What am I after?
It certainly is not my goal to maintain a false-front image of the man. “Biography cannot reform the truth,” Stegner himself wrote in his little orange notebook. When I e-mailed a writer friend of Abbey’s early in the research for this project, he wrote back, “I’m not much into hero worship.” We are all wary of this, having seen too many of our idols fall. Ours is an age of building up, and pulling down. We overcelebrate and then overexpose.
But there is another use for biography. One that involves, in Stegner’s own words, “a search for a usable past.” In this use, it is not the subject’s toilet training that matters but the ways in which what they achieved and how they lived can be helpful in the life of a reader. Can be, in Samuel Johnson’s words, “put to use” in our own lives. The goal here is not to make false heroes, but it is perhaps to look for the better self, the effort as well as the failures. To approach with sympathy not cynicism.
I know that Wallace Stegner the man had fears, flaws, prejudices. But what I will not believe is that he was unaware of these and that he didn’t make an effort to overcome them. Largeness was a lifelong effort, and if he sometimes failed in this effort this did not discount the trying. He never resorted to the artist’s usual trick of indulging his own bad behavior, of passing it off in the name of his great art. He adamantly disagreed with the Oscar Wilde statement that the fact that a man is a poisoner has nothing to do with his prose. “It does have something to do with his prose,” he wrote. “A poisoner will write poisoner’s prose, however beautiful. Even if it has nothing to do with private life, personal morality, or his general ethical character, being a poisoner suggests some flaw somewhere—in the sensibility or humanity or compassion or the largeness of mind—that is going to reflect itself in the prose.”
Stegner’s life embodied Hawthorne’s notion that an ideal artist must be both hard and sensitive, combining an outer toughness and competence with an artistic sensibility. Stegner lived in the world, fighting for the environment (even when this meant sitting in on boring meetings), teaching (even when he’d rather be writing), and caring for family and friends—these were priorities not to be entirely swamped by the attempt to make great art. And he went further, seeing a kind of morality in efficacy, sharing the practical person’s belief that there is something good about doing a job well. He believed it was possible to be both a great writer and a good human being. Perhaps his stubbornness sometimes got in his own way and perhaps he could be rigid. But he was also a model for those who have come after him, a model that of course even he sometimes fell short of.
MY ABBEY AND Stegner books sat stacked on a table, warped by another year of humidity, as summer came around again down in my writing shack. In the weeks around solstice the weather was perfect: breezes blew the glistening saw grass and the birds filled the marsh with song. Soon Hadley and I would be heading west again while Nina worked on another book. We were looking forward to seeing the mountains.
If mine was an adventure in geography, it was just as much an adventure in reading. The type of reading I like best is the kind Montaigne described in an essay called “Of Books”: “I seek only the learning that treats of the knowledge of myself and instructs me how to die well and live well.” The strange thing is that writers long dead can grow and change and live in the minds of those of us who are still alive. And if you believe as I do that these voices can have an influence on our daily lives, that we take from them and use them during our time on Earth, then you also believe that they are not just models but companions, members of a larger community. For my part, I’ve always liked the idea of talking to ghosts.
“You need the way lighted,” Wendell Berry had said.
At this point I feel like I know what Edward Abbey and Wallace Stegner have to offer me, but that doesn’t mean, as Wendell added, that I really know what I get from them. Nor do I know, as a member of the community, exactly what I offer to others. If we are lucky, our reading and influences are like a vast underground root system, and about as easily deciphered.
“He provided me in that moment with a way of thinking about the American West,” former secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt wrote of Stegner. It is a phrase that has stayed with me, since I know I wouldn’t even be able to think of the West, or my home in the East, for that matter, in the same terms and language if Wallace Stegner had not written his books. The beautiful thing is that the same basic set of tools for thinking can extend far beyond the American West. Wendell Berry had said he wanted to take Stegner’s ideas and try them out in his own “neck of the woods,” and in similar ways many others have transplanted Stegnerian ideas to their own backyards. When I first moved back from the West to Cape Cod, for instance, I transplanted some of my new western tools and used them to think about my new-old region. I considered the sandy soil, the rising sea, the lack of groundwater, the fact that the place I loved was essentially a vacation destination with a seasonal economy. I’m not sure I’d ever thought about the place that way before. The questions I was asking were my own, but the habit and way of asking had been learned somewhere, and I wasn’t foolish enough to forget where they had been learned.
It isn’t specifics we take from our predecessors, but the spirit and the tools. And each of us uses the old tools in new ways. The same set of tools helps me see how fracking in Utah connects to rising seas and how rising seas connect to western drought and to oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico. In fact, you could make an argument that not just Wallace Stegner’s ideas but his habits of thought have never been more relevant than they are today. Making connections has always been the naturalist’s job, but it is also, like it or not, the job that has fallen to all modern thinkers and writers in a time when global systems of weather, climate, and migration are being affected by man’s actions. Stegner was a master of the old children’s game of connecting the dots, and ours is a time for connecting the dots like none other. He handed down to us a way to talk and think about resources and jobs and land, and to consider the larger connections between economics, diverse cultures, geographies, industries, and peoples.
WALLACE STEGNER IN THE 1960S.
Of course, Stegner never would have claimed to have invented these ideas whole-cloth. Those who lighted his way included DeVoto and Powell, and he leaned on them just as those who have come after have leaned on him. His books helped spread a new vocabulary of the West as a home of aridity, vast spaces, and government subsidization, and his ideas were extended, altered, and complicated by the next generation of alternative western thinkers, turned to the field of law, for instance, by Charles Wilkinson, and toward history by Patricia Limerick, and toward memoir and fiction by William Kittredge, and toward journalism by Marc Reisner, whose book Cadillac Desert is a brilliant exposé of the history of dams in the West. Even many of today’s western economists look back to Stegner. It is hard to exaggerate the spreading web of this basic construct of ideas, and how much intellectual influence it has had in the West.
It is not ideas that we remember Edward Abbey for. Nor does he share with Stegner the burden of living up to some paragon of moral virtue. He is a man known as much for his faults as his virtues. If ever a writer had feet of clay, here he is. Abbey suffers from both excessive criticism—from those who see him as sexist, racist, xenophobic—and excessive love, from those members of what Luis Urrea called “the Abbeyite Order,” those who revere the externals: the flannel shirts, the trucks, the beer-swilling, the monkeywrenching. But while we are swinging between the extremes of love and hate, we might remember that this was a writer who created at least one great book. And here was a man who, for all his flaws, showed through his example what it meant to live a counterlife, a life where the love of wildness really mattered and where one’s priorities grew out of that love. He shared with Thoreau the conviction that our society is full of dry rot, and a belief that much of what the world considers good is truly bad. If you really believe this, it is not just foolish but immoral to live in the wa
y that a rotten society tells you to live. And how did society tell you to live? A successful life, a prosperous life, a life of progress, of achievement, of getting bigger. It took a strong person to say, Hey, wait a minute. Abbey agreed with Thoreau that there were good lives other than those that most of us call successful. Some might see something adolescent in this rebellion against the way things are. But going against and staying against requires a deep bravery, a ballsiness, a commitment.
Finally, there is this: I can’t think of a better antidote to our virtual age than a strong dose of Edward Abbey. He is a writer who speaks of things that are now in short supply. In an age of security and surveillance, he speaks of independence and freedom. In an age of ever-increasing computerization and industrialization, he speaks of the world and the Earth. In an age of the tame and the virtual, he speaks of the wild and the real. He loved life—this comes right through the page—and he loved the physical world. And he is still alive to us. Take October 5, 1962, for instance, just yesterday it seems, when he wrote in his journal:
Early morning snow falling in the desert—the bright vast land—coffee and hotcakes on the stove—all around golden silence spangled by bird cries—the feeling of something splendid about to occur—a setting for visions, pageants, dreams, cavalry battles—Balanced Rock at Arches, snow covered mountains beyond me and me squatting on sandstone in the clean chill air, coffee cup in hand, sun blazing down on snow already beginning to melt from juniper, cliffrose, dead pine, pinnacle, ramada—brief bliss.
Is this mere romanticism? Something we have grown out of? Have we no use for this, and no use either for Whitman, Dickinson, and Thoreau? Have we grown past them, too? I don’t believe it works that way. Perhaps in other professions we can buy the illusion that things are always getting better, sharper, cleaner—the central illusion of progress. But you cannot believe that in literature. Literature reminds us that, no matter how we would like to think otherwise, the essential human animal has not changed. We are still and always hungry for words that remind us how to live.
EDWARD ABBEY IN THE DESERT IN SOUTHEAST UTAH.
We are also hungry, Abbey reminds us, for wilderness. Wilderness is our first home, the laboratory where human beings were created, where the human genome was hammered out over millennia, and that essence does not suddenly change in a hundred years because someone invented a car or computer. Our needs are still the same.
The spirit of the fight, the thrill of the physical. If we go in search of Abbey, we find he can still offer us these. But there is something else, too, that makes Abbey relevant today. This is his willingness to tell the truth. It is a handy tool, and a lot more. Readers enjoy the thrill of transgression when he blurts something out about lust, hypocrisy, or the idiots who rankle him.
He makes bluntness a high art. For instance, here is what Abbey wrote to the poet Gary Snyder: “I like your work except for all the Zen bullshit.”
But there is a deeper honesty too. A willingness to say exactly what you feel no matter the consequences, to serve the truth even if the truth you serve promises to make you unpopular in your time. The great biographer Walter Jackson Bate wrote that one reason writers need to have recourse to writers from other times is that they help us stand firm against the fickle mores of the time in which we live. Abbey served a larger truth, and wasn’t willing to budge an inch to please those who wished his truth was more appealing. It is in this tough, independent way, always insisting that we shouldn’t follow him, that he still serves as a model, a teacher.
BY ALL ACCOUNTS, dying was the bravest thing that Ed Abbey ever did. The first of what would be his multiple death sentences came in the form of a false diagnosis: he was told he had pancreatic cancer and had only a few months to live. His early novels tended to feature men making stands against the modern world, and men dying brave deaths. He vowed to do the same, claiming that he wouldn’t succumb to the usual modern end of a long and miserable hospital stay. He stuck to his insistence on dying well through the first long false death, and then again through his longer, more drawn-out decline from esophageal varices. Before he died he managed to complete Hayduke Lives!, the sequel to The Monkey Wrench Gang. It was written under a true deadline, mostly to provide for his family, and finished less than a week before his life ended.
When the real end came he was ready. He vowed not to die in a hospital and he didn’t.
He had been hospitalized for two days already when, according to Doug Peacock: “Finally, he pulled out all the tubes and announced, with the clearest eyes I have ever seen, that it was time to go.” His wife Clarke, Peacock, Jack Loeffler, and another friend, Steve Prescott, hustled him out of the hospital and took him into the hills near Tucson, granting his request to die in the wilderness. The problem was that once he was out in nature he didn’t die, but recovered. The morning passed and it grew hot and Abbey said he wanted to go home to die in his writing cabin. Abbey survived the night and the next day, buoyed by blood taken from the hospital, blood that his friends used to “top him off.” He was surprisingly upbeat during his last day, but the night was full of pain and coughing fits, fits that only quieted after Peacock injected him with a mix of Demerol and Compazine. Just before dawn, with his family gathered around him, Abbey’s breathing slowed, became deep and guttural, and finally stopped.
For me, Abbey’s death reinforces a lesson my own father first taught me. That death can be one of life’s most elemental and visceral experiences. I had the good fortune of being there with my father, gripping his hand, as his breath slowed and his pulse faded. If there is one thing that all of Abbey’s friends agree on, it is that his death was a brave one. And as I look ahead to the coming years, I think that this example might just come in handy.
Stegner’s death was not as dramatic as Abbey’s. How could it be? Ironically, while Abbey died at home, Stegner died on the road. He was in Santa Fe for a reading and was pulling his car out onto a highway on-ramp when he was hit by another car. Mary was with him but unhurt. “I’m sorry it was my fault,” he whispered to her in the hospital, taking responsibility to the end. He was eighty-four years old.
His death saddens me, but what I am really haunted by is what Mary Stegner found when she got home. On his desk in his study was an unfinished to-do list.
I think of that list now and remind myself that there are still many items that have not been checked off.
That, for all of us, there is still much work to do.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The seeds of this book were planted long ago during my years in Colorado, when I first began to study Edward Abbey and Wallace Stegner. It’s true that Desert Solitaire was already among my books when I landed in the West, but it would take Rob Bleiberg, Ultimate Frisbee teammate, western convert, and roommate, to open up a larger world to me with the books he brought into our house. Meanwhile, at the University of Colorado, Reg Saner showed me, through words and example, how thinking about the land and the humans and other animals who live on it could be transformed into art. A class with Linda Hogan nudged me toward writing about nature and helped deepen my love of birds, and an academic paper on Abbey for Marty Bickman led to an early essay (and accompanying cartoons) about Abbey and Stegner that would eventually find its way, with the help of Betsy Marston, into High Country News. For companionship and inspiration during those early years in the West I need to thank my classmates and friends Mark Spitzer, Mark Karger, Karen Auvinen, Jim Campbell, and Heidi Krauth. I also need to thank Heidi’s dad, Lee Krauth, whose underlined and annotated copy of Abbey’s Road I borrowed and still have (sorry, Lee). I could also thank almost every one of my Ultimate teammates in Boulder, who were always pushing me toward adventure, particularly Chris “Captain” Brooks, in whose VW van many of those adventures took place.
Back here in my adopted hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina, where my trip began in the summer of 2012, I had the support of the University of North Carolina Wilmington and my colleagues in the Creative Writing Departme
nt. David Webster and Philip Gerard were great early supporters of the project and helped me find the time and funding to make it happen. Bekki Lee, Clyde Edgerton, Mike White, and the rest of the writers who populate our hallway were supportive and inspiring, and Megan Hubbard was, as usual, my go-to person for all things practical. My long trip west was preceded by a few shorter journeys, one of them to Tucson, where I relied on Alison Hawthorne Deming, Simmons Bunting, and Chris Cokinos to help me learn the lay of the land. Also Richard Shelton, who has always been a supporter of my work and who talked to me about his decision to hire Ed Abbey at the University of Arizona. Curator Roger Meyers and the other members of the staff at the University of Arizona Special Collections helped me find my way around Abbey’s papers.
In Pennsylvania, I was helped by Ian Marshall and Bob Burkholder, and, thanks to them and to Mark McLaughlin, the director of the Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center, I was allowed to spend a week in a cabin in the woods. As for Jim Cahalan, author of Edward Abbey: A Life, both the text and my notes must make it clear how indispensable and generous he was during this entire project. If you have enjoyed my book and find yourself still hungry for more Abbey, I enthusiastically recommend that you read his.
Perhaps the most important thank-yous, apart from the final ones, need to go to Page, Lynn, and Allison Stegner, who let me visit their home in Greensboro, Vermont, and freely shared their insights about their famous relative, and who later read an earlier draft of the book. They were the definition of generous. Also thanks to Jen Sahn of Orion magazine, who has always supported me in my work and who accompanied me on a walk to the top of Barr Hill above the Stegners’ home, the setting of the last scene in Crossing to Safety.
Before I headed west I received the e-mail—my “koan”—from Terry Tempest Williams that kicked off the trip. Once I pushed off, my first stop was in Port Royal, Kentucky, at the home of Wendell and Tanya Berry, who graciously made time to talk to me, with Wendell later reading some of the early pages. Thanks also to Erik Reece in Lexington for giving me a couch to sleep on and for introducing me to the inimitable Ed McClanahan, who shared his thoughts on Abbey and Stegner.
All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West Page 29
