Ed Abbey Rides Again

Edward Abbey died in 1989, but the writer’s recently resurrected in a couple of compelling new books. His contrarian, combative manner championing solitude by way of the American West in particular is enjoying new appreciation, thanks to David Gessner and John A. Murray. In "All The Wild That Remains,” Gessner places Abbey beside Wallace Stegner, his bombast and brilliance illuminated by Stegner’s stoic determination. The West shaped both men and in turn, both writers shaped the way we read The West. Abbey seized early on his major theme, after his first glimpse of the Grand Canyon, where, “It was love at first sight.” Thereafter his refrain became about “falling in love with the place and the fight to protect the threatened loved one.” More to the point, says Gesnner, “there was something that felt new and direct, almost primal, about the way Abbey wrote about nature.” Like the stoic Stegner, Abbey struggled with fiction, finding instead the “clean intensity he was looking for” in non-fiction, though still able “to retain some of the remnant romanticism” he longed to achieve. Gessner’s Abbey is personal first, prophetic from a wider angle. In “Abbey in America: A Philosopher's Legacy in a New Century,” Editor John A. Murray collects multiple angles to focus the telling. Murray invokes Montaigne, the Psalms, and Basho, among others, in his introduction, explaining Abbey’s nature was “to examine a subject in a clinical light, acknowledging only established facts, and then draw rational conclusions that would, to his delight, cast popular dogma asunder,” suggesting this simple but direct approach is perhaps no longer fashionable. Edward Hoagland, longtime Abbey correspondent, explains, in “Abbey’s Road” his friend’s nature “was a labyrinth of anger and generosity, shy but arresting because of his mixture of hillbilly with cowboy qualities,” something serious readers have long parsed. Hoagland describes the two sitting at coffee “in silence in restaurants as our twinned melancholy groped for expression,” but stops short of sentiment, believing his friend “spilled too much energy into feuds with his allies and friends.” Journalist Charles Bowden feels the primal in Abbey’s influence, as he whirls in the vortex of the immigration dilemma. Bowden walks the border between his Arizona home and Mexico, invoking Abbey as he finds, “some cast-off clothing circling a small, spent fire, empty cans, a worn shoe left behind.” Abbey delicately, comically suggests, “’In the American Southwest, where I happen to live…the subject of illegal aliens is a touchy one,’” though he refuses to bow to euphemistic correctness. Before he concludes, Bowden wishes to “live long enough so that no one read Edward Abbey because we had ended our murderous ways,” but recognizes instead, “Everything I need and love is now an outlaw.” Abbey the outlaw is alive and well in “All The Wild That Remains” and “Abbey In America.” Good Reading