Edward Abbey (1927-1987) and Charles Bowden (1945-2014) are revered by environmentalists for their furious indictments of America’s benighted destruction of its natural resources. Both men published extensively with a focus on the deserts of the Southwest. But as far as Bowden is concerned, both of them are misunderstood by their admirers. “Environmentalism,” Bowden once said, “is an upper-middle-class, white movement aimed at absolution and preserving a lifestyle with a Volvo.”
The Red Caddy is Bowden’s growling, rambling testament to his older buddy. Its premise hinges on his recounting of a conference on Abbey’s life and work that he had been asked to moderate: “I feel disgusted that I am here to lead this discussion even though I lecture myself that I want everyone to read his books, want his widow to make a million bucks for the kids, want the Academy, wherever the hell it lurks, to finally take notice of him. What I really want is out of here … Suddenly, the real problem dawns on me: I am moderating a meeting he would never attend.”
What Abbey might have attended to instead was his red 1975 Cadillac Eldorado, a gift to himself on his sixtieth birthday, a steel beast from Detroit known to speed excessively down desert highways. In other words, not a Volvo but a paradoxical emblem of the man. For Abbey and Bowden, there could be no possible ceasefire between their anarcho-landlove and neo-liberal industrialized capitalism. Their ethos abuts the western radicalism of anti-government landowners.
Abbey’s primary genre was the novel, and Bowden, who began working as a journalist for The Tucson Citizen in the early 1980’s, produced two dozen books of non-fiction. They regarded themselves first as writers – and their works are as much about how to express one’s imperfect self in this damaged world as about their agitated and raging views on everything from water usage to the border drug trade.
[right: Edward Abbey] “I think part of the problem lies in the way he wrote,” says Bowden. “People could actually understand what he was saying and this quickly pissed them off. He wrote direct sentences with active verbs and the music displayed a deep suspicion of adjectives, except for comic effect. He sounded so offhanded that the reader thought he’d just dashed it off. He sounded a lot like the guy who is sitting next to you on the barstool talking over a beer. The reality of the sentences is the opposite of the effect. He wrote very tightly and it is difficult to cut a line or word. Naturally, it took a lot of time to make it all look so easy.” These observations aptly describe Bowden’s own engaging stylistics. One hears these men’s expressions as unaffected. But as Bowden reminds us repeatedly in The Red Caddy, Abbey was as much a jokester as a prophet, and every sentence was calculated for effect.
Bowden disparages the hagiography of Abbey, forcing the reader to accept one of their mutual truths: the other person is always a mystery. Despite his grievances over our culture’s suicidal denial of ecological ruination, Bowden rejects the ideological purity of the victim – and by doing so, he creates the tension that provides the antagonizing pleasures of his text. Although a profound morality resonates in their writing, they enjoyed tweaking the noses of didactic lefties and self-crediting grievance marketers. Anticipating an antagonist response, Bowden writes, “We all need to discredit anyone who threatens us – it is a lot easier than considering their ideas … [Abbey] lived in a moral universe … one where cleverness and normal standards of success don’t count for much but right and wrong count for pretty much everything.”
[left: Charles Bowden, 2014] About Abbey, Bowden says, “He will never be what you approve of, though he will (with alarming frequency) be what you secretly think but are afraid to say or admit to. And he will most often act out the one thing you dream of but cannot do: live your life regardless of the opinion of others.” There is also resentment of the literary establishment: “The measuring for a literary winding sheet is best left to the trolls of the Academy who camp near the fabled canon and guard it with their lives and footnotes. In due time they’ll get the job done and crank out the appropriate texts like canned Spam.”
The Red Caddy revels in pointing out and then stepping back from the irresolvable aspects of Abbey’s character: “The redneck sitting there while classical music purred in his writing shack and sucking on a big ugly cigar. The culinary expert stressing the importance of fried eggs and ample portions of pig meat. The guy who couldn’t have a drink for years, claiming he roared down the nation’s highways pitching beer cans out the windows … Mr. Save-The-Wilderness lovingly recording his various journeys with machines into the wild country … Mr. Anarchist – Power to the People! – studding his works with racial jokes. I am particularly keen on his repertoire of Oriental jests since my son is half-Japanese by heritage.”
If you can bear the fact, readily conceded by Bowden, that Abbey “wrote novels where women are cagey and nimble sex objects, where other races are the butt of jokes, where the appetite for violence is admitted and at times relished, and where his own stupidity is deliciously recorded and mocked,” then you may find that their combined distaste for forms of authority and enforced behaviors aligns with the rage against Trump-era injustice. On the other hand, this may be just too much to ask of many readers.
To wit, acolytes such as Dean Prentiss, author of Finding Abbey: A Search for Edward Abbey and His Hidden Desert Grave, give insipid Ted Talks on their mentor and miss Bowden’s point entirely. Like the great humanist/essayist Montaigne, Abbey and Bowden were drawn to moral dilemmas, but they were less interested in what people ought to do than in what they actually did. They wanted to know how to live a good life – meaning a correct or honorable life, but also a fully human one.
Bowden wrote The Red Caddy in 1994 – but it was not published during his lifetime. The text was discovered on his computer after his death. “I have a hard time getting excited about books I agree with,” he writes, “and seem fated to fixate on words that prod me or threaten my world.” Bowden threatened the status quo in everything he wrote – and he was an early genre-smasher, blending history, biography, long-form narrative journalism, essayistic expression, and memoir into devastating portraits of life on the edge at the Mexican border. He owed a lot to Abbey. But even in this eulogy, he continued to prod and threaten.
[Published by the University of Texas Press on April 25, 2018. 112 pages, $21.00 paperback. A volume in the Lannan/Charles Bowden Publishing Project.]