.”

• You can’t retire to weakness-you’ve got to learn to control strength. As for gentleness and love, I think they’re harder to come by than this sheet suggests. I think they can become as coercive a conformity as anything Mr. Hershey or Mr. Hoover ever thought up. Furthermore, I’m put off by the aggressively unfeminine and the aggressively female women that would be found in a commune like this. I’m put off by long hair, I’m put off by irresponsibility, I never liked Whitman, I can’t help remembering that good old wild Thoreau wound up a tame surveyor of Concord house lots.”

• As long as I had gone that far, I thought I might as well go the rest of the way. “How would I know what it means?” I said. “I don’t know what anything means. What it suggests to me is that the civilization he was contemptuous of-that civilization of men who lived lives of quiet desperation-was stronger than he was, and maybe righter. It outvoted him. It swallowed him, in fact, and used the nourishment he provided to alter a few cells in its corporate body. It grew richer by him, but it was bigger than he was. Civilizations grow by agreements and accommodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get swept down and absorbed, they’re a side issue. Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition. If revolutionaries would learn that they can’t remodel society by day after tomorrow-haven’t the wisdom to and shouldn’t be permitted to—I’d have more respect for them. Revolutionaries and sociologists. God, those sociologists! They’re always trying to reclaim a tropical jungle with a sprinkling can full of weed killer. Civilizations grow and change and decline-they aren’t remade.”

• Up to now, reconstructing Grandmother’s life has been an easy game. Her letters and reminiscences have provided both event and interpretation. But now I am at a place where she hasn’t done the work for me, and where it isn’t any longer a game. I not only don’t want this history to happen, I have to make it up, or part of it. All I know is the what, and not all of that; the how and the why are all speculation.

• “Don’t tell me too much,” Henry James is supposed to have said, when some anecdote vibrated his web and alerted him to the prospect of a story. “Don’t tell me too much!” But he was not writing biography, and he had no personal stake in what he did. He could invent within the logic of a situation. I have to invent within a body of inhibiting facts_ that I wish were otherwise.

• I know, furthermore, that my reluctance to expose her trouble is calculated to spare myself, not her. What point is there in sparing a woman who has been dead more than thirty years? So I will do it like fortune telling. I will start at the top of that little stack of clippings and read down through them and see what they tell me.

• Forgive me if you can. At the last minute I could not come, I lacked the courage. To visualize myself knocking at your door and waiting for the sight of your face turned me faint with panic. Too much has happened, I am too deep in another life. It would not have been me! I am going back. Behind all this anguish, I believe, has been my refusal to submit. I do not mean to my husband only. I have held myself above my chosen life, with results that I must repent and grieve for the rest of my days. I have not been loyal. If there is ever a chance that our lives may be patched together, it must be in the West, since that is where I failed. I will write you when I am in control of myself. Good-bye, dearest Augusta, my ideal woman. I am not worth your sympathy or your tears, and yet I am weak enough to hope that not all the love you once had for me is effaced. I am not likely to see you, ever again. It is one of the saddest of my many sad thoughts. Good-bye, my dearest.

• One or two, she thought, craved the pleasure of pitying her, but she was impenetrable, she turned on them the bright face of self-sufficiency.

• And I am glad he is now in a position where he can build-he is always happiest when he is building some thing.

• My God, Augusta, how could I ever, what blindness of discontent could have made me responsible for so much bitterness in those I most love! In punishment I have lost three of them-four, for Ollie writes only the letters the school compels him to, and they are as cold, as cold, as a stone at the bottom of a river. Do you ever think how death may be? I do. I think of it as dusky and cool, a room with a door open to the outside, and a soft wind coming in as cool as if it blew off the stars. In the doorway, which faces away-in these visions I am never looking back-may at any moment appear the faces that one has wholly loved, and the dear voices that one remembers will be saying softly, like a blessing, We love you, we forgive you.

• I must remember who I am. I am a historical pseudo-Fate, I hold the abhorréd shears. I have set myself the task of making choral comment on a woman who was a perfect lady, and a lady who was a feeling, eager, talented, proud, snobbish, and exiled woman. And fallible. And responsible, willing to accept the blame for her actions even when her actions were, as I suppose all actions are, acts of collaboration. For her, conduct was like marriage-private. She held herself to account, and she was terribly punished.

• Efforts by the father and by Mr. Frank Sargent. Where did he come from? Did he just pop into the action as he pops into the newspaper story, out of nowhere? Had he been riding down the ditch with Oliver and Ollie? The paper does not say so. Did he come along later? We don’t know. Was he there all the time-had he been sitting hidden in that tall sage with his arm around Susan Ward, or with Susan Ward’s two hands in his, pleading his urgent, ardent, reckless, hopeless cause? Were those two so absorbed in themselves that they forgot for a while to wonder where Agnes had got to? Did Susan, pushing away the misery of their parting, or whatever it was, stand up at some point, looking anxiously around in the growing dusk, on that bench like a great empty stage, under that sky beginning to show the first weak stars, and call out, and have no answer? Did the two of them go through the sage and along the trail and down the ditch, calling? And is that when Oliver and Ollie, attracted by the voices, came riding down?

• She never blamed her husband for abandoning her in her grief and guilt, she never questioned the harshness of his judgment, she did not turn away from those dead roses that he left her for a sign. She thought he had suffered as much as she, and she knew that for his suffering she was to blame.

• She has never discussed my former wife with me, but I know what she thinks. She thinks I was callously abandoned when I was sick and helpless. With certain qualifications, that is what I think myself. I watched her in her city clothes, her face carefully friendly, that middle-aged well-kept composed American woman, break up and dominate our comfortable Saturday afternoon, and I was filled with hatred and terror. And curiosity. I looked for the signs in her of what Rodman had suggested-She doesn’t look good, she’s shaky, she’s had a bad time-and couldn’t see them, any more than I had seen, before her treachery, the signs of her growing intention.

  Kyle: Is the contrast between their marriage and his grandmothers the point? Different kinds of abandonment?

• Now! my fear and anger said to me, and I turned my chair to face her head on. She was not ready to meet me; she frowned down on her hands and handbag as if on the verge of some decision. I cried at her silently, You dare to come here and sit on my porch and drive away my friends! You dare to sit there as if you were welcome, or had a right? Do you remember at all what you did to me? Have you no shame? What do you want here? What have I got left that you’d like to take away me?

• “On the contrary, he was soft. People imposed on him. Grandmother always said he was too trusting. Actually he never expected much of people, and so he wasn’t upset if they turned out to be shysters or chiselers or crooks. But a few people he trusted absolutely. It was when they betrayed him that he turned to rock. Come on, I’ll show you the vegetable garden.”

• “I don’t know yet. I was thinking of calling it Angle of Repose.” Her sliding and pacing stopped; she considered what I had said. “Is that a very good title? Will it sell? It sounds kind of … inert.” “How do you like The Doppler Effect? Is that any better?” “The Doppler Effect? What’s that?” “Forget it. It doesn’t matter. The title’s the least of it. I might call it Inside the Bendix. It isn’t a book anyway, it’s just a kind of investigation into a life.” “Your grandmother’s.” “Yes.” “Why she wasn’t happy.” “That’s not what I’m investigating. I know why she wasn’t happy.” She stopped halfway across the floor, her drink in her hand, her eyes bent down into the glass as if Excalibur, or a water baby, or a djinn, or something, might rise out of it. “Why wasn’t she?” I set my half-eaten sandwich down on the tray that boxed me into the chair, and took one shaking hand in the other, and cried, “You want to know why? You don’t know? Because she considered that she’d been unfaithful to my grandfather, in thought or act or both. Be cause she blamed herself for the drowning of her daughter, the one Grandfather made the rose for. Because she was responsible for the suicide of her lover-if he was her lover. Because she’d lost the trust of her husband and son. Does that answer your question?”

• “So they lived happily-unhappily ever after,” I said. “Year after irrelevant year, half a century almost, through one world war and through the Jazz Age and through the Depression and the New Deal and all that; through Prohibition and Women’s Rights, through the automobile and radio and television and into the second world war. Through all those changes, and not a change in them.”

• “He was a warm and decent man,” I said. I stared in hatred at her thin narrow back, I felt my voice rising and could not keep it down. “He was as decent a man as ever lived!” I said furiously. “He was the kindest, most trusting, easiest-to-get-on-with man I ever knew. My father always made me uneasy, but my grandfather made me feel safe. All he had to do was take hold of my hand and I was in the King’s X place.” Even yet she did not turn, though she must have heard the edge of hysteria cracking in my voice. Dully she said to the bowie and horse pistol and spurs, “But you were fond of her too.” “I loved her. She was a lady.” “A lady who made a terrible mistake.” “And recognized it,” I said. “Admitted it, repented it, accepted the consequences, did her best to live it down. Her real mistake was that she never appreciated him enough until it was too late.”

• “But he never forgave her,” I said. “She broke something she couldn’t mend. In all the years I lived with them I never saw them kiss, I never saw them put their arms around each other, I never saw them touch!”

• “What do you mean, ‘Angle of Repose?” she asked me when I dreamed we were talking about Grandmother’s life, and I said it was the angle at which a man or woman finally lies down. I suppose it is; and yet it was not that that I hoped to find when I began to pry around in Grandmother’s life. I thought when I began, and still think, that there was another angle in all those years when she was growing old and older and very old, and Grandfather was matching her year for year, a separate line that did not intersect with hers. They were vertical people, they lived by pride, and it is only by the ocular illusion of perspective that they can be said to have met. But he had not been dead two months when she lay down and died too, and that may indicate that at that absolute vanishing point they did intersect. They had intersected for years, for more than he especially would ever admit.

• Wisdom, I said oh so glibly the other day when I was pontificating on Shelly’s confusions, is knowing what you have to accept. In this notquite-quiet darkness, while the diesel breaks its heart more and more faintly on the mountain grade, I lie wondering if I am man enough to be a bigger man than my grandfather.