The essays in Down the River are meant to serve as antidotes to despair. Despair leads to boredom, electronic games, computer hacking, poetry and other bad habits.
That example is appropriate here because it passingly gooses one of my own sacred cows: poetry. I am inclined to be tickled rather than bothered by Mr. Abbey’s way with consecrated bovines, and this instance does not stop me long—though I do pause to think that I, anyhow, would not equate poetry with electronic pastimes. But if one is proposing to take Mr. Abbey seriously, one finally must stop and deal with such matters. Am I, then, a defender of “poetry”? The answer, inevitably, is no; I am a defender of some poems. Any human product or activity that humans defend as a category becomes, by that very fact, a sacred cow—in need, by the same fact, of an occasional goosing.
Some instances of this activity are funnier than others, and readers will certainly disagree as to the funniness of any given instance. But whatever one’s opinion, in particular or in general, of Mr. Abbey’s blasphemies against sacred cows, one should be wary of the assumption that they are merely humorous or (as has been suggested) merely “image-making” stunts calculated to sell articles to magazines. They are, I think, gestures or reflexes of his independence, his refusal to act as a spokesman or a property of any group or movement, however righteous. This refusal keeps the real dimension and gravity of our problems visible to him, and keeps him from falling for easy answers. You never hear Mr. Abbey proposing that the fulfillment of this or that public program, or the achievement of the aims of this or that movement, or the “liberation” of this or that group, will save us. The absence in him of such propositions is one of his qualities, and it is a welcome relief.
The funniest and the best of these assaults are the several that are launched head-on against the most exalted of all the modern sacred cows: the self. Mr. Abbey’s most endearing virtue as an autobiographer is his ability to stand aside from himself and recount his most outrageous and self-embarrassing goof-ups, with a bemused and gleeful curiosity, as if they were the accomplishments not merely of somebody else, but of an altogether different kind of creature. I envy him that. It is, of course, a high achievement. How absurd we humans in fact are! How misapplied is our self-admiration—as we can readily see by observing other self-admiring humans! How richly just and healthful is self-ridicule! And yet how few of us are capable of it. I certainly find it hard. My own goof-ups seem to me to have received merciless publicity when my wife has found out about them.
Because Mr. Abbey is so humorous and unflinching an autobiographer, he knows better than to be uncritical about anything human. That is why he holds sacred cows in no reverence. And it is at least partly why his reverence for nature is authentic: he does not go to nature to seek himself or flatter himself, nor does he speak of nature to display his sensitivity. He is understandably reluctant to reveal himself as a religious man, but the fact occasionally appears plainly enough: “It seems clear at last that our love for the natural world—Nature—is the only means by which we can requite God’s obvious love for it.”
The most interesting brief example of Abbey humor that I remember is his epigram on “gun control” in his essay “The Right to Arms.” “If guns are outlawed,” he says, “only the government will have guns.” That sentence, of course, is a parody of the “gun lobby” bumper sticker: “If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.” It seems at first glance only another example of sacred cow goosing—howbeit an unusually clever one, for it gooses both sacred cows involved in this conflict: the idea that, because guns are used in murders, they should be “controlled” by the government, and the idea that the Second Amendment to the Bill of Rights confers a liberty that is merely personal. Mr. Abbey’s sentence, masquerading as an instance of his well-known “iconoclasm,” slices through the distractions of the controversy to the historical and constitutional roots of the issue. The sentence is, in fact, an excellent gloss on the word “militia” in the Second Amendment. And so what might appear at first to be merely an “iconoclastic” joke at the expense of two public factions becomes, on examination, the expression of a respectable political fear and an honorable political philosophy, a statement that the authors of our Constitution would have recognized and welcomed. The epigram is thus a product of wit of the highest order, richer than the excellent little essay that contains it.
Humor, in Mr. Abbey’s work, is a function of his outrage, and is therefore always answering to necessity. Without his humor, his outrage would be intolerable—as, without his outrage, his humor would often be shallow or self-exploitive. The indispensable work of his humor, as I see it, is that it keeps bringing the whole man into the job of work. Often, the humor is not so much a property of the argument at hand as it is a property of the stance from which the argument issues.
Mr. Abbey writes as a man who has taken a stand. He is an interested writer. This exposes him to the charge of being prejudiced, and prejudiced he certainly is. He is prejudiced against tyranny over both humanity and nature. He is prejudiced against sacred cows, the favorite pets of tyrants. He is prejudiced in favor of democracy and freedom. He is prejudiced in favor of an equitable and settled domestic life. He is prejudiced in favor of the wild creatures and their wild habitats. He is prejudiced in favor of charitable relations between humanity and nature. He has other prejudices too, but I believe that those are the main ones. All of his prejudices, major and minor, identify him as he is, not as any reader would have him be. Because he speaks as himself, he does not represent any group, but he stands for all of us.
He is, I think, one of the great defenders of the idea of property. His novel Fire on the Mountain is a moving, eloquent statement on behalf of the personal proprietorship of land: proper property. And this espousal of the cause of the private landowners, the small farmers and small ranchers, is evident throughout his work. But his advocacy of that kind of property is balanced by his advocacy of another kind: public property, not as “government land,” but as wild land, wild property, which, belonging to nobody, belongs to everybody, including the wild creatures native to it. He understands better than anyone I know the likelihood that one kind of property is not safe without the other. He understands, that is, the natural enmity of tyranny and wilderness. “Robin Hood, not King Arthur,” he says, “is the real hero of English legend.”
You cannot lose your land and remain free; if you keep your land, you cannot be enslaved. That old feeling began to work its way toward public principle in our country at about the time of the Stamp Act. Mr. Abbey inherits it fully. He understands it both consciously and instinctively. This, and not nature love, I think, is the real motive of his outrage. His great fear is the fear of dispossession.
But his interest is not just in landed property. His enterprise is the defense of all that properly belongs to us, including all those thoughts and works and hopes that we inherit from our culture. His work abounds in anti-intellectual jokes (he is not going to run with that pack, either), but no one can read him attentively without realizing that he has read well and widely. His love for Bach is virtually a theme of his work. His outrage often vents itself in outrageousness, and yet it is the outrage of a cultivated man—that is why it is valuable to us, and why it is interesting.
He is a cultivated man. And he is a splendid writer. Readers who allow themselves to be distracted by his jokes at their or our or his expense cheat themselves out of a treasure. The xenophobic remark that so angers Mr. Drabelle, for example, occurs in an essay, “Down the River with Henry Thoreau,” which is an excellent piece of writing—entertaining, funny some of the time, aboundingly alive and alert, variously interesting, diversely instructive. The river is the Green, in Utah; the occasion was a boat trip by Mr. Abbey and five of his friends in November 1980. During the trip he read Walden for the first time since his school days. This subjection of a human product to “the prehuman sanity of the desert” is characteristic of Mr. Abbey’s work, the result of one of