Crossing to Safety (Modern Library Classics) by Wallace Stegner

Author:Wallace Stegner [Stegner, Wallace]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307430861
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

13

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

It was not a big serpent, nor very alarming. But once we noticed it, we realized that it had been there all along, that what we had thought only the wind in the grass, or the scraping of a dry leaf, was this thing sliding discreetly out of sight. Even when we recognized it for what it was, it did not seem dangerous. It just made us look before we sat down.

Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie. I know what he means, and I agree. But we are sometimes tempted to lie elsewhere, too. I could probably be tempted to lie just here. This is a crucial place for the dropping of hints and the planting of clues, the crucial moment for hiding behind the piano or in the bookcase the revelations that later, to the reader’s gratified satisfaction, I will triumphantly discover. If I am after drama.

Drama demands the reversal of expectation, but in such a way that the first surprise is followed by an immediate recognition of inevitability. And inevitability takes careful pin-setting. Since this story is about a friendship, drama expects friendship to be overturned. Something, the novelist in me whispers, is going to break up our cozy foursome. Given the usual direction of contemporary fiction and the usual contemporary notions of human character and conduct, what more plausible than that Sid Lang, a rampant male married to a somewhat unmalleable wife, should be tempted by Sally’s softer nature. I have already dropped a hint of that by recalling my uneasiness about their skinny-dipping.

The possibilities are diverse, for friendship is an ambiguous relationship. I might be attracted to Charity. She is an impressive woman—though I can’t quite imagine myself smitten by her, or her by me. There are other possibilities, too: Sid with me, Charity with Sally. We could get very Bloomsbury in our foursome. Anything to get this equilibrium of two-and-two overturned.

Well, too bad for drama. Nothing of the sort is going to happen. Something less orthodoxly dramatic is. Nevertheless there is this snake, no bigger than a twig or a flame of movement in the grass. It is not an intruder in Eden, it was born here. It is one of Hawthorne’s bosom serpents, rarely noticed because in the bosom it inhabits it can so easily camouflage itself among a crowd of the warmest and most generous sentiments.

From the first days of our friendship with the Langs we had been aware of it, but pretended it wasn’t there. Comfort, one night in a canoe, told us about an episode in Greece, when her junior year abroad had intersected briefly with their honeymoon; but instead of being alarmed or dismayed, we had chosen to be amused at something so outrageously characteristic. But on the walking trip that we took as the grand finale to

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