The Journals and Prose Fragments of Philip Whalen 1950-1966
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2-2014 Space & Distance As I Require: The Journals and Prose Fragments of Philip Whalen 1950-1966 Brian Unger Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/121 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] SPACE & DISTANCE AS I REQUIRE: THE JOURNALS & PROSE FRAGMENTS OF PHILIP WHALEN 1950 – 1966 by BRIAN UNGER A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York. 2014 ii © 2014 BRIAN UNGER All Rights Reserved iii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Ammiel Alcalay___________ __Dec. 16, 2013________ __________________________ Date Chair of Examining Committee Carrie Hintz______________ __Dec. 16, 2013____________ _________________________ Date Executive Officer _________Nancy Yousef__________________________________ _________David Greetham__________________________________ ___________________________________________ Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iv Abstract Space & Distance As I Require: The Journals & Prose Fragments of Philip Whalen 1950 – 1966 by Brian Unger Adviser: Professor Ammiel Alcalay Space & Distance As I Require: The Journals & Prose Fragments of Philip Whalen 1950 – 1966 presents the early journals, prose fragments, and a few unpublished poems and essays by San Francisco Renaissance and Beat Generation poet Philip Whalen (1923-2002). This work includes a scholarly apparatus with both general literary and textual introductions, a critical bibliography that reflects my literary-historical concerns, brief section introductions, annotations, and an informal concordance with Whalen’s poetry utilizing The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen (ed. Rothenberg, 2007) as a reference work. Philip Whalen was an Irish-American writer with roots in small town Oregon, a poet who was, as Kenneth Rextroth once said, as intensely Northwestern in sensibility as the painters Morris Graves and Mark Tobey. Whalen was a poet of complex sources and influences, extraordinarily well-read in Elizabethan and 18th century English literature, in particular the satiric gestures of Sterne, Pope, Johnson, and Swift. During his lifetime Whalen produced a remarkable oeuvre of close to twenty collections of verse, twenty broadsides, two novels, eight or nine works of experimental prose, plus several dozen critical essays, lectures, commentaries, v introductions, prefaces, and interviews, an extensive literary correspondence, and forty years of carefully written literary journals, ranging from roughly 1952 to 1992. Like two of his favorite 18th century novelists Laurence Sterne and Jonathan Swift, Whalen lived the second half of his life as an ordained cleric within a formal religious setting, a “new” religion for the West, Zen Buddhism, a spiritual tradition founded in India at least a thousand years before the birth of Christ. Whalen began his study of buddhism at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, having served in the Army Air Force as a radio repairman during the final years of WWII. At Reed Whalen’s interest in Asian culture was encouraged and augmented by his roommate Gary Snyder, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who blazed a circuitous trail around Ezra Pound, bypassing Fascism and Confucianism to forge a link between Zen Buddhism, Northwestern Wobblie unionism, and Marxist economic theory. He and Whalen remained close friends throughout Whalen’s life. It was Snyder who probably first taught Whalen how to sit still in the Zen meditation posture, a fundamentally ungraspable, trans-rational, non-discursive, and deconstructive form of introspection that influenced Whalen’s writing and played a decisive role in his poetics. Shortly after the landmark Six Gallery poetry reading in San Francisco in October, 1955 Snyder moved to Japan to study Zen, leaving Whalen to fend for himself in an apartment he shared in Berkeley with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. The journals show that Whalen was clear but shy about his bisexuality. For a period of time he was in love triangle with two married people, one of them a man, the other Gary Snyder’s wife, the poet Joanne Kyger. He remained in the U.S. during the late fifties and early to mid-1960s, a tumultuous six or seven years during which he was unable to support himself financially, alternatively couch-surfing with friends, habitating a shack in the woods on Mt. Tamalpais, bumming free rooms from friends in San vi Francisco, Berkeley, and Marin County. He also attempted a ‘straight’ job and career in Newport, Oregon, and lived in San Francisco for over two years with his companion and lover Leslie Thompson. Finally, in February, 1966 – at Snyder’s behest – Whalen moved to Japan. He taught English for a regular weekly salary in the ancient capital city of Kyoto, spending his spare time reading, writing, and studying Japanese culture, religion, art, theater, and literature. I am presenting here the poet’s ‘pre-Kyoto’ journals and fragments. vii Acknowledgements My mother Helen Marie Baker Unger, an Irish-American woman from Kingsbridge, The Bronx, New York City, was the first person in our family who completed a college education. She attended Hunter College of The City University of New York when it was an elite women’s school, and completed her B.A. degree many years later at Jersey City State College as a working mother raising a family. Her devotion to formal academic education, ceaselessly pounded into our ears, transmitted to me a yearning for formal academic knowledge. My father, Gilbert Thomas Unger, was an Irish Roman Catholic with a partly Jewish background, born of an Irish mother, Helen Knowles Sullivan, and a Jewish father, Joseph Unger, whose own father Solomon had emigrated to Dublin, Ireland from Germany. They raised three sons in Flatbush, Brooklyn. As an undergraduate at CCNY, Valerie Krishna introduced me to scholarship and the formal study of literature, adopting me personally as a teacher and friend. Also at CCNY Paul Sherwin, just out of Howard Bloom’s tutelage at Yale, introduced me to the philosophical and even somewhat mystical excitement possible in the study of literary criticism. The independent scholar, translator, artist, and Zen teacher Kazuaki Tanahashi, taught me how to read, translate, and write with greater precision, calmness, and clarity. We translated poems of Eihei Dogen (1200-1250) and other medieval Japanese works while I was engaged in the formal study of Zen Buddhism during the 1970s and 1980s in San Francisco, under the remarkable Zen teacher and polymath Richard Baker-roshi. At New York University Martha Rust, Richard Sieburth, Harold Bloom, and Lytle Shaw further nurtured and ignited my rather “late-in-life” decision to re-engage a more formal and focused study of North American literature. While at N.Y.U. I also returned to study at the viii University of Pennsylvania, where I had quit formal graduate studies in the 1970s. There in Philadelphia I studied poetry and poetics with Charles Bernstein and Bob Perelman. Charles became a friend and mentor. Anne McCarthy, Ph.D., CUNY Graduate Center, a true colleague and dear friend, encouraged me along this path. Without her stunning example, I would have never comprehended how much commitment and fortitude it would take to complete this project. Ammiel Alcalay is and has been my primary Virgilian guide, confidant, conscience, and mentor at CUNY. Ammiel is a gift beyond gifts; a poet, scholar, intellectual, political philosopher, and critic with a global perspective; with family ties to Charles Olson, and with close personal ties to hundreds of poets, scholars, writers, and translators throughout the world. This dissertation would never even have been remotely possible without Ammiel’s quiet wisdom, firm scholarship, and his unshakeable devotion to American poetry as a fundamental social and political force. I also want to express my deep gratitude to my committee member Prof. Nancy Yousef for her profound grasp of literature and philosophy. It has been pure joy to study with Nancy, and also with Prof. David Greetham, whose understanding of the manifold subtleties of textuality has deeply enriched my work. My Zen teacher the poet Norman Fischer has been another veritable Virgilian guide; a poet-monk who can work with the most recalcitrant student, as I am afraid I have been. I have more respect for Norman than I can articulate, so I won’t even try. We both see the development of Zen Buddhism in North America as invaluably enriched by poets and artists. Richard Baker, the second abbot of San Francisco Zen Center, understood this very well and nurtured people like Philip Whalen and Norman Fischer. I first met Philip Whalen as a student at San Francisco Zen Center in the 1970s and later again in the calmer and quieter late 1980s and 1990s when he ix was abbot of his own temple. Philip’s quiet, rather humble, but sure-footed clarifications of Zen praxis were, for me, life changing. My children Emma, Holly, Alexander Carter, and Nora have made my life worth living. They have freely bestowed their wisdom and compassion like flower petals on all my numerous mistakes. My first wife the incredibly grounded, wise, and beautiful Barbara Wallace Winter, and my late second wife, Janice Hirschorn, were and are wise and perceptive beyond belief, grounded in the earth, defenders of nature and animals, raisers of children. Both Janice and Barbara tolerated my many foibles and weaknesses in a manner that, for me, made the institution of marriage a true sacrament. I beg them both forgiveness for my shortcomings.