By Gary Topping–
(Editor’s note: on June 1, 2023, Gary wrote about his general Sanpete County memories.)
For a period of some weeks in 1978 I lived in a dorm room at Snow College in Ephraim, Utah. I was finishing the research for a history of Sanpete County sponsored by the Utah State Historical Society. I had previously worked through all the research repositories in northern Utah and was now working in Sanpete’s city and county government records. Those city and county facilities were only open during working hours, so my dorm room evenings were free. From Albert Antrei, former high school principal in Manti and one of our local volunteers on the history project, I learned that a remarkable body of stories and novels about Sanpete existed, so I used many of my evenings to read through that literature.
No other small rural Utah community has inspired such a body of writing, so why Sanpete? The answer is contained in a new biography of one of those writers, Virginia Sorenson, by literary scholar Stephen Carter, whom I met a couple of weeks ago at a book signing hosted by our mutual publisher, Signature Books. I already realized that Sanpete County held a special place in Mormon history as an isolated mountain valley where Mormon institutions and culture could develop in a more or less pure fashion uninfluenced by outside forces. That was the motivation for the history on which I had worked in the 1970s. Sorenson and the other Sanpete writers were asking what happens when the outside world does come in? Hitherto, she seems to be saying, you rural Mormons have regarded the outside world as nothing more than a mission field. Does that world have anything, on the other hand, to teach the Mormons? And can someone from that world find happiness living in Sanpete? The answers proposed to those questions by the Sanpete writers, unfortunately, are pretty negative.
Virginia Sorenson (1912-1991) was born in Provo, but lived in Manti from age eight until she entered high school. Her father worked for the “smoky, pokey” (as she called it) Sanpete Valley Railroad. That little narrow gauge railroad was a major agent in opening Sanpete Valley to the outside world, and much of her corpus of writing explores the dynamic that resulted. Sorenson’s father was a “Jack Mormon” (baptized into the church but non-practicing), while her mother had left the church completely to join the Christian Scientists. Sorenson, though, was baptized into the church and remained an active member. That fact gives her criticism of insulated rural Mormon culture a mellowness that renders her novels and stories heartwarming at the same time they are critical.
On This Star (1946) is the story of Eric Erickson, a talented Manti pianist and organist who has trained extensively in eastern conservatories, but returns home to try to forge a career. He has a flirtation with Chel Bowen, a local musician who is dazzled by his talents but who decides instead that rather than developing her own talent outside Mormon country, she will honor her engagement to Eric’s half-brother Jens, a local farm boy. Those two worlds cannot come together. Eric remains in Manti eking out a bare living, though descending into alcoholism and eventually losing his life in a suspicious hunting accident.
Donald R. Marshall (1934-2022), a multi-talented literature professor at BYU, is known for two short story and poem collections, Frost in the Orchard and The Rummage Sale. His picaresque characters are sometimes so tawdry that they make the reader cringe, like “May the Good Lord Bless and Keep You,” in the latter collection, a made-up correspondence between a lonely Mormon girl in rural Idaho and a missionary in Ohio. More to our purpose is “The Week-end,” from the same collection. In that story, Thalia Beale a “young old maid” from Ephraim, decides that her closed-in life in that rural town has not allowed her actually to experience life. When her mother dies, relieving Thalia of responsibility for caring for her, she buys a bus ticket to Carmel, California, where she hopes to experience a little of the bohemian life. She prepares for that by renting an apartment in nearby Monterey for a month, only moving to Carmel for the final weekend. Ultimately, the closest she finds herself capable of bohemian living is a bright “pink-orange” sweater she buys in Monterey. An interesting counterpoint to the story is occasional interspersed paragraphs in which people back home in Ephraim speculate about the dissolute life into which she must have descended. Thalia can escape Ephraim, but she can’t avoid its intolerance.
Finally, there is Joyce Eliason (1934-2022—an exact contemporary of Donald R. Marshall). Eliason grew up in Manti through high school in a family of Jack Mormons. From there she found her way to Los Angeles where she enjoyed a prolific career as a television writer and producer. Her Fresh Meat/Warm Weather, unlike anything in Sorenson and Marshall, is a bitter and yet anguished memoir of the culturally impoverished life in Manti contrasted with her equally unhappy life in Los Angeles where two divorces left her a single mother with two young daughters. While she recalls with pleasure playing on Temple Hill as a young girl and enjoying sumptuous Thanksgiving dinners and picnics, she wastes no time launching into her profanity-ridden indictment of small-town Mormon life and yet her anguished inability to escape from it: “Goddamn those hills and little faraway Mormon Utah towns with names like Moroni, Lehi, Nephi. Goddamn those towns that protected me, formed me, buried me in one single motion. . . .Goddamn it all because I can never get away from it. And I can never in any goddamn way get back to it.”
How that passage resonates with me and with anyone who grew up in a small town that he had to get away from and can never get back to. I can’t forget, when I was in high school, an old fellow who used to go around saying, “The Bible is the only book you need”! I couldn’t disagree with him, if the only thing you wanted from life was a passage to Heaven. For me, though, I also wanted a full and meaningful life here on earth, and for that I needed a few other books as well. I have to believe that whatever important differences there were between Joyce Eliason’s Manti and my Coos Bay, Oregon, we saw things the same way.
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles. Signature Books recently published his latest work titled D. Michael Quinn: Mormon Historian.
