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

by David Gessner

  I knew that after Abbey died, his friends, per his instructions, placed his body in the back of a pickup, packed it in dry ice, forged a death certificate, and took him out on one final camping trip. They drove him deep into the Cabeza Prieta wilderness and spent the night there, with Ed in the truck. The next morning they dug the grave, which two of them climbed down into to test for “fit and comfort.” When they deemed it acceptable they buried their friend and poured beer on the grave as a final toast. His burial was, of course, completely illegal.

  The burial, and the wakes that followed, were well orchestrated, and added greatly to his legend. The wakes, one in the Saguaro National Monument near Tucson and one in Arches National Park, were wild celebratory affairs. At the raucous public wake in Arches, for which Abbey himself had once again left instructions, Wendell Berry read aloud the letter from their former teacher celebrating Abbey. “His books were burrs under the saddle blankets of complacency,” Stegner’s letter said. “His urgency was a lever against inertia. He had the zeal of a true believer and the sting of a scorpion. He was a red hot moment in the life of the country, and I suspect that the half-life of his intransigence will be like that of uranium.” Berry later reported back to Mr. Stegner in a letter that described how the event had been “held on a big slab of white rock slanting out toward a whole world of mountains and desert.” There was much drinking and singing among the red rocks, and not too much reading of words, just as Abbey wanted it.

  Writing in his journal in October of 1981, Abbey had left elaborate instructions, not just for how he should be buried, but for what music should be played, and what books read, at his funeral. He wrote: I want dancing! And a flood of beer and booze! A bonfire! And lots of food—meat!

  Not every man leaves stage directions for his final show.

  Before I left, I told Ken that when I was first planning out my trip I was pretty sure I was going to go in search of Abbey’s grave. It was part of the Abbey legend, after all—that grave out there somewhere in the unknown wilderness. I knew I would likely be able to find the spot: I had good contacts, old friends of Ed’s, and thought it wouldn’t be too hard to figure out the location. But when I got to the Abbey library in Tucson I changed my mind. The plan had the whiff of grave-robbing to it, and, worse, of a stunt, and I decided, finally, that I would let the poor man rest in peace.

  I had seen pictures, however, and knew that Abbey’s grave, unlike George Stegner’s, was marked. In a manner, at least. Abbey had chosen the epitaph himself.

  NO COMMENT, it said.

  “ANOTHER DROP DOWN the well of oblivion,” was what Ed Abbey wrote in his journal when The Monkey Wrench Gang came out.

  Neither Stegner nor Abbey were immune from the hunger for renown. Both wanted their work to be remembered. They would not, it seems to me, have frowned at the notion of my writing this book so many years after their deaths.

  It is oblivion, of course, that we make our names against. Nothingness that spurs us to be something. And what is worse than being ignored? To a proud person, it is as if our existence is not acknowledged. We are nobody.

  “I am tired of obscurity!” Abbey wrote in his journal on November 30, 1974. “I want to be famous.”

  Stegner, for all his striving toward largeness, shared some of Abbey’s bitterness. Of course he, characteristically, framed it in a larger way. He believed that western writing as a whole was ignored, and as he became known throughout his home region he chafed against being considered regional—when considered at all—by the East.

  I remembered watching a television interview with Stegner where he mentioned that something he had written had not been reviewed or recognized properly.

  “Because it’s provincial?” the interviewer asked.

  Stegner just stared at the poor man, who shrunk as the silence swallowed him.

  “No,” Stegner finally replied, “because the critics are provincial.”

  Of course. It was the New York critics who were the regionalists and their region was a tiny, crowded island.

  Did he have a case? Well, it should be noted that while the New York Times Book Review chose not to review Angle of Repose, they did manage to print an essay objecting when the book won the Pulitzer.

  And there was one final indignity. In 1981, the New York Times Magazine published an article called “Writers of the Purple Sage.” The idea was to finally acknowledge and celebrate the boom in western writing, to give credit where it was due, and it included mention of a young wild man named Edward Abbey.

  Stegner was featured in the article too.

  A caption below a photograph identified him as “The Dean of Western writers, William Stegner.”

  I HAD A BEAUTIFUL little schedule over my three days in Salt Lake. I got up, did a little writing, ate breakfast, and biked down to the library for six hours of study. I spent the day immersed in Stegner’s notes, letters, correspondence, and the drafts of his novels. Then back up the hill, a nap, more reading, sleep.

  One of the finds on my second day was the letters that George Stegner wrote to his son during the year before he died. Here, for instance, is one that George sent from the New Grand Hotel on March 29, 1939:

  Wallace do your damndest to raise hook or crook $200 or more to get in on this [illegible] you can write your own ticket. I have sweat blood getting it all in shape.

  This is the last chance for me and if I fail in this I will end it all. Regards to family.

  Write me at once.

  I must know what to expect,

  Your Dad

  Another letter contains this whopper of a line: “Will appreciate more than you know the occasional check you mentioned sending me so don’t let me down I’ll doubly repay you for it later enabling you to get your family well again.” And: “I’m still trying hard for it’s my last chance.”

  When I’d first read the fictional versions of these letters, in The Big Rock Candy Mountain, they seemed almost too much, close to overkill. Little did I know that they were nearly verbatim reproductions of the actual letters, letters that told a little of the day’s news and asked routinely about how “the baby is” (one gets the sense he didn’t know his grandson Page’s name) but whose real purpose was to beg for money for a stake in a new mine.

  Wallace was giving a speech in Iowa, the same place he’d been when he heard his brother had died, when he got the news about his father’s death.

  It may be too simplistic to see the son’s moral code developing purely in reaction to the father. But whatever the reason, the code did develop. Stegner would never buy into the fashionable belief, exemplified in everyone from Hemingway to Wolfe, that great art and bad behavior went together. After all, “largeness of mind” was the ideal. The notion that “it is a good thing to be large and magnanimous and wise, that it is a better aim in life than pleasure or money or fame. By comparison, it seems to me, pleasure and money, and probably fame as well, are contemptible goals.”

  These were ideals, of course, and Stegner, a realist, knew how difficult they were to achieve. He would always be a grudge holder, for instance. It wasn’t just Ken Kesey who felt his sting. The reason I was in Salt Lake, and not in Palo Alto, was that he had grown bitter toward Stanford, where everyone assumed his papers would be deposited. The reason he could never bring himself to buy a marker for his father’s grave sprung from the same root.

  I thought of the walk I had taken in Vermont with Page Stegner and his wife, Lynn, and daughter, Allison. As we climbed the hill from their house to Wallace and Mary’s old house, Allison pointed out the ferns, the names of which she had learned many years before from Mary. The landscape was right out of Crossing to Safety, the last novel Stegner wrote.

  When we stopped at the Stegners’ old house, I asked his son if Wallace could be intimidating. Page Stegner clearly loved and respected his father, and characterized their relationship as a good one, but he admitted it could sometimes be challenging having a monument for a dad.

  “It wasn’
t always easy growing up with a father who spoke the King’s English,” he said.

  I remembered a letter that Wallace Stegner had written to Page in 1979. Wallace had just read the first three chapters of Page’s contribution to the book they wrote together, American Places, and after complimenting much of the work as “first rate,” went on to criticize some of the writing as too personal, with too much of a “yum-yum tone about bourbon and porkchops.” The father essentially complains that the son parties too much on his pages, about “the tendency to uglify your own authorial image,” and suggests something “more judicious, with less mugging and hoofing.”

  And then, as if anticipating Page’s defensive response, brings up a writer known for his mugging and hoofing, a writer always ready to uglify his own image and to embrace the yum-yum tone.

  “Of course there is always Abbey,” the father writes the son. “But Abbey is outrageous, deliberately, and even when he’s throwing beer cans out into the Montana landscape he is making a point about the landscape, not about himself.”

  Fascinating to listen to the writer-father chastise the writer-son for talking too much about himself. Fascinating that Abbey is cited for his largeness. And fascinating too that it was the father’s later work, when he got most personal through his fictional narrators, that has continued to have the greatest appeal.

  But while Wallace could be intimidating and critical, my sense was that, for Page and the rest of the immediate family, Wallace Stegner was, in their eyes, everything he was in the world’s: kind, steady, brilliant, loyal, hardworking, and if a tiny bit stiff then certainly caring. That picture was tempered and complicated by a familial proximity and a reality that those who know Wallace Stegner only through books could never see. When we passed a neighbor’s house, for instance, Lynn Stegner, Page’s wife, told me that the man who lived there had been Wally’s closest friend. Wally was friends with his wife, too, and Lynn said that after the man’s divorce Wally refused to talk to the man for a long time, a period of years. He didn’t believe in divorce, or at least not in this divorce. I guess this is not shocking. Simple enough, really: Stegner had a clear moral code and the man had violated it.

  In Vermont, Allison Stegner told me about a fifth-grade report she had written about her famous grandfather, and I went to look up the report in the library files. It was Allison’s “autobiography” of her famous grandfather, written in his voice, and it featured this whopper of a line: “I try not to hate my father.”

  Both the trying not to and the hating formed the man. Did Wallace Stegner ever get beyond hating George? In moments, I’m sure he did. On an intellectual level he knew that his father had grown up in a violent family, received only a ninth-grade education, and was fending for himself by the time he was fourteen. And he knew that his father did his best to overcome his own flaws, that he made vows to reform after his bouts of bad behavior. In his better moods, George Stegner could be rambunctious, rowdy, joyful, fun. But there was always regression. The temper and bullying would always recur. On some deep level, striking it rich, making it big, trumped the concerns of his family. Or so the son believed.

  That son could be tough on people, could hold grudges, could be inflexible. But magnanimity manifests itself in the act of forgiving, and I like to think that Wallace Stegner achieved some measure of forgiveness. Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps, in the end, the son could not forgive the father his sin of smallness.

  Do any of us ever get beyond the boundaries of the selves we start with? Can we really make ourselves into more than we are? Or do we always bump against the borders of self and snap back to the default settings that we were programmed for in the first place?

  I know what Wallace Stegner believed. I would like to believe it with him.

  SALT LAKE CITY no doubt has its share of problems, but over my three-day stay my crush didn’t slacken. I could easily imagine living in that sloping town rung by mountains.

  For Wallace Stegner, Salt Lake provided a kind of salvation. The story line of his development, the way I’ve told it so far, has a bit of Dickens to it: the poor frontier boy making himself into the large man. It would be easy to imagine that, with that chip on his shoulder, the young Wally vowed, “I will be great, I will surpass them all,” like the biblical Joseph ready to avenge himself on his brothers. But it didn’t work exactly that way. In Salt Lake City it was belonging, not greatness, that first served as a balm for his childhood. We imagine the truly ambitious person as having a hole that must be filled, but Salt Lake, until his family dwindled, seemed to fill Stegner up just fine. He might have had occasional daydreams about being a great writer, a big man, but mostly he envisioned marrying his local girlfriend, getting a decent job, being part of the place. “One day I realized I could be perfectly happy if I never wrote anything,” Wendell Berry had said to me back in Kentucky. It was a delightful sentence, and I have the sense that the young Stegner could have said the same.

  Though never a Mormon himself, Stegner was attracted to certain aspects of the religion. Criticizing Mormonism has become a popular sport, and plenty of that criticism is well deserved, but Stegner would always have a soft spot for the city and the people who took him in. Though his family would move from house to house over two dozen times in Salt Lake, mostly to escape suspicion about his father’s illegal trade, the boys fit in fairly quickly. Through Mormon-sponsored programs they played basketball, attended dances, and joined the Boy Scouts, with Wally, still a runt at less than a hundred pounds, quickly winning his Eagle Scout badge. The downtown Carnegie Library was also a revelation, and Stegner, starved for culture, gobbled down books, later claiming he read a book a day. At the same time he discovered tennis, at which he excelled, and finally, at long last, grew, going in a flash from the shortest in his crowd to one of the tallest. His new tennis partner and close friend Jack Irvine got him a job at his father’s floor-covering and linoleum store, and soon he had a circle of friends and money in his pocket.

  As was his way, Stegner later thought long and hard about what his adopted hometown represented, taking his own experience and extrapolating. In books like Mormon Country and The Gathering of Zion, he would explore Mormonism, often with a critical eye. But he was also fascinated by the fact that Mormons had created a viable society in the desert. He took the sense of camaraderie and belonging that he experienced in youth basketball and at Mormon dances and imagined how it applied to the ways Mormons settled the land and irrigated their crops. If one of his life’s central questions was how humans should live in the West, then he was pretty sure that community and sharing were a large part of the answer. To anyone who thought this answer “soft,” he could point to the hard fact that the Mormons and Native American tribes both understood that it made sense to share in a land of sparseness, and that they, not coincidentally, flourished in a place where others floundered. The beehive, that symbol of Mormonism, might have repeled an individualist like Ed Abbey. But to Stegner it provided a sensible model of many working toward one goal. If Stegner was radical, as Terry Tempest Williams suggested, perhaps it was in part because he deeply believed in sharing. Against the false image of the rugged individualist, he held up the early Mormon cooperatives. Could it be that—blasphemy of blasphemies—something close to socialism was the best system for living in the desert? If he didn’t say it directly, he certainly implied it.

  I don’t want to paint an overly rosy picture of Mormonism, since we can’t ignore its proud history of intolerance, central and patriarchal control, and insular morality. But Stegner believed that are were lessons in the Mormon way of living if we want to listen, lessons that still might have relevance as we look toward drier, hotter times.

  ON MY OWN last morning in the library in Salt Lake, I came across an exciting find, a little orange theme book that seemed a kind of road map for my attempts to understand the lives of both Stegner and Abbey. The book’s cover was illustrated with pictures of boats and planes over a background like a topographic map. While Abbey was
a great journal keeper, Stegner seemed to have had little time for them, and so far this had been the only one I’d come across. He kept this notebook in the mid-’70s, and in its pages he worked through many of his ideas about biography. In red ink—scrawled but legible—Stegner wrote:

  Biography is the form for heroes; also for representative men. It is not the form for denials of humanity, or for cynical games. It really goes after a human life, and in something like its full scope. It cannot be unrepresentational; a black comedy biography is hardly conceivable. Farce does not match with reality and full representation; it writes only with exaggeration, distortion, etc. . . . In other words, it works with a certain type of novel, hardly at all with biography. History puts iron in biography.

  The little journal contained injunctions, rules of sorts, for would-be biographers. “We look through the works back at the man, in order to come back to the [illegible] in something like the spirit the writer wrote them in.” “The imagination of the biographer is ultimately like the imagination of any creator, but it walks along apparently prosy paths, and with materials large parts of which are themselves prosy.” Stegner believed that there is no reason “biography can’t utilize the techniques—and pursue the intentions—of fiction.” That said, the form requires a writer “significantly addicted to the real” and: “biography, like nature photography, is an art of found objects.” He warns against “temptations,” including the tendency to “debunk a large figure” or “settling grudges” or “tell all.” “If one has known his biographee personally, he is lucky. If he has to get him from reading, he has an act of imagination to perform—he has to bring paper to life.” Either way, biography involves “transformation of fact by the imagination,” though “imagination must work with the real.”

  Finally Stegner includes a list:

  1. No reason for chronology.

  2. None for birth-to-death coverage.