Conversations with Gary Snyder

Visit with a Fellaheen Man

Alfred G. Aronowitz / 1961

From Swank, 8, no. 4 (September 1961), 49–52, 64–67. Reprinted by permission of Joel Aronowitz.

On the stone-edged dirt streets that led through Kyoto, a motorcycle guns through the Japanese night carrying a young man who, although he doesn’t wear a black leather jacket, holds somewhat more valid credentials in the Beat Generation. He is, in fact, a character right out of one of Jack Kerouac’s books, and, if that’s not enough, he’s actually the hero of it. He is Gary Snyder, the bearded but otherwise thinly disguised protagonist who climbs mountains without a second thought or a second wind; who translates ancient Oriental poetry into modern American idiom and, with equal ease and ecstasy, does the same with ancient Oriental sex customs; who shaves his head and hitchhikes through the West, dispensing, in return for rides, the Truth according to Buddha; who topples trees with the vigor of the lumberjack he once was, but with much more tenderness than he topples conventions; who strips to nakedness at genteel parties and yet remains more clothed in innocence than those still wearing their suits; who shares narcotics and visions with America’s Indians and then sets those visions to verse with the free hand of beat prosody; who is a poet and who dominates Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums with the name, as improbable as himself, of Japhy Ryder.

The crack of the dying logs was like Japhy making little comments on my happiness, wrote Kerouac in one passage of the book, describing their camp during a climb up a mountain in search of exhilaration and other benefits. I looked at him, his head was buried way under inside his duck-down bag. His little huddled form was the only thing I could see for miles of darkness that was so packed and concentrated with eager desire to be good. I thought: ‘What a strange thing is man … like in the Bible it says, Who knoweth the spirit of man that looketh upward? This poor kid ten years younger than I am is making me look like a fool forgetting all the ideals and joys I knew before, in my recent years of drinking and disappointment, what does he care if he hasn’t got any money, all he needs is his rucksack with those little plastic bags of dried food and a good pair of shoes and off he goes and enjoys the privileges of a millionaire in surroundings like this …’

Snyder’s present surroundings, of course, are no more surprising than he is. Kyoto, aside from its contributions to the post card, is also the site of Daikota Temple, that labyrinthine compound of crumbling mud-and-tile walls, incredible gardens, wooden gates, impassable bamboo grove, highgabled structures and painted dragons which serves as the home office for one of the several great temple-systems of the Rinzai sect of Zen and in which, with his head unshaven and with his beard flashing the red-oranges and yellows of the Van Gogh self-portraits he resembles, Snyder participates in the meditations and rigors of a Zen student. As for the 244 pages of adulation directed at him by friend Kerouac, Snyder seems to be a young man with a tendency toward hard rather than swell-headedness and, anyway, Zen Buddhism has its own way of seeing that his heroics remain back home in the minds of the readers and not in his own.

They really get at the ego, explains Snyder, describing the temple routine of zazen, those half-hour periods of cross-legged silence when the student monks mediate on their koans, little puzzles, semantic and irrational, to which there are no answers but to which they must find one, reciting it, finally, in the sanzen, a momentary but momentous interview with their Zen master, held often four times daily with the first at four in the morning, a confrontation which Snyder describes as the fierce face-to-face moment where you spit forth truth or perish.

I feel, says Snyder, telling about three such weeks of intensive meditation, like I’d been through a dozen lives.

A recount of his adventures, many of which are not included in The Dharma Bums, makes it seem as if Snyder has been through a dozen lives. But the inevitable question of what is so highly ranked a member of the Beat Generation doing in a Zen Buddhist monastery is probably best answered by the question of what is Zen Buddhism doing in the Beat Generation. The decline of the West! proclaims Snyder with mock drama, but he adds, in all seriousness: Zen is the most important thing in my life. The trouble is that nine-tenths of these other cats are hung up on these Christian notions and Judaic notions of right and wrong. They can’t stand contradictions. And the idea that a religious and spiritual life is contradictory with a life of senses and yaking and enjoyment and so forth, this isn’t so. Zen sees the world as one thing. American Zen, or the type practiced in San Francisco, at least, is not accurate Zen. The thing about Zen is that there’s a hell of a lot of talk about it but it’s generally misunderstood and misrepresented. Snyder, for his part, claims neither to misrepresent Zen nor to represent it, but it is quite obvious that he, for one, is no longer hung up on the Judeo-Christian notions with which he was endowed. He has, in fact, so liberated his own mind that he no longer associates it with the tradition that nurtured it. You Westerners! he often says, in a voice full of patent condescension, placing himself emphatically on the side of the Pacific where he now happens to be. Or else; with some derision, The Western mind! Or else in equally disparaging tones: It’s all these Westerners that think you can understand your world by reducing it to a manipulated simplicity! And yet, in Snyder’s case, his conversion to Zen Buddhism and the Oriental mind has been strangely enough, an almost purely American phenomenon, evolving from his preoccupation, literally, with the nature of the country. Japhy Ryder, says poet Allen Ginsberg, looming in the background of The Dharma Bums behind the somewhat symbolic mask of Alvah Goldbook, is a great new hero of American culture. And the fact of the matter is that he is also the hero of The Dharma Bums not, essentially, because of his and Kerouac’s devotion to Buddha but because he represents, perhaps as perfectly as anyone can, a unity of the hipsterism, the Paul Bunyan travelogue and all the other spontaneous and classic forces that have helped created the Beat Generation.

… I was amazed at the way he meditated with his eyes open, wrote Kerouac. And I was mostly humanly amazed that this tremendous little guy who eagerly studied Oriental poetry and anthropology and ornithology and everything else in the books and was a tough little adventurer of trails and mountains should also suddenly whip out his pitiful beautiful wooden prayer-beads and solemnly pray there, like an oldfashioned saint of the deserts certainly, but so amazing to see it in America with its steel mills and airfields …

Undismayed by contradiction, Snyder, of course, finds no need to reconcile the place he has established for himself within American culture and his place without it. This is largely a big rural movement, he says, sounding, in fact, rural himself, with an affected country twang, Far Western, hayseed and cracker-barrel, but speaking also with an interlacing of hip colloquialisms and self-evident erudition that at the same time dispels any corn from what he has to say. Like the kids coming into San Francisco and going down to North Beach these days, they’re not from the cities, mostly, but from the farms or back woods, where they’ve been working in isolation, hatching, sort of, writing their poetry or reading or just thinking, picking up on all sorts of ideas, and now they’re bringing this great rural culture to the urban centers. See, you city fellers don’t have any monopoly on culture.

Actually, Snyder himself was born in San Francisco. My parents were extremely poor—The Depression, he says. "So they went back to Seattle, my father’s home town, and got a tar-paper shack and an acre of stumpland out north of town. Over the years, my father built the place up, fenced it, got another acre, fixed the house, built a barn and got cows and chickens. I was brought up a farmboy with chickens to feed and a milk route to our neighbors. My mother was, and is, a very high-strung, neurotic person with literary ambitions, and farm life and poverty wore her down. But she got me onto books and poetry at the age of five. When I was seven, I burned my feet badly while burning brush, and for four months couldn’t walk. So my folks brought me piles of books from the Seattle public library and it was then I really learned to read and from that time on was voracious—I figure that accident changed my life. At the end of four months, I had read more than most kids do by the time they’re eighteen. And I didn’t stop. I was hung up on American Indians and nature all through childhood and hated civilization for having [screwed up] the Indians, as described in Ernest Thompson Seton’s book of the Woodcraft Indians, my bible at eleven, and for ruining the woods and soil—which I could see going on all about me.

"So when I say I am anarchist today and don’t have much use for Western culture, I guess it goes pretty far back. I spent most of my spare time as a kid in the woods around our place and, feeling at home there, always felt uncomfortable when we went into Seattle. In high school—we had moved to Portland on account of the war—I took to spending my summers in the Cascade mountains and did a lot of real mountaineering—glaciers and all that—Mount Hood, Baker, Rainier, Shasta, Adams, St. Helens, etc., and skied in the winters. Ran around with a gang of ex-ski-troopers; we called ourselves the Wolken-schiebers. My parents—and grandparents—were radicals and atheists, so when I got a chance to go to Reed College on a scholarship, I took it. With scholarships and odd jobs and greatly enjoyed tricks of living on nothing, I made it through college, making it summertime by trail-crew and logging and labor jobs. And in the summer of 1948, I hitched to New York and worked on a ship to South America. I had to wait until I got the ship and I was broke in New York. For a couple of days I panhandled and slept on park benches, while roaming through Greenwich Village.

"I was very Marxist in college, but couldn’t make it with the regular Commie bunch because of my individualistic, bohemian, anarchist tendencies, all much looked down upon. Of course, being the only real member of the proletariat in the bunch of them, the others being upper middle class New York kids as a rule, they really couldn’t say much. I took anthropology—Indians—and literature at Reed and got much involved with primitive religion, mythology, and primitive literature—song, ritual, dance—and at about the same time was beginning to read Far Eastern history and Chinese poetry. I was married for about six months then and my left-wing wife didn’t dig this sudden interest in Oriental philosophy and Shoshone folktales.

Out of college, I spent the summer of 1951 as a log-scaler on an Indian Reservation, where I dug the Berry Feast and later made up the poem about it, and then went on a long hike in the Olympic Mountains. Up in the mountains, all the notions that had been swarming in my head crystallized and sort of hung there until the fall of that year I picked up a copy of D. T. Suzuki, writing about Zen, and read it while hitch-hiking to a graduate fellowship in anthropology at Indiana. It finished the job, and although I stayed one semester at Indiana, I was through with the academic world and headed back West in ’52 for what proved to be five years of mountain jobs, scenes in San Francisco, Chinese language study, writing poetry and so on, until I first came to Japan. Then I was at sea on a tanker for eight months, in San Francisco, and back in Japan again. I love to roam around and I like tough self-discipline, I don’t mind hard work and being poor never bothered me. I guess that’s what makes it possible to carry on like I do. Being free doesn’t mean evading necessity, it means outsmarting it.

Snyder’s emergence from the soil of America shows, of course, to what extent the roots of the Beat Generation are buried there. Whether by the romanticism which is another root or the realism which is still another, he has become a symbol of the fellaheen man that Kerouac keeps referring to—the farmers who give hitchhikers lifts in the rattletrap trucks that are the latter-day prairie schooners of the West, the Negroes who share their Saturday night wine in the bottle gangs of small-town alleys, the cowboys who spend the week telling about their weekend love rites that are sometimes grossly overstated if not overrated, the Mexicans who always offer a part of the nothing they have, sometimes no more than vermin hospitality and sometimes marijuana by candlelight. To Kerouac, as to other Beats, the fellaheen man, the man of the soil, the man of the great serf class, is creating his own culture. Jack got that from Spengler, Snyder explains. But Spengler applies it to mean a vast body of men without traditions, like they were dropped into history by a trick wave. The fellaheen man has no tradition behind him and no values and he just picks up on comic books. And there he is.

Snyder doesn’t necessarily agree with the concept of the fellaheen man in its entirety and especially not with his own involvement as a symbol, but he does insist that Western culture is being overthrown by a cultural evolution either of the non-white races or influenced by them. Of course, it’s more realized out on the West Coast, where the people are closer to the Oriental and American Indian aspect, he says. And yet, Snyder’s own poetry, although reflecting, as might be expected, this Oriental and American Indian aspect (as if the American Indian were a foreigner, anyway), also reflects, as might be expected, too, his attachment to the soil. Sometimes, in fact, he sounds as if he is to the Northwest what Robert Frost was to the Northeast. In the title poem of his book Riprap, which he defines as a cobble of stone laid on steep slick rock to make a trail for horses in the mountains, Snyder writes for example:

Lay down these words

Before your mind like rocks.

placed solid, by hands

In choice of place, set

Before the body of the mind

in space and time:

Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall

riprap of things:

Cobble of milky way,

straying planets,

These poems, people,

lost ponies with

Dragging saddles

and rocky sure-foot trails.

The worlds like an endless

four-dimensional

Game of Go.

ants and pebbles

In the thin loam, each rock a word

a creek-washed stone

Granite: ingrained

with torment of fire and weight

Crystal and sediment linked hot

all change, in thoughts,

As well as things.

Probably it was inevitable that Snyder, the farmboy bringing his culture to the city, should meet with Kerouac and Ginsberg, the city boys in search, among other things, of rural America. I could tell right away that his poetry was good, recalls Ginsberg, describing their meeting in 1955 at Berkeley, California, where Snyder lived in a shack, one of the many in his life. "I’d expected to find him writing poetry that rhymed, but as soon as he took it out to show me I could see from the way the lines were spaced out that he knew what he was doing." Until then, Snyder’s almost sole companion had been Philip Whalen, whom Snyder had met at Reed College and who, like Snyder, was also a poet of the back woods. The Warren Coughlin of The Dharma Bums, in which Kerouac describes him as a hundred and eighty pounds of poet meat, Whalen had come from Portland but had made his home in the entire Northwest, not going, perhaps, to the lumberjack extremes of Snyder but working as a forest lookout in the solitude of the Cascade mountain peaks and, more recently, as a bailiff for a country judge, traveling the circuit of an endless Oregon county. The Sierras are more spectacular than the Cascades, but the tourists have ruined them, complains Whalen, who has shared views with Snyder as well as viewpoints. Everywhere you go in the Sierras, you find tin cans. Inducted, willingly or not, into the Beat Generation, Whalen, too, has become one of its major poets, living, often in San Francisco. I wrote poetry in total isolation for ten years with only Whalen to talk to, Snyder recalls, but the advent of Kerouac and Ginsberg has, of course, lessened his isolation. There is a question, nevertheless, of whether they have proved as strong an influence on him as he on them: Kerouac, for his part, has written: But I can’t recreate the exact (will try) brilliance of all Japhy’s answers and come-backs and come-ons with which he had me on pins and needles all the time and did eventually stick something in my crystal head that made me change my plans in life. As for Ginsberg, it was Snyder who persuaded him to abandon any last hope of gaining wisdom from the academic world and to give up the graduate courses he had been taking at the University of California. A short time later, Ginsberg completed Howl, the poem which has been both hailed and damned as the manifesto of the Beat