Gary Snyder: In the Company of Heroes

 

In the company of heroes: Gary Snyder

Heroes can be a dangerous thing, particularly in an age of cancel culture and the proliferation of influencers, happy to express their opinions and purported expertise on any given topic. Too often, those we venerate end up exposed. I’ll write frequently about the pernicious influence of Andrew Tate and other men who express a model of reactionary masculinity, misogyny and violence that is execrable. We can’t choose our early influences, not least our parents. In the case of my own first male role model, I too am a reactionary, against a model of which Andrew Tate might well approve. I’ve seen and felt the impacts. I try not to envy those who find their father heroic.

Heroes are the role models we choose. They come and go. Many are domain-specific.  For example, in the world of surfing, Joel Tudor is a consummate stylist. I would not, however, take life advice from the man just as I would not from Miki Dora, another great and stylish longboarder. On those fronts, I can separate the art from the artist. So too in literature. Some fall prey to the mythos of Ernest Hemingway. I love a declarative sentence. I swooned at The Sun Also Rises as a younger man. Hemingway was, however, wildly egotistical, domineering, a major drunkard and no model for a good life. Is that what a writer should be? I look to a book for beauty, wisdom, a unique outlook. I don’t necessarily need its writer to be a guru any more than I need a surfer to be a saint. 

But for each of us, some people will embody a life well-lived. For me, there are few such people but I hold them dear. Gary Snyder is preeminently the man. 

Like many, I first encountered Snyder through the pages of Kerouac, himself complicated, an artist who, at an earlier age, fulfilled the role of the hero for me too. I was swept away in the giddy, awkward rush of his prose, enamoured of the world of drink and soft drugs, of constant travel and action that his books depicted. But, like many heroes, I dug deeper. I loved him so much that I contemplated a doctorate on his work.  But his biography revealed a far more complex, less appealing character, as Gerald Nicosia’s excellent Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac attests.  Like Hemingway, there were deep problems with alcohol that eventually killed him and with which I grew up. There was the shift towards conservatism and with it a deep sentimentality, always latent in the work but leavened by innovation. And, at the end of it, his prose was sloppy. Kerouac’s influence waned, but with it came an introduction to a master, the consummate Dharma Bum of that novel’s title, Gary Snyder, loosely fictionalised as Japhy Ryder. The real man is a good deal more interesting than the myth.

There is, at present, no Gary Snyder biography, in part, I suspect, as the real man, at 95 years old at the time of writing, lives on, wonderfully off the grid in the High Sierras of California. That alone confers hero status. He lives a quiet life of reading and meditation, writing still. But while a life is still being lived, I suspect that there will be few debunkings. 

In any case, Snyder is a man who has lived his life on his terms, is unapologetic in his rendering of free love, and unabashed at his veneration of physicality.  The beauty of his poem ‘The Bath’ is a prime example of this frankness. For him, like any good Zen Buddhist, all things are beautiful when experienced on their terms.  I suspect that when he dies, there will be some who call him a man of his time, one for whom the idealism of the 1950s and 60s counterculture did not address imbalances of gendered power. However, I’ve not seen any elements of that within his work, and see a man who, while he has loved many, loves them with the respect and integrity of a free human being. 

Snyder lived his early life in Washington State on a small freeholding outside of Seattle, growing up relatively poor but idealistic, his father an IWW member who established within his son an anarchistic streak and an independence that has burned brightly ever since; Snyder for all that he is a poet and a scholar is also a woodsman, a craftsman, a builder of his own house and raiser of plants. I intensely admire the non-duality in that position, that these two positions for Snyder are entirely sympathetic. He is no tubercular, hyper-sensitive aesthete. 

Practicality led to academia, first to Reed College, where he met fellow West Coast poets Lew Welch and Philip Walen. There, in addition to a growing interest in Buddhism and his first attempts at poetry, Snyder’s primary interest was in anthropology, particularly of native American cultures. He graduated from Reed College with a joint honours degree in Anthropology and Literature, his senior thesis on the place of mythology in literature, a theme that was emerging strongly in his own first published poems.

Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums recounts a fictionalised version of the Gallery Six reading, later mythologised as the birthplace of the San Francisco poetry renaissance, in which Allan Ginsberg gave a first, ecstatic reading of his masterpiece ‘Howl’ that became the first anthem of the Beat Generation. That night, Snyder read ‘A Berry Feast’, a poem deeply inflected by that anthropological interest, merging Salish religion and cultural practice with his own poetic insights. Indeed, having started graduate work at the University of Indiana in anthropology, Snyder might have entered academia that way, as a jobbing anthropologist. 

His roving mind and activity could not, however, be contained in the library alone. He took to logging, working for the Forestry and Parks Services as a fire lookout and trail hand, writing still while he earned his money with his hands. He recalled in his excellent series of interviews, The Real Work, that he had given up ambitions of writing poetry after years of writing. As he lived in the high country, he became more interested still in meditation. His own voice began to emerge in poems that were more naturally his own. 

The title poem of Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems is the apogee of this new maturity. ‘Riprap’ melds philosophy with the concrete world, the “Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall’ with the things of the cosmos. What are we if not a mix of the world around us and the language that we employ to name it, language being in this sense the operating system of thought? We are not separate from it for all that the illusion provided by consciousness makes us think so. Snyder’s concrete, powerful evocation of this is made as clear as the crystals in the granite he describes, “ingrained/ with torment of fire and weight”. Among the touchstones I possess, ‘Riprap’ is a poem I return to often. It becomes the testing ground for every advanced group of students I teach, a place to introduce core principles of prosody and linguistics. 

The title of the ‘Riprap’ collection includes translated work alongside Snyder’s own, his translations of the Cold Mountain poems of the mysterious Chinese Zen sage Han Shan. These translations - which feature too in the depiction of Snyder in The Dharma Bums - were conducted during his time studying at Berkeley when, having given up anthropology, he was engaged in the Oriental Studies programme, learning both Chinese and Japanese. Among the many things I admire about the man, his intellect and linguistic capacity are among them. There was little thought at this juncture of joining the staid world of academia - even Berkeley fifteen years later, at the height of the Summer of Love, was too restrained for Snyder, though he eventually found his way back to the collegiate system, characteristically via his own path of study. 

While he was in San Fracisco for the catalytic moment of the Six Gallery reading, his poetry and his life had already moved beyond the realms of press publicity, just as his poetry had surpassed ‘A Berry Feast’, the poem that he read that night. By the time that ‘Riprap’ and his other poems reached publication, Snyder had left San Francisco and the growing brouhaha about the beatniks. The communist revolution and Maoism had stopped him from taking his intended slow boat to China. Instead, he shipped out on a steamer to Japan where he studied at Rinko-in temple, part of the Shokoku-ji complex in Kyoto, working as the personal assistant to Ruth Fuller-Sasaki, an early and important champion of Zen in the West who sponsored his study in the country. 

He took Japanese classes sufficient to enable his koan study at the temple, the advanced phase of Rinzai Zen study. Thankfully, such linguistic rigour is not wholly needed today - Yamada Koun Roshi, among others, has translated The Gateless Gate and the other Zen koan sequences so that koan training can be completed in English. Some, Snyder among them, might claim that without knowledge of Japanese, such translations are incomplete, for all that Zen training surpasses language itself. I am grateful both for Snyder’s dedication in bringing this training back to the West and for allowing his later poetry to become steeped in its lessons. 

Over thirteen years, he travelled between California, India and the wider Indian sub-continent while living primarily in Japan. He underwent periods of ordination, living as a monk, while at others living separate from the temple while sitting and studying there daily. 

In 1967, he returned and famously headed the Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park alongside Allan Ginsberg, one of the launch pads of the Hippy movement. While he was fully a part of the counter-culture, particularly when he returned in 1969 for full-time residence in California, it was not to the squats and communes of Hait-Ashbury that he returned but to the nascent Back to the Land movement that was emerging. It was an extension of his Japanese experiments in communal living on Suwa-no-se Jima, a small volcanic island on which he and a group of Japanese compatriots had lived self-sufficiently. 

The place where he settled was typically a place of his own making, both linguistically and physically. Kitkitdizze is the name that Snyder gave to his place of settlement in the High Sierra, close to Nevada City, California. The name is that of an indigenous form of creosote plant, one that can be used in the treatment of wood. The building that he constructed with friends and helpers is wooden, milled from local materials, and based on a stone foundation laid from the local rock.  It is part native American, part Zendo, modelled as much on a Japanese pattern with a hearth and fireplace at its centre with the chimney rising from a central area. It was later accompanied by the second image that you can see above, the Ring of Bone Zendo where Robert Aitken Roshi taught before his move to Hawaii, where he became one of the most important practitioners of Western Zen. 

Snyder has never held the official title of a Zen teacher, choosing not to ordain as a priest. His teaching in an official capacity came later. In this period, after building his house, came the emergence of what he began to term bioregionalism, an awareness and deep rootedness to the local area in which he lives, an awareness of his entire reliance and interconnectedness with all the things around him. This intense locality found articulation in his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Turtle Island, a work that saw the unity of his Native American and Zen Buddhist influences and which became a source of profound influence to the ecological movement of the 1970s. 

Snyder, at this point, began one of the many defining friendships of his life, that with another hero of mine, Wendell Berry. Both men are profoundly spiritual in the real sense of that contentious term - both practise their relative religions on their own terms, in Berry’s case, Christianity. Berry is embedded in his native Kentucky, a place where he farms as much as he writes, practising regenerative, low-impact agriculture, ploughing with horses, mixing arable and livestock production, trying to have as little impact as possible. He is not a Luddite, though he eschews technology that causes distraction. His famous essay ‘Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer’ is a source of some amused disagreement between the pair - Snyder is able to use his Macintosh with the use of solar panels, a technology that Berry also employs. Berry prefers to compose with pen and pencil, his wife then types and provides the first editorial comment on the work as she types. 

The pair’s friendship is best captured in person. They published a collection of the 40-year-plus correspondence, Distant Neighbors, one that shows their longstanding commitment to the land and people with whom they live. That friendship, its witty back and forth of contending ideas, is best captured in the pair as older men in conversation with Jack Shoemaker, their shared editor in this wonderful video. It is an hour well spent.

Snyder’s work continues to this day, albeit that in 1996 he was able to publish a long work, 40 years in the writing, his Mountains and Rivers Without End sequence that some consider to be the crowning glory of his poetic career. I have been personally grateful to the Library of America for publishing the Collected Poetry along with a companion series of Essential Prose that I have yet to buy. 

The Collected Poetry is the book that I will take with me when, this autumn, I travel to Nepal to work with Tibetan refugees and trek the Himalayas. I can think of no more fitting work to take with me. Each day, I endeavour to read a little Snyder and, while I would not wish to be anyone else, I see in him a fitting example of a life of scholarship, integrity, outdoorsmanship (if, indeed, that is a word) and dedication to a way of being. It is one from which I like many draw deep inspiration. To be in the company of such a hero while visiting a place that I have long dreamed of makes it even better.