Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
This week we welcome Philip Fradkin to Inkwell.vue to discuss his new
book, "Everett Ruess: His Short Life, Mysterious Death and Amazing
Afterlife."

The American West in 1960 held a tremendous allure for a young man
from the East Coast; and working on a newspaper, the inexperienced
writer thought, would allow him to observe and document all aspects of
the lives and landscapes to be found in that dramatic land. That
premise proved to be correct. For 51 years Philip Fradkin wrote at all
levels of the craft of nonfiction. His writing appeared in newspapers,
magazines and 13 books. During that time he was a newspaper reporter,
urban riot specialist, war correspondent, environmental writer,
high-ranking California state official, magazine writer and editor,
photographer, author, book publisher, bookseller, university lecturer,
academic library consultant, and substitute county librarian. Prizes,
including a Pulitzer, came his way. After half a century, Fradkin has
decided to end his writing career by the end of 2011 and explore other
things that matter to him. "Everett Ruess:  His Short Life, Mysterious
Death, and Astonishing Afterlife" is his thirteenth and lucky last
book. It is the summation, in some ways, of a longer and less extreme
life than Everett Ruess experienced.

Leading our discussion will be our own <tnf>, David Gans. David is a
musician, writer, journalist, and photographer. He was a co-founder of
Inkwell.vue and still serves as co-host of the forum as well.

Welcome to Inkwell, Philip and David!
  

    

Welcome, Philip.  Reading the book now, and looking forward to the 
discussion!
  

    

Welcome, Philip!  I first heard of the book from my friend Bob Lippman, who
interviewed you on KZMU in Moab a couple of months ago and forwarded the
program to me on CD.

Everett's story captivates me because I share his awe of the southwest.  My
wife-to-be took me to Zion, Bryce, Calf Creek and Capitol Reef early in our
relationship and got me hooked with the first dose. I have contrived to
travel through the Four Corners region at least once a year for the last
decade or more, and I have often said I could happily spend the rest of my
days wandering there.  I always think of that line in "Lawrence of
Arabia" in which T.E. Lawrence, answering a reporter's question about his
love of a different desert: "It's clean."

Southern Utah is where I get my awe on.  I watched a flash flood rip through
the backstage area at a music festival near Moab a couple of years ago and
thought about the millions of such brief events that collaborated to carve
this magnificent landscape.  I watched a man, who called himself a scientist,
standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon and talking into a camera about how
Noah's flood had created this landscape in a matter of days; I fumed at the
poverty of imagination his view imposes on the adherents of that sorry
belief.

You've done a magnificent job of describing this young man and placing him in
the context of his time and place.  I've been to many of the locations
described, and I hope to visit more of them.  Much has changed in the years
since he wandered and disappeared there, but much of that change has made it
possible for less-intrepid travelers such as me to visit with less risk to
life and limb.

So that's why I'm here, talking with you about Everett Ruess. Why are you
here? How did you come to write this book?
  

    
You ask an interesting question: why are all of us here? 

That was the question Everett Ruess was asking, and he went into the
wildernesses of not only the Southwest but also California to find the
answer(s). That is why, I believe, this story and my book about his
life and times should have a wide appeal. He was on a quest, as all of
us were to some extent when we were young. His only problem was that
his search took him to extremes, and he disappeared.

As I grew older, this story of youth appealed to me more. It was a way
to complete my writing life, to close the circle of the largest chunk
of time spent in one's life, other than sleeping, by exploring the
extraordinary life of young Ruess and thus, through him, my own earlier
years.

That is the long answer, the one that indicates why this story should
have more than my personal or a regional appeal. The short answer is
that I came across mention of Everett in Wallace Stegner's "Mormon
Country," a small gem of a work about Utah that he wrote in the early
1940s while researching "A River No More: The Colorado River and the
West" in the late 1970s. For the reasons mentioned above, the story
stuck. I wrote a biography of Stegner, "Wallace Stegner and the
American West." He lived a long, productive life. How appropriate, I
thought, to write about Ruess, who lived a short, productive life.
  

    

Your last book?  What makes you so sure you won't write another?
  

    
Some things you just know. I have completed the circle mentioned
above. After fifty-one years of working in all aspects and at all
levels of the craft of nonfiction, I have become tired of arranging
words in meaningful ways. Repetition threatens. Time to quit and
explore other things that matter. That excites me; writing another book
doesn't.
  

    
This is the sort of thing that usually gets discussed at the end of an
interview, but here we are so I'll go ahead and ask: What are some of those
other things?  Answer that, please, and then I'll start asking you about the
book.

(I ask at least in part because I am 58 years old and I still feel that my
best work is ahead of me.  I am at the top of my game as a musician and I
just signed a contract to write a book, and I can't imagine retiring.)
  

    
Very good. This book is also about the arc of time: very short for
Everett, longer for you, and quite long for me. The book travels from
past to present. At the age of seventy-six, I am involved in things
that are more present and intuitive, at least for me, like being in a
place and not having to take notes and employing a digital camera
quickly, which helps me be present in that place. Everett was looking
forward, you are already there, and I am trying to fill the few
remaining holes in my life. 

Now to Everett and his time, keeping in mind the fact that he was
young and lived in a different era that becomes the puzzling present by
the end of the book.
  

    
I really love the way you integrated his own words, in italics, into
the narrative.  A brilliant editorial decision.

And how fortunate we are that Everett's life was so well documented. 
I suppose we wouldn't have heard of him at all if it were otherwise.

So please tell us who Everett Ruess was and how he became a roving
visual and verbal journalist at such an early age.
  

    
Mr. Fradkin, I just received a copy of your book and will rush to read it
tonight. In the meantime, I wonder what you think of W. L. Rusho's book
_Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty_ (1983), which contains letters Ruess
wrote to friends and families (1930-1934, when he disappeared) and some
chapters on his disappearance and possible whereabouts. (I also read Rusho's
_Wilderness Journals of Everett Ruess_, 1998) In 2000 we camped at Lower
Calf Creek Falls, and while there the remains of a man were found--which was
very exciting until we found out that they were of a man much more recently
dead. Like David, I wouldn't mind spending the rest of my life exploring the
Four Corners region, and Ruess is part of the spirit of that land. I think
people who go missing without a trace (I'm thinking also of Jim Thompson,
the silk magnate who disappeared in Thailand) embody the legends and history
of the land that swallowed them up. I'm looking forward to learning more
from you!
  

    
I also just got the book, and am rushing.  Interesting family
background - intellectual brilliance, a kind of quiet bohemianism, but
not a ton of money.
  

    
David asks who Everett was. That's a hard one. It took me 100,000
words to tell his story. Here's the version on the book jacket:

Everett Ruess was twenty years old when he vanished into the red rock
canyon lands of southern Utah, spawning the myth of a romantic desert
wanderer that survives to this day. It was 1934, and Ruess was in the
fifth year of a quest to find beauty in the wilderness and record it in
works of art whose value was recognized by such contemporary artists
as Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Edward Weston. From his home in Los
Angeles, he walked, hitchhiked, or rode a burro up the California
coast, along the crest of the Sierra Nevada, and into the deserts of
the Southwest. Seventy-five years after Ruess’s disappearance his bones
were supposedly discovered in 2009. Misguided journalism led to bad
science and erroneous DNA results.

Here's a version for this discussion:

He was raised in a family that treasured independent thinking and
beauty, and then he set off at the age of sixteen from Los Angeles to
seek beauty in the wilderness areas of California and the Southwest.
These were the depression years of 1930 to 1934 when Everett was on the
road, corresponding with his family, keeping journals, meeting people,
remaining alone, making powerful block prints and writing poetry, and
trying to figure out who he was and how he could fit into the civilized
world. And then he headed south from the small town of Escalante,
Utah, in the fall of 1934 and disappeared, leaving a mystery that has
never been solved and that is responsible for the myth. He is a
wilderness guru, the thinking goes, on a par with Muir and Thoreau. I
don't believe so. I think the reality of his life as a talented and
troubled adolescent has more to tell us than the myth.

Someone asked about W. L. Rusho's books about Everett. They were
published by Gibbs Smith of Utah and made Everett known through his
letters and journals to a wide, predominately western audience
beginning in the early 1980s. In that manner they performed a valuable
service. I knew Bud Rusho from working on a book about the Colorado
River in the late 1970s when he was with the Bureau of Reclamation in
Salt Lake City. We were in contact with each other during the
controversy about the discovery of the bones (the "Astonishing
Afterlife" cited in the subtitle) thought to be those of Everett in
2009. He died earlier this year.

Everett's story hadn't been put together in a probing narrative form
until my book was published this summer. Someone mentioned the mixing
of my words with those of Everett. I wanted Everett to be part of the
story I was telling, not separated by quote marks or indented text for
longer quotes, so I integrated his words with mine by using italics for
what he had to say. The other innovation was to use footnotes on the
page that related to the immediate text that had special interest and
relegating citatons and other less interesting comments and references
to endnotes. His best known poem and an amazing Q & A with his father
appear in full in an appendix in the back. There are photographs, a
bibliography, and an index.

There, I think I have answered the questions.
  

    

Tell us more about his family and upbringing, please.  Was it unusual for a
boy's life to be so well documented?  Seemed like everyone in this family had
a habit of keeping journals, writing letters, etc.
  

    
Off-WELL readers with questions or comments can send them to
inkwell@well.com.
  

    
I used to have problems with reading biographies because the authors
always seemed to spend too much time with the early years. Cut to the
chase, I urged them. Having written biographies of Wallace Stegner and
Everett Ruess, I now understand why the early years are important. In
Everett's case the first fifteen years constituted three-fourths of his
life. There is another reason why his upbringing is important. Not
only did it shape him before he had time to shape himself, it provides
answers for readers, particularly for the two mysteries in the book:
what caused him to leave home at the age of sixteen with his parents'
blessing and why and how did he disappear. Understanding his background
gives some clues. I leave it up to the reader to find his or her way
through the complexities of this individual.

Both sides of his family were steeped in the Unitarian religion, which
emphasizes finding your own way, whether in religion or life, through
using your mind and being independent from formal dogma. I know whereof
I speak because I was brought up in the same church and also had
parents on the progressive side of the ledger. Everett's  parents
emphasized learning outside of school, finding beauty through art, and
personal ethics. The family wandered about the country, starting on the
West Coast in the Bay Area, migrating to Los Angeles, moving to the
East Coast, then to the Midwest, and finally back to Los Angeles.
Settling in Los Angeles in 1928, Everett’s mother, Stella, became
involved in the cultural renaissance that city was experiencing in its
art and poetry clubs. His father, Christopher, a scholarship graduate
of Harvard and its divinity school, first was a Unitarian minister,
then a county probation officer in Oakland, back to the ministry, then
a salesman of desks designed to encourage youngsters’ learning, and
then a probation officer in Los Angeles. 

They were a middle class family, whose highest goals were not
materialistic. Writing and the literate and visual lives were
emphasized. All were encouraged to keep journals and exchange them so
they had an idea what the others were thinking and doing. When it came
time to leave home, Everett wandered through California and the
Southwest. His brother, Waldo, older by two years, wandered about the
world and finally settled in southern California.
  

    

Was it unusual for even the most liberal of families to allow their progeny
to wander off alone at such a young age?
  

    
I don't really know; but my guess is if the son made a good case for
hitting the road at the age of sixteen, the parents would go along with
it. Perhaps not so for a daughter. There was some correspondence in
the Ruess archive at the University of Utah about a young woman from
Pasadena, I think, who wandered for a while. She returned home under a
cloud of moral suspicion. I left my home in New Jersey in 1952 at the
age of seventeen to work on a Forest Service fire suppression crew in
the State of Washington. I returned to that job the next year. My
parents encouraged me to explore on my own, as did Everett's. Depends
on the teenager and parents, whether liberal or conservative.

I have said the first mystery involves the discussion in the Ruess
family about the youngest son's departure on his first journey in 1930.
It is a mystery because he was at home and, consequently, there are no
letters or a journal to enlighten us. Stella and Christopher did worry
about Everett while he was on road. He was lonely at times and craved
letters from his family.
  

    

I appreciate the thoroughness of your descriptions of the landscapes he
traversed and the portraits of how the park system worked at the time, how
sparse the populations were in all these places, and how people interacted.
Would you please tell us about the resources you used in your research?
People and agencies?
  

    
OK, I got the book the day after this discussion started, so I'm
pedaling hard to catch up.  I'm now far enough into it to have some
comments and questions.

First as the parent of an adolescent, you have my compliments for
portraying and understanding that age in life.  A biography of an adult
quite properly tries to answer the question "what sort of person was
this?"  People are contradictory and complex, but it's a reasonable
question to ask about someone who lives to maturity.

It's clear that Everett Ruess, like most adolescents, was many things,
and I think your book does an excellent job of illustrating those
complexities and explicitly pointing out that such things are normal
for adolescents.  On the one hand, for example, he's a sensitive and
talented artist who is immediately recognized as a kindred spirit by
Edward Weston.  On the other, he's a bully who basically beats up a
Navajo girl to steal her puppy and then later beats the puppy and
drives it away.

One area in which you do seem to be going out on a limb is in saying
that Ruess was suffering from the onset of bipolar disorder. I'm not
saying I disagree with you - I've got to keep reading - but it's
definitely a bold claim that has to remain somewhat speculative in view
of the fact that the "patient" is long dead.

Can you talk a little bit about how you reached this conclusion and at
what point in the writing process you reached it?
  

    
This sounds fascinating and I'm sorry I didn't get a copy of the book.
Did you indeed find out what happened to him?
  

    
Hey, don't spoil the ending for me! :)
  

    

> Did you indeed find out what happened to him?

There was one major false alarm in 2009, discussed in great detail in the
book.  But no, Everett's remains have never been found.
  

    <scribbled by tnf Sun 13 Nov 11 10:07>
  

    
For some reason I'm reading this book backwards, possibly because I read at
the end of chapter 1 (Davis Gulch) about the 2009 controversy, felt
embarrassed that I knew nothing about it while it was happening, so I jumped
ahead to the chapter that describes it. It was fascinating and written like
a detective story, and it has taught me that I can't place unequivocal faith
in a DNA test anymore. Which is so disappointing, since I had thought that a
DNA result was the last word in deciding the guilt or innocence of a
condemned prisoner.

I don't expect you to discuss this right now since we're immersed in
Everett's upbringing, but I'd love to hear what you've concluded from the
role of DNA testing in learning about Everett's fate. Maybe it just teaches
us that some things are meant to remain mysteries?
  

    
I need to reply to David, Mark, Lynne/David, and mother of my eyelid.

David asks about what resources I used in my research. The simple
answer is all that I could put my hands on. The principal repository
for material on Everett is the archive his brother Waldo gave to
Special Collections at the University of Utah. There is an online guide
to the Ruess Collection. I think I made a half dozen trips to Salt
Lake over the nearly three years I worked steadily on the book. The
Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley near where I live provided background
material on the era. I searched local public libraries and those
located in national parks and monuments where I went for material on
the times. I believe it is necessary for a writer to go to all the
important places that his subject visited and wrote about. What comes
immediately to mind is San Francisco, Monterey, Big Sur, Yosemite and
Sequoia national parks, and Los Angeles in California. Both in past
years and during this time I hiked part of what I call the Ruess trail
in California and the Southwest. I have written and visited many of
those areas in the past, but not with Everett in mind. In the Southwest
I went to Monument Valley, Grand Canyon, Bryce, Zion, Mesa,
Superstition Mountains, the Roosevelt Lake area, Flagstaff, Holbrook,
Tonto National Monument. I visited public and private archives,
interviewed people who knew people that Everett met, met him
themselves(like Pat Jenks), or could give me information on the time. I
live in those places I am researching because I have a VW camper. I
hike to get a feeling for those places, which included three trips into
Davis Gulch. I make a visual record with my camera and an audio one
with my tape recorder, which I transcribe when I get home. There is
more but I can't remember it all. (The book has notes etc. that is a
more thorough guide to where and how I conduct my research.) What I can
say is that no one has ever probed as deeply or as thoroughly into
Everett's life and times than I have with the tools that I learned over
a half century.

Lynne asks did I find out what happened to Everett, and David answers
for me that except for a false alarm in 2009, his disappearance remains
a mystery. I find it interesting when I give readings that some people
can't deal with mysteries. Mother of my eyelid, who skipped to the
end, asks me to discuss the very important issue of false DNA results.
I would like to delay that discussion until more of you complete the
book. Please remind me to deal with this later.

Mark, the father of an adolescent, can relate to that time in our
lives when we were all sort of mixed up and trying to find our ways in
the world, and I think that is the best way to regard Everett. He was
gifted, but he wasn't perfect. Mark then asks how I came to the
conclusions about his having bipolar disorder without being an expert
and having the chance to examine him. This is the reason the current
Ruess family, consisting of two nieces and two nephews, gave me for
dropping their cooperation. First, other writers mentioned it, but did
not thoroughly treat or research the subject. There was a need to do
that, just as there was a need to spend fifty pages in my biography of
Wallace Stegner carefully dealing with the issue of plagiarism in his
Pulitzer-prize winning novel "Angle of Repose." (The Stegner family did
not object and made clear that it did not want a hagiography.) I am
not an expert in manic depression, an illness that was unknown in the
1930s, and I haven't been an expert in a number of medical and
scientific issues I have written about over the years. But through
careful research, contacting experts, and having them read what I have
written, I have been expert enough to give an accurate description of
the subjects. (Besides I don't trust scientists. They have been wrong
about subjects I have written about, such as radioactive fallout having
no adverse health effects [see my book "Fallout"]. In the Ruess book
the scientists were wrong about DNA, which is supposedly
incontrovertible. I have learned to trust my conclusions, knowing that
they are arrived at carefully.)  That is exactly what I did in this
book. I took a lot of care in handling the bipolar and the homosexual
issues, the latter also mentioned fleetingly by other writers, with
sensitivity. Everett had tremendous emotional highs and lows, and
talked about death and suicide frequently. What does that mean? I have
described what it means in terms of bipolar disorder, but in a way that
allows the reader to come to his or her own conclusions. The family
wanted a perfect Everett. Well, he wasn't that nor was he a mythic
figure, he was something far more interesting--a human being. I have
three guidelines for what I write, and I adhered to them in this book
as well as others: be accurate, fair, and readable. That others have
different opinions about what I have written, is fine: all that I ask
of my readers is think.
  

    
>manic depression, an illness that was unknown in the 1930s,

Manic depression, now known as bipolar disorder, was well known in the
1930s. It was one of the illnesses described in the first taxonomy of
mental illnesses, created in the 1890s, by Emil Kraepelin. Kraepelin
traces the illness back to the ancients. Along with schizophrenia (then
known as dementia praecox), it accounted for much of the diagnosed
mental illness in this country.

In its classic presentation, manic depression comes on a little later
than schizophrenia--very late adolescence, early 20s. About the age
young Reuss was when he disappeared.