The Last American Man
By Elizabeth Gilbert
Viking, 271 pages, $24.95
In 1977, Eustace Conway IV left his home in North Carolina at 17 to live in the woods. Early on, Conway and his siblings were encouraged, especially by their mother, to feel at home in the woods that lay just beyond their mowed back yard. Conway drank deeply of the woods. He was an indifferent student, and nature became his textbook; his supplementary readings mostly centered on American Indian arts and subsistence practices. His love of nature and of Indian ways convinced him that the life at home and, by implication, the American Way, were a dead end. There had to be a change, and Conway came to believe he could show the way.
Conway lived on and off the land, in a way that would put to shame those who presume to call themselves survivalists, with their caches of food, guns and ammo. Conway had a knife and the clothes on his back when he departed. Road kill was crucial, not just for nourishment but for the hides and intestines, from which he fashioned clothing, material for snares and sewing, and utensils. At first he slept on the ground. Later he made himself a teepee and invoked squatter rights on the land, moving when a landowner objected or when the owner sold out to a developer. And so it went, for years. Conway endured, learned more about the land and deepened his conviction that his way was the path to redemption, the way humans could return to a harmonious relationship with the land.
Elizabeth Gilbert’s “The Last American Man” relates the riveting story of Conway’s odyssey from a child of affluent parents, to mountain man, to the owner of 1,000 acres of woods and fields in western North Carolina. Gilbert sees in Conway’s life a parable for our time, a way of capturing how our culture–family, schools, the world of work, money, the whole works–is sapping us of all that is vital. We have forgotten what freedom means just as surely as we have forgotten where our food comes from. Most of all, Gilbert argues, we have lost any inkling of self-sufficiency of the sort Jefferson prized and Thoreau sometimes practiced.
But it is risky business to enlist one person to make so large and sweeping a point. Paradoxically, Conway does not make things easier for Gilbert, precisely because he is so remarkable. Gilbert’s critique of American culture cannot possibly be asoriginal as Conway himself, and even the best-aimed critique of the culture of consumer capitalism seems pallid alongside the figure of Conway, dressed in his handmade buckskins, with his skinning knife on his belt, walking with the author in New York City. Even New Yorkers took note. How can a reader focus on really large problems while reading about Conway riding horseback–yes, horseback–from Atlanta to San Diego?
In another sense, though, Conway could not have been better suited for Gilbert’s purpose: He is a nearly perfect embodiment of all that is problematic in American culture. His father was an unimaginable tyrant who could accept nothing less than perfection from his child. Conway sought respite in the woods where, like iconic American heroes, he practiced Emersonian self-reliance to a fault. And like Emerson, he felt he was meant to lead the way.
Early on, Conway tells Gilbert that he felt from childhood that it was “his personal destiny to snap his countrymen out of their sleepwalk. He has always believed that he alone has this power and this responsibility, that he was to be the vessel of change.” Conway thus falls comfortably within the unique American philosophical school of transcendentalism.
In order to realize his vision of awakening his compatriots, Conway began offering his services to schools, nature centers and other environmentally oriented venues. Gilbert describes several of these performances, and it is clear that Conway is spellbinding. As word spread, the demand for his lectures and demonstrations grew. When it dawned on him that he could not be a squatter forever, he decided to put the proceeds of his lectures toward acquiring land that he could manage as a model of living harmoniously with the land, which he hoped would inspire others to do likewise. Shrewd to a fault, bit by bit Conway amassed 1,000 acres and began subsistence farming, relying on horses. He also opened a summer camp for youngsters interested in a real backwoods encounter. By the end of Gilbert’s account, Conway is spending more time on the phone and running the farm than he is in his beloved woods.
So there it is. With herculean effort, intelligence and will, Conway managed to recapitulate the steps by which we came to the sorry pass he left home to avoid. In the end, Conway winds up driving lovers away for precisely the same reasons he fled his father: They can never measure up to his unrelenting, obsessive demand that everything be done exactly the way he would do it. Spellbound audiences may have thought Conway had found freedom sleeping under the stars and killing his own food, but the sad fact is that Conway did not find freedom. He was driven to seek the worst of all American aspirations: perfection.
Gilbert could easily have made this into a triumphal story: tormented child recovers himself by immersing himself in nature. It is to her credit that she did not conceal the torment and the profound pathos that informs this most remarkable, if not the “last,” American man.
