|
|
That was the introduction I made to a Whalen reading at Cody's about 1980. I drew my portrait of him above at that time. To it I must add my perpetual delight in hearing Phil read his work. His voices are a chorus of characters bickering inside his cranium, though each gets his or her moment in the mouthpiece.
I met Phil in 1974 when I was researching my bibliography on the Auerhahn Press, Dave Haselwood's San Francisco imprint that launched the careers of Whalen, Welch, Wieners, and many others. Philip invited me to the Zen Center on Page Street for tea & a chat, and we got to know one another. Later I visited him in his home. I was impressed at how though he had no furniture, it was wonderfully furnished with displays of suseki or bonsai'ed rocks (!) and Buddhist artifacts, as well as the novel way his library was arranged, starting inside the door and running around the skirting board of the entire apartment on the floor. There were probably more books in the closets. He showed me portraits of himself done by McClure and Kerouac. I liked his own drawing better. He recommended The Makioka Sisters as a novel worth reading. I couldn't get into it, but I shared his taste for Jane Austen.
He showed me a book of Richard Brautigan's translated into Japanese and dedicated to him. He didn't know why Brautigan would dedicate a work to him, but it was clear to me. Brautigan was hot at the time, 1975 or so, and Phil was too modest to think he could have made an impact on the younger better-known poet's writing. Whalen was a big influence on the Hippie generation and by far the best writer of his own generation, often dubbed the Beats. Eng Lit types think of Whalen, if they think at all, as a character in The Dharma Bums by Kerouac. (Kerouac is a character in The Diamond Noodle). Yet Whalen was content to modestly sit in the background and be lumped with Snyder and Welch as part of some phenomenon arising out of Lloyd Reynold's calligraphy class at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
As I had written a bibliography of Auerhahn and was very interested in his work, Phil started sending me notes and cards about some of his own early publications, thinking perhaps I'd do a bibliography of him. I was hired to design and typeset Gary Lepper's Bibliography of 75 Modern American Authors so was able to use some of this material to give Lepper an assist. But I really didn't fancy the Boswell role that some older writers seem to inspire in their acolytes.
We'd go to lunch at Chinese restaurants. Sometimes Jim Nisbet would drive and the three of us would squeeze into the front of Jim's Datsun pickup (We were all thinner then). Phil loved to eat as well as talk. I often asked him for work to print and he always replied that he wasn't writing anymore. But then Don Allen or another small press would bring out another slim volume, so I persisted and found manuscripts squirreled away in odd places which I was able to put into metal type as broadsides or the little book, Prolegomena to a Study of the Universe I did with an introduction by Kevin Power (at that time a post-grad student at UC Berkeley, now sub-director of the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid). Those prose pieces were later rewritten and incorporated into the text of Diamond Noodle. Like many writers he mined his notebooks and would rework his ideas as he went along.
Don Allen had the manuscript of The Diamond Noodle and thought it was unpublishable, so he willingly relinquished it to me. Somehow the original art that went with it had become detached from the manuscript and was considered lost. Philip was most concerned about his drawing of Wallace Creek bridge. I asked Frances Butler to illustrate the book and she came up with some drawings that reacted to specific moments in the story. We showed them to Philip: he didn't like them (apart from the covered bridge she drew to represent Wallace Bridge which he thought looked just like it). A book should have illustrations that take the reader elsewhere, and are not pictures of what the reader is imagining, he explained. That made it easy. We went through Frances' portfolio and selected a bunch of drawings she'd done for no specific purpose (one a portrait of her mother, another of her late husband, two based on street photos by me) and showed them to Philip. He was happy, judged them the perfect accompaniment. But he had another request regarding the typesetting of the book: when he had written it, from 1956 to 1965 (pretty much concurrently with On Bear's Head), he had put the manuscript together from many disparate pages of what he called "Prose Takes." In order to cobble together sequences of these he would use groups of asterisks, piles of them like hot buns, or rows of them, or constellations, depending on his mood. He drew them and I had simply set them in type. But "Whalen's Lacunae," as seen in his other works, had been the inspiration for a whole generation of writers who had started peppering their works with triads of asterisks. Whalen wanted them gone. Fortunately I was able to razor them off the paste-up without having to do any major re-typing.
I had set the book in photo-type so it was in long waxed galleys and not as easy to manipulate as digital or even metal type. It was the biggest project I had undertaken and I was still learning how it all fits together. But I knew enough not to try to impose too much external style on to the writing: rather to try to make the voice heard through subtle use of spacing, judicious use of italics and caps, and I followed the line breaks or indents as if it were a poetry manuscript. I had liked the stars, they were so, well, Whalenesque, and now there were gaps in the pages where they had been. I introduced larger sizes of type -- repros from metal Sabon -- here and there, in lieu of chapter openings, where there was an obvious new section, but my main contribution, typographically, was in creating two title-pages for imaginary books. I did them in an early eighteenth-century English style, which delighted Philip.
When the book was finished I sent him back the manuscript and later found the pages of stars that were originally interspersed throughout. So I returned them separately. He sent me a long letter from Santa Fe detailing his itinerary whilst in San Francisco on a recent trip (as a way of excusing himself for not seeing me). He wrote (15 IX 87): "I hope you aren't too mad at me. Thanks for sending the lost pages of DIAMOND NOODLE
{my stars!},
I'm having fun reading Lord Byron's letters & journals. He was a sharp cookie."
He'd write little spontaneous poems as dedications in books I'd ask him to sign, like "Onward, in search of the pheromone!" or
Thanks for the procaine gases
Welcome to Canada horses coffee
Cup search. Really nice. who took it.
I loved getting letters and cards from him because of his wit and lovely calligraphy. My favourite came in response to a copy of my magazine The Ampersand. It reads:
Dear Alastair, Thanks for sending
the elegant magazine. I loved the
"buncombe, balderdash & sham" article,
Everything is creeping along at a
petty pace, today and mostly mañana.
I long for the fleshpots of Egypt, &c.
hope you are all keeping well & happy.
yours &c
Phil
12:VIII:86
At the end of the eighties he moved back to San Francisco from Santa Fe and I visited him in his new Zendo which was above a laundromat on Potrero Hill. I'd borrowed McClure's portrait of him for a show and it was in really poor shape, being enamel paint on butcher paper. It was so large he kept it rolled up in the closet and the ends were getting frayed. So I took it to Karen Zukor, the top paper conservator in Oakland, and had it restored and de-acidified. Philip showed me his notebooks from his trip to Japan and since he liked my work he gave me the original art for "Ten Titanic Etudes" and a lot of similar poems from his Japan trip that were calligraphy and drawing in bright multi-coloured felt pens which had just hit the market at the time of his trip. (The text is printed in On Bear's Head, pp. 377-9, but see the last pages of that volume as well as Highgrade for an example of his drawn poems.) However, he didn't really understand the printing process; there was no way to reproduce work like this by letterpress and offset-lithography would have cost a fortune. Iris prints were also out of the price range unless I wanted to create an artificial rarity and sell it for a lot of money, which is anathema to my notion of publishing. But I held onto the pages hoping that as computer technology improved I might be able to scan them and print them on a colour printer and gather them in a portfolio in a small edition. I asked Joanne Kyger to write an introduction, and set it in type and designed a title page using large Victorian wood type and a nineteenth-century foundry typeface called Bruce Mikita. I wanted to publish more of the little prose takes that Phil had sent Dave Haselwood before the publication of Memoirs of an Interglacial Age but felt bad about sitting on the Titanic Etudes for so long. When i called Phil he always complained about being blind and having no fun. I offered to read to him or take him out but his response was always along the lines of "What's the use?" As abbot of the Zen AIDS hospice on Hartford Street, in the heart of San Francisco's Castro district, he was always performing funeral rites for the young men who came there to die.
I felt sad but didn't want to bother him and returned the notebook pages after the treacherous Buddhists kicked him out of Hartford Street and he was stuck in Laguna Honda hospital. It was a cruel fate for a great American writer. One of his favourite tag-lines was "So, it's finally come to this!" which, he told me, was something Lew Welch used to say.
* * *
Once Phil told me of the time he was making a pilgrimage in Japan. He was headed for a remote monastery with a friend. As they approached the village where the monastery was situated they thought to bring a gift and stopped into the village store. There wasn't much available, and their Japanese was rudimentary, so they decided a practical gift would be a bottle of sake. Unfortunately the store only had it in 5-gallon jugs. Well, they thought, it might be appreciated as the monastery could stock up. They reached the monastery, lugging the huge jeroboam of liquor, and duly presented their gift to the abbot. Later they were invited to dinner and when they arrived in the candle-lit dining hall, the monks came out in procession bearing trays with hundreds of tiny cups, all full of the sake which they laid on the table before the pilgrims!
|
