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

by David Gessner

  But at the actual grave site I was in for a surprise. Stephen paused in front of two stone markers embedded in the grass. The first read: Husband. Cecil L. Stegner. 1907–1931. The second: Mother. Hilda E. Stegner. Aug 31, 1883–Sept. 27, 1933. Stegner’s brother and mother, respectively.

  And next to them? Next to them there was no third cathartic stone to mark the life of George Stegner, father and husband. Next to them was a lumpy plot of grass, nameless and unmarked, below which Wallace Stegner’s father lay.

  Stephen was pleased by my reaction. He had given me a gift of sorts, and he knew it. But he needed to run, and so we shook hands by the gravesite before he climbed back onto his bike. I started to do the same, but then hesitated. The clouds had closed in, dark-blue and heavy below, lighter up above. It looked like rain, but there were still a couple of hours of light, and I remembered that I had seen a convenience store earlier. I pedaled there to buy a cigar, then back to the gravesite to smoke it. The clouds grew darker; rain spat. The town lay below me, the mountains above. I smoked the cigar down to the nub.

  I studied the two graves. Cecil, Wallace’s big, strong, athletic brother, the family star, died at the age of twenty-four of pneumonia. Then came his mother, a woman whom Stegner would insist to the end of his life was “saint-like.” “I love my mother,” he wrote later, “and that is not anything for a psychologist to grin about.” Hilda was, by all accounts (mostly his, as the last survivor and writer), a kind, loyal, high-spirited woman who loved her sons despite a hard life of near poverty and spousal abuse. Her last words, as she died from cancer at the age of fifty, were: “You’re a good boy, Wallace.”

  But while the two marked graves had their own stories to tell, it was the unmarked one that held my attention. Stephen’s gift had been to present me with the perfect place to consider the relationship between George and Wallace Stegner, but more than that. The perfect place to think about names and the nameless, ambition and acceptance, fathers and sons.

  NOT FIVE MILES from here George Stegner, in that seedy downtown hotel, killed his girlfriend and himself in what his son later called “a neat and workmanlike job of murder and suicide.” It would have hardly been national news, just an event covered in the local paper, gossiped about in town for a while no doubt, but fairly quickly consigned to time’s oblivion. Except. Except for the writer son.

  “Well, at least we don’t have any skeletons in our family closet,” Wallace’s son, Page Stegner, said to me when I visited him in Vermont.

  I had laughed—rudely, I think now—assuming that Page was joking and that having a grandfather who killed himself and his girlfriend might qualify as a skeleton.

  But of course Page was right. That incident had been written about so much by his father that, far from being in a closet, it has been exposed to the harshest sunlight. It might be a skeleton, but its white bones shine for all to see.

  To the extent that George Stegner is known to any living person today, to the extent that he still has a name, it is through the pages of his son’s books. Whether as himself in the nonfiction or as Bo Mason in the fiction, he is portrayed as a bully, a strong and often angry man. While Stegner himself later warned about taking his fiction too literally, in other moods he admitted that The Big Rock Candy Mountain was in many ways an autobiography. In that novel he describes an indelible moment after Bo Mason finally returns from his wanderings to discover that his family is living in a tent in the wilderness outside of Seattle. Little Bruce Mason, still not yet five, is scared of walking the path through the woods to the outhouse, and when his father forces him to do so, the boy squats along the path instead of walking deeper into the woods. When Bo finds out what his son has done, he becomes enraged, grabs the boy by the collar, and marches him down the path, rubbing his son’s face in the excrement.

  Wallace, as a child, was prone to illness, a self-described runt, crybaby, and mama’s boy. Sick and small and at the mercy of a man whom he watched abuse, not just himself, but, worse, his mother. It is the transformation of that runt into the ambassador—the movement from small to big—that interests me. What drives a little boy to be a big man, or, conversely, makes a big man small? How is caring about one’s good name different from trying to make a name? And how does our own smallness impede our dreams of being larger?

  WALLACE STEGNER IN THE BLACK ROCK DESERT.

  The rain had begun to spit and it made sense to go, to begin my climb back to campus and the University Guest House. But it was hard to leave that place where George Stegner had not left his mark. I thought about how the architecture of Stegner’s thinking about the West grew out of the different models provided by his mother, the nester, and father, the boomer. His use of his family’s story is fairly typical of the way Stegner’s mind worked: there is always a movement toward the general, an imperative to think more broadly and openly, a preference for the long view over the short, the large over the small. This was not just an intellectual commitment but a spiritual, or at least a personal, one. “Largeness is a lifelong matter,” he once said. The goal was magnanimity. But if anything got in the way of that goal in his own life it was his feelings toward his father. Hate was the word that often came to his mind. Hate was the concept—the feeling—that he wrestled with. How to be large when a dark and bitter smallness grew inside?

  Wallace Stegner strove throughout his life to make a name, not just a known name but a good name and, more important, to create a self. Half of the genetic material he made that self with came from his father, but he consciously strove to make himself against the image of that man. Where the father was weak, he would be strong. Where the father was inconstant, he would be steady. Where the father cheated, he would be loyal. Where the father boomed, he would stick.

  That was fine, and to an admirable degree he willed himself toward this end. But he still grew out of his father, and out of the male frontier culture that his father embodied. It was a tough culture. A culture that hated “sissies.” A culture where action trumped sensitivity. A culture that laughed at anything fancy or pretentious. A culture where books, art, and intellectual conversation, the very things that Stegner was coming to love and excel at, were scorned. It was also a culture he could never entirely escape. In a particularly astute piece of self-analysis, Stegner wrote in 1962’s Wolf Willow:

  Little as I want to acknowledge them, the effects of those years remain in me like the beach terraces of a dead lake. Having been weak, and having hated my weakness, I am as impatient with the weakness of others as my father ever was . . . Incompetence exasperates me . . . affectations still inspire in me a mirth I have grown too mannerly to show. . . . I even at times find myself reacting against conversation, that highest test of civilized man, because where I come from it was unfashionable to be “mouthy.”

  In short, he was taught to be wary of the very qualities that are essential to being an artist. It should not be a great surprise, then, that as an artist he is tough-nosed, a realist, able to take a punch. That he disdained the overly romantic, had no use for Whitman, for instance, while admiring the way that Bernard DeVoto could toss aside those rotten oranges and get at the essence of a thing. He admired energy, smarts, and adherence to the evidence as opposed to romantic gushing. And as an adult he contained both frontier toughness and intellectual sweep, turning himself into the sort of man he had never encountered during his youth. His father had been a ne’er-do-well but he would be a success. He would make his name.

  And he did: not three miles from where the father rests under a nameless grave stands a library that houses a collection honoring the son. In creating the body of work that one finds there, Stegner relied on the one positive quality he acknowledged getting from his father, and the only one he openly admitted to sharing with the old man: a relish for hard work. Both father and son strove mightily to make it in their lives, though their definitions of what “it” was varied. George Stegner, though deeply flawed, had a vital animal energy, worked tirelessly, and could build or fix
almost anything. He was, his son believed, ideally suited for the frontier he longed for. And what George brought to clearing a field, Wallace brought to writing. He loved to roll up his sleeves, to tackle a project, to have another project waiting when the first lay fallow between drafts. In his biography of DeVoto, he wrote: “As a matter of fact, he loved work; he could not have existed without it; and though he sometimes complained about it, that was standard bellyaching, part of the pleasure.” As it had been for DeVoto, work for Stegner was a stay against chaos and confusion, a time to lose himself in the intense process of making.

  GEORGE STEGNER, WALLACE STEGNER, AND AN UNIDENTIFIED MAN.

  All his life, Stegner was a volcano of productivity. In Crossing to Safety, which he called his most autobiographical novel, the Stegnerian narrator says of his younger self: “I was your basic overachiever, a workaholic, a pathological beaver of a boy who chewed continually because his teeth kept growing.” This fictional creation, Larry Morgan, produces a massive amount of work, but in fact Stegner admitted that he actually “toned down the facts for fear readers would not believe them.” In his autobiography he writes: “In two years, besides collaborating on a textbook and writing a dozen essays and book reviews, I wrote four short stories, a novelette called ‘One Last Wilderness’ that killed Scribner’s Magazine, a novel called On a Darkling Plain, another novel called Fire and Ice, and the first few chapters of The Big Rock Candy Mountain. This while teaching four undergraduate classes.” He wasn’t complaining, mind you: “I suspect what makes hedonists so angry when they think about overachievers is that the overachievers, without drugs or orgies, have more fun.”

  In Crossing to Safety, the Stegnerian narrator writes that “when I hear the contemporary disparagement of ambition and the work ethic, I bristle.” But: “Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn a man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else—pathway to the stars, maybe.” Ambition can lead to the stars, or at least to that greater broadening, to magnanimity, to largeness. But it still has its more primitive roots in the craving to be noticed, to be known, to have one’s name recognized.

  FROM THE STEGNER graves it was a hard return ride up to the University Guest House. When I got back, I took a hot shower, a nap, and again headed into town, by car this time, for a visit with Ken Sanders, owner of Ken Sanders Rare Books.

  The store was ramshackle, vast and high-ceilinged, with couches and stuffed chairs in the middle for those who felt like plopping down and reading. Books everywhere, of course, in an order that was discernible to anyone who tried hard enough but known best by the proprietor himself. It was one of those bookstores that barely exist anymore in our age of the antiseptic chain store, replete with the smell of the musty pages and the sense that reading itself is, at its heart, a countercultural act. At the center of it all, sprawled on the couch next to me, was Ken Sanders, whose joking manner, smile, and Santa Claus appearance only briefly disguised the fact that he was a fount of encyclopedic knowledge of western literature, and an expert on both Stegner and Abbey. As I took a seat next to him on the couch, the first thing I noticed, high above the cash registers, were the life-size cardboard cut-out caricatures of the five members of the Monkey Wrench Gang, the work obviously that of the cartoonist R. Crumb.

  “I called Crumb to see about illustrating a new edition of The Monkey Wrench Gang,” Ken told me. “He had never heard of Abbey, and he said no at first. But I sent him a copy of the book and I guess he read it. He called me back and asked, ‘Do people in real life actually go out and engage in the sort of activities that Mr. Abbey described?’ I said, ‘Yes they do, Mr. Crumb.’”

  The activities that Crumb was referring to were acts of environmental rebellion: the pouring of sugar into the gas tanks of bulldozers, the sawing down of billboards, the blowing up of bridges.

  After we had chatted awhile more, I asked Ken to play a parlor game of comparing and contrasting the two men’s works. What if you had to rank the top-ten books of Stegner and Abbey?

  He thought about it for a while and then admitted, somewhat reluctantly, that the body of work tilted in Stegner’s favor. But he couldn’t quite shake Desert Solitaire from the top spot.

  “I’m here to tell you that what they claimed Truman Capote did with In Cold Blood, well, that’s what Ed did in Desert Solitaire. Because it isn’t just a collection of random essays but a nonfiction novel. Most people can’t write in that genre to save their lives. It’s excruciating to read the drivel that comes out these days.

  “But Ed could write that way somehow. And that’s something Stegner never did. He is telling you something, teaching you something. With Abbey, you are experiencing being Ed Abbey.”

  He mentioned their attitudes toward wilderness as an example.

  “With ‘Wilderness Letter,’ Stegner wrote one of the most important environmental statements of the twentieth century. But Wally appreciated nature from a very academic background. Abbey just celebrated wilderness for the sheer hedonistic thrill of it all. He said the only birds he could recognize were the fried chicken and the rosy-bottomed skinny dipper.”

  I wasn’t sure I agreed with Ken’s take on Stegner; I’d read some pretty visceral nonfiction of his over the last months. But it didn’t seem the right moment to object. Ken was rolling now. Customers, who likely had practical questions to ask, like where the bathroom was, were smart enough to just stand back and listen.

  “Ed could make a parody of himself, like in the introductions to his essays. But in real life he was a very serious man. And what he was most serious about was writing.

  “Plenty of people still haven’t heard of him. I remember being at the book expo right after The Monkey Wrench Gang came out. I walked up to the table of his publisher. Not only couldn’t I find any copies of his books, but I couldn’t find a single person who knew who Ed Abbey was.”

  If you set foot in Ken Sanders Rare Books you would know who Ed Abbey was, or at least you would before you left. Wallace Stegner was well respected here, but Abbey was loved in this, one of the central places of worship in the greater Church of Abbey. While the names Updike and Roth might be better known to the general reading public, they do not come close to matching the cultish fervor associated with the man nicknamed “Cactus Ed” Abbey. Cults, whatever their flaws, have the power to keep names alive.

  “When I give talks about Ed, my goal is to bring him back to life for a new generation,” Ken Sanders said. “There is a whole new generation of readers in college now who weren’t alive when Ed died. I want to introduce them to this writer who can still speak to them. He said he never wanted to write a classic. Because his definition of a classic was a book that everyone has heard of but no one has read. Well, Ed’s not written that kind of classic. He’s still read. We sell more of his work in the store than all other authors combined. After slow starts, both Desert Solitaire and Monkey Wrench Gang have sold over a million copies.”

  Before I left, I asked Ken if he had ever thought of writing a book about his friendship with Ed.

  “I’ve thought of it,” he admitted. “But I don’t want to do another I Was Ed’s Chum book.”

  I nodded. There was a whole cottage industry of I Was Ed’s Chum books.

  It is a tricky business being an Ed Abbey fan these days. We shift toward uneasy ground. Because Abbey is no longer just a writer whose books you read; he is a literary cult figure who has followers. The skeptical reader recoils: “Oh, I don’t want to be part of that.” But clearly Abbey lives, at least in the West. Fresh off the press just that week was an article in the Mountain Gazette, a journal where Abbey himself often published, in which M. John Fayhee, the editor, took no small delight in mocking the Abbey fandom: “They wore clothing that looked like what Abbey wore. They drove vehicles that would meet with Abbey’s approval. They tossed beer cans out of truck windows because Abbey did.” This hit a little close to home. I thought back to my days in Eldorado Spri
ngs and remembered the cans of refried beans I ate, part of the official Ed Abbey diet. I fear I was, unbeknownst to myself, a sort of groupie.

  It is easy to mock the more rampant Abbeyites. But the tendency to attach ourselves to writers is a not entirely unhealthy thing. Fandom may be laughable, but it has its purposes. Stegner wrote of Bernard DeVoto that “father hunting had almost been a career for him.” He meant that DeVoto sought out older writers, and was eager to sit at their knees. He did this with Robert Frost, whom he first believed was “living proof that genius could be sane” but whom he eventually broke from with the words: “You’re a good poet, Robert. But you’re a bad man.” Stegner, in turn, would look to DeVoto as a model, a father of sorts, though a father with the wild streak of an adolescent son. It is easy to dismiss these relationships as mere hero worship, as Oedipal. But what underlies them is something better, I think. A hunger for models. For possibilities. For how to be in the world.

  As we shook hands good-bye, Ken and I talked about how the Abbey legend had grown.

  “He was almost as famous for his death as his life,” Ken said.