discussion, makes jokes.
If Mr. Abbey is not an environmentalist, what is he? He is, I think, at least in the essays, an autobiographer. He may be writing on one or another of what are now called environmental issues, but he remains Edward Abbey, speaking as and for himself, fighting, literally, for dear life. This is important, for if he is writing as an autobiographer, he cannot be writing as an environmentalist—or as a special ist of any other kind. As an autobiographer, his work is self-defense; as a conservationist, it is to conserve himself as a human being. But this is self-defense and self-conservation of the largest and noblest kind, for Mr. Abbey understands that to defend and conserve oneself as a human being in the fullest, truest sense, one must defend and conserve many others and much else. What would be the hope of being personally whole in a dismembered society, or personally healthy in a land scalped, scraped, eroded, and poisoned, or personally free in a land entirely controlled by the government, or personally enlightened in an age illuminated only by TV? Edward Abbey is fighting on a much broader front than that of any “movement.” He is fighting for the survival not only of nature, but of human nature, of culture, as only our heritage of works and hopes can define it. He is, in short, a traditionalist—as he has said himself, expecting, perhaps, not to be believed.
Here the example of Thoreau becomes pertinent. My essay may seem on the verge of becoming very conventional now, for one of the strongest of contemporary conventions is that of comparing to Thoreau every writer who has been as far out of the house as the mailbox. But I do not intend to say that Mr. Abbey writes like Thoreau, for I do not think he does, but only that their cases are similar. Thoreau has been adopted by the American environment movement as a figurehead; he is customarily quoted and invoked as if he were in some simple way a forerunner of environmentalism. This is possible, obviously, only because Thoreau has been dead since 1862. Thoreau was an environmentalist in exactly the sense that Edward Abbey is: he was for some things that environmentalists are for. And in his own time hewas just as much of an embarrassment to movements, just as uncongenial to the group spirit, as Edward Abbey is, and for the same reasons: he was working as an autobiographer, and his great effort was to conserve himself as a human being in the best and fullest sense. As a political activist, he was a poor excuse. What was the political value of his forlorn, solitary taxpayer’s revolt against the Mexican War? What was politic about his defense of John Brown or his insistence that abolitionists should free the wage slaves of Massachusetts? Who could trust the diplomacy of a man who would pray:
Great God, I ask thee for no other pelf
Than that I may not disappoint myself;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And next in value, which thy kindness lends,
That I may greatly disappoint my friends . . .
The trouble, then, with Mr. Abbey—a trouble, I confess, that I am disposed to like—is that he speaks insistently as himself. In any piece of his, we are apt to have to deal with all of him, caprices and prejudices included. He does not simply submit to our criticism, as does any author who publishes; he virtually demands it. And so his defenders, it seems to me, are obliged to take him seriously, to assume that he generally means what he says, and, instead of apologizing for him, to acknowledge that he is not always right or always fair—which, of course, he is not. Who is? For me, part of the experience of reading him has always been, at certain points, that of arguing with him.
My defense of him begins with the fact that I want him to argue with, as I want to argue with Thoreau. If we value these men and their work, we are compelled to acknowledge that such writers submit to standards raised, though not necessarily made, by themselves. We, with our standards, must take them as they come, defend ourselves against them if we can, agree with them if we must. If we want to avail ourselves of the considerable usefulness and the considerable pleasure of Edward Abbey, we will have to like him as he is. If we cannot like him as he is, then we will have to ignore him, if we can. My own notion is that he is going to become harder to ignore, and for good reasons, not the least of which is that the military-industrial state is working as hard as it can to prove him right.
It seems virtually certain that no reader can read much of Mr. Abbey without finding some insult to something that he or she approves of. Mr. Abbey is very hard, for instance, on “movements” —the more solemn and sacred they are, the more they tempt his ridicule. He is a great irreverence of sacred cows. There is not one sacred cow of the sizable herd still on the range that he has left ungoosed. He makes his rounds as unerringly as the local artificial inseminator. This is one of his leitmotifs. He gets around to them all. His are glancing blows, mainly, delivered on the run, with a weapon no more lethal than his middle finger. The following is fairly typical:
The essays in Down the River are meant to serve as antidotes to despair. Despair leads to boredom, electronic games, computer hacking, poetry and other bad habits.
That example is appropriate here because it passingly gooses one of my own sacred cows: poetry. I am inclined to be tickled rather than bothered by Mr. Abbey’s way with consecrated bovines, and this instance does not stop me long—though I do pause to think that I, anyhow, would not equate poetry with electronic pastimes. But if one is proposing to take Mr. Abbey seriously, one finally must stop and deal with such matters. Am I, then, a defender of “poetry”? The answer, inevitably, is no; I am a defender of some poems. Any human product or activity that humans defend as a category becomes, by that very fact, a sacred cow—in need, by the same fact, of an occasional goosing.
Some instances of this activity are funnier than others, and readers will certainly disagree as to the funniness of any given instance. But whatever one’s opinion, in particular or in general, of Mr. Abbey’s blasphemies against sacred cows, one should be wary of the assumption that they are merely humorous or (as has been suggested) merely “image-making” stunts calculated to sell articles to magazines. They are, I think, gestures or reflexes of his independence, his refusal to act as a spokesman or a property of any group or movement, however righteous. This refusal keeps the real dimension and gravity of our problems visible to him, and keeps him from falling for easy answers. You never hear Mr. Abbey proposing that the fulfillment of this or that public program, or the achievement of the aims of this or that movement, or the “liberation” of this or that group, will save us. The absence in him of such propositions is one of his qualities, and it is a welcome relief.
The funniest and the best of these assaults are the several that are launched head-on against the most exalted of all the modern sacred cows: the self. Mr. Abbey’s most endearing virtue as an autobiographer is his ability to stand aside from himself and recount his most outrageous and self-embarrassing goof-ups, with a bemused and gleeful curiosity, as if they were the accomplishments not merely of somebody else, but of an altogether different kind of creature. I envy him that. It is, of course, a high achievement. How absurd we humans in fact are! How misapplied is our self-admiration—as we can readily see by observing other self-admiring humans! How richly just and healthful is self-ridicule! And yet how few of us are capable of it. I certainly find it hard. My own goof-ups seem to me to have received merciless publicity when my wife has found out about them.
Because Mr. Abbey is so humorous and unflinching an autobiographer, he knows better than to be uncritical about anything human. That is why he holds sacred cows in no reverence. And it is at least partly why his reverence for nature is authentic: he does not go to nature to seek himself or flatter himself, nor does he speak of nature to display his sensitivity. He is understandably reluctant to reveal himself as a religious man, but the fact occasionally appears plainly enough: “It seems clear at last that our love for the natural world—Nature—is the only means by which we can requite God’s obvious love for it.”
The most interesting brief example of Abbey humor that I remember is his epigram on “gun control” in his essay “The Right to Arms.” “If guns are outlawed,”
