Stegner's could sometimes be a grumpy goodness. In a fascinating exchange of letters with the beat poet and environmental guru Gary Snyder, Stegner argues for the less exotic virtues of the cultivated western mind versus the enlightened eastern one. This included the importance of doing what one should and not what one felt like. In a letter dated January 27, 1968, he wrote: "I have spent a lot of days and weeks at the desks and in the meetings that ultimately save redwoods, and I have to say that I never saw on the firing line any of the mystical drop-outs or meditators." He went to those meetings because it was the right thing to do. An obligation, yes, but one he valued. "The highest thing I can think of doing is literary," he wrote a friend. "But literature does not exist in a vacuum, or even in a partial vacuum. We are neither detached nor semi-detached, but linked to the world by a million interdependencies. To deny the interdependencies, while living on the comforts and services they make possible, is adolescent when it isn't downright dishonest.
( David Gessner )
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