On mountaintops, Beats sought out some answers

After cinema, no art made in California is as widely appreciated -- or as influential -- as that of the Beats.

Today, the work of such leading Beat writers as Kenneth Rexroth -- the movement’s spiritual and aesthetic godfather -- Jack Kerouac, Gary Synder, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and others is not only read and studied in schools across America, but also in England, France, Germany and Japan.

But what has been too often overlooked in such studies is that Beats were among the 20th century’s finest nature poets, and that aspect of their art was decisively shaped by their lives in California and the Northwest.

As the Berkeley-based poet and critic Jack Foley puts it in an unpublished revision of his seminal essay on the movement: “The Beat Generation was one of the most publicized, misunderstood, attacked, understood, deeply considered, cannibalized, ripped-off art movements of the 20th century. Its influence extends from the adolescent troubled about sexuality and identity to the dry-as-dust scholar looking for history and significance in old books and papers. Whereas the ‘hippies’ seem somewhat passe, sentimental and -- worst of all -- old, the even-older Beats ... have passed into history as American artists of considerable importance.”

Despite such scrutiny, the Beats still are popularly perceived around the world as urban bohemians -- habitues of jazz clubs and coffeehouses, lonely walkers of existentially empty streets. “Partly that’s because Ginsberg was such a terrific publicist,” said Foley, noting it was the late poet who first conceived his work and that of his friends as a movement. “It is through Allen’s eyes that the Beats initially passed into the public imagination. By 1958, the movement had undergone a fundamental shift, but it is Jack and Allen in Times Square that remains the powerful image.”

That fundamental shift, which has been documented not only in Foley’s recent work, but also in a new book by Boston photographer and writer John Suiter -- “Poets on the Peaks: Gary Synder, Philip Whalen & Jack Kerouac in the North Cascades” (Counterpoint Press, $40) -- put the experience of wild nature in California and the Pacific Northwest at the very center of the Beats’ work. It was, moreover, wild nature experienced not in the traditional American sense -- think Henry David Thoreau and tame little Walden Pond -- but in the light of the Buddhist spirituality and practice that was then common currency within the West Coast’s avant-garde.

At a three-day conference on the Beats last month at the John Natsoulas Gallery in Davis, McClure argued that the Beats ought to be seen “as the literary wing of the environmental movement.” As McClure recalled, one of the poems he recited at the Beats’ coming-out party -- the now legendary 1955 reading at San Francisco’s 6 Gallery -- was “FOR THE DEATH OF 100 WHALES.” And “at the United Nations Environmental Conference in Stockholm in 1972,” McClure said, “Gary Snyder and I were among the contingent of independent lobbyists ... who took it upon themselves to represent whales, Indians and the environment.”

One of the other insights to emerge from the Natsoulas conference involved the consideration of the movement’s leading visual artists, including Los Angeles’ Wallace Berman and George Herms and the Bay Area’s Bruce Conner. In light of McClure’s point, it is possible to regard their development of assemblage -- art made from found objects -- as a prophetic statement of the recycling ethic.

Still, nothing in recent years has made a greater contribution to the understanding of the Beats as nature writers than Suiter’s book. Through photos, interviews, unpublished letters and journals, it describes the decisive influence exerted on Snyder, Kerouac and Whalen by the summers they spent in the early 1950s working as solitary firewatchers along the Canadian border in the northern Cascade range. In those years, firewatchers lived alone in one-room mountaintop cabins very like ancient Buddhist hermitages, whose inhabitants then preoccupied all three men. They had been encouraged in their pursuits by Rexroth, himself a superb nature poet and accomplished outdoorsman, as well as a translator of Japanese and Chinese poetry.

In 1995, Suiter was a 47-year-old photographer and teacher who had done a number of well-received photo essays on Lowell, the Massachusetts mill town where Kerouac grew up. On the basis of that work, he was commissioned by the London Independent’s Sunday newspaper to spend two weeks in the firewatcher’s cabin atop Desolation Peak, where Kerouac had spent 63 days alone in the summer of 1955. Those weeks provided the material for the climactic episode of Kerouac’s 1958 novel, “The Dharma Bums.”

“I went to Desolation in ’95 to shoot a photo essay,” Suiter said this week. “I did an article about it and sent it to Gary Synder, who I’d never met. He got back to me right away and said, ‘This is great, but how come you didn’t shoot my lookout on Sourdough Peak, or Philip’s?’

“On one level, Gary wanted to set the story straight, making the point that he was the one who had led Kerouac up into the mountains. But the whole story of their stays in the Cascades is something that is very close to his heart, and he opened up to me.”

Suiter visited Synder at his home in the Sierra foothills near Nevada City and, through him, was introduced not only to unpublished written material about the movement and that period, but also to the other writers. They included Snyder’s old Reed College classmate, Whalen, who recently had retired as abbot of a Zen monastery.

“Philip was more unapproachable than Gary,” Suiter recalled. “And, by ‘97, when we began talking, he was retired and very ill. But we hit it off, even though his health made it very painful for him to cooperate. He died June 26, and I was very happy I was able to visit and show him a copy of the book, which includes his portrait. He was very blind, and we held the book four inches from his face and showed him the portrait.

“ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I look like a minor Charles Olsen,’ ” a hulking poetic eminence in the 1950s avant-garde.

Suiter is particularly pleased with the way his book helps place Kerouac in the pantheon of nature writers. “Kerouac’s attitude toward nature is more complex than is readily apparent in his work. He grew up in a river town, and that Merrimack River formed his understanding of nature, particularly the epochal flood of 1936, which destroyed his father’s printing business. Kerouac’s writerly ability to describe nature is very good, but he never was able to sit at peace within it, as Synder and Whalen could. He couldn’t stay up there on Desolation for 63 days without swinging wildly back and forth emotionally. Synder was quite happy to stay there and almost had to be dragged down by the other Forest Service workers in the fall.”

“My own life has been changed by this project,” Suiter said. “It has pulled my center of gravity into the mountains and much further west. But I wouldn’t have continued the project beyond Desolation if it hadn’t been for Gary. I needed living poets and a living landscape, and I found both out there.”