III

Ed Moves On

ABBEY’S ENDLESS FASCINATION with young, beautiful women—in life and art—can be glimpsed directly in Black Sun. The slim novel’s funniest, sexiest, most outrageous pages (chapter 6) have been placed alongside the poignant and bittersweet fragment from The Fool’s Progress entitled “Henry in Love—An Interlude.”

With a flair for simplicity that feminists never forgot (nor forgave), Ed dismissed Gloria Steinem’s product (which he spelled “Miz”) and repeatedly mocked the “manliness” of East Coast intellectuals of both genders. Among other targets, some deserving, some not, that attracted Abbey’s incendiary arrows: U.S. immigration policy (“Immigration and Liberal Taboos,”) and the ranchers’ practice of running cattle on public lands (“Free Speech: The Cowboy and His Cow,”).

In the summer of 1970, as he was coming to terms with the death of Judy Pepper, his third wife, from leukemia, Abbey put in time as a park ranger while caring for his three-year-old daughter, Suzie. It was the summer Abbey was completing Black Sun, and once again, he depended heavily on the kindness of Ingrid, the same woman who had seen him through the final chapters of Desert Solitaire four years earlier. By early fall a smart, attractive New York editor entered Abbey’s life. She persuaded him to publish the novel Black Sun—more like a novella, I thought at the time—with Simon & Schuster without benefit of Don Congdon, Ed’s longtime agent. The publishing relationship with Simon & Schuster was to last only one book, yet it’s my guess that the attentions of Ed’s friend within the house helped to position Desert Solitaire, which was then considered a title of limited appeal, in the paperback market. Touchstone, a reprint arm of Simon & Schuster, had purchased a paperback license to Desert Solitaire from McGraw-Hill in 1968;^* the paperback, published in the fall of 1969, loped around the Simon & Schuster stable like an unclaimed Thoroughbred until 1971, when it took off, never to falter again.

Bob Gutwillig, then a hotshot editor, had signed Abbey to a two-book contract in 1966; as with many such hotshots in book publishing, Gutwilling had departed his job before the first book, Desert Solitaire, was published. The manuscript languished in a pile of contracted but unread manuscripts in a small office at McGraw taken over by Walter Clemons. In 1968, new to my job running Dutton, I had met Walter while on the lookout for literary editors. When he sent me a galley of Desert Solitaire, I misunderstood Walter’s gesture and thought he and McGraw wanted me to take the book off their hands (he simply wanted my help in getting names of appropriate Abbey supporters). As it soon became clear, Clemons was dazzled by Abbey’s prose style; it was also clear to me that the concerns Ed raised in the book failed to capture the editor’s interest. Within a few months Clemons, too, had departed McGraw-Hill; in his case it was a career change, and Newsweek magazine was to be the beneficiary of Walter’s twenty-year run as a book critic. Before his departure, Walter and others had received enthusiastic support for Desert Solitaire from the likes of Tom Lea, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, A. B. Guthrie, Jr., and Joseph Wood Krutch.