EPITAPH FOR A DESERT ANARCHIST by JAMES BISHOP JR

Author:JAMES BISHOP JR.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 1994-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

After showing initial interest, some even paying Abbey option money for his story, film giants such as Universal, and potential producers such as Robert Redford and Dennis Hopper, decided that the plot was too violent. Implicitly, they agreed with the Tucson newspaper that castigated the novel as “Eco-pornography.”

In the meantime, mainstream environmental groups held their noses, hoping the offending odor of radicalism would pass. But the saga of an idealistic band of ecoraiders, “warped but warped in the right way,” wrote Abbey, was making him into a heroic, controversial figure.

A few months before he died, Abbey told an interviewer that he had written The Monkey Wrench Gang out of an “indulgence of spleen and anger from a position of safety behind my typewriter. But that was a tertiary motive. Mainly I wanted to entertain and amuse.”

While he may have succeeded with most of his readers, he definitely failed with Jim Harrison, the novelist who declared in The New York Times that America was probably the only country in the world where so violent a revolutionary novel as The Monkey Wrench Gang could be published with impunity. (Abbey wrote “pretty dumb review” across the top of the newspaper clipping.) He wrote no such notation across a review in the late National Observer, which found the novel to be an often sad, sometimes vulgar “fairy tale … part adventure, part melodrama, part tragedy.”

In constructing this novel, Abbey veered from his earlier plot paths in The Brave Cowboy and Fire on the Mountain. The heroes of those novels, being out of place in the modern world, were vanquished. By contrast, Abbey here gives us Hayduke, “young George, all fire and passion, a good healthy psychopath.” He is a surrogate Western hero, a cross between Tom Horn (a famed lawman and gunfighter) and the Lone Ranger. Badly shaken emotionally by combat in Vietnam, Hayduke is ready to take matters into his own hands—outside the law.

Hayduke strikes back. They all strike back, set on immobilizing the machines and technological structures invading the canyon homeland. Even if their efforts are doomed to failure, it doesn’t matter. Abbey’s avowed purpose, aside from having fun, was to utilize Hayduke and the others to explode readers’ innocent and often oblivious regard for the dam, the mines, and the power lines in what they used to consider virgin West, and to underscore the fact that none of it was necessary; simple energy conservation practices could have done the job.

Abbey’s meaning was that somebody had to do it, somebody had to bring criminals to justice.

“Okay. Here’s one for you. A real conundrum. What is the difference between the Lone Ranger and God?” Bonnie thought about it as they rattled through the woods. She rolled a little cigarette and thought and thought and thought. At last she said, “What a stupid conundrum.” Hayduke said, “There really is a Lone Ranger.”

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