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

by David Gessner

  STEGNER IN THE LOS ALTOS HILLS NEAR HIS HOME.

  If Stegner was the model writer-teacher, then Abbey, at first glance, was anything but. In fact, with the possible exception of Hunter Thompson, Ed Abbey might have been voted least likely among his kind to ever wear academic robes. No one expected the wild man to be domesticated by the academy, but he was in the end. In January of 1981 he was hired by the poet and nonfiction writer Dick Shelton, who once said to me, “Everybody told me I was crazy when I hired him.” He was quick to add that Abbey surprised a lot of people: he was strict in class—“a real schoolmarm”—and shy and quiet with his colleagues. He taught on and off over the next seven years, right up until the year before his death, and, with the help of support letters from Wendell Berry and Wallace Stegner, was appointed a full professor in 1988.

  After we had finished exploring the school, Lynn, Allison, and I climbed into the car and took the winding road up into the Los Altos Hills to the old house. This had been a beautiful, undeveloped landscape that Wallace and Mary Stegner once rode horses through. But the fields were now clotted with houses, suburbia imprinted on the hills. It wasn’t just his region that Stegner had watched be despoiled, but his neighborhood. He had seen those fields become suburbs, and bore witness as his peaceful valley became the Silicon Valley, trophy houses sprouting up everywhere.

  Wally and Mary’s retreat, where they had built their modest ranch-style house, now sat amid the second wealthiest zip code in the United States. As we curled up the driveway, through a tunnel of live and scrub oaks, Lynn pointed out the new neighbor’s house, recently built, and, through the trees, I noticed a putting green near the driveway. Forty years earlier the Stegners had organized a neighborhood conservation group here, and Wallace had written that open space was the local equivalent of wilderness. It was a lost cause now. I knew the sadness of living in a beautiful place and watching it become less beautiful, and then, ruined. It is an experience that most of us have had at this stage in the country’s “development.”

  Allison told me that the new owner of the Stegner house had grown weary of unexpected visitors, specifically Stegner fans who wanted a peek at the house. Lynn said her palms were sweating as we pulled in the driveway. The plan was to sneak in, get a good look, and sneak out. But the owner, an older Asian man, happened to be piddling around in his garage and saw us coming. We parked in the driveway, behind his car, and Allison, thinking quickly, got out and walked over to ask the man for directions. Meanwhile Lynn pointed out some details of the plain, one-story ranch house, and described how the studio was out back, by the swimming pool.

  If I couldn’t see it, I could picture it. I knew that often at the beginning of the year, and sometimes during the year, Stegner would have the students up to the house on the then-secluded hilltop. When I’d visited Ed McClanahan in Kentucky, he told me about a particularly stunning afternoon up at the Stegners’. McClanahan and the other members of one of the workshop groups were having drinks out on the back patio in the late afternoon when someone looked up and noticed that there was a hawk circling above with a big rattlesnake in its talons. While not every day could be that dramatic, those visits to the house must have been as stimulating for the students as the classes themselves. They got to see a working writer’s home with a studio out back and a book-lined living room, a place of the sort they could perhaps one day inhabit, and a writer’s life they could imagine themselves one day leading.

  The studio was still there, but when I mentioned this to Lynn she said, “Not for long.”

  She explained that there had been a recent uproar. The new owner wanted to tear down Wally’s study.

  While we were talking, Allison hurried back to the car. She climbed in and closed the door.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  Mission somewhat accomplished, we made our getaway.

  STEGNER WAS, BY almost all accounts, a great teacher. But even he showed some cracks. He worried about serving two masters and, for all his renown as a professor, said this upon his retirement from Stanford in 1971: “I am never going to miss teaching. . . . I never gave it more than half my heart, the ventricle, say.” Once he quit he felt that for the first time in his life he was able to concentrate fully on individual projects. Over the next twenty-two years, until his death at eighty-four, he produced six books of nonfiction, including his underrated biography of DeVoto, and three of his best novels: Crossing to Safety, the National Book Award–winning The Spectator Bird, and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Angle of Repose. It is true that Angle of Repose, the most ambitious of those books, was composed while he still had one foot in the classroom, but during those last two decades there is a sense of almost crystallized concentration, all the energy that had sprayed off in so many directions suddenly lasered in on the work.

  I am fascinated by this late-life kick, by how Stegner grew as a writer as he got older. Something happened to the man’s work just about the time he retired from Stanford, and that something enlivened his books over the next twenty years. The first hints of where things would go showed as far back as 1952 with the creation of Joe Allston, the narrator of the short story “A Field Guide to Western Birds.” Joe is a literary agent who has retired to his home in the California hills, where he lives with his wife, Ruth. More important, he is the prototype of the classic first-person old-man Stegnerian doppelgänger, what I have come to call the “grumbling grandpa” narrators who are crucial to the later work. Through his use of these exaggerated fictional stand-ins, he created some of his best, and certainly most readable, fiction. Joe Allston came back for the novels All the Little Live Things (1967) and The Spectator Bird (1976), and a similar, if less jokey, narrator named Larry Morgan would take over for Stegner’s last novel, Crossing to Safety (1987). Both of these men are opinionated, gruff, and none too happy about the way the world has been hijacked by its at once soft-headed and dogmatic young people. To the contemporary ear, there is a sometimes aw-shucks manner that takes some getting used to, particularly with Joe Allston, who has a little dash of by-golly Ronald Reagan jargon in his vocabulary (if not his politics). But all Stegner’s older protagonists have a barely disguised, old-fashioned agenda. They embody “continuance, rootedness,” though they are not mere symbols of those qualities. These are novels, after all, not sermons, and the beauty of the books is that the old “decided” men who narrate them are actually full of uncertainty, anxiety, and questioning. Luckily these men are also sharp, smart, and articulate, and it is the articulation of that uncertainty that brings the books alive.

  Lyman Ward, the narrator of Angle of Repose, is a darker version of Joe Allston and Larry Morgan. He has reason to be dark: he is literally truncated, his legs amputated by the same doctor who has since run off with his wife. Meanwhile, his radical son doesn’t think his father can take care of himself and hopes to put him in a nursing home. Stegner wrote this book at the height of his troubles with the young radicals who had “ruined” Stanford, and there is both some serious venting about the state of the rootless young and something close to conscious self-parody in the hippie-hating Ward. Tired of the shallow present, the narrator, a historian by trade, tunnels into the past, specifically into the lives of his pioneering western grandparents, Oliver and Susan Ward. In the book itself, these excursions into the past are first presented as artifacts, mostly as the transcripts of letters. But they soon segue into a third-person re-creation of the past, dramatizing the lives and many moves of Susan and Oliver. In the course of empathizing with his grandparents and imagining their lives, the historian-narrator becomes something else, something very close to a writer of fiction.

  The book proceeds in two simultaneous narratives, Lyman’s present and his grandparents’ past. Stegner had always been an admirer of DeVoto’s use of simultaneous chronology, of having many things happening at once. He had already learned much about moving in time by writing his own nonfiction, and it is in Angle of Repose that he most clearly plays with time like an accordion,
squeezing it tight then letting it spread out.

  Angle of Repose was also Stegner’s most criticized book. The criticism stems from the fact that the life of Susan Ward was based heavily on the life of Mary Hallock Foote, and that Stegner used some of Foote’s letters to create the words of Ward. My first instinct was to dismiss this criticism, since I so admired the book. But while in Salt Lake, I read through the original Foote letters and saw that some sections were lifted whole-cloth and plopped down into the book. In short, I saw what all the fuss was about. This was a new Wallace Stegner to me: Wally the rapper, sampling earlier work. It is a silly image but somewhat apt, too. Artists are a tribe of borrowers, which is why I have a hard time getting too worked up about Stegner’s crime. While I would have preferred it if he had reworded the sections of the original letters that he used, as the book progresses he begins to do just that, taking the same language and making it his and Susan’s (and Lyman’s) own. What begins as borrowing ends as ventriloquism, the character and her voice coming alive apart from its model. The letters prove a jumping-off point into voice. Perhaps it would have been better if Stegner had at least scumbled the sentences from the original letters, but what he ultimately does with them is pure fiction. He uses a life to create a myth.

  The myth he creates is the forever Stegner myth, the myth not just of Oliver and Susan Ward but of George and Hilda Stegner, and of Bo and Elsa Mason. It is the myth of the nester, always trying to create community, continuity, and culture in a wild land that rejects it, and of a boomer who sees that same land as his big chance. Oliver is a more subtle and reluctant boomer than either George or Bo, moving for his job and often against his will, but he is a boomer still, a member of the tribe of wheeled people. The book ends when the couple finally makes a “permanent” home in Grass Valley, California, but it is a bitter sort of settling, the result of betrayal and compromise. Stegner, writing in the notebook I found in Salt Lake, said of Lyman Ward: “One of the reasons for stubbornly writing his grandparents’ lives is to save them from neglect, reassert them. As to using historical people for a partly fictional purpose, so did Hawthorne, and for the same reason: the search for a usable past.”

  AFTER STANFORD, I drove out to Half-Moon Bay, where Abbey had lived during his time at the school. From there I’d planned on a pilgrimage up to Lassen Volcanic National Park, where I had first read Desert Solitaire and where, prompted by that book, I spent my first night alone in the backcountry. But a summer fire that spread over 15,000 acres, or 15 percent of the park, had turned the wilderness to ash.

  The truth was that, after two years immersed in his words and life, there were times when I had grown a little weary of Cactus Ed Abbey. For instance, I’d spent a good part of the fall with his novels and, honestly, rereading his fiction had been, at times, a task. The Monkey Wrench Gang is an important book and a book with historic interest. It is also a very silly and dated book. Not just silly-funny, either, but silly-sloppy. Take the character of Bonnie Abzug, for instance. The novel is told through a series of jumps into different characters’ points of view. When we are in Hayduke’s point of view, for example, we experience the world through the eyes of the passionate, deranged, scatological primitive that Abbey created out of the raw material of poor Doug Peacock: It was fucking good. He would blow it the fuck up. The writer maintains some distance from these characters and allows himself to comment on them, but the perspective is colored by the viewpoint character so that, when we shift to the more refined Doc Sarvis’s point of view, the language becomes philosophical and pompous, like Doc himself.

  Not so with Bonnie. When we are in her point of view the main thing we hear about are her own curves. She is Jessica Rabbit, a lascivious cartoon, a Playboy bunny sketched by a horny adolescent. It is as if all she spends her time thinking about are her own breasts, legs, and ass. There is plenty more of this sloppiness and outright sexist language, like Doc spouting crude metaphors as he plunges down the lever to the TNT to blow up the bridge, and at times the book shares a sensibility with recent movie comedies of the Dumb & Dumber school. Or, as Abbey wrote in the pages of the book itself: “Pleistocene humor—the best kind.” What is bad in Monkey Wrench is worse in Hayduke Lives, an uninspired bit of hackwork that is told in cartoon strokes, rarely funny in the way Abbey was at his best.

  The way Abbey was funny at his best, I think, was when the serious sat right next to the scatological, the ridiculous next to the sublime, the high next to the low. Abbey has moments like these in The Monkey Wrench Gang, and even more in The Fool’s Progress, but nowhere in the fiction do these moments rise to the level and frequency that they do in his nonfiction. This is a verdict others have pronounced about his work before, a verdict Abbey himself hated, but a verdict that in the end seems to me unavoidable. The times his Pleistocene humor really catches us by surprise are when it comes out of the mouth of the nonfiction character named Ed Abbey. Wendell Berry wrote of Abbey that there is more movement, from subject to subject, on his page than on almost any page of any other writer, and it is this movement, not just from subject to subject but from mood to mood, that makes those marks on the page seem to represent an actual man.

  Abbey would not want to hear it, but I would say that the work that is most alive and that most keeps Abbey alive today, outside of Desert Solitaire, are the individual essays. It is in these that we still hear the voice and sense the man. I earlier called the late essays “slapdash” and they were in the way the collections were thrown together. But in each of those essays, no matter how quickly written, you can hear the Abbey voice: the rumbles, the jokes, the profundities, the love and the hate.

  It is not fashionable to use a term like “literary immortality.” On a finite planet with a possible expiration date, it seems both anthropocentric and pompous to talk in terms of “forever.” But if we are to take seriously the fact that some writers last, then we need to think about the different ways in which they do. The most obvious way to do this is to look at writers from long ago who are still read. The two handiest, and best for the comparison I want to make, are writers who wrote more than four centuries ago but who overlapped in their own times. Most people would consider both Montaigne and Shakespeare “immortal writers.” And most would consider Shakespeare more so in the traditional sense: his plays are still frequently performed, his work taught in schools, his name bandied about in learned society, his reputation unparalleled. All true, but I would contend that in a different, less-traditional sense Montaigne is more “immortal.” How so? Because he is still alive to us through his book, since, as he said, his book is himself. Thanks to the marks he made on a page four hundred and fifty years ago, we feel we have a very real sense of the man, of who he was, of what it felt like to be him. We feel we know his personality, its quirks.

  This, at his very best, is what Edward Paul Abbey offers. Read him and you will know him. More than almost any writer I’ve read he remains alive on the page. You may not like him very much, but there he is. Opinionated, moody, troubled, confident, angry, compassionate, smart, kind of stupid. If this character was, as Abbey says it was, “a fictional creation,” then it was a brilliant one.

  GETTING AT ABBEY and Stegner requires not just imagining but re-imagining, freeing them, to the extent that seems accurate and not reactionary, from their hardened images. Both men have clearly been mummified by their reputations: Saint Wallace the Good and Randy Ed, Wild Man. Abbey may get it worse but Stegner risks being purified beyond interest. From some of the tributes and testimonials I’ve read, you would have thought it surprising that he kept writing and fighting for the land and instead didn’t just give it all up to teach Sunday school.

  But of course anyone who is lifted up so high is in danger of being toppled over, especially in our contentious times. The Stegner of the ’60s risks looking not like Terry Tempest Williams’s “radical,” but like a caricature of the grumpy old conservative telling the damn kids to get off his lawn. Ken Kesey went as far as once suggesting
that opposition to Stegner was part of the unifying force that brought the Merry Pranksters together and led to their LSD-fueled bus trip: “I have felt impelled into the future by Wally, by his dislike of what I was doing, of what we were doing. That was the kiss of approval in some way.”

  There are those who have gone even further, suggesting that Kesey based Nurse Ratched—one of if not the most notorious authority figures in all of American literature—at least partly on the man running the particular institution Kesey was part of: the Stanford Creative Writing Program. Stanford professor and literary scholar Mark McGurl, whose book The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing is a brilliant treatment of the rise of creative writing programs and their impact on postwar literature, writes: “It is hard to read about the bad behavior of McMurphy in the Group Meeting, his all-too-evident disrespect for Nurse Ratched, without connecting it to Kesey’s well-documented antagonism toward his teacher Wallace Stegner, whom, as John Daniel reports, Kesey saw as the ‘epitome of academic staidness and convention’ even as Stegner found Kesey irritatingly ‘half-baked.’ ”

  Try as I might, I can’t quite picture Stegner in a nurse’s uniform and little hat, enforcing order on a group of patients in a psych ward. But there are those who see in the Stegner of the ’60s a less than noble figure, one whose striving for largeness couldn’t overcome the old angry smallness.

  Perhaps there are books to come that will focus on this aspect of the man, knocking him off his pedestal. Perhaps they will attempt to expose Wallace Stegner. But that is not what I’m after.