BIOGRAPHY: ANTHONY GLAVINreviews The Last American ManBy Elizabeth Gilbert Bloomsbury, 274pp. £ 14.99
THE OPENING scene of Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs Miller, wherein the American film-maker set out "to destroy all the myths of heroism", shows the two-bit gambler McCabe, played by Warren Beatty, riding into a wilderness village with a pack-horse behind, on which sits a hat-box containing his treasured bowler.
It is, to put it mildly, an image which merrily thumbs its nose at the frontier mythos shaped by the real-life exploits of Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, and perpetuated in tall tales of Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill.
The same mythos, in fact, that even yet underpins the decidedly 21st-century story of The Last American Man,a riveting, deftly written, biography of Eustace Conway, naturalist and mountain man, by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the international best-seller, Eat, Pray, Love. Born in South Carolina in 1961, Conway spent as much of his unhappy childhood as he could manage out-of-doors, before leaving home at age 17 to live in a tepee in the North Carolina woods, where he made his own buckskin clothes and moccasins, fashioned his own tools, and fed himself on whatever he could forage or kill.
In 1981, he set off with a friend to walk the 2,000-mile Appalachian trail from Maine to Georgia in four and a half months, a punishing feat of endurance that set the standard for other exploits to follow. These included a 100-day, gruelling coast-to-coast horseback journey across America in 1995 with his younger brother, Justen, and a female friend, and another non-stop 2,500-mile trip two years later, this time in a horse-drawn buggy with a girl friend named Patience, across the Great Plains of Nebraska and the Dakotas, up into Canada, and back down through Montana and Wyoming.
Conway was an equally driven educator and public speaker, criss-crossing the South to lecture, nay proselytise, both school kids and businessmen about his singular forest life. The money he made from countless such talks enabled him, in 1987, to purchase the first woodlot of what would become his 1,000-acre Turtle Island Preserve in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina. Conway initially envisioned this as a utopian refuge that would do nothing less than transform US society by allowing him to personally reintroduce his fellow Americans – seduced by consumerism and alienated by technology – to the very first-hand communion with nature that had helped shape the identity of the frontier nation two centuries earlier.
Such staggering self-belief might be described as incredibly naive, messianic or narcissistic, take your pick, but these are only a few of the descriptors – along with handsome, charismatic, keenly intelligent, unbelievably resourceful, workaholic, and perfectionist to the point of control freak – which help define a preternatural horseman, crack marksman, self-taught blacksmith and carpenter, natural-born teacher, brilliant entrepreneur, plus unabashed showman, whom Gilbert herself describes as “this most complex and modern of mountain men”.
Patriarchal is another adjective used by several of a myriad of ex-girlfriends who’ve been initially smitten by the force of nature that is Eustace Conway, but who’ve proved ultimately unable to stay the course. “That’s how it happens with Eustace,” explains Patience. “You get sucked into the vortex of his goals and life, and then you’re lost. All he did on that trip was boss me around and tell me what to do.”
Patriarchal also neatly serves to introduce what arguably lies at the heart of this biography, namely a tortuous and heart-breaking failed relationship with his hypercritical, domineering and detached father, Eustace Conway III, a relationship that has trammelled Eustace Conway IV from his childhood to the present day. “I am . . . beaten down by years of oppression,” he wrote in his early 30s in a letter to his father, a brilliant chemical engineer with a PhD from MIT. “Every day I wake up and am in pain over this”, before adding that “a healthier relationship is my goal, not a more aggravated one”. A cri-de-coeur which, per Gilbert, once again brought no response from Eustace senior. Personal relationships, says Gilbert, have proved by far the greatest challenge for the outdoorsman who has mastered so much else, whether those with his three younger siblings, his handful of long-term friends, or in his so-far futile search over the past 20 years for a wife who might bear him the 13 children he has long envisioned. Romantic love, as Gilbert goes on to point out in this canny exploration of national character, has never featured in the narrative of the self-made American frontiersman, which is possibly why filmmaker Robert Altman introduces his anti-hero McCabe to Mrs Miller, an enterprising prostitute played by Julie Christie, who proves his soul mate, and who manages to induct McCabe into that true intimacy of the heart before he goes out to meet his gunslinger’s death. Here’s hoping the flawed but hugely appealing Eustace Conway, the larger-than-life subject of a remarkable biography, may yet have that kind of luck, not to mention a kinder fate.
Anthony Glavin is a fiction writer, editor and critic