Although One Way to Spell Man is most obviously a book of essays on almost every topic under the Western sun, it is less obviously but quite significantly a kind of serial, partial autobiography—a book which adds up to spelling not only man as Westerner but also man as Wallace Stegner. What one finds here, clear eyed and direct, are the values which have brought meaning to the author’s life as a person and as a Western writer. Thus, anyone who has enjoyed Stegner’s many fine achievements in the writing of history and fiction will recognize One Way to Spell Man as a fine and fitting companion to the author’s earlier book of essays, The Sound of Mountain Water (1969)—and, as a reader, will rejoice.
The seven essays that comprise the first portion of the book were for the most part written in the 1950’s and 1960’s, while most of the concluding nine essays which make up the second part were written in the 1970’s and 1980’s, after Stegner’s retirement as director of Stanford University’s creative writing program. The first set of essays, then, parallels Stegner’s middle phase as a writer (his first popular success was The Big Rock Candy Mountain in 1943)—a period which saw the publication of such works as Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (1954), Wolf Willow (1962), and The Gathering of Zion (1964). The second set of essays corresponds to Stegner’s later phase and the publication of such works as Angle of Repose (1971), The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto (1974), The Spectator Bird (1976, winner of the National Book Award), and most recently, Recapitulation (1979). If the first group of essays represents some of the author’s bedrock beliefs and opinions, the second group seeks to identify and describe more pointedly the American West as place and idea in giving contour to Stegner’s life and art.
One can easily begin to extract the assumptions and values, the Western stance and viewpoint of Stegner, from the title essay of the collection, “One Way to Spell Man,” which first appeared in Saturday Review in 1958. “One Way to Spell Man” and the opening essay, “This I Believe” (1952; first prepared for the Edward P. Morgan radio and magazine series) established Stegner’s own heroic “code” of the Western man and writer.
When stating his credo thirty years ago, Stegner placed moderation and conscience at the top of his list of virtues. Conscience, Stegner says, is not something divinely bestowed but something learned, part of the traditions integral to the society in which one is reared. It is his hope that even when he does not live up to his conscience, he never mistrusts its directions. Proud to be alive and an American, Stegner believes both in himself and in the responsibilities of his heritage. To be born an American is for Stegner to be born lucky and to be born obligated to the luck of that birthright. This unabashed patriotism, though grounded in the more naïve era of the 1950’s, extends quite sincerely through all of the subsequent essays.
In the title essay, Stegner also takes issue with the absolute authority of the quantitative method. The arts, too, he insists, go far in isolating truth in all its protean forms. Prompted by the curricula revisions of American education in the Sputnik era, Stegner’s insistence that the liberal arts and literature in particular are more than frills is, ironically, still as urgent in 1982, when curricula are increasingly oriented toward high-tech, computer science, and vocationalism. Stegner’s plea is the familiar one of the humanist who prizes the essential usefulness of humanistic education.
To prove his point, Stegner quotes from Joseph Conrad’s 1897 preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus.” (Conrad, like Stegner’s real-life mentor, Robert Frost, is alluded to numerous times in these essays as an aesthetic ideal.) Conrad’s is an art which in creating its own sensory worlds redefines man’s experiences and “spells” man in small flashes and gleanings, greets man as an act of “presentation and recognition.” In this essay, particularly as it resonates and expands throughout the other essays on his craft, essays such as “Fiction: A Lens on Life” and “To a Young Writer,” Stegner’s deep respect for the magic and mystery, the power and efficacy of words, of literature and art, are both convincing and contagious. Moreover, in the expansive distances and sublime vistas, the extremes of temperature and climate, the exoticism of its peoples, flora and fauna, the American West and westering provide Stegner with a subject worthy of the artistic vision he celebrates.
In one of his most inventive pieces in the first group of essays, a piece called “The Writer and the Concept of Adulthood,” originally written for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Stegner attempts to reconcile the concept of the writer with the concept of adulthood—two ideas which at first glance seem irreconcilable, given traditional stereotypes of the writer. Contrary to the Romantics (Stegner mentions William Blake, William Wordsworth, and D. H. Lawrence), who celebrate innocence and the perceptions if not the state of childhood; and contrary to the popular conception of the artist as necessarily egocentric, rebellious, and incapable of self-control, Stegner asserts that he never knew a serious and gifted writer who was not at the same time responsible, an “adult.” That responsibility may well be entirely to the writer’s own gift and genius; it is nevertheless a responsibility.
As for work and industry, the scaffolding of adulthood, and the pleasure involved therein, Stegner proposes that writers, by and large, work very hard—or so it has been his experience; they work with a kind of Puritan dedication and compulsion, in part because there is no higher pleasure than creation of something like, for example, a novel. The writer as a disciplined grown-up and the writer as a compulsive worker are profiles evidenced in Stegner’s own lifetime regime and in his prolific output, an accomplishment which he views as a fulfilled responsiblity to a talent egged on by mortality.
Generally less philosophical, less abstract, the essays in the second section of the book deal with individual Western writers such as Owen Wister, Walter van Tilburg Clark, and A. B. Guthrie, Jr., and with Stegner’s own personal culture hero, photographer Ansel Adams. Nevertheless, essays such as “That New Man, the American,” “The Provincial Consciousness” (an essay devoted entirely to a favorable assessment of Canadian culture), and “The Gift of Wilderness” bespeak some broad thinking about westering and the West, its past and its promise. More a realist than a mythologizer, Stegner still recounts and reacts to the geography and literature of the West with an epic spirit.
For the Westerner, as for all Americans fulfilling Alexis de Tocqueville’s older definition of the “new man,” the world faced is one of freedom of choice—almost total, unrestricted choice in politics, religion, and society at large. Custom has never been able to ward off dissent and experimentation, says Stegner, and in the academic West of Berkeley and Stanford, complete with student activists and “Jesus freaks,” the same antagonisms exist that have motivated generations of Americans since before the Revolutionary War. Although Stegner is quick to agree that such freedom of choice, such individual freedom to reject any norm as temporary, is an inherent American value, he also argues for routine and some degree of conformity. Much of America’s quest for Utopia, in the West or elsewhere, he observes, is an attempt to escape the persistent freedom to experiment. What holds America and the West together, he concludes, is a balance of tradition and change.
In “The West Coast: Region with a View,” Stegner rethinks a meeting he attended one recent autumn in Carmel, California, in which twenty or so notable personages from many professions addressed the question of whether the West Coast had an identifiable culture. What struck Stegner during the conference and certainly after it was that the concept of regionalism so extolled in other parts of the country, most notably the Midwest and Rocky Mountain West where Stegner has lived, was not assumed at Carmel. Regionalism in its older sense was eclipsed by a view that the West Coast is, if not three regions—Pacific Northwest, Northern California, and Southern California—then a kind of rootless non-place, prophetic of the future of America.
Except in the rural South and similar areas where local traditions have remained intact, regionalism in America is now pretty much a thing of the past, says Stegner. Assuming such a premise, he asserts that the West Coast is anything but rural and that, at least in Seattle, San Francisco, or San Diego, there is no old, organic convergence of a regional identity with a distinguishable literature. What does make the West Coast cohere as an identifiable place in newer “regional” terms is a pervasive confidence, an exuberance so great that it can, in both subtle and obvious ways, affect the entire country. As a “region with a view,” it looks out not only on the Pacific Ocean but also on all of America. In its energy and excitement, the West Coast, for Stegner, represents the American mainstream.
Probably the two most characteristic and significant essays in One Way to Spell Man concern the life of Stegner’s friend and prototypical Western man, Ansel Adams. Adams’ saying, “A photograph is made, not taken,” provides the departure point for a panoramic look at Adams as exactly that—a maker, an artist. It was during his formative period at Taos, New Mexico, in the 1930’s that Adams saw in the work of Paul Strand the potential of “straight” photography, with no soft focus, no atmospheric effects—only the lens. Since that time, a period contemporary to Stegner’s own career as a writer, Adams has photographed the West in such a way as to make one “see” it afresh. Although he has created some remarkable portraits, it is his picturing of nature (not merely scenery) that has brought Adams his greatest success. Above all, it is the Sierra Nevada mountains and Yosemite National Park which are identified so closely with Adams and his artistry, and Stegner’s essays are a personal testimony not only to the quality and perfection of Adams’ photographs but also to what they have meant to Stegner as he has looked at them daily over the years.
In “The Gift of the Wilderness,” Stegner makes a deeply felt and eloquent plea for the preservation of wilderness, not only for its beauty but also for its essential presence beyond man’s perception and appreciation of it. Here especially, it is the West which offers most dramatically the promise and the strength of wilderness. Quoting Thoreau’s famous words of a century past, “westward I go free,” Stegner—example by example—builds his case for raising the nation’s ecological consciousness. Adamantly against the policies of the Department of Interior under President Reagan, Stegner sees Secretary James Watt’s acts and attitudes as responsible for a disastrous setback to the environmental legislation of the last seventy-five years. Stegner calls upon the archetypes of Natty Bumppo and Huckleberry Finn as rendered by James Fenimore Cooper and Mark Twain to show how innately Americans distrust the destructive use of the environment and treasure its wildness, its freedom. Ironically, it is today a civilized responsibility to preserve that wildness, to save the remaining American wilderness.
In this fine collection of essays, then, Stegner reveals as honestly as he can what he thinks of man’s potential, man’s future. For America, the West has always been identified with the future—as El Dorado, Cibola, the “golden gate,”—and westering men and women have sallied forth optimistically to realize their dreams. All along the way, the Western writer has recorded, coaxed, and inspired that westering spirit in fact and fiction. Not so much a prophet or visionary as an imaginative realist, Wallace Stegner in 1982 still points to and affirms the way—nearly a century after historian Frederick Jackson Turner dated its demise.