Was This 'Discovery!' Meant to Be Found?
Wallace Stegner's Camp Says Publisher's Claim to Oil Industry Book Is Unethical

By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 29, 2007

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Wallace Stegner, who died in 1993, has a new book out this fall -- but it's one Stegner's son and his literary agent say should never have seen the light of day.

"Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oil" was published in September by the tiny, California-based Selwa Press. It resurrects a narrative history Stegner was hired to write, in the mid-1950s, by the Arabian American Oil Co., a consortium of American firms commonly known as Aramco.

A Selwa press release called the book "a lost classic." But Carl Brandt, who was Stegner's agent and who continues to represent the Stegner estate, said yesterday that the text published by Selwa was a company-edited version intended only for internal Aramco use and that its publication violated Stegner's contract with Aramco.

"It was not what Stegner wanted the world to see," Brandt said. "A bowdlerized version of what Wally wrote is being fobbed off on the American public."

"It's been considerably modified," said Page Stegner, the author's son, who called what Selwa had done "unethical." Material critical of Aramco was cut, he said, and anything that in the company's opinion might have offended its Saudi partners was also removed.

Both men cited a 1958 contract under which Wallace Stegner and Aramco would each have to approve any version intended for publication in the marketplace -- unless it appeared without Stegner's name attached.

Selwa publisher Tim Barger, who was in Washington yesterday to give a talk about "Discovery!" at the Library of Congress, denied that he had done anything unethical in publishing the book.

Barger is the son of an Aramco geologist who rose to run the company. (The elder Barger is a character in the Stegner book.) He said he had requested and received permission from Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company that resulted when the American consortium was nationalized in the 1970s.

The publisher said that Stegner had approved the text of what would become the Selwa version when it was serialized (in 14 parts) in an Aramco magazine in the 1960s, and again when Aramco converted the magazine serialization into a 14-chapter paperback printed in Beirut in 1971. Stegner also supplied an introduction.

"The story of 'Discovery!' and the peculiar fate of Stegner's manuscript is a complicated and murky tale," wrote former Washington Post reporter Thomas W. Lippman in a foreword to the Selwa version.

Aramco's decision to commission what Lippman called "a history that would accentuate the positive and show the oil company in a favorable light" was part of a much larger PR effort. It came at a time when Iran had recently nationalized its oil industry and when Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser was trumpeting his criticism of the Saudi partnership with the American consortium.

In the mid-'50s, Stegner was a respected but hardly wealthy writer. He would go on to make his reputation as a chronicler of the American West and win the 1972 Pulitzer for his novel "Angle of Repose," but at the time, as Lippman put it, "he needed extra money." In addition, the adventures of rugged American oil pioneers in Saudi Arabia appealed to him because they echoed the American frontier experiences that were a favorite subject.

Looking back at the daunting challenge faced by the oilmen, Stegner wrote, gave their task "the nostalgic, almost mythic quality of an action from the age of giants."

This might be an exaggeration, but as "Discover!" shows, it's perhaps not as big as one might think.

The oilmen's charge, as Stegner described it, was to explore "some 320,000 square miles of desert, most of it barely known, most of it casually mapped, some of it visited by westerners only two or three times in all its history." The transportation system consisted of "a handful of cars supplemented by camels and donkeys" -- and virtually no roads. The men were "half a world away from their base of supplies, and with hardly a shop or store or warehouse where they could buy so much as a nail or a pair of pliers, much less the complex spare parts of a mechanized civilization."

Stegner spent only two weeks in Saudi Arabia, where he interviewed many of the pioneers, but he also had access to letters, diaries and a raft of company documents. He soon turned in a manuscript.

Aramco had problems with it.

Bill Mulligan -- an Aramco old-timer quoted by Lippman in his book "Inside the Mirage: America's Fragile Partnership With Saudi Arabia" -- pointed out that what looked like a heroic pioneer tale to Americans might look quite different to Saudi readers.

Stegner's "glorification of the early American oilmen tended to put our Saudi friends in a bad light," Mulligan said. "As Stegner told the story, when the Americans arrived in Saudi Arabia, there was little more than flies, sand and ignorant Arabs on hand."

Aramco shelved Stegner's manuscript until 1967, when an eager young editor at the company magazine, Aramco World, published the company-approved serialization that became the company-printed book. The text of the Selwa book, Barger said, is identical to this version; he simply added the foreword, a bibliography, a glossary, an index and some photographs.

Although the book was published to little fanfare, it did generate a few interviews and reviews. Pretty soon these started popping up on a Google alert set up by a California writer named Philip Fradkin, whose new biography of Stegner is scheduled for publication in February.

Fradkin knew from his research, he said, that "Stegner did not want [the Aramco version] out as a trade book." The in-house publication "was all right by him," Fradkin said -- after all, Aramco had paid him for his work -- "but that doesn't change the fact that he did not give permission" for it to be published commercially.

Fradkin said he contacted the Stegner estate's agent, Brandt, who had also represented Fradkin when he sold his Stegner biography. Brandt said he then got in touch with Barger and asked "by what authority" he was publishing the book.

Barger replied in an e-mail that "the 1958 contract concerns a work entitled 'The Story of Aramco and Its Pioneers' " (the title of the original Stegner manuscript, now held at the University of Utah). "This manuscript was never published and never will be," he added.

Barger said yesterday that what he meant to imply was that Aramco would never agree to the publication of Stegner's original draft. He also said that Stegner was paid an additional sum for the Aramco World serialization, which the author had reviewed before publication.

"The serialization is an abridgement," Barger said. "It's a different work."

Brandt has not ruled out taking legal action, he said, but the estate doesn't have a lot of money to support a lawsuit.

Page Stegner complained that Selwa had appropriated his father's work "to make some money by using Wallace Stegner's name." But he said he would rely on Brandt's advice as to any legal action.

Barger said he wanted to publish Stegner's narrative as a way of recapturing "an era and a place in time" that he "really loved." He said he would be "lucky to break even" on the book.