In Abbey’s letters, a portrait of a bilious man

EDWARD ABBEY never took half measures. A champion of personal freedom over the tyranny of corporate perfidy and group-think, a lover and vocal defender of the unspoiled Western landscape, the novelist and essayist, who died in 1989 at age 62, was a full-bore insurrectionary in his life and art. That zealousness produced a rather large corpus of books, some of them better than others.

Abbey’s best known novel, “The Monkey Wrench Gang” (1975), is more like a polemic wrapped in a fictional conceit, but it contains scenes of searing drama, as men and women of action engage in a kind of prankster guerrilla war with industrial developers in Colorado. At one point in “Postcards From Ed,” this collection of Abbey’s correspondence, he admits to engaging in some of the same sabotage as his Monkey Wrench Gang; he was not averse to a little billboard destruction in the Arizona desert, apparently.

In our era of heightened eco-consciousness, Abbey’s name should be on the lips of all those young activists clutching their DVD copies of “An Inconvenient Truth,” but he is largely forgotten, an anachronism, a figure from the last big environmental cultural moment -- the Nixon ‘70s. Unfortunately for Abbey’s legacy, the man is not a warm and fuzzy figure, someone to embrace like a benevolent uncle or an avuncular ex-vice president. Reading these letters is not a pleasant experience -- they are a litany of complaints and rants (the subtitle’s “Dispatches and Salvos” is a tad mild) from someone who found the world wanting and had little time for opposing points of view.

While it’s tempting to look upon literary correspondence as a skeleton key, it’s always tricky to extrapolate the writer from the letters. Abbey doesn’t spend much time on the particulars of his home life here. We do know, from editor David Petersen’s useful annotations, that Abbey was in the Army -- an MP no less -- as a young man (surely a challenge for someone so anti-authoritarian) and that the third of his five wives, Judy, died of leukemia when she was 28.

Wives Nos. 2, 3 and 5 gave him a total of five children. It must not have been easy for Abbey to scratch out a living as a writer while trying to feed all those mouths, but there’s a flinty stoicism about his plight. Abbey fashioned himself as a survivalist, living the austere and contemplative life of a hermit in the Arizona desert. In response to a question from a journalist about his life, Abbey writes that his home has “no swimming pool, no horses, no tennis court, no TV. . . no close neighbors. . . . We heat with wood, cool with a swamp cooler and generally spend the summers on a Forest Service fire lookout up in the mts.” He continues: “I am pro-marriage, pro-family, pro-life, and pro-love. . . . I also believe absolutely in Negative Population Growth.”

This is when the going gets a little weird. Abbey is so opposed to any kind of rural despoiling that he repeatedly stresses the need for the United States to engage in draconian population control similar to China’s. The fewer people, the better (never mind his own example). He takes issue with feminism, because he thinks women shouldn’t act like men: “Out here a woman’s place is in the kitchen, the barnyard and the bedroom in that exack order and we dont need no changes,” he writes, in mock-hayseed dialect, to Ms. magazine. This might be interpreted as irony, but other letters in the book underscore Abbey’s blinkered sexism.

Writing is a zero-sum proposition for Abbey. Either you’re fighting the good fight for unfettered individualism or you’re worthless. Literary feuds are stoked by silly differences of opinion on this score. Abbey has a falling out with friend and essayist Edward Hoagland over Abbey’s condemnation of Hoagland’s friend John McPhee for insufficient reverence toward the environmental movement. The East Coast literary establishment -- Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, John Cheever, et al. -- is not properly engaged in the world, because it’s too preoccupied with the bedroom and not enough with the great outdoors.

Few are spared Abbey’s truncheon in this volume. Such technological prophets as Buckminster Fuller are “archaic lunatics who haven’t had a new idea since the New York World’s Fair of 1939.” The so-called spokesman of a generation, Bob Dylan, is “an entertainer, not an artist,” whose words are “bubblegum lyrics.”

Abbey is certainly entitled to his astringent opinions, but what’s missing here is generosity of spirit. Abbey isn’t just a social critic, he’s a nasty crank. Is it really necessary to criticize an august periodical like Scientific American just because it doesn’t “deal with the sort of questions raised explicitly. . . by the simple-minded, condescending, self-glorifying, eco-pornographic, fraudulent” advertisements that appear in its pages? Why, in a letter to the Phoenix New Times, must Abbey write that the paper’s readers have “probly not opened a book since they dropped out of high school”? Such bile isn’t funny, it’s just -- bilious.

What we have here, in essence, is a book of mud being slung and old scores being settled, by a man who should have known how to take the high road and leave the petty discourse to others. I suppose we can respect him, but we don’t have to like him.

Marc Weingarten is the author of “The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote & the New Journalism Revolution.”