Stegner in Saudi Arabia

This review recently appeared in the San Jose Mercury News and the Houston Chronicle. (After the review appeared, the Washington Post reported that the Stegner family has claimed that Stegner never wanted the book to be published.)

DISCOVERY! The Search for Arabian Oil
By Wallace Stegner
Selwa Press, 320 pp., $24.95
For Wallace Stegner’s admirers, learning that he once accepted a commission to write a book for an oil company may come as a shock. The involvement with the likes of Texaco, Exxon, Mobil and Chevron seems a strange move for a man who later joined the board of directors of the Sierra Club. Stegner gained a reputation for integrity when he turned down an award from the National Endowment for the Arts to protest the politicization of the NEA. So this breach of the walls between art and commerce is as startling as if Philip Roth or Norman Mailer had agreed to flack for Halliburton.

To be fair, when Stegner was commissioned in 1955 by the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) to write a history of the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia, he hadn’t yet made a name for himself. He was teaching creative writing in the program he founded at Stanford University, but the Pulitzer Prize for “Angle of Repose” was 17 years in the future. “It was a time when his books were not selling well and he needed extra money,” comments journalist Thomas W. Lippman in his introduction to “Discovery!” And the project must have had a gut-level appeal to Stegner, a chronicler of new beginnings; in his book he calls it “purely and simply the story of a frontier.”

But Stegner’s narrative of the work of the pioneering American geologists and wildcatters who came to Saudi Arabia in 1933 is riddled with the author’s ambivalence, which is one reason why Aramco decided to shelve the completed manuscript. It was dusted off in 1967 and published in the company’s in-house magazine, with some expurgation of Stegner’s ambivalences. In 1971, a year before Stegner’s Pulitzer, a paperback version was published in Lebanon, with limited distribution. Now, the first American edition of “Discovery!” has been issued by Selwa Press, a small house whose publisher, Tim Barger, is the son of Thomas C. Barger, the late CEO and president of Aramco.

Even when Stegner wrote it in the mid-1950s, it was clear that, as he says on the final pages of his book, “the American involvement in Middle Eastern economic, cultural, and political life … would grow deeper, more complicated, and more sobering. Not inconceivably, this thing they all thought of as ‘progress’ and ‘development’ would blow them all up, and their world with it.” We hardly need to be reminded that Osama bin Laden and the great majority of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis to recognize that if this was a chilling prophecy in 1955, it has only become more so with the passage of time.

But despite any uneasiness Stegner may have felt about the future, “Discovery!” is a celebration of American ingenuity and willingness to explore the unknown, or as he put it, “a demonstration not only of American skills but also of American culture.” There is a kind of innocence in Stegner’s praise of “fantastic American energy and adaptability.” He does acknowledge those who “see Aramco and its sister corporations as a sinister force embroiling us, for dirty dollars, in the power struggles of the Middle East.” But he concludes that “American oil development in the Middle East has been, all things considered, responsible and fair.”

Obviously, the American oil explorers had a great appeal to an author who later chronicled the struggles of a frontier mining engineer in “Angle of Repose.” He lauds the “tinkerers and gadgeteers” who used every means available to civilize the harsh and alien landscape, who “installed showers fed by gravity from the roof, modernized the mud-brick privy with a combination of lime and Flit guns, and, with a hundred yards of fabric screening that some foresighted individual had ordered, screened off their building from the ever-present swarms of flies.” They even devoted time to making distilled water palatable, mixing “it with well water until the flavor and saline content suited them. They had as many formulas for drinking water as Americans at home have for martinis.”

Their practicality served the Americans well in an unforgiving environment where the July heat “pours in a great engulfing tide, down from the brassy sky and up from the blinding rock and sand, and breathes like a steam boiler through every wind that moves.” In the desert, “the ring of the horizon boiled and floated with mirages. Around its edge, dunes and runty palmettos were stretched and warped until they looked like cliffs or forested headlands. Camels and their riders came over the rim as tall as towers.”

Stegner’s word wizardry constantly enlivens the book. He not only avoids cliché, he even mocks it: Journalists visiting Saudi Arabia, he says, “gave the impression they would be tongue-tied if they could not make references to ‘Aladdin’s lamp’ ” or describe the transformation of the country with the phrase “camels to Cadillacs.” He anticipates the “New Journalism” of Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe by a decade, unabashedly entering the minds of the people he writes about. He describes what one of the oil company’s negotiators must have seen and heard standing on a balcony in Jiddah: “from the suq he heard the complaining snarl of a camel, and then for a moment in the stillness, the perhaps imaginary mutter of a whole city in prayers.” And more daringly, he is with the wife of one of the geologists in the instant before she is killed in the explosion of the boat they are taking to Bahrain: “Now, sitting aft with her husband, enjoying the whip of the breeze and shouting to make herself heard, she was planning things she would buy in Bahrain’s suqs.”

This novelistic flair raises “Discovery!” far above the level of corporate PR that Aramco must have wished for. What a contemporary reader might wish more of is insight into the country the Americans helped transform into a dominant power in the Middle East. King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud is treated as a kind of benevolent despot, and Stegner gives us only incidental references to the rigidly fundamentalist Wahhabism and the draconian severity of Sharia law. The subjugation of Saudi women is alluded to only in passing: “an occasional woman in sepulchral black, only the hint of eyes showing behind the mask’s square holes, the robed figure as nervous as a runaway child.”

“Discovery!” may not quite be the “lost classic” its publisher touts it as being. In the canon of Stegner’s work it’s a minor entry. But as a journey into the origins of a boiling crisis, it’s richly fascinating. And for the reader bewildered by the dangerous mutability of America’s role in the Middle East, it supplies a small but significant piece in a vast puzzle.