American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (24 page)

While Snyder was waiting for the formal interview to begin, my instinct was to keep quiet, drink the tea, look around. Standing outside, by the pond, we covered plenty of back territory: how the FBI blacklisted the young poet and ordered the senior forest ranger to terminate Snyder’s job as a mountain-peak fire-watcher, simply because he had been a member of the National Maritime Union, which was perceived as a Communist conspiracy hell-bent on strikes. 1953. ‘That was the last government employment I ever had.’

We discussed edgelands. He had seen photographs of the huts of the Manor Garden allotments in the Lower Lea Valley in East London, before they disappeared to make way for our great Olympic Park. ‘It’s money for basically nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s the global against the local, absolutely. Semi-urban wilderness is valuable. What about Epping Forest, have they left any of that? Epping Forest is too valuable to touch.’ It was
touching
to have Gary Snyder take notice of developments in Hackney, and to see him align the recent
enclosures with grander landscape sweeps in Canada, Alaska, California. He spoke of his love of John Clare, ‘The Badger’ being one of his marker poems.

Driving down to his academic work at UC Davis, Snyder noticed another kind of urban edgeland. ‘There is a big rice field, flooded paddy, near Sacramento airport. It used to have a sign on it: “This rice field annually feeds 40,000 people.” That’s export only. There are a billion people in China. The Japanese don’t import so much rice, they have their own subsidized industry. But they import wheat from Canada. It goes out through Vancouver.’

‘But we’re reinhabiting the land,’ Snyder said, his pinkies horizontal as he lifted the small cup between his two hands. ‘This was a high-priority place to live for the Indians. They were wiped out, there’s only a few left. They’re around though. The valley was all marsh, wetlands. They go down there for the fishing and for duck. The valley is covered in tule fog for quite a few weeks in the winter. And it’s very chilly. It’s sunny up here. We’re at the snowline. Higher up, there’s deer all season. So the original inhabitants made their living in the rather benign foothills. Cooler than the valley too. This is a benign place to live.’

Snyder has a benign aura. I watched the humour lines around his mouth as he talked, unable to forget a remark in a story by Bolaño, who turned, in that way writers have, his own oral disasters into a metaphor. ‘I even regarded the loss of my teeth as a kind of homage to Gary Snyder whose life of Zen wandering had led him to neglect dental care. But it all catches up with you. Children. Books. Illness. The voyage comes to an end.’

Gary, they say, was wild, if you caught him at the right time. There have been a lot of photographs over the years, from beards and sandals, to black collarless jackets and motorbikes, to alpine sunglasses against high peaks. A confident artisan of language, ripe with paradox, monkish austerities and early libidinous pleasures. The bathing pools and parties, as Kerouac reports, where San Francisco dignitaries, scholars and art patrons were entertained in a
Marin County retreat by naked hosts: Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Snyder. The stud in the left ear still strikes a jaunty note. Narrowed eyes. Thin spectacles perched on creased brow.

The years press down a little, rounding the shoulders under the dark blue shirt, as we walk across to inspect the library in the converted barn. But the stride is sure. Snyder is undeceived. He was tempted to use horses to pull logs, but thought better of it. You can’t live on this ridge without cars. People tell him, ‘Nobody can afford to become a farmer.’ You have to inherit the land. When young folk come down from these hills, they go to Portland to retire. ‘Reinhabiting and biovisionary ideas are useful, practical and brilliant. But they don’t catch on. It’s not for the time. You cannot sell voluntary simplicity to people. And that’s what we’re talking about, voluntary simplicity. Or, in some cases, downward mobility.’

The barn, open to daylight, is stacked with information, books organized not fetishized. Snyder stressed again: ‘I’m not a prose writer, I’m a poet. That means I write when it hits me. I scribble a few things. When I do my organized editing and classifying, rewriting, I do it here, mostly in the morning. But not real early. Because the first thing I do is that I meditate.’

Chatting with this man – hands in his pockets, Emi rubbing against his thigh – we appreciate that we have taken enough of his programmed day. The long drive down 101, which will continue to San Francisco, and then Los Angeles, has been about placing this meeting. We confront one another like polite but road-weary strangers, in the middle of nowhere, nodding across red Formica in some breakfast bar; big US flag outside, convenience stores shuttered, along with the brass-plate bank. There is a piece in
Danger on Peaks
set on the road we will drive. Snyder’s sister, Anthea Corinne Snyder Lowry, noticed that a pickup ahead of her had lost a grass-mower from the back. ‘She pulled on to the shoulder, and walked right out into the lane to take it off. That had always been her way. Struck by a speedy car, an instant death.’

The poets who survived the San Francisco renaissance of the late 1950s and early 1960s were the ones who created a successful brand. They were identified with philosophies or styles attractive to the media and the academy. Voluntary simplicity was never an easy pitch. ‘There are books about that,’ Snyder said, ‘but many people looking for the simple life didn’t do it well. They came out of the bourgeois background. They didn’t have the cultural context with which to do it. But there are places that are flourishing still. Like Southern Oregon. And parts of Northern California. Or south of Eureka on the river basin. Not everybody knows about them.’

The seminal event at which poetry, or the figure of the male poet, first became visible, beyond the ghetto, was the Six Gallery reading in 1955. The gallery had previously been an auto-repair shop and a communal art venture called the King Ubu. Michael McClure, the youngest participant that night, recalled earlier performances by Gerd Stern: ‘with belly dancers and bongo drums’. Ginsberg, who had moved from New York to Berkeley, launched ‘Howl’. But just as significant, McClure felt, was Snyder’s ‘A Berry Feast’, which closed the evening.

‘Gary,’ McClure told me, when I visited him, ‘opens the door to seeing the heart.’ The two major strands of much that would follow – urban apocalypse (the madness of cities) and a new interest in ecology, shamanism – were aired and made public. McClure read his elegy ‘For the Death of 100 Whales’. Seventy-nine bored US servicemen from a NATO base in Iceland went out in four small boats, armed with rifles and machine guns, and massacred a pod of a hundred killer whales.

This line-up at the Six Gallery, under the chairmanship of the established San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth, had an historic aspect. The difficulty of sudden fame after years of benevolent neglect, and years to come of casual labour and occasional academic patronage, took its toll. If a viable persona could not be constructed, and
sold
, there was erasure, suicide, Mexico. The surrealist Philip Lamantia, declining to expose his own work, read the poems of his friend John Hoffman. Hoffman died under mysterious circumstances
in Guadalajara. Ginsberg in ‘Howl’ has him disappearing ‘into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving/behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the/lava and ash of poetry’. Snyder’s friend Philip Whalen, who was also present, performed with his usual rather shambling grace. A Zen abbot with a taste for fast food.

But the third member of the Reed College gang was not there; he was out of town. In the hills. It has been suggested that Lew Welch’s absence from the Six Gallery contributed to what happened on 23 May 1973. Welch wrote: ‘I feel like an
outcast
often.’ The confession of his identity as a poet, to fellow fishermen or cab drivers, was painful. It didn’t matter that he came from a privileged background in Phoenix, that his grandparents knew the Goldwaters at the country club. He was handy; he drank, he fitted in. But as Welch remarked, ‘It used to be just about worth your
life
– to say you were a
poet
, in a tough bar.’

Beat existence in the city must include the means of getting away,
fast
: the car. Walsh’s vehicle of choice was a ‘Jeep Station Wagon’. In 1959, he piloted Kerouac and the Japanese-American Albert Saijo, coast to coast, improvising haiku as they went. Mojave Desert, Las Vegas, New Mexico. Navel-fluff or belly-fleece from a stripper’s costume in East St Louis attached itself to a memorial cross they plucked from the empty highway in Arizona, a marked road death. The cross was presented to Ginsberg in New York and placed on the wall above his bed. ‘Lew was a fine poet who really couldn’t be employed,’ Whalen said. ‘He was going for nothing. That was what was inside him.’

Turkey Buzzard dreams after he is gone. Friends making search maps of his last words. Gagging on Larkspur Root. Climbing into the Sierras. No roads, no visible rails.

Snyder, guiding us around his home at Kitkitdizze, demonstrates where inspiration comes from, if it does: as a natural occurrence, against the practice of daily life. ‘He loved uncoiling his mind into a large inclusive loop,’ Peter Coyote said, ‘and expressing elegant formulations.’ Lew Welch lived with western restlessness, at home
nowhere but car and cabin. He looked for conclusions that were never to be found. ‘This is the last place,’ he wrote on Mount Tamalpais. ‘There is nowhere else to go.’

As a settled poet, a homesteader, Gary is the supreme technician of the ordinary, relishing kerosene lamps, backup generators, benches of blades. When and how to serve tea. When to blast the frogs in the pond. The facial expressions you get, talking to him, or leafing through old photographs, are of quizzical challenge and certainty of purpose, developed on solitary trails and in high places. Snyder writes a poetry of statement: location, weather, movement. ‘This life:/We get old enough and finally really like it!’

As Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Lew Welch never would. Kerouac, in tragically premature old-man Florida retirement, is hounded by visitors who possess some of the books (without having properly read them). He is beaten in bars by rednecks and blacks (without prejudice). He is glued to a chair inches from the TV screen with its featureless splatter of unreality (the migraine scroll of our time). He is drinking drinking drinking; to the last choked breath. A swollen-faced athlete of excess at forty-seven. Policed by nurse-wife and incapacitated working mother. And Cassady, heading south again, crosses the border, walking out along the railway track after a wedding party in Mexico. Heat haze, terminal exhaustion. Mortality is a competition. ‘I wonder which one of us’ll die first,’ Kerouac wrote in
The Dharma Bums.
‘Whoever it is, come on back, ghost, and give ’em the key.’

Kitkitdizze is a forest-baffled absence of ghosts. Strategies are in place: for snow, bears, power cuts, or the collapse of the entire Californian economy. Snyder’s sensitivity to time is geological. ‘Our records only go back a couple of hundred years. We don’t know what the past held.’

I’m still not sure what I was searching for, but I think I may have found it. I’ve always been fascinated by pests like Thomas De Quincey; the way he hiked to the Lake District and attached himself to Wordsworth and Coleridge, before ‘betraying’ them with gossip
and mangled histories. When I travelled across the United States, fifteen years ago, making a nuisance of myself with the figures of my early reading, Ginsberg, Corso, Burroughs, I missed Gary Snyder. The writers I met, apart from Burroughs in his red clapboard Kansas bungalow, were in hot, cluttered rooms in cities. They had already answered too many questions, spent too many years in the echo chamber of old recordings. Snyder’s engagement was more direct. He played a political role with the Californian Arts Council in Sacramento. He backpacked. He spoke at conferences. The only rule in politics, he reckoned, was to tell the truth.

We had returned to the footprints in the soft ground where our conversation started, the clearing in which the Impala was waiting.

‘Where was Lew Welch when he went into the woods?’ I asked.

‘Right here.’

Welch had been staying with Snyder, camping, thinking about another move. His jeep parked up above the house. Snyder, going out in the evening to call him for dinner, found the note. The gun was missing.

I never could make anything work out right … I had great visions but never could bring them together with reality. I used it all up. It’s all gone … I have $2,000 in Nevada City Bank of America, use it to cover my affairs and debts. I don’t owe Allen G. anything yet nor my mother. I went Southwest. Goodbye.

The jeep was full of cans. Snyder with around forty neighbours and friends searched the forest for five days, crawling through the manzanita. They watched the sky: no turkey buzzards. Nothing. Gone. Signed off with a letter.

Charles Upton was just one of Walsh’s circle to receive a visitation in the form of a dream. The dead float in our memories and sometimes in the streets; we see them when we need them. And we learn to let them go. Mothers, fathers, figures like Beckett or Joyce, come vividly, but never more than two or three times. They are mute as Ezra Pound, after the years in the Washington asylum,
when he drifted like a hieratic head through Venice or Spoleto. Or the funeral of Mrs Yeats in Dublin.

‘I went south-west.’

Upton, in troubled sleep, saw the suicided poet at a blackboard, doing something called ‘Chalk Speak’. Which made me think of Charles Olson, his sweat and excitement; the squeak of a chalk stub, the whaling of Camels. ‘After that dream I got a map of the Sierras, looked for some place that sounded like Chalk Speak, and finally picked “Spanish Creek”. I was wrong.’ In dreamtime, Lew was alive and well and settled in Milwaukee.

Upton writes a letter, gets no reply. Maybe Chalk Speak was Jack’s Peak, a mountain in El Dorado County. South
east
of Kitkitdizze, above the south-west shore of Lake Tahoe. Perhaps the dead lose their sense of direction. If not their sense of humour. Turkey Buzzard as Trickster. A barren and inaccessible wilderness of snow and rock.