Edward Abbey: A Life (review)

James M. Cahalan sets the agenda and the tone of his detailed biography of Edward Abbey in the first four sentences of his introduction, "From Home to Oracle." He writes: "This is a book in which I seek to separate fact from fiction and reality from myth. I have to tell readers [my italics] that Edward Abbey was not born in Home, Pennsylvania; he resided in several other places before his family moved to Home. And he never lived in Oracle, Arizona. Yet he convinced almost everyone [my italics] that he had been 'born in Home' and 'lived in Oracle'" [xi]. Later Professor Cahalan announces: "Abbey knew [my italics] that he had not been born in Home" [xi]. As if there were any doubts left, Cahalan continues: "My intention is not to perpetuate the mythology surrounding Abbey, but to examine it and to understand the actual man and his work. . . . I intend and hope that this book is useful to readers who are already knowledgeable about Abbey and want to know more as well as to others whose impressions (whether positive or negative) may be too simple and in need of correction or complication" (xii). Cahalan goes on to reveal to all of these potential readers that there were two Edward Abbeys—the public and the private. And while Cahalan admits he never knew Abbey personally—a strength which he believes will make him objective or "at least" impartial—he states "he did get to know Abbey intimately by studying everything" in his research (xii-xiv).

So who will benefit from this gradually paced demythologizing of one of the most legendary and deliberately paradoxical writers and personalities in recent American letters? As Cahalan says, everyone who has an interest in the subject will benefit from his labor and its results. On that basis Edward Abbey: A Life is to be recommended to anyone who knows of and enjoys Abbey and his work, but the biography is as much a research tool as A Life to be dipped into with the help of over eighty pages of excellent notes, bibliographies, acknowledgments and an index provided by the scholar. But can this not particularly critical biography be read with pleasure, let alone enthusiasm? Probably not by its primary audience who bring their own kinds of enthusiasm to its subject, and unfortunately not by many in its secondary audience who perhaps would have read little or no Abbey beforehand. That makes the biography a disappointment but not without the kind of usefulness the author clearly intended.

The book's organization into ten chapters is chronological as would be expected. Every reader will have to decide which chapters are the most interesting and insightful. Chapters two through four (27-96), covering Abbey's years of development as a writer and less so his maturation as a person, are the least interesting despite Cahalan's efforts to make them more than just informational. He calls attention to how the Southwest discovered and explored by Abbey in the 1950s barely exists today and how Abbey can be related as much to the culture of the Beat writers of that period as to the classic naturalists and environmentalists with whom he is normally associated.

On the other hand I found Cahalan's first and last chapters, "The Boy from Home: 1927-1944" on Abbey's parents, his siblings and his upbringing (3-26) and "One Life at a Time, Please: 1985-1989" (233-61) on the writing of The Fool's Progress and his approaching death the best written and the most moving. Here the biographer manages to exceed his intended purpose of stating objectively only the facts by revealing his own deep feelings for Abbey. Cahalan who is a Professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania lives and writes in the midst of the original Abbey Country and he makes one of his truest contributions to Abbey's...