You Need to be Writing

Crowded by Beauty: The Life and Zen of Poet Philip Whalen by David Schneider.  University of California Press.  352 pp.  $23.92. *****

Goods Short Stories by David Schneider.  Cuke Press  168 pp.  $13.00 ****

Philip Whalen was what used to be called a Man of Letters, back in the days when there were such people.  In fact, as John Tarrant pointed out in Bring Me the Rhinoceros, Whalen was more or less an 18^th century man, with his studious nature, his habit of letters, his bold and often bawdy opinions.[1]  He had passed a bookish childhood in Oregon, where his sister recalls that he used to take “pounds” of books out of the library, and where he had read Shakespeare at the age of eight and was delving into Eastern thought just out of high school.  There was no money for college, so he joined the service—in 1943, with World War II in full swing—but fortunately eluded combat and enrolled at Reed College on the GI Bill.  He was older than the other undergrads, but met Gary Snyder there, who shared his interest in poetry and Eastern philosophy.  They would remain lifelong friends.

Weirdly, though, even as an older student, Whalen didn’t thrive at Reed.  He was one of those people (I’ve known a few) who wanted to spend his life reading and writing and felt the world should provide him with a living.  There are ways to do that, of course—become a professor, or live as a freelancer and hook up with publications that pay decently—but Whalen was utterly impractical, seemed to think the world should discover him.  His idea of getting along was to be entertaining and find a series of friends who would put him up.  That worked better than I might have thought, but wasn’t a long-term plan.

He was part of the famous Howl reading that took place in San Francisco in the Fifties and remained friends with all of those folks throughout his life.  Snyder first of all, because they met at Reed, but also Ginsberg (and his pal Jack Kerouac), Michael McClure, and Joanne Kyger (who wasn’t part of the reading but later married Snyder).  Author David Schneider writes about these friendships first, in five chapters that take up the early part of the book, then moves back to a chronological account.  That turns out to be a brilliant strategy.  It was through his famous friends that Whalen himself became at least marginally famous; Ginsberg was great at promoting his buddies, Kerouac made Whalen a character in Dharma Bums; Snyder was immediately serious about both writing and Zen practice, McClure once went on tour with Whalen, and Joanne Kyger became a practicing Zennist and a lifelong poet.  All of those folks were better at promoting themselves and connecting than Whalen.  He often seemed hapless.

But he had a lifelong habit of writing in his journal and writing poems, also long letters to friends, and the work poured out of him; he was prolific throughout his early years.  He found publishers, but often they were marginal places that might take months or years getting a book out and didn’t pay much when they did.

He had started meditating as far back as high school, and was reading up on Zen in those years too.  Eventually he had two sojourns in Japan, the first with Gary Snyder, the second with Richard Baker, whom he had met when Baker worked at Grove Press.  Whalen taught English to make a living in Japan, and was apparently good at that.  But eventually his visa ran out, and his sponsor wasn’t interested in hiring him again, so he headed back to the states.

By that time Richard Baker was Abbott of the San Francisco Zen Center, and jumped Whalen over a number of people to give him a single room and, essentially, board, though he had some nominal job.  Baker tended to be a tad dictatorial, but in this case had the excuse that Whalen was a famous poet and had been practicing Zen in his own haphazard way for years.  For the first time in his adult life, Whalen had a place to live and good food to eat, dependably.  It was a perfect situation; all he had to do was attend meditation a couple of times per day.

For some reason, his literary production dried up.  It didn’t stop altogether, but he was no longer the prolific writer he had been as a homeless bohemian.  Instead he ordained as a priest and eventually was head man at a couple of temples.  He also followed Baker to Santa Fe when Baker was removed from his post for misconduct.  Though Whalen was the older man, he always considered Baker his teacher.  They stayed together until, at the end of his life, Whalen returned to the Bay area, which he loved.

That’s one puzzle in Whalen’s life, the fact that, when he finally had a settled living situation, his literary production nearly stopped.  The other is his tepid sexuality.  I had always assumed, because of various life circumstances, that Whalen was gay, but that isn’t true.  When questioned about that—straight or gay? as people used to ask—he said he was polymorphously perverse, echoing what Freud said about infants, and sex didn’t seem terribly important to him, though he fell in love with women on several occasions, especially Joanne Kyger (there were no apparent crushes on men).  Whalen did have a thing for booze and drugs, including psychedelics, though he moderated  himself once he was a priest; his real problem area was food.  He complained all his life that he was fat and couldn’t seem to do much about it.

David Schneider is a perfect person to have written this book.  He ordained as a Zen priest himself, also in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki, and knew Whalen personally.  He had actually written “another, earlier book about Philip Whalen—a journal of life with him at Zen Center, modeled roughly on Boswell’s chronicles of Samuel Johnson” (who was a lot like Whalen).  Schneider makes the disarming statement that he “had no real goals beyond the pleasure and practice of writing.”  When was the last time you heard that?  An author wrote a book for the pleasure of it.

There is also a wonderful anecdote at the end of the volume when Schneider is with his new Buddhist teacher (Schneider bailed out when the shit hit the fan with Richard Baker, and didn’t follow him to Santa Fe), Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, who said to him “in a lively, crowded booth with several other people in a lively, crowded brewery in a midsize town in France on a warm evening” (how’s that for a compelling setting), “You know what’s wrong with you?”  Of all the questions the teacher ever asks, that’s the one we would most like answered.  What the hell is wrong with me?

“’I was thinking about it,’ [his teacher] said, looking into my eyes, tightening the focus around us in a way that eliminated any other time and place.  ‘What’s wrong with you is that you’re not writing.  You need to be writing.  If you feel you can’t do it with everything else that’s going on, then I’—here he used a lengthy version of his name and one of his titles—‘am now formally giving you this as a practice to do.’”

How’s that for a perceptive teacher.  What a moment.

Schneider is indeed an excellent writer, and this is a superb biography, despite its idiosyncratic structure.  He’s found a way to present the living man, so that I knew him before I read through the chronological account; that filled in the details.  Schneider has also written a collection of stories centered around spiritual practitioners of various kinds, and though that seems a limited market, the stories are quite lively too.  They’re about a young man, sincere in his practice but living a young man’s life, and they’re surprisingly sexy (in contrast to the life of Philip Whalen).  If these stories reflect the scene at the San Francisco Zen Center, I can only wish I’d been there.  Schneider has continued as a teacher in the Shambhala lineage, but Trungpa had him pegged from the start.  He’s first and foremost a writer.

[1] Tarrant had gone to visit Whalen in a hospice, where he was in poor health and nearly blind.  He still had people coming to read to him, from Shakespeare and Boswell, Tristam Shandy and Gibbons’ Autobiography.  Tarrant managed to assemble lunch of a salami sandwich and a bottle of good beer, and Whalen consumed these with gusto.