The Best of Edward Abbey (59 page)

July 7, 1977—Aztec Peak

Many newspaper reviews of
Journey Home
all over the country, but once again the goddamned NYC press seems united in giving my book the silent treatment. Suppression by silence. Same goddamn shit as buried
MWG [The Monkey Wrench Gang]
Lousy cocksucking motherfucking tri-sexual sonsabitches. Only exception—a fairly good (but condescending) review in
New Times
, by one G. Wolff. Bastards! It ain’t fair

Should I complain? But to whom?

What the fuck. The press attempts to suppress my books. Old friends never write. The critics ignore my work. But what the fuck. I shall continue despite this shit, this ignorance and harassment. I still have a few books in my soul that must take form and body, must be born. If not for the good of the world, then at least for my own fucking sense of honor.

The reviewers consistently misrepresented the character of
MWG
.

Letters I Wrote That Never got Answered:

“Dear Judy Collins … bring sleeping bag….”

“Dear Gary [Snyder], I like your stuff too, except for all that Zen and Hindu bullshit….”

To the Editors,
Ms
. Magazine, NY: “Dear Sirs….”

“Dear Jean Sibelius: Happy Birthday.”

To bill collectors and lawyers: “Edward Abbey regrets….”

“Dear Ambassador Dobrynin….”

—and Letters To Me That Never Got Answered:

“Dear Edward Albee….”

“Dear
Senor
Abbey, please send two (2) pr cowboy pants….”

—Mario Roderigo Rodriguez-Silva (“call me Rod”)

“Dear Mr. Abbey, Do you have any idea how funny you are? In a sick way, I mean….”

August 11, 1977—Aztec Peak

I’m sitting here at 1400 hours waiting for the lightning strike. A constant fizzing or buzzing noise (like frying eggs) emanates, apparently, from all metallic objects here as the charge builds up. That vast transfer of surplus electrons about to take place … the singing of excited electrons … the light crack of the whip, the flash, the awful crash! I can feel my tower shake beneath me—the smell of ozone—pink lightning strikes through the mist, followed by that rumpling, rolling, crashing reverberation of thunder—like toppling towers of masonry—echoing from mountain to mountain.

[Now comes] a dainty stroke with something like a fireball flung at the tip of it—great balls of fire!

The high thin cruel excruciating scream of the charge begins to fade somewhat now, as the heart of the storm moves beyond me into the west.

B. Traven, Dreiser, James Jones et al—their prose is so bad, so crude, so stupid, that it’s painful to read. And yet these lads often wrote better books than such master stylists as Henry James, Nabokov, Proust. Why? Perhaps there’s something in great verbal felicity that misleads the writer, that betrays him into technique for the sake of technique; while the simple-minded prose writers, free of such allurements, are able to keep their attention fixed on the subject of their interest—the real
life of actual human beings. Thus, their work, while repellent in style and detail, achieves great cumulative power through its steadfast devotion to fact, which equals and in the long run is equivalent to, the supreme poetry of truth.

The greatest writers were those, are those, capable of both powers: i.e., Tolstoy, Conrad, Chekhov, Hemingway, Cervantes, Steinbeck and so on.

October 12, 1977—Moab

Oh Jesus Christ—my life is sinking into a bog of details, little ego trips, petty gratifications—this was not what I wanted. Not what I wanted. What I really want to do, to be, is something different. More difficult. My father is now seventy-seven; I am fifty; and love seems so fleeting, my “minor classics” and “regional notoriety” so vain and trivial, and the world—the bloody beautiful heart-breaking world!—so much more painful to understand than I had expected.