Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West.

It rained in coastal California in July this year and, to my great delight, the hills turned ever so briefly green. That delight, Wallace Stegner might suggest, marks me as an Easterner, a foreigner who has much to learn from the place I now call home. To appreciate the beauty of the West, Stegner writes, "You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time."

And then read Wallace Stegner. Even though Stegner's voice may be fleeting on a geological time scale, it has been enduring and discerning on a human one. Wallace Stegner has been writing about the West, in novels, essays, history, and short stories, for over fifty-five years. His most recent book, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, is a collection of sixteen essays in which Stegner writes about himself and the land he loves, and about other writers who share his passion.

All but one of the essays have been published before, yet this is a valuable collection of masterly crafted pieces. These essays should not perhaps be a starting point for readers unfamiliar with Stegner - better to first try The Big Rock Candy Mountain (an early novel), Angle of Repose (which won the Pulitzer Prize) or Crossing to Safety (his most recent and most personal novel) - but it is a collection Stegner collectors will want to have. One of its pleasures is reading Stegner on Stegner, sharing insights that bring added meaning to the main body of his work.

Stegner was born in lowa in 1909. After a wandering childhood, early years of study and teaching and a voluntary departure from Harvard that endears him to true Westerners, Stegner arrived at Stanford and directed the creative writing program there. Although the official biographical information says that he retired from teaching in 1971, perhaps it is more accurate to say that he's made a life of teaching by writing and encouraging others to do so.

The first three essays in Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs are deeply personal. At times, Stegner writes when he wants to understand something himself, and his own life and relationships have been fertile ground for the growth of understanding. "Letter, Much Too Late" is an essay Stegner wrote fifty-five years after his mother's death. Although the letter is addressed to her, it can be opened by anyone who knows the desire to call out to those who left too soon and have been gone too long. Stegner remembers all the emotions and images that make the memory of his mother "at once a lasting presence and an unhealed wound." From its opening line - "Mom, listen" - the essay speaks with the powerful mixture of gratitude and regret, honesty and forgiveness and compassion and joy that comprises our most sacred relationships.

In addition to offering glimpses into his own life, Stegner opens doors in these essays to other writers who have been his companions in creating a literature of the West - Steinbeck, George Stewart, Walter Clark, Norman Maclean, Wendell Berry. Happily, the topic is now timely, as "Western writers" have recently become a subject of interest coast to coast. What critics are now discerning, Wallace Stegner has been saying all along - that Western literature is provincial only in the eyes of those who insist on limiting their own appreciation to other provinces. "My anguish," Stegner writes, "is potentially as valid as that of Oedipus; my love may be as tragic and romantic as Tristan's; my bond with the earth may have as lasting significance as Wordsworth's; my work, even if it is with cows, may have as much dignity as honest work anywhere." The West, Stegner insists, now has a vital literary life of its own and only requires critics "capable, by experience or intuition, of evaluating Western literature in the terms of Western life."

The Western life Stegner knows is defined by thirst, by land that is thirsty for water and people thirsty for motion. Stegner thinks a lot about water - or the lack of it. "Aridity," he writes, "more than anything else, gives the Western landscape its character." In a series of essays on the Western landscape ("Thoughts in a Dry Land," "Living Dry," "Striking the Rock") the writer, historian, and advocate come together naturally, and Stegner describes how aridity has affected patterns of settlement, farming methods, water law, and, perhaps most of all, our own ability to adapt in the West. "And what do you do about aridity if you are a nation accustomed to plenty and impatient of restrictions and led westward by pillars of fire and cloud? You may deny it for a while. Then you must either try to engineer it out of existence or adapt to it."

Stegner's experience has been that both the land and our spirits will be better off if we adapt more than engineer. One result of our engineering has been the unsustainable sprawl of Los Angeles, with Phoenix, Denver, and other cities not far behind. One thinks too of the salinization of California farmland, the draining of the water table, the use of Western land for military target practice and nuclear waste storage. In coming West, we marched like Israelites into the Promised Land, but Stegner is wary of the vision: "Pipedreams. Arrogant pipedreams. Why should the desert be asked to bloom? ... The deserts were doing all right until we set out to reform them." To live in the West without ultimately destroying it, it is we who need reform.

Amid the concern for our present state and mourning for injuries past, Stegner is hopeful. Referring to those who love the West and the life they have there, he writes, "I believe that eventually, perhaps within a generation or two, they will work out some sort of compromise between what must be done to earn a living and what must be done to restore health to the earth, air, and water. I think they will learn to control corporate power and to dampen the excess that has always marked their region, and will arrive at a degree of stability and a reasonably sustainable economy based on resources that they will know how to cherish and renew .... The feeling is like the feeling in a football game when the momentum changes, when helplessness begins to give way to confidence, and what looked like sure defeat opens up to the possibility of victory. It has already begun. I hope I am around to see it fully arrive."

Many, many of us, from east to west, hope so too.