Charles Bowden, warts and all

America's Most Alarming Writer: Essays on the Life and Work of Charles Bowden by Bill Broyles

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


And, he had warts. An alcoholic drinker perhaps worse than Cactus Ed Abbey. As much a womanizer as Cactus Ed, despite his callout of Abbey in "Red Caddy." A fair amount of that book comes off as psychological projection; only on racism does Bowden seem truly clean of what he charges against Abbey. Maybe that's why he didn't have it published until after his death. But I digress. (Borderzine, from Tucson Citizen, has the best obit on Bowden. It does note he had quit smoking, had cut back on the womanizing and had maybe cut back on the drinking. A 2010 piece for Harper's sheds more light on his personality.)

Note: This is a greatly expanded version of the Goodreads review. Beyond the first paragraph, about half of this is additional material going behind the book at hand.  So, we're going to go back to Red Caddy and digress more.

In that book? He’s right that Abbey was, or certainly seemed to be, racist. And, I know, from what I see, that Bowden isn’t on Hispanics or Indians. Dunno about blacks. But, yes, the rest seems like projection. Including that both of them were guilty of at least emotional abuse, if not also physical abuse, against wives and girlfriends. And, in most cases, with both of them, they eventually ended things. (Clarke Abbey? Cactus Ed may have mellowed more and more the longer they stayed together; but, just as he never quit drinking, I doubt he ever fully mellowed. Her life is her own, and she can tell, or not tell, that story some day in the future. I'm done digressing now.)

This collection of essays talks about Bowden the journalist, which is what he saw his books as being — book-length reporting. Fellow authors, editors, agents and others all weigh in on his skills, his insights, his craft.

Bowden indeed told it like it was, from the destruction of desert habitat to the destruction of Mexico by NAFTA, which lies behind his series of books, articles for magazines and more, about Juarez in particular and the borderlands in general.

Arguably the most provocative essay is by Leslie Marmon Silko.

She says that already in Blue Desert, he was writing in a way that would become what she said of Gertrude Stein, Truman Capote and others — the non-fiction novel. She went on from there to his borderlands books, where she indicated that he had a lot of novelizing, and that this is part of why no Juarez drug lords offed him. He made them look so scary that they liked the PR. Same thing on the other side, she says. She made the DEA look so tough in fighting this that they liked the PR, too. She adds that she things she did much of the writing about this in Tucson, Las Cruces and spots in between, not in Juarez. In fact, she thinks that he didn’t actually stay in Juarez that long that often, especially after his first couple of books.

Silko doesn’t claim he made it all up. Nor does she claim that, at the start, he made much of it up. She uses the word “exaggerate,” not “made up,” to introduce this section of thought. And, this is as much as guess of hers as anything. Nonetheless, as she notes that even while claiming to live in Tucson, his actual whereabouts were often a mystery, who knows?

I definitely don't think she's all wet. Clara Jeffrey, after all, notes that editing Bowden sometimes required a lot of whacking, and that Bowden knew it (as with the ee cummings style in his PhD thesis) when submitting.

That said, I think Silko misreads Bowden in another way, in one section of her distinguishing between Bowden the person and CB the literary narrator he created. She said he once, in a book, called environmentalists “prostitutes” but in real life was best buds with Dave Foreman of Earth First. Well, Foreman, like Abbey and probably like Bowden, would identify as “anarcho-libertarian” or something similar first. Bowden probably did think indeed that the likes of Sierra Club leadership were prostitutes. And so, “CB” thinking women should wear high heels and makeup? I’m sure Bowden did too.

This gets back to Abbey more.

They were, other than their different takes on the border (and maybe on birth control) two peas in a bod. Both rejected — and rightly (rightly in the sense of who they were, not necessarily rightly on the idea) — the label of environmentalist. Neither of them was one, whether in a neoliberal Gang Green sense or a more truly radical sense. While both lamented the destruction of desert for its own sake, I think both lamented its losses more as losses for their own escapism, or the desert as an anarcho-existentialist place. (Ditto for Foreman, IMO.( Bowden didn’t get drunk and wreck vehicles trying to drive them in places in the desert they didn’t belong, unlike Abbey; nor did he throw tires off the rim of the Grand Canyon. Beneath his anarchism, and beneath his drinking, there was a deeper thinker and feeler. Bowden, per Silko talking about his relation with Santa Muerte, and other picking up on why he seemed to like the drug war narratives, reminds me a bit of Chris Hedges. More than a decade ago, Hedges said he was worried about getting addicted to war journalism. So, he decided to get out. And did.

Bowden himself talked about “the children,” especially. But, whether he wanted to, or not, and per Silko, whether part of not getting out was staying in by proxy, he never got out.

But, let's go to Bowden the writer.

Some samples in the book, beyond what I know best from Blue Desert, show that at times, he had just the right feel for words.

But, at other times, he feels stilted. Sounds stilted. Almost wooden. I know that's a shock to the cult of Bowden, but I stand by it. (Not as wooden as spoken-word Abbey, but still, wooden.)

One commenter, journalism professor Todd Schack, said that he, as a professor, now assigns his class to listen to Bowden being interviewed before reading Blood Orchid, to get a better feel for the man.

I thought, I’ve never done that. So I googled, and got him being interviewed by Amy Goodman for Democracy Now over Juarez, the drug war, the factories and NAFTA. Beyond the voice was the facial expressions. About every 3 minutes, after making what he had as a serious point, he raised his left eyebrow. It seemed not fully conscious. I took it as a mannerism, and because I believe in multiple levels of subconsciousness, took it as not fully unconscious, but subconsciously deliberate. It seemed about more than making a point. It seemed that Bowden was trying to indicate he was letting Goodman in on a small part of an inside secret. But no more than that. (Sidebar: Another essayist talks about Bowden's "cotton soft" voice. Really?)

This, too, somewhat reinforces Silko's take on Bowden. He's a Hermes, but perhaps more delightful in crueler mischief-making, like a Loki, or at least like a Krishna at his worst.

Laura Paskus offers this short piece at High Country News, saluting the book precisely for having people like Silko in it, as well as for having two of his ex-partners talk about editing him.

To "qualify myself," I own Blue Desert and have re-read it more than once. I've read Desierto. I've read Bowden in magazines from Harper's to High Country News.

A good short take on his thoughts about the border and Mexicans coming north is here.

==

The Charles Bowden Reader by Charles Bowden
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a great collection of the best of Bowden. As the editorial note says, material comes from several of his books — Killing the Hidden Waters, Blue Desert, Desierto: Memories of the Future, Blood Orchid, Blues for Cannibals, A Shadow in the City, Inferno, Exodus, and Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing — and a number of magazine articles. I've read Blue Desert more than once and read Desierto and his writing for High Country News and elsewhere.

One of the best pieces for me was "Snaketime." His description of a life of daily silent intercourse with a blacktail rattler, along with tagalongs with a rattlesnake biologist friend, invites the reader to a new perspective on an animal that many humans loathe with fear and revulsion. As such, it's probably a symbol for Bowden's writing as a whole — shove fear, loathing and revulsion forward and challenge the reader to think, and feel, anew.

That said, there are errors about animals in the book. Claims that animals besides humans don't engage in war? Perhaps out of date at the time of this particular essay; definitely out of date later. Chimps have intertribal warfare, for example.

Similar on blacktail rattlesnakes. The idea that ethics says we should never consider animals as more than forms or whatever? Bowden could have read Peter Singer before he died, or even someone less radically utilitarian on animal rights and realized his "ethics" claim was at minimum, painting with a broad brush and at maximum a straw man. But, it's set within a larger, beautiful peace about living "snaketime," his summer of something personally kind of like Australian dreamtime.

I get where he was coming from. It's kind of like Mark Twain in "Mysterious Stranger," challenging people for elevating humans above animals for having this "moral sense." But, as Twain was saying human were no better than animals, I think Bowden was taking it too far on the warfare issue; we're not worse, either.

Disagreements with Bowden's thoughts would be fine. I'd still 5-star the book with just that at issue.

But, the editors get it dropped a star. They offer no explanation about what drove their division into five sections. Either give an explanation or don't make any such division. Also, I know it's essays from many original sources. Nonetheless, a mini-index, at least, would have been nice.

That said, on a sidebar? It IS interesting that many of the pieces have Bowden talking about his dad's drinking near the end. Was he trying to tell us something about the "why" of his own well-known drinking history?

And, was long-time girlfriend Mary Martha Miles, the primary editor, trying to tell us something with these precise choices?


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Finally?

The Red Caddy: Into the Unknown with Edward Abbey by Charles Bowden
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The best bio of Cactus Ed there is, because Bowden portrays him warts and all (while allowing for Whitmanian multitudes to be part of his contradictions, which I'll partially buy) and also because Bowden rejects "the cult of Abbey" — while indicating at the same time that most of Ed's multitudes would probably do so as well, but yet, some small slice of Ed would love this.

On the warts and all? Contra both "friends" biographies and the more formal one by Cahalan (I've read all plus seen the "friends" movie bio Bowden references), Bowden notes that, without using the word "alcoholic," this is most likely what Ed was. And, albeit indirectly more than directly, he notes that Ed's womanizing continued through most of his marriage to his last wife, Clarke. He also notes it seemed to surprise Ed that he didn't drive her off, almost as if he not only expected this, but some part of him wanted that to happen. Bowden also seems to indicate, again indirectly, that Clarke kind of buys into the cult of Ed, and that she probably does so in part because of marketing Abbey. Sic semper capitalism, and remember this, folks, whenever you hear Clarke Abbey talking about Ed. Surprised that Bowden didn't appear to put 2 + 2 together and note that this is precisely WHY Ed couldn't drive off Clarke.

It's great for specific dismantling of the cult of Ed, including how some of these friends, more, even far more than Clarke, pushed and promoted the cult of Ed. I suspect this is part of why Chuck didn't go to Ed's desert burial. He suspected the "church" would get started, and he'd get sick — or even get into a fight or two at the burial. (Bowden makes clear both that he was invited and that he clearly and explicitly turned down the invite. And, more implicitly, that he avoided being at "Ed's Last Supper," too, even though that invite came from Abbey himself.)

Finally, it's great because, per the editorial review, it IS a "literary" biography. The material in italics in this book read like stream of consciousness snippets from a dystopian futuristic novel involving Ed as a dystopian Nietzschean ubermensch. Ed would have loved to play that role.

Read this book.

On paper, it's about Abbey. Really, it's about Bowden as much as Abbey. And that makes it all the more worth reading.

That said, while I five-starred it, I disagree with part of what I identified as its premise — that many Cactus Ed fans would agree with him in rejecting the Cult of Ed. At least at the time he wrote the book, I think this was far from the case. It's still not totally the case. Note Bowden seemingly getting it wrong about Clarke. And, capitalism and selling slices of the cult may be a driver for fans, not just his wife.


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Beyond all of the above, this 2014 High Country News piece by author, journalist and Bowden friend Scott Carrier is well worth a read.