SOURCE: Cahalan, James M. “Edward Abbey, Appalachian Easterner.” Western American Literature 31, no. 3 (fall 1996): 233-53.

[In the following essay, Cahalan discusses how Abbey's Eastern roots—including his experiences in Appalachia—contributed to his identity as a Western writer.]

Edward Abbey is part of a long tradition of western writers from the East.¹ By focusing on Abbey's Appalachian roots, I want to extend his status—already well established in western literature—and emphasize the very real links between his eastern heritage and his achievements in writing memorably about the Southwest as well as his native western Pennsylvania. I outline the facts about his Appalachian experience and his earliest writings, and then focus on Appalachian Wilderness, Jonathan Troy, and The Fool's Progress in the light of these key contexts.

As Kentucky novelist Gurney Norman tells me, “I don't think that it's ultimately fruitful to try to set up an opposition between the Appalachian region of Abbey's boyhood and the far West of his later life. It isn't that there is a contest. There is no split; it's just that the linkages have not been made manifest.” A writer who grew up in Appalachia, lived in the West for a number of years, and then returned home to write about such experiences, Norman articulates a vision that connects Appalachia and the Southwest, two mountainous regions linked in our history since the time of Daniel Boone and other pioneers.²

Abbey's Appalachian roots must indeed be made manifest, as Norman recommends, and the facts set straight.³ To begin with, Abbey was not born in the tiny, unincorporated village of Home, Pennsylvania, ten miles north of the much larger town and county seat of Indiana, as virtually every writer about Abbey—including Abbey himself, even in his vita and his journal—has claimed.⁴ Abbey succeeded in mythologizing himself as “born in Home,” just as his book jackets have managed to convince many readers that he lived in Oracle (rather than in suburban west Tucson, as he actually did) and Wolf Hole, Arizona. He always loved a good name. As his wife, Clarke Cartwright Abbey, tells me, “he just liked the way it sounded—the humor of being from Home.”⁵ The oldest of five children, he was born in Indiana Hospital, fifty-five miles northeast of Pittsburgh, not “in that lamp-lit room in the old farmhouse near Home, Pennsylvania,” as the phrase appears in Abbey's private journals (Confessions of a Barbarian 308).⁶

During the first four years of his life, Abbey lived in two different houses in Indiana, followed by two other dwellings in Saltsburg (twenty miles southwest of Indiana). He then spent the summer of 1931 on the road with his parents, Paul and Mildred, traveling throughout Pennsylvania and New Jersey, staying in various camps while his father entered sharp-shooting competitions and picked up occasional jobs. The Abbeys did not live in or around Home until “Ned” was more than four-and-a-half years old. Then they moved four more times before settling—in 1941, when he was fourteen years old—in the backwoods house midway between Home and Chambersville that he subsequently immortalized as “the Old Lonesome Briar Patch.”⁷ This was a “gray good gothic two-story clapboard farmhouse,” as he accurately described it in The Fool's Progress—wistfully fictionalizing the claim that it “remained, after a century, still the … family home” (85). In 1967, his parents left this property behind, moving to a small house several miles away along busy Rt. 119, and the old “two-story clapboard farmhouse” burned down just a few years after that. Reviewing two books by Wendell Berry, who moved back onto his family's land in Kentucky, Abbey wrote about the Old Lonesome Briar Patch that “Berry has the right idea. We should have kept the place in the family. My brothers should have stayed” (archive 25: 5, pp. 2-3).

Abbey seems to have suppressed, forgotten, or not known all the particulars concerning his more than eight different residences during the first fourteen years of his life. Yet the facts of his family's Depression struggles throw new light on his remark, in his introduction to his significantly entitled book The Journey Home, that “I found myself a displaced person shortly after birth” (xiv).

Paul and Mildred Abbey were remarkable people in their own right, and appreciating them is a key part of understanding Edward Abbey. Mildred (1905-88) was a schoolteacher, an organist and choir leader at the nearby Washington Presbyterian Church, and a tireless worker. Paul (1901-92) was a woodsman, farmer, school bus driver, and salesman who left school at an early age but carried on a lifelong self-education. He could quote much of Whitman by heart, and he became a devoted Socialist in a very conservative, heavily Republican county. Like Paul, Howard Abbey (b. 1928), Ed's closest sibling, became a woodsman and worker; like Mildred, Ed, John (1930-87), Nancy (b. 1934), and Bill (b. 1937) were all teachers at one time or another.

Abbey attended Rayne Township Consolidated School (1934-41), Marion Center High School (1941-42), Indiana High School (1942-45), and Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP), which was then Indiana State Teachers College (1947), before moving to Albuquerque in 1948, where he earned his B.A. and M.A. from the University of New Mexico. He is remembered as a “loner,” a quiet intellectual, by the several Marion Center and Indiana high-school classmates with whom I have spoken. He transferred from Marion Center (just north of Home) to Indiana High School because he could get a ride to Indiana rather than walk to Marion Center, and because Indiana offered more writing classes and greater cultural stimulation. His status as a country boy coming in to Indiana from several miles away increased his “loner” status. Of course, this became part of Abbey's subsequent adult personality, which was much more quiet and shy than fans of Hayduke have imagined.⁸ On the other hand, after a couple of years in the army right after high school, Abbey started to come out of his shell as a college student in Indiana, posting the anti-draft flyer that led the FBI to start its file on him in 1947.

Between 1941 and 1948, Abbey's earliest publications appeared. The first two were a schoolboy's typical wartime efforts, written during his freshman year at Marion Center High School: “America and the Future,” an anti-Hitler editorial that appeared in the Marion Center Independent in December 1941, when he was still just fourteen, and “Another Patriot,” a short story in an untitled Marion Center school compendium in spring 1942, when he was fifteen.⁹ “America and the Future” is evidence of Abbey's early interest in political issues; it concludes with a flourish:

Men like Hitler cannot stem the upsurge of the human race! They may try, and partly succeed, but they will always fall. … A new world of peace, security, liberty and happiness is about to unfold! The old forces of feudalism and ignorance and slavery are making their last stand. But they will be conquered.

Abbey's flair for the dramatic is in early evidence in “Another Patriot,” in which an American accused of treason eludes the grasp of two FBI agents and saves an American ship by diving overboard in front of an oncoming German torpedo.

The turning point in Abbey's early writing career came when he hitch-hiked west in the summer of 1944, between his junior and senior years of high school, which also became the most frequently cited episode in his later, adult writing.¹⁰ For Abbey, this experience hitch-hiking west was like the apostle Paul's on the road to Damascus. He was inexorably motivated to take this trip by years of reading Zane Grey novels and watching Westerns with such stars as Tom Mix (also from western Pennsylvania), and because of an Abbey family tradition of hitch-hiking and working one's way west, as begun by his father and continued by Ed's three younger brothers. During his senior year of high school, Abbey published a remarkable seven-part series about his trip in the High Arrow, his school newspaper. In contrast to his earlier wartime pieces, here Abbey wrote out of his own experiences, and his adult voice and subjects can be found in these articles composed when he was seventeen and eighteen. “Abbey Walks 8,000 Miles By Adroit Use of Thumb,” announced his first headline:

Around the last of July I began to feel an itchiness in my feet that could not be diagnosed either as athlete's foot or abstinence from soap and water. It was the wanderlust, pure and simple. … Two days later I packed a toothbrush and a notebook in a small grip, walked a few blocks out the western end of Philadelphia street, and began hitch-hiking in the general direction of Seattle, Washington.

These High Arrow articles recount such episodes as swimming in the Mississippi in the middle of the night, harvesting wheat with Indians, listening to a wolf howl while hitch-hiking at night near Yellowstone, and playing cards while riding the rails. They also reflect Abbey's characteristic ear for dialogue and interest in politics, as a man strikes up a conversation with him in Pierre, South Dakota:

“Where're you from?”

“Me? Oh, I live at Home.”

“Most people do, son, but I mean the name of the town or city you live in.”

“Home. Home, Pa. That's the name of the place.”

“Oh. … You're an Easterner, eh?”

“Yes,” I admitted reluctantly. Somehow you felt that that was a shameful thing to confess.

“What's your name?”

“Abbey. Edward Abbey. What's yours?”

“Sharpe. I'm the governor here.”

“Oh.”

Then we had a friendly little discussion on current politics, found we differed violently as to who would win the national election. As it turned out later we were both wrong, for he had bet on Dewey and I on Norman Thomas.

(“Vagabond”)

Abbey's story “A Fugue in Time,” which appeared in the IUP English Department's collection The Indiana Student Writes in December 1948, shows the influence of James Joyce and his stream of consciousness style. It describes a man's thoughts and mumblings as he gets up, stumbles around, and prepares to join his wife for breakfast downstairs—except that things start to strangely repeat themselves, as in the film Groundhog Day. The protagonist sees his wife's back leaving the room more than once, and the story ends with his eating breakfast and leaving the house—but then finding himself at the top of the stairs, ready to go down to breakfast again.¹¹ This story is interesting evidence of Abbey's youthful interest in experimental writing, but it has to be said that his high-school articles about his trip west are much more engaging and striking. When he was young, Abbey expressed great admiration for Joyce, but he later repudiated the heady styles of Joyce and other such experimentalists in favor of his own particular brand of hard-headed realism.¹² Moreover, the common critical opinion that Abbey was a better essayist than fiction writer finds support in his earliest publications.

These early publications provide important evidence because most of Abbey's earliest unpublished writings appear lost forever—such as the first three volumes of his journal, which were destroyed by water damage in his parents' basement (Confessions ix). Abbey had “published” at an even earlier age, charging his siblings a penny to read “this wonderful comic series of ‘the adventures of Lucky Stevens’,” remembers Nancy Abbey. Lucky Stevens was an Appalachian, “hillbilly” hero who later grew into the likes of Jack Burns in The Brave Cowboy, Hayduke in The Monkey Wrench Gang, and Henry Lightcap in The Fool's Progress. Bill Abbey, Ed's brother, tells me that he thinks Hayduke may have been named after the Duke family of Home, and Lightcap is a common name, carved on the gravestone closest to the one commemorating Paul, Mildred, and John Abbey in the Washington Church cemetery.

There are indeed many vestiges of Appalachia in Abbey's western writings. Doc Sarvis tells Bonnie Abbzug in The Monkey Wrench Gang about Hayduke, “The best men, like the best wines, come from the hills” (168). Hayduke himself declares: “Let them build houses that will last a while, say for a hundred years, like my great-granpappy's cabin back in Pennsylvania” (210). In Fire on the Mountain, young Billy Vogelin travels from his home in western Pennsylvania to visit his grandfather in New Mexico. On the very first page of Desert Solitaire, Abbey highlights the Old Lonesome Briar Patch, “a gray gothic farmhouse two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains,” as one of the most beautiful places on earth. Later in the book, it takes very little for his mind to flash back from red-rock Utah to hilly Pennsylvania: “Raised in the backwoods of the Allegheny Mountains, I remember clearly how we used to chop blocks of ice out of Crooked Creek, haul them with team and wagon about a mile up the hill to the farmhouse and store them away in sawdust for use in the summer” (87). With sardonic pride, he noted in his 1988 introduction to the book that “after centuries of dogged striving, at least one member of the Abbey clan (Allegheny Mountains branch) achieved membership—however transiently—in the bottom bracket of the lower middle class. Or highest bracket of the lower class” (ix). Similarly, when Sandy MacKenzie says to Will in Black Sun, “Gatlin sounds like a hillbilly name,” Will replies, “It is, it is” (60).

Edward Abbey returned home to Indiana County on many occasions to visit his relatives and friends. In his diary on his twenty-fifth birthday, he described “returning home” as his “final triumph and tragedy that has never failed me and will never fail me” (Confessions 18). He wrote poetically of autumn at home during an October 1952 visit (102). In 1969, however, when he was presented with an “Ambassador Award” by the Indiana County Tourist Promotion Bureau, Abbey tossed his plaque aside and proceeded to assail “professional tourism,” telling the home-town dignitaries to clean up the town, close the main street, and plant trees.¹³ This was the same Abbey who had the guts, in a 1985 lecture in Montana later published as “Free Speech: The Cowboy and His Cow” (One Life at a Time, Please) to attack cowboys and “welfare grazing” on public lands.

In one of his several lectures at IUP, on 9 December 1976, he recalled his “very moving little speech” seven years earlier about tourism, noting that it was so moving that “about half the audience wanted to move right out of the hall” (archive 8: 2). He went on to declare in 1976 that “I'll never get the green of Appalachia out of my heart,” and delivered a tribute to his early teachers and especially to “my mother, Mildred Abbey, who taught me to love music, and art, and poetry, and to my father, Paul Revere Abbey, who taught me to hate injustice, to defy the powerful, to speak for the voiceless.”

Abbey began his remarkable, comparatively neglected book Appalachian Wilderness (1970) with a memorable description of “Coming Home” (as he entitled the first chapter)—which he obviously valued highly, as he included this excerpt in The Best of Edward Abbey under the title “Appalachia.” First he described Indiana, “the town set in the cup of the green hills. In the Alleghenies. A town of trees, two-story houses, red-brick hardware stores, church steeples, the clock tower on the county courthouse, and over all the thin blue haze—partly dust, partly smoke, but mostly moisture—that veils the Appalachian world most of the time” (13). Then he described the Old Lonesome Briar Patch, the surrounding valley and the house, in an extended and beautifully poetic passage (14).

Appalachian Wilderness affirms the identity of Appalachia as a bioregion that transcends state lines, and Abbey refers to Native American names in preference to the imposed name of his birthplace, Indiana: “Tennessee seems today something like Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, thirty years ago. Like Seneca and Powhatan, like Home, Pa., where many of us were once brung up. All of it Appalachian, winter or summer, then and now. Land of the breathing trees, the big woods, the rainy forests” (16). Abbey outlines and criticizes the devastation of the Native Americans who once lived in Appalachia (67-68). He also includes a fourteen-page social history of the “Scotch-Irish” settlement, movement deeper into the mountains, increasing isolation and self-sufficiency, home remedies and other material culture, typical cabin structure, crops and animals. He analyzes their distinctive subculture as broken down by modern capitalism in general and strip mining in particular as well as logging, the “damning” of the rivers, and eventually mass tourism and its transformation of Appalachian people into “curiosities” (74-87). Abbey identifies “western Pennsylvania” first in his catalog of areas strip mined (82), and first by quite a margin in the number of acres “disturbed” (84-85).

In addition to Appalachian Wilderness, Abbey also wrote memorably about his home place and people in such essays as “Shadows from the Big Woods,” “Blood Sport,” and “In Defense of the Redneck.” Much as he links western Pennsylvania to Appalachia in general in Appalachian Wilderness, in these essays he characteristically connects his Indiana County places and relatives to issues and people in the West and the United States in general. In “Shadows from the Big Woods” (The Journey Home), for example, he takes the loss of his boyhood stomping grounds as emblematic of the threat to wilderness everywhere. He remembers:

In childhood the wilds seemed infinite. Along Crooked Creek in the Allegheny Mountains of western Pennsylvania there was a tract of forest we called the Big Woods. My brothers and I, simple-minded farmboys … knew that the Indians had once been here, Seneca and Shawnee. … We knew they were there. … My brother Howard could talk to trees. Johnny knew how to start a fire without matches, skin a squirrel, and spot the eye of a sitting rabbit. I was an expert on listening to mourning doves. … We invented our boyhood as we grew along; but the forest—in which it was possible to get authentically lost—sustained our sense of awe and terror in ways that fantasy cannot.

(223-24)

He concludes this memorable essay with the lament that “the Big Woods is gone—or going fast” (226).

Similarly, in “Blood Sport” (One Life at a Time, Please) Abbey explains his decision to give up hunting by recounting his father's experiences—shooting deer in the Depression as food for his family, but then later giving it up with the simple explanation, “We don't need the meat anymore” (37). The author follows in his father's footsteps; the final words of this narrative essay are “Sure will, Paw” (40). “In Defense of the Redneck” (The Best of Edward Abbey) begins with Abbey's encounters in an Arizona bar. Then he asks,

What do I have against rednecks? Nothing. I am here to defend them. My father has been a sidehill farmer, a logger, a schoolbus driver most of his life. My little brother is a construction worker and truck driver. Another is now a cop. … I am a redneck myself, born and bred on a submarginal farm in Appalachia, descended from an endless line of dark-complected, lug-eared, beetle-browed insolent barbarian peasants.

(234-35)

In this essay, he starts out in the West and then moves back to the East. And sometimes the East visits the West naturally and effortlessly—as when Paul Abbey appears in “Fire Lookout” (The Best of Edward Abbey), visiting and working with his son for a whole season, walking from rim to rim though well up in years, before returning “to his own woods in Pennsylvania where he still lives and works” (247). Abbey introduces Down the River with an account of his abortive attempt at age ten to float down Crooked Creek in his father's cement-mixing box, and with a quotation from his father's September 1970 letter to him (archive 2:1, 5:2): “Every man has to go down the river some time” (4). These and the many other East-West connections that Abbey makes in his writings serve to remind us that his career in the West was a natural extension of his Appalachian heritage rather than a rejection of it.

Like Thomas Wolfe, who was his earliest and perhaps most enduring novelistic influence, Abbey endeavored throughout his career to write a successful novel encapsulating his whole Appalachian background and, more specifically, the experience of growing up in Indiana County, Pennsylvania.¹⁴ This is the focus of Jonathan Troy (1954), his first novel—but Abbey considered it a failure, always refusing to have it reprinted. His agent and widow have continued to honor this wish, and as a result this novel has become a collector's item, with the price of the rare used copy now running above ＄1,000. Most critics have followed Abbey's lead in either ignoring this novel or judging it overly harshly.¹⁵ However, Jonathan Troy makes for fascinating reading, and despite attempts to bury this novel, “it's here,” as John Watta, Abbey's IUP classmate and friend, put it to me. “I loved it because he talks about the way adolescents behave—and this area in particular.”

Jonathan Troy expresses an adolescent's negativity about his native area, whereas The Fool's Progress is much more nostalgic. The same Edward Abbey who seemed to have forgotten that he was born in Indiana, not Home, sets Jonathan Troy in the town, fictionalizing a scenario by which Jonathan's mother is dead, and he lives in an apartment in town with his father. Here Paul Abbey becomes Nat Troy, the labor activist, who leads a strike at McGlauflin's Tire Factory (McCreary's, in real life), and is killed by disgruntled townsmen at the end of the novel—all of which is invented. Abbey thus probably felt that he had failed to deal honestly with the true nature of his real family and childhood experience. He spent much of the rest of his career trying to write a better novel about them, eventually succeeding in The Fool's Progress, which he referred to for years as his “fat masterpiece.”¹⁶

To many readers, Jonathan Troy (1954) and The Fool's Progress (1988) may look like bookends at opposite ends of a career otherwise filled almost exclusively with western writings and concerns. But The Fool's Progress was the book that Abbey had been writing, or trying to write, for over thirty years. In the late 1960s, for example, Abbey was reported as saying,

I am going to write a novel with a Pennsylvania setting. It will concern farm life in the 1930s. This is a book I have wanted to write for a long time. I guess I have been thinking about it for 20 years. … This subject interests me more. It is more challenging, more difficult. I could go on writing books about the southwest, about cowboys and Indians, which the publishers would like me to do.

(“‘Take a Big Armful’”)

A 1977 article similarly reported that Abbey “said he resents being tagged as a southwest American writer. ‘I'm trying to write an eastern,’ he says” (Bothwell).¹⁷

Abbey wrote most of Jonathan Troy in Albuquerque and Edinburgh between 1951 and 1953.¹⁸ Part of Abbey's later harsh rejection of Jonathan Troy is probably a reflection of his frustration about struggling so hard to write it and then seeing it largely ignored. While writing it in February 1952, he declared in his Edinburgh journal that “my terrible novel will drive me to ruin” (Confessions 32), and then in January 1954, back in Albuquerque, he complained that “my book has been published, faintly reviewed, virtually ignored, generally unbought” (Confessions 122). Yet despite Abbey's frustrations with the novel, “it nevertheless was published,” as he told Jack Loeffler, “and made me think of myself as a writer” (archive 27: tape 4).

Jonathan Troy might not be Abbey's “fat masterpiece,” but Abbey originally thought of it in thematic terms as his Iliad, while The Fool's Progress would become his Odyssey.¹⁹ And to one who lives in Indiana, Pennsylvania, Abbey's descriptions of the atmosphere of this area as often oppressive seem apt: “There was no wind; the clouds hung ponderously … over the town, over the valley, over the land of Appalachia” (222). He also understood how things have changed: “About fifty years ago, so I'm told, this was a green place,” Jonathan tells Leafy, his significantly named girlfriend, “with grass and real trees and a stream of clean cold water where that yellowish sewer is now” (279). Abbey was determined to lend to his novel a documentary-styled realism, interspersing many interchapter newspaper “clippings” from the Evening Gazette and identifying many places by their real Indiana names. While working on the novel, Abbey studied the files of the Indiana Gazette and drew a fictionalized map of the town in his journal (archive 4: 4).

While focusing Jonathan Troy on high-school life in Indiana, Abbey does permit his protagonist some flashbacks to a boyhood in the countryside.²⁰ While later he merged the several residences of the Abbeys all into “Home,” in his first novel he refers to his boyhood home as “Tanomee” (199, 243)—almost the same name as Tanoma, one of the actual villages where his family lived. And Abbey introduces a character who recurs thirty-four years later in The Fool's Progress, where he hits a home run but—absurdly, yet logically enough—refuses to run out the bases: Red Ginter. Jonathan has an extended flashback (199-207) about getting chased by Red Ginter into the woods from the bus stop: “The schoolboys, four of them, stand in the ocherous dust of a Pennsylvania red-dog road, deep in the forest, miles from school and home” (199). Jonathan and his girlfriend later have a scary run-in with Red and his father (287-94).

By August 1956, Abbey was planning a book to be called Confessions of a Barbarian, to include sections “at home on the farm (absurd desperation)” and about “the factory in Hoboken,” “love in Hoboken,” and “the infantry in Alabama” (archive 4: 6)—all of which made it into The Fool's Progress three decades later. He spent several years in the 1960s working on The Good Life; the unfinished typescript contains much of the raw material of The Fool's Progress. Its nine-page outline and 149-page typescript contain many of the same premises and characters—including the same two parents and four siblings, as modeled on the Abbeys. In The Good Life, however, Abbey's autobiographical perspective is much less settled. Like The Fool's Progress, The Good Life focuses on two brothers who resemble his own brother Howard (the harder-working, earthier one) and himself (the more artistic, adventurous one), but there is more overlap between the two.²¹ Abbey transformed Will into a much more interesting character in The Fool's Progress by modeling him on Wendell Berry's ideas and practice as well as on his own brother. In his journal entries on The Fool's Progress Abbey wrote of “brother Will who, like Wendell Berry, keeps alive and functioning the old farm back in Home” and “Will Lightcap as Wendell Berry” (archive 5: 5).

The Good Life was a very promising attempt, but it stopped in mid-stream—as if Abbey had lost perspective, was not sure where to take it, and perhaps did not yet have enough distance on the events of his youth and know how to integrate them with his new life in the West. In his journal, Abbey wrote extensively about gathering ideas and information for The Good Life that would remain central in The Fool's Progress. He actively researched his novel, as he indicated in his journal in 1968: “Father here for a week, pumped him considerable for information on farmlife in 20's and 30's” (archive 5: 2). In a July 1976 letter, he wrote, “Mother, could you find for me a collection of some of the classic old-time hymns? … I need the text of them for this novel I have in mind” (archive 3: 10). He tried to develop The Good Life, like Jonathan Troy, as “a documentary novel, full of documents,” as he wrote in his journal, making a note to “check back files of Indiana Evening Gazette for ads, news, styles, cars” and sitting through a session in the “Indiana County Courthouse 11-5-69” (archive 7: 2). The Good Life was so “documentary” that one of its interchapters consisted of the father's budget figures. This may be another reason why Abbey eventually abandoned The Good Life: such interchapters were pretty deadly stuff.

Abbey did not, however, give up on his struggle to write his big novel. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974 to work on it, declaring in his journal, “I must start thinking about that work—the farm, the old man, the glory and tragedy of hard work” (Confessions 240). Meanwhile, he also had been writing another unpublished, undated, unfinished novel called City of Dreadful Night, which was to become source material for the Hoboken chapters of The Fool's Progress. The Fool's Progress developed positively as Abbey realized that his “fat masterpiece” would have to move beyond his western Pennsylvanian boyhood in order to link it to his adult experiences elsewhere, particularly in Hoboken—where he tried to salvage his second marriage during the early 1960s while working in a welfare office—and in the West, which had long since become his new home. By November 1977, he was planning in his journal a big novel to be entitled “Confessions of a Barbarian, An Honest Novel” (archive 5: 4). He would reach back into not only The Good Life and City of Dreadful Night, but also “the original Black Sun or Firedogs novel (movie script) of subbohemian life at UNM,” and it would begin “in media res” and move “back and forward through time, a series of retrospections: UNM in the 50's, the U. S. Army in the 40's, Naples, at home on the farm, the Depression (days of hope!), infancy and infantilism as the Barb regresses” (archive 5: 4). Here he finally had in mind the basic structure of The Fool's Progress—an imaginative, double-edged, alternating East-West chronology that is one of this novel's chief strengths. As he expressed it in his outline to his editors, it would be “a picaresque novel, told largely but not entirely in the first person, which details the adventures of one Henry Lightcap, an Appalachian hillbilly, from his birth around 1927 to his displaced status in contemporary 1980's America” (archive 13: 1, p. 1).

Though he moved outside of Appalachia in The Fool's Progress, this novel is richer than ever in Appalachian and Abbey family materials. “Viva la Appalachia” (188), Henry thinks to himself. Not all of this material made it into the published novel, and not all of it was autobiographically factual. In real life, for example, Abbey's father outlived him by three-and-a-half years, while Henry's father is crushed to death by a tree in the 1960s.²² The fictional father's death allows Henry to deliver a eulogy, which Abbey probably wanted his father to read, in which he calls him “a true independent” and a “mountaineer” who believed that “mountain men will always be free” (321-22). As for his mother, Henry Lightcap thinks late in the novel, “that woman is meant to live forever. She will too. He felt a surge of blood-pride rise from his heart” (507). Not long after the publication of The Fool's Progress, Mildred Abbey was killed by a reckless driver in November 1988, and Abbey's trip home for her funeral, four months before his own death, was his last.

In April 1986, Abbey had journeyed all the way home from Bluff, Utah, to visit his family and research Henry's trip in The Fool's Progress, riding with his friend Dick Kirkpatrick, who tells me, “The homing instinct was obvious in that.” Abbey filled a notebook and three audiotapes with copious impressions. When they got to Kentucky, Abbey took special notice, pronouncing into his tape recorder:

We enter hillbilly country: … junked automobiles everywhere, trashy little houses, barns, stores, shell gasoline, Sunoco, graveyards, little muddy cricks. More up ahead on the horizon. Northeast and south are the little pointy hills of Appalachia. The foothills of Appalachia. … One little cabin on the road. One old man sitting on the front porch and the laundry about a half-mile long hanging there by him. Crick full of old tires, sticks, cans … beer cans. Classic hillbilly decor.

(archive 27: tape 8)

Abbey's sharp, spoken, impromptu observations became part of his novel: “The first hillbilly town—a rough and wary look on every face. … Fuzzy little conical hills begin to appear through the haze of afternoon. … The foothills of Appalachia at last. Now we're getting somewhere” (459). Abbey set The Fool's Progress ostensibly in West Virginia—the only state in the Union that is entirely in Appalachia—and he took notes on Sutton, West Virginia, as a source for Shawnee. However, in the novel's typescript, he crossed out some names that he had copied from a war memorial in Sutton, substituting some names specific to Home, Pennsylvania, such as Fetterman, Ginter, and Tait.²³

Also in 1986, Abbey published a version of the novel's first chapter under the title Confessions of a Barbarian (not to be confused with Petersen's edition of Abbey's journals). It includes a remarkable, highly entertaining preface in which Edward Abbey, academic editor, is approached by Henry Lightcap, redneck author, and handed the manuscript of the novel—the oldest novelistic ruse in the game, of course, dating back to at least the eighteenth century. “Abbey” sets himself up as Swiftian satirist, noting that Lightcap is

an American type now totally anachronistic. … They persist, alas, these atavists, throwbacks and living relics, in various dark grimy pockets around the nation, wallowing like pigs in the boué of their animal-like refuges, gathering from time to time—amidst the whining schmaltz of “country music” in their “family bars” and “honky-tonk” saloons … then appearing regularly at state Department of Employment Security agencies to apply for unemployment checks. … Nostalgia for the frontier mode of life is understandable but no longer intellectually respectable. … The Henry Lightcaps of America, like the redskinned buffalo-hunting horseman of the West, had their day—a century ago! They are the final incarnations of the Vanishing Americans. Let us let them vanish.

(16)

This is not only an entertaining comic romp, but also an interesting exercise in the delineation of a fictional author and Appalachian alter ego.

Abbey runs the risk of looking to many readers like a “kitchen-sink” novelist in The Fool's Progress as he himself joked in an interview with Petersen: “you toss in everything that's been dangling in your mind for years: all the jokes you always wanted to use somewhere; everything except the kitchen sink—and before I'm done with it, I might even throw in the sink, too” (11). However, Abbey was really much more like Hemingway, another novelist with a rough-and-ready image who actually revised and cut his work as scrupulously and as mercilessly as he could. The Fool's Progress may read like a wild romp, but in fact no page of typescript or galley escaped the pen of Abbey the editor.²⁴

The Fool's Progress was the book that Abbey was trying to write throughout his entire career—and he succeeded. He wrote in his journal that it is “a work with greatness in it, the best thing I've written yet, and I'm proud of it. Yes. Lightcap is an arrogant, swaggering, macho, obnoxious and eccentric character—but he learns some humility in the end. Good for him” (Confessions 330). Many of his reviewers agreed. For example, E. A. Mares pronounced it one of the four greatest picaresque novels, John Murray noticed that it is “a modern version of the story of Ulysses,” and the reviewer for Chronicles understood that Abbey was a frontier humorist like Twain. The Fool's Progress was certainly noticed; the Abbey collection includes over thirty reviews, mostly positive, from coast to coast.

Abbey's achievements as a writer about the West and about wilderness have been well documented. His accomplishments in writing powerfully about his native Appalachian area, which have been much less recognized, amplify the importance of this writer, whose range and significance we are still just beginning to appreciate.

Notes

1. Among the many examples of western writers from the East are Lewis and Clark, Francis Parkman of Oregon Trail fame, Shane author Jack Schaefer, and Abbey's friend William Eastlake. Karl Doerry goes so far as to assert that

   the West has always been an artistic invention of Easterners, a reality that in no way changed when the West became more hospitable to artists around the beginning of the twentieth century. Becoming more hospitable meant, of course, that the Old West had passed, and the painters or writers who came West set themselves the task, quite consciously, to preserve what they thought this West had been or should have been.

   (138)

   This rings true to Abbey, who liked to urge his readers to “Keep it like it was” (145), as he put it in “Return to Yosemite.”

2. A more extended analysis of the historical, cultural, literary, and imaginative links between Appalachia and the Southwest can be found in Arthur K. Moore's classic critical study The Frontier Mind. More specifically, Hugh Henry Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry, serialized in the Pittsburgh Gazette beginning in 1781 when western Pennsylvania was the frontier, has been called “the first important western fiction” (1283) by Martin Bucco, and Edwin James's 1823 Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains was Abbey's precedent.

3. My article in Pittsburgh History provides much more biographical detail than I can here and includes maps and many photographs. Pittsburgh History is published by the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania (1212 Smallman Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15222; telephone: (412) 454-6000). I am very grateful to all of the individuals whom I interviewed, each of whom gave generously of their time and knowledge, and kindly permitted me to quote them. I also wish to express my thanks to Richard Higgason, my graduate assistant during 1995-96, who transcribed these interviews and several audiotapes from the Abbey collection, helped me gather sources, and generally assisted me expertly and in various ways in this project; Eric Temple, who generously sent me transcripts of his interviews that were part of his work for his excellent video documentary Edward Abbey: A Voice in the Wilderness (1993); Dr. Virginia Brown, Associate Graduate Dean for Research at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP), who helped me administer an IUP Senate Fellowship that supported this work; Dr. Suzanne Brown of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education in Harrisburg, who facilitated the administration of my Faculty Professional Development Fund grant, which also made this project possible; my brother Bill, a bioregionalist and Cincinnati psychologist, who gave me my first book by Abbey; and Peter Narusewicz, an IUP doctoral student whose interest in Abbey helped to increase my own.

4. Abbey listed himself as “Born 29 January 1927, Home, Pennsylvania,” on his vita in the Abbey collection at the University of Arizona, box 1, folder 1. Further parenthetical quotations from the Abbey collection refer to box and folder numbers, thus: “(archive 1: 1).” If a typescript page number is available, that is listed after the folder number, and for quotations from audiotapes, the tape number is specified. I am very grateful to Clarke Cartwright Abbey for her permission to study, copy, and quote from the Abbey collection, and am also very thankful to Roger Myers, Peter Steere, and their assistants in the Special Collections Department of the University of Arizona library, for all of their invaluable and copious assistance.

5. Only the FBI got his birthplace right, in their file on Abbey dating from 1947: “Subject born January 29, 1927, Indiana, Pa” (archive 1: 6). Indiana, Pennsylvania, is identified as Abbey's birthplace on his birth certificate. Mildred Abbey listed Indiana Hospital as the location of Abbey's birth in the baby book she kept on him. I am thankful to Howard and Iva Abbey for helping me obtain a copy of Abbey's birth certificate and for loaning me this baby book as well as Mildred Abbey's 1931 diary. The Abbey Collection at the University of Arizona currently begins only with materials dating from after Abbey's move to the Southwest in 1948, whereas I have materials dating from 1927-48 as well. A few of the clippings that Howard and Iva lent me are undated items from the Indiana Gazette, identified as such in my list of works cited.

6. Home was such an appealing name to people that it historically supplanted the previous name of the town, Kellysburg. Abbey referred to Kellysburg in the draft manuscript of his unpublished novel The Good Life (archive 4: 8) and in the handwritten draft of The Fool's Progress (archive 13: 2), and he changed “Kellysburg” to “Home” in the original printed version of his essay “Hallelujah, on the Bum” in American West Magazine at the beginning of the 1970s, for its appearance in The Journey Home (archive 24: 5, p. 13).

   Confessions of a Barbarian (Confessions), unless otherwise noted, refers to the selections from Abbey's journals edited by David Petersen.

7. My key sources in tracing these residences were Howard and Bill Abbey, Betty [Elizabeth Postlewait] George, Isabel [Postlewait] Nesbitt, and Ed Mears.

8. As Abbey himself remarked in 1977, “The real Edward Abbey—whoever the hell that is—is a real shy, timid fellow, but the character I create in my journalism is perhaps a person I would like to be: bold, brash, daring. … I guess some people mistake the creation for the author, but that's their problem” (Hepworth 44).

9. I am grateful to Ivan McGee, a contemporary of Abbey at Marion Center High School and now executive director of the Historical and Genealogical Society of Indiana County, for loaning me both of these articles.

10. Perhaps Abbey's best known essay about this experience is “Hallelujah on the Bum” in The Journey Home.

11. I thank John Watta, professor emeritus of English at IUP and my next-door neighbor, for first bringing this early publication to my attention.

12. In his journal in 1952, Abbey named his “favorite predecessors: Mann, Dostoyevsky, Mark Twain, and above all, JOYCE” (Confessions 15). In 1983, however, he argued for Chekhov's simplicity against the “opposite school” of “wind-up whirligigs that went straight from the authors' laboratories to the professors' studies … Borges, Nabokov, Joyce, Proust, Kafka” (306).

13. Abbey's old friend and classmate Sam Furgiuele, a retired professor of English at IUP, who attended the banquet at the Rustic Lodge when Abbey received this award, recounted this event to me.

14. Abbey described The Fool's Progress as “partly autobiographical in the Thomas Wolfean sense” (archive 13: 1), in his early outline to his editors, and wrote in his journal that “I'm with Wolfe” (Confessions 223). In the case of the author of Look Homeward, Angel and You Can't Go Home, Again, the influence was early and important enough that Wolfe is remembered from both early in Abbey's life, by Howard Abbey, and from much later, by Ken Sleight, as Abbey's key early influence.

15. Garth McCann does call this novel “a success” (13) and seems to prefer it to The Brave Cowboy and Fire on the Mountain. But Ann Ronald's declaration that “Jonathan Troy is unmemorable” (3) has been more influential.

16. For a couple of examples of Abbey's references to his “fat masterpiece,” see The Journey Home (xii) and Garfield.

17. Of course, it should be noted that both of these statements were made back home in western Pennsylvania—not to reporters in the Southwest, where instead Abbey liked to rail against New Yorkers' neglect of him as a western writer. As both Appalachian and a Westerner, Abbey was bound for such neglect on both counts. However, the contrast between Abbey's reputation in the West versus his native county is underscored by the fact that following his death in 1989, the Tucson Weekly devoted a magazine supplement to Abbey, while the Indiana Gazette limited itself to a single obituary.

18. As early as March 1951, the University of New Mexico's The Thunderbird magazine, during his own colorful editorship, ran an article entitled “Some Implications of Anarchy,” in which one Jonathan Troy serves as the mouthpiece for Abbey's views.

19. Abbey was thinking partly in terms of the Homeric framework in both novels: his first protagonist is named “Troy,” and his second one thinks to himself, “Yes, I am Ithaca-bound” (221). Abbey wrote in his journal as early as November 1951 that he hoped “to write a book called Ithaca—an improvement on the Odyssey. Man seeking Home—a man trying to get home, after years of sorrow and danger, reaches home, to find it” (archive 4: 1).

20. Jonathan remembers the Old Lonesome Briar Patch, “the old farm which nobody wanted any more and which nearly everybody had forgotten except the boy” (243).

21. Some of the experiences that are Henry's in The Fool's Progress, such as being scooped up in the field by his father when a small child, are assigned to the “Howard” character in The Good Life, Will Gatlin (a name later given to the protagonist of Black Sun), who becomes Will Lightcap in The Fool's Progress.

22. Abbey may have based this part of his plot on a close call with a tree in which his father was nearly killed. Jim Dougherty recorded Paul Abbey remembering as late as 1990,

    Had a few close calls. I was cutting the head of a strip job, a couple of miles up here. And I cut a big red oak one day, and the tree went down. … Knocked me on my ass. The blood gushing out of there. I tried to stop the blood and then I got to thinking, I better get to the truck. Lay here and bleed to death, they'd have a hard time finding me. So I got to the truck, and I had an undershirt and I stopped the bleeding.

23. Archive 15: 1, p. 880; The Fool's Progress 498.

24. One need not even examine the earlier handwritten and typed drafts of The Fool's Progress in the Abbey archive (though it helps to do so) in order to get a good sense of how significantly Abbey revised and cut. One can simply study earlier published extracts—such as the 1986 version of the novel's first chapter published as Confessions of a Barbarian (not the book edited by Petersen) and, more easily obtainable, the version in The Best of Edward Abbey of chapter 4, “The Rites of Spring.”

Works Cited

Abbey, Clarke Cartwright. Interview with author. 6 February 1996.

Abbey, Edward. “Abbey Walks 8,000 Miles By Adroit Use of Thumb.” High Arrow 8 November 1944: 4.

———. “America and the Future.” Marion Center Independent December 1941, n.p.

———. “Another Patriot.” Untitled Marion Center High School compendium, supplied to author by Ivan McGee, spring 1942, pp. 5-6.

———. Appalachian Wilderness: The Great Smoky Mountains. Photographs by Eliot Porter, with “Natural and Human History by Edward Abbey.” New York: Dutton, 1970.

———. Archive of unpublished materials in the Edward Abbey Collection in Special Collections at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

———. The Best of Edward Abbey. 1984 (Originally Slumgullion Stew). San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1988.

———. Black Sun. 1971. Santa Barbara, California: Capra, 1990.

———. The Brave Cowboy. 1956. New York: Avon, 1992.

———. Confessions of a Barbarian. Santa Barbara, California: Capra Press, 1986. Includes “Editor's Preface” and a version of the first chapter of The Fool's Progress.

———. Confessions of a Barbarian: Selections from the Journals of Edward Abbey, 1951-1989. Ed. David Petersen. New York: Little, Brown, 1994.

———. Desert Solitaire. 1968. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988.

———. Down the River. 1982. New York: Penguin, 1991.

———. Fire on the Mountain. 1962. New York: Avon, 1992.

———. The Fool's Progress. 1988. New York: Avon, 1990.

———. “A Fugue in Time.” The Indiana Student Writes. Ed. Rhodes Stabley. Indiana, Pennsylvania: English Department, Indiana State Teachers College, 1948, 9-11.

———. Jonathan Troy. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1954.

———. The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West. 1977. New York: Penguin, 1991.

———. The Monkey Wrench Gang. 1975. New York: Avon, 1976.

———. One Life at a Time, Please. New York: Holt, 1988.

———. “Return to Yosemite: Tree Fuzz vs. Freaks.” In The Journey Home, 138-45. 1977. New York: Penguin, 1991.

———. “Some Implications of Anarchy.” The Thunderbird March 1951: 3-9.

———. “Vagabond Lover Has Drink With Governor.” High Arrow 20 December 1944: 2.

Abbey, Howard. Interview with Eric Temple. September 1992.

Abbey, Nancy. Interview with author. 2 December 1995.

Abbey, Paul. Interview with Jim Dougherty. 23 June 1990. “America's Industrial Heritage Project Folklife Division.” Special Collections, Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Abbey, William. Interview with author. 27 October 1995.

“Author Dies in Tucson.” Indiana Gazette 15 March 1989: 1, 4.

Bothwell, Pamela. “Novelist, Environmentalist Edward Abbey Says ‘I'm A Wild Preservative’.” Greensburg Tribune Review 2 January 1977: n.p.

Bucco, Martin. “The Development of Western Literary Criticism.” In A Literary History of the American West. Ed. James H. Maguire et al., 1283-1316. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1987.

Cahalan, James M. “‘My People’: Edward Abbey's Appalachian Roots in Indiana County, Pennsylvania.” Pittsburgh History: A Magazine of the City and Its Region 79.3 (September 1996): 92-107 and 79.4 (November 1996).

“A Celebration of Edward Abbey.” Special magazine supplement, Tucson Weekly 5-11 April 1989.

Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. Unsigned review of The Fool's Progress. February 1989: 36.

Doerry, Karl. “The American West: Conventions and Inventions in Art and Literature.” Essays on the Changing Images of the Southwest. Eds. Richard Francaviglia and David Narrett. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1994, 127-53.

Furgiuele, Samuel. Interview with author. 17 November 1995.

Garfield, Lisa. “Abbey Talks About His Craft.” Indiana Gazette [December 1976?], n.p.

Hepworth, James. “The Poetry Center Interview.” Resist Much, Obey Little: Some Notes on Edward Abbey. Ed. James Hepworth and Gregory McNamee. 1985. Tucson: Harbinger, 1989, 33-44.

James, Edwin. Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains, Performed in the Years 1819 and '20, under the Command of Major Stephen H. Long. 2 volumes. Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1823.

Kirkpatrick, Dick. Interview with author. 16 December 1995.

Mares, E. A. Review of The Fool's Progress. Santa Fe Reporter 23-29 November 1988: 27.

McCann, Garth. Edward Abbey. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1977.

Mears, Edward. Interview with author. 4 October 1995.

Moore, Arthur K. The Frontier Mind. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957.

Murray, John. Review of The Fool's Progress. Bloomsbury Review 9.2 (March/April 1989): 10, 12.

Norman, Gurney. Interview with author. 18 December 1995.

Petersen, David. “A Conversation with Edward Abbey.” Basin and Range August 1985: 9-13.

Ronald, Ann. The New West of Edward Abbey. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984.

Sleight, Ken. Interview with Eric Temple. April 1992.

“‘Take a Big Armful of Life,’ Abbey Tells Aspiring Novelists.” Indiana Gazette [1969?]: n.p.

Watta, John. Interview with author. 18 May 1995.