What They Were Reading: Wallace Stegner

From a 1974 interview between James Day and “Wally” Stegner. The whole thing is fascinating, but the really good stuff starts at about the 22 minute mark:

STEGNER: I think probably there’s no point in teaching people who don’t have a noticeable gift. Often there’s no point in teaching people who do  have a noticeable gift, if they don’t have those qualities of character, or neurosis or whatever it is that keep them at it. If they can be stopped, they’ll stop.

DAY: What is the gift?

STEGNER: The gift is partly of the senses, I think. It’s basically a gift of the senses, a gift of observing and also, I suppose this is William James’ doctrine, the gift of quick association so that one thing suggests another and things go together to become something new and ahead. I’m not a psychologist and you’d better not follow my formula, but I think it has to do with senses in the first instance. And then it has to do with the gift of words. A lot of writers have been writers of some consequence, however, without the gift of words-Dreiser being one. He just comes over you like a tank leaving his tread tracks in your lawn, and he clanks and grinds and so on, but he does tear up your lawn alright. And he never wrote a good sentence in his life. Not a one, I think.

DAY: So how do you measure good fiction then?

STEGNER: I think the measure should be nothing that one person defines. I can tell you the kind of fiction that I like. That’s about the best I can do, and the kind of fiction that I like is a kind of fiction which is not only perceptive, and which has people in it who are plausible people, and which has some relation to real life.

DAY: It’s important to you that it do relate to real people.

STEGNER: Oh yes, I’m a realist. I never get over that. I told you I was a nineteenth century character. I don’t know what it’s about unless it’s about real life. I don’t see any point in turning real life upside down, unless what you’re doing gives you a better look at real life, like looking at a view through your spraddled legs. That’s alright. I don’t mind that. But the ultimate thing is that illusion of reality, and some kind of commentary on reality. So I would guess that anybody who has something to say about reality, who can say it in memorable ways is going to appeal to me. And sometimes they get away with it even if they can’t say it in memorable ways. If they have, as Dreiser had, every gift of the novelist, except the verbal gift. He’s a great feeler. He knows how people feel in certain situations, and he is structurally, a man who can build bridges that reach from here to there. They go from bank to bank. But I guess if I were picking the kinds of people that I like best, what is good fiction, I would pick people like Checkov, Conrad, Turgenev. I seem to be very Slavic about it. Those are the people I’d take to my desert island if I had to take some three.

Author Look-Alikes: Vol. 11

Young Peter Orlovsky looks like he could have lit “the world on FAH-EE-UH” years before the idea struck Fun’s lead vocalist (Nate Ruess.)

Playwright Tennessee Williams isn’t a bad match for Clark Gable, plus a few pounds and a receding hairline.

And how about Ivan Turgenev? Give the man a shave and a haircut and he could have played Mr. Matuschek or the Wizard of Oz as well as Frank Morgan.

Another writer-to-writer doppelganger: I give you a young Thomas Mann and Australia’s only Nobel Laureate, Patrick White.

And for the fans of Mad Men (and tortoiseshell specs), here’s Truman Capote and Lane Pryce (Jared Harris). 

Bazarov and Bluto: Where are they now?

Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons has been regarded as the first truly modern Russian novel, and is certainly one of the first to gain wide recognition in the West. Among other things, the book delivers the world’s first great literary nihilist in the character of Eugene Bazarov. But Turgenev’s masterpiece may also hold another interesting distinction: it may just be the birthplace of the ‘where are they now’ snippets that occasionally accent the closing credits of screw-ball comedies and films based on true stories.

Believe me, the last thing I expected to think of as I read Turgenev’s closing passages was John Blutarsky from Animal House, yet that’s precisely what the last four pages brought to mind. The author brings the action to a close, then offers this:

“It seems to me that all is ended. But some of my readers will perhaps desire to know what the different persons of who we have just been talking are now doing. We will ask nothing better than to satisfy them.”

He then goes on to relate a few sentences for each of the principal characters, some humorous, others sentimental. Here’s a smattering:

“The princess is dead, and forgotten from the day of her death.”

“Nicholas Petrovitch has been chosen justice of the peace, and fulfils his duties with greatest zeal; he traverses unceasingly the district assigned to him, makes long speeches, for he thinks that the peasant needs to be well  “argued with,” that is, that it is necessary to repeat the same thing to him, to satiety; and yet, to tell the  truth, he does not succeed in fully satisfying either the enlightened gentlemen who discuss “emancipation” at one time with affectation, at another with melancholy, or the unlearned masters who openly curse this unfortunate “emuncipation.” Both find him too tame.

“Do not let us forget Peter. He has become quite stupid and more inflated with importance than ever; but that has not prevented him from making quite an advantageous marriage; he has married the daughter of a gardener of the city, who preferred him to two other suitors, because they had no watch, while he possessed not only a watch,- but even varnished boots!”

I think most film scholars would attribute the birth of this farewell trope to the closing credits of American Graffitti: 

And it was famously parodied a few years later by Animal House:

Since that time it has become commonplace.

But it got me to thinking about whether the world had seen anything like this prior to Fathers and Sons. There are obviously plenty of examples of authors addressing their readership directly at the end of their writing: the morals shared at the end of Aesop’s Fables, for example, or Shakespeare’s frequent closing speeches asking for the indulgence of the audience. But these would be the rough equivalents of an Author’s Note- not "where are they now" cutaways.

We do see formal epilogues like the one in Crime and Punishment (published a few years after Fathers and Sons) and time jumps like the last chapter of Great Expectations (written one year before Fathers and Sons), but these are usually continuations of the regular narrative- after some interval of time- rather than quick glimpses at the future fates of several characters.

So, I ask the question: Are there any earlier examples of ‘where are they now’ snippets to close out a literary work? Or was Turgenev the pop culture innovator I think he was?