There is perhaps no author who elicits more mixed feelings
from me than Edward Abbey (1927-1989). Abbey’s best-known works, both fiction
(e.g. The Monkey Wrench Gang) and
non-fiction (e.g. Desert Solitaire),
earned him a deserved reputation as an intellectual godfather of the radical
environmental movement. I read much of his fiction and non-fiction when I was
in my twenties, between the late ‘70s and late ‘80s, and was greatly influenced
and moved by his beautiful descriptions of the desert, canyon, mesa,
plateau, and mountain country of the American Southwest, exuberantly passionate
descriptions of a life fully lived, and fierce defense of preserving wilderness
in its raw, unspoiled state. However, even then, 30 and more years ago, I was
troubled by his obnoxious self-assurance, bald misanthropy, love of guns, sometimes
racist language and (seemingly) views, and his apparent sexism. Concerning race
and gender, his written views were complicated but his language was frequently
blunt and offensive, even by the standards of the time. In short, while Ed was
a fascinating thinker and fantastic writer, he was also an asshole, at least as
viewed only through his writing.
Abbey clearly relished his image as something of a barbarian,
and likely intentionally exaggerated some of his views and made them
inflammatory as intellectual sport. He once stated that “I write in a
deliberately provocative and outrageous manner because I like to startle
people. I hope to wake up people. I have no desire to simply soothe or please.
I would rather risk making people angry than putting them to sleep. And I try
to write in a style that’s entertaining as well as provocative. It’s hard for
me to stay serious for more than half a page at a time.”[i]
Friends and I recently started a new book club, focusing on
nature- and adventure-oriented writing, and we selected Desert Solitaire as our first month’s book, partially because of
its focus on the part of the Southwest affected by the Trump Administration’s
drastic reductions in the size of the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears
National Monuments. I thus recently reread Desert
Solitaire and found it just as enjoyable and provocative, and composed in as
distinct and unique a voice, as the first time I read it so many years ago. His
descriptions of his experiences in (then) Arches National Monument, a float
trip down the Colorado River through Glen Canyon shortly before it was to be
flooded and irrevocably altered by the Glen Canyon Dam, and perambulations in
the environs of Arches are those of a man who knows these areas intimately and
loves them deeply. His language is vivid and often hilarious, and his thinking clear
and unfettered by convention. His savagely critical and trenchant view of what
he called Industrial Tourism (the “development” of national parks and other
wild areas by building paved roads,
campgrounds for motorhomes, and other “amenities”) was completely in keeping
with my own views (which were reinforced and probably initially formed partly
by reading Abbey lo these many years ago). Fifty years ago, when Desert Solitaire was published, these
views were hardly mainstream, even among those sympathetic to traditional
conservation efforts. Keep the wild wild!
After rereading Desert
Solitaire, Abbey’s breakout first non-fiction work, I decided to reread one
of his last novels, the semi-autobiographical The Fool’s Progress: An Honest Novel. Abbey’s protagonist in the
novel, Henry Holyoak Lightcap, seems like a pretty faithful self-portrait of
Abbey himself. (A digression: If Abbey was half the lusty womanizer that Henry
was, he must have been pretty hard to take. While I mostly loved the novel, I
found myself wearying of his descriptions of his tingling groin and massive
manhood. In actual fact, Abbey was married five
times, fathering five children—ironic
for a man who kvetched at length about overpopulation and the overbreeding
immigrants and poor—compared to the three wives and one child for the fictional
Henry…)
Henry comes by many of his irascible ways and opinions
naturally through his father, Joe, who was eulogized at his funeral in the
novel by Henry in a way that I imagine Abbey would perhaps see himself: “My
father was a vain stubborn self-centered stiff-necked poker-playing whiskey-drinking
gun-toting old son of a—gun. ….He never gave his wife the kind of home she
wanted or the kind of life she deserved. He was cantankerous, ornery,
short-tempered and contentious—probably the most contentious man that ever
lived in Shawnee County. He was so contentious he never even realized how
contentious he was. He had strong opinions on everything and a neighborly view
on almost nothing. He was a hard man to get along with. But I’ll say this for
him: he was honest. He never cheated anyone. He was gentle with children and
animals. He always spoke his mind. And he was a true independent. Independent,
like we say, as a hog on ice.”
Henry also has this to say about his own prodigious reading
and what it provided him: “He remembered best not the development of character
or the unraveling of plot or the structure of an argument—philosophy is an art
form, not a science—but simply the character of the author’s mind. That part
remained and by that standard alone he finally judged his author and either
threw the book aside or read it through and searched out more by the same
writer.” I guess I have much the same approach to reading, and the fact that I
read many of Abbey’s books through and searched out more says a lot about the
character of his mind and the quality of his writing, the occasionally offensive
rants notwithstanding. In fact, I find myself wanting to seek out the rest of his canon which I have not yet read.
Abbey includes this half-hearted mea culpa for his prickly, often offensive style in the
introduction to Desert Solitaire:
“Certain faults will be obvious to the general reader of course, and for these
I wish to apologize. I quite agree that much of the book will seem coarse,
rude, bad-tempered, violently prejudiced, unconstructive—even frankly
antisocial in its point of view. Serious critics, serious librarians, serious
associate professors of English will if they read this work dislike it
intensely; at least I hope so. To others I can only say that if the book has
virtues they cannot be disentangled from the faults; that there is a way of
being wrong which is also sometimes necessarily right.”
Ed Abbey is someone with whom I would have loved to spend an
evening around a desert campfire, drinking and philosophizing, or a day floating
down the Colorado River, or scrambling through canyon country. Had I been able
to do so, I might have a better sense of whether or not this man who described
undeniable problems with overpopulation, illegal immigration, poverty among the
Navajo, and welfare dependence in offensively racist language and terms was
really a racist. I might have a better sense of whether this man who loved to
describe his serial womanizing was simply a man who loved women too much, or
whether he was really a grotesquely sexist pig. Based on his writing, he certainly
comes across as a racist and sexist asshole. Maybe that is his “way of being
wrong which is also sometimes necessarily right.” I can’t help feeling, though,
that his immense literary talents could have been even more broadly effective,
and resonated with a broader segment of the population, had he been less of a
seemingly racist, sexist guy.
[i]
Trimble, Stephen, ed. (1995). “Introduction.” Words from the Land: Encounters with Natural History Writing. University
of Nevada Press, p. 27.
