Earthblog

CSU writer remembers Abbey as his professor
Written by Steven Schwartz
Tuesday, 14 June, 2010
Look for this essay in Matter 13: Edward Abbey.

Edward Abbey sat squeezed behind a small student desk.  It wasn’t an elementary school desk, but it looked like one with him sitting behind it.  “What do you want to talk about?” he asked that first day of class in 1981.  He’d been invited to join the creative writing faculty at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and we were to be the first class he’d ever taught—a graduate seminar in writing nonfiction.  He wore a red bandana tucked under a plaid shirt and a jean jacket.  Making little eye contact, he smoked a pipe and spoke mostly in one- or two-word pronouncements.

He wanted us to call him Mr. Abbey, although he didn’t state this explicitly.  Just that he called us Mr. Kessler, Miss Temple, Mr. Hepworth, Miss Young, and Mr. Schwartz.  He told us to write every day.  We wrote this down in our notebooks.  Did he write every day?  No, he said, and didn’t elaborate, except to admit that he revised very little.  “I never spend more than twenty-four hours on a piece,” he said.  He always regretted this a year later when he read over the work, he added.  We wrote this down too.  There didn’t seem to be any contradiction between what he said and did.  Sometimes one’s persona can embrace contradictions that in others would be screamingly hypocritical.

At break, he wandered away and got lost.  University of Arizona is not that big a campus, but he failed to return for forty-five minutes.

“I got lost,” was all he said.  I was outside smoking a cigarette when he came back.  We were all wondering where he had gotten to—back to Ajo, his home in the mountains?  Had we alienated him the first day of class?  Didn’t he like us?  Was academia that bad?  I rarely smoked and didn’t look natural when I did.  The cigarette had burned down to the filter and either I imagined or it really happened that he stared in disapproval at my hand—which threw the butt (suddenly the word was so ugly) on the ground.  I picked it up and walked a block to the trashcan where I deposited it, contrite.

The second half of class continued much as the first, with Mr. Abbey nodding occasionally.  I felt at once protective of and embarrassed for him.  On the other hand, he seemed perfectly comfortable with the large and silent gaps in the discussion.  Wasn’t this teaching?  What’s the hurry?

“Anyone want to discuss anything else about writing?” he said.

Mr. Hepworth, an ambitious young man who was running his own small press even while in graduate school, thrust his hand into the air.  “The thing that bothers me about writing is the potential for failure,” he said, and looked at our instructor plaintively.

Mr. Abbey leaned over his elementary school desk, his knees above the edge.  “That sounds more like a psychological problem than a literary one.”

“Really?” Mr. Hepworth said, intrigued.

“Have you seen your shrink about it?”

“I don’t have a shrink.”

“Maybe you should get one,” Mr. Abbey said.

I had my own encounters with him.  I’d had a certain reputation, you might say, as a promising writer in the program.  And although it was mostly based on my fiction, I’d also done humorous essays for a local weekly, witty and clever and filled with subtle resonances, or so I thought.  The first piece I submitted to the class was one of these.  Before I got the sketch back with a B, which would have been enough of a blow, having never seen one of these in graduate school, we “workshopped” it in class.

The discussion was mostly uninspired and meticulous: “You’ve got a comma splice on page six, the fourth paragraph,” Mr. Hepworth pointed out, having returned undaunted to class despite his psychological problem.

“I like how you start with the fire,” said Miss Young.

“I think it might work better in present tense,” offered Mr. Kessler.

“You make the neighbors very real to us,” said Miss Temple.

Finally, impatient, because He wasn’t saying anything, I asked Him what He thought.  He was still behind the elementary school desk, puffing on his pipe—no one had told him he couldn’t smoke in class, and would it have mattered anyhow to an anarchist?  “What do you think of it?”  His silence perturbed me.  After all, he was the teacher, wasn’t he?

“You really want to know?”

He was smiling.

“Yes, I do,” I said.  “What do you think?”

Thereupon he pulverized the small (oh, how much smaller it got in those ten minutes he expounded!) vignette.

“What’s it about?” Abbey finally asked me in front of the class.

“Well, there was this fire—”

“What’s it about?”

“Well, all the neighbors came out this night because of the fire, and we’ve never really talked to each other before—”

“What’s it about?”

He kept pounding away and every time I tried to explain he’d ask me again to tell him what it was about until he humbled me into silence.  He was right, of course: it wasn’t about much, not at any level that mattered, and I don’t think he considered social commentary on the planet going to hell the only worthy subject matter.  He just wanted something truthful, something that cut.

I should have rebounded, but I caved and decided to drop the course.  I needed to get his signature, however, since it was already weeks into the class.  So I went to his office.  It was on the third floor of the Modern Language building.  Rather than use the fluorescent light in the ceiling he had brought in his own lamp with its single incandescent bulb that cast a jaundiced haze over his desk—a completely bare desk, interestingly enough.  Even though it was larger than the one he sat behind in class, he was still hunched over, his long arms leaned across it as if waiting for someone to come in and rap his knuckles.  He appeared misshapen and misbegotten behind the desk, and his beard, roughened skin, and deep-set eyes in the dim yellowish light made him look like a seafaring captain stripped of his commission.

“I just wanted to let you know that I’m dropping the course,” I said.

“Why?”  He seemed genuinely surprised, which caught me off guard.  I didn’t expect him to have any reaction at all, much less question me about my decision.  My impression had been that he wasted little time on soothing anybody’s hurt feelings.

“I don’t think it’s working for me.  I’m not sure what you’re looking for,” I said, a statement that would make me cringe years later when I became a teacher and would hear it from my own students.  “You don’t seem to like anything I write.”

“You’re one of best writers in the class,” he said.

I stood there surprised and pleased that he cared enough to try to persuade me to stay and just when I thought we would negotiate my decision, and I’d tell him more of what I needed from him as a teacher, I saw him go completely blank and withdraw, and he would say no more.  He’d lost interest in my predicament or perhaps he was just being a hands-off Westerner and respectful of my rights.  The message, however, was clear: it was up to me whether I persisted.  After an awkward moment of silence, awkward for me if not him, I slid the form across the desk, he signed it, and I left, feeling relieved and cowardly all at once.

I saw him one more time.  Invited by the Cultural Affairs Board, he came to Colorado State University to give a reading during my first year as a faculty member.  I went up to him at the reception.  It had been more than four years.  I wasn’t sure he would recognize me.

“Mr. Schwartz,” he said.  He seemed pleased to see me.  He had heard I was teaching here.  I complimented him on his reading, and we talked about Arizona.

“Are you still teaching there?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “I don’t have it in me to be a teacher.”

I felt sad.  I always felt sad when people made blunt and honest self-assessments and all you could do was nod.  We were surrounded by people watching us talk.  The lecture had sold out—twelve hundred people.  There were another four hundred who had come down from the mountains around Fort Collins or from Boulder, from all over Colorado and Wyoming actually to hear him, many who couldn’t get in the packed auditorium.  Some folks from the radical environmental group Earth First! had broken the doors trying to do so.  There are mortal and immortal writers and he was clearly on his way, at least in the West, to being deified as one of the gods, much to his discomfort it seemed.  He had said once in class that he cared more about a good sentence than anyone could ever imagine.

Other people waited in a long line to speak with him, to listen, to hear anything he would say.  We shook hands and wished each other well.  Four years later I would learn of his death from internal bleeding.  It was said that he’d been buried in his blue sleeping bag and without a casket in the Tucson desert—the same desert I’d seen him walk toward that day he got lost on campus.

This essay will be published in Matter 13: Edward Abbey.  Click here for more information about this upcoming book and the release party.