Where have you gone, Edward Abbey?

His best work celebrated the natural world, free and clear of "the caterwauling of commerce." More than ever, America needs the ornery writer today.

By Philip Connors

Read more: Books, History, New Mexico, Reviews, Book reviews

 

Photo composite of Edward Abbey

Oct. 22, 2006 | Mention the name Edward Abbey among literary folk in Manhattan, and they give you looks of condescension and pity, thinking you've mispronounced the name of a well-known playwright. In the five years I lived in New York almost no one I met had read him. In this part of the world, west of the Mississippi and east of the left coast, mention Cactus Ed and people's eyes light up with either fury or reverence. Larry McMurtry anointed him the Thoreau of the American West. Wendell Berry praised him as a first-rate autobiographer. His friend Dave Foreman called him a "Mudhead Kachina," a fond reference to the multifaceted clowns in Hopi religious ceremonies. Others were not so kind. In papers and magazines across the political spectrum, from the National Review to the Nation, he was labeled xenophobic, puerile, dopey, racist, sexist, an "eco-brutalist," a "creeping fascist hyena." One reviewer suggested he be "neutered and locked away for life." He never failed to provoke a response. Love him or hate him, it was impossible -- remains impossible -- to read him with indifference.

In what may be our final chance to sample his previously unavailable work, Milkweed has now published Abbey's selected letters as "Postcards From Ed: Dispatches and Salvos From an American Iconoclast," a book that mostly reads as one last series of broadsides against the greed and lust for power that were the enemies of all he cherished. It arrives at a strange and foreboding moment, when many of Abbey's fears and premonitions have come to pass. What little wilderness remains has come under brutal assault by oil, gas, coal, timber, mining and agricultural interests, both in America and elsewhere. Our government claims an unassailable right to spy on anyone it chooses; habeas corpus is apparently moot. Our military is bogged down in a feckless, asinine war. The planet is in the midst of warming irreversibly, and none of our politicians have the guts to be honest about what this means for our future.

Our lifestyle, we are told, is sacrosanct, any sacrifice in "our way of life" not only unnecessary but unpatriotic. Our elected leaders treat us as children or consumers -- ideally both, monstrous in our appetites, unable to discriminate between our wants and our needs. As early as 1954 Abbey wrote presciently in his journal about the culture of Texas, an assessment with even greater relevance today, given the source of so many of our troubles: "Why pick on Texas? Because it typifies, concentrates and exaggerates most everything that is rotten in America: it's vulgar -- not only cultureless but anti-cultural; it's rich in a brazen, vulgar, graceless way; it combines the bigotry and sheer animal ignorance of the Old South with the aggressive, ruthless, bustling, dollar-crazy brutality of the Yankee East and then attempts to hide this ugliness under a facade of mock-western play clothes stolen from a way of life that was crushed by Texanism over half a century ago. The trouble with Texas: it's ugly, noisy, mean-spirited, mediocre and false."

Such observations make reading Abbey a stiff tonic in almost any form -- and make his letters, rich in passages like this, a kind of solace just now.

It's been nearly 40 years since he wrote his masterpiece, "Desert Solitaire," without which there would be less interest in the letters. Despite its stated purpose as a eulogy to a lost world, it seems hardly to have aged at all. In a series of linked essays Abbey telescoped his three seasons -- 1956, 1957 and 1965 -- at Arches National Monument in Utah into one "season in the wilderness." Part of the book's staying power resides in the synthesis Abbey created between the American desert -- the red-rock canyons, "Abbey's country" -- and the beautiful, hard-chiseled prose, as rough and gorgeous as the land itself, that he used to celebrate its harshness and mystery. There were other lovers of the arid American West before him -- Mary Austin, Joseph Wood Krutch -- although they were far outnumbered by those who feared and loathed it, and none were as vociferous in its defense, before or since. None have matched his style. Like many good writers, he misjudged what was best in his body of work, preferring the vastly inferior novels "Good News" and "Black Sun," the first an apocalyptic comedy, the second a saccharine love story. His biggest gripe was being pigeonholed as a "nature writer," and for years he refused to allow any portion of "Desert Solitaire" to be anthologized.

For most of his writing life he was the creator of his own myth, the myth of a man who shared his name if not all the details of his actual biography. Late in life he employed misdirection to ward off pilgrim admirers, signing letters from "Oracle" or "Wolf Hole" in Arizona, but the creation myths begin in his idealized youth. He often claimed to have been born on a submarginal farm near Home, Penn., an actual town where his family moved when he was 14, but he was in fact born in 1927 in the larger nearby town of Indiana, better known as the birthplace of the actor Jimmy Stewart. His mother taught school. His father, a radical socialist, sold real estate and later magazine subscriptions. Aside from a summer spent on the road during the Depression, camping in state parks while his father moved from job to job, Abbey seems to have enjoyed a comfortable if modest upbringing. His life changed the year he turned 17. That summer, in a family tradition shared by his brothers and his father, Abbey hitchhiked west for several months and fell irretrievably in love with the land he would defend and celebrate for much of his life: the Sonoran and Chihauhuan deserts of Arizona and New Mexico. (Only later did he find his way to Utah.) He subsequently wrote that on his virgin trip to the Grand Canyon, "the first thing I did was urinate off the rim onto a little aspen tree waiting patiently below. It was a semiconscious act, no offense meant, signifying a claim to territoriality. But I have belonged to the Grand Canyon ever since, possessing and possessed by the spirit of the place."

This, in a nutshell, explains much worth knowing about the man. Territoriality, for Abbey, did not mean actual title to the land, in the sense of private property. For most of his life he was peripatetic, and for more than two decades he lived half of each year in various national parks, national forests and wildlife preserves, where he supplemented his writing income as a seasonal ranger and fire lookout. The places he revered most were usually part of the federal land-management map, and therefore "owned" by none and by all. Territoriality to Abbey meant something deeper. It meant a love that didn't seek to dominate or tame, a love that encompassed even the harshest of the wild creatures that knew it as home. "I'm a humanist," he wrote, in "Desert Solitaire." "I'd sooner kill a man than a rattlesnake."

Next page: Abbey endorsed industrial sabotage to slow the worse kinds of destruction: Dam building, strip mining, clear-cutting