by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

Edward Abbey’s Desert Style: “Clear, Intense and Infinitely Suggestive”

     Found on the Recent Acquisitions shelf in the suddenly vacant Lauinger Library: All the Wild That Remains, by David Gessner – a just-published double portrait of Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey as the Emerson and Thoreau of writing about the American West, with an account of the author’s own experience of the West threading the two portraits together.    

Here’s a passage, remarkable in its vitality and sensitivity, about the process whereby Abbey, installed as a ranger of a kind at Arches National Monument in eastern Utah, pushed past his apprentice-y first novel and made himself into a writer of a particular kind:

In 1956, the same year that  Brave Cowboy was published, he spent his first season as a ranger at Arches.  On August 26 of that summer he wrote: “This is the thing.  The desert is a good place – clean, honest, dangerous, uncluttered, strong, open, big, vibrant with legend.”  In his journals, and in his subsequent nonfiction, he retains some of his early, sensual romanticism: “The more I dim my eyes over print and frazzle my brain over abstract ideas, the more I want and appreciate the delight of being basically an animal wrapped in a sensitive skin: sex, the resistance of rock, the taste and touch of snow, the feel of sun, good wine and rare beefsteak and the company of friends around a fire with guitar and lousy old cowboy songs.”  Counterbalancing this is something harder, something leaner.  He is learning this leanness in part from the craft of fiction, but also from the desert itself, which seems to be offering up its own aesthetic.  Three years later, on August 15, 1959, Abbey, now living in Albuquerque, described what it would mean to “write like the desert”:

“Conrad.  To write of – no, to do for the desert what he did for – of – the sea.  But I must avoid his rich flowing organ-valved almost lush (tropical) style.  Emulate his passion for the exact.  My style: something almost harsh, bitter, ugly.  The rough compressed, asymmetrical, laconic, cryptic.  Cactus.  Old Juniper.  Rock, dry, heat, the stark contour.  

“NO FOG.  NO GODDAMED FOG.

“Combine intensity (not density) with clarity.   Clear and intense.  Like the desert landscape, the desert light, the desert atmosphere – clear, intense and infinitely suggestive.  Hard distinctions, precise outlines – but each thing suggesting, somehow, everything else.  As in truth each thing does.”

This was a beautiful, and incredibly self-aware, description of one of the effects that Abbey would create in his coming work.

So it was, and is.   Abbey would match his style to the desert, and to the garrulous solitude he attained in the desert:

The key in fact would be the embracing of the first-person voice, the voice he had long been sharpening in the journals.

  1. etr-gu posted this