The Safety of Friends

Settling in with the insightful and gentle prose of Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety is like wrapping yourself in a warm, soft blanket on a chilly evening.

The sentences land quietly upon the intellect, inspiring reflection, comforting in their sure-footedness on the page. Throughout the story, four friends remain committed to one another, offering support through the rough patches and simple celebrations through the good times. The corners and crevices of their lives are illuminated, much like the room in your study might be with a warming blaze in the fireplace.

The four friends are actually two couples, and their story is narrated by one of them, Larry Morgan, who recounts their lives over several decades, as he remembers it. Looking back from 1972, Larry recalls how he and his wife met the other couple in 1937 at a small university in Wisconsin. Recently married to Sally, Larry arrives on a one-year teaching contract in the English Department, relieved to have this pittance of an income in the depth of the Depression. He aspires to be a writer and soon is placing stories in national magazines. Sally is pregnant and will have a difficult delivery.

Sid Lang is also teaching in the English Department on a year-to-year contract. He aspires to be a poet, but never, we learn later, is published, as his work lacks depth and emotion. Thanks to an inheritance and trust fund, Sid and wife Charity have no money worries, but they are intensely focused on Sid gaining tenure and a permanent position at the university. Charity is also pregnant.

As Larry reflects from the perspective of more than three decades, through the mist of memory, he remembers good times. An afternoon of ice skating is followed by “the hour afterward in our basement, hot buttered rum and Sally’s cinnamon rolls still warm from the oven. Red faces, tingling skin, exuberant vitality, laughter, and for Sally and me the uncustomary pleasure of giving instead of taking.”

But there is also an aspect of the unreliable narrator in this. Larry is a writer of fiction, so he is staging the characters and events of his life to first emphasize how enjoyable and tight the friendship was among these four, before they encountered life’s random unfairness. Larry also acknowledges early on that memory is fickle: “Recollection, as I have found, is usually about half invention, and right now I realize that there is much about Sid and Charity Lang that I either invented or got secondhand.”

The friendship among these four forms the heart and soul of the story as they each move through the curveballs and unforeseen setbacks of everyday existence. Each provides a mooring for another when in need. We should all be so lucky to have friends like this—undemanding but always ready to help.

After the birth of the Morgans’ first child, Sally is diagnosed with polio and spends weeks in an iron lung. She cannot walk without her “iron legs” and uses a special seat that she must be helped in and out of and is always carried on outings. Larry is between jobs and writing furiously, hoping to sell his stories for income. Without asking, Sid and Charity step in to pay all the medical bills. The Morgans insist on paying back every dollar once Larry finds work as an editor and gains a degree of success as a writer.

Stegner, wisely, relies on character to propel the novel forward. Sid, Charity, Sally, and Larry are all likable but not without flaws. Charity, for example, wants to script every aspect of her life, with no deviations regardless of circumstances. In one instance, the young foursome plans a weeklong walking trip through rural Vermont with a loaded mule, Wizard, carrying all that may be needed, including food, water, and changes of clothing. After Wizard is fully loaded, Charity insists that everything be unloaded and laid out to be checked off a list. Sid resists, and “[i]ncredibly, it becomes a confrontation, you can feel the stubbornness in the air.” Eventually, Charity wins this argument.

Writing involves moments of stress that provide clues to the broader strokes of how someone will react in larger and more serious life decisions. A few years later when Sid’s annual university contract is not renewed, Charity’s plans for her husband’s future as a respected academic fall apart. Charity breaks down mentally and spends two months in a sanatorium. Eventually, Larry (by then a successful writer) uses connections to help get Sid a position and tenure at Dartmouth College.

Years pass, some without visits, children go off to college and marry, grandchildren are born. There is a year together in Italy, visits to the Lang family compound in Vermont, and many letters exchanged. Life rolls on. But when the four do assemble, the conversation picks up where it was last left.

I first read Crossing to Safety three decades ago when I was in my 30s. What struck me then were the well-drawn characters, thoughtful and self-reflective, and how the Langs and Morgans stuck together through the rough patches. Now, in rereading the novel, I am the same age as Larry Morgan as he narrates from the vantage point of his mid-60s. My perspective has changed. What strikes me now is how random life is, how we adjust and persevere through crisis, and how all of it can be made easier by close, non-judgmental friends. I have been lucky to have these as well, and reading this novel again made me cherish that all the more.