Superfetation – FOUR books in Two Years.

George R. Stewart told his oral history interview, Suzanne Riess, that he practiced superfetation, like a rabbit.  Rabbits begin a new litter while an earlier one is still in the womb.  In Stewart’s case, he was researching one or more books while he was writing another book or two – and teaching, and living.

Between U.S. 40 and N.A. 1, for example, Stewart wrote four books.  One was based on talks he presented in Athens while he was a Fulbright Scholar; the second was a a small work about the first wagon party to make it through to California; the third, his only book for children; the fourth, his last novel.

American Ways of Life was the book based on his talks in Athens.  (“American,” in the case of this book, meant United States American.)  Stewart presented the essence of the way Americans lived in the post-World War II era in several chapters:   habits of eating, dressing, drinking, celebrating holidays, religion – even sex.  For American readers, it was a good overview of what we share as a national culture.  For foreign readers, especially those doing business with Americans, or traveling here,  the book was an invaluable guide to American dos and don’ts.  It’s not one of his best-known, or most readable books; but it is a fine window into its era.

By the early 50s, Stewart was researching the Westward Movement over the California Trail.  In his usual passion for field research, he traveled much of the original trail accompanied by historians or geographers. (He first encountered the place he named “Sheep Rock” on one of his trail expeditions.) He also consulted books – especially the manuscripts of the pioneers which are held by the Bancroft Library.   The one that particularly caught his eye was the oral history of Moses Schallenberger, a 18 year old boy who was a member of the first expedition to bring their wagons all the way to California – the Stevens Party.  Schallenberger’s story was an especially gripping one – he was left alone near Donner Pass for 3 months, in a rough cabin, during a cold and seemingly endless winter.  The two men who had volunteered to stay with him, and who had helped build a cabin at what is now known as Donner Lake, decided to head over the Pass.  Moses was too weak to keep up with them – and in one of the great and moving moments of the Westward Migration, he encouraged them to leave him and head for the safety of the Sacramento Valley; and they, heading down the trail, turned and waved and said “Goodby Mose.”  He survived, though, and was rescued.  (The next year, that cabin would be used by the Breens, members of the ill-fated Donner Party.) Stewart turned this story into a small book printed by the University rather than a trade publisher.  Then, thinking it over, he realized that with a teen-aged hero, it would make a perfect children’s book.

Stewart had written nothing for children.  But he taught himself how to write for younger readers, who have more limited vocabularies than adult readers.  The result was By Covered Wagon to California. The book was published in the popular Landmark Series – Number 42 – and enjoyed great success.  It was republished 33 years later, in 1987, as The Pioneers Go West.

His Fulbright year in Greece gave Stewart the chance to research the history of Greek City-States in their original settings.  Since his mother had taught him how to read Greek when he was still in high school, Stewart could easily read the histories and manuscripts of ancient Greece.  It gave him the idea for what would be his last novel, The Years of the City. 

One of Stewart’s literary devices was the use of non-human characters as the protagonists of his novels.  By the mid-1950s he’d used a storm, a fire, a place – and in Earth Abides – the ecosystem as protagonist.  In this novel, the protagonist was an ancient Greek City state, the fictional Phrax.

The novel opens with the founding of Phrax by a boatload of colonists which includes a child who is the only survivor of the sack of another city.  During the early years of Phrax, the city grows into a strong community of ethical, hard-working people.  Citizens  successfully defeat an enemy known as The Horde, in what might be called the city’s high-water mark.

Then, the city’s inhabitants sink slowly into laziness, selfishness, and materialism.  The old values are forgotten.  They are now ripe for conquest – and it comes, at first, from within.  A contractor creates terrorist acts and blames them on “terrorists.”  The “old money” gives control of Phrax to the contractor and his thugs, and sinks slowly into softness and decadence.  When The Horde attacks again, the people of Phrax are not strong enough to defeat them.  The city is sacked and burned to the ground, to pass into (fictional) history.  The only survivor is a small boy who manages to hide on one of the town’s ships – and thus, the story has come full circle.

The book was not a success.  Although Stewart felt its length was to blame I think it more likely that the dark descriptions of the decadence of the city and the contractor’s use of “terrorists” to  make the people fearful hit too close to home.  As it does, and it should, today, as once again we hear of “terrorists,” and contractors benefit mightily from the wars that follow.

George R. Stewart’s Ordeal By Hunger — First Whole Earth work

(PLEASE NOTE:  For some reason, WordPress is not inserting paragraph breaks in part of this post.  Please read it with that understanding.  Thanks, DMS.)

 

I believe George R. Stewart’s Ordeal By Hunger was the most important book of the twentieth century.

The book is the history of one of the great calamities of the Westward movement, the stuff of nightmares:  The story of the Donner Party.

The Donner Party, from an eastern ecosystem, made the mistake of listening to trail salesman Lansford W. Hastings.  Hastings’ “shortcut”  delayed the Party and the worst winter in many years pinned them down at what is now called Donner Lake, just below what is now known as Donner Pass.    Rescue parties tried to bring food in and survivors out, but the harsh winter meant that they would have limited success.  Members of the Donner Party tried to escape by climbing through the deep snow over the 7000+ foot pass, but most were forced back by weather and deep snow.  Eventually, their food gone, those at the camps by the lake, and some of those stranded by snow on their way to Sutter’s Fort were forced to eat human flesh.  Those acts of necessary cannibalism insured that the story of the Donner Party would become a major part of the story of the Westward Movement, and the settlement of California, even though it was actually a small blip on the historic record.

One of the survivors, Virginia Reed, summed it up in a letter to a relative written a year later:

I have not wrote to you half the trouble we have had but I have wrote enough to let you know that you don’t know what trouble is. But thank God we have all got through and the only family that did not eat human flesh. We have left everything but I don’t care for that. We have got through with our lives but Don’t let this letter dishearten anybody. Never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can.

“Never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can” is one of the great lessons of the Westward Movement.

But that’s not the reason I believe this history is critical to understanding our time.  It’s the two epiphanies Stewart had while working on the book, which he wrote into it.

Books  write themselves, even though authors do the hard slogging of getting things down on paper.  Stewart had a dickens of a time trying to put the book together.   There was the long trek across the plains, through the Rockies and the Wasatch, and over the deserts; there was the barrier of the Sierra Nevada (the name means “Snowy Mountains, which should have been a warning); there were the two winter camps; there were the various parties of emigrants braving the Sierra Nevada, seeking safety; there were the several parties of rescuers braving those same storms as they headed into the Sierra Nevada — the story was all over the map of eastern central California.

That gave Stewart an idea — he’d map the story.  Stewart loved maps, and he loved to make maps.  So they were the perfect tool to help him put the story together.  As he mapped out the various events, he realized that he could use a technique of English to make the story compelling:  He would follow one group until there was a critical moment, and then move to another group, similarly following them to a  crisis, and then return to the first group to reveal how things had worked out.  So readers would turn the pages quickly, eager to see what would happen next to each of the groups.

But mapping showed Stewart something much more important:  The importance of the geography of the story in its eventual outcome.  As Stewart put it, in the book, “It should be obvious to the reader that I consider the land to be a character in the work.”  That simple statement, and the understanding it contains, reveal one of the great moments in western thought.  Shakespeare told readers that the world is simply a stage for humans to act on.  Stewart is telling his readers – us – that Shakespeare is wrong.  The world – Earth, and its ecosystems – “The land” – is the principal player in any human drama.  It is a remarkable vision, and it prepared readers for the great paradigm shift of the twentieth century, the idea that an ecological view of the world is the correct one.

What defeated the Donners, and defined the character of the human players in this tale, was their ignorance of ecosystems.  They were easterners, and had no sense of the ecological reality of deserts or high  “Snowy Mountains.”

Once he’d come to understand the ecological viewpoint, the idea that the land is a character, Stewart seems to have decided to emphasize that in the beginning of the book.   Most histories of this type would begin with the party starting their ill-fated journey west, or with an overview of the Westward Movement up to that.  But Stewart begins with an unprecedented look at northern Nevada and eastern California from the perspective of space.

To observe the scene of this story, the reader must for a moment imagine himself …raised in space some hundreds of miles above a spot near the center of the state of Nevada.  …Far to his left, westward, the onlooker from the sky just catches the glint of the Pacific Ocean; far to his right, on the eastern horizon, high peaks of the Rockies forming the Continental Divide cut off his view.  Between horizons lie thirteen degrees of longitude, a thousand miles from east to west…

He continues, describing the Earth from space so accurately that features in Astronaut photos of the area can easily be identified.

Stewart did this, mind you, 24 years before anyone actually saw that view.  But in writing the Astronaut’s perspective into the opening of the work, he was making the point that all human experience took place in small ecological microcosms in that huge macrocosm of Earth.   Now, of course, we have moved away from Earth, and the idea is not unusual.  But he was the first to define our stories as Earth stories, and Earth ecosystem stories.  A quarter of a century before humans actually saw the view, and began to speak of “Earth,” he was preparing us.

In writing the book, Stewart developed two remarkable ideas.

The Whole Earth concept – the idea that Earth  from afar is small and beautiful; and from the surface a complex ecological and geographic system; and which defines the actions of all life, including human life – can be said to be the defining idea of the twentieth century So that century should be known as the first Whole Earth century.  It was the time when we began to see ourselves as a raft of life on a very special place in the universe, and it was the first time humans  did so.   Ordeal By Hunger, the first Whole Earth book, prepared us for this great change in our understanding.

For the first time in human experience, a book was written which educated its readers to the understanding that Earth and its ecosystems are the principle protagonists in any human drama.

Once he’d experienced the Whole Earth epiphany, and shared it with readers, Stewart would continue writing books around that truth.  Over the next decade or so, he would invent a “literature of the land.”  He would invent the Whole Earth novel, and the ecological novel, and would refine them until he created his masterwork, Earth Abides.  In doing this work, he would build upon this most important of twentieth century books, the first book to see and share the Whole Earth idea.  Thus, George R. Stewart would shape the twentieth century.