Snow Country

 Novels are not like albums. Most bands have a career that grows to a pinnacle, and once you have heard The Great Album there is very little to convince you that they will ever reach the same dizzy heights again.

I’m glad that novels do not work like that. If it was the case, I don’t think Sebastian Faulks would ever have recovered from the majesty of ‘Birdsong’.

And yet here is another novel as deep and as moving, about another corner of Europe, with characters just as real.

I have been trying to put my finger on what it is that makes his writing so special. The closest that I can get is that it stays with you. The characters are so complete and real that they linger after the last page. It’s something about their voices that make them like ghosts that keep coming back to you for days. Perhaps ghosts is the wrong term, because there is nothing frightening about it.

 I am not sure if it is a peculiarity of the British, but both World Wars seem to still loom in our fiction, film-making and popular history. Do the French and Germans dwell on the two wars as much as us?

As a result, almost every angle of what happened to the Fighting Tommy has been thoroughly explored. However, Faulks is able to write fiction that continues to mine the two greatest tragedies of the last hundred years. He knows that the tragedy of war is as much in the commonplace as the heroic. He writes in order to illuminate the ordinary lives of people, to bring them to life, and then tell you how the war twisted and damaged them.

In ‘Snow Country’ the perspective is Austrian, and particularly Viennese. British readers will rarely think, ‘I wonder what it was like for normal Austrians in 1916?’, and yet here it is. The view from the other side of the fence. The same loves, career struggles, visits to the theatre, favourite meals, and all the other things that we know, are described from the point of view of a young journalist called Anton. The story follows his progress from the schoolroom to the Russian front and back to his home city in the 1930s, still reeling from his experiences.

The focus of the story is a sanatorium that is familiar to readers of ‘Human Traces’, Faulks’ previous novel about the damages sustained by the mind. It is a contrast to the sort of places that we think we know about in Britain between the wars. We picture long corridors, the smell of disinfectant, ageing men trapped by wartime experiences, ‘The Mad House’. I think it’s a damaging part of British culture that for many people the issue of mental health still plays out against this terrifying backdrop. In ‘Snow Country’ the sanatorium is open, filled with light, clean, welcoming, and a place of learning and exploration. My father told me that there were old men who were committed in Northern England in 1917 who were still there fifty years later – whole lives wasted. The contrast to the sanatorium in ‘Snow Country’ is clear. Schloss Seeblick is a place of research and healing.

 There is a love story. I struggle not to draw back to ‘Birdsong’ at this point, because the long story is full of tenderness in the same way. From 1914 to 1933 there are points when you think some elements might be resolved, and the voices of the characters are so authentic that it’s hard to leave them and put the book down. You root for them.

 There is something that Sebastian Faulks does better than anyone else writing fiction in English at the moment. Since ‘Charlotte Gray’, he has created female characters that are as complete as I have read. In the centre of this story is Lena. Faulks develops her voice in a way that sticks in your head. She begins an almost-orphan, and spends all her life looking for belonging.

How does she do? You’ll have to pick up the book to find out.

The Man Miles

 

Miles The Autobiography by Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe

 Sometimes, to really develop an understanding of the life of a great artist, it’s not enough to go to the internet and read Wikipedia. I have listened to the music of Miles Davis for nearly thirty years, more or less since the time of his passing. His mid-period music was a companion to me in my 20s, and the electric era of the late 60s in my 30s. I knew only a little of his life and his development.

It has been long overdue, but this spring I bought The Autobiography, rolled up my literary sleeves (do I have those?) and dived in.

Miles’ autobiography is a remarkable doorstep of a book. It is a little over 400 pages in paperback, and considering he died in his mid-60s it is a record of an amazingly full life. I can’t say a well-lived life, because Miles admitted frequently that he made lots of mistakes. His output, however, was prodigious despite several years in isolation and a similar period handicapped by heroin in the early 1950s.

This book comes with an elephant-sized caveat: it is written as Miles spoke it, full of swearing. In a similar way to Irvine Welsh’s ‘Trainspotting’, in the end you stop seeing the language and listen to the voice. I’d like to know more about how much time Quincy Troupe took putting the contents of the book together, and how he came around to deciding how much to include and what to omit. It’s Miles’ voice coming through loud and clear, and because of that it’s such an important book for the history of music. It’s interesting to find out that as well as being a biographer, Troupe is a poet.

Miles began his life in East St Louis, and it is an important part of his life that his parents were successful, wealthy people. His father was a doctor and politically active, and his mother musical. He was lucky to learn music at the right place at the right time, and Miles was taught by Elwood Buchanan, his first teacher and mentor. Buchanan was important in helping Miles to find his musical voice, to the extent that he is credited right at the end of the book and not forgotten. From East St Louis Miles made a series of fortunate choices and began his musical journey in New York City in 1944, where he met Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. They became the Holy Trinity of Bebop, and ultimately of all jazz. Bird died young, a victim of excess, but Dizzy and Miles remained friends throughout their lives.

It might be easy to assume that Miles’ talent was God-given and that he didn’t have to work at it. The book makes it abundantly clear that Miles was a student of music for all of his fifty years of playing. He studied at Julliard in New York, read music, and read and listened widely to a wide range of musicians.

His first great period was from 1944 until 1949. He was a few months too young to be involved in the Second World War. In immediate post-war New York, he was right at the centre of a vibrant melting pot of new ideas. Miles makes it clear that this initial period was joyous, and changed quickly when the audience changed from largely a black population to returning GIs, the latter of whom wanted to be entertained rather than to listen.

Drugs played a big part in Miles’ life and he is honest in his assessment of how damaging they were for him. Like Bird, he developed a heroin habit in 1949 and spiralled downward into addiction. He did not emerge from the swamp until 1954. From 1954, with his health returning to him and a creative spark of new collaborations, he entered a period of breath-taking creativity. Right through to the early 1960s, he was at the forefront of amazing music. He spoke so warmly of his collaboration with Gil Evans in this period, and called him his best friend.

Something that confused me about the book is how the process of creating his greatest music is not at the centre of the text. Instead, he tended to talk about the musicians and the revolving door of talented performers that he used to create the sound he needed. He quickly became a leader. I had expected a deeper dissection of the process of recording, for example, ‘Kind of Blue’.

Opinions vary, but I think his greatest recording is ‘InA Silent Way’ from 1969. I have returned to the album many times over the last twenty years. I would love to have seen more about how he recorded it.

The second great trial of his life, after beating heroin, was a retirement in the mid to late 70s and a hermit-lie existence dominated by cocaine. As with heroin, he is blunt and honest about the mistakes he made and the way he managed to pull himself up and out of a dark time. He is generous in the way he acknowledged the support of friends and partners, but clear that in the end he had to make the decision himself to step back into the world and clean up.

Miles’ book is dominated by race. He doesn’t mince his words. It is impressive how his thoughts, written in the late 80s, are still on the mark today. He would despair at the racism that has overtaken America in the latest wave of fascist Trump ideology. The dominant theme for Miles was that the creativity of people of colour was always appropriated by white promoters, and the originators disenfranchised. Any time that a studio head could replace an original voice of colour with a white face, he would do. Hindsight reveals that it has happened many times since Chet Baker was promoted as a sanitised alternative to the real geniuses of jazz and is still happening today. Miles’ brutal put-down of the grinning hangers-on when he was invited to a dinner at Reagan’s White House was brilliant and intelligent.

In the final quarter of the book Miles ruminated on the future of music. He recognised that Jimi Hendrix was a musician with the same spirit as him, and they were close to collaboration before Jimi’s untimely death. And finally, in a far-sighted look into the future, Miles chose Prince as his worthy successor. That says everything you need to know about how well he understood music and knew what would last and what would fade away.

He was a musical forefather, largely unrecognised today, who needs to be studied and discussed far more widely. The current soul-searching by the Biden administration as they pick over the smouldering wreckage of Trumpism should be an opportunity to re-evaluate. Maybe all music students should be asked to study Miles as closely as Mozart.

Four pages before the end of his book, he said,

“I think the schools should teach the kids about jazz and black music. Kids should know that America’s only real cultural contribution is the music that our black forefathers brought from Africa which was changed and developed here. African music should be studied as much as European (‘classical’) music”.

England’s greatest hero

 

England’s greatest hero

In England, and probably Britain, we have a strange regard to the heroes. Possibly because of the influence of Shakespeare, and probably because of the abiding strength of Victorian historians, many people are unable to look further than our monarchs for heroes. The shadow of Shakespeare’s fictionalisation of Henry V is long. The field is narrowed considerably by the fact that so few women have held power in the last thousand years.

It was only in the Twentieth Century that some revision began, as different heroes presented themselves, and a study of history based on research and fact rather than embroidered hearsay emerged. A modern view of heroism began to include commoners – great people who were remembered for action, not status. A look at who graces our banknotes in the Twenty-First Century is instructive.

In recent times a reassessment of colonial history and the sins of empire have already started to further refine our pantheon of heroes, removing some and adding others. For all the achievements in his long life, perhaps Winston Churchill’s legacy is not as certain today as it was fifty years ago. The administrators of India such as Clive and Canning are already resigned to the murky backwaters of what Britons can accept as the face of our shared history.

Another distortion of the way history is considered is that some eras are obsessed over at the expense of others. It is a fault of history teaching in England that there is such focus on the Tudor dynasty – a nasty, corrupt and short-lived episode in our story. As both World Wars ebb from living memory, our obsession with the valour of its combattants and its subsequent distorting of our idea of our place in the world continues. The time between the Second World War and today is nearly the same span as that war to the Crimean, but one look at our newspapers would make you think it is only twenty years ago. That is not to denigrate any of the great sacrifice of the wartime generation, and the lessons learned should continue to be taught to our children – the evidence of forgetting them has been painfully obvious in recent times. But to focus so much on it sidelines important understanding of the European revolutions, Napoleon, Catherine the Great, the land grab of North America and so many other events we really should know much more about.

In a time when the whole notion of what it means to be English, or British, or European, is up for grabs and there is a great narrowing of understanding and appreciation of the history of our islands, the longer view is as important as it has ever been. The tired old assumptions of island power, unconquerable realms and Victorian daring-do persist. Who can possibly understand what it means to be English when England as a kingdom has not existed for over three hundred years? How can we get a sense of the fractured, uncertain and ever-changing historical landscape when a large number of people still believe England has remained unbeaten on the field of battle since 1066? It’s the same tunnel vision that helps football fans to believe that England are somehow still world beaters when there is only one world championship winning team in seventy years of trying.

 

Enter a real hero, untainted by modern nationalism, unadopted for political capital, and from a period of history so little explored that nearly all of it is educational. You won’t find his name in school history books, and his name does not appear at the airport book stands alongside the habitual subjects worshipped by Antonia Fraser and Alison Weir.

His name was William Marshall. He was not a king. However, his achievements are so impressive that he ought to be on page one, pushing Henry VIII and his boring wives well down the national conversation.

The most recent book about his long life was written by Thomas Asbridge in 2014. If you really want to pick up lots of information about an unglamorous but fascinating corner of English history (and French, Welsh and Irish history for that matter) then I advise you to start here. Asbridge has written a book that is so readable that it is a pleasure to move from chapter to chapter. He is one of a new breed of historians who do not need to semi-fictionalise his writing to sell copies.

The achievements of William Marshall are so lengthy that it is difficult to summarise theme briefly. Some statistics begin to do him justice: he served five anointed Angevin monarchs from Henry II to Henry III. He was almost executed by King Stephen at the age of five, as a hostage and bargaining chip. He travelled to the Holy Land. He was the greatest Tournament Champion of his age and was known throughout Western Europe for his prowess. He was the only man to better Richard the Lionheart in single combat. He was a servant of monarchs for fifty years, and lived into his seventies in a time when most men were dead at forty. At the age of seventy he led the charge intobattle to protect the interests of the boy king Henry III – and won.

The eye-opening facts keep coming. Starting out as the undervalued son of a minor landowner, his service caused him to rise first to knight, then to personal retainer of the son of the king, to regent of England and guardian of the realm. All through those years of service, he retained an amazing knack for steering a careful political course that largely avoided falling from favour for any of the five monarchs he served, and to be respected on all sides of the many turbulent events of the late Twelfth and early Thirteenth Centuries.

Near the end of his life, he was instrumental in the construction of the Magna Carta and its successful re-writing and employment.

This is the kind of hero who should be discussed in the Twenty-First Century. If nothing else, a study of his life and times will teach people just how fragile and impermanent our place on these islands has always been. It will add to our understanding of the ties that have bound England to Normandy and France for centuries, and why that is still important. The place of Wales and Ireland in our island history also has important roots in Marshall’s times, and some of his actions have echoes many hundreds of years later.

He is a hero from a time of different values and understanding of the world, but he remains a hero because of his honesty, faithfulness and service. His story deserves to be known by everyone who wants to know about English history. His example needs to be heeded by those who attempt to lead us today.

Zen on the Trail by Christopher Ives

 

A Snyder Primer

In this meditation about the intersection between hiking and zen, Christopher Ives has done an important thing. He has normalised some of the information that has long been seen as important to those interested in Eastern Ideas and wilderness and made it accessible to everyone. He deserves for this book to be a great success and widely read, because it leads the reader through several layers of understanding. Some people who have read more widely can drop in at a deeper level, but for the interested novice it is a good introduction to a whole range of ideas that are a rich starting point.

The meticulous research and marshalling of different sources means that it is easy to put down to look up an idea, and return to when you have read up a little.

In particular it is clear that Christopher Ives is an enthusiastic disciple of Gary Snyder. I go so far as to say that in this area he is well qualified and deserving to take on Snyder’s torch and carry the message on to a whole new generation of readers. He is modest in referencing his own background and credentials.

The range of stopping-off points in the text is impressive and I am tempted to go back through the book more thoroughly and to explore the footnotes and dip into some of the more demanding texts that are referenced. In this sense it is a real primer for the outdoors and how we understand it.

The writer is open to ideas from all cultures and his depth of knowledge is impressive – it’s not all zen, and obviously not all done for soundbites, but rather as a result of a lifetime of careful exploration.

There are several pleasant touches that impressed me. Mr Ives has probably been made aware frequently about how the language of zen is male dominated, and so deliberately describes his pilgrim as female. It is just a little twist to show that he understands and appreciates who might be reading. He is inclusive. He is also generous and understanding about the fact that we are not all privileged and can’t all spend a weekend hiking in the American wilderness. He spends time giving examples of where and when we might all have the opportunity to experience the feeling of detachedness from the normal, even if only for a moment, or in our back yard.

The book was written in 2018, and I read it in 2020, with all the restrictions that entailed. I am glad I did. I felt at the beginning of the year that the chance to return to the open spaces might never happen again. Even though the book is a serious piece of reflection, there was also an escapism in sharing the writer’s experience of packing up and heading out.

If you are the sort of person who has always meant to go out for long walks but never had the time, this book is for you. If you are the kind of person who walks every day but wishes he or she could do more (like me), then this is a book for you. And if you are a person who wants to start the interior journey, this is definitely the book for you.

Stand By Me by Wendell Berry

 

Wendell Berry, well known in his native Kentucky, is a remarkable writer. I have come to his fiction late, having experienced the precise, logical and beautiful non-fiction already and some of his poetry.

This collection of short stories focuses on the town of Port William, which is a thinly disguised fictionalisation of Berry’s home in Henry County, Kentucky.

The stories span 1888 to 1981 and tie together the stories of families in the area. They are linked by the theme of connectedness to place. All the characters are tied to the soil that they farm, and are loyal to the old ways.

Here are the recollections handed from father to son, mother to daughter, repeated with affection and love. Berry was born in 1934, and his memory extends further having assimilated the lore of his ancestors. His skill is to interpret them, perhaps to rename, and shape the stories in a way that teach the reader about the importance of tradition.

Rural America is often derided. The picture of America that is beamed into our homes is shaped by the literature of the East Coast and the Film Industry of the West. What Berry is keen to make clear is that the centre, the backwoods, the farms and wild places, are as vital and important, and must not be overlooked. He portrays intelligent, fair and peaceful people who resist the creep of large companies into their lives, and the destruction that the greed of an all consuming economy can wreak on those left behind. He is right, of course, that most of do not see where or how the things we consume are grown or produced. What these stories do is give an indication of lives now passed that were just as important and vital as our own. We inhabit a world of technology and instant pleasure. In describing rural life over a hundred year period Berry shows us that the lives we lead are for the most part so disconnected from our origins as to be unbalanced and unhealthy.

It is difficult to describe the simple beauty and wisdom of these stories. They contain insights into rural America that cannot be found elsewhere. The closest comparison is some of the writing of Annie Proulx, a near contemporary from the other end of the country. Certainly some of the names employed have the same strange ring.

America is so divided, and perhaps here are insights into why it has journeyed so far down a difficult road. The past, and the wisdom that it contained, is being ignored.

America needs Wendell Berry now, but it also needs to have people who are willing to read, and to listen.

These Things I Know

 

THESE THINGS I KNOW

 I have been on Earth for nearly 47 years. There are several things that appear self-evident to me that others might not have thought about. Here are forty-seven things that I have found out.

 1             Blu-tack and carpets are not comfortable bedfellows.

2             Taking an umbrella guarantees that it will not rain.

3             There is no need to rinse rice before or after cooking it.

4             There is no cure for cats using your garden as a toilet.

5             English people really like to talk about the weather more than anything else.

6             Three products that are not replaceable with shops-own brand: Fairy Liquid, Heinz Beans, Beer.

7             Your insight will always be superior to the football commentator.

8             There is time in your life to watch a sunset.

9             Three things not to do: tattoos, motorcycles, cigarettes.

10           There will always be someone who knows more about fixing things than you.

11           Women are adults at 20. Men are adults at 40. That’s the problem.

12           Do not be intimidated by scaffolders.

13           A posi-driv and a Phillips screwdriver are not the same thing, and it’s impossible to distinguish them.

14           There is great beauty to be had by getting up early.

15           Always buy the best wine you can afford.

16           Modern politicians know nothing of history – even recent history.

17           You will reach a point when people younger than you seem to be having more fun. It’s OK, and don’t resent it.

18           If you wait long enough, the sports team you don’t like will lose in the end. Be patient.

19           Sometimes side-stepping political conversations is necessary to maintain friendships.

20           By the time you are forty you will start losing your heroes.

21           Beer or wine, not both.

22           Three things to always have in the car: corkscrew, nail clippers, sweets.

23           Dr Pepper is a good restorative. Works for me.

24           Try to see as much of France as you can.

25           The good people of the United States are foreigners, don’t be misled by the language. We have more in common with the French. Think about it.

26           The music you love the most comes from the year you were fifteen.

27           You need to leave your phone alone.

28           You need to eat something you have grown or killed yourself.

29           Boil eggs from cold.

30           The real name of William the Conqueror was William the Bastard. Not to his face, though.

31           Gary Oldman is younger than Gary Numan.

32           We are all related to each other.

33           Our bones are all the same colour.

34           A horse sweats. A man perspires. A lady glows.

35           A horse has a belly. A man has a stomach. A woman has a tummy. Respect and be accurate with language. Embrace the joy of gender. Accept difference.

36           After forty, you will become ever more emotionally fragile.

37           The people who paid no attention to grammar have already won.

38           Three things to never pay full price for: mobile phones, aeroplane flights, hotels.

39           Read a print newspaper of your choice when you have the time.

40           It’s really good for an understanding of the size of this planet to cover a large distance on foot, then try to find it on a map.

41           Know the rivers where you live. Try to describe where you live without using place names.

42           The stories that your grandparents tell you will be the ones you want to tell your own grandchildren. Listen carefully.

43           Sell-by and use-by dates are for the nervous. Does it smell bad or look bad? If not, eat it.

44           There is no substitute for a new pair of socks.

45           Champagne is just a place.

46           If local people are eating there…

47           You have two ears and one mouth for a reason. 

Conversations with Gary Snyder

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.