Conversations with Gary Snyder, Edited by David Stephen
Calonne, University of Mississippi Press, 2017
If you are fortunate your life will intersect with that
of a person so wise and remarkable that it can have a transformative effect on
your own. For me, the writings of Gary Snyder, and the example he has set in
the second half of the Twentieth Century, have changed my outlook.
Three years ago a comprehensive collection of interviews
with Gary were published by The University Press of Mississippi, curated by
David Stephen Calonne. In the absence of a biography, there are already two
books that are useful insights into his life: ‘Poets on the Peaks’ by John
Suiter, and the earlier ‘Dimensions of a Life’ by Jon Halper. This book adds
depth to understanding his writing and the causes that he has championed. The
collected interviews stretch from 1961 to 2015.
The value of this collection is that the interviews cover
a period of great change. Gary Snyder is remarkably consistent in his outlook
and message to the world. Fashions come and go, slang dates some, but for the
most part the key ideas are consistent and shine through.
The first interview is from Swank Magazine in
1961. Alfred G Aronowitz begins with a raft of questions that Gary has spent
the rest of his life patiently responding to. At the time the questions were
quite fresh and relevant – for example, Gary’s fictionalisation as Japhy Ryder
in Kerouac’s ‘The Dharma Bums’ was still news. However, Gary was already
shunning popular fascination with the Beats and moving away, toward something different.
There is some good journalism and a definition of Zen. Snyder was 31. Eastern
religion is now something that is better understood in the West, appreciated,
and has become a totem for those seeking an alternative. Sixty years ago it was
unknown to the point of being quite alien. Snyder was at the front edge of a
long-rolling wave. 1961 was almost ten years before Woodstock, the hippies,
alternative lifestyles and the need to seek a new way of living.
The interview ends with a telling comment;
“I’m too young to be in a book. I’m just getting warmed
up. Wait about twenty-five years.”
By 1964 when he was interviewed by Monique Benoit, momentum
was picking up and change was in the air. It would have been easy at this point
to slip into the exciting new thinking of the day, but it is clear that Snyder
sticks to his guns. The interview is short, and even as a text seems a little
bristly, as an able journalist pressed him on his attitudes to women. In
hindsight his attitude now seems out of step, but it is a mistake to judge from
the perspective of 2020. He seems to simply have been saying, ‘This is my
lifestyle, take it or leave it, I’m not forcing any woman to like it.’ I don’t
think it applies exclusively to women, but anyone he encountered… by 1964 he
knew his path, and there was work to be done.
In an interview with Ananke the following year, he
talks in greater depth about sex and family structures, and how sex was
becoming more important to people as the other ‘realities’ of life were
increasingly eroded. A strand that runs through lots of Snyder’s writing is an
understanding of one’s own body, and how it can be used fully to experience the
world. He was right in 1965 that many for many people this had already shrunk
to their sexual relations. The whole body is an organ of communication with the
world, and a way of being in it.
It is ironic that the most dated of the interviews is the
most famous. The ‘Houseboat Summit’ of 1967 took place with Alan Watts, Timothy
Leary and Allen Ginsberg. It has been frequently reprinted, perhaps because it
was one of the few occasions that the four were together. The hippie
sensibilities have dated. Snyder comes out of it slightly better than the
others, as the consistency of his message is only partially compromised by the
fashions of the time. I have always thought that when the hippies had finished,
and put on neckties, Snyder continued with his themes of responsibility,
respect for the Earth, and digging in. He has never sold out.
By 1970, the conversation had moved on, and population
became a hot issue. Gary was interviewed by Dan Kozlovsky for Modine Gunch.
How could a world cope with population overload? What impact might it have on
the planet? To soundbite Snyder here is dangerous because it is easy to make a
phrase sound extreme when out of context. However, he does say at one point,
‘Let the cities die!’ It was the start of the back-to-the-land movement. A far
more telling throwaway remark is how the interview ends: ‘The computer is now
your guru.’ It was 1970.
Perhaps the least readable interview was conducted by
Nathaniel Tarn for Alcheringa in 1972. Snyder’s responses are clear and
sparse, but the notes from Tarn, himself a poet, are unclear. Despite that
there is some useful biographical information that Gary shares about his
parents, and early contact with Amerindians in the 1930s.
Another thing that comes across from Gary’s responses is
the rigour with which he began his anthropological studies, and the wide range
of connections that he made early on. This really is a conversation between two
specialists, though, and you need some anthropological knowledge to get the
most from the detail.
The 1970s interviews come in two or three year intervals,
and the next is for the California Quarterly in 1975. Lee Bartlett went
to meet Snyder at his home late in 1974, and there are some nuggets. Gary is
pressed on food supply, meat consumption, controlling population and America’s
dependence at the time on beef. ‘…..the people of the United States have to
learn to eat lower on the food chain.’
Ever the engaging interviewee, Gary’s responses turn
across a range of different examples and ideas, and off on a tangent there are
some really interesting ideas about writing in English and the importance of
paring down, returning to the clarity of Anglo-Saxon language.
In the charmingly named Unmuzzled Ox in 1977,
there is a good source of inspirations as Snyder outlined to Jack Boozer and
Bob Yaeger some of the other writers that he had been reading. If you really
want to be a student of Snyder, here are the places you need to look. A good
writer reads widely.
He is also very generous towards Kerouac, already long
gone at the time that they were talking.
The Interlochen Review piece from 1979 is
charming. Gary is asked a series of questions by students and what comes through
is his patience, generosity towards them and his desire to always educate. Once
again the concern about world population arises, and Gary’s simple attitude
around trying to get to a situation when population naturally decreases is well
explained. Sadly hindsight tells a different story, and now more than ever we
need fewer billions.
In The Cottonwood Review in 1980 Denise Low and
Robin Tawny tease out more insight from Snyder about his views on the things
people learn, and the fact that for schoolchildren the teaching of history is
about the last three thousand years, not thirty-five to fifty thousand. At the
time he was part of the California Arts Council under Jerry Brown and probably
at the most visibly political part of his long public life.
By 1980 the idea that remote communication between people
could save a whole lot of fuel was starting to dawn on people, and Gary was
pressed on this. He explained how the CB radios that he was using to talk to
neighbours across the valley made very little energy demands compared to
driving a truck twenty miles for a conversation. It was impossible in 1980 to
see how communication technology would change before the end of the century.
What has remained constant is Gary’s careful assessment of the use of each
innovation, whether it be oil lamps in his homestead or an electric typewriter.
In Affinities in 1981 Gary talked to Paul
Christiansen about his early poetry, up to Turtle Island. It’s a nice
retrospective. He talks about Bob Creeley and Charles Olson. Clear again how
well read he is, and how many connections he has made.
By 1987 in Creation, the conversation was
biocentric. Since the 1940s when Gary wrote his thesis at Reed, the link he has
made between body and surroundings has been fundamental. By the 1980s it became
clear to many that the resources of the American continent were not limitless,
as the nineteenth-century settlers assumed. The disconnect between settlers and
their environment has been Gary’s main concern. The richness of intimate human
connection with the earth beneath our feet is frequently celebrated, but the
flip side is that the damage that has been done is the result of people not
taking responsibility for their surroundings. ‘Bioregionalism is a fancy term
for staying put and learning what’s going on’.
The range of different subjects in this book help to give
a rounded picture of many different sides to Snyder. In 1990, he spoke to
Donald Johns in Writing on the Edge. He talks about his craft, his
development and teaching techniques. It is instructive for writers and teachers
of writing.
In 1995 the later-period Snyder writings were out there,
and there are questions about ‘A Place in Space’. In The Wild Duck Review,
Casey Walker asks about the changes that have taken place in Gary’s writing
over the last forty years. Here is the nub of everything that Gary Snyder
stands for. His response is that there has been a gradual grounding of ideas in
practice. It’s all well and good having ideas as a young man, but it takes
maturity to use them in a practical way. Is there anyone quite like Gary to
have given an example of this practical application? His homestead is the
physical reality of his ideas.
The most famous interview in the latter part of the book
is titled ‘The Wild Mind of Gary Snyder’, and was conducted by Trevor Carolan
in 1996. A simple internet search brings this up again and again. It first
appeared in Shambala Sun. He talks about his Zen practice, about
politics, and about the West’s addiction to fossil fuels. It’s a great
interview because it draws together many different strands. Perhaps that’s why
it keeps popping up.
There is a distinct Pacific Rim (which is clearly
different to ‘Western’) feel to the interview he gave to John P. O’Grady in
1998 for Western American Literature. Gary talks warmly about his past
when it helps to inform a point he is making. It is here that his love of the
mountain environment comes across. By the time he was twenty he had already
experienced what it was like to climb in the Cascade Mountains, famously so at
the age of fifteen when he left his name at the summit of Mount St Helens. He
talks about the way his early appreciation of the mountains informed a lifetime
of connection to the wilderness. He obviously feels connected to the Pacific
Northwest. How many readers, I wonder, have looked on with envy from the
lowlands at his achievements? Kerouac certainly sensed it in ‘The Dharma Bums’
and the fictionalised account of their scaling of Matterhorn Peak.
By the time Gary spoke to Anne Greenfield for the Bellingham
Review in 2005, his volume ‘Danger on Peaks’ was in print. There is some
useful background to the poems in this interview, conducted before he spoke at
the school. For me, ‘Danger on Peaks’ is the best of his later writing, and
it’s interesting to hear some of the ideas behind the poems.
There follows another interview by students, which Gary
made at Montalvo in 2006 to De Anza College students. Snyder speaking to the twenty-first
century students whose world is defined by the internet, and not print media. Their
questions are ones that he must have had to answer many times over the decades,
but he is characteristically generous and explains when he needs to. It’s
charming to think, perhaps, that some of these young people have grandparents
that read Snyder in the Sixties.
The interview with Junior Burke for not enough night
in 2012 is unique in the book because there was an opportunity to talk about
Kerouac at some length, which is not common for Snyder. He is warm and
describes the person of Kerouac behind the media image. Their face to face
friendship was brief – Gary shipped out to Japan – but there is an affection
for the kindness Kerouac showed, and respect for his craft.
The final piece with Sean Elder is full of biographical
detail, and touches on the fact that John Suiter has been preparing a biography
of Gary for a while now. It seems to be a comprehensive study, and there are
glimpses here. At ninety, one wonders whether the biography will appear in his
lifetime.
So here is Gary Snyder in all his different guises –
mountain man, anthropologist, poet, Buddhist, ecologist, statesman. The main
thing omitted from the book, even though he speaks about his children, are
comments about his three wives. Whilst happy to talk about his life if it is relevant
to the conversation, it is clear that there is an area of his life that is not
public property.
He has had an amazing life so far (‘I’ve read a lot, and
done a lot’) and although immortality cannot be expected, I think he may be
around a while yet. Until John Suiter gets the biography completed, this is a
vital book in understanding a remarkable man.
