The Last American Man
By Elizabeth Gilbert (Viking, 271 pp., $24.95)
For males in the midst of at least a minor identity crisis (as what thoughtful 21st century man is not?), Elizabeth Gilbert’s new book will be simultaneously a comforting revelation and a major stomach-churner, for it both clarifies and confounds the central questions of the postfeminist guy: If women can now play every role that men have traditionally played, then what exactly does it mean to be a man? And if, moreover, contemporary culture itself is set up on the traditionally female virtues of cooperation and communication, rather than the masculine virtues of endurance and strength, then what’s the point of manhood at all any more?
Granted, the right role of maleness in an age of shifting gender roles is not the major premise of Gilbert’s provocatively titled book, The Last American Man, but it’s one of the issues the book brings up again and again as it chronicles the life of latter-day Appalachian mountain man Eustace Conway. This book is not just a fascinating case study of a brilliant guy who’s decided to ditch the modern world and return to the life of his ancestors; it’s also a philosophical inquiry into the psyche of the men who “tamed” a million miles of wilderness, creating themselves as surely as they created a country. Gilbert is absolutely insistent on this point: “The history of Eustace Conway is the history of man’s progress on the North American continent.”
Raised in a troubled home in suburban Gastonia, N.C., Eustace Conway spent virtually his entire childhood attempting to escape from the mental cruelties of a tyrannical father. The child wasn’t able to elude the damage the elder Conway was intent on inflicting on his oldest son, but what he learned in the attempt made it possible to escape for real at the age of 17. Spending hour upon hour in the deep woods behind his house by day and reading Native American lore and pioneer narratives by night, Eustace was a competent woodsman while still a little kid. In fact, Gilbert opens her book with a list of his juvenile accomplishments. “By the time Eustace Conway was seven years old, he could throw a knife accurately enough to nail a chipmunk to a tree. By the time he was ten, he could hit a running squirrel at fifty feet with a bow and arrow. When he turned twelve, he went out into the woods, alone and empty-handed, built himself a shelter, and survived off the land for a week. When he turned seventeen, he moved out of his family’s home altogether and headed into the mountains, where he lived in a teepee of his own design, made fire by rubbing two sticks together, bathed in icy streams, and dressed in the skins of the animals he had hunted and eaten.”
Then Gilbert adds the real put-it-into-cultural-context kicker: “This move occurred in 1977, by the way. Which was the same year the film Star Wars was released.”
OK, a tormented modern kid grows up to damn the rat race and moves into a primitive shelter in the wilderness—haven’t we heard this tale before? Surely it can only go one of two predictable ways: It can lead to some sort of hippie version of Little House on the Prairie, or it can lead to Ted Kaczynski. To its author’s immense credit, however, Gilbert’s story does neither. In avoiding such predictabilities, it helps that Eustace isn’t crazy, and that he hasn’t yet found the fairy-tale ending he’s still hoping for: a wife who shares the vision and children who will carry it forward. But still, the impulse to romanticize a guy like Eustace Conway has to be powerful.
Yet the picture Gilbert draws of Eustace Conway, while admiring and even loving at times, is not the portrait of a hero. Eustace has done some amazing things—broken two equestrian distance records; hiked the Appalachian Trail, surviving entirely on plants and game he caught with snares; bit by bit bought up a thousand acres of pristine forest and hewed from it a fully functional primitive farm; traveled the Mississippi in a handmade canoe; kayaked across Alaska; and lived among the Guatemalan Mayas for months—and all in an effort to demonstrate to other Americans that they don’t have to settle for the rat race. But just like the rest of us still settling, Eustace is nonetheless a human being, and Gilbert reveals him in all his flaws.
His relationships with family and friends, for example, are all problematic at best and have often been totally ruined by his drive to dominate and succeed at any task he undertakes. (Eustace even calls himself a “Type A Mountain Man.”) It’s not easy to live with someone who works 20 out of every 24 hours, and who has an unwavering conviction that he knows better than anyone around him how to do it all. (One girlfriend dumps him when he digs up a squirrel carcass, in the middle of the night in a driving winter storm, to show her how much meat she wasted when she made a soup he found wanting.) No, Gilbert isn’t in the business of creating an icon of Eustace Conway.
Nonetheless, if you’re going to claim that one man represents not only the hidden lingering desires of all men to live like a man, but also the very embodiment of the psyche of the nation itself, a certain amount of unacknowledged iconography has to slip in. I’m not sure Gilbert is right, for example, when she argues that every man in America secretly wants to live the way Eustace Conway lives but doesn’t have the courage or the skills to give it a try. Surely we understand as a culture—and have always understood, even in the 19th century—that ideal manhood has many more versions than the Davy Crockett model. (And that the Davy Crockett model is itself far from ideal. Just ask Mrs. Crockett.) And surely we all understand that while the desire for self-sufficiency is an inherently American identity trait, we’ve never actually been self-sufficient, not truly; from the Franco-American alliance during the Revolutionary War to the wagon trains that depended upon shared resources for survival to today’s global economy, we’re not the rugged individualists of legend. (Even Eustace has to make some money somehow; it doesn’t grow on the trees of his forest.)
As Gilbert finally suggests, despite her own earlier arguments and the title of her book, what Eustace Conway has to teach is not really how to be a man, nor even how to be an individual; it’s how to be a competent, fully alive human being—a lesson that makes no distinctions, as is befitting a postfeminist age, between men and women. “Show up for your own life” is one of Eustace’s most inspired messages, and if he manages to teach only that, the world would be a better place for it. Still, his real goal to convert Americans to the cause of harmony with the natural world is far loftier; and even at 40, discouraged and still alone, he can’t quite give it up. Eustace Conway will probably never succeed in convincing a generation of young Americans to take up a life of personal independence in close communion with nature, but reading Gilbert’s book, you can’t help but hope he does.
