All the Little Live Things by Wallace Stegner

First published: 1967

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: The early 1960’s

Locale: The San Francisco Bay Area

Principal Characters:

• Joe Allston, a retired literary agent
• Marian Catlin, a neighbor, pregnant and afflicted with cancer
• Jim Peck, a beatnik
• Tom Weld, a real-estate developer
• Julie LoPresti, a young girl, pregnant by one of Jim Peck’s followers

The Novel

All the Little Live Things consists of seven chapters, a prologue, and an epilogue. Set in the Bay Area of California, the novel plays out some of the generational conflicts of the 1960’s as a group of strong characters settle in wild, hilly country near San Francisco much like Los Altos Hills, where Wallace Stegner’s family lived for many years.

Joe Allston, a retired literary agent, and his wife Ruth have built a retirement home, where they hope to live quietly, mourning the recent death of their son, who drowned in the Southern California surf, perhaps deliberately. The 1960’s, as depicted in this novel, was not a good time to seek peace and quiet in this part of California. Into the neighborhood come first Jim Peck and then Marian Catlin, characters who in different ways challenge Joe Allston’s convictions. Jim Peck squats on a corner of the Allstons’ property and establishes a sort of commune.

Marian Catlin and her husband have come to find a sheltered place for Marian and their daughter to live while John conducts research in the North Pacific. As the Allstons soon learn, Marian is pregnant and suffering from breast cancer. Meanwhile, Tom Weld, the owner of most of the undeveloped property around the Allstons’ place, is busy bulldozing the hills to build more homes.

Allston finds himself at the center of bitter quarrels with Weld and Peck about the fate of this piece of land, which he frequently compares to the Garden of Eden, and in amiable disagreement about the nature of good and evil and of life and death with Marian, who is fighting her own hopeless battle against cancer. Although he succeeds in driving Jim Peck and his followers away, he is not able to stop the relentless development of the open land around him.

The argument with Marian is inconclusive. She is an extraordinarily beautiful young woman, in love with “all the little live things.” When she first meets the Allstons, Joe is firing his shotgun into a gopher hole. She fiercely criticizes Joe’s violence against nature, insisting that gophers have the same right to live that she and Joe do. She misses seeing Joe in his most appalling, if accidental, act of violence against nature: when he spears a magnificent king snake with a pitchfork, man and snake in pursuit of the same gopher.

Marian’s devotion to the idea that life is sacred and not to be interfered with by humankind finds its most ironic expression in her battle with cancer. She is pregnant with what could be her second child and refuses medication either to halt the cancer or to control her pain. The Allstons do everything they can to help her cope, but they find themselves pulled into a series of events as painful as the death of their son.

Marian’s death provides a terrible climax to the plot of All the Little Live Things. When she goes into labor, Joe and Ruth Allston set out to drive her to the hospital, where she hopes her baby’s life can be saved even though her own cannot. On the way, they are involved in a nightmarish accident caused in part by Joe’s haste, in part by the sudden reappearance of Jim Peck and some of his followers, in part by Tom Weld’s failure to keep the bridge in good repair. The last sight Marian sees is the death of Julie LoPresti’s horse, clubbed to death by her husband to put it out of its pain after it breaks its leg on the damaged bridge. Julie is pregnant by someone in the commune; ironically, her baby will live and Marian’s will not.

The Characters

Wallace Stegner’s characters are well drawn and convincing, even though many of them represent typical attitudes of the 1960’s and do not develop much in the course of the novel. The reader is invited into the mind of only one character, Joe Allston himself.

As narrator and protagonist of All the Little Live Things, Allston is a complex, well-rounded character who does indeed grow through the events of the novel. Although Stegner obviously wants the reader to sympathize with him, Allston is by no means perfect. Age and experience have given him considerable knowledge, a strong sense of honor and responsibility, and a sharp wit. On the other hand, he is impatient and often makes situations worse by his impulsiveness. Stegner’s technique in developing this first-person narrator allows the reader to see both what Allston thinks and what he says or does, and thus to note the frequent ironic mismatch between his intentions and their consequences. While he would like to make the world safer and more orderly, he often does just the opposite. Allston’s principal antagonist is Marian Catlin, in spite of their affection for each other. In some respects, she seems too good to be true, based as she is on Stegner’s mother and on several friends of the Stegners who had died of breast cancer. Marian’s affection for all kinds of life and her acceptance of death move Joe to both sympathy and anger. She is closely associated with the title of the novel and helps to establish the generation gap as a major theme of the novel.

Other characters dramatize the conflict between the generations that characterized so many aspects of American life in the 1960’s. Joe’s son has recently died, perhaps a suicide, certainly a failure in Joe’s eyes. Now in his sixties and in retirement, Allston is again challenged by young people: Marian with her uncritical acceptance of things as they are; Jim Peck with his dropout’s disrespect for established values; Tom Ward, who sees nothing to respect in the past, not even the shape of the landscape; and Julie LoPresti, pregnant in large part because she knows her condition will upset her mother.

Two characters, neither of them quite at the center of things, possess a more balanced view and the ability to mediate between the extremes the other characters represent. Joe’s wife Ruth and Marian’s husband John suffer greatly, but both are ready to go on with life after Marian’s tragic death. They possess the kind of wisdom Joe gains only at the end.

Critical Context

All the Little Live Things was written fairly late in Wallace Stegner’s distinguished career as novelist, historian, environmentalist, and teacher. The book reflects his concerns about cultural trends in the 1960’s, especially what he saw as a growing rootlessness and irresponsibility in young people, including, apparently, his own students at Stanford University. He saw in the young a callous indifference to the pain of others; Marian Catlin’s struggle with breast cancer connects her with Stegner’s own mother and the lasting pain he felt about her death.

The novel also marks a stage in Stegner’s development as an environmental writer. In essays, short stories, and historical works such as Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (1954), as well as in many of his novels, Stegner describes the uneasy relationship Americans, especially Westerners, have with their natural surroundings. Joe Allston is a fascinating case in point, wanting the dramatic views from his hilltop home preserved but willing to destroy any wild creature who interferes with his efforts to grow tomatoes where they never grew before.

This first-person narrative is technically brilliant; the way in which the highly literate Joe Allston relates contemporary issues to the classics—to the Old Testament, The Tempest, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667)—as well as to modern poetry such as Robert Frost’s lets readers into the mind and personality of an extraordinarily attractive, if sometimes disturbing, consciousness. Through his eyes, and mind, natural objects attain symbolic weight without losing their realistic character; pages could be written about the redtail hawk that appears regularly over Joe Allston’s retirement home or about the king snake under his brick walk. To see Allston from within is to glimpse the psychological factors that make preservation so problematic.

The issues All the Little Live Things raises remain significant; and this beautifully designed book is clearly the work of a major American writer, not merely a Western regionalist.

Bibliography

Arthur, Anthony, ed. Critical Essays on Wallace Stegner. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. Two of the essays, those by Barnett Singer and Lois Phillips Hudson, treat aspects of All the Little Live Things.

Benson, Jackson J. Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work. New York: Viking, 1996. A fine biography; chapters 16 and 17 treat the connection between this novel and events in Stegner’s life.

Hepworth, James R. “Wallace Stegner’s Practice of the Wild.” In Wallace Stegner and the Continental Vision, edited by Curt Meine. Washington: The Island Press, 1997. Hepworth studies environmental concerns in several novels, including this one.

Robinson, Forrest G., and Margaret G. Robinson. Wallace Stegner. Twayne United States Authors Series. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977. An excellent survey of Stegner’s work through the mid-1970’s. Chapter 5 treats this novel in some detail.