The Real Work: Interviews & Talks 1964–1979 by Gary Snyder (review)

Reviews The Real Work: Interviews & Talks 1964-1979. By Gary Snyder, edited by Scott McLean. (New York: New Directions, 1980. 189 pages, $4.95.) The tape recorder often gives us wordy ramblings of egocentric writers. Fortunately Gary Snyder is neither wordy nor egocentric, and the interviews and lectures collected in this volume show his usual wit and concision. He talks better than most people write. Anyone who wants to know how Snyder’s thinking on social and literary issues has evolved since Earth House Hold in 1969 will find much to mull over. The six pieces collected in The Old Ways (1977) were an uneven batch, but these statements are con­ sistently strong. Between 1969 and 1980 a puzzling decade went by. During that time Snyder lived in the Sierra Nevada foothills and managed to be both involved and detached. Detachment enabled him to get closer to the real world — the soil of the continent and all it sustains — and involvement enabled him to contribute insights and do constructive work on local and regional issues. He has perhaps mellowed or become a little more inclined to long views since Earth House Hold, but he has not backed down on his ecological positions, even if he does concede that cities are part of nature too and that land reform may take a century. The Wobbly motto, “building the new society within the shell of the old,” has been his since the 1950’s. Imagine Shelley living a long life in the Lake Country and struggling to turn Prometheus Unbound into something real by founding Fabian socialism. But Snyder was always a practical visionary, while Shelley had a silly streak. For Snyder, the “real work” includes physical labor as well as writing prophetic poetry. In his utopia, everybody will have to help with the dishes. Much of the book is given over to social and political issues, but poetry is not ignored. The most illuminating remarks pertain to shamanism and poetry. Snyder has been attacked from a native American viewpoint iri recent years for appropriating the persona of the shaman. His interview with Michael Helm sets the matter straight. Shamanism, Snyder points out, is a world-wide phenomenon, and its core is learning from the non-human, “not a teaching from an Indian medicine man, or a Buddhist master. The question of culture does not enter into it. It’s a naked experience some people have out there in the woods.” The crucial encounter in western 56 Western American Literature American poetry, and often in the novel (thinking of Rudolfo Anaya and Frank Waters), is a spiritual encounter with the non-human. Snyder has written about the experience in his poetry and his prose has taught a generation where the documents of shamanism can be found. He has influenced Simon Ortiz of Acoma Pueblo as well as Barry Gifford. Snyder places himself at one point of a vast network of American intellectual life that embraces the cities and universities as well as the Allegheny Star Route in northern California. He doesn’t speak as a solitary prophet although he does live in the hills. The scope of this network is shown by the sources of these interviews, which include academic journals, a health food magazine, poetry journals, counterculture newspapers — and there is an uncollected interview in a skiing magazine. Eclectic and esoteric as his interests may be, they are shared by a sizable community. Scott McLean has gathered materials from sources as obscure as Road Apple Review and the City Miner. He has provided an index and his notes will lead readers to other interviews. All this care makes me wonder why he supplies texts which have sometimes been silently abridged. Interviews are often edited before they are published, but it is misleading to leave material out in a reprint without indicating the deletions. Some major cuts have been indicated with a row of asterisks, and this practice could have been followed consistently. It is still a pleasure to have so much of Snyder’s sensible talk between covers. BERT ALMON, University of Alberta Only One Point of the Compass: Willa Cather in the Northeast. By Marion Marsh Brown and Ruth Crone. (Danbury...