Understanding Gary Snyder by Patrick D. Murphy (review)

170 Western American Literature entails a paradoxical phenomenon. The texts she describes are consummate expressions of a politics using “old voices newly calibrated . . . to address the ethnic plurality of the late twentieth-century”; these works are meaningful because they define a real space for political struggle and contestation. Taken individually, the chapters of Sending My Heart Back provide useful readings of important texts. However, Wong is unable to bring the same attention to the larger issue of the m anner in which this body of literature traces the contours of Native American governmentality. As a result, Wong’s volume is a useful rhe­ torical/literary study when it might have been a much needed work of cultural criticism. v ^ h r i s t o p h e r D. FELKER Massachusetts Institute of Technology yOnderstanding Gary Snyder. By Patrick D. Murphy. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. 186 pages, $29.95.) In Gary Snyder’s “Bubbs Creek Haircut” the narrator speaks of looking down upon “reflections [that] wobble” on the surface of a “half iced-over lake, twelve thousand feet,” but as he climbs higher he notices that “the crazy web of wavelets makes sense/seen from high above.” Patrick D. Murphy’s excellent little book weaves the same kind of sense into the myriad details of Snyder’s life and work. Obviously well-acquainted with the unpublished material in the Snyder Archive at the University of California Library at Davis and the extant scholarship on Snyder, Murphy “spots that design”in things as he relates early texts to later ones, poems to poetics, and the experiential to the aesthetic. With his marvelous ability to intertwine biographi­ cal matters, chronological facts, publishing details, and critical commentary on Snyder’s writing, Murphy provides us with the proper perspective—the view from high above—to discover the patterns that emerge as he takes us chapterby -chapter along the trail of Snyder’s published books from Riprap (1959) and Myths & Texts (1960) right up to The Practice ofthe Wild (1990). In just eighteen pages, in Chapter 1, Murphy efficiently leads us through the poet’s career: his upbringing, education, summer jobs, marriages, turning points, and present “location.” The same chapter serves as an overview of Snyder’s ideology and poetics, including (among other items) his attention to orality and performance, his alternation between mythographic and lyric modes, his continuing reliance upon Buddhist ideas and practice, and his focus upon the concepts of reinhabitation and bioregionalism. Murphy points to three informing areas that readers must become familiar with if they are to understand Snyder’s work: primitive cultures, Asian cultures, and ecology. In subsequent chapters, Murphy returns again and again to these interconnected areas in order to bring us a clear-sighted understanding of Snyder, both the man and his work. Reviews 171 Chapters 2 through 8 take up Snyder’s major volumes of poetry and prose in the approximate order of their publication. Each chapter is a compendium of solid scholarship and common-sense interpretation relevant to individual poems, sections of poems, an d/or essays found in the books under discussion. Throughout Murphy seems especially sensitive to multicultural, ecological, and feminist issues as they emanate from or apply to Snyder’s work. In addition to his own insights, Murphy neither hesitates to draw on the judgm ent of other scholars nor is reluctant to correct that scholarship when necessary. After a brief “Conclusion,” a serviceable annotated “Bibliography”furnishes a quick way for readers to sample the range of material written by and about Gary Snyder. Snyder’sjourney began among the mountains and rivers of the American West, but, as Patrick D. Murphy makes absolutely clear in this admirable book, the poet, now in his sixties and “recognized as one of the major American poets of the second half of the twentieth century,” is a writer whose message, stature, and influence is global because his roots remain stubbornly bioregional. ■^ANTHONY HUNT University ofPuerto Rico at Mayagüez \£/frLove ofJack London: His Life withJennie Prentiss— a True Love Story. By Eugene P. Lartemay and Mary Rudge. (New York: Vantage Press, 1991. 186 pages, $16.95.) This book is less important for what it...