Crossing to Safety

Wallace Stegner

He believes that all serious writers have a vocation, a sort of mystical call. What they exploit is not intelligence or training, but a glorious gift that is also an obligation.

To have all of one's physical needs taken care of by specially appointed assistants; to be marched to and from meals with neither choice nor cooking, payment nor dishwashing, on one's mind; to be sent at stipulated times to the yard for exercise; to have whole mornings, afternoons, evenings, of freedom from interruption, with only the passing and repassing of a guard's steps in the corridor to assure and emphasize it; to hear the clang of opening and closing doors down the cellblock and know that one needn't be concerned, one still had months to serve--who could not write the history of the world under such circumstances? Who could not, in a well-insulated but austerely padded cell, think all the high thoughts, read all the great books, perhaps even write one or two?

In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation becomes a game. In the next two weeks we spent a few dollars on white paint and dotted swiss, and were settled. The storeroom next to the furnace, warm and dry, would by my study until Junior arrived. I set up a card table for a desk and made a bookcase out of some boards and bricks. In my experience, the world's happiest young man is a young professor building bookcases, and the world's most contented couple is composed of that young professor and his wife, in love, employed, at the bottom of a depression from which it is impossible to fall further, and entering on their first year as full adults, not preparing any longer but finally into their lives.

Eden. With, of course, its serpent. No Eden valid without serpent.

Does this bother you? he said. Kick me if it does. But I admit I've taken a kind of comfort from your bad luck. I've seen someone else tied and helpless, though for very different reasons. You've been constant, a rock, and I've admired you for that. But I've wondered what your life might have been if Sally hadn't got polio. You were upward bound when we first knew you, headed up like a rocket. Success might have taken you away from her--you wouldn't have been the first one. You've done a lot anyway, but maybe not all you might have done if you hadn't had the greater obligation of looking after her. I think your marriage did to you something like what mine did to me.

But in this script there will be no such ending.

Of all the people I know, Sid Lang best understands that my marriage is as surely built on addiction and dependence as his is. He tells me what under other circumstances would infuriate me--that he takes some satisfaction in my ill luck, that it gives him comfort to see someone else in chains. He says too that he would not be unchained if he could, and he knows I wouldn't either. But what he doesn't understand is that my chains are not chains, that over the years Sally's crippling has been a rueful blessing. It has made her more than she was; it has let her give me more than she would ever have been able to give me healthy; it has taught me at least the alphabet of gratitude. Sid can take his guilty satisfaction in my bad luck if he pleases. I will go on pitying for what his addiction has failed to give him.

This is in my mind a beautiful story of marriage. Not because it is the firmest or most solid or cleanest or most smooth marriage, but because come the end of the story, they are still together and discovering that they are happier because of it. Even in the difficult characters of Sid and Charity (a marriage that would surely be what we call failed) we see a desire towards mutual understanding and help.
Most gloriously though is the commonality of this story. These people are not extraordinary. They live lives somewhat charmed (but no more than an idyllic lunch or time spent with someone you love or moments in a warm chair with a book) and they grind out the struggle beneath a weight of misfortune. Shit does, it turns out, happen but it does not taint us. We don't have to use perfume to disguise the world from ourselves. We just have to shovel it.
I wish I could say these things better. But at the moment I can't. Only, if you read The Good Soldier, do not consider the book finished without reading this, Crossing to Safety.