Big Rock Candy Desert
This cover caught my eye at the bookstore the other day. Surely, that couldn't be the Wallace Stegner writing a seemingly heroic account of the discovery and exploration of the Arab oil fields. Ah, but it is. Seems Stegner, the late Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and renowned environmentalist who served on the Sierra Club Board of Directors from 1964 to 1966, contracted with Aramco, the Arabian American Oil Company, in 1955, to do a book-length story on Saudi Arabia's oil boom. The handsomely paid work-for-hire project was first serialized in Aramco World, the company's magazine, and has now been published between hardcovers. In taking the assignment, Stegner was clear about establishing his journalistic boundaries: "I have no liking either for muckraking or for whitewashing jobs; I should very much like to make this book straightforward and honest history... . To do that properly I shall need my elbows free," he wrote. But this piece in Stanford magazine, (Stegner founded the school's esteemed creative writing program), takes a rather harsh view of the end product, finding it romanticized and boosterish.
No doubt, the mere revelation of Stegner's oil book will disillusion some of the author's fans (of which I am one), but I would argue that that's not such a bad thing. After all, who needs illusions?
2 Comments:
I'm the publisher of the Selwa Press edition of Discovery! and can't imagine that any Stegner fan would be disillusioned by his account of the Arabian oil frontier. The oil industry, though it is a business and will strive to achieve the highest profit like any other business, is not intrinsically and mutually exclusive with the best use of a society's environment.
A hundred years from now people will be astonished that we actually burned such a valuable resoure, but a realist such as Lyman Ward would certainly recognize that people must use their environmental riches to survive, if not flourish; producing oil is essential to modern life and of all the extractive industries it leaves the smallest footprint.
Stegner presents the history of an ancient culture and a kingdom that was saved from deep impoverishment and near collapse by the efforts of a few Saudis and Americans working together across cultures to build a now great oil company from scratch.
In typical Stegner fashion, this history reads like a novel and the keen reader will see in this tale of the Arabian East many parallels with his stories of the American West, especially Angle of Repose that was published 15 years after he wrote Discovery!
If any Stegner fan can read Discovery! without being absorbed by his narrative, enthralled by his bigger than life characters or simply struck by the man's incredible empathy, prescience and wisdom - please contact me at editor@selwapress.com to arrange a full refund.
Tim Barger
Thanks for chiming in Tim. We'll see if any readers take you up on the money-back guarantee.
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