Crossing to Safety

Crossing to Safety is a 1987 semi-autobiographical novel by Wallace Stegner. Using a series of flashbacks in the mind of a writer, Larry Morgan, throughout a single day, the novel is a reflection on youth, idealism, and the often unarticulated but lifelong process of compromise one must endure while seeking a stable place in the world. Stegner’s novel explores these themes via Larry’s perspective on two academic couples: Larry and his wife, Sally Morgan, and Sidney and Charity Lang. The flashbacks extend from Larry’s time as a young professor during the Great Depression in Madison, Wisconsin, through his late-life near the end of the 20th century.

Larry recalls his early years in Madison, in which he struggles to secure a job in a liberal arts college while also trying to complete his first novel cloistered in a small, dingy basement apartment. He tries to convince the academy staff to extend his teaching job to support Sally and their expected child. In a stroke of luck, Larry and Sally become fast friends with Sid and Charity. While the Langs are highly educated, wealthy, born into prestigious families, and ostensibly well integrated into their society, the Morgans come from poor, uneducated backgrounds and struggle to fit in. Both couples are expecting a child. Despite their historical and cultural differences, the couples’ shared interests in humanistic pursuits, such as writing, literature, and spirituality, bind them together across time as they grapple separately and collectively with existential stresses.

Through parties and concerts, the Langs quickly begin to enrich the Morgans’ otherwise difficult time in Madison. In the meantime, the Langs also introduce the Morgans to other local academics, through which Larry begins to build a network and the accompanying fiscal and job security. The Morgans slowly learn that the Langs have dysfunctions of their own lingering behind a highly conscious veneer. Charity, who highly values social capital, clashes with Sid over the likelihood of him securing tenure, which she deems necessary to integrate smoothly into the kind of academic community that she wants to belong to. Meanwhile, Sid’s own passion moves outside of academia into writing poetry; he eventually feels he has made enough money to detach from the careerism that has saturated their lives.

The tensions in both couples’ relationships are the core motifs in the novel, growing more complicated through each successive flashback. Neither couple’s struggle improves linearly or follows classical plot structures; rather, they weave through and strengthen their core narrative threads, modeling the rhythm and synthesis of real life. Larry works foremost on his writing passion while abstractly attempting to secure tenure and dealing with familial sickness and disability. Sally develops polio and slowly deteriorates over time, challenging Larry’s expectation for a life of intellectual and creative labor. The Langs’ relationship is tested as Charity grows more upset at Sid’s poetic meditations, asserting that he has not yet shown the required “product,” or concrete work, to facilitate a secondary creative endeavor.

Larry only partially succeeds at becoming a successful novelist; it is accomplished late and punctuated by illness. To please Charity, Sid spends his life in the pursuit of tenure writing articles he doesn’t care about. At the same time, Charity’s realism anchors him, giving him a social and moral stability that he could not develop alone. The irony of the couples is that their narratives are “unsuccessful” in the context of American literature: They do not make much progress despite their idealist beginnings. The Langs remain unstable and alienated, even from each other, unable to conceive of a life that is not driven by the accumulation of capital. The Morgans never transcend their core struggle to find a community they naturally resonate with or find true satisfaction in their work.

Stegner’s novel is both a reaction against persistent and formulaic pre-Depression models of American literature and a historicist character study that sifts and winnows away at figures to reveal their underlying motivational and effective blueprints. Refusing to resolve the characters’ struggles, they remain, in a sense, incomplete and mysterious, especially because they are described through the biased lens of the protagonist. Stegner thus offers a compelling improvisational model for the human relationship enduring through time. Despite Stegner’s characters’ failures, they are deeply human and complicated, leading scholars to question how real narrative should correspond to plot.