Worthy spin

Even though Wallace Stegner had established his literary reputation by the early 1950s with a string of books -- including “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” “Second Growth” and “Mormon Country” -- reputation didn’t pay the bills. He needed extra money, and so, like many great American writers before him, he became a pen for hire.

“Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oil” (Selwa Press: 266 pp., $24.95) is the result of Stegner’s commission in 1955 by the Arabian American Oil Co., a consortium of oil companies known as Aramco, to write the history of oil exploration in the Arabian deserts in the 1930s and the partnership between the U.S. oil industry and Saudi Arabia’s founder, King Abdulaziz ibn Saud.

Journalist Thomas W. Lippman explains in a preface that company officials conceived of the book as a good public-relations tool. Then, they changed their minds: After Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal and denounced the House of Saud’s arrangements with the oil company, they thought it better to file the manuscript away. In 1967, it was rediscovered and published in the oil company’s magazine and in 1971 as a paperback in Beirut.

Though “Discovery!” is a company-approved bit of propaganda -- usually the kiss of death for any reader hoping to find literary risk-taking or innovation -- the book is an invaluable part of our understanding of an important American writer. Much of what we appreciate about Stegner’s touchstone work -- the taming of a vast frontier, the colorful characters enlisted for the job -- is here, causing faraway places, like the city of Jiddah, an ancient trading center on the Red Sea, to sound somehow familiar: “In the old town, in those days, the walls leaned together over alleys barely wide enough for two donkeys to pass; the warped, carved, weathered balconies all but touched. Minarets tilted dizzily and the whole town sagged and slouched on foundations gradually sinking into the unconsolidated coral sand.”

But for the minarets, you might think he was describing the American Southwest. After an exhausting day of exploration, “the men lay out under the scatter of dry bright stars” like pioneers crossing the prairie.

If any PR work was worth a writer’s time, it surely was this. At its core, “Discovery!” is a grand adventure story. There are accidents. Derrick fires blaze in the desert sun. A wildcat well “goes wet” and then, to everyone’s dismay, dries up. Geologists scout new territory. Bedouins are encountered. And, finally, there is a glimpse of that precious prize that everyone, then and now, wants to control: “[T]he column of fire dropped as if a burner valve had been turned down. At the end of the two-hundred feet of pipe, the oil gushed out in a thick stream that blackened the sand . . . . “

--

nick.owchar@latimes.com