Learning More About Edward Abbey

Two biographies about "Cactus Ed"

commentary and book review by Bruce Pavlik

Adventures With Ed: A Portrait of Abbey by Jack Loeffler

Edward Abbey: A Life by James M. Cahalan

I have long been a fan of Edward Abbey's writings. Beginning with Desert Solitaire and continuing on through The Monkey Wrench Gang, The Journey Home, Black Sun, Fire on the Mountain and other titles, I eagerly read and re-read his works, and quoted from them extensively when I was teaching environmental education. I found his writings (especially his non-fiction) to be lucid, intelligent, thoughtful, and powerful. He simply made sense to me.

He also wrote about places that I had been, and a lot of places that I had never seen, but fueled a desire to go see them. The list continues to grow.

It was a shock to learn of his death, back in 1989. Like most of his fans, I had no idea he was ill (how would I have known?) and collected several obituaries and articles about him. He was young, 62, and it was a loss for the literary community as well as environmentalists across the country who admired his viewpoints, opinions, and shared his love of all things wild.

Turns out, Ed Abbey was wild in more ways than one. He hailed from western Pennsylvania, the northern Appalachians where the winters are cold and the summers can be oppressive with the heat, humidity, and insects. It was on a solo trip across the United States when he was still in high school that he became enamored of the Southwest, especially the red rock country near the four corners region. Following a stint in the Army, where he served as an MP in post-World War II Italy, he enrolled in college, first at Indiana [PA] State Teacher's College near his hometown, and then at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Abbey excelled at writing, making excellent marks in English and Philosophy. He went on to graduate school, eventually completing an MA degree in Philosophy, studying and writing about anarchism, a theme that would later emerge in his writings.

While he was working on his novels he worked at several low paying jobs in Washington DC, New York City, and New Jersey, but he kept returning to the Southwest. Landing a job as a ranger at Arches National Park launched him on a seasonal career with NPS and the US Forest Service, working for sixteen seasons across the country, from Death Valley throughout Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, Montana and as far east as Everglades National Park. It gave him the opportunity to explore these "lands of enchantment," meet kindred spirits, and write some of his best works. Abbey even spent a season living in Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco (a city he loved) and studied with the venerable Wallace Stegner at Stanford University.

Abbey not only wrote about wild places, he eagerly explored them. He took careful, copious notes, which later were reworked into his books. He traveled far afield, into Mexico, north to Alaska, and south to Australia on commission for National Geographic magazine.

The two biographical works Adventures With Ed (Loeffler) and Edward Abbey: A Life (Cahalan) show the rigors of life as an author and artist, as well as free spirit who cherished freedom above all else. It did not come easy, nor without a toll: on his family, his wives (he was married five times), and his friends. He wore out several pickup trucks, dozens of hiking boots, and perhaps even an FBI agent or two, who were busy compiling a dossier on the firebrand environmentalist who coined the phrase "monkey wrenching" and who engaged in a few extracurricular activities (such as burning down billboards).

Cahalan, a professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (the former state college that Abbey attended), has written a very credible, objective, and well researched biography. There are many myths that Cahalan dispatches, creating a character much more complex and difficult than is revealed in Abbey's writings. For example, Cahalan strives to revise the notion that Abbey was a misogynist, citing his many personal and professional relationships with women. Well, that may be true (it still seems open to interpretation) but one would never mistake Abbey for a feminist. The biographer pulls no punches, and some ardent fans of Cactus Ed may well squirm at some of the information contained within the covers of this book. Some of it is unflattering, and parts are downright upsetting. A writer's public persona and a writer's private life are two very different things, and while one might be able to discern from the published works something of the author's character, it is from his journal entries, letters and interviews with family and friends that the fuller picture emerges.

And it ain't always pretty.

Loeffler was a close friend of Abbey, and his account is more subjective and kind to his subject. Loeffler starts out writing a biography which contains some musings and interpretations on Abbey's motives that I found to be questionable. After all, it's sometimes hard for us to understand our own reasons for doing things, let alone someone else divining our deepest feelings. It's when Loeffler begins to recount his many travels and exploits with his old friend that the book becomes a pleasure to read. They laugh and joke and philosophize like any two men who share common interests and enjoy each other's company.

Of course, Abbey never claimed to be anything that he was not. He stated, in print, that he was not a naturalist, for example, but a lover of unfenced country, the open range. He was uncomfortable with his following, the legions of readers who sought out his approval, his friendship. He loved solitude, his lonely fire lookouts, canyon country and desert, where he could think, write, hike, explore, and ponder.