Prophets on the Burning Shore

Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and San Francisco

California,
a prophet on the burning shore

California,
I'll be knocking on the golden door.

Like an angel,
standin' in a shaft of light,
risin' up to paradise -

I know I'm gonna shine.

"Estimated Prophet"
John Barlow and Bob Weir¹
© 1977, 1979 Ice-Nine Publishing

JACK KEROUAC and Gary Snyder met in late September 1955 at a gathering held to plan the Six Gallery poetry reading that would introduce Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" to the public, as well as mark the first public performances of poets Ginsberg, Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Michael McClure. Kerouac was not a reader at the event nor a San Franciscan, merely a visitor. But the connection of his name and the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance is a justifiable one. Despite Ginsberg's relatively brief residence in San Francisco, the "beats" of New York and their Bay Area poet friends would prove inseparable subjects to the media and historians to follow. The liberated sensibility the beats had found for themselves in New York would germinate in California, giving both themselves and their local compatriots an entirely new atmosphere in which to create.

To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald on the rich, "Californians are not as you and I." The "estimated prophet" of San Francisco that Barlow and Weir evoke above identifies the paradox of the city's contributions to American culture as the center of what may be called the counterculture: a sheaf of undoubtedly valuable therapies, philosophies, and information sets from gestalt to Zen to the Whole Earth Catalogue rests beside a streak of hedonism that can result in contemporary psychobabble and narcissistic selfindulgence.

Much of the city's unique atmosphere has been generated by its extraordinary geographical vantage point. San Francisco is not only to the west of the continental United States, it is at the end of the land itself. Blocked from the pervasive influence of New York City by the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevadas, and the encircling coastal range, it overlooks the Pacific such that its view is as much west to Asia as it is east to the rest of the nation. Its heavy Asian population confirms that the city is as much part of the Pacific basin as it is part of the North American continent.

There is more: The mild climate, dreamy, sensual fog, views of the magnificent Marin headlands and Angel Island, and above all the hovering presence of Mount Tamalpais (held sacred by the original Bay Area Native American inhabitants) make it a city responsive to nature in ways uncommon to other American cities. Snyder wrote of the North Beach neighborhood in which he lived as the "bow of a ship," and it is an apt association. ² It is like no other American city.

That is not only mystical fog, but historically reasonable. San Francisco, as Kenneth Rexroth first pointed out, was the only major American city settled not by protestant mercantile or manufacturing interests, but via a gold rush that chaotically filled it up with miners, ne'er-do-wells, whores, Latinos, Asians, Jews, and later sailors and longshoremen–in general, by citizens frequently lacking any attachment to WASP notions of behavior. Despite its late Victorian pretensions to European sophistication as embodied in the Opera House and its vigorous high culture, San Francisco has been since 1849 archetypally "western" as a conscious sanctuary for personal freedom–sexual, political, and social–in the traditional western context of outlaws and cowboys beyond the "civilizing" impact of women and the law.

Snyder is the very model of a San Francisco poet, based not only on simple residence but on his values and practice as a poet. Kerouac lived intermittently in the city and wrote much of his best material there, but was ultimately rootless. His true connection with San Francisco was through his great friend Neal Cassady, whom he described in On the Road as a "sideburned hero of the snowy west." The journeys on the road that defined Kerouac to himself and established his art were westward bound.

Snyder said of the city: "San Francisco taught me what a city could be, and saved me having to go to Europe." ³ Kerouac wrote of "the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her 11 mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness of the late afternoon of time . . . California characters with their end-of-the continent sadness, handsome, decadent . . . hustlers, pimps, whores, masseurs, bellhops–a lemon lot, and how's a man going to make a living with a gang like that.)" ⁴ The two men–Snyder the practical-minded Zen Buddhist, Kerouac the romantic, self-obsessed observer–neatly capture two of the major facets of a unique place.

Yet it was still part of the United States, and it would be wise to review the nation in 1955. In the previous twenty-five years, her citizens had passed through a depression, a drastically modernizing world war, a cold war, a police action, and an internal political bloodletting. Now there was prosperity–prosperity bought with the coin of a conformity that serviced the corporate technocracy, but prosperity nonetheless. The G.I. Bill had helped a major portion of an entire generation to climb at least one layer in the social strata, and millions pushed into the managerial class with its suburban perquisites. Conspicuous consumption eased both social dislocations and the intimidation of personal freedom that Truman had initiated, McCarthy had capitalized on, and the Supreme Court let stand. Cars dripped chrome and exploded with fins. TV Guide and Playboy, the young-man-on-the-make's introduction to consumer values, surfaced as the nation's most popular periodicals. Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar and Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit exemplified the desire to believe in the virtues of conformity. The age of marriage dropped radically and the percentage of young women who were mothers jumped sharply as an entire generation rushed into the "security" of marriage.

The two most popular books of the era also spoke to the subliminal doubts many felt about the increasing rigidity of American social life. Mickey Spillane's murderous Mike Hammer acted as a vicarious avenger who was always an individual, no matter what else. And Grace Metalious's Peyton Place, filled with stock characters receiving Puritan "justice" for their acts, reassured its readers that the individual still counted, even as the power of large-scale organizations increased dramatically.

As in most things, San Francisco was a bit out of step with the rest of the country. Where leftwing ranks had been annihilated by McCarthyism, Harry Bridges could defy the Justice Department in San Francisco and be reelected forever to his union presidency. Where Stalinism had divided the left in New York and elsewhere, San Francisco had maintained throughout World War II an Anarchist Circle of Finns and Italians and the Randolph Bourne Council, which had offered support and counseling to many conscientious objectors from the Waldport, Oregon camp.

Robert Duncan, an important San Francisco poet, was in 1955 teaching at the San Francisco State Poetry Center headed by Ruth Witt-Diamont, another vital source of activity. He had returned some years before from Black Mountain College, the 50s' most remarkable educational institution, attracting some former students, including the poet Ed Dorn and Knute Stiles, who owned the bohemian bar known as The Place.

Further south, the Henry Miller–Robinson Jeffers bohemian tradition at Big Sur continued to carry considerable meaning, as did the presence of Jaime de Angelo, anthropologist and postwar anarchist/bohemian culture hero, a friend of Jeffers and a student of American Indian lore.

In the city's bohemian neighborhood North Beach, Lawrence Ferlinghetti had opened City Lights Bookstore, a coffeehouse without coffee and a natural focal point for nontraditional literary interests. And most importantly, the city had Kenneth Rexroth, rejected from Communist Party membership in the 30s for being too individualistic, an elder brother who dispensed radical political talk along with poetry news and opinion on his program on public radio station KPFA in Berkeley, itself a unique element in the Bay Area's cultural life.

For all that, Snyder told an interviewer in 1959 that "I was in isolation for 10 years (until 1955). I only had Whalen to talk to." ⁵ It was Allen Ginsberg, who had fled New York in 1954 and blossomed in the fertile atmosphere of San Francisco, who brought together all of the poets, including Kerouac and Snyder, for the catalytic Six Gallery Reading.

To review Kerouac's life before 1955: Born in 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts, Kerouac grew up as a Roman Catholic mystic obsessed with freedom, the wider world, and spiritual search on one side of his life, and with a desire for the stability and traditions of his native French-Canadian culture on the other. The split had begun in the psychic turmoil over his brother's death when Kerouac was four, and it would tear him apart–first opening within him a rarefied sensibility that would make his mark as a writer, and finally killing him.

In the meantime, he escaped Lowell with a football scholarship to Columbia University, dropped out of college, and shipped out as a merchant seaman during the war. He came to be close friends with Ginsberg and also William Burroughs, and with them adumbrated a romantic/existential philosophy they called the New Vision, a set of beliefs based on Rimbauvian sensation-seeking via drugs and the exploration of sexuality. Kerouac also used music–specifically bop jazz as played by Charley Parker, Thelonious Monk, and many others–as a trance medium to expand consciousness.

In 1947 Kerouac met Neal Cassady, whose whirlwind energy and perception made him a role model. While following Cassady about the road, Kerouac wrote and published a traditional novel, The Town and the City. Dissatisfied with the book's style, which did not jibe with his current lifestyle or learning, he experimented with his style and eventually wrote the spontaneous On the Road and then his equally spontaneous masterpieces, Visions of Cody and Dr. Sax. This new work was unsaleable, and from 1950 until the 1957 publication of On the Road he wandered in poverty around the U.S. and Mexico. In 1954 he encountered Buddhism through Thoreau and became a serious student, among other things writing the Buddhist poetry Mexico City Blues in the summer of 1955. Ginsberg had sent him news of the interesting atmosphere in San Francisco and a copy of his new poem "Howl," and in September 1955 Kerouac caught an illegal ride on a train north from Mexico to visit.

Snyder's road was different. Born in 1930 in San Francisco, he had been brought up on a scratch farm in Washington State, the child of depression radicals. His grandfather's words to him were: "Boy, read Marx." ⁶ He spent summers in the mountains around Spirit Lake and Mount Saint Helens, and as a teenager worked as a copyboy for the UPI and the Oregonian newspaper. Like Kerouac, he had also shipped out as a galley worker on a freighter. In 1951 he graduated from Reed College, and after one semester as a graduate student in anthropology at Indiana University he returned in 1953 to San Francisco to attend classes in Japanese and Chinese at the University of California at Berkeley, eking out a living working on the docks in San Francisco. Until he was disqualified as a security risk for his leftwing connections, he worked as a lookout in the Mount Baker National Forest.

That solitary confrontation with wild nature was crucial. As Joseph Conrad put it, to "you" as an ordinary person, "stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums–how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude–utter solitude without a policeman–by the way of silence–utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbor can be heard whispering of public opinion?" ⁷

IWW anarcho-syndicalist politics and a profound commitment to wild nature were joined by an ever-deepening study of Zen Buddhism. In the fall of 1955 Snyder was preparing to leave the following spring for residence in the Rinzai Zen Daitoku-ji monastery in Japan. A few years later he would list Mao, Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, and Crazy Horse as his heroes, and Buddhist thought, Chinese poetry, American Indian logic, and western science (he urges his correspondents to read the mathematical ecologist H. T. Odum) as his main sources of inspiration.

Moving forward from 1955, he spent a year in Japan, returned briefly to the U.S., spent several more years in Japan, both in meditation and on an island commune, traveled in India, and returned to the United States in late 1966 in time to be a leader of San Francisco's Great Human Be-In in January 1967. Subsequently, he moved to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada above San Francisco with his wife Masa and sons Gen and Kai to take a stand in the manzanita, find a place, and urge the earth consciousness that his poetry so brilliantly depicts.

Kerouac, of course, was to become famous with the 1957 publication of On the Road, publish many more books, write a few more, and fall prey to his insecurities and the glare of fame by diving into a bottle until he died in 1969. It is his notoriety that is one of the complications of discussing Kerouac and Snyder together. Though Snyder may become more well known as a result of his membership on the board of Friends of the Earth, he is to this point not a media "star" but an acknowledged spokesman of a real and functioning subculture–"Earth People," for lack of a better term–living his lifestyle nationwide but in particular in northern California and Oregon, the area tagged as "Ecotopia" in Ernest Callenbach's novel. Snyder has had little national publicity, and none of the racier sort. Kerouac, on the other hand, had a bestselling bohemian novel at a time when social oddities like bohemians were scarce, and consequently became the subject of some of the most scurrilous reporting and criticism in American intellectual history. The inaccurate linking of his work with violence and obscurity has clouded his single "message" per se: "that young kids in this country, instead of yearning to be jet pilots should have turned their attention to Rimbaud and Shakespeare and struggled to draw their breath in pain to tell a brother's story." ⁸ To consider all this in another way, one might wonder why an outspoken radical like Gary Snyder was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry while Jack Kerouac became a critical football never once honored with any sort of award at all.

There are many reasons for all this, but the one that seems most germane is that Snyder fulfills at least one of the major critical criteria–his practice is from a classical rather than a romantic stance. It is a common presumption that the postwar bohemian counterculture of those alienated from middle-class materialism and sexual standards and toward mystical and ecological awareness is purely a romantic phenomenon. Critical theory tends to value form as the sine qua non of writing–and of course an intuitive, spontaneous writer like Kerouac was anathema to these values. Generally the romantic upstarts going back to Blake, Whitman, and the preWorld War I era valued creativity over order, passion above stability, and so forth.

This point of view toward the counterculture ignores the fact that it is part of what Snyder calls the "great subculture," a tradition quite as old if not so widespread as the Western intellectual tradition that flows from Aristotle. As to Snyder: his praxis as a poet and the content of that poetry are supported by two traditions that are classical in terms of concern with form, craft, and the detached expression of emotions (however "mystical"), but still distinctly separate from the Western tradition of progress and reason: Zen and the American Indian steady-state ecological model and mythology.

All of this suggests that the western tradition of bohemianism may well be far more complex and sophisticated than previously acknowledged, and that northern California's primary role in introducing Asian and American Indian material to that subculture needs to be more closely examined.

Kerouac, of course, can be completely identified with the romantic wing of the western counterculture, as in his most famous sentence: "I shambled after as I've been doing all my life, after people who interested me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn . . ." ⁹ He wrote spontaneously from–to describe it over-simplistically–the ear, based on the model of Charley Parker and jazz improvisations. Like Snyder, therefore, he stepped out of traditional western high culture to a third-world culture, but like most observers he perceived the Afro-American culture in Dionysic terms, and certainly bop jazz had intensified emotion leading to a trance "highness" as a fundamental element.

In describing his attitude toward his art, Snyder wrote, "Poetry a riprap on the slick rock of metaphysics." ¹⁰ (Riprap is a forestry term for hand-laid stone steps along a trail–steps, wrote the critic Richard Howard, that "enable the reader to ascend on earth, not to slide back nor to fly.") ¹¹ This is the Zen mode, ultimately not mystical at all, despite western assumptions about it. Snyder seeks to recreate the natural state of the wilderness in the mind, really the same goal as Kerouac's–to be very "high"–but from the other side of the fence. It is poetry written from the eye-imagist poetry closely connected with William Carlos Williams's dictum "no ideas but in things," for the natural state with which Snyder is so familiar is classical– i.e., ordered, structured in a natural hierarchy.

Thus Snyder wrote in his journal while a lookout on Sourdough Mountain some three years before he met Kerouac, "Strange how unmoved this place leaves one; neither articulate nor worshipful; rather the pressing need to look within and adjust the mechanism of perception." ¹² Conversely, Kerouac was an urban man who wrote brilliantly articulate celebrations of the wilderness, but was ultimately terrified by it when he too was a lookout, a year after meeting Snyder.

Kerouac saw himself as a recording angel for his times, a solitary witness self-obsessed but stormily moving; Snyder's work as a poet is shamanistic, an invocation to an ancient and fully felt tradition, less turbulent but perhaps more grounded and enduring.

For two men of nearly the same generation both vagabond Buddhists,