{"id":9405,"date":"2015-12-09T06:48:49","date_gmt":"2015-12-09T13:48:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=9405"},"modified":"2015-12-09T06:48:49","modified_gmt":"2015-12-09T13:48:49","slug":"western-icons-stegner-and-abbey-never-more-relevant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2015\/12\/western-icons-stegner-and-abbey-never-more-relevant\/","title":{"rendered":"Western icons Stegner and Abbey ‘never more relevant’"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"New<\/a>

Edward Abbey, left, and Wallace Stegner are the subjects of a new book by David Gessner. (Stegner photo by Paul Conklin.)<\/p><\/div>\n

David Gessner\u2019s new book, \u201cAll the Wild That Remains,\u201d is at once a celebration, biography and comparison of two of the West\u2019s seminal writer-conservationists\u2014Edward Abbey and Wallace Stegner.<\/p>\n

Gessner is a self-described \u201capprentice literary westerner, as common as Sagebrush,\u201d who discovered the work of these authors after coming West as a teenager and later as a young man. After spending more than a year trying to read everything the two men wrote in preparation for the book, Gessner found that Abbey and Stegner, \u201cfar from being regional or outdated, have never been more relevant.\u201d The two were particularly prescient, it would seem, in regard to the kinds of environmental issues we face today and how we got here.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the region had a literary Mount Rushmore,\u201d Gessner says, \u201ctheir faces would be chiseled on it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not that they are particularly celebrated outside the West. \u201cMore than once,\u201d says Gessner of times he brought up the two writers back East, \u201cI had been asked: \u2018Wallace Stevens? Edward Albee?\u2019 No, I would patiently explain. Wallace Stegner<\/em> and Edward Abbey<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The two authors shared a passionate conservation ethic but had rather different ways of going about protecting their beloved places. Gessner\u2019s book is perhaps guided by the question of whether we should rate Stegner\u2019s or Abbey\u2019s ideology as the best fit for the West today.<\/p>\n

The comparison is an immediately interesting one for me. The \u201cbuttoned-down\u201d and soft-spoken Stegner (\u201cWally\u201d to his friends and students) was the more formal of the two. His novels, biographies and histories excelled at developing a sharp sense of place while also giving a clear sense of the big picture\u2014of historical and cultural forces that converge to shape people and places.<\/p>\n

Stegner\u2019s best-known novel, \u201cAngle of Repose,\u201d won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 and was my introduction to Stegner. I remember being rather awed by the novel\u2019s realism, scope and power.<\/p>\n

As you might expect from his appearance, Stegner wasn\u2019t one to waste time; his regimen of writing in the morning and teaching in the afternoon was as steady as a Swiss clock. He couldn\u2019t abide idleness or the (to him) phony and irresponsible philosophy of the 1960s counterculture\u2014claiming that \u201cwhat makes hedonists so angry when they think about overachievers is that the overachievers, without drugs or orgies, have more fun.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>And then there was Edward Abbey, briefly a student of Stegner\u2019s at Stanford\u2019s creative writing program, and probably just the kind of hedonist Stegner was thinking of. Abbey wrote novels and nonfiction that similarly excelled at depicting the Western landscape and railed at its exploitation, yet where Stegner was subtle and restrained, Abbey was outrageous and irreverent. To Gessner, \u201cAbbey is more than any writer I know, this side of Montaigne, alive on the page.\u201d<\/p>\n

Abbey loved the land but loved to throw his empty beer cans out the window of his truck on cross-country trips, too, and wasn\u2019t too keen on shaving or withholding his opinion about you. He extolled manliness to a sometimes tiresome (even misogynistic) degree. He wrote, above all, to entertain his friends and exasperate his enemies, and he certainly succeeded at both.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Monkey Wrench Gang,\u201d probably Abbey\u2019s best-known novel, is the story of a group of Western dissidents who team up to fight the developers, dam builders and clear-cutters who are despoiling the landscape of the Southwest. The monkey wrenchers pour sugar into the gas tanks of bulldozers, blow up bridges, drink a lot of booze and generally wreak havoc in the name of a kind of Robin Hood eco-justice. Many of the characters were based on friends of Abbey, and some of their escapades were (by Abbey\u2019s admission) based on real ones that Abbey had taken part in himself.<\/p>\n

Contrast this approach to Stegner\u2019s more measured approach\u2014writing conservation-minded books or working with Stuart Udall, secretary of the Interior Department under President Kennedy\u2014and you have a pretty damned interesting and hilarious juxtaposition.<\/p>\n

In the tradition of many a good nature read (including those of Stegner and Abbey), this one has its own journal-like story to carry forward, a story in which Gessner travels across the states to visit some of the relevant places and people. This includes a stop at the Kentucky home of Wendell Berry (a former student of Stegner\u2019s), Abbey\u2019s hometown of Home, Penn., and Stegnerian haunts in Saskatchewan, Salt Lake City and Vermont.<\/p>\n

\"Abbey-Steg<\/a>Some of the many funny parts of the book come when Gessner tracks down some of Abbey\u2019s disciples\u2014like Doug Peacock, the inveterate wild man upon whom George Washington Hayduke of \u201cThe Monkey Wrench Gang is\u201d based and whose doormat reads \u201cCome Back With A Warrant.\u201d Or Ken Sleight, the inspiration for Seldom Seen Smith, also from \u201cThe Monkey Wrench Gang.\u201d<\/p>\n

After visiting several of Abbey\u2019s devotees you begin to get a sense (in Gessner\u2019s words) of the cult that has kept his books alive. Paraphrasing David Quammen, Gessner says that Abbey had the power to change lives, \u201ccould make a salesman in Ohio buy hiking boots and head west.\u201d Despite never getting noticed by the Eastern arbiters of literary taste (a group he seemed to intentionally spit in the eyes of), Abbey\u2019s stock continues to grow mostly by word of mouth.<\/p>\n

One of the most interesting discussions in the book comes from Terry Tempest Williams, whom Gessner was not able to visit, but who wrote a letter to the author in which she said, \u201cIn so many ways Ed was the conservative, Wally, forever the radical.\u201d<\/p>\n

The line does at first seem counterintuitive when you think of Cactus Ed, as he was known, a kind of poster boy of counterculture who delighted in breaking social norms and trampling on decorum, and Wally, the polite and well-dressed scholar who frowned on the student protestors at his beloved Stanford and rolled his eyes at the 1960s counterculture.<\/p>\n

But take a closer look. Stegner was the one who crafted sympathetic and believable female characters; was not given to misogynistic or racist outbursts; had even written an admirable book about racism in America called \u201cOne Nation\u201d; was the one committed to rootedness and community as an antidote to the West\u2019s recurring problems with the loot-and-scoot mentality; and was (in Gessner\u2019s words) the one who \u201cwould never buy into the fashionable belief, exemplified in everyone from Hemingway to Wolfe, that great art and bad behavior went together.\u201d As may be obvious, I\u2019m leaning towards Williams\u2019 view, but I\u2019m not sure that Gessner ever quite endorses it.<\/p>\n

Gessner does a fair job of weighing the two men\u2019s writing and he is a good reader and critic, yet I am left with the sense that he has an especially soft spot for Abbey, perhaps even a part of himself that can\u2019t quite forgive Stegner for combing his hair or tucking in his shirt. He fought The Man, sure, but damned if he doesn\u2019t look just like him!<\/p>\n

Gessner rates Abbey\u2019s \u201cDesert Solitaire\u201d highest of any of the two men\u2019s books (I would have picked Stegner\u2019s \u201cWolf Willow\u201d), and though, like many Abbey fans, Gessner resorts to some pretty difficult gymnastics in defending the wild man, I appreciate Gessner\u2019s overall fairness.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter all, the modern biographical impulse is to tear down,\u201d says Gessner, who doesn\u2019t appear to be interested in that dishonorable trade.<\/p>\n

Stegner had the more direct connection to Montana, having spent a few years of his itinerant childhood in Great Falls which, compared to the roughness of Saskatchewan, was dazzlingly civilized in 1920\u2014boasting sidewalks, flush toilets and green lawns. Apparently, it was enough of a connection for the editors of \u201cThe Last Best Place\u201d to anthologize Stegner as a Montana author.<\/p>\n

Abbey doesn\u2019t seem to have any real connection to Montana, though Gessner does quote from a lecture Cactus Ed delivered at the University of Montana in 1985 in which he said, \u201cWestern cattlemen are no more than welfare parasites.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ah, Ed, there you go again. But don\u2019t get too comfortable, even if you agree heartily. If you continue to page through Abbey\u2019s books, you\u2019ll probably soon find him ridiculing your particular sacred cow, too\u2014whether it be yoga, poetry, jazz or those (in Abbey\u2019s opinion) effete Eastern hacks like Updike, Roth or Mailer who couldn\u2019t write their way out of a tarpaper shack.<\/p>\n

As Stegner said in a letter to his son, warning of exaggeration in writing, \u201cOf course there is always Abbey, but Abbey is outrageous, deliberately, and even when he\u2019s throwing beer cans out into the Montana landscape he is making a point about the landscape, not about himself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whatever their differences, however, the two men were real fighters in protection of the West they loved, albeit in different ways. Even with widely disparate styles, they are often trying to say the same thing.<\/p>\n

In a letter to the poet Gary Snyder, Stegner had said, \u201cI have spent a lot of days and weeks at the desks and in the meetings that ultimately save red-woods, and I have to say that I never saw on the firing line any of the mystical drop-outs or meditators.\u201d<\/p>\n

Abbey, too, had an opinion to share with Snyder, and I can\u2019t resist including it here.<\/p>\n

\u201cI like your work,\u201d Abbey said, \u201cexcept for all the Zen bullshit.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for whose approach to conservation wins out in Gessner\u2019s eyes, you\u2019ll just have to pick up a copy to find out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Gessner\u2019s new book, \u201cAll the Wild That Remains,\u201d is at once a celebration, biography and comparison of two of the West\u2019s seminal writer-conservationists\u2014Edward Abbey and Wallace Stegner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":68,"featured_media":9406,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[3483,846,3485,3480,3484,3486,3482,3481,3487],"class_list":["post-9405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","tag-david-gessner","tag-david-quammen","tag-doug-peacock","tag-edward-abbey","tag-gary-snyder","tag-ken-sleight","tag-terry-tempest-williams","tag-wallace-stegner","tag-wendell-berry","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/68"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9405\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}