40 pages • 1 hour read
Wallace StegnerCrossing to Safety
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaPart 1, Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary
Chapter 7 focuses on Larry’s professional and literary activities in Madison. In addition to his teaching responsibilities, Larry writes several short stories, a few of which are published. Larry also writes a novel, the content of which is not described. As Sally’s due date draws near, Larry grows more anxious. Describing himself as an “overachiever, a workaholic” (97), he puts deliberate effort into dividing his time between life and work. The constant danger is that he will neglect Sally, and his method of dividing his time is stark:
Early in our time in Madison I stuck a chart on the concrete wall of my furnace room. It reminded me every morning that there are one hundred sixty-eight hours in a week. Seventy of those I dedicated to sleep, breakfasts, and dinners (chances for socializing with Sally in all of those areas) (97).
These anxieties are intensified as the darkening storm of the incipient World War gathers: “We loved our life; we never looked up from it except when rallies for the Spanish Loyalists ruffled the waters of the university [...] or when Hitler’s frothing voice over our radio reminded us that we were on a bumpy gangplank leading from world depression to possible world war” (102-3). Upon reflecting on this mix of signs, Larry laments on not having kept a journal, but concedes that, he was simply unaffected, if not indifferent.
Part 1, Chapter 8 Summary
Chapter 8 begins on March 19, 1938. Charity has just gone into the hospital to deliver her baby. Sally tuts that she has lost the “baby derby,” but the couple remain optimistic. Soon, Larry receives word that a publisher has picked up his novel. Larry’s novel is deeply personal: “It had been corked up a good while—the story of my decent, undistinguished, affectionate, abruptly dead father and mother, and the glamorous friend who periodically brought excitement, adventure, and romance into our house in Albuquerque [...] who used them, and sponged on them, and borrowed money from them” (108-9), who inadvertently caused their deaths in an aviation accident. However, Larry is yet aware of the double-sided character of this resentment as he himself profits from this tragedy: “Yet now, having held in grief and resentment, and evaded thinking too much about the episode that changed my life with the finality of an axe, here I am exalted by having made use of it, by having spilled my guts in public” (109). The others greet Larry’s achievement with joy and praise, throwing an impromptu party in his honor. At the party, Larry tentatively begins to indulge the feeling of success, but these intimations of self-satisfaction are broken when Sally goes into labor.
Part 1, Chapter 9 Summary
Chapter 9 is a brief set of recollections as Larry anxiously waits for Sally to deliver. The baby is breech, meaning it will be a difficult and dangerous delivery: “Times like that are a kind of paralyzed frenzy. I was imbecilic with shock, fatigue, and fear, and close to passing out” (118). Charity and Sid are with them, providing what comfort they can. At an indistinct point, Larry learns that the delivery was a success; although the baby girl has a broken arm, she and Sally are resting. As Larry reaches exhaustion, he has greater and greater trouble tying the events together in his mind. To lift Larry’s spirits, Charity muses about names, admitting that she and Sally had decided on the name Lang, to which Sid and Charity offer the joking hypothetical: “Why didn’t Sally think? We had a plot to marry her to David if she turned out female. What kind of name is that going to leave her? Lang Lang. She’ll sound like a streetcar” (123).
Part 1, Chapters 7-9 Analysis
Chapters 7 through 9 describe early major milestones in Larry’s life, such as the acceptance of his novel and the birth of his daughter. How Larry conceives and experiences these events, in recollection, illustrates much of his worldview in 1938 and how these experiences have changed him. His novel, which communicates the tragedy and resentment of losing his parents, is both a personal and professional success, one which comes on the heels of his entrance into academia but branches from the academic, professional life into a creative and artistic mode. Although grateful for the recognition of his “gift,” he feels guilty that he seems to have profited from his loss. At work, he is subconsciously eager to make up for the deficit he perceives in himself. Only through conscious effort is he able to devote time to Sally, although writing the novel compromises these measures. It is at an impromptu party thrown for him by his friends that Sally begins to go into labor; the experience, although exciting, is not at all joyous. Sally’s delivery is difficult and dangerous. Throughout the delivery, Larry is in a constant state of panic, tipped with exhaustion. The events contrast with respect to the level of control he experiences in these situations and with his own general inexperience. In the hospital, he is viscerally struck by the amount of blood at the delivery, nearly losing consciousness more than once. The experience seems to shatter the delusion of the previous chapters, which overvalued his professional, academic, and artistic success; real life, Larry discovers violently, does not conform to the idealistic portraits and calm pursuits he was accustomed to, and it is also dangerous and always uncertain.
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By Wallace Stegner
