Distant Neighbors - Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry

Distant Neighbors: The Letters of Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry

Edited by Chad Wriglesworth, Counterpoint Press

This is a book for serious students of mid-century American writing. It is a collection of letters between the two men from the mid 1970s until the Twenty-First Century. It is a dry and rather academic document, but one full of insight.

Gary Snyder began life as a backwoodsman and logger, and is now a Man of Letters. His impressive gifts have taken him from the stump-farm on which he was raised, first to University, then to an association with the Beat Movement, to Japan, and latterly to a homestead on the San Juan Ridge in the Yuba watershed in California. He is a godfather of the American environmental movement and a considerable figure in anthropological circles. His is an impressive CV which is fleshed out considerably through the letters he has written and received from Berry.

Wendell Berry is a Kentucky tobacco farmer who studied in New York City, and returned to the farm that had been the home of his family for four generations. As much as Snyder he firmly believes in the importance of being rooted in place. It is only if we know, love and respect our environment that we can begin to take responsibility for it is his claim. There is no responsibility from people only passing through. Berry, like Snyder, has received the Pulitzer prize for literature.

The letters are a strange mix of the academic and fraternal. The editor has chosen a broad range of letters from each man (slightly more were written by Berry) that illustrate their literary aspirations and pursuits, their concern about farming and logging, and their growing friendship.

The letters at the beginning of the book are the most charming. As a friendship begins there are many small politenesses that are evident. As familiarity builds you can sense the warmth between the two men and their families. Both maintain a cordial air, especially when signing off.

The research is thorough, and there are copious footnotes to accompany the text. What is lacking perhaps is some biographical detail. It is almost as if the editor did not wish to enter the more private areas of the lives of the two men. An example of this is when Snyder’s beloved wife Carole passed away early in the new century. When Wendell Berry makes a passing comment to Snyder’s loss, there is a simple footnote and no more. At that point a biography of Carole would have been fitting. The same is true when Snyder lost his sister.

It is perhaps partly due to the fact that both are private men. Snyder knew celebrity in the 1950s in California and his 1972 Pulitzer Prize for ‘Turtle Island’ thrust him back into the spotlight. In the intervening years he has retreated somewhat and spoken through his writing.

Knowledge of the writing of the two men is necessary to add meaning to much of the book. The Gary Snyder Reader is a good companion to have, and many of the letters caused me to look again at his writing. I know Berry’s work less, and it has prompted me to look deeper, especially into his fiction.

Much of the detail that can be gleaned from the letters relates to the number of appearances the two men have made over the decades; speaking to land institutes, academic audiences and literary enthusiasts. It reveals that a career writing is not easy, and involves many airports and departure lounges, even for those most grounded in the soil. It is a particular paradox to think of Gary Snyder boarding a business flight to New York, or answering an e-mail. The latter is something that Wendell Berry has refused to do: he still writes long-hand, true to his piece in the 1980s about his reluctance to buy a personal computer.

There is a long exchange of letters about belief. Berry is of a Southern Christian upbringing, and Snyder is a Buddhist. The interest lies in the way that the two bounce ideas off each other and the mutual respect that they show. There are few other places in his writing where Snyder comments so sensitively – and expertly – about Christianity.

A lifetime of letters (the first are from a time when both men had turned forty) reveal how lives change as people age. The first letters are full of action and the later ones predictably begin to contain medical reports. More delightfully, the later letters also contain details of expanding families, grandchildren, and the love that both men feel for their families.

This book is a tribute to a great friendship that has blossomed over forty years. It is apparent that both men owe a debt of friendship, too, to Jack Shoemaker, who has been a great champion of the writing of Snyder in particular. If it is an insight into Snyder as a man that you are looking for, his letters to Allen Ginsberg is a better choice. However, this book is full of detail about Snyder and Berry and what great servants of the Earth they have been. Now both in their eighties, it is a great tribute to two men who have done so much to open our eyes to the realities of our planet.