The West’s contemporary regional literary scene is known for
taking itself seriously. It’s a case of a cultural reaction to a
place that is the most mythologized of any in America, coupled with
a romanticism about big skies and wide open spaces. Throw in the
environmental debate and you have the makings of an old myth
morphing into a new one. A myth of a New West to replace the old
Hollywood one where John Wayne, Alan Ladd or Gary Cooper rode off
into the sunset after defeating the Indians or vanquishing the bad
guys. Now the good guy-bad guy roles are reversed, and the bad guys
are the conservatives.
The Godfather of the New Myth was the late Wallace Stegner
(1909-1993), probably the finest writer the American West ever
produced, but one ironically relegated to minor status by the
snooty New York literary establishment for the perceived sins of
regionalism (it’s interesting that Southerners such as William
Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor were never tarred with this brush),
and equated with horse opera hacks he detested like Louis L’Amour.
In 1972, Stegner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Angle of
Repose had not even been reviewed by the New York
Times, and the then Sunday Book Review Editor John Leonard
penned a nasty piece implying that John Updike’s Rabbit
Redux should have won. It was a sordid affair, and reinforced
Stegner’s loathing of East Coast culture snobs.
Though Stegner was himself a liberal and mostly agreed with the
politics of those aforementioned elitists. He was an Adlai
Stevenson-JFK cheerleader whose low point was Ronald Reagan’s
election in 1980. Stegner was an ex-Sierra Club board member who
actually believed that Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior James
Watt was more of a threat to Western civilization than Leonid
Brezhnev.
The author has influenced a generation of writers in the West
who have learned from his mistakes, and kowtow to the literary
establishment. Basically telling them what they want to hear so the
reviews will be kind, thus reinforcing new PC myths about the West
to the satisfaction of liberal urban intellectuals who don’t
otherwise have a clue.
Much of the precarious living I make as a freelancer comes from
reviewing books about the West, especially for the conservative
press. So I have a good handle on the regional literary scene, and
over the years I’ve discovered that the writers promoting the New
Myth are not an homogeneous entity, but are made up of a number of
Schools. Maybe the most prominent is the Environmentalist School,
in that all others seem to defer to it. In other words, the
literary West is predominantly Green. The Left’s main criticism of
the century and a half settlement of the region is the perceived
degradation of the environment (though the displacement of “Native
Americans” is a pea in the same pod). This has given us a trite and
oft used phrase: “the extractive West,” a term that implies that
people who make a living on the land — ranching, farming,
harvesting timber — are evil. Those awful conservatives again.
The Green West is best personified by the late Edward Abbey
(1927-1989). Abbey has been called “the Thoreau of the American
West” (Larry McMurtry). His reputation rests on Desert
Solitaire (1968), a memoir of his wanderings in the Southwest
while employed as a ranger in Arches National Monument (now Arches
National Park) in Utah before the advent of what the author called
“Industrial Tourism.” Four volumes of essays (Beyond the
Wall, Down the River, One Life at a Time,
Please, Abbey’s Road) complement the book. Abbey’s
eight novels (The Brave Cowboy, Black Sun,
Fire on the Mountain, Hayduke Lives, among
others) are frankly bad and populated by sketchily-drawn caricature
characters, and are primarily vehicles for Abbey’s enviro-activism
better executed in a more forthright way in Desert
Solitaire and the essays.
Abbey’s best known novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975,
and still in print) is a narrative train wreck, but has a unique
place in the history of American letters because it was the first
book to advocate — and is an excellent how-to manual for —
eco-terrorism. In it, four characters (George Washington Hayduke,
Bonnie Abbzug, Doc Sarvis, Seldom Seen Smith) meet on a river
rafting trip, share their alienation toward modern society and
their anarchic sensibilities, and decide to put their theories into
practice with a sabotage campaign targeting the works of Man in the
Southwest, notably with a scheme to blow up Glen Canyon Dam on the
Colorado River. Their idealistic goal is to “murder machines, not
people.”
If the latter quote sounds familiar, it’s because we hear
variations of it in the media all the time. With their arsons and
tree-spikings, pulled-up survey stakes and cut barbed wire fences -
modern eco-terrorist groups such as Earth First! (co-founded by
Abbey, by the way), the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), the Earth
Liberation Front (ELF), along with their financial backers,
including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), look
to The Monkey Wrench Gang as their Bible. The title even
inspired “monkey wrenching,” the phrase used as the general rubric
for what all these groups do.
Abbey’s legacy — whether he would accept it or not — is that
of an American Bakunin, whose spoiled, upper middle-class,
well-educated and nihilistic disciples vandalize remote logging
sites or set fire to a McDonald’s in Tucson or a Starbucks in
Seattle. Little did this son of the Pennsylvania coal fields
realize that one day he would be a patron saint of anarchy-chic,
and achieve cult status bordering on the messianic (the story goes
that upon Abbey’s death, some of his friends took his body and
buried it in a secret and remote place in the southern Arizona
desert). All this is interesting in light of the world we live in
today, post-September 11.
An Abbey apostle — but not personally — would be Rick Bass.
Though Bass seems to shun the anarcho-types (he has never written
anything in their support, to my knowledge), he is nonetheless a
fervent Green. At 44, he has already churned out some eighteen
books. He is also a regular contributor to Audubon,
Sierra, and other enviro journals. Like Abbey, his
fictions (Where the Sea Used to Be, Platte River,
The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness) are marred by
advocacy, with simplistic characters delineated either good or evil
to compliment Bass’s clichéd Green worldview. And like
Abbey, his nonfictions (The Ninemile Wolves, The Lost
Grizzlies, The Book of Yaak) are more genuinely
rendered, but unreadable in that Bass is one of those writers who
throws in everything, sparing not even the kitchen sink for
understatement. His prose is convoluted and preachy; he always
tells, never shows. But he enjoys cult status, and his vast
readership forgives his literary sins by being oblivious to
them.
Bass also has a pretentious side. Early on in The Lost
Grizzlies, he laments the dilapidated condition of his venerable
pickup truck, and hopes it doesn’t break down as he travels from
Montana to Colorado to meet other Greenies to search for rare bears
in the San Juan Mountains (in the end they don’t exist). This from
a man with royalty checks clogging his mailbox because his books
have never gone out of print. He could afford five brand new
pickups if he wanted them. He’s also fond of telling readers that
he lacks electricity in his cabin in Montana. Yeah, sure. Bass is
so unpretentious in his Enviro-political correctness as to be very
pretentious.
Bass and Abbey’s readers remind me of kids I used to know in
college in the 1970s. Everybody who was in school then remembers
them. Counterculture connoisseurs, they preferred Kerouac, Kesey,
Burroughs, Brautigan and Vonnegut to Shakespeare, Joyce, Melville,
Tolstoy, Flaubert, and Faulkner. Though a college education today
is such a mindless horror that I would imagine that they’re not
even bothering to read Brautigan and Vonnegut anymore. If they did
they would at least have a sense of humor.
And so it is in the Green West, where Luddite hacks tripping on
utopian fantasies torment us with turgid humorless prose.
