have it!
There are tales of justice, public and private, heartwarming or hair-raising. There are the inevitable chapters of the region’s history of violence. Best of all, to me, is “The Straight Shooter,” a political biography of one Fess Whitaker: I don’t know how it could be better told.
This book, I fear, is doomed to be classed by those who live by such classification as “folk” material. But they had better be careful. It is, for one thing, very much a lawyer’s book. Harry Caudill is master of an art of storytelling that I think could rightly be called “legal,” for it has been practiced by country lawyers for many generations. Its distinction and distinctive humor lie in the understanding of the tendency of legal rhetoric to overpower its occasions:
Thereupon he towered above Collins like a high priest at some holy rite and poured forth a generous libation of buttermilk upon the judge’s pate, shoulders, and other parts.
For another thing, these stories—though they have to do with people who by a certain destructive condescension have been called “folk”—are the native properties of an able, cultivated, accomplished, powerful, and decent mind.
1981
A FEW WORDS IN FAVOR OF EDWARD ABBEY
Reading through a sizable gathering of reviews of Edward Abbey’s books, as I have lately done, one becomes increasingly aware of the extent to which this writer is seen as a problem by people who are, or who think they are, on his side. The problem, evidently, is that he will not stay in line. No sooner has a label been stuck to his back by a somewhat hesitant well-wisher than he runs beneath a low limb and scrapes it off. To the consternation of the “committed” reviewer, he is not a conservationist or an environmentalist or a boxable ist of any other kind; he keeps on showing up as Edward Abbey, a horse of another color, and one that requires some care to appreciate.
He is a problem, apparently, even to some of his defenders, who have an uncontrollable itch to apologize for him: “Well, he did say that. But we mustn’t take him altogether seriously. He is only trying to shock us into paying attention.” Don’t we all remember from our freshman English class how important it is to get the reader’s attention?
Some environmentalist reviewers see Mr. Abbey as a direct threat to their cause—a man embarrassingly prejudiced or radical or unruly. Not a typical review, but one representative of a certain kind of feeling about Edward Abbey, was Dennis Drabelle’s attack on Down the River in The Nation of May 1, 1982. Mr. Drabelle accused Mr. Abbey of elitism, iconoclasm, arrogance, and xenophobia; he found that Mr. Abbey’s “immense popularity among environmentalists is puzzling” and observed that “many of his attitudes give aid and comfort to the enemies of conservation.”
Edward Abbey is, of course, a mortal requiring criticism, and I would not attempt to argue otherwise. He undoubtedly has some of the faults he has been accused of having, and maybe some others that have not been discovered yet. What I would argue is that attacks on him such as that of Mr. Drabelle are based on misreading, and that the misreading is based on the assumption that Mr. Abbey is both a lesser man and a lesser writer than he in fact is.
Mr. Drabelle and others like him assume that Mr. Abbey is an environmentalist—and hence that they, as other environmentalists, have a right to expect him to perform as their tool. They further assume that if he does not so perform, they have a proprietary right to complain. They would like, in effect, to brand him an outcast and an enemy of their movement and to enforce their judgment against him by warning people away from his books. Why should environmentalists want to read a writer whose immense popularity among them is puzzling?
Such assumptions, I think, rest on yet another assumption that is more important and more needful of attention: namely, that our environmental problems are the result of bad policies, bad political decisions, and that, therefore, our salvation lies in winning unbelievers to the righteous political side. If all those assumptions were true, then I suppose that the objections of Mr. Drabelle would be sustainable: Mr. Abbey’s obstreperous traits would be as unsuitable in him as in any other political lobbyist. Those assumptions, however, are false.
Mr. Abbey is not an environmentalist. He is, certainly, a defender of some things that environmentalists defend, but he does not write merely in defense of what we call “the environment.” Our environmental problems, moreover, are not, at root, political; they are cultural. As Edward Abbey knows and has been telling us, our country is not being destroyed by bad politics; it is being destroyed by a bad way of life. Bad politics is merely another result. To see that the problem is far more than political is to return to reality, and a look at reality permits us to see, for example, what Mr. Abbey’s alleged xenophobia amounts to.
The instance of xenophobia cited by Mr. Drabelle occurs on page seventeen of Down the River, where Mr. Abbey proposes that our Mexican border should be closed to immigration. If we permit unlimited immigration, he says, before long “the social, political, economic life of the United States will be reduced to the level of life in Juarez. Guadalajara. Mexico City. San Salvador. Haiti. India. To a common peneplain of overcrowding, squalor, misery, oppression, torture, and hate.” That is certainly not a liberal statement. It expresses “contempt for other societies,” just as Mr. Drabelle says it does. It is, moreover, a fine example of the exuberantly opinionated Abbey statement that raises the hackles of readers like Mr. Drabelle—as it is probably intended to do. But before we dismiss it for its tone of “churlish hauteur,” we had better ask if there is any truth in it.
And there is some truth in it. As the context plainly shows, this sentence is saying something just as critical of ourselves as of the other countries mentioned. Whatever the justice of the “contempt for other societies,” the contempt for the society of the United States, which is made explicit in the next paragraph, is fearfully just: “We are slaves in the sense that we depend for our daily survival upon an expand-or-expire agro-industrial empire—a crackpot machine—that the specialists cannot comprehend and the managers cannot manage. Which is, furthermore, devouring world resources at an exponential rate. We are, most of us, dependent employees”—a statement that is daily verified by the daily news. And its truth exposes the ruthless paradox of Mexican immigration: Mexicans cross the border because our way of life is extravagant; because our way of life is extravagant, we have no place for them—or won’t have for very long. A generous immigration policy would be contradicted by our fundamentally ungenerous way of life. Mr. Abbey assumes that before talking about generosity we must talk about carrying capacity, and he is correct. The ability to be generous is finally limited by the availability of supplies.
The next question, then, must be: If he is going to write about immigration, why doesn’t he do it in a sober, informed, logical manner? The answer, I am afraid, will not suit some advocates of sobriety, information, and logic: He can write in a sober, informed, logical manner—if he wants to. And why does he sometimes not want to? Because it is not in his character to want to all the time. With Mr. Abbey, character is given, or it takes, a certain precedence, and that precedence makes him a writer and a man of a different kind—and probably a better kind—than the practitioner of mere sobriety, information, and logic.
In classifying Mr. Abbey as an environmentalist, Mr. Drabelle is implicitly requiring him to be sober, informed, and logical. And there is nothing illogical about Mr. Drabelle’s discomfort when his call for an environmentalist was answered by a man of character, somewhat unruly, who apparently did not know that an environmentalist was expected. That, I think, is Mr. Abbey’s problem with many of his detractors. He is advertised as an environmentalist. They want him to be an environmentalist. And who shows up but this character, who writes beautifully some of the time, who argues some of the time with great eloquence and power, but who some of the time offers opinions that appear to be only his own uncertified
