Wallace Stegner, the legendary author of the American West, also spent time teaching in New England. A keen observer, he recreates the ethos of America’s puritanical Northeast in the memorable family of Charity Lang in his final novel, “Crossing to Safety.”
The novel, chronicling the decades-long friendship of two married couples (one marked by the aforementioned New England inheritance, the other rising from the free and undeveloped West), offers visions of a picturesque summer through the character of Aunt Emily. Known as “Aunt” by everyone—including her adult children, summer neighbors, and family friends—she is the imposing matriarch of a New England family installed in the upper echelons of academe.
Like many aristocratic-seeming families with a summer retreat, Aunt Emily’s household decamps from Cambridge to the woods of Vermont where the family summers in a storied cabin by a lake. From this command center, Aunt Emily orchestrates a blissful summer retreat. Children near and far are drawn into her orbit and become part of a summer of intentional and orderly leisure.
The narrator recalls:
Aunt Emily believes in the freedom of summer. She doesn’t much care what the children do so long as they do something, and know what they are doing. It is idleness and randomness of mind that she cannot abide. When the children go on a hike, she packs bird and flower guides into their knapsacks, and quizzes them on their return to see if they have learned anything. When she accompanies them on an overnight camping trip, sleeping in her own worn pup tent, they can count on instructive fireside talks on the stars. And on rainy days such as this she sits like a confident spider in the midst of her web until boredom drives all the children on the Point to her porch, where she reads to them or teaches them French.
Aunt Emily’s steady and unrelenting efforts, not direct or nagging, set the stage for a summer of productive boredom. Beyond simply letting children loose to roam unsupervised, the conscientious woman of culture supplies all the books and conversations that buttress free time used well.
Beyond simply passing the summer, the narrator, an outsider from the untutored West, observes that Aunt Emily is forming the interior life of the children in her care. He observes that the children circled on her expansive porch to listen to “Hiawatha” are “getting an imprinting that will last for life. The sound of her voice reading will condition how they look upon themselves and the world. It will become part of the loved ambience of Battell Pond, a glint in the chromatic wonder of childhood. These small sensibilities will never lose the images of dark woods and bright lake. Nature to them will always be beneficent and female.”
He goes on to speculate, “Some of those children, years later, may awaken in the night from a dream of that strong voice changing Iroquois myths in Finnish trochees, and their souls will yearn within them for the certainty and assurance and naturalness and authority of the time Aunt Emily dominated.”
In addition to her authoritative readings delivered to audiences on the porch, Aunt Emily stocks a well-circulated library of good books for children near the entrance of the house. Volumes like “The Wind in the Willows,” “The Boy Scout Handbook,” the “Pooh” books, “Black Beauty,” “Little Women,” and “The Yearling,” provide stimulating entertainment for children with time on their hands.
The action of the novel casts doubt on the wisdom of Aunt Emily’s dominance, her position of “radiating control,” but from the narrator’s recollections we can say in Aunt Emily’s defense that she recognized the importance of summer and ensured that many people partook of an exquisite experience of eternity.
The mother who wants to summer well should seek access to water, good books, the study of native flora and fauna, music to be sung together or at least listened to and enjoyed together, and the open-ended and unstructured hours of a glorious time outside of time. No need to toil away at perfection. The complex Aunt Emily had her faults as a matriarch, but she succeeded in making a lasting impression of summer in the souls of many children, a sunny place to return to in memory through a lifetime in this weary world.
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