For years now we haven’t been as close as we used to be. They live in New Mexico where the weather is better for Sally’s polio, the malady she first suffered in one of the early summers at the Lang compound - and survived, in part, because of Charity’s support and encouragement. They’ve been distant, in part, because of geography. Now, twenty years after spending a year with Sid and Charity in and around Florence and after a separation of nearly a decade, the Morgans have returned because Charity is dying of stomach cancer. Indeed, the scene with Hallie takes place in 1972 at the Vermont compound that Charity and Sid have maintained as a summer gathering place for their large extended family, including Larry and Sally as honorary members. They fall into friendship and, for the rest of their lives, through ups and downs, remain deeply bonded. The premise of Crossing to Safety seems simple: Two young couples meet in 1937 as lowest-rung members of the University of Wisconsin faculty at Madison. I can’t reproduce the real Sid and Charity Lang, much less explain them and if I invented them I’d be falsifying something I don’t want to falsify.” “Taking charge of everything”

Novels or biographies, it makes no difference. Those aren’t people you see in books, those are constructs. They don’t understand any more than other people. “Hallie, you’ve got the wrong idea of what writers do. It’s been a kind of agony for both of them.” Such as, why have they stuck together all these years. Hallie wants the book because it “might help answer some of the unanswered questions.

But, at the same time, Stegner is addressing, through Larry, his own reader. Wallace Stegner, who offers this scene near the end of his 1987 novel Crossing to Safety, has Larry, his narrator, address Hallie. Hallie wants Larry Morgan to write a book about her parents Charity and Sid Lang.Īfter all, he’s a famous novelist, and, for 35 years, Larry and his wife Sally have been close friends of the couple.

Crossing to safety