All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

by David Gessner

  He told me about the split that occurred between Kesey the student and Stegner the teacher. According to McClanahan, Kesey gave an interview to Gordon Lish for the magazine Genesis West, in which he suggested that Stegner’s work had suffered due to being lionized by his students—that it had all gone to the professor’s head. Almost immediately Kesey understood he had screwed up. The very next day he brought a big red apple by Stegner’s office. McClanahan was there but Stegner was not, so Kesey gave the apple to Dolly Kringle, the secretary. Later, when Stegner came in, Dolly handed it to him.

  “I don’t know what he did with the apple,” Ed McClanahan said to me. “Threw it at Dolly? But he wasn’t in a forgiving mood. He just looked at Dolly without smiling and said, ‘Well, he said it, didn’t he?’”

  After that Kesey came to represent all that was wrong with the ’60s: the drugs, the recklessness, the trashing of hard-won traditions.

  Abbey stood on the other side of this divide. There was no one less “buttoned-down” than Abbey.

  Now, as I drove south to Moab, I found myself thinking, oddly, not of the split between the men’s books or careers, but of two separate parties they had thrown. Stegner, though a paragon of responsibility, was no teetotaler and would at times let his well-combed hair somewhat down; he was even known, according to his biographer, Jackson Benson, to entertain by singing and “dancing a little soft shoe.” In 1937 he threw a party when he learned he had won a first-novel contest sponsored by Little, Brown and was awarded $2,500 and the publication of his first book. In Stegner’s fictional version of the party that followed, re-created in his last novel, Crossing to Safety, the Stegnerian character, Larry Morgan, buys more bottles of booze than he ever has before in his life, and his friends pop Champagne and make toasts to his glorious future. But the party—“quite a party”—has an unexpected end when his wife goes into labor. Two days later their son is born.

  Stegner’s party, then, began with the start of his career and ended with the birth of his first and only child. Or, as he put it in his autobiography, “My new family responsibilities and my new literary life began together.” The fledgling novelist and father was twenty-eight years old.

  Abbey’s party was quite different. It too is re-created in fiction, in his late autobiographical novel, The Fool’s Progress. In the novel, Abbey describes a sacrifice made on the day of the party, and his fictional wife’s reaction to it: “She stopped and stared. Her husband, with blood smeared hands, forearms, face, knelt at the side of a blazing pit. Behind him a naked child hung upside down from a dead tree.”

  While Abbey could be extreme, there was in fact no child sacrifice. What his wife mistook for a child was a slow-cooking goat. Then, as the goat continued to cook over the coals, a wild celebration broke out, made up of a crowd of artists, writers, and University of New Mexico students who drank all day, burned down the outhouse, and then leapt over it like pagans. The party didn’t end until the wee hours of morning, when the Abbey character kicked over some embers and burned down the house. This is fiction, of course, but it is actually a composite of two real events in Abbey’s life, as his biographer Jim Cahalan has pointed out. The first was the actual party where the goat was cooked. The second occurred in 1954, when Abbey and his second wife, Rita, were serving as caretakers of an old adobe home—a task that it would be hard to argue they performed well considering that they burned the house down soon after they moved in (ignited by a fire Abbey set in the stove).

  I guess the point was that I didn’t quite know how to tease out an answer to my koan, at least not yet. Of course, you could cite Abbey’s frequent rants against immigration and his adamant belief in the right to bear arms, but I still had a hard time calling him a conservative. Somewhat to my own surprise, I actually found it easier to imagine Wallace Stegner as a radical. I thought of Wendell Berry’s decision to not make ambition his personal deity. “The life that men praise and call successful is but one kind,” wrote Thoreau. Wendell Berry knew this and acted on it, and in doing so he had a model who lighted his way: his old teacher. Rather than cash or fame, what was important was knowing a place, belonging to a place, committing to a place. Even, in Wendell Berry’s language, marrying a place.

  Like his student, Wallace Stegner was a placed person, defining himself against his placeless father. “The old man could never say anything without sounding like he was daring you to contradict him,” Stegner wrote of Bo Mason in The Big Rock Candy Mountain. In a way, Wallace Stegner’s whole life was lived as a contradiction to his father. Like so many of his ideas, Stegner’s ideas about home grew out of his childhood. Having witnessed the failure of a thousand rugged individualists, his father among them, as they battled the inhospitable landscape, he came to believe in community. Having grown up in movement, he came to value staying put.

  Where is home? Stegner asked near the end of The Big Rock Candy Mountain. Is it where we were born, where we spent our childhood, where we hang our hat? For too many Americans, especially the American who fathered him, it seemed to always be around the next corner. “The whole nation had been footloose for too long,” he wrote at the novel’s conclusion. “Heaven had been just over the range for too many generations. Why remain in one dull plot of earth when Heaven was reachable, was touchable, was just over there?”

  It is a question that remains central for many contemporary American writers, not to mention many contemporary Americans. And it is this idea of home that perhaps starts to unlock Terry Tempest Williams’s riddle. Perhaps to be radical in this country is to try to be rooted. Perhaps to be radical is to not flit after the next fancy over the hill, not to give into the culture’s constant come-ons of “more,” but to truly commit to one’s place, one’s family, one’s mate. Perhaps that was what Tempest Williams had suggested.

  And in a fractured, rootless, overheated world, is it wrong to consider these notions radical?

  4

  PARADISE, LOST AND FOUND

  I followed the river and road down into Moab and encountered a different sort of spectacle: a great cluster of strip-mall tackiness where every sign hollered “Adventure!” RVs rumbled down the streets and a hundred gaudy signs tried to draw in tourists like beckoning recreational prostitutes, selling, instead of sex, rafting and biking and jeep tours. Think Vegas for outdoorsmen. Beamed down onto Main Street, an extraterrestrial could be forgiven for concluding that the word adventure was the most common in our world.

  Moab has always been a boomtown, starting with the discovery of uranium in the 1950s, when it briefly reached a population of 9,000, or almost twice today’s numbers. When uranium prices dove with the shift away from nuclear energy and the end of the Cold War in the ’80s, the town floundered: unemployment skyrocketed and the population fell. But the town reinvented itself fairly quickly as a mountain-biking mecca, hosting the first fat-tire festival in 1986, and the chamber of commerce, realizing they were on to something, began to advertise it as a recreational haven. Today Moab is a center for biking, off-road vehicles, rafting, rock-climbing, skydiving, and anything else even vaguely adventurous, while playing host to dozens of annual festivals that include the Jeep Jamboree and the Moab MUni Fest (“MUni” of course being short for mountain unicycling).

  The town’s other main business is Edward Abbey. Or as my friend the writer Luis Urrea once called it, “The Dead Ed Industry.” The last time I was here I stayed up at the Pack Creek Ranch in the La Sal Mountains, and the caretaker there said to me: “Ed Abbey was a hypocrite. His books brought more people to Moab than all the ads by the chamber of commerce.” Certainly, I admitted to the man, he had brought me.

  Despite the clutter and all the beckoning signage, I was happy to be back. I’d told myself that I would camp outside of Moab, but my hands had other ideas, turning the steering wheel so that the car pulled into the parking lot of a Sleep Inn off Main Street. My hands had a point: thunderclouds still threatened and the rain would have made camping unpleasant and possibly dangerous due to
flash flooding.

  After I’d thrown my bags in the room and washed up, I headed up to Arches National Park. Of course it’s obligatory for someone writing a book about Edward Abbey to make the pilgrimage to this particular park, the setting of his greatest book, but it’s also a place that has in some ways fulfilled Abbey’s worst nightmares, and now seems to celebrate not just a wild red-rock landscape but the rise of the automobile. Abbey called these incursions of cars into national parks “industrial tourism.” Could he have imagined where this would lead? Arches, which saw about 25,000 people during Abbey’s entire stint as a ranger from 1956–57, now has almost a million visitors each year.

  For all its beauty and grandeur, it is a hard place to view without irony. You try to find a spot to create some quiet, some personal relationship with the unearthly landscape, to drink a beer and maybe smoke an honorary cigar, and revel in the desert quiet. But then another line of cars comes ripping up the paved road. Or, as happened to me, a camper full of kids and parents landed right where I’d tried to have my little ceremony. Meanwhile there were no doubt other earnest Abbeyites in other parts of the park trying to worship in their own ways, also part of the larger crowd. It was like getting into a traffic jam on the way to Walden Pond (which I’ve also experienced), and soon I felt a dark mood descending.

  Though this place was relatively unpeopled during the two seasons he worked as a ranger here, Abbey, too, did his share of grumbling while living in the park. Grumbling about tourists, although back then they had as many in a year as they now do in a week; grumbling about cars; grumbling about familial obligations (his second wife and first son were back in Hoboken, New Jersey); grumbling about his own precarious mental state, always just a step away from the melancholia he both feared and romanticized. The journals from that time tell a story of a man fighting depression, a brave man but an inconsistent one.

  “The spoiler has come.” This line from Robinson Jeffers, an early twentieth-century poet whose work had a great influence on Abbey, came into my mind as I walked away from the camper. But who was I to complain about all the people? I was no less a spoiler than the family that now spilled out over the rocks. Maybe it was simply a case of too many of us in the world, of the fact that for something to feel sacred we must feel it is ours and only attainable to a few. Is every traveler on this overstocked planet now by definition a tourist?

  Soon I was driving again, gawking up at three giant sandstone towers that someone had named, perfectly, the Three Gossips. If this stunning landscape had lost its power to stun me, it still impressed: great sand doodles of rock, huge eye sockets in rock walls, muscular bulges of stone. I hadn’t shaken my bad mood when I reached Balanced Rock, but there was only one other car in the parking area, which seemed promising.

  And then something strange happened. All day bulky clouds had crowded the sky. But now the sun, just about to set, dipped below the line of clouds in the west, and the whole place lit up. In particular, Balanced Rock lit up. It glowed orange, and I noticed my own feet now taking charge, hurrying me closer to it. The only other person at the site was a man in a muscle shirt who had ignored the warnings about not stepping on cryptobiotic soil, and who was standing right below the rock itself, snapping pictures furiously. He no doubt resented the intrusion of another human and, respecting that, I walked around the other side of the rock, giving us both a half privacy.

  Ravens shot by. Bats and swallows, too, both after the same insects. The rock was amazing: a fifty-five-foot-high boulder of slick rock balancing atop a more quickly eroding seventy-one-foot-high mudstone base. Dark was coming in like the tide, but the rock, high enough to catch the sun, stayed light, as if it were holding the day inside it, turning that intense, almost-edible orange you only find here. It occurred to me that I had been too cynical too quickly. The sunset line blazed and turned the distant La Sal Mountains pink. Something opened up inside me.

  On the walk out I almost bumped into the muscle-shirted photographer. But I now felt more benevolent toward my own species.

  “You had some good luck with the light there, huh?” I asked.

  “You betcha,” he said. “Got some real good ones.”

  Soon I was grumbling again, caught in a commuter line of red-ember taillights snaking out of the park. But I left glad I had come.

  Maybe inconsistent is the wrong word for Edward Abbey. Imperfect may work better. Wendell Berry defined Abbey as an autobiographer, and Desert Solitaire is autobiography, though of course it is what Wendell called selective autobiography. We are treated to the wild thoughts of a man alone in the wilderness. There is no mention of the fact that there were times when Abbey’s wife and young son shared his solitary trailer with him, and not much of the fact that the other half of the year was spent trying to salvage his marriage, working as a welfare caseworker in Hoboken. No matter. Paradise is never really paradise, idylls never truly idylls. In Desert Solitaire, Abbey created a character, a fiction, of a man living in nature, a man passing his days watching cloud formations, a man living bravely and in solitude. But his own life was never so simple. Not only was he about to undergo his second divorce, but to tell the truth he sometimes didn’t do all that well in solitude, his brain turning on itself.

  Of course, Abbey wasn’t trying to tell the true and full story of his life. While he wrote about the exhilaration of living far apart from others, he still had his daily battles with anxiety, still had his regular worries.

  But he had his moments, too. His elevated moments, his inspired moments, his transcendent ones. That was the important thing. It was out of those moments that he would build a great book.

  PERHAPS YOU COULD unravel many of the differences between Wallace Stegner and Ed Abbey by considering their attitudes toward “moments.” Abbey disdained soft mysticism and his one experience with LSD was flat and uninspiring, but in other ways he fell in line with the ’60s, the decade that celebrated the moment in so many forms: the ecstatic, the present, the sexual. Stegner, meanwhile, believed that even in the present we should respect the past and consider the future. Not that he didn’t enjoy life—it seems clear he did—just that pleasure was fairly far down on his list of priorities.

  If a sort of bristling impatience enlivened Stegner’s early years, there is a different feel to Abbey’s beginnings as a writer. Back in May, when I traveled to Tucson to work my way through the Edward Abbey collection at the University of Arizona, I spent a week with his journals and got some sense of what it was like to occupy that wild, shaggy, slovenly but often brilliant mind. I understood how a mind like that might not do so well when left to its own devices. As a philosophy major, Abbey prided himself on doing “the work of brooding,” but the brooding in his writing was leavened by descriptions of landscape, and by creativity and humor. Because while Abbey brooded plenty, he was at heart not a philosopher but a maker. And it would turn out he was better at portraying a character named Ed Abbey in the act of philosophizing than he was at philosophizing itself.

  I was struck, and even caught off guard a little, by just how smart the man was, how contemplative and well read. Also striking was the constant wordplay, including the jokes and bad puns, the frequent references to women he lusted after. Spread over it all like a mist net was all that melancholia and moodiness, something dark and slothful and, for all his love of outer nature, decidedly inward-turned. It felt darkly adolescent and, to me, familiar.

  There was reason for depression, other than a simple genetic predisposition for it. From the time he left the East for good in 1948 and landed in the Southwest until the publication of Desert Solitaire twenty years later in 1968, Ed Abbey was involved in an immense struggle. The struggle was the brute effort to become a writer. True, he was involved in other things too: halfheartedly working toward his degree, getting married and falling in love a couple of times, working at various park ranger jobs and as a welfare counselor and, briefly, as a factory worker, roaming around the desert in old cars and trucks, and making a good many
lifelong friends. But underneath it all, and seeping through it all, was a driving ambition that belied his claims of sloth: he wanted to make something great.

  It’s true that this effort was sporadic, and that his habits were never consistent. “I write best under duress,” he confided to his journal. Then: “I write only under duress.” Later when he taught creative writing to graduate students at the University of Arizona, he advised them to write regularly, every day. He was an intimidating teacher, but one student got up the nerve to ask if he did this himself. “No,” he answered simply.

  But words were set to the page, if not consistently then persistently. The journals filled up, little schoolboy notebooks crammed from end to end with scrawling cursive sentences, and the effort put into the first novel is impressive. During a Fulbright fellowship in Scotland in 1951, the twenty-four-year-old Abbey scribbled notes about the need to write the book, notes that swing wildly between pep talk and parody:

  About time my friend about time to think about the book, the first spasmodic effort of the reluctant soul harrowing itself for something to say; do I have something to say? Your goddamned ass I have something to say!

  What?

  And:

  Everything. I’ll throw everything in. Whole hog. Hog wild. A great big fat beautiful obscene book, the most hilarious, tear-jerking, side-splitting, throat-choking, belly-busting, heart-breaking book ever written. Don’t forget the book in the book. (The proper place for parody.)

  Throw everything in? Maybe you better throw in the towel.

  The trouble is that these journal notes show more life, and more Abbey, than Jonathan Troy ever did. It was a novel that would embarrass him for the rest of his life, and for good reason. Thomas Wolfe threw a long shadow over youthful writers in the mid-twentieth century, longer than Hemingway’s in some ways. Abbey’s first effort swells with both earnest Wolfian romanticism and chronic self-obsession.