Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey

First published: 1968

Type of work: Nature/autobiography

Time of work: The mid-twentieth century

Locale: Arches National Monument, Utah, and the American Southwest

Principal Personage:

• Edward Abbey, an American novelist and conservationist

Form and Content

When Desert Solitaire first appeared in 1968, Edward Abbey was an established novelist. His second novel, The Brave Cowboy: An Old Tale in a New Time (1956), had been translated by Dalton Trumbo into a successful film, Lonely Are the Brave, in 1962, starring Kirk Douglas as Abbey’s anachronistic hero, Jack Burns. Burns, who loves the land and the freedom of his life as an itinerant sheepherder, finds that he is a man out of step with his time. The encroachment of the city upon the surrounding countryside, aided by technological progress, becomes a metaphor for the destruction of a way of life characterized by personal freedom, physical labor, and respect for the land. Abbey picks up these themes again in Fire on the Mountain (1962), in which John Vogelin battles the United States government to preserve his ranch, which has been earmarked for use as a missile test site.

There is an urgency in Fire on the Mountain that is not present in The Brave Cowboy. The evils of technology masquerading in the guise of civilization have become better organized and gained momentum; time is running out. Thus, Abbey feels compelled to address the reader directly, to convey his love of the land and his anger at its destruction. Desert Solitaire is at once a paean to the wondrous beauty of the land, an elegy for its death at the hands of what Abbey labels “Industrial Tourism,” and an angry indictment of those who would exploit it for pleasure or profit.

Such shifts in subject and mood make for radical shifts in style. Abbey’s prose moves from the lofty to the vulgar, from the reasoned argument to the vitriolic attack, with deliberate disregard for stylistic consistency. Thus, assigning Desert Solitaire to a genre presents a difficulty that would please its iconoclastic author. It does not fit neatly. Abbey writes of nature, but he is not a naturalist. He defends the wilderness, but he is not an environmentalist. Evidently, Abbey is Abbey, and Desert Solitaire is an autobiographical work that contains Abbey’s views on a variety of subjects from the problems of the United States Park Service to a personal metaphysics.

Ostensibly, Desert Solitaire stems from Abbey’s three seasons with the Park Service at Arches National Monument, in the desert canyonlands of southern Utah. In the introduction to the work, Abbey explains that he is combining the experiences of these three summers into one for narrative consistency. He declares that the first two summers were good, but that the last season spent at the Arches was marred by the advent of “Industrial Tourism.” Therefore, the reader is not surprised to find in the early chapters a sense of wonder and beauty and in the later chapters a sense of loss and rage.

The book is arranged in a series of personal essays that range from an evocative description of the land and its flora and fauna in “The First Morning” to the gruesome description of a decaying corpse in “The Dead Man at Grandview Point.” Each chapter is a separate essay, linked to the others by a pervasive sense of passion and humor. The voice of loss and anger is balanced by a saving irony that the author frequently turns on himself and his narrative. Abbey gently mocks himself with chapters titled “The Serpents of Paradise” and “Cowboys and Indians.” Yet he never wants his readers to forget that his efforts have a seriousness of purpose that transcends style, that attention must be paid to the impact of commercial and industrial growth on the physical and spiritual landscape of the American Southwest.

I quite agree that much of the book will seem coarse, rude, bad-tempered, violently prejudiced, unconstructive—even frankly antisocial in its point of view. Serious critics, serious librarians, serious associate professors of English will if they read this work dislike it intensely; at least I hope so. To others I can only say that if the book has virtues they cannot be disentangled from the faults; that there is a way of being wrong which is also sometimes necessarily right.

Despite Abbey’s protestations, Desert Solitaire’s serious defenders as well as detractors are legion. It has become one of the focal points in the debate over the use and abuse of land west of the one hundredth meridian.

Critical Context

Despite the frequently militant stance of its author, Desert Solitaire clearly reflects concerns of certain essayists who have gone before him. Moreover, Abbey is not unaware of his predecessors and acknowledges his debt in a bibliographic paragraph toward the end of the work. He claims to be undertaking an original task, however, among those who write about deserts, for he wishes to discover “the peculiar quality or character of the desert that distinguishes it, in spiritual appeal, from other forms of landscape . . . if it exists at all and is not simply an illusion.” This singularity of essence tends to resolve itself as a matter of preference, for which Abbey is characteristically unapologetic. The attempt to discover transcendent truth in nature, however, is ground that has been plowed before, stretching at least as far back as Henry David Thoreau’s Walden: Or, Life in the Woods (1854). The landscape may differ, but the philosophical undertaking remains essentially the same. Thoreau entered the mystery through Walden and environs, whereas Abbey passes through the Arches in search of the bare bones of existence.

The themes of transcendent insight and spiritual union with the natural world are pervasive and recurrent in the works of Western naturalists. In the writings of John Muir, immersion in nature is likened to a baptism. The artificial duality between man and nature breaks down in the intensity of the experience. Yet Muir does not sacrifice science to mysticism; rather, the emotional and aesthetic experience heightens and enriches scientific inquiry. In this respect, Muir is one of Abbey’s direct antecedents. Although Abbey is not a naturalist, Desert Solitaire is filled with observations of the trained eye. Whereas Muir enriches science with personal communion, Abbey’s scientific observations serve the eloquence of his prose. He catalogs and caresses the names of the rocks; his ecology is poetry. His grasp of scientific facts lends validity to the thrust of his ideas. For Abbey, observation is a means to a truth that is larger than fact. Yet he is an inadequate mystic.

In The Land of Little Rain (1903), Mary Austin discovers the transcendent self in communion with nature. She writes of the “Deep-self,” her term for deeper awareness that comes from the realization that one’s self and the environment are an inseparable whole. In The Land of Journey’s Ending (1924), she recounts reaching this level of consciousness in the observation of a stand of juniper trees. Following in her footsteps, Abbey sets about the daily observation of a juniper tree. From coming to know its essence, he surmises that he may penetrate into the essence of the desert itself. Nothing makes itself apparent. “I presently suspect,” he writes, that “its surface is also the essence.” For Abbey, however, that appears to be enough; the reality of the tree becomes the bedrock of his existence. He refuses to be drawn into the “pathetic fallacy.” He may yearn to be a romantic, but he eschews Romanticism. He insists on the brutal fact of the observable. He resists the temptation to remake nature into a more yielding and gracious pattern or to succumb to the view that the human condition is somehow special and separate from that of the natural environment, from the wilderness, from the desert and from Earth itself. Thus, the desert becomes a part of the temple of existence in which the “earthiest” Abbey worships.

Austin’s voice was prophetic when, at a conference of prominent Southwesterners in 1927, she alone spoke against the construction of Boulder Dam. Edward Abbey is her spiritual heir. Her voice was restrained, however, tempered by her faith in a vision of a coming civilization that would exist in harmony with the land. This vision no longer sustains the writers of the Western nature essay; their voices have become anxious, angry, and sardonic. In The Voice of the Coyote (1949), J. Frank Dobie prefers the night cries of the coyotes to the noise of modern civilization. His friend and fellow naturalist Roy Bedichek is less restrained. He attacks the despoilers of the land; like Edward Abbey, he is filled with a sacred rage, a wounded witness to the land’s destruction. For Abbey, the time for anger and action was yesterday. His voice is that of the Old Testament prophet, come from the desert to call down destruction and vengeance on an errant people. The passionate voice of outrage in Desert Solitaire has become a voice for those who are grieved for the wilderness lost and who view with alarm the encroachment of the forces of commerce and industry upon what remains of the unspoiled land in the American Southwest.

Bibliography

Hepworth, James, and Gregory McNamee, eds. Resist Much, Obey Little: Some Notes on Edward Abbey, 1985.

Lyon, Thomas J. “The Nature Essay in the West,” in A Literary History of the American West, 1987. Edited by Max Westbrook et al.

McCann, Garth. Edward Abbey, 1977.

Ronald, Ann. The New West of Edward Abbey, 1982.

Standiford, Les. “Desert Places: An Exchange with Edward Abbey,” in Western Review. III (Winter, 1966), pp. 58-62.