Wallace Stegner, plagiarist

May 20, 2022 1:15 PM

While preparing to write a play based on Wallace Stegner’s Pulitzer-winning novel Angle of Repose, Sands Hall learned that Stegner plagiarized from the writing of Mary Hallock Foote (who was also an accomplished illustrator.) Later, Hall wrote a play about the situation called Fair Use.
posted by larrybob (10 comments total)

Funny thing -- not long ago, I was reading essays by Ursula K. Le Guin in which she described this situation.

Here's the thing upon which Stegner, consciously or unconsciously, relied: men don't listen to women. That statement is of course not universally true. It's shorthand for: men socialized under a patriarchal system tend to disregard the contributions of women. Mary Halland Foote's writing, to him, was not independent work but instead so much sociological material. I don't think Stegner really thought of himself as doing wrong, except perhaps in the naughty burlesque way of writers who like to throw around the aphorism about "stealing from the best." I think he simply felt that he was building a great work of art from "broken rocks."

Incidentally, I remember reading the plot incident of a drowning child among characters in an entirely unrelated novel. I don't know whether that means anything, though.
posted by Countess Elena at 1:35 PM on May 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

I recommend Stegner's A Shooting Star from 1961 as the accompanying text to this discussion.

Kirkus wrote at the time: Some will feel that it is a subject- and a handling-that would have been expected from a Rebecca West, perhaps, rather than a Wallace Stegner. For the central figure is a woman, Sabrina Castro, rich, tantalizing rather than beautiful, at the end of her tether in a marriage that holds seemingly no love and little affection. In a slow spiral of disintegration she goes down through various stages of infidelity and dissipation, always battling with her own New England conscience and her agonized need to be wanted and loved. The story is set against the isolation of great wealth in the Peninsula section below San Francisco- and the neighboring suburban developments — and against Sabrina's vacuity of heritage and background is highlighted the content and satisfaction of a childhood friend, serene in her middle-class suburban home. It is a compassionate but never sentimentalized handling, which, perhaps, will touch women's sensibilities rather than men's.

It is not a bad novel, certainly of its time, but it is very clearly a man deciding to write about a troubled woman's inner life because only a man can really tell that story.

Meanwhile, if you like what Foote produced, you'll love Isabella Bird's A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains
posted by chavenet at 1:52 PM on May 20, 2022 [7 favorites]

I just checked on Wikipedia and am distressed to note that the entry for Angle of Repose has only a very gentle nod to the plagiarism allegations.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:59 PM on May 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

from the linked essay, " We have a word for the theft of writing; we do not have one for a stolen life. "
That's another aspect of this crime, to not just steal another's words, but in doing so to warp history so completely that nobody believes the life and the words to have been real.
posted by winesong at 1:59 PM on May 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

I tried several times over years to get started in Angle of Repose but never could; though I thought the metaphor of the title was brilliant, I didn’t care for Stegner's authorial voice.

It’s interesting and somewhat of a relief to know that the metaphor wasn’t his at all, and that some of the best things that voice says weren’t his either.

There was a lot of tragedy in those lives, however:

In 1971, when Repose was published, many recognized the arc of the Footes’ lives. The couple’s daughter Agnes—the only Foote family name Stegner did not change—had also died young, at 18, of pneumonia. Those readers naturally assumed that Mary had had an affair and that she and Arthur lived in bitter silence out there at the North Star. Later, in what the Foote descendants apparently felt was a direct response to having opened the door to Stegner, Janet Micoleau suffered a nervous breakdown. Her nephew, Bob, who struggled with mental illness but for years worked as a docent at the North Star Mining Museum—commandeering the attention of anyone who visited with the story of the vast disservice done to his great-grandparents—died by suicide.

But I’m inclined to think Stegner was blind to the most likely underlying cause of so much misery.

We might wonder, sitting in our comfortable houses, just what they pulled out of the ground and piled the leavings of around their homes and waterways in hills of tailings as steep as the angle of repose would allow: gold, silver, zinc — and lead.
posted by jamjam at 2:17 PM on May 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

This is sleazy AF and clearly you can get away with that.
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:15 PM on May 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

If it ain't true, it oughta be.
posted by thecincinnatikid at 4:14 PM on May 20, 2022

I slogged through Angle of Repose while I was in college, because it was Northern California and everyone talked about Stegner. I did not love it (and I thought I would, because of the geography) -- and later realized it had to do with his voice, and his denial of women's inner lives.

Misogyny is a hell of a drug, and it's not a surprise that Le Guin would be the one to point out that a Great Man would assume that a book hadn't really been written until He wrote it.
posted by allthinky at 6:30 AM on May 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

Thanks to larrybob for posting this. Very illuminating. While the plagiarism is appalling, it does fall somewhere on the continuum of “what novelists do” which (along with misogyny) let’s Hall’s famous father brush it off. I agree with Hall that Stegner’s character assassination of Foote is worse than the plagiarism.

To transform that talented, fascinating, three-dimensional woman into a stereotypical shrewish wife holding back her genius husband is just gross.

While I admired much of the writing (although now I know that Foote should get much of the credit) I did not really enjoy reading Angle of Repose. Found it to be dry, boring and lacking heart. Which makes sense now that I know The Rest Of The Story.
posted by lumpy at 6:51 AM on May 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

Meanwhile, if you like what Foote produced, you'll love Isabella Bird's A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains

I first encountered Isabella Bird as a character in Caryl Churchill’s play Top Girls. I’ve got a copy of her Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (just found out there’s a manga based on it) but haven’t read her Rocky Mountains book - maybe I should before my Colorado visit this summer.

posted by larrybob at 12:48 PM on May 21, 2022