One Life at a Time, Please. - book reviews

National Review, Feb 5, 1988 by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

NEAR THE beginning of that monumental berg of English literature, Travels in Arabia Deserta, Charles M. Doughty remarks that "for the rest the sun made me an Arab, but never warped me to Orientalism." Similarly, it might be said of Edward Abbeynovelist, naturalist, essayist, and journalist-that, in his forty years in the deserts of the American Southwest, the sun has never warped him to Occidentalism, he being an enemy of the technological, industrializing, and expansionist spirit of the West, as well as of the bolo-tied, Cadillac- and Cessna-propelled Western agribusinessmen who, along with their counterparts in the real-estate and extractive-mining industries, are currently laying claim to his favorite stalking grounds, ftom Lame Deer, Montana, to Wolf Hole, Arizona. Who but Ed Abbey would fly from Tucson to the University of Montana at Missoula to deliver an address before five or six hundred cowboys, cowgirls, local ranchers, and "instant rednecks" (i.e., transplanted Easterners) titled "Free Speech: The Cowboy and His Cow" and demanding the immediate removal of all domestic animals ("these ugly, clumsy, stupid, bawling, stinking, fly-covered, shit-smeared, disease-spreading brutes") ftom the public range?

Abbey, who was raised on a poor sidehill farm in Pennsylvania, is appalled by cities: his idea of a good place to live (near) is Moab, Utah (pop. approx. 5,000), fifty miles or so from the confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers. An uncompromising "environmentalist," he loves watercourses, deserts, and rocks, and is a compulsive hugger of trees, in which his tastes are as catholic as Don Giovanni's though he probably prefers the juniper above all others ("that lone juniper, the hard turquoise-blue berries shining on the dark green of its foliage, the cedar-like incense of its redlined bark, the twisted form of its trunk and the cockeyed upreach of its limbs, the look of things that live for five hundred years-and go on living"). He loves the American West, not primarily for its legend, its history, its people past or present (Abbey would agree with Charles Marion Russell, the cowboy artist, that the pioneers of glorious memory were simply people who "destroy[ed] things and call[ed] it civilization"), but for the country itself. Yet there is much human warmth in Edward Abbey's books, and a genuine, even passionate, appreciation of human community-if not of the nation-state which, in his opinion, can "go hang" itself. The eagle, though living distantly, has a keen and watchful eye: unlike the "instant redneck," Abbey, in his aerie, has not said goodbye to all that. He keeps up. He has just said no to living there.

Abbey's position in regard to the national political scene is of relatively long tradition and strongly to the "A plague on both your houses!" "Them liberals," he quotes his Arizona neighbor as saying, "can't say the word shit even when their mouths is full of it." But don't call him a conservative, either. For Edward Abbey, a "conservative" is a person who cannot bring himself to criticize (or countenance criticism of) the contemporary democraticcapitalist system in America on the ground that to do such a thing is to give aid and comfort to America's totalitarian enemies; who is, moreover, unable (or unwilling) to recognize that, as he expresses it ("A Writer's Credo"), "the Soviet Union and the United States, while by no means morally equivalent, are basically similar in structure and purpose. Both societies are dedicated to nationalism, militarism, industrialism, technology, science, organized sport, and, above all, to the religion of growth-of endless expansion in numbers, wealth, power, time, and space." True fact, Ed. In both countries we witness what Evelyn Waugh once calle "the modern world in arms."

Like Waugh, Abbey as a social critic is primarily concerned with the need for a restitution of the fulcrum between pre-civilized and post-civilized barbarity. He likes his nature savage, but not his fellow citizens. He is against immigration to this country, for example, for tbe bluntly stated reason"these uninvited millions bring with them an alien mode of life which -let us be honest about this-is not appealing to the majority of Americans. Why not? Because we prefer democratic government for one thing; because we still hope for an open, spacious, uncrowded, and beautiful-yes, beautiful! -society, for another. The alternative, in the squalor, cruelty, and corruption of Latin America, is plain to see." (But is it plain to the general run of American politicians? Apparently not. "The conservatives love their cheap labor; the liberals love their cheap cause."-"Immigration and Liberal Taboos.") On the other hand, we in the United States (really, in the "civilized" world) seem intent upon rebarbarizing ourselves. "Never before in history have slaves been so well fed, thoroughly medicated, lavishly entertained-but we are slaves nonetheless. Our debased popular culture -television, rock music, home video, processed food, mechanical recreation, wallboard architecture-is the culture of slaves" ("Theory of Anarchy").