SOURCE: Bryant, Paul T. “Edward Abbey and Environmental Quixoticism.” Western American Literature 24, no. 1 (spring 1989): 37-43.

[In the following essay, Bryant argues against the commonly held view of Abbey as an extremist.]

When Edward Abbey visited my campus some years ago, I was curious to know what he was like. His public lecture was in the tone one might expect from his writing—a mixture of Jack Burns and George Washington Hayduke. But I was interested in the person behind the public image. At a reception at a colleague's house, after the lecture, I hoped to meet that person.

Before many people had arrived, Abbey was quiet, affable, relaxed. As the number of people increased to a loud, milling mob, he became visibly less comfortable. Finally, he retreated as unobtrusively as possible to the kitchen. I was already there, having made a similar retreat a few minutes earlier. We had a quiet conversation that ended only when others found where he had fled.

From that brief acquaintance, I got the strong sense that Edward Abbey was not the sharp-tongued, outrageous anarchist so many believe him to have been (see, for example, Gregory McNamee, 24), but rather a quiet, shy, thoughtful man who created a far different persona for public consumption. Confirmation has since come from others. Barry Lopez, for example, writes of Abbey's “ingenuous shyness, so at odds with the public image of a bold iconoclast” (65). Indeed, in an interview with James Hepworth, Abbey himself confirmed this view: “Oh, I'm dimly aware of some sort of mythical Edward Abbey, but I don't take him seriously, don't attempt to live up to it. … 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 created this character, and I gave him my name. I guess some people mistake the creation of the author, but that's their problem” (42).

My thesis here is that such a personality, and such a vision, lie at the bottom of the aggregate of Edward Abbey's writing. This idea is hardly new, of course. Other critics, such as Garth McCann, Ann Ronald, and Jerry Herndon, have found a balanced, eminently rational environmental moderate in Abbey's non-fiction nature writing, despite his more extreme statements,¹ and despite popular emphasis on some of his more extreme fictional characters. I would like to demonstrate the soundness of that thesis, and to explore the complex ways this moderation beneath the surface of extremism has been stated outright in Abbey's non-fiction and has evolved as a definitive counterpoint to the more colorful extremism in his fiction.

Abbey's readers have long recognized his habit of using similar names for similar characters from one work of fiction to another, such as Vogelin as Jack Burns's grandfather's name and as the name of the embattled rancher in Fire on the Mountain, and Desalius for the military man in both of those novels. And of course there is the return of Jack Burns in Good News, with the suggestion that the “lone ranger” in The Monkey Wrench Gang was Burns. Abbey has said that this repetition of names “began as chance but became a design following the evolutionary principle” (Balian 60).

This continuity and development from work to work extends not only to characters but also to themes and relationships. Through such continuity, Abbey's works as a group present a pattern of meaning, a “figure in the carpet,” that supports the image of moderation at levels deeper than the direct statement found in the non-fiction.

First, however, let us consider the direct statements, particularly in his non-fiction nature writing. His position is clearly stated in Desert Solitaire. Early in that book Abbey observes not, as readers of his fiction might expect, that wilderness is the desirable alternative to civilization, but rather that “wilderness is a necessary part of civilization.” No Luddite, he can make use of the genuine benefits of civilization. The refrigerator, for example, is a useful machine for producing ice for his drinks: “Once the drink is mixed, however, I always go outside, out in the light and the air and the space and the breeze, to enjoy it. Making the best of both worlds, that's the thing” (Desert Solitaire 110).² Despite his often stated enjoyment of solitude, Abbey in Desert Solitaire also denies that he is misanthropic. The one thing better than solitude, he says, is society, not of crowds but of friends (111). What he objects to, he insists, is what he calls anthropocentricity, not science, but science and technology misapplied (274). “Balance,” he concludes, “that's the secret. Moderate extremism. The best of both worlds …” (298).

The same theme arises in The Journey Home. There Abbey denies that technology and industry are inherently evil, but insists that they must be kept under control, “to prevent them from ever again becoming the self-perpetuating, ever-expanding monsters we have allowed them to become” (46-47). “Optimum industrialism, neither too much nor too little,” a moderate level of technology, is what he urges (47).

Consistent with this Hellenic moderation is Abbey's praise of objective realism and rationality. Again in The Journey Home he says that the poet of our age must begin with the scientific view of the world. There is, he says, “more charm in one ‘mere’ fact, confirmed by test and observation, linked to other facts through coherent theory into a rational system, than in a whole brainful of fancy and fantasy” (87). In short, Abbey does not display the romanticism or the sentimentality so often associated with extreme environmentalism. His vision is that of the moderate realist. As he says in Abbey's Road, he wishes “to stand apart, alone if need be, and hold up the ragged flag of reason. Reason with a capital R—sweet Reason, the newest and rarest thing in human life, the most delicate child of human history” (127).

Thus the Abbey of his non-fiction takes moderate views, yet the colorful extremists of his fiction continue to attract the attention and usually the sympathy of Abbey's readers. Are they the true representative of Abbey's environmentalism? Once his imagination has left the realistic constraints of non-fiction, does it give us Abbey's deepest beliefs? And do these creations of Abbey's imagination contradict or somehow give the lie to his more restrained and rational essays? No, they do not. Examined with care, and as part of the larger pattern of Abbey's work, these characters fit his vision of realistic rationality, not contradicting it but only keeping it open-ended and still available to the idealistic imagination.

To consider this pattern, perhaps it will be useful first to distinguish between two closely related but not identical themes in these works: human freedom, on the one hand, and nature undominated by human activity, on the other. The extreme of human freedom is anarchy, and the extreme of nature without human domination is wilderness. The two are intertwined in Abbey's work because wilderness is the one possible site for anarchic freedom. Wilderness, Abbey says in Desert Solitaire, is an assurance of freedom. Urban masses in a technological landscape are more easily controlled (149-50).

The anarchists in Abbey's writing begin with Jonathan Troy's father, the one-eyed Wobbly in Abbey's first novel. An ineffectual figure, the father is killed in a bar, shocking the protagonist into fleeing the bonds of his childhood. Thus the pattern for the anarchists in Abbey's fiction begins with monocular vision—seeing things from only one side—and with defeat.

In The Brave Cowboy, on the other hand, resistance to the established order takes two forms: the active, atavistic resistance of Jack Burns, the brave cowboy, and the passive, somewhat self-centered resistance of Paul Bondi. Both, within that novel, fail, but in Jack Burns, Abbey has begun to develop a figure that will finally suggest the necessary unquenchability of the spirit of freedom.

In his reversion to nineteenth-century ways of living, and the idealism of the romanticized old West (the solitary stranger fighting always for justice and the underdog), Burns is a quixotic figure in modern Duke City (Albuquerque). To emphasize this quixotic quality, Abbey makes Burns tall, thin, a college man turned cowboy, a clear parallel with Don Quixote, who is tall, very thin, and comes to knight errantry after its time has passed, through reading books. Burns is addressed by the Chicano children as “don charro,” another indicator of the parallel. The final quixotic comparison, of course, is that Burns's mission to free Paul Bondi is mistaken because Burns misunderstands Bondi's reasons for draft resistance. And Jack Burns fails.

John Vogelin, in Fire on the Mountain, again stands quixotically against all odds—in his case the U. S. Government—and again fails. Abbey does not even allow him a moral victory. Vogelin has to acknowledge that the land he is trying to keep the government from “stealing” from him had come to him through a long line of theft and chicanery back to the time it was taken from the Indians, and perhaps even before that. Again, the anarchist is at least partially in the wrong, and he fails.

At this point in the development of the anarchic idea in Abbey's work, the fiction and the non-fiction cross in an interesting detail. In Desert Solitaire, Abbey devotes an entire chapter to the moon-eyed horse, who has broken free from working for humans and fled to a hard and lonely life in an arid Utah canyon. It is a tall, gaunt animal, seventeen hands high, gelded, blind in one eye (monocular vision), and totally alone in a harsh life of the barest subsistence. Abbey pursues it and tries to bring it back to society by talking to it of grain, lush grass, easy living, and the companionship of its own kind, but the horse will have none of it.

The monocular vision of the lonely horse suggests the monocular vision of Nat Troy. Thus having one eye begins to suggest a single, extreme way of seeing the world, the way of completely untrammeled freedom. The fact that the horse is gelded suggests that the anarchic drive for complete freedom, a traditional western theme, is essentially sterile.

This set of images—the anarchist disposition associated with the single good eye, the tall, gaunt, quixotic figures of horse and man, continue in The Monkey Wrench Gang in the one-eyed “lone ranger” who befriends Hayduke. By the time Hayduke is resurrected at the end of the novel, he, rather than the one-eyed man, is riding the tall (as before, seventeen hands high) horse. By this time, too, the tall horse is named Rosie, clearly suggesting Don Quixote's tall, thin horse Rozinante.

In view of the fact that when the Zia paperback reprint of The Brave Cowboy was being prepared, Abbey asked that the paragraph saying that Jack Burns is dead be omitted (Ronald, 28), we should not be surprised that in Good News, the now aging, now one-eyed cowboy, with his quixotic horse, Rosie, turns out to be Jack Burns, who was supposed to have been killed yet a second time in an attempt to blow up a dam. Again the mission is quixotic, again it is against the forces of order and development, again it fails, but again the anarchist, defeated and grievously wounded, appears to have escaped death.

Thus we see a line of anarchistic extremists who develop around a narrow set of images: monocular vision, loss or avoidance of society, failure that seems complete but is never final because the anarchist always barely survives. The increasingly obvious associations with Don Quixote give these images an ironic context of misapplied, mistaken, but somehow comically attractive nobility. In Good News, the clearly quixotic Jack Burns is even supplied a Sancho Panza (or perhaps Tonto?) in the person of his Indian friend Sam.

Offsetting these figures, Abbey provides a suitable set of villains, but the most interesting of these are the sympathetic villains, the men who oppose Don Quixote, but do so with sympathy, and not totally to the death. In The Brave Cowboy, there is Sheriff Morlin Johnson, a complex, educated, balanced man who appreciates the wilderness, and understands Jack Burns's desire for freedom well enough to know how to pursue him successfully. In Fire on the Mountain, Lee Mackie is not a villain, but he presents again the balanced man who can understand both sides of the dispute.

In The Monkey Wrench Gang, the novel in which all the threads of Abbey's interest in wilderness and freedom come together most completely, there is a whole spectrum of figures ranging from George Washington Hayduke, the total anarchist, to Bishop Love, the arch-representative of the Establishment. Seldom Seen Smith loves the wilderness, freedom, and women, but lacks the preoccupation with violence that Hayduke has. Bonnie Abbzug and Dr. Sarvis are environmentalists but not anarchists per se. Anarchy merely becomes their hope for saving the habitability of the Southwest. When their freedom is pitted against their social obligation to render medical aid, they choose to honor their social obligation.

Perhaps the most interesting on the villains' side of this spectrum is Bishop Love's younger brother Sam. Again we have the sympathetic, less-than-total villain. He even appears to have guessed Hayduke's final trick on the rocky point, calling into the cleft in the rock, to “Rudolf,” that he cannot always fool everyone.

Finally, even the Bishop softens his position, forgiving Seldom Seen Smith the cost of his vehicle. So at last only Hayduke and the one-eyed stranger remain unyielding extremists, defeated but still alive to fight another day. Even Hayduke has an unspoken debt to Sam for not revealing his trick on the rocky point: it is the moderate who allows the anarchist to survive.

Yet another sympathetic villain appears in Good News, in the figure of Colonel Charles Barnes. Barnes is made the alienated but partially understanding son of the anarchist. By creating this connection Abbey seems again to be emphasizing the essential relationship, the shared humanity, of the extremists of both camps. Barnes finally conceals from authority the fact that Jack Burns, with his singular vision of freedom, may yet live. Again the moderate allows the anarchist to survive.

What has evolved, then, is an image of a quixotic searcher for freedom and wilderness undisturbed, a figure that is extreme, ironic, always doomed to failure, but nevertheless immortal. The immortality has been added as Abbey's themes have developed. With it, Abbey suggests that extremism cannot succeed, but that perhaps the extreme of anarchy and wilderness is necessary to counterbalance the repressive and environmentally destructive forces of unbridled technology and exploitation. For this reason, it should be allowed to survive.

Like Benton MacKaye before him, Edward Abbey sought a balanced environment that includes the urban and the rural as well as the primeval, and a balanced polity that includes both freedom and order. What he saw in our complex, industrialized, highly interdependent society, however, is excessive emphasis on technology, order, and control. In response to that imbalance, he came to value the eternally doomed extremists at the other end of the spectrum as counterweights. They had his sympathy, perhaps even his admiration. Dramatically, in his fiction, the extremists are more interesting than the moderates, just as Satan is the most interesting figure in Paradise Lost. Still, as he makes clear in his nonfiction, and in the broad patterns of his fiction, Abbey sees extreme environmentalism as quixotic and destined only for failure. What Abbey seeks is balance.

Notes

1. As long ago as 1976, in a lecture at Vail, Colorado, for example, Abbey called for what he characterized as “certain limited forms of violence” in a war against industrialization of the West (McCann 40).

2. Page references to Desert Solitaire are to the Ballantine Books edition, as the one most readily accessible (see Works Cited).

Works Cited

Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968; Ballantine Books, 1971.

———. The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977.

———. Abbey's Road. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979.

Balian, Charmaine. “The Carson Productions Interview,” Resist Much, Obey Little. Some Notes on Edward Abbey. James Hepworth and Gregory McNamee, Eds. Salt Lake City: Dream Garden Press, 1985. Pp. 58-61.

Hepworth, James. “The Poetry Center Interview,” Resist Much, Obey Little. Some Notes on Edward Abbey. James Hepworth and Gregory McNamee, Eds. Salt Lake City: Dream Garden Press, 1985. Pp. 33-42.

Herndon, Jerry. “‘Moderate Extremism’: Edward Abbey and ‘The Moon-Eyed Horse,’” Western American Literature 16 (1981). Pp. 97-103.

Lopez, Barry. “Meeting Ed Abbey,” Resist Much, Obey Little. Some Notes on Edward Abbey. James Hepworth and Gregory McNamee, Eds. Salt Lake City: Dream Garden Press, 1985. Pp. 62-65.

McCann, Garth. Edward Abbey. Western Writers Series No. 29. Boise, Idaho: Idaho State University, 1977.

McNamee, Gregory. “Scarlet ‘A’ on a Field of Black,” Resist Much, Obey Little. Some Notes on Edward Abbey. James Hepworth and Gregory McNamee, Eds. Salt Lake City: Dream Garden Press, 1985. Pp. 23-32.

Ronald, Ann. The New West of Edward Abbey. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982.