THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc. DATE: Sunday, July 16, 1995 TAG: 9507130593 SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL TYPE: Book Review SOURCE: Bill Ruehlmann LENGTH: Medium: 80 lines
EDWARD ABBEY (1927-1989) looked like Lincoln and thought like Jesse James.
``I am - I really am - an extremist,'' he wrote, ``one who lives and loves by choice far out on the very verge of things, on the edge of the abyss, where this world falls off into the depths of another.''
Let me give you an example. Abbey was, among other things, a park ranger at Arches National Monument near Moab, Utah. One day some colleagues from the Bureau of Public Roads showed up to survey a path for wide pavement that would bring in 30 times as many tourists as before behind the wheels of motorized vehicles. ``Parks,'' went conventional government wisdom, ``are for people.''
Sure, said Abbey, and provided the survey chief and his assistants with water.
He watched them head off into the sunset, their mission accomplished.
Then he systematically pulled up five miles of wooden stakes and hid each one of the ribbon streamers that marked them.
``Let the people walk,'' Abbey said.
He was a beautiful renegade and he wrote some beautiful books: Desert Solitaire, Black Sun, The Monkey Wrench Gang. In our morally incorrect '90s era, when personal conviction seems driven by team consensus and everybody's either in a support group or on a committee, Abbey's stubborn individuality seems as prickly and precious as the saguaro cacti he lived among. Born anonymous in the Allegheny Mountains, he died a literary lion near Oracle, Ariz.
Now editor John Macrae has compiled a generous selection of Abbey's work, arranged chronologically: The Serpents of Paradise: A Reader (Henry Holt, 400 pp., $25). The result is a cranky hymn of a book.
Here are harps: ``Lavender clouds sail like a fleet of ships across the pale green dawn; each cloud, planed flat on the wind, has a base of fiery gold.''
Here are horns: ``I've already been called fascist, racist, elitist as well as communist, terrorist, misanthrope, bleeding-heart, etc. so often it doesn't bother me anymore. To hell with all these petty, taboo-ridden dogmatic minds.''
Here are drums: ``Since motherhood really is a full-time, difficult, highly skilled and essential human occupation (I speak from personal experience), women who do not wish to be mothers should not have babies.''
Abbey believed writers should be critics of the society in which they live - critics of the critics, if need be. He saw writers as heroes, ``moral leaders, wanted or not.'' Their job has never been to make us feel good about ourselves but to create the intellectual discomfort that pushes us toward a kind of progress that cannot be measured by technology, popularity or sheer physical size.
``I believe that words count,'' Abbey said, ``that writing matters, that poems, essays and novels - in the long run - make a difference.''
He liked authors who said no in thunder - Twain, Thoreau, Solzhenitsyn. He disliked authors who produced ``boutique shopping-mall literary soap opera.'' Abbey found Kurt Vonnegut ``provocative, meaningful, suggestive''; he found John Updike ``fussy, prissy, precious.''
Abbey himself wrote ``to oppose, resist and sabotage the contemporary drift toward a global technocratic police state,'' which for him meant that unbridled American capitalism was as much an enemy as Soviet communism.
In 1986 Abbey was awarded a major prize from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and he promptly turned it down. ``It's too late,'' he said. ``Besides, prizes are for little boys.''
Abbey didn't much care for collegiality. He wasn't a follower; he wasn't a demagogue, either. He wasn't in favor of the feds or the militia.
Poet-farmer Wendell Berry wrote of his departed friend:
I praise the joyous rage
That justified his page.
The angry voice is stilled now, but we can still hear its insistent echo whenever anybody says what the prevailing system really needs is not oil but a monkey wrench. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. ILLUSTRATION: Photo of book cover
by CNB