(3 of 4)
Wallace Stegner shares with Willa Gather what Edmund Wilson once called "two currents of profound feeling—one for the beauty of those lives lived out between the sky and the prairie; the other for the pathos of the human spirit making the effort to send down its roots and to flower in that barren soil." In this book, Stegner rides both currents.
His protagonist is Lyman Ward, a writer-historian with a crippling bone disease. His wife has long since left him. Ward describes his son as "Paul Goodman out of Margaret Mead," and between father and son there exists not so much gap as "gulf." Believing "in life chronological rather than in life ex istential," Ward seeks to re-create the frontier past from his grandfather's relics and the prolific papers and sketches of his artist grandmother.
He learns that his grandparents' marriage had a tragic crisis and nearly fell apart. But its center held for sixty years —once the couple finally found their angle of repose, a term Stegner borrows from geology to describe the degree of slope at which falling rocks stabilize and cease to roll.
Sadly, Ward compares their marriage to his own and predictably concludes that modern marital combinations get too little help from society in finding any angle of repose whatever. Even Victorian inhibition seems less destructive than the free-flow orgiastic analysis that drowns so many modern marriages in sexual debate and self-indulgence.
Loss is what the novel is about. The author conveys the most private sense of it, with refreshing reticence about body logistics and bedroom scenery. By not telling all, Stegner illuminates experience and provides insights that are "like dark water under sunlit ice."
THE GRANDEES by Stephen Birmingham. 368 pages. Harper & Row. $10.
Our Crowd, Stephen Birmingham's chronicle of New York's "Great Jewish Families," led him to The Right People, a history of "the American Social Establishment." Now comes The Grandees, grandson of Our Crowd. It might be retitled Their Crowd, for Birmingham's latest is a history of a rather special group—"America's Sephardic Elite"—which was previously given short shrift by the author.
In 1654, the Saint Charles, a ship since dubbed "the Jewish Mayflower," arrived in what is now New York Harbor with 23 Jews aboard. They were fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. It is their descendants—including the Nathan, Gratz, Seixas, Franks and Lopez families—that Birmingham examines. They consider themselves the nobility of American Jewry because their heritage can be traced back to medieval Spain and Portugal, where their ancestors lived as grandees—Spanish or Portuguese noblemen of the first rank.