Eve and the Serpent
Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety
I began reading Wallace Stegner’s final novel Crossing to Safety before the Supreme Court decision came down, and finished it in the changed USA, a country in which the right to abort a pregnancy is no longer federally protected. It’s a beautiful book, full of subtle prose and finely wrought humanity, and it disturbed me deeply. It’s an affectionate love letter of a novel, that I cannot talk about with affection. The power of its ending is mixed with a blindness that infuriated me, and the blindness magnified the power. Particularly this week, it was a very difficult book for me to read.
The title comes from the poem I Could Give All to Time by Robert Frost, which is quoted in the epigraph, and speaks of quiet resistance to the inexorability of loss:
I could give all to Time except – except
What I myself have held. But why declare
The things forbidden that while the Customs slept
I have crossed to Safety with? For I am There,
And what I would not part with I have kept.
And indeed, the novel concerns itself with the stretches of happiness, comfort, and safety seized from lives that, unspooling as they do, must one day run out of thread.
The narrator Larry, a novelist, and his wife Sally are great friends with another couple, Sid and Charity. As the novel opens, the foursome are planning a reunion after a long absence from each other’s lives. Charity is unwell and nearing death, but insists that they all gather for a picnic in their old treasured spot.
Most of the rest is told as a series of reminiscences, flashing back to their first meeting, when both Sally and Charity were pregnant with their first children:
“It’ll be a race!” Charity said. “Let’s keep notes and compare. Who’s your obstetrician?
“I haven’t got one yet. Is yours a good one?”
A big ringing laugh, as if parturition, which sometimes brought the clammy sweat of apprehension to Sally and me, were the most fun since Run Sheep Run. “I guess so,” Charity said. “I really don’t know him very well. He’s only interested in my uterus.”
Sally looked a little daunted. “Well,” she said, “I hope he’ll like mine.”
I made to rise. “Excuse me,” I said. “I believe the only wholesome thing is to blush a deep crimson and leave the room.”
In a way, the novel is in large part about this wholesome male act: blushing and leaving the room.
Immediately Sally and Charity are foils for each other. Sally is shy, soft, gentle, and loving. Charity is extroverted, ambitious, opinionated, and — it becomes clear — willful. On the surface, the women both want the same thing: to support their husbands and raise their children. We learn early that Sally dropped out of her studies (Classics) after marrying Larry, and supports him by staying as unobtrusive as possible to allow him to write his novels. Charity, on the other hand, pours everything into pushing her husband up the academic ladder: she makes connections, organizes parties, and plans out exactly what papers he should be writing for maximum scholarly impact. Propelled by urgent ambition, she treats his career as if it were her own.
Larry, the narrator, loves his wife Sally to distraction (that he kisses another woman after only a two-week separation is given as evidence of how he can’t function without her) and is fascinated by Charity. The two women form a deep bond and are always going off by themselves to talk — about what, he does not speculate. He and his male counterpart, Sid, become friends, but often find it difficult to talk about the larger forces guiding their lives. Sid, we learn, wanted to write poetry, but has mostly given it up because Charity doesn’t think it professionally advantageous.
Over time, Larry develops a view of their position as men: they live in a world within which they are helpless, the women’s world of birth and death. He feels pity for Sid and his lost potential as a poet. That Charity’s potential has also been stunted, with her ravenous intelligence and overpowering drive subsumed wholly into a marriage to a weaker man, is a thought that never occurs to him. His wife’s lost potential — his wife who impresses all his academic colleagues at a party by reading aloud from Homer in the original Greek — never troubles him.
But why should it trouble him? The four of them lead idyllic lives, largely enabled by Sid and Charity’s fabulous riches (his, inherited). Near the center of the book, they spend a summer together in Vermont, and his description is full of longing and nostalgia. What he describes is a very particular vision of the good life: they live surrounded by quiet and natural beauty, unconcerned with shallow luxuries (except the luxury of the beauty and quiet itself: Sid’s money has kept their environs free from tourists and developers). The women educate the children and attend to the house, while the men live the life of the mind, working on their books or tinkering in the shed. The women pack the picnic lunches, the men grill. There is swimming, rowing on the lake, starlit walks, intellectual conversation at dinner. What could ever be better than this? he seems to be asking. (I was tempted to illustrate this post with a Thomas Kinkade painting, but that would have been doing the book a cruel disservice)
He describes it, explicitly, as a paradise lost:
Eden. With, of course, its serpent. No Eden valid without serpent.
It was not a big serpent, nor very alarming. But once we noticed it, we realized that it had been there all along, that what we had thought only the wind in the grass, or the scraping of a dry leaf, was this thing sliding discreetly out of sight. Even when we recognized it for what it was, it did not seem dangerous. It just made us look before we sat down.
What is this serpent in the midst of Eden? Many possibilities suggest themselves, for their lives are certainly touched by tragedy. Sally nearly dies in childbirth, and later suffers a bout with polio that leaves her permanently disabled. Sid endures the lesser tragedy of academic failure. But the serpent turns out to be none of these things.
The serpent turns out to be Charity, or more specifically her willfulness: she’s too rigid, too bossy, insists too much on being in charge.
The Problem with Charity is illustrated by an ill-fated hike: she badgers her husband over the packing list, insists on a compass-guided route that proves to be suboptimal, and follows a recipe from a guidebook that results in undercooked chicken. Larry is offended on Sid’s behalf and notes his disapproval, grumbles to his wife that Charity tries too hard to run Sid’s life. Sally defends her friend: “You can’t stand to see anybody else with that sublime self-confidence.” Larry is momentarily chastened, but later speculates that Charity doesn’t have sex with her husband often enough.
The hike becomes a metaphor for their different approaches to life: is it better to follow “the compass course,” identifying the desired direction and following it with determination, or to be guided by the land and one’s own intuition, changing the path to respond to unforeseen obstacles? It’s obvious which he believes to be correct. As a philosophy of living, it carries some wisdom and needn’t be gendered. But in the context of the novel it has everything to do with womanhood. Where Charity is willful, Sally is soft: resplendent in pregnancy, noble in suffering, uncomplaining about the cruel turns her life has taken, and never ever interfering with her husband’s work. That’s how he likes it: it’s much better for a woman to be like Sally than Charity. He allows himself to feel a little self-pity about becoming her caretaker after her illness but never doubts that it’s what she, as a good and noble woman, deserves.
Larry’s Eden is a paradise in which two things are sacrosanct: the pride of men in their work and women in their homes and children. The domestic sphere he concedes entirely. He and his wife have a daughter, but she is something of a ghost in this novel; she is raised offstage, and we get no sense of her character. In a flashback we get an idealized scene of Charity’s mother, a New England matriarch, reading to children, and he illustrates that they are absolute rulers there: men are irrelevant intruders. But men must then have their freedom from it. One scene, meant to illustrate Charity’s unreasonableness and Sid’s state of emasculation, turns on her request, at a party they are hosting, that her husband do the dishes. The horror! Larry is appalled.
The afterward, by T. H. Watkins, gives Stegner credit for his female characters: “[Stegner had] an uncanny sensitivity to the needs and feelings of women in general; this is certainly reflected in his fiction, in which women play a larger and more central role than in the work of any other male writer I know about.”
And I suppose this is sometimes what that sensitivity looks like. The word misogyny means, literally, the hatred of women, and it is not useful here. The women of the novel are vivid and intelligent and sympathetic. The reader never doubts that they have rich inner lives, and unlike many “strong female characters,” they are placed at the center of the story, both its action and its feeling. The men are sidelined, deliberately so. But the afterward also lingers on Stegner’s hunger for place: “If you can’t be born to a place where you can stay, then make one.” Another way of putting this is: know your place, and stay there.
The bitter reaction to feminism, to the demands of women to be able to set the course for their own lives and seek fulfillment outside the domestic sphere, comes so often cloaked in this version of love, of respect. If the good life is as Stegner describes it, then aren’t women harming themselves by rejecting it? Can’t they see that they’re already queens of their own realms, realms where men are helpless? Don’t they understand their special connection, through childbirth, to eternity and the mystery of life? That their men love and cherish them the more for it? Wanting more only spoils things for everyone — wasn’t it enough to get kicked out of Eden the first time around?
It was Stegner’s love, this respect, braided in so tightly with this view of how a wife should be, that disturbed me as I read in the wake of the Roe decision, that sometimes made me feel ill. Needless to say, abortion is utterly incongruous with this view of a Good Woman. Abortion is like Charity following the disdained “compass course” — sticking to the path, not tolerating derailment nor accepting fate.
And then there’s everything else unacknowledged: their Eden is protected by wealth, money amassed by Sid’s father, a capitalist gilded age tycoon. They have nurses and nannies everywhere they go. Larry owes much of his literary success to Charity’s connections and advocacy on his behalf. And it goes without saying that their paradise — described with so much beautiful, masterful, subtle prose — does not include anyone queer, of color, or uneducated.
The title and epigraph are taken from Robert Frost, another exponent of this vision of the Good Life. I was put in mind of the Polish poet and philosopher Czeslaw Milosz’s short essay about Frost, writing that he found him “disturbing and depressing.” He saw fraudulence at the center of Frost’s image:
He changed his clothes and donned a mask. He put himself forward as a rube, a New England farmer, writing in a simple language, full of colloquialisms, about his environs and the people who lived there. A real American, digging in the soil, and not from any big city! A self-made talent, a country sage in daily contact with nature and the seasons! Helped by his acting and declamatory talents, he carefully maintained that image, playing on the appeal of the simple country philosopher… In fact, he was someone entirely different.
The biographical details are at odds with this image — Frost was born in San Francisco to a journalist father, was educated at Harvard, and wintered in Florida later in life. But more worrisome for Milosz was Frost’s concealment of his underlying philosophical skepticism. He suggests that Frost’s ambition to become a famous poet led him to construct a faux-naive ideal of American simplicity in which he did not believe.
Larry accuses Charity of pursuing her ideal so doggedly that she harms herself and others — to him it’s self-evident that his own philosophy is superior. But I see the same kind of hollowness there, a kind of willful self-deception, that Milosz observes in Frost.
The final scenes of the book show Charity getting her way once more. Ironically, it takes the form of a withdrawal, a self-diminishment, a surrender to greater forces — in an act that is simultaneously in defiance of her husband and children. It’s an ending full of emotional fireworks, and it got under my skin in a way that I can’t tell if Stegner intended. It passes that the men really are helpless before the horrors of fate, helpless in a way that extends beyond the benign irrelevance of their presence in the home. The women’s world really is full of blood and death, and they are weak before it.