Writing Nature in Cold War American Literature 9781474430043

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Writing Nature in Cold War American Literature

Modern American Literature and the New Twentieth Century Series Editors: Martin Halliwell and Mark Whalan Published Titles Writing Nature in Cold War American Literature Sarah Daw F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Short Fiction and American Popular Culture: From Ragtime to Swing Time Jade Broughton Adams Forthcoming Titles The Big Red Little Magazine: New Masses: 1926–1948 Susan Currell The Literature of Suburban Change in Late Twentieth-Century America Martin Dines US Modernism at Continents End: Carmel, Provincetown, Taos Geneva Gano The Reproductive Politics of American Literature and Film, 1959–1973 Sophie Jones Ordinary Pursuits in American Writing after Modernism Rachel Malkin Sensing Willa Cather: The Writer and the Body in Transition Guy Reynolds The Plastic Theatre of Tennessee Williams: Expressionist Drama and the Visual Arts Henry I. Schvey The Labour of Laziness in Twentieth Century American Literature Zuzanna Ladyga

Writing Nature in Cold War American Literature

SARAH DAW

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-­edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Sarah Daw, 2018 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The ­Tun – ­Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10.5/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 3002 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 3004 3 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 3005 0 (epub) The right of Sarah Daw to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

C O NT E NT S

Acknowledgements vii Introduction: Ecocriticism and the Mid-Twentieth Century 1 1. Attaining fana in Paul Bowles’s Infinite Landscapes 26 2. Nature and the Nuclear Southwest: Peggy Pond Church and J. Robert Oppenheimer 61 3. The Influence of Chinese and Japanese Literature on J. D. Salinger’s Philosophy of Nature 95 4. The Beat Ecologies of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac 129 5. Bifurcated Nature in Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America 169 Conclusion: ‘Know that the earth will madonna the Bomb’ 205 Notes 212 Index 248

A C K NO W L E DGE M E NT S

My thanks to the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, who awarded me two fellowships between 2016 and 2017. These postdoctoral fellowships provided the time and financial support that allowed me to write this book. I am also grateful to the University of Bristol, who awarded me a Vice-­Chancellor’s Fellowship in November 2017. This new post has supported the final stages of this book project, as well as continuing to support my second research project, ‘Unknowing Nature: The Development of Ecological Thought in British and American Science and Literature from 1945’. I am very grateful to all the scholars who have helped and supported me in writing this book. My thanks to Professor Martin Halliwell and Professor Mark Whalan, and to Michelle Houston at Edinburgh University Press, for their editorial work, advice and their support for this book. Special thanks to Dr Alex Murray, who supervised much of this research during my PhD, and whose work, comments and advice have shaped this project. My thanks also to Dr Paul Williams at the University of Exeter, who second-­supervised my PhD, to Professor Nick Selby at the University of East Anglia, to Dr David Farrier at the University of Edinburgh, to Dr Isabel Galleymore at the University of Birmingham, and to Professor Ralph Pite at the University of Bristol, for all of their generous help and advice, and to Professor Richard J. Schneider for his edits to an earlier version of part of this research. My gratitude and thanks also to my family, especially to Dr Peter Daw for reading many, many versions of this work, and to Mark Johnston.

Introduction: Ecocriticism and the Mid-Twentieth Century

Ahead of his 2016 Reith Lectures, Professor Stephen Hawking gave a damning assessment of the survival chances of the human race. He warned ‘we face a number of threats to our survival from nuclear war, catastrophic global warming, and genetically engineered viruses’, before adding the grim prediction that: ‘although the chance of a disaster on planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, becoming a near certainty in the next thousand or ten thousand years’.1 Hawking’s comments mirror recent thinking within the environmental humanities concerning the advent of the ‘Anthropocene’ – the geological period in which humans have come ‘to play a decisive, if largely incalculable, role in the planet’s ecology and geology’.2 There is a growing consensus that we have arrived at a point where humans will almost certainly be the architects of our own destruction. Or perhaps we arrived at that moment in a previous epoch. In June 1961, the natural scientist Rachel Carson wrote that she had finally settled upon an opening sentence for Silent Spring (1962). The book would begin, she wrote to her friend and confidante Dorothy Freeman, with the declaration: ‘This is a book about man’s war against nature, and because man is part of nature it is also and inevitably a book about man’s war against himself’.3 Carson, who was to become, like Hawking, one of the most widely recognised scientific figures of her generation, was writing about the massive environmental threat posed to humans and ecosystems alike by the increasingly widespread use of organophosphate and organochloride chemicals in the post-­war

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period. Despite the differences in the mode of delivery of the perceived threat to the human, by the human, Carson’s and Hawking’s statements both evoke the location of the Anthropocene, which, as Timothy Clark notes, ‘brings to an unavoidable point of stress the question of the nature of Nature and of the human’.4 Hawking’s comments highlight the Cold War and Climate Change as two significant phases in the creation of the Anthropocene, further drawing together the contemporary moment and the mid-­century period in which Carson was writing. The ecocritic Timothy Morton lists the following as the key moments in the Anthropocene’s development: ‘1784, soot, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, plutonium’.5, 6 With three out of five of Morton’s list directly linked to nuclear capabilities originating in and after 1945, the Cold War and nuclear proliferation feature as heavily in Morton’s list as they do in Hawking’s prediction. Morton further fortifies this link between the first use of nuclear weapons and contemporary environmentalism by choosing J. Robert Oppenheimer’s famous statement upon witnessing the first atomic bomb blasts, ‘I am become death, shatterer of worlds’, as the epigraph for Hyperobject: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World – his 2013 book from which the above quotations are taken.7 However, despite these overt references to the Cold War as a significant moment in ecocritical thought, ecocriticism has spent far more energy addressing the questions that Climate Change raises about the human’s relationship to ‘Nature’ than it has engaging with the Cold War as a ‘point of stress’ in the development of this relationship over the course of the twentieth century. This book will suggest that the Cold War caused a seismic shift in the collective American understanding of the nation’s relationship to the environment. It reveals that, despite a persistent media narrative of human ‘mastery’ over ‘Nature’, American writers and scientists alike were rapidly rewriting the position of humanity in relation to the environment in increasingly ecological terms.8 This, often radical, reconsideration of ‘Nature’ forms a significant and compelling component of Cold War literature. Carson’s statement that ‘man’s war against nature’ is a ‘war against himself’ suggests an ecological association between humans and their environment, a point further strengthened by her description of ‘man’ as a ‘part of nature’. However, her interdependent, ecolog-

Introduction: Ecocriticism and the Mid-Twentieth Century/ 3

ical vision of the human relationship to Nature is a far cry from the dominant presentation of the natural world in the American media during the early Cold War years. For instance, in an unpublished 1962 letter sent to the New Yorker following the publication of Carson’s Silent Spring, an anonymous reader advised caution about the uptake of Carson’s work: We can live without birds and animals, but, as the current market slump shows, we cannot live without business. As for insects, isn’t it just like a woman to be scared to death of a few little bugs! As long as we have the H-­bomb everything will be O.K.9

The writer’s hubristic dismissal of environmental concerns is a neat demonstration of the attitude to Nature that dominated hegemonic American cultural discourse during the Cold War years. M ­ an – ­for it was nearly always ‘man’ – was perceived to have conquered Nature in creating the atomic bomb and, as a concept, Nature was habitually characterised as obsolete, vanquished and passé. Such an attitude is clear in the periodical press of the time; print culture was busy promoting American science in the years following the dropping of the nuclear bombs, simultaneously mythologising scientists as ‘Modern Prometheans’ and touting them as the country’s new ‘political and ethical guides’.10 This collective media endorsement of Cold War science was often couched in the language of conquest. The rhetoric of President Harry Truman in his September 1945 address to Congress in support of the National Science Foundation illustrates this, with the President asserting that ‘vast scientific fields remain to be conquered in the same way’ as America was perceived to have ‘conquered’ in the development of the nuclear bomb.11 But what were American scientists conquering? The implicit answer was almost always Nature. For instance, the science writer David Dietz painted the following picture of the Cold War scientist: ‘he visions mankind marching down the ages, with comprehension of the universe growing greater and greater, his mastery of nature and of himself ever increasing’.12 Elsewhere, Truman explicitly frames the development of the nuclear bomb as man ‘harnessing’ the power of Nature; in an August 1945 Life magazine article titled ‘The Manhattan Project: Scientists Have

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Harnessed Nature’s Basic Force’, for example, he describes nuclear power as man ‘harnessing’ the ‘forces of solar energy’.13 Peter Middleton discusses the valorisation of atomic science by the American media and establishment at length in Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After (2015). Middleton recounts atomic scientist Hans Bethe describing the atom as the ‘hero of the day’ in the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima, and details the process by which the adulation of nuclear physics, precipitated by the detonation of the nuclear bomb, had led nuclear science to become synonymous with American global supremacy. As Middleton exposes, the pervasive celebration of nuclear science in the national media after 1945 had a multidimensional impact on mid-­century society, with consequences ranging from the resurrection of the periodical Scientific American to the development of the notion that to be an American citizen was of itself ‘to be scientific’.14 The idea that the ‘scientific’ American had finally conquered Nature was not uniformly accepted, but dissenting voices were often intentionally marginalised.15 For instance, Rachel Carson could not gain publisher interest in the project that would become Silent Spring for nearly twenty years, due to the powerful draw of the media narrative of America’s atomic success.16 The acceptance of a connection between the development of atomic weapons and the obsolescence of Nature is also implicitly evident within literary criticism of the period. In fact, discussion of the role and representation of Nature is largely absent from Cold War literary criticism.17 There is, however, a brief moment of recognition in Alan Nadel’s field-­defining study Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (1995). In a short section on the concept of the ‘dual nature of nuclear fuel’, Nadel reveals that the US State Department deliberately depicted nuclear fuel as possessing a ‘dual nature’ with respect to its two functions: as atomic energy used for peaceful purposes, and as atomic weaponry. Nadel highlights this rhetoric in his argument that ‘nuclear fuel has no nature at all; it is no more natural than it is naturally dual’. He goes on to state: ‘For the energy of the atom to become fuel, “unnatural” acts must be performed; nature must be violated and its power spent in some exterior way’.18 His analysis therefore contains an implicit depiction of Nature as something

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‘Over There’, which is separate from both the human, and from nuclear energy.19 However, the following chapters will show that a number of Cold War writers portray nuclear science as a part of an infinitely expansive, ecological vision of Nature. This book interrogates the Cold War as a particular ‘point of stress’ in the evolution of American literary representations of ‘the nature of Nature and of the human’. It finds that despite the prevalence of media descriptions of humanity having achieved ‘mastery’ of Nature through the development of nuclear weapons, Carson, and many other Cold War writers, depicted the human as a component within an infinite and interdependent system of Nature.20 My five chapters will explore the influences behind these emergent portrayals of ecology in literature written between 1945 and 1971, as well as reflecting upon the implications that Cold War literary depictions of ecology have for contemporary ecocritical theory. The Cold War is a covert presence in much recent ecocriticism, as the above extract from Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects exemplifies. In this same theoretical text, Morton notes that: ‘“The actual earth,” as Thoreau puts it, now contains throughout its circumference a thin layer of radioactive materials, deposited since 1945’.21 Morton’s juxtaposition of Thoreau’s writing of Nature with the environmental legacy of the Nuclear Age also gestures towards the disproportionate influence that historically situated literary movements such as American Transcendentalism and British Romanticism have had on contemporary environmental writing and criticism. An earlier generation of American literary ecocritics leaned heavily on the British Romantics and American Transcendentalists for their key literary objects, and guiding frameworks. In addition, Morton’s own early work, which I will draw on in my methodology, disproportionally analytically engages with the work of Henry David Thoreau and with British Romantic writing.22 However, while Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (1995) is predicated on the assumption that Thoreau’s work continues to exert a defining influence on the writing and theorisation of American Nature at the end of the twentieth century, Buell also qualifies his presentation of the merits of a continued reliance on Thoreau, writing that a ‘more radical critic’ would ‘favor more than I do the prospect of a complete, ground-­up

6 / Writing Nature

reconstruction of western values in terms of some other ­paradigm – ­perhaps Taoism, or some Native American culture’.23 Buell therefore signals that there is a need for something more ‘radical’ than a continued reliance on Thoreau to be the primary influence behind the writing of Nature at the close of the twentieth century. The ‘deep ecology’ movement of the late 1980s and 1990s enthusiastically promoted the turn towards the inclusion of non-­Euro-­ American philosophies within American environmental thought that Buell references in The Environmental Imagination.24 This move was, in turn, rightly critiqued by postcolonial ecocritics, as this Introduction will go on to describe in greater detail. However, the shift from a reliance on Thoreau and others in the tradition of eighteenth-­century and nineteenth-­century environmental writing, and towards a greater reliance on non-­Euro-­American philosophies, began to occur within mid-­ twentieth-­ century American literary depictions of Nature. Many years before the emergence of the ‘deep ecology’ movement, mid-­century American writers began to draw heavily on a range of non-­Euro-­American philosophies in order to reimagine the human relationship to the natural world after 1945. The chapters in this book will mine the influences behind the ecological presentations of Nature that it identifies in a variety of Cold War texts, revealing that at mid-­century, American writers were drawing far more on non-­Euro-­American texts and worldviews when re-­inscribing Nature than they were on the legacy of Transcendentalism. In this way, Writing Nature in Cold War American Literature exposes that the influences on which a number of mid-­century writers drew in order to respond to the new nuclear environment were both culturally and globally diverse. However, it is significant to note that these widespread attempts to understand the changes brought on by the nuclear moment through recourse to non-­Euro-­ American philosophical traditions were not confined to writers, as Oppenheimer’s decision to quote the words of The Bhagavad Gita when witnessing the first detonation of an atomic bomb evidences. Oppenheimer turned to Hindu m ­ ysticism, Paul Bowles to Sufism, and Peggy Pond Church to the Pueblo Native American worldview that she was exposed to in her region of northern New Mexico. J. D. Salinger and the Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac

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reached for some of the many contemporary, Americanised translations of ancient Chinese and Japanese Taoist and Buddhist texts that were widely available in the American literary marketplace at mid-­century. Somewhat differently, Mary McCarthy sought to radically reorient literary depictions of Nature in reaction to a rising environmental consciousness in America, which she viewed to be an incomplete response to the changing status of the natural world in the mid-­twentieth century. Her theorisation of Nature draws heavily on the work of the French philosopher Simone W ­ eil – ­an influence that led her to form a complex environmentalism, and to critique the place of Nature in twentieth-­century American society and culture. In this regard, significant parallels will be drawn between McCarthy’s thinking and Carson’­s – ­both writers’ work displays a sophisticated understanding of the separation between the cultural work of the idea of Nature and what they understood to be its ecological reality. This book seeks to highlight the pronounced turn towards a diverse range of non-­ Euro-­ American philosophies in the work of a number of white American writers between the mid-­1940s and early 1970s, and to expose the extent that this turn directly impacted upon these writers’ literary depictions of Nature.25 In doing so, it will not shy away from the colonialism, Orientalism and tendency toward universalism, that are inherent within white American writers’ appropriations of ideas from Sufi theology, Native American philosophy, and translated Taoist and Zen Buddhist literature. The acts of cultural appropriation practised by the mid-­century American writers on whom this book will focus thankfully appear increasingly problematic and archaic within the context of contemporary ecocriticism; although, as has been noted, comparable engagements with non-­Euro-­American philosophies were a significant aspect of the deep ecology movement that dominated American ecocriticism in the final decades of the twentieth century. This study has no desire to contribute to the whiteness of the ecocritical field, or to endorse cultural appropriation as a valid approach in the development of American ecological thought. However, the acts of cultural appropriation undertaken by the white writers on whom this book concentrates, which were inevitably governed and enabled by their white-­skin privilege, nevertheless

8 / Writing Nature

significantly contributed to the evolution of the writing of Nature at mid-­century and beyond. For this reason, they do demand critical attention. In investigating this pervasive trope, I will concentrate analysis on the specific texts through which these writers gained access to a range of non-­Euro-­American philosophical and spiritual ideas. The sources used by the writers examined in this study were often among the most Americanised and inauthentic translations and interpretations that were available in the American literary marketplace, and as such it must be continually emphasised that the interpretations of the philosophies and spiritualities discussed should not be taken as in any way representative of the cultures and traditions from which they derive. Indeed, they very often constitute highly racist and Orientalist interpretations of the traditions from which they are drawn, and must be recognised as such. However, as none of the writers, save for McCarthy in the case of Simone Weil, read the philosophies to which they were drawn in their original languages, analysis will necessarily concentrate exclusively on the particular translations from which the writers covered gained access to these ideas. In examining the degree to which depictions of ecology at mid-­century appropriate globally diverse philosophies, this book will actively engage with the substantial criticisms of American Environmentalism that were first raised by Ramachandra Guha in his important 1989 intervention ‘Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique’. Guha condemns the universalising tendency of American environmentalism, and particularly targets the at-­the-­time emergent movement of ‘deep ecology’.26 He argues that the ‘deep ecology’ movement ‘lumped together’ a number of different Eastern ­philosophies – ­Hinduism, Buddhism, ­Taoism – i­n order to aid the creation of a universal deep ecology, and that deep ecology resultantly reductively depicts these disparate traditions as holding comparable, biocentric views of Nature.27 Guha describes this appropriation of Eastern thought in the service of a fundamentally Euro-­American ecological agenda as functioning in the following way: At one level, the task is to recover those dissenting voices within the Judeo-­Christian tradition, at another, to suggest that religious traditions

Introduction: Ecocriticism and the Mid-Twentieth Century/ 9 in other cultures are, in contrast, dominantly, if not exclusively, ‘biocentric’ in their orientation. This coupling of (ancient) Eastern and (modern) ecological wisdom seemingly helps consolidate the claim that deep ecology is a philosophy of universal significance.28

In an example of this tendency, Guha cites Michael Cohen’s characterisation of John Muir as ‘a Taoist of the [American] West’. The superficial appropriation of Eastern thought that Cohen displays through this construction is also found in the work of Jack Kerouac and J. D. Salinger in the chapters that follow. This book aims to explore the impact that white American writers’ appropriations of non-­Euro-­American ­philosophies had on the development of increasingly ecological literary depictions of Nature at mid-­century, while in no way endorsing the Orientalism and cultural appropriation that postcolonial ecocriticism has shown to be inherent in such practices.29 Accordingly, this study will continue to emphasise that the appropriation of non-­Euro-­American philosophies by American writers was solely influential and impactful within the context of American literary depictions of Nature, and will not portray their influence as in any way a part of the creation of a global or universal environmental narrative. While postcolonial analysis is not the focus of this study, the following chapters will continue to stress the ‘monolithic, simplistic’ and Orientalist character of white American writers’ representations of non-­Euro-­American philosophies and spiritualities at mid-­century – a­ ll tropes that Guha identifies in later American ecocritical writing.30 In the years since Guha’s 1989 intervention, a number of his criticisms of Western ecocriticism have been answered by the rise of ecocriticism that focuses on the interrelations between capitalism and ecology, including the recent work of Jason W. Moore.31 Guha’s critique of the pursuit of a universalising global narrative in US ecocriticism has also been restated and developed within the growing field of postcolonial ecocriticism.32 Ecocritics from this school such as Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Rob Nixon have reiterated Guha’s criticism of these universalising tendencies, and have particularly levelled this criticism at the recent field-­wide turn from the local to the ‘global’; DeLoughrey, for instance, describes an ongoing ‘postcolonial wariness about globalizing narratives in

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which ecocritical expertise emanates from a “first-­world” center and is exported to the peripheries/colonies as a second wave’.33,34 Positive steps towards redressing this universalism are visible in the various calls for the inclusion of more globally diverse critical voices that have come from within the field. Scott Slovic and Joni Adamson wrote in 2011 that recent developments in ecocriticism indicate the emergence of ‘a new third wave of ecocriticism, which recognizes ethnic and national particularities and yet transcends ethnic and national boundaries’, and Slovic’s recent co-­ edited collections also attest to the desire to present a more globally representative ecocriticism.35 However, despite the emergence of notable recent studies including Serpil Oppermann’s edited volume New International Voices in Ecocriticism (2015) and Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur and Anthony Carrigan’s Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches (2015), change in this regard has been relatively slow, with a problematic US-­centrism still ­undeniably persisting across the field. As the ecocritic Elizabeth DeLoughrey has noted, ‘the legacy of the Cold War has not, strangely enough, been a major concern for US ecocriticism’. However, she continues to argue that the Cold War ‘certainly has played a vital role in the contemporary understanding of ecology and ecocriticism itself’.36 Twentieth-­century texts have not figured anywhere near as predominantly within the field of ecocriticism as one might expect, given that this period contains the origins of the modern environmental movement. However, recent years have seen the emergence of the field of ‘Green Modernism’, and the number of ecocritical studies of modernist texts continues to grow exponentially.37 There have also been excellent studies by field-­leading ecocritics, including Serpil Oppermann, aimed at developing an ecological postmodernism.38 By comparison, the mid-­twentieth century has received very little attention, with the work of Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Cheryll Glotfelty representing notable exceptions.39 The Nuclear Age undeniably catalysed a period of considerable environmental change, and this book contends that its impact upon literary configurations of Nature was similarly profound. Donald Worster writes in Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (1977) – one of the earliest ecocritical studies – ‘the Age of

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Ecology began on the desert outside Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945 [sic]’.40 The relationship between the development of ecological thought and the Nuclear Age is also foregrounded in Joel Hagen’s An Entangled Bank: The Origins of Ecosystems Ecology (1992), which details the substantial role played by the Atomic Energy Commission in fostering and financing the growth of the academic field of ecosystems ecology.41 However, far more critics have dated the rise of the modern environmental movement from the publication of Carson’s Silent Spring than from the dropping of the first nuclear bombs.42 Silent Spring has been widely recognised as a tangible milestone in the development of modern environmentalism, and the publication of Carson’s groundbreaking text was unquestionably a significant moment in raising public consciousness concerning environmental issues. However, this book will argue that it is equally necessary to consider the place of Silent Spring with respect to its contemporary literary context. Carson’s text did not arise in a vacuum. Rather, it was published at a moment when public consciousness of the significant dangers to public health posed by the radiation and fallout from nuclear weapons was growing, and had prepared the public to accept the invisible and pervasive environmental dangers of which Silent Spring warned.43 Indeed, Carson actively brings out the similarities between organophosphates and radiation throughout Silent Spring in order to place her work within what was already a significant, emergent public health narrative; she characterises the organochlorides she studied as the ‘partners of radiation’, and stresses that ‘the parallel between chemicals and radiation is exact and inescapable’.44 Elsewhere, Carson explicitly states that the dangers of organophosphates that her work identifies should have parity with the nuclear threat in American media discourse, asserting that: ‘news such as [insect resistance to the new chemical insecticides] is enough to make headlines as big as those concerning the new atomic bomb if only the significance of the matter were properly understood’.45 The following chapters will reveal that in the period between 1945 and the publication of Silent Spring in 1962, a subversive re-­examination of the human relationship to its environment, precipitated by the dropping of the atomic bombs, took place within the realms of fiction and poetry. As a result, this book

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asserts that Silent Spring can be understood as part of a developing trajectory of increasingly ecological depictions of Nature in post-­ war American literature. Whereas Silent Spring certainly deserves its reputation as a catalyst for twentieth-­century environmental consciousness-­raising, the claim consistently made in both ecocriticism and Cold War criticism that it represents the origin of an ecological revision of the relationship between the human and the environment is far less convincing.46 In addition, it is necessary to view Carson’s work within its literary context in order to reveal the continuities that exist between her ecological vision of Nature and those present in other early Cold War literary texts. Silent Spring is, in equal measure, a scientific and a literary work. Carson skilfully employs recognisable American literary traditions as part of the text’s persuasive strategy; for example, in the opening chapter, ‘A Fable of Tomorrow’, she draws on both the pastoral and the gothic modes.47 This opening pastoral-­gothic ‘fable’ is also inspired by the book’s epigraph, which is taken from John Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’: ‘the sedge is wither’d on the lake,/And no birds sing’. Carson replicates the poem’s tropes of ‘withered’ vegetation and the absence of birdsong within her opening chapter in order to recreate the same uncanny effect that is present in Keats’ poem. However, in evoking this foundational text of British Romanticism as part of the book’s initial evocation of Nature, she is also crucially able to more powerfully shock her readers with the revelation that in mid-­ twentieth-­ century America, it is ‘the people’, rather than ‘witchcraft’, that have caused the environment’s ­haunting transformation.48 This recourse to Romantic literary tropes can appear to sit oddly alongside Carson’s evocations of the human as enmeshed within an ecological ‘web of life’, and the ecocritic Hannes Bergthaller has characterised the dual presentation of Nature in Carson’s work as a ‘bifurcation’ of the scientific and the Romantic understandings of the term.49 However, Carson’s complex manipulation of the location of the human in relation to Nature is a fundamental part of the persuasive strategy of her text. As a scientist, Carson was concerned to communicate the human’s place within, and dependence on, systems of ecology. However, she was also keenly aware of the need to foreground the scale of the damage that humans were causing to

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their environment through the increasing use of chemical agents. In order to advance this latter objective, she repeatedly employs her contemporary society’s prevailing presentation of Nature as othered and conquered, as well as drawing on recognisable American literary traditions.50 This strategy can appear to produce contradictions within Carson’s overall construction of the interrelations between humanity and the environment, but it also enables her to better engage her contemporary readership. This, in turn, allows her to carefully introduce her own powerful ecological revision of the relationship between human and world. The following chapters find similar strategies employed in the work of a number of Cold War writers, from Paul Bowles to Peggy Pond Church to Mary McCarthy. Carson’s strategic ‘bifurcation’ of Nature also echoes the differentiation between a powerful and destructive cultural idea of Nature, and an appreciation of its ecological reality, which characterises Timothy Morton’s contemporary theoretical work.51 Against this context, my book argues for a revaluation of the position of Silent Spring, by drawing attention to the ecological depictions of Nature that are a significant feature of literary texts written in the years after 1945 and prior to its publication. In doing so, it will demonstrate that a diverse range of literary texts responded to the new nuclear climate with ecological portrayals of the human ­relationship to Nature. The Cold War years also produced tangible environmental problems. These included the increased depletion of natural resources, the dislocation of a number of ecosystems, and the substantial build-­up of toxic and radioactive pollution, which Richard Tucker describes as ‘some of the most fundamental global legacies of the years 1948–90’.52 There was also considerable crossover between the emerging environmental movement and the growing anti-­ nuclear movement.53 A small number of local conservation groups grew significantly during the early Cold War years, prominent among which were the Sierra Club of the Sierra Nevada and the Audubon Society.54 These groups, whose primary concerns were the prevention of localised pollution and local species and ecosystem preservation, expanded and developed significantly between 1945 and 1962.55 Rachel Carson was active in her local Audubon Society, and her fellow members provided her with a number of leads

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when she began work on Silent Spring.56 The Audubon Society also published Silent Spring across two issues of its Audubon magazine, dramatically increasing the text’s exposure.57 However, as Adam Rome relates, the Audubon Society failed to take a stance against DDT until 1967, despite the fact that it had strong personal links to Carson and to Silent Spring.58 Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) all also have their roots in locally based Cold War conservation groups, and yet by the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s, all had acquired international agendas.59 A significant catalyst for this change was contact with the anti-­nuclear movement. A microcosm of this process can be seen in the transformation of the Sierra Club from a local club associated with a particular landscape into a national environmental movement.60 The Sierra Club began tackling international issues in the late 1960s, but would not take a position on nuclear disarmament, causing one of its most influential members, David Brower, to leave and form Friends of the Earth in 1969.61 Friends of the Earth therefore originated as an explicitly anti-­nuclear environmental pressure group, which would ‘take an unbiased stance against nuclear power and nuclearism more generally’.62 After Brower’s departure, however, the Sierra Club itself moved towards an anti-­nuclear position.63 Greenpeace developed out of a similar combination of anti-­nuclear and pro-­environmental sentiment. It was founded as part of an effort to stop American nuclear testing in Canada from causing environmental damage, and developed from a foundation in local environmentalism combined with anti-­ nuclear protest, into an international organisation, during the Cold War years.64 A clear trend of environmental consciousness-­raising therefore emerged as a direct result of the Cold War. Given this context of a growing environmental consciousness in the United States, it is surprising that writers’ engagements with Nature remain largely neglected within Cold War literary criticism. The growth of American conservation groups and the subsequent emergence of the modern environmental movement during the 1950s and 1960s encourages the conclusion that the Cold War precipitated a consciousness-­raising concerning the effects of humans on, and the human relationship to, the environment.65 This same

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turn is visible in the work of the writers who are examined in this book. However, the literary depictions of Nature that these writers expound often confound what would perhaps be predicted. Rather than presenting the fragility of Nature in an age of Cold War and nuclear threat, many chose to depict Nature as an infinite ecological system, which is even presented as the origin of nuclear weapons. The writers upon whom this study concentrates also routinely allude to the human presence being annihilated not by thermonuclear war, but by forces originating within an infinite Nature, and this literal or metaphorical annihilation is repeatedly celebrated as a positive transformation. Their literary depictions of an infinite, ecological Nature explicitly overturn dominant media representations of the natural world as ‘mastered’ or ‘harnessed’ by the ‘scientific’ American, and also nuance the accepted critical understanding of the role of Nature within Cold War literature.66 As such, this book aims to fill in the gap created by the lack of critical attention to the function of Nature in Cold War texts, and to highlight and develop the connections that exist between ecocriticism and the dawn of the Nuclear Age. Despite the lack of interaction between the fields of ecocriticism and Cold War studies, connections have been made between nuclear criticism and contemporary ecocriticism that are instructive in the triangulation of the fields of Cold War criticism, ecocriticism and environmental history. The nuclear criticism of the 1980s and early 1990s was a relatively short-­lived critical moment. However, despite its brief life­span, it introduced a critical field dedicated to the study of the effects of the Nuclear Age on Cold War literature.67 It has also been noted to have influenced the formation of contemporary ecocriticism, as a result of the two movements’ temporal overlap, and shared focus on combining ‘theory and the protection of life on earth’.68 The perceived impact of nuclear criticism on the formation of ecocriticism also reflects the connections forged during the simultaneous emergence of environmental activism and anti-­nuclear activism after the Second World War, and the environmental justice movement’s continued engagement with nuclear politics.69 The apocalyptic rhetoric shared by early ecocriticism and nuclear criticism may appear to be an additional point of convergence

16 / Writing Nature

between the two fields. However, whereas early ecocritics such as Lawrence Buell have argued that ‘apocalypse is the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal’, much recent ecocriticism has convincingly criticised the presence of an apocalyptic narrative within the contemporary environmental movement on the grounds that it is actively unhelpful in the promotion of environmental protection.70 The writers that this book treats did not promote apocalyptic visions of the end of life on e­ arth – ­rather the reverse. Although the nuclear climate shaped their presentations of human engagements with Nature to a degree, it did not lead Cold War writers to recreate images of apocalypse. Instead, the writers analysed in the following chapters repeatedly depict the annihilation of the human within Nature as a positive thing, due to its occurrence within an infinite system of ecology. Shortly before the disappearance of nuclear criticism, the field of Cold War literary criticism began to develop.71 Two of the most influential figures in the early theoretical development of this field are Elaine Tyler May and Alan Nadel. May’s Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988) exposes that the same ethos of ‘containment’ that defined Cold War foreign policy was an influential force within the domestic sphere in the Cold War USA.72 Alan Nadel’s field-­defining 1995 study, Containment Culture, provides detailed analysis of the function and reach of the culture of containment that May’s work identifies. His work also highlights the unravelling of containment that followed its ideological domination, and demonstrates that its dissolution was concomitant with the ascent of postmodernism. He asserts that: ‘by the mid-­ 1960s, the problems with the logic of c­ ontainment – ­its blindness, its contradictions, and its ­duplicities – h ­ ad started to be manifest in public discourse, displaying many traits that would later be associated with postmodernism’.73 Nadel’s work therefore argues that literary postmodernism is a symptom of the breakdown of the dominance of the ideology of containment, a position that has been taken up and further developed by a number of the influential Cold War critics who have succeeded him. A strong ‘second wave’ of Cold War literary critics have presided over to the development of Nadel’s model in recent years. Three

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critical studies from this period have been particularly influential on the development of this book. Daniel Cordle’s States of Suspense: The Nuclear Age, Postmodernism and United States Fiction and Prose (2008) argues for the significant presence of nuclear anxiety, or ‘nuclear states of suspense’, within Cold War fiction. These ‘states of suspense’ were created by the ‘withheld but constantly threatened destruction’ that the new potential for thermonuclear war had introduced. A chapter of States of Suspense, and another in Cordle’s recently published Late Cold War Literature and Culture: The Nuclear 1980s (2017), discuss the influence of the US environmental and anti-­nuclear movements and the publication of Silent Spring on American literature written in the 1970s and 1980s. Cordle specifically identifies Silent Spring as uniquely influential in its ‘reconstruction of the idea of the human’ as ‘ecosystems that are microcosms of, and intimately connected to, larger ecosystems’.74 My work hopes to highlight the widespread presence of the ‘new ecological consciousness’ that Cordle identifies in later Cold War fiction, within a wide range of literature that pre-­dates the publication of Silent Spring.75 It also aims to nuance Cordle’s characterisation of Cold War ecology as crystallised in the image of the ‘fragile planet’, by demonstrating that many early Cold War writers construct literary ecologies that are neither fragile nor planetary.76 Adam Piette’s The Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam (2009) also touches on Cold War environmental concerns; for example, Piette discusses a ‘subatomic, cellular and somatic anxiety’ brought on by widespread reporting on the infiltration of Strontium 90 into the food chain.77 My work will continue to explore the fear generated by an emergent knowledge of ecological interdependence, and will highlight the increasingly ‘trans-­corporeal’ location of the human within Cold War literary texts that this anxiety produced.78 In On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War (2011), Daniel Grausam argues that postmodern experimentation is a symptom of attempts to write about a post-­Hiroshima world in which the exponential proliferation of nuclear weapons had created the possibility of thermonuclear war. Grausam’s work asserts that the new potential for thermonuclear war engenders a shift in authorial treatments of history and of time, and that it introduces a new category of e­ nding – t­he ‘nuclear ending’.79

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In this book, I suggest that many Cold War writers were actively attempting to circumvent the problem of the ‘nuclear ending’, through the depiction of an infinite, ecological Nature that is projected to endure beyond humanity’s potential thermonuclear annihilation. A marked shift within the field of Cold War literary studies has come in the form of a recent, sustained ‘global turn’, which is in the process of transforming the parameters and practices of Cold War criticism. The work of Christina Klein, Adam Piette, Paul Williams and Steven Belletto introduced a global focus to the field, and this has been built on in recent work such as Andrew Hammond’s edited collection, Global Cold War Literature: Western, Eastern and Postcolonial Perspectives (2012), Robeson Taj Frazier’s The East is Black: Cold War China in the Black Racial Imagination (2015) and Denis Jonnes’s Cold War American Literature and the Rise of Youth Culture: Children of Empire (2015). New analytical modes and areas of focus have also begun to emerge in the most recent Cold War criticism: Tyler T. Schmit’s Desegregating Desire: Race and Sexuality in Cold War American Literature (2013) departs significantly from previous analytical frameworks and opens up new areas of analysis by looking at cross-­race writing and its intersection with queer identity; Peter Middleton’s Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After (2015) also opens up new ground, exploring the substantial and overlooked interactions between Cold War poetry and science writing.80 This book seeks to introduce another new site of analysis to the field, bringing ecocriticism to bear on Cold War texts for the first time in a sustained and comparative study of a range of mid-­century literary texts. The following five chapters will chart the function and representation of Nature in Cold War texts written after the first uses of nuclear weapons in 1945, and throughout the early Cold War period that followed in the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, taking an end date from the publication of Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America in 1971. The writers covered all depict Nature as an infinite ecological system, often at the same time as criticising the actual and potential damage to local and global environments caused by the Cold War American ‘military-­industrial complex’: Paul Bowles describes the annihilation of the American individual by the North

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African desert landscape, while critiquing post-­war American cultural imperialism. J. D. Salinger and the Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac locate spiritual enlightenment and an escape from Cold War American culture within a Taoist-­ inspired ecological conception of Nature. The New Mexican poet Peggy Pond Church and the atomic scientist and ‘father of the atomic bomb’ J. Robert Oppenheimer both write Nature as an infinite ecology.81 Mary McCarthy critiques Cold War America’s nuclear capabilities and military involvement in Vietnam, as well as the environmental degradation that it presided over both at home and abroad, through the development of a bifurcated theorisation of Nature influenced by Simone Weil’s concept of ‘force’. The book is structured so that for the most part a single author is treated in each chapter. This allows for the sustained exploration of each writer’s portrayal of ecology. However, one or two structural inconsistencies should be explained here. The second chapter takes as its principal subject the New Mexican poet Peggy Pond Church, a regionally well-­known but canonically unrecognised writer. It uncovers the significant influence of the Pueblo Native American worldview on Church’s portrayal of Nature as an ecological system capable of inspiring and containing nuclear science. In my research on Church, I discovered biographical links between Church and a number of significant Cold War scientific figures, including J. Robert Oppenheimer and Niels Bohr. Upon further investigation, I found notably similar depictions of ecology in Oppenheimer’s writings from the same period, when compared to those of Church. Church was familiar with Oppenheimer’s work, and cites it in her prose writing. Chapter 2 therefore explores the place of Nature in Oppenheimer’s lectures given in the 1950s and 1960s alongside Church’s work. This pairing also allows the second chapter to consider that similarly ecological portrayals of Nature exist across disciplinary boundaries. It also illustrates that although Church is a very marginal figure in terms of the literary canon, her work has a claim to greater significance through the similarities that exist between her work and that of Oppenheimer, one of the most iconic Cold War figures. The fourth chapter also covers two writers: Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Ginsberg and Kerouac developed a shared interest in American translations of Zen Buddhist and Taoist

20 / Writing Nature

texts, and their correspondence on this point is a major part of this chapter’s analysis. Ginsberg and Kerouac’s shared engagements with Chinese and Japanese literature and philosophy in translation also had a significant impact on both writers’ explorations of the interrelationship between humans and the environment, and the two writers are therefore treated together, with this comparative work allowing for a more wide-­ranging exploration of ‘Beat’ ecology. However, by nature of being the first book-­length ecocritical study of Cold War literature, this work cannot offer a fully comprehensive survey of authorial engagements with Nature during the Cold War years. Rather, it aims to highlight the potential of this methodological approach for the field of Cold War literary criticism, and to simultaneously suggest that Cold War texts represent a rich resource for ecocritics to investigate further. Writers have been chosen solely on the basis of the magnitude of their contribution to my field of study, and the majority of the writers chosen are, to greater and lesser extents, canonical figures. This study focuses on the work of white writers in order to interrogate the specific trope of their increasing appropriation of non-­Euro-­American philosophical and spiritual traditions, and the influence of these acts of cultural appropriation on the writing of Nature during the early Cold War period. This trope is particularly significant in that it anticipates similar actions by white American writers during the deep ecology movement of the late 1980s and 1990s. However, in addressing this suggestive and unrecognised trope, the book does nevertheless unhelpfully contribute to the already disproportionate amount of ecocritical work on white American writers. A growing body of ecocritical work is emerging on African American literature, although much more work in this area is still needed to address the historic whiteness of the field of ecocriticism.82 A study of the specific impact of mid-­century African American writers’ engagements with non-­Euro-­American philosophies on the writing of Nature would be a welcome addition to the field, and would complement the analysis in this area begun by Yoshinobu Hakutani’s Cross-Cultural Visions in African American Literature: East Meets West (2011).83 Comparative studies must follow initial investigations, as the relationship between race and Nature in mid-­

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century ­literature – ­both of which were highly politicised during the ­period – r­emains a neglected topic within North American ecocriticism.84 This book hopes that by d ­ emonstrating the extent to which white writers’ appropriations of non-­Euro-­American philosophies impacted changing literary depictions of Nature, and the extent to which this largely critically overlooked trope in the work of mid-­century writers pre-­dates similar actions by American environmentalists during the deep ecology movement, it will highlight the need for more work to be done on the intersections between race, nature and nuclear culture in m ­ id-­twentieth-­century American literature. My ecocritical methodology is predominantly influenced by the work of Timothy Morton, who has been at the forefront of ecocriticism’s theoretical evolution. One of Morton’s key contentions is that the word ‘Nature’ impedes the development of new, ecological forms of culture, and that the ‘idea of nature’ must therefore ‘wither away’ in order to allow contemporary ecological writing and thinking to flourish.85 Morton also advocates the adoption of the term ‘ecology’ in place of ‘Nature’. Where it is necessary to use the term Nature in ecocritical work, he capitalises the word in order to enforce the problematic historical associations of the term, stating: ‘I shall sometimes use a capital N to highlight [Nature’s] ‘unnatural’ qualities, namely [. . .] hierarchy, authority, harmony, purity, neutrality, and mystery’.86 I will adopt a similar approach, capitalising the term throughout my analysis in order to emphasise the difficulties that the term presents for ecological writing and thinking. Morton develops his theorisation of ‘ecology’ in The Ecological Thought (2010) by introducing two new critical concepts: ‘the mesh’, and ‘dark ecology’. Both will be instrumental to my analytical methodology. Morton suggests that the term ‘mesh’ more accurately communicates an ecological structure, as it evokes ‘the interconnectedness of all living and non-­living things’.87 He goes on to describe the relationship between the ‘mesh’ and a concept that he terms ‘the ecological thought’. ‘The ecological thought’ is both ‘a thought about ecology’ and ‘thinking that is ecological’, and it ‘imagines’ the interconnectedness of the mesh.88 This sprawling mesh of interconnections ‘without a definite center or edge’ is

22 / Writing Nature

infinite and nonlinear, and contains ‘all life forms’ and ‘all dead ones’. The mesh is also inhabited by ‘a multitude of entangled strange strangers’.89 Morton uses the term ‘strange stranger’ to refer to animal life, but also to other human life and, crucially, to the self, which is depicted as an equally unknowable part of the mesh. Many other life forms count as people in The Ecological Thought, and Morton places at the heart of his theorisation of ecology a questioning of the category of ‘person’; he writes: ‘interconnection implies separateness and difference. The mesh [. . .] is the entanglement of all strange strangers’.90 The idea of the ‘strange stranger’ also enforces the presence of both the uncanny and the u ­ nimaginable – ­two core aspects of Morton’s ecocritical theory that contribute to the theorisation of Nature as inherently unknowable that his work expounds. Our encounters with other life forms, and with ourselves, are made strange by our inability to ‘know’ them/us, Morton contends. Consequently both the ‘strange stranger’ and the self remain ‘intrinsically strange’.91 In The Ecological Thought (2010), Morton also outlines the concept of ‘dark ecology’. This theorisation of ecology is defined by its infinite scale, and allows for the absorption and neutralisation of the ‘anti-­ecological’ within an infinitely expansive ‘ecological thought’.92 The chapters of this book will demonstrate that Morton’s theorisation of ‘dark ecology’ consistently explicates the strategy adopted by a number of Cold War American writers as they struggled to respond to the development and deployment of the nuclear bomb. The concept of ‘dark ecology’ enforces the infinite capacity of the mesh, depicting it as able to contain even ‘anti-­ecological’ concepts such as melancholy, irony and uncertainty. Morton argues that ‘rather than closing our ears and making loud noises to combat the sound of anti-­ecological words, we shall absorb them and neutralize them from within’.93 ‘Dark ecology’ is therefore an ecological vision defined by its capacity to contain the negative as well as the positive; if the mesh of ecology is truly infinite or total, Morton argues, it must be able to contain everything, including that which is perceived to be evil or ‘anti-­ecological’.94 ‘Dark ecology’ therefore also represents a definite break between Morton’s ecocritical theory and deep ecology; he explains that ‘in a response to deep ecology, I once called this “depthless ecology”: either unimaginably deep or

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having no depth at a­ ll – w ­ e can never tell. In the end, I decided to call it dark ecology’.95 The chapters that follow exhibit comparable portrayals of ecology as ­infinite – o ­ r ‘dark’ – enough to contain even the ‘anti-­ecological’ nuclear presence. Another significant development in the field of ecocriticism that impacts my methodology is the move away from a focus on ‘ecomimesis’, and towards ‘ecopoesis’, a term first used by Jonathan Bate in The Song of the Earth (2000), and more recently adopted and adapted by Scott Knickerbocker.96 In Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language (2012), Knickerbocker asserts that the poets in his study ‘relate to nature as a powerful source of meaning, although none of them use language mimetically’. The acknowledgement that Nature can function in the text as a ‘powerful source of meaning’, despite the intrinsically anthropocentric structure of language, is vital to this book’s methodology. Knickerbocker argues that the artifice of literary language can contribute to ecological portrayals of the human relationship to its environment, and that the process constitutes ‘a way to relate meaningfully to the natural world’. He terms this process ‘sensuous poesis’.97 Such a premise is at the core of this book’s arguments, which foreground the capacity of literature to propose infinite and interdependent ecological structures, despite, and indeed because of, the mediating influence of literary devices including simile and metaphor. My reading strategy will also draw upon the newest analytical framework within the field, ‘material’ ecocriticism. The recent intersection of ‘new materialism’ and ecocritical theory has led to the rise of ‘material’ ­ecocriticism – ­the theorisation of the human relationship to the environment that invokes the ‘matter’ level in order to challenge binary relationships between Nature and Culture, and between human and environment. At the ‘matter’ level, human and environment are inextricably interdependent, and are composed of the same substances and subject to the same laws; as Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin write in New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies (2012), ‘new materialism’: ‘does not privilege matter over meaning or culture over nature. It explores a monist perspective, devoid of the dualisms that have dominated the humanities (and sciences) until today, by giving special attention to matter, so neglected by dualist thought’.98 ‘Material’ ecocriticism develops

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the theorisation of the human’s embedded position within the environment that Morton’s mesh introduces, as well as advocating the agential properties of matter.99 In illuminating Cold War writers’ depictions of the human relationship to Nature, my methodology will draw upon the material ecocritical reading strategies of Stacy Alaimo and Jane Bennett, in addition to the work of Morton. Alaimo’s theory of ‘trans-­corporeality’, which she debuts in Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and the Material Self (2010), imagines human corporeality as ‘trans-­ corporeality, in which the human is always intermeshed in the more than human world’. This focus on the ‘trans-­corporeal’ location of the human emphasises the movement of substances between human and environment, and refutes further the notion that the environment is ‘empty space’ somewhere ‘Over There’.100 Instead, Alaimo’s work understands human corporeality to be deeply and fundamentally interconnected with its environment at the matter level.101 Jane Bennett’s influential study Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010) also introduces a new materialist reading strategy that she terms ‘vital materialism’. Vital materialism, which Bennett also refers to more colloquially as ‘Thing-­power’, ‘draws attention to an efficacy of objects in excess of the human meanings, designs, or purposes they express or serve’. By refocusing critical attention on the ‘lively’ and agential properties of ‘vibrant matter’, Bennett argues, the ‘life/matter’ binary can be more successfully overcome. Her theorisation of ‘vibrant matter’ has in common with Alaimo’s concept of ‘trans-­corporeality’ the description of the human body as comprehensively entangled with its environment at the matter level, and Bennett describes the human body-­ and-­ mind as ‘a heterogeneous compound of w ­ onderfully vibrant, dangerously vibrant matter’.102 As has been noted, despite the substantial interactions between the anti-­nuclear and environmental movements at the genesis of both, ecocriticism has had very little to do with Cold War writing, and, likewise, the rich and growing field of Cold War literary criticism contains almost no analysis of the place and function of Nature within Cold War texts. In spite of these absences, there is much that the field of ecocriticism can gain from the analysis of Cold War writers’ presentations of Nature at the dawn of the

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Nuclear Age. Writing within the Anthropocene, ecocritics today face many of the same challenges that Cold War writers were grappling with some seventy years earlier. Within contemporary ecocriticism, the tension between the urgent need to communicate the harm that humans are doing to the global environment, and the simultaneous compulsion to convey an understanding of the universal and infinite dimensions of ecology, constitutes a challenge comparable to that which faced the Cold War writers whose work this book investigates. However, many Cold War writers do not resort to depicting what Daniel Cordle terms ‘the fragile planet’.103 Rather, they repeatedly portray Nature as an infinite ecological structure that is capable of containing both the human and the nuclear within its expansive ­dimensions – ­a depiction of ecology that strongly foreshadows Morton’s contemporary concept of ‘dark ecology’. The following chapters will reveal these neglected ecological portrayals of the human relationship to Nature in literature written during the early Cold War years, and explore their implications for the fields of Cold War literary criticism and ecocriticism.

CHAPTER 1

Attaining fana in Paul Bowles’s Infinite Landscapes

As dawn broke over the Tell Atlas mountains in late July 1931, a 21-­year-­old American writer gazed up at their silhouetted slopes from the deck of the ship Iméréthie II, which was crossing the Mediterranean towards the North African coast. This was a young Paul Bowles’s first glimpse of a landscape that would fascinate and obsess him throughout his life, and which would deeply colour all of his future writing. Bowles’s autobiography, Without Stopping (1972), contains the following sketch of his first sight of the mountains of North Africa: I went on deck and saw the rugged line of the mountains of Algeria ahead [. . .] it was as if some interior mechanism had been set in motion by the sight of the approaching land. Always without formulating the concept I had based my sense of being in the world partly on an unreasoned conviction that certain areas of the earth’s surface contained more magic than others. Had anyone asked me what I meant by magic, I should probably have defined the word by calling it a secret connection between the world of nature and the consciousness of man, a hidden but direct passage which bypassed the mind.1

This sketch of Bowles’s initial impression of the North African desert is defined by its sustained meditation on the interaction between the landscape and the human mind. The passage moves from a lyrical description of the landscape’s effect upon the ­observer – ­the ‘magic’ emanating from certain areas of the earth’s s­ urface – ­into

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a detailed explication of the relation between the human mind and the environment. Bowles asserts the presence of a ‘secret connection’ between mind and landscape that is ‘set in motion’ by proximity to ‘certain areas of the earth’s surface’. He describes this connection as a ‘passage’, and the material connotations of the word, in combination with the earlier ‘mechanism’, evoke a physical pathway between the human mind and the world beyond. This proposition that human and environment might share a common materiality, allowing the environment to infiltrate and affect the mind, gestures towards a ‘trans-­corporeal’ understanding of the human. Stacy Alaimo describes trans-­corporeality as: ‘Imagining human corporeality [. . .] is always intermeshed in a more-­than-­ human world’. This process in turn ‘underlines the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from “the environment” ’.2 Bowles’s evocation of a passage between mind and world that functions unconsciously to impact the human suggests a similarly ‘trans-­corporeal’ conception of the human’s relationship to its environment. Alaimo emphasises that one effect of a ‘trans-­corporeal’ understanding of the human is a greater ‘acknowledgement of material agency’, and this connection is evidenced throughout Bowles’s literary representations of Nature.3 In this example, and throughout Bowles’s work, the landscape possesses the power to influence the human mind as a result of a fundamental inseparability between the ‘substance’ of the human and of the environment. The environment’s material agency is accentuated further by Bowles’s description of his knowledge of the ‘secret connection’ as ‘unreasoned’. The word destabilises the metaphysical connotations of ‘mind’, implying instead that the landscape is acting on the human through a material and ‘unconscious’ process. Bowles therefore asserts that the presence of the North African desert landscape is capable of activating an innate, or primordial, response in the perceiving human, by reactivating a dormant ‘passage’ of material pathways that already exist between the environment and the human mind. Bowles’s depiction of the interaction between mind and landscape in this passage from his autobiography also introduces a limit to the capacity of the human mind. By describing the ‘secret connection’ as one that ‘bypasses the mind’, Bowles establishes the landscape

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as acting on the human in a process that the human mind cannot fully grasp. This evocation of an unknowable dimension to Nature anticipates the mesh structure of ecology that Morton outlines, as does the interconnected, material relationship between human and environment that the passage establishes.4 The full effects of the subconscious process that Bowles describes in this passage are not disclosed in Without Stopping. However, the presence of this ‘hidden but direct passage’ between human and environment, and the activation of changes in the human mind through proximity to the desert landscape, are persistent and recurring features across Bowles’s fiction and non-­fiction writing. This aspect of Bowles’s work has so far resisted critical interpretation, as has the writer’s wider presentation of Nature.5 The work of this chapter will be to explore the potential of an ecocritical reading strategy to illuminate both the writer’s broader depiction of ecology, and the function of this particularly dominant trope. Although the majority of Bowles’s works have North African settings, this chapter will demonstrate that Bowles’s literary evocations of the Saharan landscape serve to interrogate Cold War American culture’s naïve and misguided conception of the human relationship to Nature. It will also aim to uncover the influences that encouraged the writer to depart so markedly from dominant mid-­century American cultural depictions of Nature as newly ‘harnessed’ by nuclear science, in the years after 1945. Paul Bowles lived most of his life as an expatriate, in a form of self-­imposed exile from America. He began his career as a composer and poet, and progressed from this to write the fiction for which he remains best known: his first and most successful novel, The Sheltering Sky (1949), stayed on the US Best Seller list for three months in 1950.6 Fleeing America at the age of seventeen, Bowles moved first to Paris, where he expended great energy in ingratiating himself with the literary milieu, including such modernist literary giants as Ezra Pound and Andre Gide.7 He then took up residence in Northern Morocco. Following the success of The Sheltering Sky in the American literary marketplace, Bowles’s presence in Morocco and his rising status as a cult figure on the American literary scene helped Morocco to become a creative hub for American writers. The Beat Generation writers, in particular, were drawn to Tangier

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by Bowles’s presence there. Allen Ginsberg spent much time with Bowles during a 1957 visit to Morocco, and despite Jack Kerouac’s and William Burroughs’ often-­ unflattering private depictions of Bowles, both men also made extended trips to Tangier.8 Bowles’s presence and literary success therefore did much to highlight Tangier as a fashionable destination for American writers who wished to escape the geographical and ideological confines of the Cold War USA. As Michelle Green describes in her study on the effect of Bowles’s residence in Tangier on the American literary scene: ‘Paul became a magnetic force in a scene enlivened, at various junctures, by Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams [and] Brion Gysin’, as well as by Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs.9 Bowles the countercultural icon and literary personality drew these writers to Tangier, but his work also set the tone for the literary portrayals of North Africa by post-­war American authors that followed.10 Bowles’s first visit to Morocco in 1931, with the composer Aaron Copland, lasted for almost a year; he was eventually forced to return to Paris in May 1932 because of a shortage of money. However, he found ways to return to North Africa in 1933 and 1934 for shorter periods.11 His next extended residency in Morocco was in 1947. Feeling restless in New York, Bowles wrote a series of short stories with North African settings, including ‘A Distant Episode’ and ‘Tea on the Mountain’. When the Partisan Review published ‘A Distant Episode’ in 1947, Bowles decided to pursue writing as his primary vocation, and promptly booked passage back to North Africa. He had already begun work on his first novel, The Sheltering Sky, in New York, and remained in North Africa for over a year while completing it.12 After its successful publication, he continued to live and write predominantly in Morocco for the rest of his life, residing for sustained periods in Tangier, Fez and sub-­Saharan Africa.13 This North African location was an overwhelming influence on all of Bowles’s fiction writing, with the vast majority of his short stories and all of his four novels having North African settings. Within these works, the North African landscape looms large. However, despite its persistent and integral presence, the landscape has been the focus of a very limited amount of critical work on the author. This is a particularly surprising omission, as during interviews given later in his life Bowles is both candid and explicit

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in discussing the power and agency that his writing affords to more-­than-­human Nature. Speaking in 1971, Bowles revealed that the aim of both his 1947 short story ‘A Distant Episode’, and The Sheltering Sky, was ‘to tell the story of what the desert can do to us’. In the same interview, he also reveals his intention to make ‘the landscape [ …] the protagonist’ of his fiction. More illuminating still, Bowles’s comments in this interview explicitly frame the human relationship to the environment as ecological, emphasising the status of the human as merely ‘a part of nature’.14 In addition to invoking a conception of Nature as an ecological system of which the human is ‘a part’, the phrase also reinforces the suggestion of a commonality of substance between human and Nature. As these instructive comments by Bowles suggest, the depictions of the relationship between human and environment in his writing from this period represent a significant departure from dominant presentations of Nature within Cold War American media discourse. Rather, his writing combines critical engagement with Cold War American nuclear culture with portrayals of an infinite, ecological system of Nature that contains the power and agency to annihilate the human presence. The flight from Atomic Age America provides the initial narrative drive in much of Bowles’s fiction written in the late 1940s and 1 ­ 950s – n ­ ot least The Sheltering Sky. However, these narratives of self-­imposed exile are almost always structured in order to mount a sustained and explicit critique of the very America that at first glance appears to have been successfully left behind. Bowles’s own complex relationship with the post-­war United States is summed up in his autobiography Without Stopping, in which he declares that: ‘Each day lived through on [the Moroccan] side of the Atlantic was one more day spent outside prison’.15 In addition to the publication of ‘A Distant Episode’, 1947 saw Bowles receive an advance from Doubleday for the novel that would become The Sheltering Sky, and this financed his more or less permanent return to North Africa.16 Significantly however, he relates that the initial idea for the novel, and ‘all of the most important decisions’ about it, came to him in New York while riding up town on a Fifth Avenue bus.17 Bowles also penned the short story ‘Pages from Cold Point’ on the Atlantic crossing from America to North Africa, before beginning work on the novel. The opening of ‘Cold

Fana in Paul Bowles’s Infinite Landscapes/ 31

Point’ details its protagonists’ elation at leaving his job and the United States, following the death of his wife, and his subsequent immigration, with his son, to an unnamed Caribbean island. There are a number of brief but explicit allusions to anxiety over nuclear war being one reason for the protagonist’s flight from America, including his repeated assertion that there will not be a nuclear attack on his secluded side of the Island. However, the protagonists’ desire to escape from ‘the paralyzing effects of present day materialism’, the coercive necessity of employment, and the compulsion to ‘live in terms of time and money, and [. . .] think in terms of society and progress’ are also referenced as sustained and powerful motives for his flight from the US. These tangible motives are combined with a frenzied desire to avoid contact with his brother, who has knowledge of an unmentioned secret about the protagonist that he declares renders him unfit to raise his own son. This untold secret is repeatedly implied to be the father’s own homosexuality, through a combination of phallic imagery and oblique allusions to homosexual desire.18 The flight from an America that is presented to be both aggressively materialist and socially repressive also provides the narrative drive in The Sheltering Sky (1949), which contains a comparable repulsion towards post-­war American culture set against a background of nuclear anxiety. These close similarities between ‘Cold Point’ and The Sheltering Sky extend to the portrayal of Nature, and its relationship to the nuclear context, across both texts. The opening section of ‘Cold Point’ sets up a dichotomy between Nature and the decay of Western culture that also governs The Sheltering Sky. Bowles’s protagonist in ‘Cold Point’ states: Our civilisation is doomed to a short life [. . .] I personally am content to see everything in the process of decay. The bigger the bombs, the quicker it will be done. Life is visually too hideous for one to make the attempt to preserve it. Let it go. Perhaps someday another form of life will come along.19

The contrast presented in this passage between the infinite, regenerative capacity of Nature and the linear decay in post-­war American culture also defines The Sheltering Sky. Similarly, the suggestion that

32 / Writing Nature

the cleansing of humanity from the earth will be achieved through the regenerative capacity of Nature, which may ‘come along’ again in another form in the aftermath of thermonuclear war, displays in microcosm the vision of a regenerative and infinite ecological system of Nature that The Sheltering Sky also expounds. What Bowles refers to here as ‘life’ is depicted as a spontaneously regenerative system that has the capacity to outlast both humanity and thermonuclear war. The protagonist of ‘Cold Point’ goes on to comment: ‘I am still a part of life’, revealing the presence of the underlying conception of the human as a ‘part of nature’ that Bowles states to be at the core of his writing from this period. The agency of the more-­than-­ human environment of the Island is also emphasised, with Bowles describing that ‘on the Islands vegetation still has the upper hand, and man has to fight even to make his presence seen.’20 This characterisation of a hostile, ecological relationship between the human and the environment could also be applied to the function of the desert landscape across much of Bowles’s fiction; both The Sheltering Sky and ‘Cold Point’ depict the human as a vulnerable ‘part’ of an infinite system of Nature, and as engaged in a constant, and often futile, fight for survival. An additional point of similarity is that each text achieves this recalibration of the relationship between the human and Nature by transplanting American protagonists into hostile and unfamiliar global environments. The Sheltering Sky narrates the journey south from Tangier in Northern Morocco to the centre of the Sahara made by three young Americans, Port, Kit and Tunner. Bowles does not provide specific details as to why his protagonists have left the United States, aside from the fact that it is: ‘with a great deal of luggage and the intention of keeping as far as possible from places that had been touched by the war’ (11).21 However, Bowles does situate Port’s departure from Europe within a particularly post-­war moment, commenting that: ‘the war was one facet of the mechanized age that [Port] wanted to forget’ (11). He goes on to reveal that it is not the memory of the war itself that his American protagonists are fleeing from, but rather what they perceive to be the post-­war cultural decline of the West. Kit references an increasing cultural homogenisation in Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, in which: ‘the people of each country get more like the people of every other country. They

Fana in Paul Bowles’s Infinite Landscapes/ 33

have no character, no beauty, no ideals’ (12). However, this critique of cultural degeneration is not as straightforwardly confined to European culture as it at first appears. Instead, Bowles advances a specific critique of the global effects of post-­war US foreign policy. Port states that: ‘Everything’s getting grey, and it’ll be greyer. But some places’ll withstand the malady longer than you think. You’ll see, in the Sahara here . . . ’ (12). Port’s dramatic statement trails off into the silence of the ellipsis, suggesting that despite his definite tone, he cannot quite articulate what the Sahara represents beyond its resistance to the encroachment of a homogenising American cultural presence. The ellipsis also allows Port’s statement to merge with the sentence that follows: ‘across the street a radio was sending forth the hysterical screams of a coloratura soprano. Kit shivered. “Let’s hurry up and get there,” she said. “Maybe we could escape that” ’ (12). This second sentence impacts upon the meaning of the first, suggesting one culprit at least for the cultural homogenisation that Bowles’s protagonists are determined to outrun. The coloratura soprano is a particular operatic vocal type, which in the 1940s had strong associations with the Metropolitan Opera of New York. Lily Pons had made this type of soprano famous through performances at the Met Opera between 1931 and 1960. One particularly celebrated example of Pons’s coloratura soprano at the Met Opera was her part in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, a 1943 performance which Bowles favourably reviewed for the New York Herald Tribune. As Timothy Mangan observes in the Introduction to his collection of Bowles’s music criticism, the allusion to the coloratura soprano in the novel’s opening pages ‘serves as an obvious symbol for what the three Americans are leaving ­behind – ­Western civilisation’.22 The unwelcome intrusion of the radio broadcast of a particularly American cultural influence connects the three travellers’ condemnations of European cultural degradation with the aggressive spread of American culture through post-­war Europe and into North Africa. It therefore implies that the motivation behind Bowles’s protagonists’ journey deeper and deeper into the heart of the Sahara is a flight from post-­war American cultural imperialism. The flight from the reach of post-­war American culture exhibited by the travellers in The Sheltering Sky also reflects the motivation for immigration displayed by the protagonist of ‘Cold Point’.

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The saturation of Europe and North Africa with American products and technologies was a significant issue at the time that Bowles was writing, and is one to which he repeatedly refers in his travel journalism. In a 1951 piece for The American Mercury, he notes that: ‘after driving six days to get to some place like Tata or Tindouf one will find a party of one’s countrymen already there, complete with Coca Cola and light-­meters’.23 This spread of Coca-­Cola and other American products throughout North Africa was calculated American Cold War foreign policy. Truman’s Point Four Program, announced on 20 January 1949, was conceived in order to promote capitalism though the introduction of American consumer culture, in an effort to counteract the global spread of communism. The Point Four Program was envisaged as an extension of the Marshall Plan, which had offered American financial assistance to European countries struggling economically as a result of the devastating effects of the Second World War. The programme’s stated aim was to provide American technical and financial assistance to developing ­countries – ­including M ­ orocco – ­to facilitate regional industrial and economic growth. As Anne Pierce notes, however, ‘Truman’s primary concern [. . .] was neither financial nor humanitarian. His main objective was the expansion of the power (which included the unity) – of the free world’.24 The calculated foreign policy decision to saturate foreign countries with American products in order to promote American capitalism abroad had already begun during the Second World War. North Africa was of particular interest to the US State Department and, as a result, a number of American companies including Coca-­Cola opened premises in Tangier. As Brian T. Edwards exposes, reporting on the Marshall Plan and Point Four Program in the American media made no secret of the fact that American business was returning to the sites where GIs had been stationed in order to ‘stave off the spread of Soviet influence’ through the introduction of American consumer goods, with ­headlines as explicit as ‘We’re Invading North Africa Again’.25 In The Sheltering Sky, Bowles employs the different make-­ up brands in Kit’s handbag as a recurrent motif, in order to comment on the ultimate futility of this form of American economic and cultural imperialism. During the first half of the novel, Kit turns to the branded make-­up in her handbag for comfort. She looks into

Fana in Paul Bowles’s Infinite Landscapes/ 35

the ‘dark little world’ (155) of her handbag for reassurance, and repeats the brand names Helena Rubenstein and Mark Cross to herself, viewing the products as symbolic of the global strength and dominance of American culture: ‘the names were still there, still represented something’ (155). However, after Port’s death, these names quickly become absurd. They offer no protection or consolation within the hostile Saharan environment. Worse still, these motifs of post-­war American consumer culture are eroded by the very presence of the desert; Kit eventually realises that: ‘she could not remember what the things meant’ (235). Bowles introduces the stability and comfort that Kit finds in her make-­up only to document the gradual loss of meaning that these objects undergo once they are exposed to the Saharan environment, and to demonstrate the disastrous effect that this loss of meaning has on Kit’s sanity. The make-­up brands therefore function as synecdoche for American cultural imperialism, and Bowles emphasises the ineffectiveness of this strategy through the failure of the brands to either placate anxiety, or retain their original cultural meaning, under the stress of the Saharan environment. This reprimand of post-­war American materialism is therefore also designed to highlight the ultimate futility of Cold War American foreign policy initiatives that aimed to saturate North Africa with American consumer goods. As part of the novel’s wider critique of American culture, Bowles also targets the foundational colonial myths of America, in a characteristically ironic engagement with frontier rhetoric. He writes of Port: ‘it amused him to watch [Kit] building her pathetic little fortress of Western culture in the middle of the wilderness’ (128). As Brian T. Edwards notes, Bowles employs the language of ‘fortress’ and ‘wilderness’ in order to couch Port’s derisive assessment of Kit’s attempts to shelter behind American consumer culture in the rhetoric of Frederick Jackson Turner’s ‘frontier thesis’.26 These allusions to the American frontier re-­emerge within the text at frequent intervals, including in Port’s comment that he feels ‘more closely identified’ with his pioneer great-­grandparents as he travels further towards the centre of the Sahara (84). While borrowing from the recognisable framework of Turner’s frontier thesis, Bowles’s subversive engagements with frontier ideology build the novel’s persistent suggestion that an imperialist attitude towards the desert, as well as

36 / Writing Nature

a personal desire for contact with ‘infinite things’, lies behind Port’s desire to reach the centre of the Sahara. Denis Jonnes notes that the post-­war re-­engagement with ideas of ‘the American West, frontier life and the pioneering ideal were in part purely celebratory’. However, Jonnes goes on to emphasise that they were also exhortatory, containing ‘an insistence on the continued validity of the frontier virtues’ and their continuing ability to prevail in a Cold War global climate.27 In contrast, Bowles’s portrayal of Port and Kit as twentieth-­century pioneers contains a notable absence of either glory or celebration. The novel does not endorse these values or their continued global ­dominance – ­rather the reverse; it sets out to challenge the post-­war and early Cold War notion that America’s ideology and culture were globally applicable, and that their spread would lead to America’s global dominance.28 Through the ignominious death of Port, and the disappearance and presumed death of Kit, Bowles works to unsettle founding American colonial mythologies of the strength and force of Euro-­American culture in conquering the frontier ‘wilderness’, which the Cold War climate had done much to reinvigorate.29 The deployment, and subsequent subversion, of the American ‘pioneering ideal’ in Bowles’s work therefore exposes a desire to undermine foundational aspects of American culture by translating them into a Saharan context, echoing the process by which Bowles illustrates the meaninglessness of American consumer goods once they are embedded within the Saharan environment.30 Far from conquering the North African ‘wilderness’, Bowles’s protagonists are presented as helpless victims of the power and agency of an insurmountable Nature; they are made pitiful examples of ‘what the desert can do to us’. In one of the first unmediated encounters between the novel’s protagonists and the desert landscape, Port and Kit have cycled out from the town of Boussif into the foothills of the surrounding desert. Bowles describes an ‘endless flat desert, broken here and there by sharp crests of rocks that rose above the surface like the dorsal fins of so many monstrous fish’ (77). ‘Endless’ suggests the ‘infinite’ spatiotemporal dimensions of the desert landscape, and the combined effect of ‘sharp’, ‘monstrous’ and ‘broken’ highlight the hostility of this environment to the human traveller. Bowles builds

Fana in Paul Bowles’s Infinite Landscapes/ 37

on this initial evocation of an antagonism between the landscape and the human two paragraphs later, describing Port and Kit as ‘sat side by side, facing the vastness below’ (78), with ‘vastness’ again evoking the landscape’s infinite qualities. There is no sign of the ecological or ‘trans-­corporeal’ location of the human at this stage in the novel. Instead, Bowles evokes a deliberate antagonism between the human subjects and the desert environment. Confrontation with this vast and hostile landscape prompts radically different reactions in Port and Kit. Bowles describes that ‘the very silences and emptiness that touched his soul terrified her [. . .] always he held the fresh hope that she, too, would be touched in the same way by the solitude and the proximity to infinite things’ (78). Kit’s terror in the face of the ‘vastness’ of the desert contrasts with, and accentuates, Port’s differing response to the landscape. He is drawn to the very ‘infinite’ quality of the desert that Bowles’s descriptions take pains to enforce, and it is Port’s developing quest for unmediated interactions with an ‘infinite’ embodied in the North African landscape from which the novel’s potentiality emerges. Port’s obsessive desire for ‘proximity to infinite things’, and his pursuit of ever-­greater levels of exposure to the desert environment, occur in direct correlation to his bodily deterioration. For instance, Port returns to the same spot in the desert alone at night, and recommences his contemplation of the landscape: ‘he could not see the desert in front of him, down b ­ elow – o ­ nly the hard stars above that flared in the sky. He sat on the rock and let the wind chill him’ (80). Port letting ‘the wind chill him’ is the first indication in the novel of the character’s deliberate destruction of his bodily health in his pursuit of contact with the desert landscape. This is reinforced later in the novel when after his death it is revealed that Port had also ‘neglected to be immunized against any sort of disease’ before leaving America (204). This posthumous revelation develops a trajectory of Port’s escalating acts of self-­harm that exists alongside his desire for closer ‘proximity’ to the desert landscape. These acts include Port not sharing with his fellow travellers the warnings against travel into the heart of the Sahara that he hears, lest they should attempt to dissuade him from his intended route towards the centre of the desert (84). He also attempts on several occasions to conceal his desire for solitary communion with the

38 / Writing Nature

landscape from Kit. On this first occasion, he fails to tell her of his return to the desert because of a fear that she would ‘understand too well’ the reason for his return (80). This oblique implication that a taboo motive lies behind Port’s desire for exposure to the ‘infinite things’ of the desert landscape hints at a suicidal motivation, and this is intensified by the novel’s depiction of Port’s unhealthy and escalating drive to do harm to himself that exists in tandem with his pursuit of more and more unmediated contact with the desert. The novel’s most haunting and oppressive representation of infinite Nature is the eponymous motif of the ‘sheltering’ desert sky, and an examination of this dominant image is illustrative of the relationship between human and landscape that the novel expounds. In Without Stopping, Bowles describes the genesis of the ‘sheltering sky’ motif. He reveals that before the war there had been a song called ‘Down Among the Sheltering Palms’, and recounts that one ‘strange word’ in the song, ‘sheltering’, fascinated him from an early age, and caused him to consider at length: ‘What did the palm trees shelter people from, and how could they be sure of such protection?’31 However, the function of the ‘sheltering sky’ in the novel is not to represent the unmitigated protection of the novel’s human protagonists. Rather, the image functions as a metaphor that foreshadows the fates of both Port and Kit. As Port and Kit gaze over the desert during their first close encounter with it, Port comments that: ‘the sky here’s very strange. I often have the sensation when I look at it that it’s a solid thing up there, protecting us from what’s behind’.32 His words unnerve Kit, who asks him ‘what is behind’ the sky. Port answers: ‘nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night’ (79). The ‘absolute night’ that lies behind the ‘sheltering sky’ (188) is therefore cast as a threat to the life of Bowles’s protagonists; from its first introduction, it is depicted as a danger that the ‘solid’ shelter of the sky protects the human from coming into contact with. The looming threat of a darkness contained by the ‘sheltering sky’ is intensified by the rapid disintegration of the ‘solid’ protection of the sky that Port suggests in this initial description. From this point onwards, Bowles’s portrayals of the desert sky emphasise the growing fragility of the liminal spaces that surround and contain the darkness beyond it. Progressive descriptions emphasise ‘the thin pencilled border between the earth and the sky’ (217),

Fana in Paul Bowles’s Infinite Landscapes/ 39

and the fragility of the border holding back the sky is gradually increased until this liminal space has completely rescinded. As Port and Kit drive across the desert from Aïn Krorfa to El Ga’a, Kit looks out of the window and observes ‘the windswept emptiness. The new moon had slipped behind the earth’s sharp edge [. . .] the horizon was the brink of space’ (143). This metaphor presents the human as vulnerable to the danger of tipping into the ‘emptiness’ behind the sky that Port previously refers to as ‘absolute night’. At this point in the novel, the sky no longer offers any shelter to the novel’s protagonists, and nothing at all separates the terrestrial and the extra-­terrestrial. Instead, Bowles’s imagery locates the human as precariously positioned at ‘the brink of space’, and even introduces the threat that the human will be lost to the infinite darkness that lies behind the now absent border of the ‘horizon’ line. Bowles also develops a metaphorical association between the darkness of outer space and d ­ eath – a­ process that culminates in the moment of Port’s death, when he is described as passing through the sky and into the darkness beyond (188). The association of the looming darkness that lies behind the ‘sheltering sky’ with the foreshadowed but withheld death of Port, and later, Kit, reveals the substantial influence of f­atalism – a­ n aspect of the Islamic culture that inflects the North African desert ­environment – ­on Bowles’s writing. The presence of Islam as a theological and philosophical influence within Moroccan social life is well documented by Bowles in much of his travel journalism, and on multiple occasions he foregrounds the cultural presence of fatalism. Fatalism refers to the prevalence of predetermination within North African culture. Certain elements of fatalism pre-­date Islam, but the dominance of Islam in the region helped to established the presence of fatalism in North African culture, and as Dalya Cohen-­Mor states in her excellent study of fatalism in modern Arabic literature: ‘the idea that God’s will determines all things and that they are entirely beyond human control is explicitly stated in the Qur’ān’.33 Bowles’s travel articles often contain details of what he perceived to be the day-­to-­day manifestations of fatalism within North African culture. In the article ‘Africa Minor’ (1959), he describes witnessing an old man slice his finger in two in a car door, and then ‘put the two parts of his finger together [. . .] saying softly, “Thanks be to

40 / Writing Nature

Allah” ’.34 Bowles relates to his American readers that the old man concerned is not resentful of this event for the very reason that all events are predetermined by the will of A ­ llah – i­t would therefore be pointless to express either resistance or annoyance at any turn of events. In another article, ‘Fez’, written for a 1950 edition of US travel magazine Holiday, Bowles writes that: ‘The Moroccan, educated or otherwise, simply does not believe in germs’. He goes on to assert that the Moroccan response to the Western insistence that germs exist is: ‘for you they exist, therefore they can hurt you’. However: ‘for us [as Muslims] there is only the will of Allah’35; if Allah determines the time and method of the death of each person, then the Western obsession with hygiene in order to prevent disease is, Bowles suggests, simply pointless. These anecdotal reports of the effects of fatalism are saturated with the Orientalism that many critics, including Ralph Coury, have rightly highlighted as manifest across Bowles’s journalistic and fictional representations of North African culture.36 However, they do also usefully expose Bowles’s perception of the significance and prevalence of fatalism within Moroccan society. Bowles’s travel writings also contain praise and advocacy for what he understood to be the cultural consequences of the presence of fatalism within North African society. For example, he describes: ‘a complete lack of nervous tension’ within Moroccan society, and declares emphatically that: ‘the Fassi have always known how to l­ ive – t­ hey still do’.37 In summarising what he understood to be the influence of fatalism on Moroccan culture, Bowles writes: ‘the true Muslim attitude demands that one act always as though death loomed immediately ahead’.38 This understanding of death as a ‘looming’ presence is visibly incorporated into The Sheltering Sky’s dominant motif. Throughout the novel, the darkness beyond the ‘sheltering sky’, or ‘absolute night’ as Bowles terms it, is initially held back by the liminal boundary of the ‘horizon’ line. However, its oppressive presence persistently reinforces the looming threat of death that it represents, and this threat becomes increasingly imminent as the novel progresses. Port’s attempted interactions with the desert environment escalate as the narrative unfolds. Midway through the novel, he ­drunkenly soliloquises following an argument with Kit:

Fana in Paul Bowles’s Infinite Landscapes/ 41 ‘I know why I’m disgusted,’ he called after her. ‘It’s something I ate. Ten years ago.’ [. . .] He gripped the windowsill and leaned out, thinking: ‘She doesn’t know what I’m talking about. It’s something I ate ten years ago. Twenty years ago.’ The landscape was there, and more than ever he felt he could not reach it. The rocks and the sky were everywhere, ready to absolve him, but as always he carried the obstacle within him. (133–4)

In this passage, Bowles presents a direct correlation between Port’s memory of his past in America, and his inability to achieve the unmediated ‘proximity to infinite things’ that he desires. Port relates a ‘disgust’ with something that he ate ‘ten years ago’, situating the metaphorical repellent consumption in his American past. It is this past event that inhibits Port in his attempts to achieve what it is that Bowles reveals he has been seeking through his repeated attempts at communion with the desert l­ andscape – a­ n absolution. The presence of the window encourages this reading of the image, in that it too represents a cultural barrier holding Port back from his desired communion with the desert. Its function also echoes that of the mediating, liminal barrier of the ‘horizon line’ from earlier in the text, by ultimately restraining Port from unmediated exposure to the infinite Nature that the desert represents. The characterisation of an American past, or identity, as an impediment to engagement with the desert landscape, also recalls the reference in ‘Cold Point’ to ‘life’ regenerating in the aftermath of the nuclear destruction of American culture. This interpretation is additionally reinforced by Port’s desire to outrun several potent symbols of his American identity, including the coloratura soprano on the radio in Tangier at the opening of the novel, his American passport, and Tunner. The passage also contains a suggestion of the same ‘interior mechanism’ that Bowles evokes in his autobiographical description of the initial effects of the North African environment on the observing human; the mere physical presence of the landscape is again depicted as affecting the ‘consciousness of man’, instigating a desire in Port for a closer, unmediated union with it. However, at this point in the novel, Bowles crucially reveals that the result of the ‘secret connection between the world of nature and the consciousness of man’ is the precipitation of a desire for absolution through unmediated contact with the landscape. He writes of the

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landscape being ‘ready to absolve’ Port, while also depicting Port as prevented from receiving this absolution by the residual presence of his American past. That this past is metaphorically represented as the lingering presence in the body of something previously consumed, once again enforces the material, ‘trans-­corporeal’ connection between human and environment that the novel promotes. Bowles’s non-­fiction writing sheds greater light on the meaning and origin of his description of Port’s desire to gain absolution through contact with the landscape. In an article written in 1953, ‘Baptism of Solitude’, Bowles goes into detail about a ‘peculiar’ process by which the contemplation of the landscape can lead to the permanent alteration of personal identity, or consciousness: You leave the gate of the fort or the town behind, pass the camels lying outside, go up into the dunes or out onto the hard, stony plane and stand awhile, alone. Presently, you will either shiver and hurry back inside the walls, or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you, something that everyone who lives there has undergone, and which the French call le baptême de la solitude.39

Bowles describes the interaction between a lone protagonist and the desert landscape in terms that reflect Port’s attempted interactions with the desert in The Sheltering Sky. Liminal borders again define the encounter; the walls of the city and the lines of the camels function as barriers to be traversed in order to reach the unmediated desert beyond. The choice is presented between ‘hurrying back inside the walls’, and maintaining the position of exposure that will lead to the ‘peculiar’ process described in the passage occurring, and there is a defined progression within the extract from enclosure to ­exposure – ­the protagonist has to pass first through the gate in the wall, then past the camels, until they are ‘alone’ within the landscape. The emphasis on the hostility of the landscape in its ‘hard, stony’ appearance, and the physical exposure of the human, through to ‘shiver’, also recall Port’s first self-­imposed solitary contemplation of the desert in The Sheltering Sky, in which he ‘let the wind chill him’. It is again suggested that the testing of the limits of human flesh is a vital component of the ‘baptism’ that Bowles details in this essay.

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The process of the ‘baptism of solitude’, which Bowles insists to be a particular rite of passage undergone by every human who enters the desert regions of North Africa, is then described in lyrical detail: Here, in this wholly mineral landscape, lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears; nothing is left but your own breathing and the sound of your heart beating. A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintegration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it take its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while is quite the same as when he came.40

A direct connection between the landscape and the mind of the human is depicted as inherent to the interaction described, and the ignition of this pathway is triggered by the presence of a particular ­landscape – ­the ‘certain areas of the earth’s surface’ that Bowles refers to in Without Stopping. Bowles’s evocation of the desert as ‘this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares’ highlights the mineral alongside the celestial, once again foregrounding the landscape’s ‘infinite’ spatio-­temporal dimensions. This emphasis on the extra-­terrestrial and geological elements of the landscape develops Bowles’s portrayal of Nature as defined by its alternate temporality and spatiality with regard to the human, and challenges the conception of rocks as amorphous and inert. The depiction of a vibrant, mineral landscape also exemplifies material ecocriticism’s contention that imagining the human as ‘trans-­corporeal’ encourages an acknowledgement of the agency of the material environment; ‘wholly mineral’ draws attention to the ‘matter’ level at which the environment exists, and the emphasis on the environment as ‘vibrant’ and agential resultantly raises ‘the status of the materiality’.41 By contrast, the human presence is stripped back to its most basic and vital functions: breathing and heartbeat. Consciousness (memory) is erased, leaving only the physical body. Once consciousness has been removed, the human is presented as undergoing a ‘reintegration’, which is implied to instigate a permanent change in the human’s mental processes, the exact nature of which is left ambiguous at this point in the novel.

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That the human is able to ‘reintegrate’ through exposure to the ‘infinite things’ of the desert landscape implies an original state of integration. The process described therefore presupposes the existence of an infinite, material and interconnected system of ecology, of which the human is a ‘part’. However, consciousness, or ‘memory’, is suggested to create powerful and artificial divisions between the human and Nature within the human mind. Bowles portrays the sheer force of the agency of the desert environment as able to erase these divisions, and thereby return the human to a state of original, unconscious integration. The process of the ‘Baptism of Solitude’ therefore suggests the ‘trans-­corporeal’ location of the human. This trans-­corporeality allows the agency of the landscape to infiltrate and affect the human through a fundamentally material connection, which Stacy Alaimo terms the ‘literal contact zone’ between the human body and ‘more-­than-­human nature’.42 The eponymous ‘baptism of solitude’ outlined in this travel article illuminates both the structure and intention of the ‘interior mechanism’ that Bowles repeatedly depicts as ignited in the human by the presence of the desert landscape. Despite the process’s name referencing the Christian religious tradition of purification and ­regeneration – a­ n influence echoed in Bowles’s description of the landscape as capable of granting ‘absolution’ in The Sheltering Sky – this distinctive feature of Bowles’s presentation of the desert landscape also reflects the influence of North African theology and culture.43 Upon closer examination, it strongly resembles the Sufi concept of fana – a process by which union with the ‘infinite’ is achieved through the extinction of personal identity. The ‘baptism of solitude’ that Bowles outlines closely replicates the stages and conditions of the attainment of fana. As this chapter will go on to explore, a comparison of Bowles’s literary depictions of human interactions with the desert landscape and the concept of fana reveals the extent to which Bowles draws on this aspect of Sufi theology in order to convey the power and agency of the desert landscape. Sufism is an ascetic form of Islam that developed as a result of the religion’s rapid spread during the first century of the faith’s history.44 As a response to this expansion, there were fears of a loss of purity within the Islamic faith, which led to a rise in asceticism

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among some Muslims: the word sufi denotes a wearer of wool (suf), which was the usual garb of early ascetics.45 One way in which Sufism is distinct from orthodox Islam is the presence of ‘chanting, physical feats, whirling, dancing, music and miracles’ as part of the act of worship.46 Fana is a core concept within the Sufi religion, and has been described as the ‘goal of annihilation’.47 Majid Fakhry characterises Sufi mysticism as: ‘a desire to reach out to the Infinite [. . .] finally in a total dissolution of personal identity (fana)’. The attainment of fana therefore denotes the annihilation of personal identity as a result of the contemplation of the Infinite. The process culminates in ‘extinction in unity’ – the total annihilation of the worshiper through union with the infinite, which is the divine.48 Clear parallels exist between moments in Bowles’s writing and this aspect of the Sufi mysticism that was ‘deeply entrenched in popular life’ in Morocco.49 These parallels are particularly marked in Bowles’s evocations of a desire for contact with the infinite, and in the fundamentality of the annihilation of personal consciousness or identity to his depictions of such contact. Bowles’s prolific travel writings reveal a familiarity with the different tribes and ethnic groups that make up the Moroccan population. In particular, he writes in detail of the presence of Sufism in Morocco, as well as describing his personal experiences of witnessing Sufi worship. In one article for Holiday magazine (1959), he writes: [Moroccans] have a passion for forming cults dedicated to the worship of local saints. In this their religious practices show a serious deviation from [Islamic] orthodoxy [. . .] men and women can be seen dancing together, working themselves into a prolonged frenzy [. . .] Self-­torture, the inducing of trances, ordeal by fire and sword, and the eating of broken glass and scorpions are also not unusual on such occasions.50

In a rare disclosure of personal response, Bowles writes: ‘to me these spectacles are filled with great beauty, because their obvious purpose is to prove the power of the spirit over the flesh’.51 Sufi worship clearly appealed to Bowles; he almost never discloses his personal responses in his travel writing, and this praise for Sufi practices of worship is especially significant given the author’s

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avowed atheism.52 In the above passage, Bowles reports being particularly moved by the splitting of the physical body of the human from what he calls the ‘spirit’, in the Sufi ritual that he witnesses. This division of ‘flesh’ from consciousness becomes a core component of Bowles’s depiction of the ‘secret connection’ between the human and Nature, as is indicated in his description of the connection between human and landscape ‘bypassing the mind’ in his autobiography. The foregrounding of self-­harm in the creation of this split between body and mind is also replicated in Port’s focused attempts to destroy his ‘flesh’ through repeated physical exposure to the desert, and in his refusal to be immunised against the typhoid that eventually kills ­him – ­both actions that he undertakes in the pursuit of a ‘proximity to infinite things’.53 In her study of the Tangier literary scene, Michelle Green describes Brion Gysin’s first encounter with Sufi musicians, which was facilitated by Bowles while the pair were lodging together in Tangier. On a tour through the streets of Tangier, Gysin and Bowles came upon a troupe of Sufi m ­ usicians – ­an incident that precipitated a fascination with Sufi music in Gysin. This ‘ecstatic music of the Sufi brotherhoods’ was a common presence in the streets of Tangier, but originated in the rural Sufi communities of the Moroccan countryside; Gysin eventually tracked the troupe he heard with Bowles to ‘a remote village in the Jibala hills, about sixty miles south of Tangier’.54 In his own writings, Bowles mentions the prevalence of Sufism in Morocco as early as 1950. In the following passage from the Holiday magazine article ‘Fez’ he explicates: the Sultan in 1937 issued an edict forbidding public demonstration of the two dissident religious sects which have been most in evidence here: the Gnaoua and the Aïssaoua. This does not mean that the cults have been abolished. On certain occasions one has only to travel an hour from Fez to see the Aïssaoua eating their scorpions and serpents, lacerating themselves and drinking their own blood while the women scream and dance themselves into unconsciousness.55

Sufism rose to prominence in Morocco between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries, as a result of political and economic ‘regression’. However, the spread of this branch of Islam to the majority of

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the rural population of Morocco took place in the fifteenth century, as Sufism became a central force in the organisation of mass popular resistance against the Portuguese. Sufis were a significant presence in leading the resistance, and this Sufi leadership cemented the religion’s place as the dominant religious practice among the Moroccan rural population.56 However, a division between a Sufi rural majority and an orthodox city minority continued into the twentieth century, and Bowles remarks on the tensions that it caused on a number of occasions in his travel writing; he explains that: ‘this saint-­ worship [. . .] has long been frowned upon by devout urban Moslems’, and he also notes Sufism’s increased prevalence in rural Morocco.57 Bowles was thus aware of the presence of Sufism as a historically significant element within Moroccan society and culture, and he also responded to the religion’s continued prevalence in rural Morocco during the post-war period. However, as his travel writing reveals, it was the graphic ­physical displays of Sufi worship, which involved self-­mutilation, and through which the physical flesh was symbolically separated from the conscious mind, that most appealed to Bowles. Bowles’s writings consistently depict the testing of the physical body in combination with exposure to the presence of the infinite causing a change in human consciousness. This process results in the permanent alteration of the human mind and affords agency to the landscape, as is reflected in the statement that: ‘no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while is quite the same as when he came’.58 Bowles’s inclusion of this trope across his fiction and non-­fiction writing reinforces his declaration that The Sheltering Sky was composed in order to convey ‘what the desert can do to us’. The practice of the attainment of fana, in particular, provides him with a framework for engaging with, and representing, the power and agency of the desert landscape. Bowles therefore increasingly appropriates the mechanism of fana in order to explore the agency of the landscape, and to represent the transformation, regeneration and annihilation of the human mind that he felt to be instigated by unmediated contact with the desert. However, the extent of ‘what the desert can do to us’ that The Sheltering Sky portrays far exceeds the mental transformations that are described within Bowles’s travel writing.

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The culmination of Port’s desire for union with the landscape comes at his death from typhoid midway through The Sheltering Sky. In Bowles’s description of Port’s death, the same language of reintegration that is evident in ‘Baptism of Solitude’ is again evoked. The process described also reflects that of the attainment of fana: His cry was a separate thing beside him in the desert [. . .] the spots of raw bright blood on the earth. Blood on excrement. The supreme moment, high above the desert, when the two elements, blood and excrement, long kept apart, merge. A black star appears, a point of darkness in the night sky’s clarity. Point of darkness and gateway to repose. Reach out, pierce the fine fabric of the sheltering sky, take repose. (186–8)

Port’s death is portrayed as a passing into the infinite landscape that he has until this point longed for but been unable to fully reach. This is affirmed by the black hole imagery at the centre of the passage, which reinforces the presence of an infinite and unknowable Nature at the centre of this process of human change. Port’s body becomes a part of the infinite l­andscape – h ­ is ‘blood’ is described as returning to, and blending with, the ‘earth’. However, this ‘reintegration’ only occurs once Port’s ‘cry’ has become a separate thing from his body. ‘Long kept apart’ is indicative of the return of the body to a state of ultimate belonging within an infinite and material ecology. Port’s physical being is therefore reincorporated into the fabric of Nature after he has lost consciousness, as is emphasised by the image of his ‘bleeding entrails open to the sky’ (186) that follows. At this climactic point in the novel, Port’s body returns to the infinite ­landscape – ­the ‘rocks and the sky’ (134) that have been described as waiting, ‘ready to absolve him’ (134). The protection that the liminal barrier of the ‘sheltering sky’ has provided is necessarily broken at this point, and its fracturing is implied to be both causative of, and caused by, the death of Bowles’s protagonist; the moment of Port’s death is described as a ‘piercing’ of the liminal barrier of the sky. He then passes through the sky into the ‘absolute night’ that lies behind it. This is once again rendered synonymous with outer space, through the black hole imagery that overshadows the moment of Port’s corporeal integration. The image of the black hole that emerges at this point therefore represents a culmination

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of the foreshadowing of Port’s death created by the association between the ‘absolute night’ that lies behind the ‘sheltering sky’ and the imminent death of Bowles’s protagonists. The process of Port’s death again indicates the influence of fana. The need for self-­annihilation in order to achieve unity with the ­infinite – ­which Sufism equates with God, and Bowles with ­Nature – ­is a necessary condition for Port’s physical ‘reintegration’, and represents a culmination of the acts of self-­harm towards which the character demonstrates an escalating tendency. In Sufi theology, contact with the infinite reaches its successful conclusion only in the extinction of the self. Bowles’s depiction of his protagonists’ final moments reflects these conditions, as Port can only achieve final unity with the landscape once he has lost consciousness for the final time. Fakhry describes extinction in unity through fana as a cyclical process by which: ‘through the act of self-­annihilation (fana) [. . .] the end of man may revert to his beginning, whereby he becomes what he was before he came to be’.59 Similarly, Bowles’s novel depicts the human body as ‘reintegrated’ into an infinite ecological system, which is also described as the point of its origin. However, this only occurs on the condition of the disintegration of personal identity, through, for Port, the permanent annihilation of consciousness in death. The novel’s overriding presentation of the human being as constituting merely a part within an infinite ecology anticipates the structure of ecology outlined by Timothy Morton as the mesh. In Morton’s theorisation of the mesh, the human is trans-­corporeally located within an infinite, material system of interconnected matter.60 Rather than portraying Nature as ‘That Thing Over There’ that is the discrete and binary opposite of the human and the cultural, Bowles depicts his protagonists and landscapes as intrinsically connected; his protagonists are enmeshed within the same infinite and interconnected material system of ecology.61 Bowles repeatedly represents the human as fundamentally ‘trans-­corporeal’. However, the human’s ‘trans-­corporeal’ location within an infinite, ecological Nature remains largely obscured until the point of its climactic corporeal ‘reintegration’, as a result of the divisions between human and environment that he implies to be contrived by, and disseminated through, the medium of American culture.

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The argument of this chapter is that Bowles combines tropes from Islamic and Christian theology in his fictional representations of the human relationship to the environment. In his travel writing, Bowles reveals a conviction in the similarities between these two monotheistic faiths, and an understanding that these similarities derive from the physical presence of the desert landscape. In the 1959 essay ‘Africa Minor’, Bowles discusses a theory that a direct connection exists between the landscape and human religion. In this piece, he argues: ‘the landscape is conducive to reflections of the infinite’, and goes on to elaborate on his conviction that the landscape plays an influential part in the formation of religious doctrine: In other parts of Africa you are aware of the earth beneath your feet, of the vegetation and the animals; all power seems concentrated in the earth. In North Africa the earth becomes the less important part of the landscape because you find yourself constantly raising your eyes to the sky. In the arid landscape the sky is the final arbiter. When you have understood that [. . .] you have also understood why it is that the great trinity of monotheistic ­religions – J­udaism, Christianity and I­slam – ­which remove the source of power from the earth itself to the spaces outside the e­ arth – ­were evolved in desert regions.62

In this extract, Bowles reveals a belief that the landscape provides the primary inspiration for human religion. By equating the overbearing presence of the sky in the arid desert regions of North Africa with religions that ‘remove the source of power from the earth’, he situates Nature as the principal influence behind both religion and religious variety. It is a controversial statement, subtly put, and buried in what is ostensibly a tourist article. However, it helps to explain the complex interactions between Nature and structures derived from religious thought that lie at the heart of Bowles’s work. These comments are influential in establishing both Bowles’s atheist status, and his conception of religious beliefs as cultural constructions. His deft manipulation of the theological and the secular in this passage helps to clarify the ease with which he deploys frameworks lifted from disparate religious traditions as convenient structures for exploring and representing the human

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relationship to Nature. This section of ‘Africa Minor’ also reveals Bowles’s understanding that Nature is not synonymous with God, but rather that it contains the inspiration for the human concept of a God, in which he does not believe. In an interview in the Mediterranean Review (1971), Bowles provides further insight into his understanding of this interaction between the concepts of God and Nature. Describing the vision of Nature that his writing portrays as: ‘not inimical, but merely indifferent’, he adds: ‘if you use the word God in place of nature, then I think you get even closer to it’.63 This conflation of God and Nature may at first appear to be an admission by Bowles that his annihilating landscapes are all allegories for the spiritual presence of an indifferent God. However, I contend that it in fact references Bowles’s utilisation of religious frameworks to develop his literary explorations of the relationship between the human and Nature, while always retaining a standpoint that is ultimately atheistic. Bowles does not seek to actively engage with religion in his use of religious language and concepts. Rather, he appropriates a diverse range of theological concepts in order to better describe the interaction between the individual and the landscape, with Nature taking the place that God does in religious doctrine. In this way, Bowles first enforces the specificity of place in the development of diverse human religious practices. He then deliberately transcends this specificity, by utilising elements from Christianity and ­Islam – ­which he suggests could only have been developed in desert ­regions – ­in order to advance a broader interrogation of the human relationship to Nature, which is nevertheless exclusively located within the experiences of his mid-­century American protagonists. In his influential ecocritical essay ‘The Trouble with Wilderness’ (1996), William Cronon exposes the ability of the atheist to substitute the wilderness for the Godhead as the subject of ‘religious awe’. Cronon argues that ‘wilderness fulfils the old romantic project of secularizing Judeo-­Christian values so as to make a new cathedral not in some pretty human building but in God’s own creation, Nature itself.’64 Bowles’s appropriation of theological structures in order to explore the relationship between the human and Nature adheres to the atheistic displacement of ‘religious awe’ into Nature that Cronon identifies. Indeed, Cronon’s description of the atheist

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substituting Nature into an existing religious structure can help to illuminate Bowles’s conflation of terminology from two different theological ­traditions – t­he Christian and the Islamic. The substitution of Nature for God underlies Bowles’s use of both Christian and Islamic terminology, and his understanding of the landscape’s role in connecting Judaism, Christianity and Islam explains his lack of inhibitions in utilising the religious concepts of baptism, absolution, fatalism and fana in combination, in exploring the human relationship to the environment. These passages from Bowles’s travel writing also provide additional evidence of the strength of the connection between human spirituality and the agency of the desert landscape that underpins his work. The second half of The Sheltering Sky narrates the fates of Port and Kit once they have reached the centre of the Sahara. Bowles’s presentation of the landscape has, up to this point, been mediated and enhanced by his focus on the fragility of the liminal barriers that protect the human from the landscape beyond, whether these are windows and walls, or the ‘solid’ protection represented by the image of the ‘sheltering sky’. However, when Port and Kit reach the centre of the Sahara, these liminal structures that have separated them from the surrounding desert begin to disintegrate. In the period immediately prior to Port’s death, Bowles emphasises Kit’s enclosure within more and more restrictive walled spaces. She is confined to one small sickroom with Port, and her movements are severely restricted by the French Colonel’s suspicion of her. Kit describes the room as ‘a prison’ (163), and Bowles accentuates the impression of Kit’s captivity through the penitentiary-­like qualities of the architecture; he writes: ‘she went out into the courtyard and walked around it several times, looking up at the stars’ (164). The imagery is strongly evocative of a prison yard, and Bowles uses the gaze of the protagonist at the stars in order to evoke a spatially and temporally remote Nature that is juxtaposed to Kit’s trapped state. The mediating liminal structures of windows and walls become increasingly unstable in the period prior to Port’s death, as the desert begins to encroach more and more into Port’s sickroom. In the nights before his death, Kit wakes to find dust from the desert has entered the room: ‘She moved her fingers along the pillow: it was covered with a coating of dust. Then she became conscious of

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the noise of the wind outside. It was like the roar of the sea’ (164). As Kit’s movements become increasingly confined, the threat of infiltration from the desert outside gradually increases. Bowles also foregrounds the power of the wind outside during these final nights that Kit spends in the room prior to Port’s death, describing its ‘fury’ (164) and its ‘singular, animal-­like sound beneath the door’ (165). The repeatedly emphasised walls and windows that have separated Bowles’s protagonists from the unmitigated force of the desert landscape are at this point under siege and at breaking point. Kit’s description of the wind and Port’s sobbing as ‘two impersonal, natural sounds’ (165) also implies that Port has, even at this point before his death, stopped being human. Bowles describes his cry as a ‘natural sound’ that blends with the sound of desert winds, and thereby suggests that his transition from an embodied, conscious human into a part within a greater ecological system of Nature begins even before his death. Kit observes: ‘he’s stopped being human’, as he lies beside her in his typhoid-­induced delirium; ‘it was the ultimate taboo stretched out before her [. . .] she choked back a wave of nausea’. Port’s death thus occurs in symbiotic relationship with the desert wind that ‘moaned spasmodically through the cracks in and around the window’ (171). The scenes leading up to Port’s death therefore reinforce the novel’s depiction of the human as merely a transitory state that matter passes through, contributing to Bowles’s overarching presentation of Nature as a material and interdependent ecology of which the human is a ‘part’.65 After the moment of Port’s death, the infiltration of the desert is finally complete. Kit returns to the room and, finding that Port has died, rips down the sheet that she had tacked over the shutterless window of the sickroom to keep out the light and the sand (191). In this way, the desert finally gains entry into the room following Port’s death. His death also precipitates Kit’s flight into the desert, and the tearing down of the sheet coincides with the end of any attempts to resist the power of the encroaching desert. Until Port’s death, Kit functions solely as a foil for Port’s desires; her earlier reactions of caution and fear in response to the ‘proximity to infinite things’ further highlighting the perversity of Port’s

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desire for increasing levels of mental and physical exposure to this hostile landscape. However, in the aftermath of Port’s death, Kit’s response to the desert changes markedly. She becomes the novel’s central protagonist, and so inherits Port’s quest for union with the landscape. Upon leaving the compound in which Port has died, Kit begins to seek out the darkest alleyways, drawn on by the ‘liquid sound of the rivulets’, which ‘had their effect without her knowing it’ (197), leading her further and further into the desert, and continuing Port’s journey towards the centre of the Sahara. The language with which Bowles describes her unconscious desire for greater and greater integration into the desert environment also echoes his description in Without Stopping of an ‘interior mechanism’ that ‘bypasses the mind’ and connects the human to the desert landscape.66 An acknowledgement of this parallel also reveals the influence of fatalism on the novel’s narrative structure. Throughout the novel, Bowles’s protagonists are repeatedly depicted as unconsciously drawn towards the centre of the Sahara, and their predetermined fate. Port first pursues his impulse to penetrate with ‘each successive movement [. . .] deeper into the Sahara’ (85) with conscious agency; he is actively trying to outrun both his passport and Tunner, which form two facets of his American identity that he wishes to escape. Bowles also discloses Port’s covert but conscious actions to ensure the party continues to travel further and further into the desert, including his decision not to mention to Kit and Tunner the warnings he has received about the dangers of travelling further into the heart of the continent (84). However, Port’s progression towards this goal continues inexorably even after his illness renders him insensible, and he ends up on his deathbed in the centre of the Sahara long after he is capable of making conscious choices. Bowles emphasises Port’s lack of agency over his fate in the following description of the final stages of his journey: As he lay in the back of the truck, protected somewhat from the cold by Kit, now and then he was aware of the straight road beneath him [. . .] it had been one strict, undeviating course inland to the desert, and now he was very nearly at the centre [. . .] It was all right to speed ahead into the desert leaving no trace (157–9)

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This lack of agency, as external factors continue to propel Port further from medical aid and closer to death, creates an ominous atmosphere of predetermination that reflects the influence of fatalism. This is amplified when, after Port’s death, Kit is drawn towards, and meets, a similar fate. However, in Kit’s narrative arc following Port’s death, the fatalistic narrative structure becomes even more pronounced; as Kit shuts down her mind and begins to emulate Port’s behaviour in the period after his death, the foreshadowing of Kit’s demise by Port’s earlier death increasingly appears to suggest the predetermined nature of her fate. In the final section of the novel, Bowles’s descriptions of the landscape contain a heightened hostility towards the human; Bowles writes: ‘The light of the moon was violent’ and ‘occasionally there was a white pile of dried palm branches stacked against the wall; each time she thought it was a man sitting in the moonlight’ (196). In this second image, the landscape assumes the part of a human attacker stalking Kit, and its personification enforces the imminent threat to Kit’s life that the desert environment presents. However, following Port’s death, Kit’s entire attitude towards the desert is changed. She bathes in a pool that she is drawn to by the sound of water, and this immersion instigates a mental transformation: ‘Life was suddenly there, she was in it, not looking through the window at it’ (198). Kit’s bathing echoes the baptismal function of exposure to the desert that is described by Bowles in the article ‘Baptism of Solitude’, with her immersion in the water forming a permanent division between her present journey into the desert landscape, and her memory of the trauma of Port’s death. The final section of the novel sees Kit desperate to maintain this divide at all costs: ‘because she had found it again, the joy of being, she said to herself that she would hang onto it, no matter what the effort entailed’ (199). The ‘joy of being’ that her baptism of solitude precipitates is characterised by a total departure from habitation and human contact. It also foreshadows her later implied death from total exposure to the desert. Whereas earlier in the novel Kit claimed that she would ‘simply die if’ she ‘didn’t see something civilised soon’ (128), now: ‘without hesitating she made for the nearest tree and set her bag down [. . .] it was like a tent [. . .] in no time at all she was asleep’ (199).

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Furthermore, she now considers the tree she shelters beneath to be ‘her protecting tree’ (215) – a reference to the protection offered by the ‘sheltering palms’ in the song from which the ‘sheltering sky’ motif originates, and a response to the desert landscape that is far removed from the dread she has previously expressed upon contact with it.67 Her active integration into the fabric of Nature is emphasised by the simile: ‘like an insect spinning its cocoon thicker’, which further establishes Kit’s new, environmentally embedded state. Bowles describes this ‘cocooning’ as Kit ‘strengthening the partition’ (215) between her new state of total memory loss and the painful memory of Port’s death. Her immersion and integration into the desert landscape therefore comes only at the cost of the total erasure of memory, again replicating the conditions of fana; the crucial condition for the successful ‘reintegration’ of the human into a system of ecological Nature is once more presented as the annihilation of consciousness. A clear parallel therefore exists between Kit’s desire not to remember the events of Port’s death, and the division between Port’s memory and body that occurs during this event. In both cases, Bowles depicts a division between consciousness and the body as necessary for the human to pass into a state of closer unity with ‘Nature’, and to reach the state of the ‘extinction’ of personal identity that is a necessary condition for fana.68 This parallel is developed through Kit’s actions at the close of the novel. After she has escaped from the house of ­Belquissim – t­ he Berber lover that she briefly takes up w ­ ith – a­ nd has been rescued by the American Consulate, Kit runs away. Penultimate to her flight, Bowles writes: ‘before her eyes was the violent blue ­sky – ­nothing else. For an endless moment she looked into it. Like a great overpowering sound it destroyed everything in her mind, paralysed her’ (251). Again, unmediated contact with the sky has the effect of ‘destroying’ the mind of the human that is subjected to it. The qualifying influence of ‘nothing else’ recalls the novel’s earlier descriptions of the desert sky in which the horizon recedes to become ‘the brink of space’; it no longer represents a ‘sheltering’ force for the protection of the human, but rather a ‘violent’ and hostile entity capable of the annihilation of the human mind. In Bowles’s description of the original appeal of the ‘sheltering sky’ metaphor in Without Stopping, he poses the question that the

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novel ultimately answers: ‘What did the palm trees shelter people from, and how sure could they be of such protection?’69 The final novel provides an emphatic demonstration that the human cannot rely on protection from the annihilating force of the desert environment. In the aftermath of her unmediated exposure to the ‘violent’ desert sky, Kit refuses to speak, and is mutely conveyed toward the British Embassy by her rescuers. Bowles writes: ‘Mrs Moresby sat like a stone figure’ (255) in the taxi, and her face was: ‘so utterly changed that [her rescuer] Miss Ferry was appalled’ (256). This description of Kit as a ‘stone’ figure immediately before her disappearance echoes the earlier translation of Port at his death from autonomous human into a part of the desert landscape (256). Kit’s flight from the American C ­ onsulate – i­ t is implied back into the ­desert – a­ fter prolonged exposure to this hostile environment, is paralleled in Bowles’s 1947 short story ‘A Distant Episode’. This story narrates the experiences of a Professor who is captured and tortured by the ­Tuareg – ­a Berber tribe – ­while journeying through the North African desert. Significantly, the protagonist, a Western languages Professor who seeks to record all of the desert tongues, ends up having his own cut out. While unable to speak, the Professor does manage to escape from the Tuareg, and finds himself in a town. However, instead of summoning help from its inhabitants, he runs away back into the desert, presumably to his death: ‘The Professor ran beneath the arched gate, turning his face toward the red sky, and began to trot along the Piste d’In Salah, straight into the setting sun’.70 Again, Bowles presents unmediated contact with the desert sky as instrumental in the destruction of the human mind, causing the Professor to pursue the same trajectory from exposure to certain death that both Port and Kit undergo. Like Port and Kit, the Professor has become so altered by exposure to the desert that he is capable only of a suicidal flight towards its imagined source. The trope of self-­destructive flight towards the centre of the desert represents the culmination of Bowles’s protagonists’ desire for an absolution from the landscape, and this suicidal impulse is depicted as the ultimate result of the ‘secret connection between the world of nature and the consciousness of man’ that both Bowles’s fiction and non-­fiction writings r­epeatedly evoke.

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Bowles has commented that The Sheltering Sky and ‘A Distant Episode’ are two versions of the same story, and the points of comparison between these two otherwise very different tales are worth noting: the American nationalities of the protagonists; the fatalistic narrative structures within which these protagonists are drawn inextricably towards the centre of the desert, and the desire of the protagonist in each case to utilise the desert for their own egocentric purposes. Port believes that he can escape his American identity and past by travelling into the heart of the S­ ahara – ­as is most neatly captured by his fixation with outrunning his passport. The Professor in ‘A Distant Episode’ similarly imagines that he can collect the desert languages in order to further his academic career in the West. Both place these egotistical aims ahead of any consideration of the dangerous autonomy of the desert environment; they ignore ‘what the desert can do’ to them.71 The same fatalistic narrative structure, and failure to respect the latent power of the desert, are also evident in the tale of ‘Tea in the Sahara’ – the mise en abyme situated in the opening pages of The Sheltering Sky. The story of ‘Tea in the Sahara’ is told to Port by the Arab prostitute, Marhnia, whom he illicitly visits in the opening chapters of the novel: three dancing girls, Outka, Mimouna and Aïcha, live on the North African coast, and dream of drinking tea in the Sahara. They receive the money to make this dream a reality, and try to find the highest dune in the desert on which to make their tea. However, they are led further and further into the desert by dune after dune appearing higher than the last, until: When they got to the top [of the highest dune] they were very tired and they said: ‘We’ll rest a little and then make tea’. But first they set out the tray and the teapot and the glasses. Then they lay down and slept. [. . .] Many days later another caravan was passing [. . .] they found Outka, Mimouna and Aïcha; they were still lying there the same way as when they had gone to sleep. And all three of the glasses [. . .] were full of sand. (30)

The story performs the function of a mise en abyme, foreshadowing the progress and eventual fate of both Port and Kit. It also acts as an exploration in miniature of the same fatalistic narrative structure that Bowles employs in both the novel and in ‘A Distant Episode’.

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In each case, the annihilation of the protagonists is precipitated by attempts to exploit the desert environment in order to satisfy human caprice. As Bowles’s narratives reveal, this human arrogance has at its heart a fatal underestimation of the power of Nature. His protagonists are helpless in the face of the desert’s power and agency, reflecting the Islamic fatalism that infiltrates Bowles’s writing. However, Bowles resituates the power that fatalism attributes to God within an infinite ecological system embodied by the desert ­landscape – ­one of the ‘certain areas of the earth’s surface [that] contained more magic than others’.72 The effect of this magic on the human is, for Bowles, inextricably bound up with the loss of human agency. Furthermore, this loss of agency occurs alongside an accentuation of the agential capacity of the landscape, which possesses the ability to transform and manipulate the human absolutely. The process again endorses Alaimo’s maxim that the ‘trans-­corporeal’ situation of the human causes an increased emphasis on the agency of more-­than-­human materiality. The model for Bowles’s presentation of the effect of the desert landscape on the human is the Sufi concept of fana, and he employs this in combination with an appropriation of aspects of Islamic fatalism, which influence the novel’s imagery and narrative structure. Bowles was thus strongly influenced by the Islamic and Sufi cultures that inflected the North African landscape about which he wrote, and these influences provided the inspiration for new frameworks through which to explore the relationship between the human and the environment. His writing portrays the human as ‘a part’ ­of – ­and as at the mercy o ­ f – ­a powerful, agential, ecological Nature.73 In this way, his work differs markedly from dominant portrayals of the relationship between the human and Nature that dominated American media discourse during the Cold War years, and which overwhelmingly present the human as having achieved global scientific supremacy, and a final ‘mastery’ of Nature, through the creation of the nuclear bomb.74 Bowles’s depictions of the annihilation of the human by an infinite Nature undoubtedly also reflects the preoccupation with the possibility for nuclear annihilation present within Cold War American culture and literature. The nuclear ‘states of suspense’ that Daniel Cordle argues to heavily inflect the fiction of the Cold

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War period are predicated upon a similar preoccupation with annihilation.75 However, the crucial difference within Bowles’s work is that the annihilation of the individual is not depicted as something to be ­feared – ­indeed, it is actively pursued. As this chapter has shown, Bowles appropriates a framework for the positive annihilation of the human within an ‘infinite’ entity from Sufism, in order to depict the process of the annihilation of the human by a powerful and regenerative Nature that he first hints at in ‘Cold Point’, the structure of which anticipates the mesh structure of ecology theorised by the contemporary ecocritic Timothy Morton. The infinite and interdependent Nature that Bowles’s writing portrays therefore fulfils a significant function within the text, allowing the annihilation of the human to become a positive thing through the subversion of the ‘nuclear ending’. Grausam argues that the advent of nuclear weapons caused a ‘paradigmatic change in understandings of historical time and finitude’, introducing the possibility of an ending ‘at once secular and instantaneous’. The totality of this new kind of ‘nuclear ending’ denies representation; it is fundamentally ‘unwitnessable’, as it leaves no humans alive to record it. The ‘nuclear ending’, Grausam asserts, ‘haunts’ the fiction of the Nuclear Age.76 Bowles’s presentation of an annihilation that takes place within, and is precipitated by, an infinite, ecological Nature deliberately seeks to bypass the ‘nuclear ending’ by depicting the annihilation of the human within the context of a spatially and temporally infinite and regenerative ecology. This literary portrayal of Nature as an infinite ecology capable of enduring thermonuclear war is also found in the work of a number of Cold War writers besides Bowles, as the following chapters of this study will demonstrate. The possibility of nuclear annihilation haunts the work of all of these writers, but their responses to the nuclear anxiety and suspense of the years after 1945 saw each of them respond by creating innovative, ecological systems of Nature within the text, which are depicted as capable of enduring and outlasting both the human presence and the nuclear threat. In each case, the human is represented as ‘trans-­corporeally’ enmeshed within this infinite system of ecology; it is, in Bowles’s words, merely a ‘part of nature’.77

 

CHAPTER 2

Nature and the Nuclear Southwest: Peggy Pond Church and J. Robert Oppenheimer

The second chapter of this study will examine depictions of Nature and of nuclear science in the work of the little-­known New Mexican poet Peggy Pond Church, and the rather more well-­known physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer.1 The histories of these two figures are entwined within a small area of the New Mexico desert, close to Santa Fe. This same area of land was also the site of some of the most significant events in the history of the twentieth century, as this chapter will outline. Like the Saharan landscape about which Paul Bowles writes, this area of New Mexico is a desert region. However, as the following chapters will demonstrate, a wide range of Cold War writers depict disparate, globally diverse landscapes in strikingly comparable ways. In this way, their nature writing transcends the specificity of place, and instead attempts a broader recalibration of the relationship between mid-­century American society and Nature. As this chapter will go on to reveal, Church’s own personal mission to communicate one specific area of land gradually transformed into a broader struggle to reconcile the nuclear and Nature in the aftermath of the development of the atomic bomb. Since Church is a relatively obscure writer, a little biography is necessary to begin with. Church was born Peggy Pond in 1903, to parents who moved between Detroit, California, Connecticut and New Mexico during her formative years.2, 3 Her father attempted a number of business ventures in the West, all of which were unsuccessful, until the establishment of the Los Alamos Ranch School

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on the Pajarito Plateau in 1917.4 Church spent only two summers on the plateau during her childhood;5 after her father set up the ranch school, she spent much of her time away at private schools in California and Connecticut.6 Despite such a fractured residence on the plateau, Church was deeply affected by these early summers spent at the Ranch School, and her childhood memories of the ­place – i­ts landscape, geology and the Native American worldview of its Pueblo ­inhabitants – ­inflect almost all of the writing that she produced in the next sixty years. This latter influence in particular had a deep, underlying effect on her future literary production, the extent of which has not been fully acknowledged in the small amount of criticism that her work has so far attracted. In June 1924, after a year at Smith College, Peggy Pond married Fermor Church, an engineering graduate, and teacher at her father’s school. As a result, she returned to live permanently on the plateau at the Ranch School from 1924 until the land’s repossession in December 1942.7 During these years, Church was a housewife, or ‘faculty wife’ as she called herself, as well as a writer.8 Her personal frustration in occupying this role is painfully apparent in her journal writing, as well as in her memoir of her friend Edith Warner, The House at Otowi Bridge (1960).9 This frustration was exacerbated by the ethos of the Ranch School; despite being an accomplished trail rider, Church was banned from accompanying the men on the many wilderness excursions that were part of the school’s curriculum.10 However, in 1942, the lives of all of the Ranch School’s inhabitants were turned upside down when the land on which the school stood was repossessed by the United States Government to make way for the Manhattan Project. Church continued to live in Taos and Santa Fe for the rest of her life, and despite being affected by a degenerative and incurable eye condition, her literary productivity continued uninhibited until her death in October 1986.11 Her final publication during her lifetime was the poetry collection Birds at Daybreak (1985), which appeared only a year before her death.12 At the time of its publication, she was ­eighty-­two years old. Church continues to be a celebrated regional writer within New Mexico, although she remains largely unknown within the broader context of twentieth-­century American literature.13 Between 1923

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and 1985 she produced several collections of poetry, as well as extensive journals.14 She also wrote memoirs of fellow Southwestern nature writer Mary Austin, and of her friend Edith Warner; these works arguably represent her finest literary achievements. However, her oeuvre is overwhelmingly defined by a struggle to write a memoir not of a person, but of a place. Throughout her sixty years of creative practice, Church was motivated by the desire to capture and preserve her beloved Pajarito Plateau in ­words – ­something she felt that she never fully achieved. Even in her final journal entries, there is evidence of her continued desire to successfully communicate a landscape, the presence of which coloured almost every piece of writing she produced.15 This chapter will investigate the changing depictions of Nature and of the nuclear in Church’s literary portrayals of the Pajarito Plateau, and argue that analysis of her work helps to augment accepted critical readings of the l­ iterature of the Southwest, and of early Cold War literature. Church was forced to consider the relationship between her beloved New Mexico landscape and nuclear development at some length, after her life became irrevocably entwined with the United States nuclear programme. In 1942, the US government repossessed the Ranch School and its surrounding lands, which became the site of the Manhattan Project. This high security research post at what is now the city of Los Alamos developed the nuclear bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing an end to the Second World War. Church’s writings at the time reveal her grappling with what she saw to be the shocking juxtaposition of the nuclear technology that appeared to represent the pointless destruction ‘man perpetrated on himself’, and the ‘natural’ b ­ eauty – ­and thousands of years of cultural h ­ istory – o ­ f the mesas upon which the bomb was developed.16 These same mesas continued to obsess and bewitch Church even in her exile from them, which continued from 1942 until her death in 1986. Incredibly, however, Church’s writing moves from a position of complete revulsion and grief at the development of atomic weapons on what she felt to be ‘sacred’ ground, to an understanding of the atomic bomb as constituting a power of Nature.17 This chapter will demonstrate that Church was able to reach such a position as a direct result of the influence of the Pueblo

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Native American worldview.18 She was exposed to this influence during her life on the Pajarito Plateau, and she also actively studied Pueblo philosophy through the writings and lectures of the Pueblo anthropologist, and member of the San Juan Pueblo, Dr Alfonso Ortiz. This chapter will also investigate the similarities that exist between Church’s depictions of the relationship between the nuclear and Nature, and those that define the writings of the atomic scientist and ‘father of the atomic bomb’ J. Robert Oppenheimer.19 Church and Oppenheimer knew each other through their mutual friend Edith Warner, and became occasional correspondents. They also produced comparable literary depictions of the relationship between the emergent nuclear presence and the landscape of the American Southwest within which it was developed. Church has so far received very little critical attention. A notable exception to this is found in the work of Shelley Armitage, who has single-­handedly compiled and edited much of Church’s work in the last twenty years.20 However, a far larger body of regional criticism has developed that focuses on the implications of the development of the nuclear bomb in the American Southwest. Much of this work has sought to draw comparisons between the frontier thesis that has dominated critical discussion of the West since Frederick Jackson Turner’s definitive study, The Frontier in American History (1893), and the nuclear presence that came to the region in the mid-­twentieth century.21 As a result, something of a critical consensus has formed around the continued application of Turner’s thesis22 in analysing the effects of the bomb’s development on the American Southwest, and this has led to the rise of critical studies of what has been termed the ‘Nuclear Southwest’.23 Much of this criticism reads the development of the nuclear bomb in the region as the continuation of a Euro-­American conquest of Nature that began with the settlement of the frontier that Turner’s work details. Audrey Goodman, for example, writes that the development of the atomic bomb represents man’s ‘pride in surpassing nature’s limits’.24 Other earlier works in this tradition such as Patricia Limerick’s The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (1987) have, while condemning the dominance of Turner over the field, simultaneously sought to extend his thesis as far as the 1980s, in an attempt to create a single narrative encom-

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passing all of the West’s history. Surprisingly, this attempt to extend Turner’s paradigm in order to read all socio-­economic, political and environmental events that shaped Western American culture and history through the lens of Turner’s ‘frontier thesis’ has become a dominant reading strategy applied to the nuclear activity in the region.25 Limerick argues for the continued significance of Turner’s Western paradigm to American history as a whole, writing that: ‘conquest forms the historical bedrock of the whole nation’.26 This dominance of the frontier paradigm has continued to shape the most recent criticism. For instance, Goodman’s 2011 summary of ‘Nuclear Southwest’ criticism adopts Limerick’s stance absolutely, asserting that: ‘the history of the nuclear Southwest [. . .] recapitulates and identifies dominant patterns in western American history’. Goodman argues that: ‘the Atomic Age compressed and exaggerated the patterns that we now understand to define the region’s particular history of conquest, economic development, and environmental change’.27 These critical readings of the region apply Turner’s frontier rhetoric of the human’s conquest of Nature to the atomic experimentation that dominated the region in the mid-­twentieth-­century.28 The substitution is, however, highly problematic. Turner’s paradigm is, as Limerick accepts, to ‘put it mildly, ethnocentric and nationalistic’, and ‘nearly as invisible [as peoples of non-­white ethnicity] in his work, are women’.29 That such readings of the culture and history of the American West have dominated for so long is troubling, particularly given the ethnic diversity of the Southwest region. However, the American Southwest has also been the subject of several recent studies that focus on Native American experiences, and which confront the tensions between race and nuclear weaponry in the region, both from a literary perspective and from an environmental one.30 With regard to the latter, Valerie L. Kuletz’s The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West (1998) presents a detailed case study of the Los Alamos area, drawing attention to the disproportionate degree to which Native Americans have been the victims of both the fallout from nuclear weapons testing and the repossession of land by the United States government for use as nuclear weapons ­testing sites. This Native

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American land was viewed as wasteland by the United States government, but was integral to the spiritual, economic and social lives of the tribes affected.31 Indeed, Native American land has been so disproportionally used for the testing of nuclear weapons that Kuletz describes the process as a form of colonialism.32 The contamination of Native American lands, as well as the substantial impact of nuclear testing on the non-­Native American population of the American West, is also extensively treated by Sarah Alisabeth Fox in Downwind: A People’s History of the Nuclear West (2014). In literature, a large number of later Native American Renaissance texts also deal explicitly with the environmental damage to Native American land in the Southwest caused by atomic testing and weapons manufacturing.33 Literary critics including Paul Williams and Patrick B. Sharp have also highlighted the many forms of racism within the politics of nuclear weapons deployment, from the end of the Second World War to the present day.34 The context provided by these studies is critically relevant in positioning the analysis contained in this chapter, and should always be referenced in any work on the region’s nuclear history and legacy. While this chapter’s aim is to emphasise the influence of the Pueblo Native American worldview on Church’s representations of Nature and of nuclear weapons, it is vital to contextualise this analysis in relation to the catastrophic and disproportionate impact of nuclear weapons development in the Southwest on Native American communities, which the work of critics including Kuletz, Fox and Joy Porter has exposed.35 In analysing the influence of the Pueblo worldview on Church as a white writer, it is equally essential to foreground the cultural appropriation inherent in her literary representations of Pueblo Native American philosophy. Church’s understanding of Pueblo thought, as described in this chapter, should therefore be recognised as an inherently inauthentic and ‘Orientalist’ representation of the Pueblo worldview. Church struggled throughout her life to come to terms with her own exile from the Pajarito Plateau in 1942, writing as late as 1983 in her journals: ‘Miserable all morning about the Pajarito Plateau. About the destruction of my childhood paradise [. . .] is the plateau the center of anyone’s sacred world any longer?’ Her writing also

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responds to the juxtaposition of the destructive military-­industrial mindset that lay behind the development of the bomb, and the thousands of years of Native American cultural history, from the ancient Anasazi ruins to the traditions of the present day Pueblo Native American communities, that formed the dominant cultural presence on the mesa before the coming of the Manhattan Project.36 Resultantly, Church was increasingly drawn to the Pueblo Native American worldview, which she saw to be so starkly contrasted with the displays of military might and economic and scientific ‘supremacy’ that overtook the plateau following its repossession in 1942. In her journals, Church writes of the ‘irony that the atomic bomb could have been developed on these mesas. How can I write peacefully any more of Pajarito?’37 However, she did continue to make the plateau the primary subject of her work, and as a result, her writings document her struggle to understand the relationship between the newly emergent nuclear science and the landscape within which it was created. In doing so, she increasingly drew upon elements of the Pueblo Native American worldview, and this influence significantly shaped the developing ecological presentation of Nature in her work. Consequently, her literary depictions of Nature evolve into representations of an infinite, ‘dark ecology’, which possesses the dimensions to contain and neutralise even the ‘anti-­ecological’ presence of nuclear science.38 However, before turning to these specifically nuclear texts, this chapter will first examine the wider influence of the Pueblo Native American worldview on Church’s poetry. The following section of this chapter will explore the degree to which the ecological depictions of Nature in Church’s poetry were shaped by her exposure to elements of Pueblo Native American culture. Church spent time in the San Ildefonso Pueblo village that was a near neighbour to the Ranch School, and had good friends among the villagers, including Atilano (Tilano) Montoya, the life partner of her close friend Edith Warner. These interactions with the San Ildefonso Pueblo are detailed at length in her memoir of Edith Warner, The House at Otowi Bridge (1959).39 Church’s proximity to, and engagement with, her neighbours at the San Ildefonso Pueblo incited a lifelong interest in the Pueblo worldview, and Church also actively studied Pueblo thought through the work of Dr. Alfonso ­Ortiz – a­ renowned scholar of Pueblo culture, and a

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member of the nearby San Juan Pueblo.40 Church’s journals reveal that she owned and read Ortiz’s New Perspectives on the Pueblos (1972) in detail, and attended his lectures on Pueblo culture. The work of Ortiz represents a major documented source of Church’s knowledge of Pueblo Native American culture, although she came to New Perspectives after writing many of the poems analysed in this chapter, as it was published in 1972.41 However, the book nevertheless represents a useful contemporary source on which to draw in assessing the extent to which Church was influenced by concepts derived from the Pueblo worldview, as Ortiz’s work describes the specific Pueblos, and Pueblo rituals, to which Church was exposed. This chapter will assert that the Pueblo worldview was an instrumental influence upon Church’s writing, and particularly upon her writing of Nature. It will also suggest that her engagement with Pueblo culture both aided her critical portrayal of hegemonic American culture, and inspired the emerging ecological depictions of Nature in her writing. An undated early poem of Church’s demonstrates the degree to which her depictions of an ecological and interdependent relationship between the human and Nature were shaped by her exposure to the Pueblo worldview, from her earliest work.42 ‘I Shall Take Root Here Like the Pine’ is also indicative of the relationship between Nature and the poem’s persona that continues to exist across Church’s oeuvre: Perhaps I shall take root here like the pine, I have been still so long even the trees Think I am one of them. That fragrant fir Confidingly sets free her hidden birds. [. . .] I have no thoughts at all. The smallest pool Of clear, unrippled water is aware As much as I of wind and sky and leaves [. . .] Almost I am a part Of the mute age-­old cliffs and silent hills. Perhaps I shall take root here like the pines – I have been still so long.43

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As the poem progresses, its persona evolves from attempted ­mimesis – ­standing still like the ­tree – ­to the point where consciousness is ‘almost’ eroded by the presence of Nature. At this point, the persona comes close to becoming a part of Nature, and entering an alternate state presented as a loss of consciousness: having ‘no thoughts at all’. The poem depicts the destruction of consciousness as necessary for the human to become a part of an interdependent and ecological Nature, as the persona’s state of thoughtlessness is the catalyst for its becoming ‘almost’ a ‘part’ of the landscape. The personification of the landscape as ‘mute’ and ‘silent’ compounds the suggested need for the removal of s­ peech – a­ principal indication of human consciousness, and of the human’s supposed superiority in relation to more-­than-­human N ­ ature – ­in order for the persona to come close to the reintegration into the landscape that the poem contemplates. Church therefore promotes the ‘thoughtlessness’ brought on by mimesis as a desirable state that potentially allows the speaker to move from mimesis to metamorphosis, and so to ‘take root like a pine’. The desire for the loss of identity in order to achieve integration into the landscape that the poem describes is strongly reminiscent of Bowles’s depictions of ‘reintegration’, as analysed in the previous chapter. Bowles and Church both depict the loss of identity, or consciousness, as a precondition for the desired integration of human into the landscape. In each case, the landscape is conceived of as an interdependent system of ecology, as it possesses the capacity to integrate and contain the human presence. Both writers depict human protagonists that desire integration into an ecological Nature, yet at the same time both describe their protagonists as ultimately prohibited from achieving this integration as long as they retain their Euro-­American identities. The remaining chapters of this book will demonstrate similar structures at work in the writing of J. D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Mary McCarthy. Analysis of the work of J. D. Salinger in the following chapter will also reveal ‘muteness’ linked positively to the integration of the human into an ecological system of Nature. The poem’s emphasis on metamorphosis, or the human’s ability to ‘become’ other forms within Nature, draws heavily on the Pueblo Native American concept of intertransposability. In New Perspectives,

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Ortiz describes intertransposibility as a fundamental and structuring interdependence between all life forms, writing: ‘within this relentlessly interconnected universal whole the part can affect the whole [. . .] Men, animals, plants and spirits are intertransposable in a seemingly unbroken chain of being’. As Ortiz explains, the presence of intertransposability within the Pueblo worldview leads to an understanding that ‘­everything – ­animate and i­nanimate – ­counts and everything has its place in the cosmos’. It also results in a view of the human as occupying no superior place within this ‘interconnected universal whole’.44 Church’s writings display an understanding of the role of intertransposibility within Pueblo culture that heavily resembles that which Ortiz outlines in New Perspectives. She was clearly deeply impressed by this aspect of Pueblo thought, and a significant proportion of the text of Otowi Bridge is given over to expounding a universal sacredness within all of material Nature that is clearly inspired by her knowledge of the Pueblo concept of intertransposability. In Otowi Bridge, Church explains her understanding of the function of intertransposability within Pueblo philosophy, and its role in generating an understanding of Nature as both ‘sacred’ and ecological: The Pueblos have always believed that the earth they live upon is sacred. Each stone and bush and tree is alive with a spirit like their own. The gods lean from the clouds. They walk the earth in the shape of rain and rainbows. When a man dies his spirit joins those of the Ancestors and comes with the clouds to rain upon the earth and make it fertile. It is the duty of all living men to maintain the harmony they are aware of in the world around them. They live in community not only with one another but with earth and sky, with plants and animals. They believe that the orderly functioning of the universe depends on them.45

Church’s explication of intertransposability in this passage from Otowi Bridge closely echoes Ortiz’s description of the translation of ‘spirit’ between different entities within Nature, and emphasises the interdependent, ecological conception of Nature that an understanding of intertransposibility produces. She references the ability of the human spirit to inhabit other aspects of material Nature,

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and notes that this causes a lack of hierarchy between the human and other organisms within Nature. The ‘human’ state is therefore depicted as a transitory part of a dynamic ecological system of Nature, within which the human enjoys no superior position. This conception of all of material Nature as dynamic and ‘sacred’, and of the human spirit as able to inhabit other forms within Nature, clearly appealed to Church. The desire for metamorphosis in ‘I Shall Take Root’ can therefore be read as Church experimenting with her own interpretation of the Pueblo concept of intertransposability. However, the poem’s inclusion of ‘almost’ qualifies the potential for intertransposibility that Church’s poem introduces, holding the speaker back from fully enacting the metamorphosis that is attempted and desired. Across Church’s oeuvre, there is a comprehensive separation between the interactions with Nature that  Native American subjects enjoy, and those that non-­Native American subjects are able to experience. Although the background of the speaker in ‘I Shall Take Root’ is not revealed, the use of ‘almost’, within the context of Church’s wider work, implies that the speaker is not Native American. For this reason, they are ultimately prohibited from achieving the interaction with Nature that the poem’s evocation of metamorphosis celebrates as an idealised form of human reintegration into an ecological Nature. Throughout her writing, Church maintains this divide between the relationship to Nature that she presents Native American subjects as capable of experiencing, and that which she depicts Euro-­American subjects as able to achieve. Her work promotes representations of the human relationship to Nature that draw on elements of the Pueblo worldview, but she is consistent in maintaining the impossibility of non-­Native American subjects achieving the interdependent, ecological relationship with Nature that she repeatedly presents as an idealised form of human engagement. The repeated association of Native American subjects with a greater degree of ecological integration that characterises Church’s work is itself deeply problematic; as Joy Porter states, the simple equation of Native American culture with an inherent closeness to Nature is both stereotypical and racist.46 Furthermore, the depiction of non-­white bodies as enjoying a closer relationship with Nature has ­historically been at the heart of racist depictions of non-­white

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­ eoples within Euro-­American colonial discourses.47 In the context p of her wider oeuvre, it is clear that Church initiates this separation between Native American and non-­Native American subjects in order to critique hegemonic American culture’s alienation from Nature. However, it is nevertheless vital to highlight and condemn the racist and ‘Orientalist’ connotations that her depictions of Native American subjects as ‘closer to Nature’ contain. The 1948 poem ‘San Felipe’ demonstrates Church maintaining the same divide between Native American and Euro-­American subjects’ interactions with Nature. As a result, the poem simultaneously builds a depiction of Nature as an interdependent system of ecology defined by intertransposability, and emphasises the alienation of the poem’s ­persona – t­his time explicitly defined as non-Native American – ­from this e­ cological Nature: They had been dancing all day crowned with sky color, holding in their hands green   branches. All day they had been merging with one another, and with the earth, the heaven. After the dance was over a few of them came to throw their boughs upon the water, and we to whom prayer has become a spectacle lined up at the river’s edge to watch them. It will be a shame, we said, when the Indians dance   no longer; and we spread our picnic things out in their holy places and we stared at the men who stood praying beyond us   without shame in the ancient and beautiful gesture of the human heart   humbled we dared not dream what deities moved among us nor dared to say what emptiness swept through us.48

The dance that ‘San Felipe’ references is a Pueblo ritual performed at the San Felipe Pueblo village during the summer solstice. The ritual is described by Ortiz in the chapter ‘Ritual Drama and the

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Pueblo Worldview’, in New Perspectives. Ortiz explains that the ritual’s aim is to restore unity between ‘heaven and earth’, which are disparate and dualistic elements within Pueblo thought.49 Church’s reference to ‘the heaven, the earth’ evokes the significant, structuring function of these dualistic sites at the heart of the ritual. The foundational role of dualities in Pueblo thought is a major focus in Ortiz’s New Perspectives, and is also discussed at length in the chapter ‘Ritual Drama’.50 Church’s journals evidence that she had read Ortiz’s work, and this chapter in particular, which she mentions by name, although she accessed this material after writing ‘San Felipe’.51 In ‘Ritual Drama’, Ortiz explains that the ‘grand dualities of the cosmos also serve to unify space and time and other, lesser dualities that reverberate through Pueblo life’. The most powerful of these is that between the sun and the earth, which, ‘having separated the two long ago in myth, all the Pueblos devote endless myth cycles to bringing them back together again [sic]’.52 The function of the ritual described in ‘San Felipe’ is to restore balance in Nature, and the role of the human within this process is a vital one; as Ortiz describes: ‘among human beings the primary causal factors are mental and psychological states; if these are harmonious, the supernaturals will disperse what is asked and expected of them. If they are not, untoward consequences will follow just as quickly’.53 In Ortiz’s description of this aspect of Pueblo ritual, human actions determine the human’s treatment by the forces of Nature; if the human acts to create a state of harmony and balance within N ­ ature – ­including symbolically, through r­itual – t­hen they will benefit from the smooth functioning of the ecological system of Nature, of which they are a part, and, crucially, upon which all human life depends.54 The poem’s description of the Pueblo dancers’ bodies merging with each other, and with ‘the earth’ and ‘the heaven’, suggests a symbolic symbiosis between the dancers and their environment that reflects Ortiz’s explanation of the role of the human in symbolically restoring balance to its environment within this particular Pueblo ritual. This evocation of harmony between dancers and their environment is further encouraged by the line ‘crowned with sky color’, which suggests that a recognition of the dancers’ efforts is expressed within Nature. In contrast to the images of the Pueblo

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dancers involved in the ritual, which foreground harmonious interactions between humans and the environment, the observing ­picnickers – ­of which the poem’s persona is ­one – ­are presented as static and strictly bounded by the ‘river’s edge’. They are emphatically situated on the outside of both the ritual, and, by implication, the symbiotic relationship with the environment that the ritual portrays. The dividing line of the river rigidly enforces this separation between non-Native America observers and Pueblo dancers, suggesting the former’s alienation from the symbiotic relationship with Nature that the latter are presented as exemplifying. Church also explicitly condemns the objectifying gaze of the spectators: ‘we to whom prayer had become a spectacle/lined up at the river’s edge to watch’. An antagonism between the poem’s persona and the Pueblo dancers is further propagated by Church’s transition from the repetition of the term ‘they’ to the repetition of ‘we’. By beginning with the depersonalised ‘they’, Church emphasises the poetic persona’s division from, and lack of engagement with, the ritual that is being witnessed. The sharp contrast between the two terms that their repetition exaggerates entrenches the separation between Pueblo and non-­Pueblo subjects that the poem strives to establish. The poem’s intention is therefore to contrast what Church understood to be Pueblo culture’s symbiotic relationship with, and superior understanding of, Nature, with the alienation from the environment that the poet felt to define hegemonic Cold War A ­ merican culture. As has already been noted, Church’s depiction of Native American culture as exemplifying a more interdependent, ecological relationship to Nature, and her portrayal of Native American subjects as able to experience a closer relationship to Nature, are inherently deeply problematic. By drawing on and depicting Pueblo culture in this way, Church’s work not only exemplifies the trait that Joy Porter critiques within Western environmentalism of uncritically equating Native American culture with a closeness to Nature,55 but it also epitomises Ramachandra Guha’s critique of Western environmentalism’s Orientalist tendency to appropriate non-­Euro-American philosophies in order to create new forms of ecological thought.56 ‘San Felipe’ goes on to describe the ‘emptiness’ that sweeps

 Nature and the Nuclear Southwest/ 75

through the non-Native American observers of the ritual. The movement of this ‘emptiness’ parallels and contrasts with the motion of the ‘deities’ that the non-­Native American subjects in the poem are shown to be unable to experience, as a result of their detachment from the symbolically symbiotic engagement with Nature that the ritual exemplifies. Lines such as ‘we dared not dream what deities moved among us’ draw on Church’s exposure to the Pueblo concept of intertransposability, which led her to describe Nature as a dynamic ecological system alive with ‘spirit’.57 In addition to these suggestions of a spiritual barrenness caused by hegemonic Euro-­ American culture’s alienation from Nature, the poem also contains explicit depictions of Euro-­American cultural imperialism, in ‘we spread our picnic things in their holy places’. The poem’s indictment of Euro-­American colonialism is combined with a critique of the intrusive and objectifying gaze of the poem’s non-Native American observers; ‘we stared’ is contrasted with the depiction of the ‘human heart humbled’ in the act of prayer, upon which the observers invasively focus their gaze. ‘San Felipe’ therefore highlights and condemns the collective failure of the observers to express a humility and reverence for their environment comparable to that which they witness in the actions of the poem’s Native American subjects during the performance of the ritual. In later poems, Church goes on to more explicitly contrast what she understood to be Pueblo culture’s superior understanding of, and attitude towards, Nature, with hegemonic Cold War American culture’s devastation of the Southwest landscape through nuclear experimentation. In the poem ‘Master Race’ (1948), Church outlines the violent consequences of the antagonism between hegemonic Cold War American culture and Nature that she expresses in ‘San Felipe’. Although Los Alamos is not explicitly mentioned in the poem, Church’s forced eviction from the Pajarito Plateau, and the nuclear experimentation that was the reason for her eviction, are unnamed presences at the heart of the poem. The sarcastically titled ‘Master Race’ provides further evidence of Church’s depiction of Pueblo culture as a superior alternative to hegemonic Cold War American culture. In this poem, she continues to portray the latter as spiritually and intellectually underdeveloped, and as inherently violent and destructive:

76 / Writing Nature The mountain, ancient and wise as myth, created prophecies above our city enormous and unheeded. Daily we witnessed heroic marriages of light and darkness, the births of heroes, the revolt of angels, deities crowned and murdered, holy incests. We were too proud to read unwritten wisdom. We forbade any but our own tongue to be spoken. Our knowledge had pierced all shrines and left them broken. The former inhabitants whom we had made our servants worshipped these wonders. They spoke with delicate gestures of a god in the cloud, in the rainfall. They honoured the earth as woman; in winter would not permit a wheel to turn upon her. They prayed with eagle’s feathers, with the hand shaking yellow pollen, with the sound of the drum hid deep in the earth like a heartbeat. There were times when this stirred in us something long forgotten, or a thing not dreamed yet. We knew what we knew: that the earth was nothing sacred; that the voice of our brother’s blood would not cry against us; that whatever we wanted from women could be taken. There was nothing joined that we dared not put asunder. We did not fall on our knees when we rent the atom. We could look upon God and live. There was no wonder our wisdom could not pierce in earth or heaven, and claim for our possession. When did the mountain cease to be our landmark? When did we notice that our sky was barren? When did a wilderness replace our marked roads? We walked and seemed to stumble among ruins. Stones, fallen, cried out in unfamiliar patterns. Seeking, we could not find, hearing, all songs were broken. Our eyes did not weep for terror or for kindness. We did not know at last whose children lead us, nor if for scorn or pity of our blindness.58

 Nature and the Nuclear Southwest/ 77

Although the poem does not make explicit mention of Los Alamos, the building and testing of the atomic bomb in what Church considered to be a ‘sacred’ landscape is strongly evoked throughout the poem’s imagery. In the opening stanza, Church describes ‘the mountain’ ‘creating prophecies above the city’, but the image conjured is of the location of Los Alamos, which sits on the top of a huge ­mesa – t­he Pajarito P ­ lateau – a­ bove the city of Albuquerque. Church continues to develop the allusions to nuclear experimentation begun by this reference to the site of Los Alamos in: ‘heroic marriages of light and darkness’. Working together with ‘prophecies’ in the second line, this phrase suggests that a form of sorcery or dark magic is taking place at the top of the mountain, while also evoking the blinding flashes that in her contemporary readers’ collective imagination would have been synonymous with the detonation of a nuclear bomb. The method of nuclear fission is even more explicitly educed by the description of the ‘rent’ atom. In addition to alluding to nuclear science and nuclear bomb detonation as a new and destructive form of necromancy, the poem also explicitly depicts nuclear science as ‘unnatural’. The line: ‘There was nothing joined that we dared not put asunder’ elicits the destruction of natural forms and orders, and the reference to ‘incest’ compounds the poem’s portrayal of nuclear science as a form of alchemy that is being practised ‘against the order of nature’. ‘Master Race’ therefore condemns nuclear science as a violation of the order of Nature, as well as evoking the destruction to the environment that the detonation of a nuclear bomb has the potential to unleash. The description of ‘stones, fallen’ that cry out in ‘unfamiliar patterns’ conjures a post-­detonation landscape, with the jarring and de-­familiarising image of ‘stones’ that ‘cried’ implying the suffering of both people and places, lives and landscapes, as a result of a nuclear explosion. These images contribute to the poem’s characterisation of a nuclear disaster as a disturbance of the familiar order of Nature. The final stanza also ­suggests the apocalyptic aftermath of a nuclear bomb detonation, through depictions of a ‘barren sky’, and humans ‘blindly’ ‘stumbling among ruins’. This blindness is both literal and metaphorical; it is evocative of ‘flash blindness’ – the temporary blindness that afflicts all who are near the centre of a nuclear detonation.

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However, it also ­simultaneously contains a condemnation of the metaphorical blindness of hegemonic American culture in omitting to read – ‘unwritten wisdom’ – a reference Pueblo Native American philosophy. Although there are no specific or overt references to Native Americans save for in the tenth line, which describes ‘the former inhabitants who we had made our servants’, a Native American cultural presence is nevertheless integrally encoded within the poem. This Native American presence is again juxtaposed with the ‘barren’ and destructive Cold War culture responsible for the construction of the nuclear bomb. The poem evokes Pueblo culture as an alternative, ecological mode of human relation to Nature through the reference to the Pueblo concept of intertransposability: ‘a god in the cloud, and the rainfall’. This depiction of Pueblo culture as more ecologically embedded is furthered by the reference to a drum ‘hid deep in the earth like a heartbeat’, which specifically alludes to the centre of the Pueblo cosmos: the sipapu, or ‘earth navel’, which is often situated below the Pueblo village.59 What Church understood as Pueblo culture’s more developed relationship with Nature is also suggested by the poem’s indictment of hegemonic Euro-­American culture’s rejection of a relationship with the landscape, in the lines: ‘When did the mountain cease to be our landmark?/When did we notice that our sky was barren?’ ‘Master Race’ simultaneously decries the folly and devastation of the bomb’s development, and of Euro-­American cultural ­imperialism – ­which it implicitly blames for the former eventuality. ‘We forbade any but our own tongue to be spoken’ references hegemonic Euro-­American culture’s historic, systematic repression of Native American languages, and the poem repeatedly signals to a Native American cultural presence that exists outside of the boundaries of written English language, in: ‘They spoke with delicate gestures’.60 ‘Master Race’ therefore attempts to satirise and condemn the toxic arrogance, ignorance and cultural imperialism that Church felt to be inherent within Cold War nuclear ­culture – ­a satire enriched by the irony with which the poem’s content fills its title. The poem’s persona and their compatriots ‘knew what we knew’, but Church suggests this knowledge to be an impoverished epistemology that pales in comparison to the ‘ancient wisdom’ that

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she attributes to Pueblo culture and spirituality. The poem’s determined overuse of the full stop serves to disrupt any lyricism, and the resultant fractured rhythm echoes the fragmentation that Church perceived to define her contemporary society’s relationship to its environment. In turn, this fragmentation and the barrenness that it creates are depicted as stemming from her contemporary society’s failure to respect the human’s interdependent place with respect to Nature. In an echo of the portrayal in ‘San Felipe’ of the failure of the poem’s non-Native American observers to be appropriately ‘humble’, Cold War America’s refusal to ‘fall on our knees when we rent the atom’ is revealed to have destroyed the very possibility of spiritual growth: ‘our knowledge has pierced all shrines and left them open’. ‘Master Race’, like ‘San Felipe’, presents Pueblo culture as an ‘unheeded’ and persecuted, yet infinitely superior, alternative to the spiritually and intellectually barren Cold War culture that it condemns. It also explicitly attributes this cultural superiority to a more biocentric and respectful attitude to Nature.61 ‘Master Race’ can therefore be read as a poetic condemnation of Cold War America’s attitude to scientific experimentation, which Church describes in her journal writing as ‘knowledge without love’. In the following journal entry, written in 1954, Church uses this phrase to refer explicitly to atomic science: Tilano taught Peter [Edith Warner’s goddaughter] to find the god in the stone [. . .] What of the scientists tearing apart the atom? Strange that too should take place upon these mesas where in the kivas the ‘force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ was so long worshipped [. . .] Atomic energy, knowledge without love. The symbolic relationship to life, the ecological. That is what the Indian has that the white man lacks.62

In this extract, Church again contrasts her understanding of the Pueblo concept of intertransposability that is encapsulated in the image of finding ‘the god in the stone’, with twentieth-­century scientific knowledge. She depicts contemporary nuclear science as founded on destruction, or ‘tearing apart’, reflecting the violent imagery of ‘Master Race’, and this is juxtaposed with the process of ‘finding’ out that she uses to characterise Pueblo knowledge formation. Church’s language in this journal extract is drawn

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directly from the title of her contemporary Dylan Thomas’s 1933 poem ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’, and the phrase intentionally conflates powers situated in Nature with forms of dynamism that are understood to be ‘man-­made’. ‘Fuse’ and ‘drive’ imply a mechanical power, and yet this allusion to the technological is simultaneously subverted by the force’s description as ‘green’, which is suggestive of an organic origin. The implication that the technological may have an origin within Nature is a developing theme in Church’s work. It also significantly informs her evolving ­characterisation of the relationship between Nature and the nuclear, which will be the focus of analysis in the final section of this chapter. The increasingly expansive depictions of ecology that develop within Church’s writing reveal the substantial influence of the Pueblo concept of intertransposability. At the same time, her evolving conception of Nature as interdependent and ecological threw into sharp relief the very different relationship with Nature that she perceived within hegemonic Cold War culture. What this dominant ‘white’ American culture ‘lacks’, Church suggests, is an appreciation of the dynamism and interdependence that fuses the human within an infinite, ecological system of Nature. The same argument that she makes in this journal entry also drives her condemnation of the blindness of hegemonic Euro-­American culture in ‘Master Race’. In both cases, Church contrasts the superior ‘unwritten wisdom’ that she attributes to the Pueblo ­worldview – ­and which she conflates with a more sophisticated, ecological conception of the human’s relationship to Nature – with hegemonic Euro-­American culture’s dangerous ignorance of, and resultant alienation from, Nature. It is this ignorance and alienation, she suggests, which has led to the development of the nuclear bomb. In ‘Driven’, written in 1966, Church again presents Euro-­ American culture as responsible for the decimation of the Southwest landscape, as a result of a wilful alienation and detachment from Nature. In this poem, an ecological Nature is once again depicted as offering the poem’s persona some hope of salvation. However, the integration into the infinite ecology that the poem idealises is ultimately presented as a form of liberation that the protagonist is unable to access:

 Nature and the Nuclear Southwest/ 81 I drove with two strangers through the dead world. They did not know it was dead or that we were already ourselves ghosts. [. . .] I kept looking up at the stars like a drowning person gulping fragments of air before going down for the last time. But the stars said no hope or promise; their light spoke nothing to my dead ear, having abruptly turned their backs on mankind, my kind, Lords of creation in the dead myth.63

In this later poem, Church writes Nature as infinite in scale, and as possessing an agency that allows it to ignore the plight of humankind. Hegemonic Euro-­American culture is once again depicted as destructive, and as the bringer of death to the landscape of the Southwest. The personification of the stars in the poem’s final lines also introduces a new agency within Nature that allows the stars to turn ‘their backs on mankind/my kind’. Church’s choice of the stars as the entities within Nature that her protagonist is desperately seeking to maintain a connection with ensures a universal, rather than a planetary, dimension to the poem’s depiction of Nature. The infinite spatio-­temporal scale and remoteness that the stars embody therefore allows them to elude the destructive impact of Euro-­American culture on its local, planetary environment. At the same time, the italicisation of ‘my kind’ enforces the allegiance of the poem’s persona to the destructive hegemonic Cold War culture that the poem portrays as spreading death over the Southwest landscape. The phrase also alludes to the existence of another kind of human p ­ resence – o ­ ne that it is suggested might be capable of a different form of relationship to the environment that would not lead to an inexorable spread of death and a symbolic abandonment by Nature. In this way, the Pueblo Native American presence is again implicitly encoded within the poem as representative of an

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alternative, ecological engagement with the environment, albeit in a manner that is damagingly reductive in its representation of Pueblo philosophy and culture. The equation of hegemonic Euro-­American culture’s detachment from Nature with death is reinforced in the final stanza of ‘Driven’, through the lines: ‘I kept looking up at the stars/like a drowning person/gulping fragments of air’. This time, however, the poem’s persona is depicted as having brought about their own d ­ eath – ­a point emphasised by their earlier description as a ‘ghost’. In these lines, the infinitely remote stars are presented as holding the potential for the persona’s salvation, as the speaker desperately attempts to keep them in view. The vital nature of this visual connection to the stars for the poem’s persona is enforced through the simile’s alignment of the perception of the stars with the ability to breathe. Ultimately, however, salvation is once again denied to the speaker, and the poem presents no hope of re-­forging what is characterised as a life-­giving connection between the speaker and the infinite Nature that the stars represent. The significance of Church’s choice of the stars as the recipients of the speaker’s silent entreaties is more completely revealed if the poem is read alongside the following passage from her journals, dated 21 May 1942: Our world goes to ruins, and men destroy their souls to build daily greater engines of destruction [. . .] Destruction whirls up out of the sea of all living like the storm which in two hours laid the wealth of our forest low. Yet the great stars acknowledge the ruin by not a flicker, not the slightest drawing back or shrinking of their motion.64

In this passage, Church describes the stars as ultimately unassailable by human actions, as a result of their spatio-­temporal remoteness from the earth. ‘Men’ are portrayed as capable of spreading death over planet earth, but this is not equated to the death of Nature because Nature is understood to be an infinite, dynamic and universal ­ecology – o ­ ne that possesses the agency to ignore the caprice of Cold War America’s wanton environmental destruction. In this journal entry and in ‘Driven’, Church employs the image of the extra-­terrestrial stars in order to emphasise that Nature extends far

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beyond the planetary – ‘our world’ in this journal extract, and ‘the dead world’ in ‘Driven’. In contrast to these images of the planetary dimension of the human’s sphere of influence, Church depicts an infinite and dynamic extra-­terrestrial Nature within which the human and human agency ­are – ­like the earth itself – ­comparatively insignificant. Her writing therefore promotes an infinite, ecological vision of Nature that is reminiscent of that found in the work of Bowles in the previous chapter, with images of extra-­terrestrial Nature such as the stars and the sky functioning comparably in the work of both writers. This ecological Nature, which is conjured through an evocation of infinite spatio-­temporal dimensions, is also compellingly similar in structure to Morton’s mesh.65 Church’s exposition of a universal Nature that is able to absorb and contain the environmental destruction caused by her fellow mid-­ century Americans also anticipates Morton’s contemporary theorisation of ‘dark ecology’. Morton describes ‘dark ecology’ as a depthless ecology that will necessarily ‘absorb’ and ‘neutralize’ the anti-­ecological ‘from within’ its infinite structure.66 It is just such a neutralisation that Church depicts in the above passage. Morton’s theorisation of ‘dark ecology’ therefore helps to elucidate the function of the infinite Nature that Church’s poetry and prose evoke, and which acts to enforce the relative limitations of human agency. Church’s literary depictions of the Pajarito Plateau across her oeuvre are characterised by comparable evocations of the extra-­terrestrial and of the geological, which introduce dislocating spatio-­temporal scales into her landscape descriptions in a manner that reflects those present in the work of Bowles.67 Her landscapes also echo Bowles’s in the lure that she describes these embodiments of an infinite, ecological Nature to possess for her protagonists. However, in both ‘I Shall Take Root’ and in ‘Driven’, the poetic persona is ultimately unable to attain the ‘proximity to infinite things’ that is desired, even through death.68 In ‘Driven’, for example, the speaker is doomed to ‘going down for the last time’, and this implied death is not suggested to initiate a redemptive ‘reintegration’ into an infinite, ecological Nature, as it does in the work of Bowles. The final section of this chapter will explore the changing relationship between Nature and the nuclear in Church’s work, as well as identifying comparable depictions of the same relationship in

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the writing of Church’s friend and correspondent, the atomic scientist and Scientific Director of the Manhattan Project J.  Robert Oppenheimer. In the poems of Church’s that have been analysed so far, written during the early Cold War years, the Pueblo worldview has been shown to be catalytic in the development of Church’s ecological depictions of Nature. This influence allowed Church to both critique hegemonic Euro-­American culture’s relationship to the environment, and to suggest an alternative to it. However, the portrayal of opposition and contrast between Nature and the nuclear that has been evident in the poems of Church’s analysed so far does not represent the full extent of her literary depictions of their interaction. Across her oeuvre, Church gradually expands her ecological vision, positioning the nuclear within – and as a part o ­ f – ­an infinite ecological system of Nature. In The House at Otowi Bridge (1958), Church’s memoir of Edith Warner and of life on the Pajarito Plateau both before and after the coming of the Manhattan Project, Church introduces the idea that the forces and forms unlocked by nuclear experimentation could themselves be conceived of as part of the same expansive, ecological vision of Nature that more easily encompassed the flora and fauna of the Pajarito Plateau. For instance, she writes: ‘the energy of the a­ tom – w ­ as it really different from that which slept in the waiting seed, in the sunlight released from the blazing pine knots?’69 This rhetorical question proposes the possibility of equating the energy that is unlocked within atoms of uranium and plutonium by nuclear science with those energies more readily ascribed to Nature that are contained within a seed waiting to germinate. Further reflections on the possibility of understanding the nuclear as a part of Nature are found in Church’s later journal writing. In a Pajarito journal entry dated 23 October 1983, the poet writes: as I lay under the golden tree on the peaceful autumn afternoon, I almost forgot that just north of Frijoles Canyon was where the atomic bomb was ­born – ­which still may destroy the whole world in a violence man perpetuated on himself.   But as I reflected on the violent transformations in the sun from which the earth itself emanated and which was responsible for the color in the leaves, the violence of water which had carved the canyon, the blasts of

 Nature and the Nuclear Southwest/ 85 lightning which had shattered some of the tallest trees, I thought it is not after all so strange. Perhaps it is only nature.70

Church suggests that the atomic ­bomb – a­ symbol of ‘man-­made’ science and destruction within the dominant discourses of her contemporary ­society – ­may in fact be better understood as a manifestation of the power of Nature. She goes on to argue that the sun, the source of life on earth, is powered by the same nuclear reactions as those that are directed by the human for destructive purposes in the atomic bomb.71 To make this point, Church compares nuclear power with forces that are already understood as manifestations of the power of Nature, as she does in the above association of nuclear energy with the energy present in a germinating seed. First juxtaposing the tranquillity of a ‘peaceful autumn afternoon’ with the violence of the atomic bomb, she then compares the energy within atomic weaponry to ‘the color of the leaves’, the erosive power of water, the destructive power of lightning, and the ‘violent transformations’ within the sun. These comparisons evoke powerful forces from within what is understood to be the ‘natural’ world that either mimic or balance images associated with the destructive potential of the bomb within her contemporary society’s collective imagination. Church heightens this effect by deploying language specifically associated with an atomic bomb detonation in her description of the potentially devastating force of lightning, through the use of ‘blast’ and ‘shattered’. By emphasising the violence and changes of colour and light within these ‘natural’ processes, Church therefore encourages the consideration that the nuclear could in fact be c­ onceived of as another m ­ anifestation of the power of Nature. The ecocritic Elizabeth DeLoughrey has written extensively on the naturalisation of images of nuclear bomb detonations in Cold War American government propaganda, particularly the use of the ‘heliotrope’, or solar metaphor. Describing a nuclear bomb blast through images that evoke the sun, or sunshine, was widespread within Cold War government propaganda, and was undertaken for the purposes of naturalising both nuclear weapons and radiation, in order to confuse the public as to the risks associated with them.72 Church’s adoption of similar metaphors to those used by the US

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government to naturalise the threat posed by the nuclear bomb may appear to suggest that her work falls into this same tradition. However, when analysed with knowledge of the ecological vision of Nature that pervades Church’s writing, her naturalisation of the nuclear in these passages fulfils an altogether different function. Church positions the nuclear as a part of an infinite, ecological Nature that has the dimensions to neutralise and contain both the human and human agency. She also does so while condemning Cold War American culture for allowing the development of the bomb, as is evidenced in her description of the bomb as a ‘violence man perpetuated on himself’. Her writing therefore attempts a naturalisation of the nuclear bomb as part of a broader recalibration of the human relationship to the environment. Furthermore, she attempts this recalibration in order to explicitly challenge and counteract the narrative of the human’s conquest of Nature through the development of nuclear science, rather than to enforce it. Church also attempts to recalibrate the relationship between Nature and the nuclear in Otowi Bridge, this time by depicting nuclear science as an inherent and fundamental aspect of Nature. She does this by introducing the suggestion that the Pueblo worldview already contains the knowledge that nuclear science sets out to discover, as a result of what she again depicts as Pueblo philosophy’s superior, ecological conception of the human relationship to Nature. In this text, Church relates a friend explaining Niels Bohr’s ‘Complementarity’ theory to her in the following terms: ‘harmony in nature consists of an interplay of apparently conflicting forces’.73 Although this is obviously a gross simplification of Bohr’s theory, what it leads Church to state is significant in understanding the effect of the Pueblo worldview in shaping her depictions of the relationship between an ecological Nature and nuclear science. She writes of the aforementioned explanation of ‘Complementarity’ that it: seems to me like a curious reflection of something Edith Warner’s pueblo neighbors have always known. The dual nature of life reveals itself to them in the relation between earth and sky, between summer and winter [. . .] in the patterns of design and ritual through which earth and sky are brought together.74

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In this passage, Church suggests that the philosophical implications of the groundbreaking discoveries that define twentieth-­century science, including Bohr’s concept of complementarity, are in fact already incorporated within the Pueblo worldview, as a result of Pueblo philosophy’s more sophisticated understanding of Nature. A core principle of Bohr’s theory of complementarity is ‘wave–particle duality’, which posits that an electron can demonstrate the properties of both a wave and a particle; as the physicist Werner Heisenberg explains: ‘Bohr considered the two ­pictures – ­the wave picture and the particle p ­ icture – a­ s two complementary descriptions of the same reality’.75 Church compares this new appreciation in quantum physics that electrons exhibit dualistic properties or behaviours with the Pueblo understanding that unity in Nature is achieved through the resolution of dualistic forces. The comparison relies on the common thread of understanding unity through duality, and Church exploits this point in order to suggest that the discoveries of contemporary science may perhaps be restating knowledge that already exists, albeit in a different form, within the Pueblo worldview. Church restates this position more explicitly in a journal entry dated 10 February 1952. In this extract, she again describes the Pueblo worldview as containing an understanding of Nature superior to that which is represented by contemporary nuclear science, writing: The white man’s wisdom has resulted only in the atomic bomb. But you knew the ancient wisdom that will outlive man and all his bombs, the wisdom of the earth, the mysterious relations we should have, could have, that the Indians have ­had – w ­ ith life, with helping the earth to live.76

Church again enforces the connection between what she terms ‘mysterious relations’ with the earth, and the superior and lasting ‘ancient wisdom’ that she believes the Pueblo worldview to contain.77 Again through problematically conflating Pueblo thought and ‘the wisdom of the earth’, she associates both with an infinite temporality that: ‘will outlive man and all his bombs’, and this expansive, ecological vision of Nature is unfavourably juxtaposed with her contemporary society’s valorisation of American science,

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which crystallises in the image of the ‘atomic bomb’. Church goes on to suggest that a symbiotic relationship with a temporally infinite, ecological Nature constitutes an infinitely superior form of knowledge when compared to nuclear science. This evocation of an infinite system of ecology in order to contextualise and diminish, or ‘neutralize’, nuclear science is again reminiscent of Morton’s contemporary theorisation of ‘dark ecology’; Church depicts ecology as infinite and expansive enough to contain and neutralise even those aspects of the world considered to be ‘anti-­ecological’ such as nuclear science. However, far more significant than Church’s portrayal of the nuclear as a part of an infinite, ecological Nature is the fact that she was not alone in advancing this depiction of the relationship between Nature and nuclear science. As this chapter has already hinted, comparable depictions of the relationship between nuclear science and Nature to those found in the writings of Church also exist in the lectures of the atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer.78 Church and Oppenheimer had met on several occasions at the house of Edith Warner, and they became correspondents. Church details their meetings in The House at Otowi Bridge.79 Following her family’s eviction from the Pajarito Plateau, Church continued to visit Edith Warner, whose riverside house had become a meeting place for some of the leading physicists involved in the Manhattan project, including Oppenheimer and Niels Bohr.80 In a letter that Church includes in the text of Otowi Bridge, Edith describes how Oppenheimer was responsible for orchestrating these gatherings at her home. She wrote to Church: ‘Now I can tell you [. . .] that Oppenheimer was the man I knew in pre-­war years and who made it possible for the hill people to come down [to the house at Otowi Bridge]’.81 Oppenheimer himself also recounted the history of his friendship with Edith in a letter to Church. He writes that the Los Alamos scientists ‘were very very fond of’ Edith,82 and goes on to provide details of the origin of his own association with the Pajarito Plateau: I first knew the Pajarito Plateau in the summer of 1922, when we took a pack trip up from Frijoles and into Valle Grande. We came back to it often from our ranch in Pecos. In the summer of 1937 I first stopped at Edith

 Nature and the Nuclear Southwest/ 89 Warner’s tea room [. . .] it was the first unforgettable meeting. I remember that in the summer of 1941 I brought my wife over to introduce her to Edith. By early 1943 we came to Los Alamos, and very early we stopped to talk with her and try to reassure her.83

As this letter indicates, Oppenheimer’s relationship with the Pajarito Plateau had developed over the course of his life well before he came to Los Alamos as part of the Manhattan Project in 1943. Indeed, his devotion to this particular part of the Southwest desert landscape is reminiscent of Church’s own, and was the driving force behind his selection of the Pajarito Plateau as the location for the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer’s early exposure to this same landscape that so affected Church had a significant impact on the trajectory of his own life, and an even greater one on the history of the Pajarito Plateau. His first trip in 1922 had, according to Oppenheimer’s biographer Ray Monk, ‘a deep and lasting effect’ on him. Monk relates that Oppenheimer: ‘developed a love of horse riding and [. . .] explored the slopes and valleys of the area around Cowles; this included [. . .] the Pajarito plateau’. This first trip to New Mexico led to Oppenheimer returning in 1925. It also, crucially, caused him to suggest the Pajarito Plateau as a potential site for the Manhattan Project’s main scientific laboratory. In this way, he engineered his own return to a landscape that he had become attached to.84 Monk notes that Oppenheimer was particularly taken with a ‘ranch school [that] stood atop a two-­mile-­long mesa bounded on the north and south by steep canyons’.85 This Ranch School, of course, was the home of Peggy Pond Church. In addition to a mutual attraction to the landscape of the Pajarito Plateau, Church and Oppenheimer also produced comparable ecological depictions of Nature in their writing about nuclear science. In The House at Otowi Bridge, Church herself links her thinking and Oppenheimer’s, quoting from Oppenheimer’s 1953 Reith Lecture, ‘The Sciences and Man’s Community’: For most of us, in most of those moments when we were most free from corruption, it has been the beauty of the world of nature and the strange and compelling harmony of its order that has sustained, inspired and led us.86

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Church asked for Oppenheimer’s permission to quote directly from his work in Otowi Bridge, a request that he granted.87 He was therefore fully aware of Church’s synthesis of his work within her memoir of the plateau. Oppenheimer’s comments in ‘The Sciences and Man’s Community’ imply that Nature provided a source of sustenance for the scientists working on the bomb, and also, controversially, a source of inspiration for the bomb’s inception. He asserts that the ‘compelling [. . .] order’ of Nature was an inspiration for the science that led to the development of the nuclear bomb, and in doing so he neatly subverts accepted portrayals of the development of the nuclear bomb as demonstrating the human’s conquest, or mastery, of Nature. By casting Nature as the inspiration for nuclear discovery, Oppenheimer suggests a similar relationship between nuclear science and Nature to that which Church evokes when she writes of the nuclear as ‘only nature’.88 Just as Church asserts that the Pueblo worldview already holds the knowledge of Nature that atomic scientists sought to re-­establish, Oppenheimer states in this lecture that the secrets of Nature ‘led’ to the understanding necessary to create the atomic bomb. This is a bold and provocative claim. Both writers situate Nature as an origin of the knowledge contained within nuclear science, and both also advocate a symbiotic relationship with Nature as the ­preeminent method for accessing this knowledge. Upon further examination, Oppenheimer’s writings on the relationship between Nature and nuclear science support Church’s presentation of this aspect of his thought in Otowi Bridge. In another lecture, ‘Space and Time’, published in The Flying Trapeze (1962), Oppenheimer opines on the future of science: ‘I am confident that the years ahead will teach us more than all preceding history of man about how living organisms perform their miraculous functions, and about man as a part of nature’ [sic].89 This remark not only reveals the same ecological vision of the human as a ‘part of nature’ that underpins Church’s writing, but it also again foregrounds the fundamental role of N ­ ature – ­the ‘miraculous’ function of living ­organisms – ­as the primary inspiration for scientific discovery, supporting Oppenheimer’s earlier claim that he felt ‘inspired and led’ by Nature during the development of the nuclear bomb.90 In describing ‘man as a part of nature’, and Nature as

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the inspiration behind scientific discovery, Oppenheimer’s work, like Church’s, advances an ecological depiction of Nature that substantially subverts dominant portrayals of the relationship between nuclear science and Nature within Cold War American media discourse. In an episode of the BBC Panorama television series titled ‘The 1960s’, Oppenheimer remarked further on the future of science, and his comments in this piece are similarly ecological. In this interview, he describes a hope that: ‘we will begin to re-­knit human culture, and by the insight and the wonder of the world of nature, as science has revealed it, into relevance and meaning for the intellectual life, the spiritual life of man’.91 Oppenheimer’s words again expose a belief in the function of Nature as an inspiration and origin of scientific advancement. In addition, his description of science as revealing ‘the insight and wonder of the world of nature’ marks another significant step away from the American media’s overwhelming depiction of the birth of nuclear science as evidence of the human’s final mastery of Nature. This alternative position is also evident in a 1949 Life magazine profile of Oppenheimer written by Lincoln Barnett. Barnett’s profile contains the following statement: ‘The world is subtler than man’s understanding, and the contradictions the scientist uncovers in studying nature lie not in nature itself but simply in man’s own inadequate concepts’.92 This assessment of the relationship between science and Nature reflects Oppenheimer’s position in his own writings so closely that it is probable that he himself was behind its phrasing and inclusion. In the case of each of these examples, Oppenheimer’s depiction of the relationship between Nature and the nuclear deviates markedly from those that were more commonly found in publications such as Life.93 Instead, Oppenheimer’s characterisation of the relationship between nuclear science and Nature is more closely comparable to those that Church expounds in her representations of recent advancements in atomic physics as the ‘scientific’ American coming to an understanding of one small aspect of Nature.94 A further point of comparison between the thought of Oppenheimer and Church is the degree to which both writers were influenced by non-­Euro-­American philosophies. As has been demonstrated, Church’s writing was heavily influenced by her

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exposure to elements of Pueblo Native American philosophy, and her diaries also demonstrate that the ancient Chinese text the I Ching was an interest.95 Similarly, Oppenheimer carried out the sustained study of Hindu philosophy and ­literature – ­a fact that provides one more piece of evidence of the degree to which many writers, and other intellectuals, appear to have turned to non-­Euro-­ American philosophies in Cold War America. In his biography of Oppenheimer, Ray Monk writes of Oppenheimer’s ‘absorption in the literature of Hinduism’, and the same 1949 Life magazine profile of Oppenheimer previously mentioned also contains a lengthy discussion of Oppenheimer’s friendship with the Sanskritist Arthur Ryder, who was a fellow faculty member at Berkeley.96 Barnett’s profile reveals that Oppenheimer ‘learned to read Sanskrit’ under the guidance of Ryder. It also contains the following passage, in which Barnett draws some intriguing connections between the study of nuclear science and of Hindu mysticism. He writes: A factor underlying [Oppenheimer’s] interest in oriental thought lies in the analogy between the Hindu philosophies and the philosophical concepts which have been developed by modern science, e.g. the world defined by the  senses is merely the world of appearances; the world of reality lies hidden beneath the surface of things; and to the real world both the mystic and the scientist seek to penetrate by their separate disciplines.97

In this unusually reflective account of the interactions between modern science and mysticism, Barnett makes a similar point to that made by Church in her assertion that the secrets of Nature exposed by nuclear science are in some sense comparable to the understanding of Nature that already exists within Pueblo thought. Barnett suggests that the differences between the ancient philosophy of Hinduism and modern science are perhaps not as great as they may at first sight appear, before going on to assert that both contain a shared view of the dissociation between phenomena and reality. He also suggests that the role of the scientist and of the ‘mystic’ are comparable and equable, as both are concerned with unravelling the ‘reality’ that lies hidden beneath illusory surface phenomena. The point Barnett makes ­here – ­that the similarities

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between nuclear science and Hindu thought lie in their mutual emphasis on the role of the phenomenal world in obscuring a reality that is ‘hidden beneath’ these surface ­phenomena – ­is one that will recur in the writing of J. D. Salinger and Jack Kerouac in the following two chapters of this study. Although Oppenheimer’s interest in Hinduism is widely known, there has been very little speculation as to the impact of this influence on his life and work.98 In addition to Barnett’s discussion of his study of Hindu literature in Life, Oppenheimer’s amateur interest in the religion became infamous as a result of his quotation from The Bhagavad Gita upon witnessing the first test blast of the atomic bomb: ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds’.99 This study will not presume to speculate on the degree to which Oppenheimer’s exposure to Hinduism influenced either his physics or his conception of the human relationship to Nature. It is nevertheless significant to note, in the context of this study, that both Church and Oppenheimer turned to non-­Euro-­American philosophy at the time of the rise of nuclear science, and apparently in efforts to better conceptualise the implications of a new Nuclear Age for the human relationship to N ­ ature – a­ move that is replicated in the work of Bowles, as well as in that of Salinger, Ginsberg, Kerouac and McCarthy in the following chapters. The significance of Oppenheimer’s recourse to ancient Sanskrit poetry in order to vocalise the impact of witnessing the first test blast of the atomic bomb has been picked up by a number of Oppenheimer’s biographers, with Jon Hunner contending that the physicist had to ‘borrow from Hinduism’ in order to find a framework within which to understand ‘what he had unleashed in the desert’.100 Hunner therefore implies that the Western philosophical tradition lacks the philosophical or spiritual depth to respond to the detonation of the nuclear bomb, and that this relative paucity caused Oppenheimer to turn to The Bhagavad Gita. Guha’s critique of the appropriation of non-­Euro-­American philosophies and spiritualities by white American writers for the purpose of advancing new, ecological visions of Nature must always be foregrounded when examining this trope within mid-­century American literature. However, the frequency with which the nuclear moment caused white American writers to undertake these acts of cultural

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a­ppropriation at mid-­ century is remarkable, and, as this book explores, these writers’ exposure to non-­Euro-­American philosophies does often appear to directly impact their efforts to rethink the relationship between the human and the environment at the dawn of the Nuclear Age. In this way, the mid-­century period can in some respects be viewed as representing a precursor to the deep ecology movement of the 1980s, during which, as Guha demonstrates, white American environmentalists drew indiscriminately upon non-­Euro-­American philosophies in search of new ecological conceptions of the human relationship to Nature. Both Oppenheimer’s voice and Church’s have been lost in critical discussions of the relationship between Nature and the rise of nuclear science. This is particularly ironic in the case of Oppenheimer; he is not only one of the names most widely associated with the creation of the atomic bomb, but elements of his thought also reached very wide audiences, as Lincoln Barnett’s 1949 Life profile and Oppenheimer’s 1953 Reith Lectures evidence. However, in spite of the high-­profile platforms through which his views were disseminated, Oppenheimer’s nuanced, ecological depictions of the relationship between Nature and scientific enquiry have, like Church’s, been largely ignored. By presenting both the human and the nuclear as parts of an infinite, ecological Nature, both Church and Oppenheimer deviate markedly from prevailing conceptions of the relationship between Nature and nuclear science within Cold War American media discourse. In addition to depicting Nature as the original and guiding inspiration for the science that precipitated the Nuclear Age, Church and Oppenheimer both also present Nature as a source, or origin, of future scientific knowledge: Church does this by suggesting that an interdependent, ecological understanding of the human relationship to Nature, such as that which she believed Pueblo culture to exemplify, would bring the human a less destructive and more comprehensive knowledge of Nature. Oppenheimer advances a similar position by locating the source of the future enrichment of the ‘intellectual’ and ‘spiritual life of man’, and the future of scientific knowledge, within a similarly ecological depiction on Nature.101

CHAPTER 3

The Influence of Chinese and Japanese Literature on J. D. Salinger’s Philosophy of Nature

J. D. Salinger began work on his most celebrated and iconic novel, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), while on active military service in the Second World War. During this time, Salinger was stationed in Devon, England, and later in France, after taking part in the D-­Day landings at Normandy; as he wrote to his erstwhile mentor, the Editor of Story magazine Whit Burnett: ‘Am still writing whenever I can find time and an unoccupied foxhole.’1, 2 The novel started life as a series of short stories, all narrated by Holden Caulfield.3 These narratives contain many of the same scenes and characters that later appear in The Catcher in the Rye. However, as Salinger’s most recent biographer Kenneth Slawenski notes, these early drafts ‘lack the spiritual force’ of the final novel. Slawenski goes on to observe that ‘it [would] require a spiritual transformation and revelation within the author himself’ for The Catcher in the Rye to be realised in its final form.4 On returning to New York in 1946, Salinger began to work seriously on finishing the novel. The same period also saw him commence the increasingly intense study of Chinese and Japanese literature and philosophy, which he would continue to pursue throughout his years as a publishing author.5 ‘Sonny: An Introduction’, the illuminating contemporary portrait of the author published by Time magazine in 1961, reveals that Salinger was immersed in the study of Eastern literature from the time of his return from the Second World War. The piece describes Salinger as an early pioneer in the study of Zen in America, and also contains the intriguing detail that

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Salinger was in the habit of giving reading lists on Zen Buddhism to his constantly changing cast of Greenwich Village dates.6 There has been some sustained critical attention to the influence of non-­Euro-­American religion and philosophy on Salinger’s work in recent years, particularly in regard to the influence of Zen.7 However, these critical enquiries often do not focus on the specific sources from which Salinger built up his understanding of Chinese and Japanese literature and thought. Not only was Salinger exclusively reliant on translated versions of Chinese and Japanese texts, limiting his exposure to those that had been translated into English for the American market, he also leaves specific clues in his fiction as to the particular translators and editions that he was familiar with. The work of this chapter will differ markedly from previous studies by basing its conclusions on analysis of the specific translations of Eastern literature and philosophy that are named by Salinger in Seymour: An Introduction (1959), all of which are philosophically grounded in Taoist thought.8 Zen Buddhism developed in China from the merging of Indian Buddhism with an already established Taoist tradition.9 My approach therefore does not seek to question the influence of Zen on Salinger’s work. Rather, it examines the role of Taoist philosophy, as a philosophical influence on Zen Buddhism, across Salinger’s oeuvre. Taoism’s influence on Salinger’s work has not been a critical focus, save for a short section in Eberhard Alsen’s wide-­ranging study of religion in Salinger’s later work, Salinger’s Glass Stories as a Composite Novel (1983). However, Salinger’s later stories, particularly ‘Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters’ (1955) and ‘Seymour: An Introduction’, contain many explicit references to, as well as detailed excerpts from, key Taoist texts. Once the significance of Salinger’s engagement with Taoism is taken into account, the influence of this philosophy is apparent within many aspects of his writing. However, its impact is most notable in shaping the presentation of Nature across the author’s oeuvre. While Salinger’s interest in Chinese and Japanese literature and thought has attracted some critical attention, the presentation of Nature in his work has received almost no study at all.10 Even the article by cultural geographers Baer and Gesler, ‘Reconsidering the Concept of Therapeutic Landscapes in J.  D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the

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Rye’, reads the novel’s landscapes as representative of abstract ideas, predominantly ‘innocence’, and their argument for the respective therapeutic or destructive properties of the novel’s landscapes entirely avoids considering these landscapes as aspects of Salinger’s wider presentation of Nature.11 As a result of the critical neglect of Salinger’s literary representations of Nature, Holden’s desire to go ‘somewhere out West’ is a passage of much greater significance within The Catcher in the Rye than has so far been recognised.12 Denis Jonnes is one of the few critics to draw attention to the similarities between Holden’s dream of escaping New York and Salinger’s own post-Catcher life of rural isolation. He notes that: ‘Salinger’s renunciation of public life and withdrawal to rural Vermont and into silence would seem to have been the fulfilment of desires Holden repeatedly gives expression to in the novel’.13 However, Jonnes does not go on to analyse the significance of Holden’s ‘desire’ to head ‘West’ f­urther – S­ alinger, after all, headed North of New York to Cornish, New Hampshire, further up the East Coast of the United States. This chapter will begin by considering Salinger’s presentation of ‘out West’ in the context of wider Cold War engagements with the American West, before outlining the Taoist-­influenced philosophy of Nature that exists at the core of Holden’s dream of escape into a rural Western American landscape. It will then go on to consider ‘out West’ as a part of a broader presentation of ecology across Salinger’s oeuvre. Holden comes to the decision to go ‘out West’ after his contemporary society pushes him to the point of mental disintegration. Indeed, Salinger explicitly positions Holden’s dream of a life ‘out West’ as a reaction to his alienation from an ideologically oppressive 1950s New York society.14 Just prior to his declaration that he will go ‘out West’, Holden has reached crisis point: Then all of a sudden, something very spooky started happening [. . .] I had this feeling that I’d never get to the other side of the street. I thought I’d just go down, down, down, and nobody’d ever see me again.15

At this point in the novel, Holden feels so isolated and detached from New York life that he is convinced he will disappear. In response, he begins an imaginary conversation with his dead

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younger brother – ‘I’d say to him, “Allie, don’t let me disappear” ’. His increasing distress and mental deterioration leads him to the following decision: ‘Finally, what I decided I’d do, I decided I’d go away. I decided I’d never go home again and I’d never go away to another school again [. . .] I’d start hitching my way out West’.16 ‘Out West’ is therefore introduced as a place of escape from, and a space antithetical to, urban New York. Leerom Medovoi is one of the few critics to engage with the significance of historic constructions of the American West in Salinger’s work, using Holden’s affinity with the West to argue against Alan Nadel’s reading of Catcher as politically influenced by McCarthyism and ‘domestic themes of containment’.17 Instead, Medovoi suggests that: ‘Holden could well have represented the Jeffersonian, human rights-­focused, democratic America of the West in its struggle against the Hamiltonian, property rights-­oriented capitalist America of the East’, and that, resultantly, ‘just as The Catcher in the Rye was readily assimilated to the Cold War liberal narrative, it could also have been adapted to the preceding progressive liberal narrative of the thirties’.18 While I am not in agreement with the conclusions that Medovoi ultimately draws from his reassessment of the West in Catcher, his argument that the political significance of Salinger’s depiction of the ‘West’ has been under-­investigated is compelling. As this chapter will demonstrate, re-­establishing the significance of the ‘West’ augments a number of established critical assumptions about the text, not least with regard to the role of Nature in the novel. During the early Cold War years, literary and filmic treatments of East Coast American culture were dominated by the suburban realism of writers such as John Cheever, John Updike and Mary McCarthy.19 By contrast, literature that took the West as its subject was overwhelmingly influenced by nostalgia for the frontier mythology that had characterised the nineteenth-­century West in the American cultural imagination. As John Beck has argued, the rise of the US as a global power in the 1940s was ‘coterminous with the rise of the American West as an economic, political and military powerhouse’.20 However, literary and filmic representations of the West at mid-­century continued to be defined by a combination of a persistent frontier narrative, and oblique references to the Cold War political and ideological moment. In the mid-­century West,

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an economic boom driven by defence and infrastructure spending significantly undermines Medovoi’s assertion of a dichotomy between the capitalist East and the democratic West. However, far from being an oversight, many critics have argued that the prevalence of disingenuous, archaic depictions of the American West in mid-­century literature and film marked a ‘constitutive feature of post-­war western representation’, and were also instrumental in allowing writers to critique mid-­century American political and social structures.21 Stanley Corkin characterises Cold War ‘Westerns’ in this way, describing the genre as: ‘concurrently nostalgic and forward looking. They look back upon the glory days of western settlement and they look ahead to the expression of US centrality in the post-­war world’.22 Similarly, Krista Comer reads A. B. Guthrie Jr’s 1950 Pulitzer Prize-­winning novel The Way West (1949) as using ‘the formula of the Oregon Trail journey to talk about 1950s suburban life’. She also argues that this strategy was responsible for the contemporary success of a novel that ostensibly cleaves to the formula of a nineteenth-­century frontier narrative.23 There has been much scholarship on the role of the American West in the Cold War political and cultural imagination, as a result of the overt parallels drawn by Cold War politicians between Western frontier rhetoric and Cold War foreign and domestic policy. In a 1952 campaign speech, presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower argued that: ‘[a]n analogy can be made, with some validity, between the life we lead today and that led by the American pioneers who [. . .] lived a full life even under the never-­ending threat of attack by hostile Indians’.24 Such deliberate attempts to plant Cold War ideologies within the familiar mythologies of the American West were widely evident within both political and cultural spheres. The ‘Western’ film genre showed unprecedented growth between 1946 and 1962, as a result of its ability to simultaneously evade the censorship of the House Un-­American Activities Committee through a perceived ideological purity, and to provide a vehicle for anti-­communist propaganda by displaying ‘the conflict between the pagan “red skins” and the God fearing whites standing in for the ideological clash between East and West’.25 As John H. Lenihan notes in his field-­defining study of the Cold War Western, the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 precipitated ‘a

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rash of [Westerns] that advocated total military defeat of an irreconcilable enemy’, as well as warning against ‘liberal overtures of ­appeasement’, and ‘outright subversion by treacherous elements’.26 The function of the West in the Cold War ideological imagination is therefore significant in considering Salinger’s presentation of ‘out West’ in The Catcher in the Rye. Like Guthrie, Jr, Salinger subverts the dominant appropriation of the West as the frontline of the Cold War ideological battle, and instead casts the West as a place of escape from the reaches of ‘containment culture’.27 Indeed, Holden’s reasons for desiring to go ‘out West’ show marked similarities with the sentiments that lead the protagonist of Guthrie Jr’s novel, Lije Evans, to make the decision to go ‘to Oregon’. Guthrie, Jr writes of Lije: ‘It was just that he wanted something more out of life than he had found’,28 a sentiment that is echoed in the dissatisfaction with his life and surroundings that Holden battles against throughout Catcher. Both novels thus express a shared post-­ war cultural malaise, through recourse to archaic depictions of an American West untouched by mid-­ twentieth-­ century American 29 culture and ideology. Further affinities between the two texts can also be glimpsed in Lije’s musings about his planned journey westward: It was likely a foolish business, this going to Oregon, but it was good to think about it, like thinking about getting out of old ways and free of old places. Like his pa had said once, telling about coming down the Ohio in a flatboat, there wasn’t any place as pretty as the one that lay ahead.30

The meaning that the West takes on in Lije’s daydream reproduces the mythology of the frontier predicated by Frederick Jackson Turner’s ‘frontier thesis’, first expounded in 1893.31 Turner characterises the West as a space in which social convention is necessarily overturned by contact with a ‘wilderness’ that subsequently ‘disappears’, as a result of its catalytic role in transforming social and cultural conventions.32 In ‘The Problem of the West’ (1896), Turner describes the West as a region: whose social conditions result from the application of older institutions and ideas to the transforming influences of free land. By this application, a

 J. D. Salinger’s Philosophy of Nature/ 101 new environment is suddenly entered, freedom of opportunity is opened, the cake of custom is broken, and new activities, new lines of growth, new institutions and new ideals, are brought into existence.33

A comparable function is performed by the promise of the West in the work of Guthrie, Jr, and in The Catcher in the Rye. In the case of both novels, the expectation is that the power of social institutions and ideologies will be broken down through contact with a Western environment. In this respect, Holden’s desire to escape from the ideological impositions of his contemporary society by heading ‘out West’ can be read as a direct, if ambivalent, echo of Turner. Turner’s contention that: ‘a new society has emerged from its contact with the backwoods’ therefore finds a degree of parallel in the escape from society and ideology that Salinger presents in Holden’s daydream of leaving New York.34 Holden describes the ‘West’ that he plans to escape to as: ‘somewhere out West where it was very pretty and sunny and where nobody’d know me’.35 This desire to escape from his own identity is fundamental to Holden’s dream of a life ‘out West’. Significantly, such self-­negation is described as a positive when it happens in conjunction with an immersion in Nature. This contrasts markedly with Holden’s fear of disappearing while crossing the street in New York, and the transformation in Holden’s response to the idea of disappearing that is apparent across these two different scenarios helps to reveal the function of Nature in the novel. The suggestion of a positive loss of personal identity that occurs in the presence of Nature is further enforced through Holden’s desire to be a ‘deaf-­ mute’; he fantasises that: ‘I’d pretend I was one of those deaf-­mutes’ out West.36 This personal withdrawal from both society and identity is fundamental to Holden’s Thoreauvian37 dream of retreat to his own cabin in the woods: I’d build me a little cabin somewhere [. . .] I’d build it right near the woods, but not right in them, because I’d want it to be sunny as hell all the time. I’d cook all my own food, and later on, if I wanted to get married or something, I’d meet this beautiful girl that was also a deaf-mute, and we’d get married.38

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The combination of Thoreauvian and frontier imagery that comprises the aesthetics of Holden’s dream life ‘out West’ sits oddly alongside the reference to his desired ‘deaf-­mute’ status. However, the withdrawal from personal identity and language that is represented by Holden’s idealisation of becoming a deaf-­mute does reveal the influential presence of Taoism at the heart of Salinger’s depiction of Nature in The Catcher in the Rye. In Taoism, language is emphatically presented as a barrier to the expression of Tao, as ‘Taoism at its heart denies the validity of language’.39 The antagonism between language and spiritual meaning is an aspect of Eastern thought that Salinger engages with at length in his later work, as this chapter will go on to discuss. Yu and Huters highlight this tension in ‘The Imaginative Universe of Chinese Literature’, explaining that: Daoism and Buddhism also share a distrust in the power of language to express meaning with any degree of adequacy, an issue that obsessed poetic theorists as well [. . .] The preference for short lyric forms throughout the tradition [of Chinese literature] may reflect [. . .] an acknowledgement of the incommensurability of words and meanings and a consequent preference for the evocative and unstated, for suggesting a ‘meaning beyond words’.40

The inability of words to express Tao is rooted in one of Taoism’s founding philosophical texts, the Tao Te Ching. The opening words of the Tao Te Ching, ‘The way that can be articulately described/is not the Unchanging Way/The Name that can be said out loud/is not the Unchanging Name’, exemplify this understanding that Tao is by its very nature incommunicable through language.41 The integral place of Holden’s ‘deaf-­mute’ status to his fantasy of life ‘out West’ reflects this fundamental Taoist precept: that an awareness of Tao, or ‘the actual essence of all things’, is inhibited by the presence of language.42 The search for truth also forms a strong thematic current that runs through The Catcher in the Rye. The novel’s opening sentence ends with Holden’s conspiratorial: ‘if you want to know the truth’, and the phrase is repeated twenty-­eight further times throughout the text.43 Nadel reads the presence of this repeated refrain as an internalisation of the McCarthyist HUAC confession.44

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While this analysis is persuasive, my reading of the novel will interpret the phrase as part of a wider narrative drive that is precipitated by the protagonist’s often frustrated search for ‘truth’, or spiritual meaning, within his contemporary Cold War American s­ ociety – ­a quest perhaps inspired by Salinger’s own post-­war search for what Slawenski has termed a ‘spiritual revelation’, within ­ translated Taoist literature. The most compelling difference between Salinger’s construction of ‘out West’ and Guthrie Jr’s, then, is that Salinger’s ‘out West’ is not primarily a place at all. Rather, it functions as a kind of synecdoche for a wider Taoist-­influenced philosophy of Nature that underpins both this early novel, and Salinger’s later work. Salinger’s ‘out West’ operates by adopting elements of the same nineteenth-­century construction of the West that was popular within his society’s cultural imagination, and utilising them to subvert dominant Cold War ideological and social diktats, as is also exemplified in Guthrie, Jr’s The Way West. However, Salinger transforms ‘out West’ from a deeply mythologised place, into a powerful synecdoche for a particular philosophy of Nature that is imbued with a spiritual meaning derived from his reading of translated Taoism. The phrase ‘philosophy of Nature’ may initially appear to trigger Morton’s criticism that the ‘idea of nature [. . .] get[s] in the way of ecological forms’.45 However, as this chapter will demonstrate, Salinger’s Taoist-­ influenced philosophy of Nature is itself an ecological structure. It promotes an ‘ecological thought’ that ‘imagines interconnectedness’, reflecting the construction of ecology that Morton terms the mesh.46 The Taoist-­influenced philosophy of Nature that ‘out West’ represents is an infinite and interdependent ecology, in the presence of which the annihilation of identity, or ‘self’, is depicted as a positive antidote to life in a spiritually dispossessed New York. This strong Taoist influence developed as a result of Salinger’s growing fascination with translated Chinese and Japanese literature during the period of the novel’s composition. In 1946, while Salinger was working on The Catcher in the Rye in New York, Chinese and Japanese literature and philosophy was widely available, in translation, in the American literary marketplace.47 Modernist writers’ interactions with Chinese poetry and thought have been fairly well documented in recent criticism. This is particularly true of

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Ezra Pound, whose engagement with the work of Chinese translators from the previous century, especially Ernest Fenollosa, did much to foster an awareness of Chinese literature among American writers.48 However, the influence of translated Eastern poetry and philosophy on mid-­twentieth-­century American writers has been much less discussed by critics,49 with perhaps the exception of the work of the Beat writers.50 Modernist literary magazines published during the years that Salinger was working on The Catcher in the Rye in New York contain an abundance of translated Chinese and Japanese poetry, as well as accompanying essays on Eastern thought. One of the most high-­ profile of these translators, Witter Bynner, wrote of the American reception of his co-­ translation of 300 Chinese poems in 1929: ‘magazine publication of nearly all our three hundred “pearls” had shown a marked Western interest in Chinese poetry’.51 Perhaps unsurprisingly, the writers who are among the most visible within these magazines are the same translators whom Salinger quotes by name in a lengthy footnote in ‘Seymour’, which is dedicated to the discussion of American translations of Eastern literature: Since this is a record, of sorts, I ought to mumble, down here, that [Seymour] read Chinese and Japanese poetry, for the most part, as it was written [. . .] let the young person please know, if he doesn’t already, that a goodish amount of first-class Chinese poetry has been translated into English, with much fidelity and spirit, by several distinguished people; Witter Bynner and Lionel Giles come most readily to mind. The best short Japanese p ­ oems – p ­ articularly haiku, but senryu t­oo – c­ an be read with special satisfaction when R. H. Blyth has been at them52

The three translators whom Salinger names here are also among the most prominent contributors of translated Eastern literature to modernist literary magazines including Poetry, The Egoist, The New Age and The Little Review. Lionel Giles translated the foundational Taoist texts the Tao Te Ching (The Sayings of Lao Tzu) in 1905 and The Book of Lieh-Tzü in 1912, and Witter Bynner’s English translation of the Tao Te Ching was published in the United States in 1944.53 The third ­named translator, R. H. Blyth, produced several volumes of translations of Japanese haiku, as well as writings

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on haiku and on Zen Buddhist philosophy. All of these writers were authors of popular American translations of Taoist and Zen Buddhist philosophical texts, and they therefore provide an indication of Salinger’s own reading list, with the addition of the eminent Japanese translator D. T. Suzuki, whom Salinger mentions by name in ‘Zooey’ (1957).54 Given Salinger’s citation of each translator as an authority, it seems fair to assume that both Giles’s 1912 Tao Te Ching and Bynner’s 1949 Tao Te Ching would have been familiar to Salinger, as well as Blyth’s four-­volume Haiku, published between 1949 and 1952.55 Indeed, the Taoist tale quoted in the opening pages of ‘Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters’ is taken from Giles’s The Book of Lieh-Tzü (1912), which further evidences the connection between Salinger’s fiction writing and his reading of the work of these named translators. It is therefore possible to have a fairly good idea of the reading material from which Salinger built up his personal understanding of Chinese and Japanese poetry, and of Taoist philosophy. As Salinger did not read Chinese or Japanese, he would have been wholly dependent on translations such as Bynner’s in order to pursue his rapidly developing interest in Eastern literature and thought. However, his assertion that the translators whom he names reproduced Chinese and Japanese texts with ‘a good amount of fidelity’ betrays either ignorance or wilful deceit. The translations of Bynner, Giles and Blyth are in fact some of the most Americanised of the fairly large number that would have been available to Salinger during the 1940s and 1950s.56 Bynner, like Salinger, read no Chinese at all, and while Bynner’s first book-­length translation, The Jade Mountain (1929), was compiled with the assistance of native speaker Dr Kiang Kang-­hu, his version of the Tao Te Ching (1944) was completed alone using other scholars’ English translations.57 This was combined with a liberal amount of the author’s own input, which was based, Bynner stated, on his: ‘fair sense of the “spirit of the Chinese people” ’.58 The influence of Bynner’s approach on Salinger is perhaps indicated in the echo of Bynner’s language in Salinger’s footnote, in which he describes Bynner’s and Giles’s translations as containing ‘a good amount’ of the ‘spirit’ of Chinese poetry. Such a direct echo of Bynner’s language suggests that Salinger was very familiar with Bynner’s introduction to The

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Jade Mountain (1929), and that his own attitude to the translation and appropriation of Chinese and Japanese texts was significantly informed by Bynner’s ‘translation’ philosophy. Bynner placed great emphasis on the accessibility of his Chinese ‘translations’ for his American audience, and denounced the much more scholarly translations of others, such as Arthur Waley, as ‘painstakingly accurate and scholarly’ but ‘culpably dull, and to a Westerner, unintelligible’. By contrast, Bynner’s own philosophy of translation was that: ‘Laotzu should [. . .] be brought close to people in their own idiom’ – an attitude that is shared by Jack Kerouac, as the next chapter in this study will demonstrate.59 However, Bynner’s incredibly Orientalist stance clearly either appealed to Salinger, or at the least did not seem problematic. As such, it must be emphasised that the version of Taoist philosophy that this chapter will show to be reflected in Salinger’s writing derives exclusively from this highly Orientalist and inauthentic ‘American Version’ of ­Taoism – ­as Bynner prefaced his 1944 translation of the Tao Te Ching.60 This chapter’s analysis of the influence of Eastern thought on Salinger’s work will therefore focus on the presence of a particular representation of Taoism that characterised the translations made by Salinger’s preferred translators. Bynner, Giles and Blyth all foreground the role of Nature in their ‘American versions’ of Taoist texts. However, this emphasis on the seminal role of Nature in Taoism is a matter of translator accentuation; over the decades of the twentieth century, translators have chosen to highlight and to down-­play the role of Nature in their translations of key Taoist works such as the Tao Te Ching and The Book of Lieh-Tzü.61 However, the strong emphasis given to the role of Nature is a common factor in the translations of Bynner, Giles and Blyth. Indeed, this fact lends weight to the overall argument of this book, as it suggests that the post-­war and early Cold War climate contributed to an increased emphasis on the portrayal of Nature as an entity of growing philosophical significance within Cold War texts and translations. As the chapter will go on to outline, comparable presentations of the relationships between Nature, Taoism and Eastern poetry to those that characterise the translations of Bynner, Giles and Blyth are also reflected across Salinger’s work.

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Taoism and the text of the Tao Te Ching do also contain a significant degree of engagement with the human relationship to Nature regardless of translator emphasis. The Chinese word ‘Tao’, which is most commonly translated into English as ‘Way’, is also often directly translated as ‘Nature’.62 Taoism holds Tao to be the ultimate and essential source of all things, and as Yin Zhihua writes, ‘Taoism claims that all things are equal, and refuses man’s superiority in all things’.63 As Zhihua goes on to describe, ‘Tao is not only the origin but also the noumenon of everything. That means the Tao not only gives birth to, but also exists in all things’.64 Respect for the environment is also a core premise of Taoism, and alignment with, and adherence to, the ‘laws of nature’ are fundamental components of Taoist philosophy.65 However, the degree to which the influence of Nature is stressed in English translations of foundational Taoist texts has varied across translations of Taoist literature over time, and, significantly, it is particularly heavily emphasised in the ‘American versions’ of the texts that Salinger recommends to his readers. In Bynner’s ‘Introduction’ to his 1929 translation of 300 Chinese poems, The Jade Mountain, the author writes that: ‘Wordsworth, of our poets, comes closest to the Chinese; but their poetry cleaves even nearer to nature than he’.66 In a 1953 essay in The Occident, ‘Remembering a Gentle Scholar’, Bynner outlines his understanding of the relationship between the human and Nature in the seventh-­to-­tenth-­century Tang Dynasty poetry that appears in Jade Mountain.67 He describes ‘the intuitional sense of oneness in man, nature, and eternity, which permeates many of the T’ang poems’, and writes that: ‘T’ang poets, living their Taoism, had eased meship into the whole current of life itself, no god or man intervening’.68 This statement acknowledges the governing influence of Taoism within Tang poetry. It also references the function of qi within the Taoist worldview. ‘Qi’ denotes the ‘energy’ and ‘origin of life’, which flows indiscriminately through human and world.69 This original energy has a unifying function, in that it renders the human and Nature equal and interchangeable in status and substance. Therefore, in comparison to Western thought Taoist philosophy ‘refuses man’s superiority’, and instead advocates the position of the human as a part of an interdependent, non-­hierarchical Nature, the ‘actual essence’ of which is Tao.70 Bynner’s essay ‘Translating

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Wang Wei’, published in the February 1922 edition of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, further illuminates his understanding of the instrumental role of Nature within Taoist thought. In this essay, Bynner argues that Taoism, rather than Buddhism, is the governing philosophical influence over the poems of Wang Wei. Wang’s work, translated by Bynner, makes up a large part of this issue of Poetry. In his discussion of the Taoist influence on Wang Wei, Bynner draws together the influence of Taoism and of Nature, claiming that: ‘Wang Wei found an abiding content in the “green and healing hills” and in the highly humbled and attuned mysticism of Lao‑tzu’s teaching’. In the same essay, he goes on to explicitly state his own understanding of the Taoist concept of the ‘Way’ as ‘the natural way of the world’.71 In the introduction to his 1912 translation of The Book of Lieh-Tzü, which Salinger was familiar with,72 Lionel Giles also foregrounds the role of Nature in his interpretation of the philosophy of Lao Tzu, author of the Tao Te Ching: Condensed into a single phrase, the injunction of Lao Tzu to mankind is to ‘Follow Nature’ [. . .] although the ‘Tao’ does not exactly correspond to the word Nature, as ordinarily used by us to denote the sum of phenomena in the everchanging universe. It seems to me however that the conception of Tao must have been reached originally, through this channel. Lao Tzu interpreting the plain facts of nature before his eyes [. . .] For this Essential Principle, this power underlying sensible phenomena of Nature, he gives, tentatively and with hesitation, the name of Tao, ‘the Way’, though fully realising the inadequacy of any name to express the idea of that which is beyond all power of comprehension.73

For Giles, Nature is both the origin of Tao and the foundation of the Taoist way of living. He pronounces that the human must ‘follow Nature’, while at the same time emphasising the failure of language to adequately express either Nature or Tao. Giles goes on to outline the relationship between Tao and Nature further, commenting: ‘that which chiefly impresses the Taoist in the operations of Nature is their absolute impersonality’. This reference to an ‘absolute impersonality’ in Nature highlights the very different position of the human, and of human agency, that exists within

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Taoism. In comparing Taoism and Christianity, Giles notes that: ‘The Christian takes a different view altogether. He prefers to ignore the facts that Nature shows him, or else he reads them in an arbitrary and one-­sided manner. His God, if no longer anthropomorphic, is anthropopathic’. Here, Giles alludes to the lack of human superiority over Nature within Taoist thought, which subverts the dominant position that the human holds within the Christian religious tradition.74 Giles is also notably strong in his condemnation of the Christian ‘anthropopathic’ belief system, commenting that ‘there can be no doubt [that Taoist thought] is the more logical’.75 Blyth’s Haiku: Volume 1 (1949) foregrounds the significance of Nature in its depiction of both the discipline of writing haiku and the philosophy of living that Blyth also uses the word ‘haiku’ to denote. Blyth discusses at length the Zen philosophy in which he grounds both of these meanings of ‘haiku’. He alludes to the Taoist philosophical roots of Zen Buddhism, writing that: ‘The Chinese philosophers stimulate through their intellectual “form” that “serene and blessed mood” which haiku poets arouse through their representation of the things of nature’.76 Blyth therefore represents material Nature as a governing influence within both Chinese philosophy and Japanese haiku. He neatly summarises his understanding of the role of Nature in the process of writing haiku in the preface of Volume 1: Haiku is the apprehension of a thing by the realisation of our own original and essential unity with it, the word ‘realisation’ having the literal meaning here of ‘making real’ in ourselves [. . .] It is with ‘all things’ because, as Dr Suzuki explains in his works on Zen, when one thing is taken up, all things are taken up with it. One flower is the spring; a falling leaf has the whole of autumn, of the eternal, the timeless autumn of each and all things.77

In this extract, Blyth describes the function of haiku being to draw attention to the interdependent relationship between human and world. Elsewhere, he characterises Zen as: ‘the state of mind in which we are not separated from other things, are indeed identical to them’, further exposing the governing role of interdependence between human and environment at the heart of his conception

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of Zen. The human is therefore depicted by Blyth as a part of an interdependent, ecological system of Nature. This interdependence, predicated on a ‘oneness’78 of substance between human and world, is often communicated in literature with a Taoist philosophical base through synecdoche.79 Blyth draws attention to the integral role of synecdoche and metonymy in literature with a Taoist philosophical base by describing the ability of the image of a single object to stand in for a whole system of Nature: ‘One flower is the spring; a falling leaf has the whole of autumn’. Blyth’s Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics (1942) also foregrounds the role of Nature in its discussion of Eastern literature, and attempts to draw comparisons between the writing of Nature in Eastern and Western literary traditions. In this work, Blyth again depicts his concept of Zen as grounded in an interdependent relationship between the human and Nature, writing that: ‘whenever there is [. . .] a union of the Nature within man and the Nature without, there is Zen’. Blyth also presents the material world as the inspiration for poetry with an Eastern philosophical base, asserting that: ‘It is the essence of poetry that it points to Something, just as (to use a favourite Buddhist simile) the finger points at the moon. This something, though instantly recognised, is not to be defined’.80 The ‘Something’ Blyth contends that Eastern poetry gestures towards is situated within material Nature, as is indicated by the simile of a human finger pointing to the moon. As a result, Blyth once again renders material Nature synonymous with the source of haiku poetry, and also with the origin of his concept of ‘Zen’. As this chapter will go on to reveal, Salinger’s writing closely replicates this romanticised, Orientalist interpretation of Eastern poetic traditions as possessing an origin within Nature. Like Blyth, Salinger also repeatedly employs synecdoche in his literary rendering of a Taoist-­inspired Nature.81 Salinger’s engagement with Taoism is most evident in two long stories written in the 1950s, ‘Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters’ (1955) and ‘Seymour: An Introduction’ (1959). In addition to the overt presence of sustained passages discussing Taoism in these works, the influence of the translated Taoist texts that Salinger references is also visible in the underlying philosophy of Nature expressed in both narratives. Although ‘Raise High the Roof Beam,

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Carpenters’ and ‘Seymour: An Introduction’ were first published in magazine form as long stories, they were also later published together in book form in 1963. Buddy Glass, the brother of the eponymous Seymour, and a thinly fictionalised version of the author, narrates both stories.82 This narrative voice serves to unify two pieces of writing that are stylistically very different. The first describes Seymour’s wedding day, during which the bridegroom fails to appear at the ceremony. It is later discovered that the couple have eloped, and the narrator, Buddy, spends the majority of the piece trapped in the company of the bride’s irate friends and relatives. The piece is written in the satirical style typical of earlier Salinger works such as Catcher and ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ (1948), and the majority of its content and energy is concentrated upon social critique. ‘Seymour’, on the other hand, has a far more direct and conspiratorial tone, and takes the form of an anecdotal character study of its eponymous hero, which chiefly comprises of Seymour’s letters to Buddy, and his brother’s sporadic reflections. It is also generously interspersed with lengthy digressions on the subjects of literary criticism, Western philosophy, and, most notably and voluminously, Chinese and Japanese literature and philosophy. A large section of the narrative of ‘Seymour’ is devoted to the discussion of Eastern poetry. Salinger expands at length upon the merits of Eastern poetic processes and forms, and embeds this discussion in an extended exploration of Seymour’s character. Buddy discloses: ‘Seymour was drawn, first, to Chinese poetry, and then, as deeply, to Japanese poetry, and both in ways that he was drawn to no other poetry in the world’, explaining that: ‘even a short discussion of it may shed a good deal of light on my brother’s nature’. Salinger overwhelmingly privileges Eastern poetry over its Western counterpart in these pages; Buddy Glass asserts: ‘at their most effective, I believe, Chinese and Japanese classical verses are intelligible utterances that please or enlighten or enlarge the invited eavesdropper to within an inch of his life’. The comparison that he draws between the Eastern and the Western literary traditions is all the more damning for its ironic tone; at one point he declares: ‘There is a risk, always, of being a trifle too beastly to the West. A line exists in Kafka’s ­diaries – ­one of many of his, ­really – ­that could

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easily usher in the Chinese New Year’.83 What is praise of Franz Kafka is also the calculated denigration of a Western literary tradition that can, in this characterisation, only produce one or two lines that attain the same level of sophistication as that which the author presents to be the base standard of Chinese and Japanese art. This valorisation of Eastern poetry is also evident in Salinger’s characterisation of Seymour as an American with the sensibilities of an Eastern poet. This portrayal is first exposed in Buddy’s relation of a childhood anecdote, in which: from watching the guests for some three hours, from grinning at them, from, I think, loving them, ­Seymour – ­without asking any questions ­first – ­brought very nearly all the guests, one or two at a time, and without any mistakes, their own true coat.84

In this passage, the authorial intention behind the Taoist tale that opens Carpenters is revealed. This tale is recounted in full in the opening two pages of the novel, and comes from the Taoist text The Book of Lieh-Tzü, a popular version of which, translated by Lionel Giles, was published in the US in 1912.85 Buddy discloses that Seymour read this tale to his baby sister Franny when he was seventeen. It relates a series of discussions between Duke Mu of Chin, and the man who chooses the Duke’s horses, Po Lo. When Po Lo is due to retire, the Duke asks him to find an equally talented replacement. Po Lo counsels the Duke that: ‘A good horse can be picked out by its general build and appearance. But the superlative ­horse – ­one that raises no dust and leaves no ­tracks – ­is something evanescent and fleeting, elusive as thin air’. He then recommends a man, Kao, as his replacement. On his first assignment, however, Kao sends a horse to the Duke that is different in colour and gender from the one that he promised would appear. The Duke is unnerved by what is apparently a serious error of judgement, and proceeds to admonish Po Lo for his poor choice. In response, Po Lo asks: ‘Has he really got as far as that?’ He goes on to explain to the Duke that: ‘What Kao keeps in view is the spiritual mechanism. In making sure of the essentials, he forgets the homely details’. The story ends with the words: ‘When the horse arrived, it turned out to be a superlative animal’.86

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The tale is an allegory for the ability to perceive Tao in material Nature. Buddy’s later anecdote concerning Seymour’s ability to give each guest their correct coat deliberately echoes Lieh-­Tzü’s tale, and so asserts Seymour’s power to perceive the ‘spiritual mechanism’ of Tao in the material world. Just as Po Lo’s apprentice in the Taoist tale does not remember the gender or colour of horses because he perceives Tao beyond these superficial details, Seymour is able to ‘see’ what the external reality of his parents’ guests’ coats reveal about their underlying natures, in order to match each coat to its owner. The presence of this Taoist tale introduces Taoist philosophy into the opening pages of the narrative. It also draws the narratives of ‘Carpenters’ and ‘Seymour’ together, as the significance of Taoism to the character of Seymour is only fully unpacked in the latter narrative. Buddy explicitly links the Taoist tale that opens the former narrative with the latter, and enforces the anecdote’s function in providing a complete understanding of its eponymous hero, by stating: ‘What I’m really getting at is this: Since the bridegroom’s permanent retirement from the scene, I haven’t been able to think of anybody whom I’d care to send out to look for horses in his stead’.87 The Taoist tale that opens ‘Carpenters’ therefore introduces the idea that Tao is manifest in the material world.88 The characterisation of Seymour as a ‘seer’ who literally ‘sees more’ in the material Nature than is apparent to the average ­American – a­ s his name ­implies – ­is also directly linked to his ability to write Chinese- and Japanese-­style lyrics. Buddy states that: ‘if a Chinese or Japanese verse composer doesn’t know whose coat is whose, on sight, his poetry stands a remarkably slim chance of ever ripening’.89 In general, materialism is a much more significant component of Chinese poetry than it is of Euro-­ Western literature; as Yu and Huters explain, early Chinese literary theory contains: ‘no true dichotomy between the real and the ideal. Rather, literature spoke of the things of the world’.90 As a result, Chinese literature has traditionally contained a strong focus on the material world, as both subject matter and inspiration for poetry: ‘The writer in traditional Chinese formulations exists in a network of relations with the worlds of nature and society that provide the impetus, forms and subject of his or her works’.91 A similarly strong focus on materiality is also found

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within classical Japanese poetry.92 However, Salinger’s assertion of a relationship between Nature and the composition of Eastern poetry primarily demonstrates his replication of the romanticised, Orientalist depictions of Eastern literature as constituting a more direct representation of Nature, and as developing from an origin within Nature, which characterise the translations of Bynner, Giles and Blyth. Salinger develops this portrayal of material Nature as both subject matter and origin of Eastern poetry throughout ‘Seymour’, writing: unless a Chinese or Japanese poet’s real forte is knowing a good persimmon or a good crab or a good mosquito bite on a good arm when he sees one, then no matter how long or unusual or fascinating his semantic or intellectual intestines may be, or how beguiling they sound when twanged, no one in the Mysterious East speaks seriously of him as a poet, if at all.93

In this passage, Salinger explicitly endorses a model of poetic composition in what he understands to be an Eastern literary tradition, which privileges the observation of the material environment over and above linguistic ingenuity. Material Nature is again rendered synonymous with the inspiration for, and the subject matter of, Eastern poetry. However, in this extract, Nature is also implied to contain a kind of creative agency in the generation of poetry. Salinger reinforces the idea that Nature possesses an agency in the generation of poetry composed in the Eastern tradition by writing: ‘the very mention of Issa’s name convinces me that the true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it. A fat-­faced peony will not show itself to anyone but Issa’.94 He therefore explicitly depicts material Nature as not only the subject matter of poetry composed in the Eastern tradition, but also as possessing a form of creative agency that allows it to govern the terms of its own poetic revelation. This suggestion of a connection between Eastern poetry and Nature is saturated in the Orientalism that Robert Kern describes as governing twentieth-­ century American writers’ engagements with Chinese poetry, as is pointedly demonstrated by Salinger’s simultaneous deployment of the phrase ‘Mysterious East’.95 Salinger’s work also falls into the

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broader trend, identified by Kern, of nineteenth- and twentieth-­ century American writers conflating the concept of a ‘language of nature’, first identified by Ralph Waldo Emerson, with an ‘idea of Chinese, into which [the idea of a language of nature] is ultimately absorbed’. As a result, Kern asserts, ‘Chinese is often regarded, in the West, as a script which overcomes the mediation of alphabetical writing systems’, and resultantly appears, to American writers, to achieve ‘greater access to the being of the world’.96 That Salinger’s consumption of translated Chinese and Japanese literature influenced his views on art from as early as 1947, when he was working on The Catcher in the Rye, is evidenced by another short story of his written in this same year. ‘The Inverted Forest’, which has never been anthologised, details the initial success, and subsequent decline, of another gifted American poet, Ray Ford. During the narrative, Ford meets with a younger poet, in a scene that contains strong echoes of Rainer Marie Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (1929).97 Dismissive of the junior poet’s style, Ford explains: ‘A poet doesn’t invent his p ­ oetry – h ­ e finds it [. . .] The place where Alph the sacred river ­ran – w ­ as found and not invented’.98 The idea that poetry is ‘found’ within material Nature, rather than invented, reveals the strong influence of translators such as Blyth. As has been noted, Blyth describes haiku poetry as both originating in material Nature, and reflecting the human’s interdependent relationship to it. In ‘The Inverted Forest’, Salinger posits that the capacity of the poem to echo revelations within ‘Nature’ is of superior importance to ‘invention’ or linguistic innovation, as he does in his assertion of the primary role of the ‘good persimmon’ or ‘good mosquito bite’ in the composition of Eastern poetry in ‘Seymour’. One of Salinger’s lengthiest and most explicit attacks on his contemporary America appears in the long sentence that ends, enigmatically, in what Salinger describes as a ‘bouquet of parentheses’: In this entre-­nous spirit, then, old confidant, before we join the others, the grounded everywhere, including, I’m sure, the middle-­ aged hot-­ rodders who insist on zooming us to the moon, the Dharma Bums, the makers of cigarette filters for thinking men, the Beat and the Sloppy and the Petulant, the chosen cultists, all the lofty experts who know so well what we should and shouldn’t do with our poor little sex organs, all

116 / Writing Nature the bearded, proud, unlettered young men and unskilled guitarists and Zen-­killers and incorporated aesthetic Teddy boys who look down their thoroughly unenlightened noses at this splendid planet where (please don’t shut me up) Kilroy, Christ and Shakespeare all ­stopped – ­before we join these others, I privately say to you, old friend (unto you, really, I’m afraid), please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early blooming parentheses: ((((()))))99

The sentence’s extreme length is characteristic of the narrative style of ‘Seymour’ as a whole, and its sustained critique of numerous aspects of 1950s American culture, from the ad men who devise ‘cigarette filters for thinking men’ to the countercultural Beat movement, reaches a crescendo when juxtaposed with an allusion to Zen Buddhist philosophy, in the form of the ‘bouquet of parentheses’. A deliberate contrast between East and West is brought out in Salinger’s description of ‘unenlightened’ Teddy boys, with Salinger again attempting to expose the philosophical and spiritual impoverishment of the West by juxtaposing it with Eastern philosophy. This criticism of mainstream American culture as unenlightened is paired with an even stronger admonishment of the mid-­ century American counterculture. The Beat writers are described as ‘Zen-­killers’ for their well-­publicised forays into Eastern thought, and Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums (1958) is particularly singled out for ­condemnation – ­its title ignominiously placed between Salinger’s sarcastic description of advertisements for ‘thinking men’, and his withering portrayal of the technological obsessions of ‘middle-­aged hot-­rodders’. The reference to The Dharma Bums signals that Salinger was familiar with Kerouac’s work, and his reference to the title suggests that he felt Kerouac’s brand of Eastern spirituality to be equally as vapid, ‘pretentious’ and conformist as the ‘hot rodders’ and ad men that he places it alongside. However, this criticism of the Beat writers’ engagements with Eastern thought rings somewhat hollow, given that the translations of Eastern literature consulted by Salinger and the Beats overlap considerably, and that neither Salinger nor Kerouac or Ginsberg read any Eastern philosophy in its original language. All three writers therefore relied on similar translations, the vast majority of which expound similarly ‘Americanised’ inter-

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pretations of Taoist and Zen Buddhist philosophy, as Chapter 4 will continue to explore with regard to the Beat writers. The parentheses that the long sentence ends in present an even more powerful demonstration of Salinger’s deployment of Eastern philosophy in an attempt to chasten Cold War American culture. Earlier in ‘Seymour’, Salinger explicitly engages with the limitations of language in regard to the representation of Tao, stating: ‘I don’t really believe there is a word, in any ­language – ­thank G ­ od – ­to describe the Chinese or Japanese poet’s choice of material.’100 The italics, and the ‘thank God’, reinforce the author’s support for the Taoist distrust of language’s ability to communicate Tao.101 It is this Taoist-­inspired rejection of language that is so emphatically represented by the ‘bouquet of very early blooming parentheses: ((((()))))’ in which the sentence culminates.102 The comparison presented between the overly verbose and lengthy sentence and its abrupt ending enhance the parentheses’ function as a literary rendering of the Zen Buddhist Flower Sermon. The Flower Sermon is the origin legend of the Zen branch of Buddhism, and Salinger would undoubtedly have been familiar with it. It appears in a number of mainstream Zen texts that were in circulation at this time in the American marketplace, including D. T. Suzuki’s Essays in Zen Buddhism (1927). The parable describes that the Buddha, instead of giving a sermon to his assembled disciples, did not resort to any lengthy verbal discourse to explain his point, but simply lifted a bouquet of flowers before his assemblage. Not a word came out of his mouth. Nobody understood the meaning of this except the old venerable Mahākāśyapa, who quietly smiled at the Master, as if he fully comprehended the purport of this silent but eloquent teaching on the part of the enlightened one.103

In a literary rendering of this foundational Zen lesson, Salinger offers his readers his own ‘bouquet’ of ‘early blooming’ parentheses, through which wordlessness is juxtaposed to the sentence’s early verbiage. He therefore performs his own literary rendering of the flower sermon. Salinger’s description of the parentheses as a ‘bouquet’ exactly echoes Suzuki’s vocabulary, and this further encourages the analogy between the cluster of incomprehensible

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punctuation, and the symbolic function of the flowers in the Zen flower sermon. That the manifestation of the parentheses is referred to as ‘early blooming’ only reinforces this reading of Salinger’s deployment of the punctuation as a representation of the flower sermon. However, Salinger’s most explicit conflation of Tao and Nature appears in his depictions of migratory birds. In the opening pages of Seymour, Salinger describes his reader as a ‘great bird-lover’, addressing them: ‘you’re someone who took up birds in the first place because they fired your imagination; they fascinated you because “they seemed of all created beings the nearest to pure s­ pirit – ­those little creatures with a normal temperature of 125°” ’.104 The quote is taken from the Scottish writer John Buchan’s short story ‘Skule Skerry’ (1928), which tells of a man pitted against the full force of the Arctic Ocean, and driven to the edge of his sanity, by what he thinks is a murderous phantom. It turns out to be an injured walrus. Salinger draws heavily on Buchan’s work in his presentation of Nature in this section of the narrative, quoting from Buchan again further on in the same passage: ‘The gold-­ crest, with a stomach no bigger than a bean, flies across the North Sea! The curlew sandpiper, which breeds so far north that only about three people have ever seen its nest, goes to Tasmania for its holidays!’105 Buchan’s portrayal of these elusive migratory birds foregrounds their inherent unknowability, and Salinger draws on this incomprehensible quality in his redeployment of the images of the goldcrest and the curlew sandpiper. Salinger’s utilisation of Buchan’s descriptions of these birds in ‘Seymour’ also adopts the image of the migratory bird as a metaphor for Tao. The references to extraordinary perception in relation to the sight of these birds recalls the Taoist Tale at the opening of Carpenters, and this connection is further enhanced in the comment that follows: ‘it would be too much of a good thing to hope, of course, that my very own general reader should turn out to be one of the three people who have actually seen the curlew sandpiper’s nest’.106 These repeated allusions to exceptional perception breed a metaphoric association between the migratory bird and the concept of Tao. Salinger deploys the appropriated images of the goldcrest and the curlew sandpiper as synecdoches for the wider Taoist-­influenced

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philosophy of Nature that ‘Carpenters’ and ‘Seymour’ develop. In this way, they function similarly to ‘out West’ in The Catcher in the Rye, as in each case the focal image refers to a wider construction of Nature invested with a Taoist ‘spiritual mechanism’.107 In both texts, Salinger presents Nature as unknowable by referencing the boundaries of human perception and thought, suggesting a limit to the reach of human knowledge and influence. He thus destabilises the dominance of the human through these portrayals of a fundamentally unknowable Nature, as well as developing the narrative’s wider depiction of Nature as an interdependent system that’s potentially infinite dimensions lie outside of the limits of human perception and comprehension. This portrayal of Nature can be better understood when it is considered in light of Timothy Morton’s contemporary theorisation of the mesh. Morton describes the mesh structure of ‘ecological thought’ as: ‘vast, perhaps immeasurably so. Each entity in the mesh looks strange. Nothing exists all by itself, and nothing is fully “itself” ’.108 The infinite and interdependent structure of the mesh enforces the limitations of human understanding and influence, as well as challenging the position of the human as distinct and exceptional. Human encounters with other beings are also augmented by an understanding of the mesh; Morton asserts that once the mesh is appreciated, ‘our encounter with other beings becomes profound. They are strange, even intrinsically strange. Getting to know them makes them stranger’. Other life forms therefore become ‘strange strangers’, and their very existence as part of the same infinite and interdependent ecological system as the human brings into focus the limits of human knowledge and perception.109 Salinger’s inclusion of Buchan’s descriptions of the goldcrest and the curlew sandpiper in ‘Seymour’ perform the function of Morton’s ‘strange stranger’, as their inscrutability gestures towards the presence of a vast and unknowable ecology. This unknowability in turn introduces the idea of the infinite, by invoking the potentially limitless qualities and dimensions of Nature that lie beyond the boundaries of human perception. The interdependent, ecological Nature that Salinger’s writing subtly develops heavily reflects representations of the relationship between human and world that define the Taoist-­influenced writings of Bynner, Giles and B ­ lyth

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– ­all of whom present the human as but one part within an interdependent, ecological system of Nature. While Salinger borrows content from Buchan, the ecological presentation of Nature across both his early and his later work is nevertheless grounded in the worldview promoted in these translated Taoist and Zen Buddhist texts, which devalue the human while privileging an ecological and ‘impersonal’ Nature as the site of spiritual meaning.110 This Taoist-­influenced philosophy of Nature necessarily limits the role of the human, and suggests that moments of ontological clarity are reached solely through the observation of an infinite and ­inscrutable material world. Throughout ‘Seymour’, Salinger continues to develop the migratory bird as a metaphor for Tao. Drawing on Buchan’s description of birds as ‘of all created things the nearest to pure ­spirit – ­those little beings with a normal temperature of 125°’,111 Salinger addresses his ‘general reader’ as an exceptional individual, while simultaneously enforcing the extraordinary perception of his protagonist: if, as I know you do, you love best in the world those little beings of pure spirit with a normal temperature of 125°, then it naturally follows that the creature you love next best is the person [. . .] who can write a poem that is a poem. Among human beings, he’s the curlew sandpiper, and I hasten to tell you what little I know about his flights, his heat, his incredible heart.112

The strong influence of Salinger’s conception of Eastern poetic composition, derived from his reading of Blyth, is again apparent in his presentation of poetry’s relationship to Nature at this point in the narrative. The ability to perceive Tao in Nature is obliquely evoked as the process of poetic composition, and the description of birds as ‘pure spirit’, which Salinger appropriates from Buchan, further develops their metaphorical association with Tao. Salinger’s language also recalls the Taoist tale at the opening of Carpenters, in which Li Po is able to perceive the Tao, or ‘spiritual mechanism’, manifest in a ‘superlative’ horse. Like his ability to distinguish the inner lives of his parents’ guests from their outer appearances, Seymour’s poetic genius is implied to derive from his ability to perceive Tao in ‘a really good persimmon’, or a bird in flight,

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and to convey this extraordinary perception through the medium of poetry. This again reflects Ford’s definition of true poetry as ‘found’, not invented, in ‘The Inverted Forest’, and provides further evidence that across his texts from 1947 to 1959, Salinger presents poetry as intrinsically related to material Nature, as a result of the influence of the work of Blyth, Bynner and Giles.113 In an even greater conflation of Tao, Nature, poetry and poet, Seymour is described as himself a ‘curlew sandpiper’, and the character resultantly takes on the unknowable and infinitely elusive qualities that Salinger’s writing affords these birds. The presence of a Taoist-­influenced philosophy of Nature in The Catcher in the Rye is not limited to its presence within Holden’s dream of a life ‘out West’. Rather, it is revealed to be an active and visible presence throughout the novel, once the novel is reconsidered in light of Salinger’s later, more overtly Taoist, texts. It is to such a reconsideration that the chapter will now turn. Salinger’s only overt reference to Eastern philosophy in Catcher comes when an older and wiser ex-­school friend of Holden’s, Carl Luce, tells him aloofly: ‘I simply happen to find Eastern philosophy more satisfactory than Western. Since you ask’. Luce does not elaborate on this comment any further than to clarify testily: ‘Not necessarily in China, for God’s sake. The East’.114 His observation is nevertheless significant, in that it asserts that Eastern philosophy is a valuable source of knowledge, and positions it as a superior alternative to Western thought. It also provides further evidence of Salinger’s engagement with Eastern philosophy during the years that he was working on The Catcher in the Rye. Reading Catcher with an appreciation of the influence of the translated Taoism of Blyth, Bynner and Giles on Salinger’s writing from the period of the novel’s composition also reveals significant continuities in the presentation of Nature across Salinger’s earlier and later work. In particular, the use of birds as metaphors for Tao, and as a form of synecdoche for a Taoist-­influenced philosophy of Nature, is reflected in the role of the ducks in The Catcher in the Rye. The ducks of Central Park are a dominant motif in Salinger’s first novel, and yet their function has not been investigated by critics as part of the novel’s wider presentation of Nature. Holden first mentions the ducks when he is in a position of confinement and

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discomfort, trapped in the bedroom of his teacher, ‘Old Spencer’. In the midst of Old Spencer’s tirade about Holden’s bad attitude and folly in allowing himself to be kicked out of Pency Prep School, Holden divulges: I live in New York, and I was thinking about the lagoon in Central Park, down near Central Park South. I was wondering if it would be frozen over when I got home, and if it was, where did the ducks go. I was wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over. I wondered if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something. Or if they just flew away.115

Holden’s continued musing on where the ducks go in the winter develops a dichotomy between his trapped position within urban New York, and a freedom that Salinger locates in the unknowable, and potentially infinite, system of Nature that the ducks represent. Holden’s questioning of ‘where the ducks go’ also contains an echo of his constant refrain ‘if you want to know the truth’, with both contributing to the creation of a narrative drive that is powered by an ongoing search for ‘truth’, or spiritual meaning. Holden’s contemplation of the whereabouts of the absent ducks is always juxtaposed to a claustrophobia generated by his alienation from his urban surroundings, and this in turn enhances Salinger’s presentation of Cold War New York as both oppressive and insubstantial. The ducks therefore develop into a powerful symbol of a Nature that contains both the spiritual meaning and the physical protection that Holden seeks, as a result of its infinite, ecological structure. The ducks’ disappearance reflects their location within this infinite ecology, and Holden’s obsession with their disappearance repeatedly reinforces his relative isolation and vulnerability, and the negative effect that this has on his mental and physical health. There is an added significance to the fact that the ducks are first mentioned from Old Spencer’s room. They interrupt Holden’s description of his anxiety at being imprisoned in the presence of his irate teacher, whose age and health problems cause him such distress. His former teacher further unnerves him by wishing him ‘good luck’.116 Holden is acutely aware of the ominous tone of this statement, which directly follows Old Spencer’s description

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of what he predicts to be Holden’s downward spiral. The ducks’ first appearance in the novel at this point, at the very start of Holden’s mental and physical deterioration, therefore establishes a dichotomy between a freedom of movement available to more-­ than-­human Nature, and the trapped position of Holden within a society that precipitates, even as it stigmatises, his life-­threatening mental breakdown. Throughout the novel, Salinger repeatedly precedes Holden’s discussion of the ducks with an evocation of urban New York. This deliberate juxtaposition of the city with a powerful synecdoche for a Taoist-­influenced philosophy of Nature displays the same technique that Salinger employs in describing Holden’s fear that he will disappear while crossing the street in New York, directly before he expresses the desire to escape ‘out West’. The second instance of Holden questioning where the ducks go directly follows on from one of the most chilling of Salinger’s depictions of New York at night. From the taxi, Holden comments: ‘New York’s terrible when somebody laughs on the street very late at night. You can hear it for miles. It makes you feel so lonesome and depressed’. This reference to the mental toll of the New York environment is directly followed by Holden asking Horwitz, his irascible cabbie, ‘Hey, Horwitz, [. . .] You ever pass by the lagoon in Central Park? Down by Central Park South?’ Holden continues: ‘Well, you know the ducks that swim around in it? In the springtime and all? Do you happen to know where they go in the wintertime, by any chance?’117 Holden’s persistent enquiries about the whereabouts of the ducks therefore reveal his own desire for escape from his current ‘lonesome and depressed’ state, and suggest a relationship between this quest for release and his increasingly persistent search for the ducks. Horwitz cannot answer Holden’s question about the ducks, but what he does tell Holden is that the fish are frozen, alive, within the ice on the lagoon. He goes on to comment that: ‘If you was a fish, Mother Nature’d take care of you, wouldn’t she? Right? You don’t think those fish just die when it gets to be winter, do ya?’ This statement develops Salinger’s presentation of ecological Nature as a source of protection to more-­than-­human life forms, which is first suggested by the ducks’ implied ability to leave New York once its winter environment begins to threaten their well-­being. The

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perceived safety of the fish is derived from their place within this interdependent, ecological system of Nature. However, as a result of the cabbie’s suggestion that ‘Mother Nature’d take care of you’ if you were a fish, Holden’s alienation from this ecological vision of Nature is only reinforced; in contrast to the protection that the fish receive from Mother Nature, New York society certainly is not ‘taking care of’ him. However, Salinger also implies that it is Holden’s human identity that prevents him from the integration into an interdependent, ecological system of Nature that he desires; he isn’t ‘a fish’ and so cannot be part of the nurturing ecology that the novel evokes. In a reflection of Holden’s fantasy of becoming a deaf-­mute ‘out West’, Horwitz’s description of the supposed suspended animation of the fish suggests the appeal of relinquishing individuality and identity in order to become a part of what is depicted as an infinite, regenerative and protective ecological system of Nature. This episode therefore contributes to the development of an ecological and interdependent mesh structure at the heart of the novel’s portrayal of Nature, echoing the comparable structures of ecology present in the work of Bowles and Church in the previous chapters.118 The degree to which a Taoist-­influenced philosophy of Nature infiltrates and defines The Catcher in the Rye is also evident in its veiled presence at the heart of Mr Antolini’s analysis of Holden’s ‘problem’. Holden calls up Mr Antolini, another former school teacher, in the latter half of the novel. Already well oiled by the time Holden arrives, Antolini proceeds to lecture him on the dangers of his current life trajectory. He tells Holden that he fears him to be ‘riding for some kind of terrible, terrible fall’. The nature of this fall is grimly foreshadowed by Holden’s classmate James Castle’s suicidal fall from a window, described mere pages earlier. Mr Antolini has already been linked with Castle’s death, as it was he who picked up Castle’s body. Salinger is also explicit in enforcing the connections between Holden and James Castle; Holden discloses that their names were next to each other on the school register, and reveals that Castle was wearing a sweatshirt of his at the time of his suicide.119 As a result, Antolini’s revelation that: ‘The whole arrangement’s designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own

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environment couldn’t supply them with’, bleakly foreshadows the potentially deadly effects of Holden’s failure to find what he needs within his current ‘environment’. Such a reading is strengthened by Alan Nadel’s contextualisation of the ‘fall from a window’, the contemporary political significance of which in McCarthyist America ­renders it synonymous with an admission of a failure to conform.120 The search that Antolini alludes to in his description of what Holden is ‘looking for’ also contributes to the narrative momentum that the novel derives from its evocation of Holden’s quest for ‘truth’, or spiritual meaning. The word ‘environment’ connotes images of rural Nature, and of the human’s relationship with the more-­than-­human world. In doing so, it subtly imbues Antolini’s statement regarding the detrimental effects of Holden’s failure to adapt to New York life with the presence of its ­opposite – ­the interdependent and ecological Nature that Holden has imagined to be so sustaining in his dream of a life ‘out West’, and for which he is searching through his constant questions regarding the absent presence of the ducks in Central Park. The consequences of Holden’s failure to adapt to his contemporary society are, Salinger suggests, potentially severe. The severity of these consequences is further enforced by the advice that Antolini ultimately leaves Holden with; he writes on a scrap of paper that: ‘The mark of an immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one’.121 Through Antolini’s parting words of advice, Salinger again suggests that there is a very real danger that Holden will die as a result of his failure to adapt to his current ‘environment’. This suggestion of the deadly consequences of Holden’s search for ‘truth’ or spiritual meaning within his contemporary environment is reinforced by Holden’s near immersion in the frozen Central Park lagoon. Holden’s actions at the shore of the frozen lake accentuate the connection that the novel develops between contact with Nature and the annihilation of the self. The possibility of death through contact with a hostile environment is invoked in Salinger’s descriptions of the frozen lake, as the repeated references to the absence of the ducks also introduce the possibility that they have been killed by the freezing conditions. This implied fate of the ducks also

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foreshadows the fate of Holden, who comes close to peril through his drunken search for them on the lake’s ­shore – ­he fears he will die of pneumonia, and subsequently contracts tuberculosis. The initial symptoms of this illness induce his run-­down state at the close of the novel, which precipitates his fear of disappearing and his resultant desire to go ‘out West’. Such foreshadowing in turn creates parallels between Holden’s dream of going ‘out West’ and the potential flight of the ducks. Similarly, Holden’s eventual fate echoes another of the potential fates that he imagines for the ducks: he, too, is taken away. The end of the novel finds him removed from New York by human forces, and his transfer to an asylum reflects the captivity in a zoo that he imagines to be another possible reason for the disappearance of the ducks. Salinger’s development of the ducks as a motif is therefore deeply rooted in the novel’s imagery and narrative trajectory, with the device foreshadowing all of Holden’s possible and eventual fates, and acting as another potent synecdoche for Salinger’s Taoist-­influenced philosophy of Nature. At the climax of the novel, Holden comes close to falling into the frozen lake in the fury of his inebriated search for the ducks. Salinger once again begins by suggesting that the cause of Holden’s search for the ducks lies in his feelings of alienation and isolation within his contemporary society, writing: I didn’t have hardly any money left [. . .] I didn’t even know where I was supposed to go. So what I did, I started walking over to the park. I figured I’d go by that little lake and see what the hell the ducks were doing, see if they were around or not [. . .] I didn’t even know where I was going to sleep yet.122

Driven by feelings of hopelessness and disaffection, and by his lack of security or resources within urban New York, Holden’s search for the ducks again represents a quest for security and spiritual meaning within an ecological Nature. However, on this occasion his search for the ducks almost ends in tragedy, in a manner foreshadowed by Antolini’s warning about the deadly danger of searching for sources of truth or spiritual meaning that are felt to be deficient within one’s ‘environment’.123 Holden narrates:

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The perilous nature of Holden’s quest exemplifies the foreshadowed danger of his increasingly frantic search for spiritual meaning within the New York ‘environment’. Holden is aware of the danger that this futile search for the Central Park ducks has led him into, commenting that: ‘The back of my hair [. . .] was sort of full of little hunks of ice. That worried me. I thought probably I’d get pneumonia and die.’125 The explicit introduction of death as a possible end to Holden’s search for spiritual meaning within Nature both references Antolini’s grim warning, and develops the deaf-­mute fantasy that is integral to Holden’s dream of life ‘out West’. The annihilation of the self, through death and through the loss of language respectively, is presented, in both cases, as a prerequisite for the human’s desired integration into an ecological Nature. Holden, Salinger implies, may die before he finds out the answer to his question about where the ducks have gone. However, his search for them mirrors his frustrated desire to become a ‘deaf-­mute’ out West. In both cases, the annihilation of the self is hazarded in the hope of a desired integration into an interdependent and ecological Nature. The Taoist-­influenced philosophy of Nature that is integral to Salinger’s fiction therefore exhibits the same trope of the annihilation of the self within a potentially infinite, ecological Nature that is visible in the work of Church and Bowles in my first two chapters. This trope represents a particularly marked departure from the spiritual enrichment of the self through contact with Nature that characterises nature writing in  the Transcendentalist tradition.126 By contrast, these Cold War writers introduce the presence of an ecological Nature in order to disrupt the dominant Cold War metanarrative that Daniel Grausam terms the thermonuclear ‘ending’. Holden’s fear that he will ‘disappear’ while crossing the street speaks to the Cold War anxiety of just such a sudden and permanent ‘ending’. However, Salinger, Church and Bowles each reimagine this brutal and permanent annihilation of the human as occurring within an infinite and interdependent ecological Nature. These

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writers therefore attempt to circumvent the unrecorded ending that Grausam shows to induce nuclear anxiety, by portraying the human’s corporeal integration within an infinite, ecological Nature that will endure beyond any such ‘nuclear ending’.127 Salinger’s wider presentation of Nature also displays the same mesh structure that characterises Church’s and Bowles’s literary e­ cologies – ­all of which anticipate Morton’s twenty-­first-­century theorisation. Like Bowles’s and Church’s protagonists, Holden also desires corporeal integration within an interdependent, ecological Nature, and he is ultimately prevented from achieving this as a result of his failure to cede language and consciousness. The fact that language and consciousness have no place within the imagined and idealised integration of self and Nature that Salinger’s work presents reveals the influence of a Taoist distrust of the function of language. As is enacted by Salinger’s textual rendering of the Zen Buddhist flower sermon, the author’s presentation of Nature across his oeuvre is predicated upon the fundamental necessity of rescinding language and consciousness in order to find Tao, or spiritual meaning. This Taoist-­inspired conviction in the value of silence is also evident in the Zen koan that forms the epigraph of Salinger’s Nine Stories (1953): ‘We know the sound of two hands clapping. But what is the sound of one hand clapping?’ An awareness of the shaping influence of translated Taoist philosophy on Salinger’s deployment of silence also sheds new light on The Catcher in the Rye’s enigmatic final imperative: ‘Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody’.128 Slawenski reads this closing directive as a reference to Salinger’s reluctance to talk to civilians about his wartime experiences, due to the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that a number of critics and biographers have suggested the author suffered from in the years after his service in the Second World War.129 Such a reading is persuasive. However, I would suggest that the suspicion of language advocated in the Taoist literature to which the author turned on his return to New York was instrumental in providing both a philosophical base, and an intellectual support, for such a strategy.

CHAPTER 4

The Beat Ecologies of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac

In the fifth chapter of On the Road (1957), Jack Kerouac writes: ‘The waves are Chinese but the earth is an Indian thing’.1 His words provide further evidence that when describing Nature, mid-­twentieth-­century American writers habitually evoke non-­Euro-­American philosophical and spiritual frameworks. In the same spirit that Bowles turned to Sufism to explore the relationship between the human and the desert landscape, and that Church and Salinger drew on Pueblo and Taoist thought, Kerouac emphatically asserts that the ‘waves’ and the ‘earth’ are the province of older and more venerable philosophical traditions than those that were dominant within his contemporary Cold War American society. This chapter will explore the portrayals of Nature in the seminal ‘Beat’ writings of Kerouac and of his close friend and confidant, the poet Allen Ginsberg. The two men maintained a long and detailed correspondence between 1953 and ­1956 – ­a period when both produced some of their best-­known works. Their letters reveal that during these years, Kerouac and Ginsberg were studying translated Chinese and Japanese literature and philosophy, and simultaneously endeavouring to bring these Eastern texts into conversation with their own co-­created, countercultural ‘Beat’ philosophy. This chapter will therefore suggest that, despite Kerouac’s apparent privileging of Native American philosophy by attributing it to the more tangible and robust ‘earth’ in this sentence from the final section of On The Road, it was his sustained study of ancient Chinese thought that had a significant and lasting influence on the literary ­depictions of Nature in his and Ginsberg’s work.

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There have been a number of scholarly studies on the influence of Eastern thought on the writings of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, but not a proportionally large volume given the amount of criticism that both writers have attracted.2 Of these studies, all deal with the influence of ‘Buddhism’, and in many cases view Buddhism as a secondary or complementary presence, rather than as a primary philosophical influence.3 It is worth noting that Kerouac and Ginsberg often use the terms ‘Buddhism’, ‘Zen’ and ‘Taoism’ somewhat interchangeably across their writings. Two points illuminate what might appear to be uninformed carelessness in this regard; one is that many of the early proponents of Zen Buddhism were themselves T ­ aoists – a­ point that Dwight Goddard makes in justification of his inclusion of the foundational Taoist text, Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, in the 1956 revised and updated edition of his highly influential book A Buddhist Bible (1932). In this revised edition, Goddard notes that: ‘nearly all of the Chinese masters of Buddhism were Taoist scholars’, and the ‘Laotzuan teaching of the Tao-the-king has had [. . .] a wholesome influence on the development of Chinese Buddhism’.4 In particular, Taoism had a significant influence over the development of the school of Zen Buddhism, which emerged in Tang Dynasty China as a result of the blending of the newly arrived Indian Buddhism with existing Taoist influences.5 The second point to note is that Ginsberg and Kerouac used their reading in Eastern literature and philosophy to develop their own hybrid ‘Beat’ version of Eastern thought, which incorporated concepts taken from American translations of both Zen Buddhist and Taoist texts. This ‘Dadaist’ approach did not prioritise disciplinary fidelity; instead, Ginsberg and Kerouac actively sought to utilise, combine and adapt elements of Taoism and Zen Buddhism.6 As a result, they liberally interpreted translated and Americanised texts such as Goddard’s in line with their developing ‘Beat’ ideology.7 In a 1958 essay, Alan Watts describes the product of this process as ‘Beat Zen’. ‘Beat Zen’, as Watts astutely observes, combines doctrinal, social and cultural non-­conformity; its genesis lies in a revolt from mid-­century American culture, which in turn inspired a creative, rather than scholarly, engagement with translated Eastern thought. Watts’s article was first published in a Chicago Review special edition

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on ‘Zen’, alongside a section of Kerouac’s 1958 novel The Dharma Bums that describes the protagonist’s woodland ­meditations – ­a section of the novel that will prove a significant passage in this chapter’s exploration of the influence of the two writers’ developing interest in Eastern thought on their increasingly ecological depictions of Nature. The chapter will also adopt Watts’s term ‘Beat Zen’ as a shorthand for the co-­developed interpretation of Eastern thought that Ginsberg and Kerouac forged through their exchange of letters between 1953 and 1955.8 The poet Gary Snyder was a committed disciple of Zen Buddhism, and a significant inspiration for both writers in terms of their engagements with Eastern theology and philosophy.9 However, Ginsberg’s and Kerouac’s initial explorations of Eastern literature and thought in translation significantly pre-­date their first meeting with Snyder, and their interactions with Zen proved to be more creative and far less rigorously doctrinal than Snyder’s.10 By the time the three writers did meet in 1955, Kerouac and Ginsberg had already developed their own mutually constructed and highly personal interpretations of a wide selection of American translations of Eastern texts. Their jointly configured ‘Beat Zen’ was influenced by translations of both Taoist and Zen Buddhist writings, and their discussions of both often favoured Taoist texts. Ann Douglas makes this point in her excellent introduction to The Dharma Bums, noting that: ‘From the start Kerouac was skeptical about the Zen branch of Buddhism to which Snyder gave his allegiance’.11 Instead, Ginsberg and Kerouac developed their own ‘Beat’ version of Americanised Eastern thought, and, as was shown to be the case in relation to Salinger in the previous chapter, their understanding of Eastern philosophy was formed by a relatively small number of the English-­ language translations of Eastern literature and philosophy that were available in the American literary marketplace at the time.12 Ginsberg first encountered Chinese aesthetics during a visit to the New York Public Library Fine Art room in April 1953. This initial encounter with images that included Southern Song Dynasty artist Liang Kai’s Sakyamuni Descending the Mountain after Asceticism, inspired Ginsberg to check out over seventy books of Eastern literature and  philosophy, including D.  T. Suzuki’s Introduction to Zen Buddhism (1934).13 The influence of Ginsberg’s encounter with

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Chinese art in 1953 was to prove significant in shaping the aesthetics of both his and Kerouac’s future engagements with Eastern literature and thought. However, it was Kerouac’s far more rigorous scholarship that precipitated the serious study of Eastern texts in translation by both writers, which would in turn become a sustained lifelong interest for both men. Kerouac’s engagement with Eastern thought began in early 1954, while he was staying with Neal and Carolyn Cassady in San Jose. Sparked by an initial curiosity in, and subsequent aversion to, Cassady’s sudden obsessive fascination with the Californian mystic Edgar Cayce, Kerouac began to spend his days in the San Jose library, reading a wide variety of Eastern philosophical texts. He did so initially in order to inform his nightly arguments with Cassady about the validity of Caycean mysticism, but his reading quickly developed into an all-­ consuming ­intellectual fascination with translated Eastern texts.14 Kerouac’s letters to Ginsberg allow for the construction of a detailed list of the works that he and Ginsberg were exposed to during this period. They also reveal the material that most attracted both writers; a 1952 edition of Dwight Goddard’s A Buddhist Bible (1932) is by far the most frequently cited text.15 However, Henry Clark Warren’s Buddhism in Translations (1896) – which also famously appears in Eliot’s notes on The Waste Land, E.  A. Burtt’s The Techniques of the Compassionate Buddha: A Pocketbook (1955), Robert Payne’s The White Pony (1947), and the work of D. T. Suzuki, are all also mentioned by both writers.16 In addition, both men appear to have read the Hindu text The Bhagavad Gita, and make very frequent references to the work of the foundational Taoist writers Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu. It isn’t clear from the two writers’ correspondence which translations of these Taoist texts they possessed in addition to Bhikshu Wai-­tao’s translation of the Tao Te Ching, which was included in Goddard’s A Buddhist Bible from the 1952 edition.17 This varied reading marked the beginning of an intense period of sustained, if eclectic, observation and study of Eastern philosophy and meditation practice, lasting in its most intense form from 1954 until the final acceptance of the manuscript of On the Road by Viking Press in July 1955, when Kerouac was for a while distracted from such intense levels of engagement with Eastern philosophy by his newfound wealth and success.18

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Kerouac’s many letters to Ginsberg during this period provide significant insight into the detail of both writers’ engagements with Eastern philosophical texts. They reveal that the two writers were particularly drawn to a number of the Zen Buddhist sutras contained in Goddard’s A Buddhist Bible, and especially to ‘The Diamond Sutra’ and ‘The Surangama Sutra’.19 In January 1955, Kerouac instructs Ginsberg: ‘What you need at once is the DIAMOND SUTRA [. . .] It is the first and highest and final teaching [. . .]’.20 In Ginsberg’s next letter on 14 February, he writes back: ‘I read through the Diamond Sutra, which I found the perfect statement. I have marked passages and will note them presently and send them for your notation in relation to me.’21 These and other similar exchanges reveal that the Diamond Sutra had a particular significance for both writers; as this chapter will go on to demonstrate, Goddard’s translations of the Diamond and Surangama sutras form the crux of the pair’s developing ‘Beat Zen’.22 The two writers’ correspondence also exposes that it was to Taoist sources that Kerouac and Ginsberg were most strongly drawn, in addition to Goddard’s translations.23 The pair’s letters attest to Kerouac’s sustained efforts to instruct his friend in all that he was learning, so that Ginsberg might emulate his reading. In return, Ginsberg expressed an enthusiastic desire to join Kerouac in his study of Eastern thought, and actively consulted his friend for instruction. He wrote to Kerouac on 18 June 1954 affirming his commitment to the study of Eastern texts: ‘I will read Bhagavad Gita and some Buddhism soon, if you have directions and advice’, and again on 10 July, stating: ‘I will study Buddhism with you’, although this time he added, ‘I can’t get the fucking books here.’24 In response, Kerouac concentrated all of his notes from his reading in the San Jose library in early 1954 into a lengthy manuscript titled Some of the Dharma. This text was initially intended to be private notes of instruction for Ginsberg, although its purpose was later augmented, with Kerouac reframing ­it – ­in his own mind at l­east – a­ s a Taoist manual for the average American man.25 In addition to Some of the Dharma, he also produced a re-­telling of the Diamond sutra titled The Scripture of Golden Eternity (1960), and a posthumously published life story of the Buddha, Wake Up (2008), both of which drew heavily on the work of Goddard.26

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Above all however, the two men’s letters reveal the collaborative nature of their co-­created interpretation of Eastern thought as ‘Beat Zen’, and their uninhibited, Dada-­esque approach to combining ideas from different translations and traditions. Prior to their exposure to Eastern thought, both Ginsberg and Kerouac had inherited strong personal spiritualities from their respective upbringings.27 Ginsberg had also developed a complex personal spirituality that related to his 1948 ‘visions’, during which he claimed to have experienced the poet William Blake speaking to him. Early on in the two writers’ discussions of Eastern thought, Ginsberg explicitly relates Kerouac’s meditation experiences to these Blake visions. In 1948, while living alone in an apartment in East Harlem, Ginsberg experienced a series of what he refers to variously as ‘visions’ and a ‘psychotic episode’, in which he heard Blake’s voice speaking to him, reading the poems ‘Ah! Sunflower’, ‘The Sick Rose’ and ‘Little Girl Lost’ – a copy of which he had open in his lap at the time. These visions had a profound effect on Ginsberg, who dedicated much time and effort to trying to both interpret and recreate them.28 As his letters reveal, it was not until his 1954 correspondence with Kerouac on this point that he was able to begin the process of reconciling himself to his Blake episode, and this was ultimately only achieved by placing the visions within a Taoist philosophical framework.29 Ginsberg’s letter of 10 July 1954 requests Kerouac’s advice concerning whether his 1948 Blake visions could have been moments of samadhi – meditative ‘concentration’30 in the Zen Buddhist tradition.31 Kerouac wrote back to Ginsberg on 30 July, enthusiastically advocating such an interpretation, and unselfconsciously placing Ginsberg’s Blake visionary experiences at the heart of the hybrid, emergent ‘Beat Zen’ philosophy that the two writers were d ­ eveloping through their letters from this period. Kerouac writes: At your request, I pondered and remembered your 1948 Harlem visions, and they were the granddaddy of em a­ ll . . . a­ ccurate ­too . . . ­prophetic of Buddha. I would say you are a Sage, an elephant among Kings, a veritable Ananda among men, you have more naturals in you then Old Bull B ­ alloon . . . ­Strange to say, tho, I see you very clearly now as more of

 Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac/ 135 a Chinese type sage, a Taoist, a Chuangtse, than a ­Buddhist . . . I­ am now reading Tao over again carefully; Chuangtse especially, who is absolutely brilliant; I find Indian Buddhism almost impossible to practice; Tao is a more elastic, more humane philosophy whereas Buddhism is an ascetic way of life tacked on to a ­philosophy . . . ­asceticism and yogism are hard on a big boned fella like me, sensual wine lover, woman lover like ­me . . . ­bum like m ­ e . . . ­I think I’ll become a wandering Taoist ­Bum . . . ­wanta come?’32

Kerouac interprets Ginsberg’s 1948 visions as examples of the poet achieving what he variously terms Buddhist enlightenment, as an ‘Ananda’, and Taoist wisdom, as ‘a Chuangtse’.33 However, in this passage Kerouac also reveals his preference for Taoism as opposed to ‘Indian Buddhism’.34 This preference for Taoism is clearly partly the result of an admiration for the writing of Chuangtse (Chuang Tzu), who is considered one of the founding fathers of Taoism alongside Lao Tzu. However, the primary reason that Kerouac states for this preference is what he perceives to be the more elastic, and less ascetic, nature of Taoist thought; he describes Taoism as more easily adopted by a ‘big boned [. . .] sensual wine lover’ – in other words, by a mid-­twentieth-­century American man who has grown up in a culture of conspicuous consumption, as opposed to ascetic self-­denial.35 This ease of adaption is a significant point, as both writers approached Eastern literature and thought with a view to its adoption and adaption in equal measure. However, in this passage, Kerouac notably differentiates between Taoism and Buddhism, and he goes on to express a preference for Taoism as a philosophy. This preference is articulated by both writers on multiple occasions in later letters, with Ginsberg writing back in reply to this letter and affirming a preference for Taoism: ‘I like your Tao, its more humane’. He also explicitly reinforces Kerouac’s language in support of the adoption of Taoism: ‘I’m a wandering Taoist Bum [. . .] or would like to be’.36 The pair’s letters from the years 1954–6 provide further evidence that Taoism was a dominant influence upon their developing ‘Beat Zen’, alongside Goddard’s translations of the Zen Buddhist Diamond and Surangama sutras. Ginsberg writes to Kerouac in a letter dated 14 January 1955:

136 / Writing Nature I have no, or few, doubts that you have conceived and touched (by means of mental, physical sensation) the basic single truth [. . .] X which is ‘unspeakable,’ ‘unknowable’ and ‘unthinkable.’ Believe this X can however be e­ xperienced. I imagine it can also be communicated, or hinted at, pointed to (with finger, image, X, poem, word, etc).37

What Ginsberg describes variously as the ‘basic single truth’, and ‘X’, corresponds closely to the characterisation of Tao within foundational Taoist texts such as Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching and the writings of Chuang-­Tzu. These texts describe Tao as inherently ‘unspeakable’, or un-­nameable: the opening lines of the Tao Te Ching are ‘Tao called Tao is not Tao/Names can name no lasting name’, while The Way of Chuang Tzu states that ‘Tao is beyond words/And beyond things’.38 In his introduction to Stephen Addiss and Stanley Lombardo’s recent scholarly translation of the Tao Te Ching, Burton Watson describes Tao as a ‘metaphysical first principle that embraces and underlies all being, a vast Oneness that [both precedes and generates] the endlessly diverse forms of the world’. However, he also qualifies this description by emphasising that ‘as the Tao Te Ching stresses, tao lies beyond the power of language to describe’.39 Ginsberg describes ‘X’ as a ‘basic single truth’ that is similarly unutterable and unknowable. His sense that, although ‘X’ cannot be ‘represented by ideas’, it can still be ‘communicated and hinted at’ by writing and imagery, reflects Watson’s explanation of the role of the Taoist text, which he describes as being ‘to impart [Tao] to the reader, through hints, symbols, and paradoxical utterances’.40 Ginsberg and Kerouac continue to use the letter X to denote this idea of an unutterable ‘basic truth’ that is commensurate with Tao throughout their letters, and indeed the substitution is a particularly apt one given that the symbol’s inscrutability reflects the inability of Tao to be either ‘named’ or ‘written’. Further analysis of the two writers’ letters reveals that their mutually developed, personalised interpretation of Eastern thought is characterised by its prioritisation of two major factors: an interdependent relationship between human and world, and the annihilation of the ego as a precondition for the achievement of spiritual enlightenment.41 Ginsberg writes to Kerouac of his developing study of Eastern thought:

 Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac/ 137 I am absorbed in the world. The world is real, as it wasn’t to me when I had first vision of X. And now it is perhaps time for training in the absolute illusion of absolute reality, that is, time for another approach to the unimaginable only this time not by thinking of X but by emptying the mind of all thought.42

Ginsberg describes the goal of his developing study of translated Taoist and Zen Buddhist texts in terms of the annihilation of thought. It is through this emptying of the mind and diminishing of the ego that he asserts X, or Tao, can be experienced. The annihilation of the ego is also a significant feature of Goddard’s translation of ‘The Diamond Sutra’. The goal of Zen meditation practice, as Goddard describes it, is to move beyond any conception of the ego, and towards a state of ego-­less interdependence between the human mind and the more-­than-­human world. In his translation of ‘The Diamond Sutra’, Goddard writes that the disciple of Zen Buddhism must: give up [. . .] all clinging to arbitrary conceptions about phenomena [. . .] The mind is disturbed by these discriminations of sense concepts and the following arbitrary conceptions about them and, as the mind becomes disturbed, it falls into false imaginations as to one’s self and its relation to other selves [. . .] if a Bodhisattva-­Mahasattva [. . .] conceives within his mind any of these arbitrary conceptions discriminating himself from other selves, he will be like a man walking in darkness and seeing nothing.43

This passage from ‘The Diamond Sutra’ promotes an interdependent relationship between the human mind and the environment that is closely connected to the annihilation of the ego; as Goddard’s translation describes it, enlightenment is achieved through the breaking down of the boundaries between the ‘self’ and other ‘selves’. This understanding of total interdependence between mind and world reflects Ginsberg’s statement above that he feels ‘absorbed in the world’. The ecological implications of this process are better illuminated when it is thought through in relation to Stacy Alaimo’s concept of ‘trans-­corporeality’. Alaimo describes ‘trans-­corporeality’ in entirely material terms, and in relation to the human body. However,

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her description of the ‘trans-­corporeal’ location of the human as: ‘always intermeshed with the more-­than-­human world’, and her extrapolation that this ‘underlines the extent to which the human is ultimately inseparable from the “environment”’, provides a framework for understanding the relations between human mind and world described in Goddard’s translation of ‘The Diamond Sutra’.44 ‘The Diamond Sutra’ presents the rejection of ‘arbitrary conceptions of phenomena’, including ‘the existence of one’s own ego-­selfness’, as necessary preconditions for the attainment of enlightenment. It also describes the state of enlightenment in terms of a total integration of the ‘self’ with ‘other selves’, which is facilitated through the presence of a common, unifying immaterial substance that is termed ‘Mind Essence’.45 The connection between enlightenment and an awareness of the total interdependence of the ego with the world is reinforced on the same page of Goddard’s Diamond sutra, on which Buddhahood is described as a state: ‘whose essence is identical with the essence of all things’.46 The ecological implications of this interpretation of the self are evident if it is understood as expressing a kind of ‘trans-­corporeal’ location of the human mind; within the state of enlightenment that ‘The Diamond Sutra’ describes, the human mind is ‘ultimately inseparable from “the environment”’, although both mind and world are conceived in immaterial terms.47 Kerouac and Ginsberg also discuss the role of the annihilation of the ego on numerous occasions in their letters, and their descriptions closely echo the Diamond and Surangama sutras’ depictions of the necessity for the renunciation of the ego in the pursuit of a state of egoless absorption in the immaterial, unifying substance of ‘Mind-­Essence’.48 For instance, in his description of one of his earliest meditations, Kerouac relates that: ‘I lost myself in the recognition that I have no self, no ego, and therefore can no longer act as “I” ’.49 The emphasis on the annihilation of the ego, and the resultant awareness of ecological interdependence, which Kerouac and Ginsberg take from Goddard’s translations of the sutras, becomes a shaping influence on both writers’ literary depictions of the human relationship to Nature. As this chapter goes on to demonstrate, both writers repeatedly portray the process of spiritual enlightenment as a movement towards an egoless, ‘trans-­corporeal’ location

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of the human mind with respect to the world, which results in a state of increased ecological awareness. However, as the above passage from Ginsberg’s letter illustrates, references to Goddard’s translations of the Zen sutras are often combined, in the writing of both Ginsberg and Kerouac, with allusions to Taoism. In this way, both writers repeatedly blend Zen Buddhist and Taoist vocabulary and concepts in order to create their own hybrid ‘Beat Zen’, which unselfconsciously combines elements from both traditions. The two writers’ increasing absorption in translated Eastern thought also had a significant impact on the development of Beat literature. In a letter to Ginsberg dated 18 January 1955, Kerouac argues that the new philosophical framework that he and Ginsberg felt they were constructing through their adoption and adaption of elements of translated Eastern thought was imperative to the development of a new twentieth-­century American poetics. He writes: ‘there can be no poetry with any basis other than Buddhist that will have no holes’,50 and follows this up in a later letter dated 14 July 1955 by instructing Ginsberg, who is considering beginning graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley: Don’t study Greek and Prosody at Berkeley, get away from this Pound kick, Pound is an Ignorant P ­ oet – ­How many times do I have to tell you that it’s a Buddhist, AN EASTERN FUTURE ahead [. . .] At Berkeley study Sanskrit and start translating big Sutras never before translated and write poetry with Buddhist base [. . .] even greater and deeper than Buddhism, is Primitive Africa where old men when its time to die sit down and think themselves out to death51

This passage illustrates the degree to which Kerouac believed ‘Beat Zen’ to be an influence on the new Beat writing, a point which is underscored by Ginsberg’s later observation that the Beat Generation was ‘primarily a spiritual movement’.52 It also evidences the wider turn towards globally disparate philosophies by mid-­century American writers that this book exposes. The reference to African culture as another site of philosophies that Kerouac felt had the potential to offer superior wisdom and spiritual fulfilment in comparison to hegemonic Cold War American culture recalls

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Bowles’s engagements with Sufi mysticism detailed in the first chapter of this study. Indeed, the close relationship between Bowles and the Beat writers means that Bowles’s work may even have been a direct inspiration for this remark. The directive that Kerouac gives Ginsberg to ‘study Sanskrit and start translating big Sutras’ also closely echoes the actions of J.  Robert Oppenheimer at Berkeley under the tutorage of Arthur Ryder, as detailed in Chapter 2. Ginsberg’s letters contain comparable assertions of the role of translated Eastern philosophy in influencing the development of ‘Beat’ writing; for example, in a letter dated 14 January 1955, he aligns the writing of free verse with his immersion in Taoist literature. It is a significant point that Ginsberg’s most productive early period, which culminated in the writing of ‘Howl’, occurred at the climax of the pair’s developing discussions of Taoist and Zen Buddhist thought. Ginsberg alludes to this connection in a letter to Kerouac, writing: I also perhaps mistakenly (thru reading Taoism and Confucius and Yeats and Blake) followed the line thus: since all things are One, absorption in the idea of One is an absorption on the one thing that one isn’t, so to speak. So that to enter One I had to enter its manifestation, the world [. . .] (that’s when I began to write free verse too) [. . .] Also influenced by poem #1 in Lao-­Tze (don’t have it here, but it says, since the inner mystery, X, and the surface of the universe are One, – men give them different names are confusing the issue ­metaphysically – ­who names or touches surfaces touches the inner mystery [sic].)53

In this letter, Ginsberg explicitly links reading Eastern texts in translation with a significant change in his writing style, stating that his reading of Taoism coincided with him beginning to write in free verse. This not only implies that he had already begun to do as Kerouac suggested and merge his study of Eastern thought with his creative practice, but it also implies that another transformative moment in the evolution of his poetic style may have been inspired by his reading of Eastern texts. Ginsberg first responded to his initial engagement with Eastern thought and art in the New York Public Library by experimenting with the triadic form, and later readings of Taoism and Confucius, as well as Yeats and Blake, appear to

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have motivated a transition to the use of free verse.54 This passage also evidences the fundamentality of the idea of interdependence between humanity and world to Ginsberg’s developing appreciation of Taoist and Zen Buddhist thought. It also demonstrates that he had at least some understanding of the role of material Nature in Taoism: a core principle of Taoist thought is that ‘all physical things contain the Tao’.55 Ginsberg writes that ‘X’, or Tao, and the ‘surface of the universe’ are ‘One’, referencing the presence of a common substance uniting all of material Nature, including the human. Taoism is built upon the fundamentally monist precept that all human and nonhuman life ‘contains the same qi’,56 and that resultantly there is no sense in which the human is privileged over the nonhuman.57 Tao is therefore both the origin, and also ‘the noumenon of everything’, and exists in all things.58 This monist perspective is alluded to in Ginsberg’s paraphrasing of Lao Tzu: ‘to touch the surface of the universe [is to] touch the inner mystery’. Notably, the role of qi as a unifying common substance functions in a comparable manner to ‘Mind Essence’, which in turn reflects the substantial influence of Taoism on the foundation and development of Zen Buddhism.59 The two writers’ growing fascination with Eastern thought is present alongside their shared sense of a philosophical vacuum existing at the heart of mid-­century American culture. In Some of the Dharma, Kerouac alludes to an inadequacy in contemporary American philosophy, writing: ‘all over America, truckdrivers, and the only philosopher Professor Whitehead. And everybody mad as hell and black in ignorance. But not Professor Whitehead’. He goes on to denounce Whitehead’s philosophy further, suggesting it to be both elitist and inaccessible by quoting from another translator of Chinese philosophy whose work was widely accessible in the American marketplace, Lin Yutang60: ‘“When one thinks about contemporary philosophy in America one thinks of Professor Whitehead. But what has the philosophy of Professor Whitehead got to do with the common man?” (Lin Yutang and its funny)’.61 Alfred North Whitehead was an English mathematician, historian and philosopher of science, who moved to America to take up a post at Harvard University in 1924. His philosophy of science writing, which included Science and the Modern World (1925) and

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Process and Reality (1929), was widely read in America after his appointment at Harvard, and was particularly influential upon the Black Mountain College poets.62 However, Kerouac’s belief that Whitehead’s thought was supremely ill-­ fitted to the ‘truckdrivers’ of America is clear in Some of the Dharma, as is his desire to promote his hybridised ‘Beat Zen’ as an accessible and spiritually enriching alternative that would, he believed, be better suited to the ‘common man’ of the mid-­century USA. Motivated by this desire to promote ‘Beat Zen’ as the ideal philosophy for his fellow mid-­ century American men, he is increasingly brazen in his attempts to depict ‘Beat Zen’ as a philosophy located within existing American cultural frameworks.63 These attempts to suggest an innate compatibility between ‘Beat Zen’ and American culture consist of the unsubtle re-­ situation of elements of Eastern literature and thought within established American literary and cultural traditions. In The Dharma Bums, Kerouac characterises Japhy Ryder/Gary Snyder as a product of rural West Coast American culture, through repeated references to Ryder’s Rocky Mountain childhood and backwoodsman skills. However, he also simultaneously describes Japhy as ‘exactly like the vision I had of the old Zen Masters of China out in the wilderness’. This jarring amalgam of the two disparate cultural traditions is even more explicit in the list of Japhy’s ‘heroes’ that Kerouac provides, which include: ‘John Muir and Han Shan and Shih-­te and Li Po and John Burroughs and Paul Bunyan’.64 By placing American environmentalists Muir and Burroughs, and the mythical American woodsman Paul Bunyan, alongside these Tang Dynasty Chinese Masters, Kerouac develops Japhy as a character that simultaneously embodies the traditions of American environmentalism and Eastern philosophy. By presenting Japhy’s personal philosophy and lifestyle as developing from these two distinct and globally disparate traditions, he thus hopes to suggest that ancient Chinese thought and American environmentalism can be viewed as complementary traditions. Kerouac goes on to compare Japhy to the American naturalist John Muir on a number of occasions throughout the novel. Japhy describes his past sojourns in the Sierra Nevada mountains to Ray in the following terms: ‘For weeks on end, like John Muir, climb around all by myself following quartzite veins or making posies of

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flowers for my camp, or just walking around naked and singing [sic]’.65 Muir’s influence is therefore present in Kerouac’s depiction of the ascent of American mountains as a form of escape from the pressure to conform exerted by hegemonic Cold War American ­society – ­a tradition into which Japhy inaugurates Ray during the novel by telling him: ‘You know old John Muir used to go up those mountains where we’re going with nothing but his old army coat and a paper bag full of dried bread and he slept in his coat [. . .] and he roamed around like that for months before tramping back to the city’.66 Kerouac therefore depicts his protagonists in The Dharma Bums as heirs to a tradition of American naturalism that Muir, Thoreau and John Burroughs represent.67 However, he simultaneously portrays Ray and Japhy’s interactions with Nature as governed by the Taoist–Zen Buddhist traditions that are embodied in the Chinese Tang Dynasty poets Li Po, Han Shan and Shih-­te. A page later in The Dharma Bums, Ray states that: ‘All over the West, and in the mountains of the East, and the desert, I’ll tramp with my rucksack and make it the pure way’.68 In a single sentence, Kerouac joins a narrative of exploration of the American wilderness ‘out West’ with an evocation of East Asian pilgrimage, through the allusion to the Taoist ‘Way’. He therefore attempts to combine the two narratives, of Eastern enlightenment, and of immersion in the American wilderness in the tradition of naturalists such as Muir, in an effort to locate ‘Beat Zen’ within the American landscape and naturalist tradition. His appropriation of Eastern philosophy in order to suggest a superior form of Western environmental engagement again brings to mind Ramachandra Guha’s contemporary critique of the deep ecology movement, in which he condemns the ‘coupling of (ancient) Eastern and (modern) ecological wisdom’ in aid of consolidating ‘the claim that deep ecology is a philosophy of universal significance’.69 Kerouac is guilty of the same impulse that Guha describes throughout his engagements with translated Eastern thought, which he consistently suggests to constitute a superior framework for ecological thought and action. He also repeatedly argues for the widespread American adoption of his Eastern-­influenced ‘Beat Zen’ philosophy, which he presents as grounded in a renewed ecological awareness. This approach should continue to be unequivocally condemned within contemporary

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ecocriticism, in line with Guha’s critique. However, it is significant to note the presence of this persistent trope within the work of white American writers’ depictions of Nature at mid-­century, a number of decades earlier that the similarly Orientalist and universalising appropriations of Eastern thought that Guha criticises in the deep ecology movement. Kerouac’s strategic relocation of ‘Beat Zen’ within American literary and cultural traditions is also evident elsewhere in The Dharma Bums. One instance of this that gives a particularly illustrative insight into the direct impact of this strategy upon Kerouac’s ecological portrayal of Nature is found in his allusion to the work of Washington Irving. In this passage of the novel, Kerouac employs the recognisable framework of one of Irving’s best-­known works, ‘Rip Van Winkle’, in order to depict ‘Beat Zen’ as the ‘natural’ philosophy of the ‘common’ American man. Ray describes his interactions with the men from the South Carolina village where he habitually stays with his mother: I’d watch them rambling around in the fields all day looking for something to do, so their wives would think they were real busy hardworking men, and they weren’t fooling me either. I knew they secretly wanted to go sleep in the woods, or just sit and do nothing in the woods, like I wasn’t too ashamed to do. They never bothered me. How could I tell them that my knowing was the knowing that the substance of my bones and their bones and the bones of dead men in the earth of rain at night is the common individual substance that is everlasting tranquil and blissful?70

Kerouac’s description of the desire of his fellow men to ‘go and sleep in the woods’ echoes the narrative of Irving’s 1819 sketch ‘Rip Van Winkle’, in which the eponymous protagonist is famously ‘henpecked’ for his failure to work in a way that his wife finds productive. Rip spends his days attempting to look busy, and when he finally manages to escape into the woods to sleep, he is enchanted, and sleeps through the Revolutionary War. Kerouac’s allusion to Irving’s 1819 story has a twofold impact on his attempts to situate ‘Beat Zen’ within an American cultural context. Firstly, it promotes the idea of a search for Eastern spiritual enlightenment existing within a founding work of American literature, thereby implying

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that enlightenment in the Taoist–Zen Buddhist tradition has an American cultural origin. Kerouac achieves this by reframing Rip’s decision to escape from work by disappearing into the forest as an innate spiritual hunger, in a fashion that mirrors Ray’s meditation practice in The Dharma Bums. Secondly, the references to the tale of Rip Van Winkle build up Kerouac’s presentation of ‘Beat Zen’ as the antidote to a particular spiritual thirst present within the average mid-­century American male. He depicts the American ‘common man’ – here represented by Rip, and in other examples by the ‘truckdrivers’ and ‘bums’ he encounters in the ­novel – a­ s innately drawn towards enlightenment in the Eastern philosophical tradition.71 Rip’s chronic lack of productivity renders him an archetypal ‘bum’, and Kerouac’s allusions to the character therefore also advances his portrayal, throughout The Dharma Bums, of a dichotomy between commodity culture and ‘Beat Zen’ spirituality.72 Similarly, Kerouac depicts the men in his hometown as under societal pressure to appear ‘real busy hardworking men’, while simultaneously possessing an innate desire to ‘go and sleep in the woods, or go into the woods and do nothing, like I wasn’t ashamed to do’. Kerouac’s portrayal of a fundamental affinity between the ‘common’ American man and ‘Beat Zen’ is enforced in the statement that follows the above passage: ‘I actually told [one of the men] how I was sitting out in the woods meditating and he really rather understood’.73 Kerouac positions ‘Beat Zen’ as not only a philosophy that his fellow American men would benefit from adopting, but also as a philosophy the hunger for which is innately present within them. The same strategy of situating ‘Beat Zen’ within foundational aspects of US literature and culture is also apparent in Kerouac’s references to the work of Walt Whitman in both The Dharma Bums and in Some of the Dharma, and to the figure of Abraham Lincoln in the latter text.74 The above passage also demonstrates Kerouac’s depiction of the outcome of Ray’s forest meditation in terms of a renewed ecological awareness. The insight that he gains from his meditation practice is that: ‘the substance of my bones and their bones and the bones of dead men in the earth of rain at night is the common individual substance’. Meditation leads Ray to a conception of his own corporeality as one part within a system of ecology that includes

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both other humans and the material environment, with the run-­ on in the metaphor ‘earth of rain’ enhancing the elicitation of an interrelation between diverse phenomena within Nature. The reference to a ‘common individual substance’ again reflects the role of qi in Taoism as a common substance that flows throughout all of material reality.75 Qi at times takes ‘material form’, while also representing an immaterial state,76 and the presence and function of qi is fundamental to Taoism’s emphasis on an ecological interdependence between the human and the more-­than-­human environment.77 The reference to a common unifying substance also echoes the role of ‘Mind Essence’ in Goddard’s translation of ‘The Surangama Sutra’, although this substance is notably wholly immaterial in the Zen Buddhist tradition.78 Kerouac’s portrayal of Ray’s newfound appreciation of his place within an ecological Nature combines elements from both traditions, describing a corporeal interdependence with the environment that draws on the more material terms of the Taoist tradition, while also depicting an immaterial interdependence between human mind and world that reflects Goddard’s translation of ‘The Surangama Sutra’. Although Ray acknowledges that he will struggle to make his fellow American men understand his newfound ecological awareness, this fresh conception of the position of the human as an interdependent part of Nature is nevertheless depicted as the primary result of the wider dissemination of ‘Beat Zen’. Kerouac accepts that the concepts and vocabulary of Eastern philosophy will be alien to this target audience, but he contends that the ecological awareness that Taoist literature and Zen meditation practices generate is something that the average American man intrinsically ‘really rather’ understands. He thus presents the innate desire to ‘go and sleep in the woods’ in his fellow American men as a spiritual thirst that could be quenched through the wider dissemination of ‘Beat Zen’, the ultimate result of which would be a widespread ecological awareness. Throughout The Dharma Bums, immersion in material Nature is repeatedly presented as fundamental to Ray’s meditation practice. Kerouac also depicts the presence of the more-­than-­human world as a significant point of difference between the practice of his and Ginsberg’s ‘Beat Zen’, and the more conventional Zen practice of Gary Snyder/Japhy Ryder. Ray states:

 Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac/ 147 I couldn’t meditate indoors any more like as Japhy had just done, after all that winter in the woods of night I had to hear the little sounds of animals and birds and feel the cold sighing earth under me before I could rightly get to feel a kinship with all living things being empty and awake.79

Kerouac avers that the goal of his particular meditation practice, unlike Japhy’s, is the development of an interdependent relationship with an ecological N ­ ature – a­ feeling of ‘kinship with all living things’. He therefore presents the ‘sounds’ of the wood’s nonhuman inhabitants and the ‘feel’ of the ‘cold earth sighing’ as integral to the successful attainment of samadhi. Kerouac describes the materiality of the connection between himself and his environment triggering insights into his corporeal interdependence with Nature, and ultimately leading to the dissolution of the ego through the realisation that the self is indiscriminate from ‘other selves’. This emphasis on the presence of a unifying common substance that facilitates ecological interdependence between human and environment is recurrently established in the novel, with Ray commenting: ‘I felt great compassion for the trees because we were the same thing’ and ‘all living and dying things like me and these dogs coming and going without any duration or self substance’.80 The Zen Buddhist–Taoist revelation of a unifying substance common to all phenomena is therefore depicted as leading Ray to relinquish the idea of his own ‘self substance’, and to perceive both the stray dogs that follow him, and the trees, as his equals. Kerouac’s portrayal of Ray’s forest meditations therefore once again evidences the writer drawing on, and combining, elements of Taoism and Zen; the emphasis on equality and interdependence within material Nature reproduces the prominence of these traits in the Taoist tradition,81 whereas the description of the role of a unifying, immaterial ‘self-­ substance’ replicates the role of ‘Mind Essence’ as described in ‘The Surangama Sutra’.82 As I have already noted, the function of a unifying substance in facilitating an ecological worldview in which the human is an indiscriminate and interdependent part of Nature is common to both Taoism and Zen Buddhism, and derives from the influence of Taoism on the foundation of Zen Buddhism.83 The parity between

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human and nonhuman, or between sentient and non-­ sentient beings, is also explicitly f­ oregrounded within Goddard’s translation of ‘The Diamond Sutra’.84 This text states that ‘the phenomena of all things is of one “suchness” with Buddhahood’, and describes this universal ‘suchness’ as the basis of all of the ‘arbitrary conceptions of phenomena’ and the ‘infinite number of living and dying beings’.85 Kerouac’s language in The Dharma Bums closely parallels Goddard’s, with the echo of Goddard’s phrasing in ‘all living and dying things’ providing further evidence of the substantial influence that Goddard’s version of ‘The Diamond Sutra’ had on the ecological, interdependent depiction of the human in relation to Nature that the novel advances. The desired result of Kerouac’s woodland meditations is described in terms of the same loss of ego, or ‘self substance’, that characterises the discussion of ‘Beat Zen’ in his and Ginsberg’s letters.86 This foregrounding of the loss of ego as fundamental to the achievement of enlightenment again draws on the language and concepts of ‘The Diamond Sutra’, which prioritises the realisation of ‘the principle of the egolessness of all things’ and the attainment of ‘perfect selflessness’ as the ultimate goal of the Bodhisattva-­Mahasattva.87 In The Dharma Bums, Kerouac describes the process of his woodland meditation in the following terms: I immediately fell into a blank thoughtless trance wherein it was again revealed to me ‘This thinking has stopped’ and I sighed because I didn’t have to think any more and felt my whole body sink into a blessedness surely to be believed, completely relaxed and at peace with all the ephemeral world of dream and dreamer and the dreaming itself.88

The disappearance of the ego is therefore presented as both the goal of meditation, and as resulting in the integration of the ‘ephemeral world’ and the human mind. The influence of Goddard’s translation of the Diamond sutra therefore leads Kerouac to place the human mind and body into ‘trans-­corporeal’ relation with the more-­than-­ human world. Kerouac emphasises this same ‘trans-­ corporeal’ location of the human mind in a state of successfully transcendent meditation in his letters to Ginsberg, writing of his meditation practice: ‘I am emptiness, I am not different from emptiness, neither

 Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac/ 149

is emptiness different from me; indeed, emptiness is me’.89 The influence of the Diamond and Surangama sutras is again evident in Kerouac’s phrasing, with his claim to understand himself as ‘emptiness’ reflecting the Diamond sutra’s declaration: ‘[Buddhahood] is neither reality or unreality but abides together with all phenomena in emptiness and silence, inconceivable and inscrutable.’90 The multiple occasions of similarity between Kerouac’s language and Goddard’s reinforces the degree to which Kerouac drew on Goddard’s translations in particular in his representations of Eastern thought. It also indicates the impact that Goddard’s translations had on Kerouac’s literary depiction of a ‘trans-­corporeal’, ecological relationship between the human mind-­and-­body and the environment. However, the most pervasive and recurrent location of spiritual enlightenment in the work of both writers is the mountaintop. Goddard’s A Buddhist Bible opens with the following description of the location of Zen wisdom at the top of a mountain: ‘As one upon a rocky mountain standing [. . .] E’en thus, O Thou with Wisdom filled, ascending’.91 The connection between the ascent of a mountain and the achievement of spiritual enlightenment that this opening quotation establishes is also present in the recurrent portrayals of mountains in the writing of Ginsberg and Kerouac from this period. In the work of both writers, the ascent of the mountain becomes a symbol for the attainment of ­enlightenment – ­an association that originates in Ginsberg’s initial experiences of Chinese art in the New York Public Library Fine Arts collections in 1953. Ginsberg’s exposure to Chinese art in 1953 was instrumental in defining an aesthetic that would dominate his and Kerouac’s ‘Beat Zen’. The potency of this aesthetic influence is apparent in a letter that Ginsberg wrote to Kerouac on 5 September 1954: I also have read some Chinese cloud ­mountain – ­for as said in the Green Auto ‘Like Chinese magicians, confound the immortals with an intellectuality hidden in the mist.’ And my poem also by the way on Sakyamuni (who brought Buddhism to China) coming out of the mountain. I got most of my titles about it from digging the pictures of the cloudy mountains and the sages that the arhats painted [. . .] at the N. Y. Public Library Fine Arts room the great collections of Chinese p ­ aintings – v­ isions of

150 / Writing Nature the physical Tao, if one can get a spiritual insight from the painter’s material vision of the mountains receding into vast dream infinities series of mountains separated by infinities of mist. The paintings of the infinite worlds of mountains were my favorite [sic].92

This passage from Ginsberg’s letter offers a significant insight into the writer’s initial impression of Taoism, and outlines the role that twelfth-century Chinese art played in its formation. It also helps to illuminate the function that the image of the mountain goes on to play in the Taoist-­influenced fiction and poetry of both writers. The letter makes explicit the relationship between Ginsberg’s poetry from this period and the Chinese aesthetics that he encountered in the New York Public Library, and also reveals the strong correlation that developed in Ginsberg’s mind between the image of the mist-­ covered mountain and the idea of Tao. He describes ‘the cloudy mountains and the sages’ as ‘visions of the physical Tao’, and this conflation of the image of the mountain with spiritual enlightenment remains a fundamental part of the depictions of Taoist and Zen Buddhist thought in both his and Kerouac’s later work. His location of Tao within images of the ‘clouded mountain’ and the ‘series of mountains separated by infinities of mist’ reflects Tao’s simultaneous immateriality and manifestation within material Nature, and the repetition of ‘infinite’ additionally reinforces the relationship between Tao and unknowability, through the evocation of scales that lie beyond the comprehension of the human mind. The reference to ‘infinite worlds’ in this passage is also the first indication of a multi-­universal structure of ecology that recurs within both Ginsberg’s and Kerouac’s writings from this time. An appreciation of the aesthetics of Liang Kai’s Sakyamuni Descending the Mountain after Asceticism provides additional insight into the images that inspired Ginsberg’s descriptions of ‘Cloud Mountain’ art in this letter to Kerouac in 1954. Liang Kai was a painter in the imperial court of the Southern Song Dynasty, and was responsible for ‘some of the most evocative depictions of Taoist mountain paradises’ to come from the Song Dynasty. Kai is primarily famous for his depictions of Zen Buddhist themes, but his works are also some of the best surviving examples of Taoist painting from the Southern Song period, providing further evi-

 Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac/ 151

dence of the historic cross-­pollination of these two distinct traditions in early China.93 In his 1953 poem ‘Sakyamuni Coming Out From the Mountain’, written in response to viewing this work by Liang Kai, Ginsberg renders the mountain instrumental to the process of attaining enlightenment, describing Sakyamuni as an: ‘Arhat/who sought Heaven/under a mountain stone’. His conception of Taoism as both fundamentally unknowable, or unspeakable, and as ‘infinite’, is also reinforced in the poem’s closing lines: ‘[Sakyamuni] knows nothing/like a god [. . .] humility in beatness/ before the absolute World’.94 The absence of knowledge, or ego, that is established by ‘knows nothing/like a god’ reflects the emphasis on the annihilation of the ego that becomes a core component of Kerouac’s and Ginsberg’s ‘Beat Zen’, and the reference to the ‘absolute world’ implies that this annihilation occurs within an infinite structure. The prominence of the image of the mountain in ‘Sakyamuni’ as the site of enlightenment is also repeated across the work of Ginsberg and Kerouac. However, both writers modify and adapt the symbolism that they absorb from Taoist and Zen-­ influenced Chinese art, by resituating their ‘vision[s] of physical Tao’ within distinctly American landscapes. The mountains that come to symbolise the ascent to Taoist wisdom in both writers’ work are not the rugged Chinese landscapes like that of Sakyamuni Descending the Mountain after Asceticism, which so inspired Ginsberg in the New York Public Library. Instead, they are the Sierra Nevada and the North Cascades mountains of the American West Coast. The Dharma Bums contains comparable depictions of American mountains as locations of Eastern spiritual enlightenment, and also as sites of opposition to, and escape from, Kerouac’s contemporary American society. Mountains bookend the narrative: the first section of the novel relates Ray and Japhy’s trip up the Sierra Nevada mountains above Berkeley, California, and the final section narrates Ray’s season-­long sojourn as a fire watcher on Desolation ­Peak – ­part of the North Cascades Mountains of Washington State, just six miles south of the US’s northern border with Canada. The novel’s primary action is precipitated when Japhy begins to tell Ray of his ‘hero’, the legendary monk of Tang Dynasty poetry, Han Shan: ‘a Chinese Scholar who got sick of the big city and the world and took off to hide in the mountains’. After describing Han Shan’s flight

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from the city, Japhy proceeds to instruct Ray: ‘what you got to do is climb a mountain with me soon’.95 This declaration precipitates the book’s first major narrative episode, in which the pair ascend a peak in the Sierra Nevada mountains together. Their movement from the city into the mountains also reproduces Taoism’s founding legend, in which Lao Tzu, the Keeper of the Archives, leaves the city in disgust for a hermitage in the mountains. At the request of the city gatekeeper, Lao Tzu sets his wisdom down on paper before leaving for a remote life in the mountains. According to the legend, the text that he leaves behind is the source of the Tao Te Ching.96 Japhy and Ray’s ascent of the Sierra Nevada is related through constant allusions to a ‘Beat Zen’ aesthetic that reflects the combined influence of Ginsberg’s ‘Cloud Mountain’ and Goddard’s A Buddhist Bible. As the pair climb the mountain, Ray comments: ‘I was immensely pleased with the way the trail had a kind of immortal look about it, in the early afternoon now, the way the side of the grassy hill seemed to be clouded with ancient gold dust’.97 The suggestion of an ‘ancient’ and ‘immortal’ path draws heavily on Taoist imagery; as is noted in the previous chapter, Tao is most often translated as ‘the Way’ or ‘Path’.98 In addition, the references to clouds re-­forge the connection between clouds and ‘visions of the physical Tao’ that Ginsberg’s letters to Kerouac establish. The passage’s description of ‘ancient gold dust’ also displays the aesthetic influence of the translation of ‘The Surangama Sutra’ in A Buddhist Bible. Goddard’s version of this sutra is characterised by recurrent images of ‘dust particles’, which are depicted as analogous to the illusory and impermanent nature of ‘phenomena’. Kerouac was clearly drawn to the sutra’s evocation of the impermanence of phenomena through these repeat images of ‘dust particles’, as he notably reproduces similar passages of ‘The Surangama Sutra’ in the early pages of Some of the Dharma.99 In The Dharma Bums, he adds the qualifier ‘seemed’ in order to further emphasise the unknowability and impermanence of material Nature. The first mountain ascent that the novel describes is therefore steeped in similar references to the hybrid Zen Buddhist–Taoist-­ influenced aesthetic that Kerouac and Ginsberg were together developing. Resultantly, the American landscape takes on some of the attributes of the philosophical framework used to describe it; the

 Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac/ 153

mountain becomes associated with both ‘immortality’ and a shifting impermanence that belies a deeper transitory interdependence between human and Nature. This association is strengthened by the impact of the ascent on Ray and Japhy; it precipitates both silent reflection and the spontaneous generation of poetry. Ray describes: ‘As we got higher we got more tired [. . .] we weren’t talking any more and didn’t have to talk and were glad’, and ‘when we had any haikus now we’d yell them fore and aft’.100 The mountain climb is depicted as inspiring the spontaneous generation of poetry brought on by the perception of phenomena in material Nature, with Japhy singing to Ray: ‘yellow aspens. Just put me in mind of a haiku… “Talking about the literary ­life – ­the yellow aspens” ’.101 Kerouac’s presentation of haiku poetry as spontaneously engendered in the mind of the human by the perception of Nature recalls Salinger’s similar portrayals of poetry in the Eastern tradition as generated within Nature from the previous chapter. In Kerouac’s work, like Salinger’s, there is a suggestion that Nature possesses total agency in the generation of poetry in an Eastern literary tradition. While these depictions of the relationship between Nature and Eastern literature do gesture towards the comparatively larger role of materiality within Chinese and Japanese literary traditions, what these references to Eastern poetry as generated by material Nature overwhelmingly reveal is the persistence in the mid-­century of the pervasive, Orientalist fantasy that Robert Kern has shown to be prevalent within American literature, which represents Eastern languages and literatures as inherently closer to Nature than their Western counterparts.102 The final chapter of The Dharma Bums can be read as an extended evocation of the ‘Cloud Mountain’ art that Ginsberg refers to in his letter to Kerouac in 1953. In this section of the novel, Ray has followed Japhy’s advice and taken up the position of Fire Watcher on Desolation Peak. This episode fictionalises a job that both Kerouac and Gary Snyder did at different times in their lives, Kerouac in the summer of 1956. The role involved living in a tiny hut with 360-­ degree windows on top of Desolation Peak, in order to spot any wildfires that might break out in the Washington State wilderness. The extended descriptions of mountain landscapes in this section of the novel are dominated by depictions of an ecological Nature

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defined by its infinite extra-­terrestrial dimensions. The human presence in these final sections of the novel is also presented in progressively more unfamiliar relationships with its environment, and this dislocation contributes to the suggestion of new, and increasingly interdependent, ecological associations between the human and Nature. Kerouac describes Ray: standing on my head before bedtime on that rock roof of the moonlight I could indeed see that the earth was truly upsidedown and man a weird vain beetle full of strange ideas walking around upsidedown and boasting, and I could realize that man remembered why this dream of planets and plants and Plantagenets was built out of primordial essence [sic].103

The reference to ‘primordial essence’ evokes Taoism’s foundational monist precept that all of reality is comprised of the same common substance, qi.104 As has already been noted, this common substance is also present, but is referred to as ‘Mind Essence’, in Goddard’s translation of ‘The Surangama Sutra’.105 Kerouac was clearly very familiar with Goddard’s version of this ­sutra – ­he recommends it to Ginsberg on a number of occasions, repeatedly refers to ‘Mind Essence’ in his letters to Ginsberg, and reproduces numerous passages from this sutra in Some of the Dharma.106 He may also have lifted the phrase ‘primordial essence’ from one of the Surangama sutra’s many descriptions of ‘Mind Essence’; Goddard’s version of the Surangama relates the Buddha’s explanation that: ‘the origin of anything in all the universe [. . .] is but a manifestation of some primal essence. Even the tiny herbs, knots of thread, everything’. The Buddha then goes on to reveal that this ‘primal essence’ is the ‘essence’ of ‘Mind’.107 Kerouac’s reference to a ‘primordial essence’ as the origin of diverse ‘phenomena’ closely echoes this passage of the Surangama in both language and argument. This, in turn, inspires the increasingly ecological depiction of the human relationship to Nature in the latter sections of the novel; ‘Planets, plants and Plantagenets’ are all described as originating in the same substance. They are all also relegated to the same status of illusory phenomena, or a ‘dream’, in Kerouac’s vocabulary, as all are ultimately made up of the same immaterial ‘Mind Essence’.108 As a result of this Taoist–

 Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac/ 155

Zen influence, human history is depicted as but a part of an interdependent and transient universe. The dominance of the human is entirely subverted through Kerouac’s description of ‘man’ as a ‘weird vain beetle’, and Ray’s yogic headstand catalyses this dislocation by introducing an alternative view of the mountain landscape. This upside-­down perception is then connected with the rotation of the earth, thereby expanding the novel’s ecological presentation of Nature from the planetary to the universal. In these latter stages of the novel, Kerouac once again describes the enlightenment that Ray gains on the mountaintop in terms of a newfound ecological awareness. Standing on his head on the ‘rock roof’ of the mountain, Ray’s perspective shifts such that he has the following realisation: ‘The world was upsidedown hanging in an ocean of endless space and here were all these people sitting in theatres watching movies down there in the world to which I would return . . . ’109 The contrast between the infinite, ecological vision of Nature that Ray comes to through his meditation on the mountaintop, and the homogenous image of Americans down below ‘watching movies’, echoes Japhy’s earlier description of the ‘Beat’ movement as a rejection of working ‘for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn’t really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils, deodorants and general junk’. Instead of this cycle of capitalist consumption and production, Japhy predicts ‘thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks going up the mountains to pray’.110 In both of these passages, the ascent of the mountain connotes a rejection of mid-­century American society, while simultaneously awakening an awareness of the human’s ecological relationship to ­Nature – o ­ ne that is contrasted with the detachment of the moviegoers down below. The juxtaposition of the movie-­goers with ‘endless space’ exacerbates Kerouac’s presentation of the insignificance of American society in comparison to the infinite, ecological Nature that he situates it within, and this sentiment is reinforced by the enigmatic sentence that follows: ‘The innumerable worlds in the Milky Way, words.’ Kerouac thus contrasts the infinite, multi-­universal ecology that he evokes with language, and the tacked on, italicised ‘words’ reproduces the inability of language to convey Tao/Zen that is

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common to both traditions.111 This evocation of the inadequacy of language to convey Tao/Zen is also suggested elsewhere in the novel, with Ray variously expounding: ‘but there weren’t any words to describe the nothingness and purity’, and ‘I don’t want to hear your word description in words words words’.112 The very act of juxtaposing language with a multi-­universal depiction of Nature further shrinks the human presence and influence within the text, as well as recalling Salinger’s references to the Zen Buddhist flower sermon from the previous chapter. The Dharma Bums also contains its own retelling of the flower sermon, which Japhy delivers to Ray during the pair’s first ascent up the Sierra Nevada. He does so in order to explain the following Zen anecdote: One disciple came to a Master and answered his koan and the Master hit him with a stick and knocked him off the veranda ten feet into a mud puddle. The disciple got up and laughed. He later became a Master himself. ’Twasn’t by words he was enlightened, but by that great healthy push off the porch.113

Ray is less than convinced by the example, which he decries as ‘silly’ when it is first mentioned in a conversation with Japhy in the opening pages of the novel. His scepticism towards this founding myth of Zen Buddhism hints at the divergence of Kerouac and Ginsberg’s thought from Snyder’s Zen doctrine, which is reproduced in the novel through the different devotional practices of Ray and Japhy. This discrepancy is further outlined in the paragraphs that follow Japhy’s insistence on the value of ‘wallowing in mud’. In response to Japhy’s admonishment ‘Why do you sit on your ass all day’, Ray states: ‘I practice do-­nothing’.114 This is an allusion to the Taoist doctrine of ‘non-­action’, which dictates that the human should ‘be natural and remain non-­active’.115 However, ‘non-­action’ does not equate to inaction, but rather to ‘acting in accordance with the laws of nature and the nature of things’.116 Kerouac’s promotion of this Taoist practice reflects his earlier assertion of a preference for Taoism’s ‘more elastic’ and ‘less ascetic’ doctrine in his letters to Ginsberg. Whereas in The Dharma Bums Japhy is very much the Master, and Ray the pupil, there is nevertheless a deliberate

 Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac/ 157

endorsement of the Taoist ‘Way’ in this section of the novel, as opposed to Japhy’s studious and industrious devotion to Zen. Kerouac is unambiguous in his support for doctrinal infidelity in the novel, with Ray explicitly stating both: ‘I’m not a Zen Buddhist, I’m a serious Buddhist’, and, ‘I warned [Japhy] at once I didn’t give a goddam about the mythology and all the names and national flavors of Buddhism’.117 However, Japhy’s defence of the Master’s ‘mud puddle’ sermon also highlights a belief in the inadequacy of language to convey moments of enlightenment that is common to both Taoism and Zen Buddhism, with both traditions promoting the understanding that ‘mud is better than words’.118 Kerouac and Ginsberg’s collaborative creation of a hybrid ‘Beat Zen’ between 1954 and 1955 also had a significant impact on the poetry that Ginsberg was writing in these years, and, as has been demonstrated to be the case in the work of Kerouac, this influence manifests particularly strongly within the poet’s presentation of the human relationship to Nature. The period between 1954 and 1955 represented a prolific writing period for Ginsberg, and culminated in the debut of ‘Howl’ at the Six Gallery poetry reading organised by Ginsberg at the City Lights bookshop in San Francisco, on 7 October 1955.119 Kerouac arrived in San Francisco in time to attend the reading, but was too shy to read h ­ imself – ­he did, however, dramatise the night’s events in The Dharma Bums.120 This first performance of ‘Howl’ at the Six Gallery established Ginsberg as a major new name in American poetry, and led to the publication of his first collection, Howl and Other Poems, in 1956.121 Howl’s publication marked the beginning of Ginsberg’s illustrious career, as well as leading to his notoriety by sparking an indecency court case against the volume’s publishers.122 My reading of ‘Howl’ will contend that there is significant evidence in the poet’s letters to suggest that Goddard’s translation of ‘The Surangama Sutra’ had a shaping influence upon the composition of the poem. This influence is particularly marked within what will be shown to be the poem’s overarching ecological vision, and becomes clear if ‘Howl’ is considered in the context of the wider ecological vision of Nature present in Ginsberg’s work from this period. The poem ‘Sunflower Sutra’, written in the same period as ‘Howl’ and also published in 1956, illustrates the effect that Ginsberg’s

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discussions of ‘Beat Zen’ in his correspondence with Kerouac had on his poetry from this period. It also helps to expose the depth and complexity of the ecological vision that ‘Beat Zen’ precipitated in Ginsberg’s poetry, and the environmentalist perspective that this philosophy eventually led him to adopt. The influence of the Taoist and Zen Buddhist philosophy that Kerouac and Ginsberg were actively studying at the time of the composition of ‘Sunflower Sutra’ is clear throughout the poem; its most obvious manifestation is the reference in the poem’s title to the ‘sutra’ form, which in Buddhism is ‘commonly reserved for writings representing direct transmissions of the words of the Buddha’.123 As this reading of the poem will expose, Ginsberg’s appropriation of the sutra form signals the writer’s desire to communicate his own lesson concerning the intrinsically entangled and interdependent nature of environments, and to express an ecological vision of the relationship between human and universe.124 Ginsberg does not present Nature as a separate, oppositional entity with regard to the human in ‘Sunflower Sutra’; Nature is not ‘That Thing Over There’, as Timothy Morton describes its dominant depiction within twentieth- and twenty-­first-­century Euro-­American culture.125 Instead, the poem expresses a complex entanglement between human and environment, and in particular between the detritus of ‘industrial-­modern’ America and the organisms of sunflower and Beatniks alike. This entanglement is embodied in the juxtapositions that characterise the poem’s imagery. In images such as ‘box house hills’ and ‘the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery’, Ginsberg orchestrates metaphors that combine the ecological and the mechanical, describing an environment of material entanglements within which there is no divide between Nature, the human, and the mechanical.126 Rather, the human is presented as a part of an ecological mesh that encompasses all aspects of material reality.127 The dominance of these metaphors that provocatively juxtapose images of Nature, culture and technology begins in the poem’s opening description of the ‘tincan banana’ dock, and the pervasive presence of these images of entanglement contribute to a sustained evocation of an ecological Nature within the poem that has remained critically overlooked.128 The ‘Cloud Mountain’ aesthetic present in Ginsberg’s earlier work is also evoked in the first of the poem’s images of the polluted

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environment in which the speaker sits. There are ‘no fish in the stream, no hermit in those mounts’, and the absence of the ‘hermit’ in the mountain recalls the ‘Cloud Mountain’ images of Sakyamuni Descending the Mountain after Asceticism from the New York Public Library that were so influential upon the aesthetics of Kerouac and Ginsberg’s formative expressions of ‘Beat Zen’.129 Within ‘Sunflower Sutra’, the allusion to the absence of a Sakyamuni-­like hermit in the mountains creates a comparison between the pristine landscapes that are associated, for Ginsberg, with ‘visions of the physical Tao’, and the spiritual vacuum that is presented as both created by, and causative of, the dangerously polluted landscape of the poem. With knowledge of the substantial influence of the ‘Cloud Mountain’ aesthetic over Ginsberg’s poetics, the critique implied by the absent sage is clear: there is no possibility for spiritual enlightenment within the polluted American landscape described. The poem’s images of water pollution in ‘the oily water of the river’, and ‘no fish in that stream’, also eerily foreshadow the haunting images of heavily polluted waterways in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), which would enter public consciousness a full seven years after ‘Sunflower Sutra’ was written. The poem’s middle section catalogues the items found in a ­heavily polluted river: Harlem and Hells of the Eastern rivers [. . .] dead baby carriages, black treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the poem of the riverbank [. . .] the guts and innards of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what more could I name the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars [. . .] all these entangled in your mummied roots130

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These entangled images that juxtapose the organic and the industrial continue the poem’s depiction of the environment as a complex conglomeration of Nature, culture and technology, with the personification of the polluting material developing the poem’s portrayal of the human and the nonhuman existing together in a mesh of entwined forms. Ginsberg’s repetitive use of composite images that juxtapose human anatomy with the poisonous and mechanistic – ‘guts’ with ‘car’ and ‘cock’ with ‘cigar’– also suggest that the deformation and corruption of the human body is the result of its position within the polluted ecological mesh that the poem evokes. The images of dismembered human anatomy also emphasise the poem’s ‘trans-­ corporeal’ location of the human; ‘Sunflower Sutra’ presents the human body as enmeshed within, and resultantly subjected to toxification by, its environment. This implication of the harm to the human that its location within the polluted and entangled environment will cause is heightened by the insistent images of dismembered body parts, and the particular focus within these images on human reproductive organs suggests that the threat posed by such an environment extends to the human’s reproductive potential. These allusions to impotency and sterility, and resultant species death, culminate in the final composite image, the ‘dead baby carriage’; the ultimate result of the human’s corporeal suspension within such a heavily polluted environment, the poem implies, is the failure of human life to procreate. The poem’s evocation of the entwined fates of human and nonhuman life within twentieth-­century America is reinforced by depictions of Kerouac and of the sunflower as mirror images of each other. Kerouac is described as ‘rheumy-­eyed and hung-­over’, conjuring an irritant, unhealthy atmosphere, and suggesting that the subject has been poisoned through a combination of alcoholic self-­poisoning, and the osmosis of pollution from his environment. The sunflower is portrayed in similar terms, with the lines: ‘dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of old locomotives in its eye’, creating the first of many parallels between the forms of Kerouac and of the sunflower. However, Ginsberg also describes the dirt covering both the sunflower and Kerouac as a ‘grime’ that ‘was no man’s grime’. He therefore draws a line between humanity and

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industrial modernity that he refuses to draw between the human and Nature. This distinction appears to undermine the ‘dark’ ecological vision expounded by the poem’s earlier entangled images. Morton’s theorisation of ‘dark ecology’ asserts that the infinite dimensions of the mesh are able to contain and neutralise all, even those ­elements – s­ uch as the products of i­ ndustrialisation – t­ hat are considered to be ‘anti-­ecological’.131 In describing industrial ‘grime’ as ‘other’ with respect to both the human and the sunflower, the poem ultimately separates Nature and industrial pollution. This separation undercuts the poem’s earlier depictions of human and nonhuman life forms as equable and interchangeable, and disrupts its portrayal of the environment as an entanglement of the natural, cultural and technological that is so evocative of Timothy Morton’s mesh. ‘Sunflower Sutra’ thus ultimately falls short of replicating the conditions of Morton’s concept of ‘dark ecology’. However, Ginsberg’s groundbreaking poem ‘Howl’, written in the same year as ‘Sunflower Sutra’, demonstrates the poet expanding the ecological vision of his poetics, and exhibiting a depiction of Nature that does replicate the infinite dimensions of Morton’s ‘dark ecology’. The vocabulary and style of ‘Howl’ and ‘Sunflower Sutra’ display notable similarities, and these include the presence of the same entangled, composite imagery. ‘Howl’ opens with a description of ‘the starry dynamo in the machinery of night’, which again combines the mechanical and the celestial, and locates New York City within an infinite, entangled mesh of the organic and the mechanistic.132 The two poems also contain a substantial cross-­ over in terms of their Eastern-­influenced vocabulary and imagery. However, the presence of this influence in ‘Howl’, and the ecological vision that I will argue to lie at its heart, are only exposed when the poem is read with an appreciation of the developing discussions of ‘Beat Zen’ that Ginsberg and Kerouac had been engaged in during the period of its composition. When read in conjunction with Ginsberg and Kerouac’s discussions of ‘Beat Zen’, the lines: ‘burning for the ancient heavenly connection to/the starry dynamo in the machinery of night’ suggest a desire for a Zen Buddhist–Taoist interdependence between human mind and world. The ‘connection’ sought in ‘Howl’ can therefore be read as an ecological one, founded in the i­nterdependent

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l­ocation of the human mind with respect to its environment. This interpretation is given ballast by the connection’s description as ‘ancient’, which implies the presence of epistemological frameworks that pre-­date the development of Euro-­American culture. Such a reading is further enhanced by the image presented a few lines later of those: ‘who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated’.133 In conjunction with the reference to tenement buildings, ‘baring their brains to Heaven’ echoes Ginsberg’s descriptions of his Blake visions in 1948, which he relates as ‘like the top of my head coming off, letting in the rest of the universe connected to my own brain’.134 The poem’s protagonists ‘baring their brains to Heaven’ can therefore be read as indicative of a desire to forge an interdependent relationship between human mind and world in line with that which Ginsberg experienced during his original Blake visions, and which he and Kerouac sought repeatedly to reproduce through the practice of Zen meditation. The poem’s depiction of an interdependence between human mind and world reflects Goddard’s descriptions of ‘Transcendental Consciousness’ in ‘The Surangama Sutra’. This is the state that results from successful meditation, within which the human mind can be simultaneously ‘in perfect conformity with all sentient beings’ and with the ‘Essential, Mysterious Enlightened Mind of all the Buddhas’. In Goddard’s translation of ‘The Surangama Sutra’, access to ‘Transcendental Consciousness’ is described as occurring after the attainment of Nirvana.135 As ‘Howl’ progresses, the poem evokes this state of ‘Transcendental Consciousness’, through which the poem’s persona gains access to a plethora of experiences. ‘Howl’ suggests the ability of its poetic persona to experience ‘Transcendental Consciousness’ in lines such as – ‘They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells!’ This omniscient perspective is reiterated to a greater degree in the repetition of the phrase ‘I’m with you in Rockland’ throughout the final section of the poem. In this latter section, the poem’s persona is portrayed as able to experience life inside the psychiatric hospital in solidarity with Carl Solomon, and to simultaneously access a plethora of other experiences outside of it.136 The poem’s evocation of a state that reflects ‘Transcendental Consciousness’ is also developed through its depiction of the ‘trans-­

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corporeal’ location of the human mind; the mind is presented as able to move into and out of other minds and experiences, and this interdependence between human mind and world is facilitated by the unifying common substance, ‘Mind Essence’. Ginsberg’s letters reveal he was working his way through ‘The Surangama Sutra’ at the same time that he was writing ‘Howl’; in a letter dated ‘before Aug. 15, 1955’, he writes that he is enclosing the ‘first scribbled notes of a poem I am writing, nearer in your [Kerouac’s] style than anything’ – almost certainly a draft of ‘Howl’ – and also that he is ‘continuing the Surangama Sutra’.137 A reading that acknowledges the presence of these Taoist and Zen Buddhist influences within both ‘Sunflower Sutra’ and ‘Howl’ particularly illuminates the ending of the latter poem. The description of the eponymous sunflower as an ‘Unholy battered old thing’138 prefigures the repetition of ‘holy’ in the footnote to ‘Howl’, in which the word appears fifty-­eight times overall, and fifteen times in the first two lines alone.139 The repetition of ‘holy’ in ‘Howl’, and the radical philosophical position that ‘everything is holy’, have been read by critics including Shirley Dent and Jason Whittaker as evidence of the substantial and continued influence of Blake on Ginsberg’s work.140 This is a natural assumption, given Ginsberg’s relationship with Blake’s work across his oeuvre, the poem’s eponymous sunflower, and the frequency with which the line ‘Every thing that lives is holy’ appears in Blake’s work.141 However, an examination of the use and repetition of ‘holy’ in Ginsberg and Kerouac’s correspondence reveals that both writers habitually used the word as a form of shorthand in their letters to refer to their discussions of ‘Beat Zen’. For example, in a letter dated 29 December 1954, Ginsberg implores Kerouac to ‘practice thy Dhyana and bring me holy news’. Similarly, in a letter dated 12 January 1955, he writes: ‘forgive me for answering your holy letter with inflammatory’, referencing a letter from Kerouac discussing Eastern thought.142 Therefore, Ginsberg’s use of ‘holy’ in ‘Howl’ and in ‘Sunflower Sutra’ can also be read as a reference to ‘Beat Zen’.143 This reading of the word’s connotations is supported by the fact that Ginsberg specifically states, in a letter to Kerouac from this period, that ‘Howl’ was written in an attempt to replicate Kerouac’s writing; he describes it as ‘an imitation, practically’ of Kerouac’s

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style.144 This chapter has already exposed the degree to which Ginsberg’s visions of Blake were linked with his and Kerouac’s study of Eastern thought in the period in which ‘Howl’ was w ­ ritten – ­his visions of Blake were his first reference when considering the concept of samadhi, and both he and Kerouac proceeded to situate his 1948 Blake visions at the heart of their developing ‘Beat Zen’. As a result, the Blake visions signify both the work of Blake, and Ginsberg and Kerouac’s evolving hybrid ‘Beat Zen’ philosophy, in this period. Ginsberg himself refers to this joint signification within ‘Sunflower Sutra’, in the lines: ‘my first sunflower, memories of ­Blake – m ­ y ­visions – H ­ arlem’.145 Therefore, the repetition of ‘holy’ in Howl’s footnote should be understood not solely as a reference to Blake’s concept of holiness, but also as an allusion to Ginsberg and Kerouac’s emerging ‘Beat Zen’. As such, the line: ‘Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy!’ draws on both the work of Blake and on Ginsberg’s Taoist–Zen belief in the oneness of human mind and universe that derives from the monist belief in a unifying common substance, whether qi or ‘Mind Essence’.146 Despite the notable points of comparison between the two poems, ‘Howl’ differs from ‘Sunflower Sutra’ in the consummate ‘dark’ ecological vision that the poem advances. Timothy Morton’s theorisation of ‘dark ecology’ argues that for ecology to be definitively infinite, it must necessarily contain everything, including the ‘anti-­ecological’.147 In a process that reflects Church’s presentation of the nuclear bomb as a part of an infinite, ecological Nature in Chapter 2, Ginsberg develops a ‘dark’ ecological vision throughout ‘Howl’ that is at once critical of ‘industrial-­modern’ American society, and also understands that this society and its detritus are necessarily part of an infinite and entangled ecology. The ecstatic Taoist–Zen-­inspired revelation that ‘Everything is holy!’ therefore represents the culmination of the poem’s ‘dark’ ecological composition. The poem’s dramatisation of the process of the absorption and neutralisation of the ‘anti-­ecological’ within an infinite ecological thought is exemplified by the trajectory of the image of the warehouse, ‘Moloch’,148 the facade of which Ginsberg encountered while under the psychoactive influence of peyote a few days before he wrote ‘Howl’ in 1955.149 Moloch enters the poem as a demonic symbol of the destruction

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and horror of America’s ‘military-­industrial complex’, as ‘Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies!’150 However, as the poem progresses, Moloch’s presence is contained and neutralised by the poem’s infinitely expansive, ‘dark’ ecological vision of Nature. This transformation is effected through the utilisation of the concepts of ‘Mind Essence’ and ‘Transcendental Consciousness’ taken from ‘The Surangama Sutra’. Recourse to these elements of Zen thought facilitate the poem’s rehabilitation of the industrial-­ modern America that so alienates and horrifies Ginsberg, through their evocation of an infinite and expansive ecological vision. If all phenomena are illusory, empty and transitory, and the ‘tranquil and enlightened Mind’ is ‘the source of all conceptions of manifested phenomena’, then Moloch and the poem’s persona are fundamentally interconnected, as both are manifestations of the infinite and unifying substance that is ‘Pure Mind’. The line ‘Moloch whose name is the Mind’ explicitly references the role of ‘Mind Essence’ as a unifying substance, and the intertransposability between the poetic persona and Moloch that the unifying presence of ‘Mind Essence’ facilitates is evoked by the images of the poetic persona inhabiting Moloch: ‘Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels!’151 The reproduction of ‘Transcendental Consciousness’ within the poem therefore encourages and facilitates the poem’s ‘dark’ ecological vision, in which everything, including the ‘anti-­ecological’, is necessarily contained within ‘the infinitude of Pure Mind Essence’.152 This infinite ecological vision culminates in the poem’s ecstatic footnote, in which ­Moloch – ­the epitome of the ‘anti-­ecological’ – is included within the unifying statement: ‘Everything is holy!’ Ginsberg emphasises the inclusion of Moloch within this vision by explicitly stating: ‘holy the angel in Moloch!’153 The influence of ‘The Surangama Sutra’ therefore enables Ginsberg to expand his poetry’s ecological vision to include, and ultimately to neutralise and contain, even ‘anti-­ecological’ symbols of industrialisation such as Moloch, within an infinite ecology that is built upon the monist philosophical frameworks of Taoism and Zen Buddhism. This expansive ecological thought allows Ginsberg to advance a poetic vision in which human and world are radically interconnected

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through their mutual absorption and neutralisation in the monist substance of ‘Pure Mind’. He expresses this radical position in the lines: ‘They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!’154 The answer to the aggressive industrial ­capitalism that Moloch represents is therefore presented as knowledge of a radical unity and interconnectedness that underpins all phenomena. This is conceptually derived from ‘The Surangama Sutra’, and is incorporated within the line: ‘Heaven exists and is everywhere’. This enlightened understanding, the poem suggests, will allow the angel headed hipsters that are its protagonists to eventually redeem even Moloch and ‘the city’, through the heroic act of euphoric self-­sacrifice detailed in the line: ‘They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven!’ The poem’s colossal energy, which Ginsberg reveals caused it to burst forth from the triadic form into a freer verse form inspired by the work of Christopher Smart, leads the reader from the crisis of individualism that the industrial-­modern complex of American capitalism generates within ‘the best minds’ of Ginsberg’s generation, and towards ecstatic enlightenment.155 This enlightenment is achieved through the attainment of ‘Transcendental Consciousness’, and the resultant apprehension of the unifying role of ‘Mind Essence’. As this reading reveals, the ‘fix’ that Ginsberg describes his ‘angel-­ headed hipsters’ urgently requiring isn’t in fact heroin.156 Rather, it is the movement from a crisis of alienated individualism towards the interdependent ‘Transcendental Consciousness’ that comes with the attainment of ‘perfect Emptiness of Mind’.157 The poem therefore depicts a movement from darkness to enlightenment, which is facilitated by the presence of a unifying common substance, and encapsulated within the exclamation: ‘Everything is holy!’ In ‘Howl’, ‘Beat Zen’ enlightenment is once again depicted as a form of ecological awareness; the poem’s culmination in a vision of the interdependent, ‘trans-­corporeal’ location of the human mind reflects Kerouac’s presentation of heightened ecological awareness as the successful outcome of Zen meditation in The Dharma Bums. In this way, both pieces betray the substantial influence of ‘Beat Zen’ – and of Goddard’s translation of ‘The Surangama Sutra’ in ­particular – ­in their explorations of the human’s interdependent, or

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‘trans-­corporeal’, location with respect to its environment. However, ‘Howl’ displays an expansion of ‘Sunflower Sutra’s’ emergent ecological vision, through its ‘dark’ ecological expression of a mesh structure that is able to absorb and neutralise even the presence of the ‘anti-­ecological’ within its infinite dimensions. In the work of both Kerouac and Ginsberg from this period, the two writers’ co-­ created ‘Beat Zen’ philosophy directly influences their increasingly ecological depictions of Nature, and specifically inspires portrayals of the annihilation of the ego in pursuit of an interdependent relationship with an ecological Nature. These constructions, which strongly echo those found in the work of Bowles, Church and Salinger in previous chapters, are substantially facilitated in the work of the Beat writers by a monist worldview drawn from both Taoism and Zen Buddhism. Later in his life, Ginsberg commented that the development of the nuclear bomb in the 1940s was directly responsible for the emergence of the  environmental movement, and he dates rising environmental concern in American society from this time. In a lecture at Kyoto University in 1988, he discusses the origins of the environmental movement in the following terms: It grew into social form, from insights of the (19)40’s, after the creation of the Bomb. The threat to the Planet became visible, say, by 1948, or if that is exaggerated, maybe some new sense of (a) different kind of Planet. I think there was a biological assertion of a desire to live, and a reconsideration of the difference between words and things, words and events, and a cleansing of the senses, a search for a New Vision or a new way of living.158

Speaking in 1988, Ginsberg argues that the development of the nuclear bomb caused a profound change in the human relationship to the environment. He also credits this shift with creating a desire for a ‘New Vision or a new way of living’ and a ‘new sense of [. . .] Planet’. ‘Sunflower Sutra’ and ‘Howl’ attest to the fact that these environmental concerns infiltrated Ginsberg’s poetry from as early as 1955, and that the terms of their expression were influenced by the Eastern philosophy and aesthetics that he and Kerouac studied and discussed from 1953. The search for a ‘New Vision’

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of Nature and a ‘new sense’ of planet, which Ginsberg suggests to have been precipitated by the development of the nuclear bomb, is apparent across the work of all of the Cold War writers that this study has examined. Each of the writers covered in the previous chapters was similarly drawn to non-­Euro-­American philosophical and spiritual frameworks in their efforts to recalibrate the human relationship to its environment in the wake of the development of the nuclear bomb, and all did so in the hope of evoking what Ginsberg describes as a ‘new sense of planet’. The next and final chapter of this book will engage with Mary McCarthy’s reflections on the role of Nature in literature, in the years after the publication of Silent Spring. It will reveal McCarthy’s attempts to re-­introduce Nature as a ‘character’ in mid-­century American literature, in the wake of a rapidly developing American environmental movement, and will establish the degree to which this process was substantially inflected by her journalistic interventions into the political discourses surrounding the Vietnam War.

CHAPTER 5

Bifurcated Nature in Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America

Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America (1971) ends with the ominous final line: ‘Nature is dead, mein kind’ (344).1 The words are uttered by a hallucination of the Enlightenment philosopher, Immanuel Kant, who appears to the novel’s protagonist after he is bitten by a black swan in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Despite this enigmatic final sentence, however, McCarthy’s presentation of mid-­century Nature in Birds of America cannot be summed up so neatly or easily. This chapter will demonstrate that, quite apart from portraying Nature as destroyed and departed, McCarthy writes Nature into the novel as a complex, abiding and powerful presence. It will also place the novel’s depiction of Nature within the context of McCarthy’s wider literary and theoretical consideration of the place of Nature in mid-­century American society and culture. Birds of America was contextually influenced by the legacy of the Second World War, and by the Vietnam War. McCarthy interrupted the writing of Birds, which she began in 1964, in order to devote herself to opposing American military involvement in Vietnam.2 She began work on Birds in the spring of 1964, but took breaks from the novel in order to travel to Vietnam in 1967 and 1968.3 McCarthy’s opposition to American involvement in Vietnam was galvanised when the American Air Force began to bomb North Vietnam in 1965.4 However, her stance on Vietnam also reflected her personal politics, and her self-­ declared ‘utopian’ and ‘anti-­ Stalinist’ socialism is evident in the strong bias that her Vietnam War reports display against the American military-­industrial complex,

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and in favour of North Vietnamese communism.5 Birds was finally published in 1971, but the novel and McCarthy’s Vietnam writings share the same period of genesis, and consequently exhibit a cross-­ pollination of ideas and influences. This is particularly apparent in her exploration of the implications of American attitudes to Nature and the environment across both texts. In order to fully appreciate McCarthy’s complex depictions of mid-­century American Nature, it is necessary to read Birds of America alongside her nonfiction writing from the period of the novel’s composition. McCarthy’s Vietnam War journalism and her essay theorising contemporary environmentalism and literary depictions of Nature, ‘One Touch of Nature’ (1970), are particularly illuminating in this regard. Reading these texts alongside the novel helps to expose the multifaceted presentation of Nature that the novel exhibits. Between them, these overlapping texts reveal McCarthy’s views on an emergent North American environmental movement, and her understanding of the role of Nature in the modern novel. They also illustrate the strong influence of the work of the French existentialist philosopher Simone Weil on McCarthy’s literary presentations of an infinite, powerful and ecological Nature. McCarthy was familiar with Weil’s work, and translated her 1939 essay ‘The Iliad, or the Poem of Force’ from French into English in 1945.6 Evidence of the adoption of Weil’s rhetoric and philosophy can be found across McCarthy’s work from this time, with Weil’s thought proving particularly influential upon McCarthy’s conceptualisation of the human relationship to the environment. This chapter will expose McCarthy’s condemnation of what she felt to be Cold War America’s increasing alienation and detachment from a potent historico-­cultural ‘idea of Nature’. However, McCarthy simultaneously depicts Nature as an infinite and agential material system, from which the human originates, and in comparison to which human agency is rendered insignificant. Drawing heavily on the philosophy of Simone Weil, and to an extent also on that of Immanuel Kant, McCarthy depicts an ecological, material Nature that is both the source and origin of ‘force’, and the foundation of morality and ethics. Criticism on McCarthy has not been particularly prolific in the years following her death in 1989, and the majority of critics have

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analysed McCarthy’s work in relation to her particular post-­war historical moment and intellectual milieu. Sabrina Fuchs Abrams combines both of these related analytical foci in Mary McCarthy: Gender, Politics and the Postwar Intellectual (2004) – the only single author book-­length study of McCarthy, which focuses on the role of gender within the context of McCarthy’s contribution to post-­ war New York intellectualism.7 However, there has been almost no criticism on the representation of Nature in Birds, or in McCarthy’s wider oeuvre.8 This is particularly surprising given McCarthy’s sustained critical and theoretical engagement with literary presentations of Nature in articles like ‘One Touch of Nature’, which enjoyed high profile publication in The New Yorker in 1971. ‘One Touch of Nature’ was first given as the Harcourt Brace lecture at Columbia University in 1961, and was eventually published in The New Yorker on 24 January 1970.9 The essay was therefore written and edited during the same period as the novel Birds of America. McCarthy’s own notes towards the essay, which are available in the archives of her alma mater, Vassar College, illuminate her intention to theorise ‘Nature’, and its changing role in literature, with greater clarity. For instance, drafts and notes reveal that her decisions to capitalise ‘Nature’ throughout ‘One Touch’, and to gender it female, were deliberate, and that these decisions were based upon McCarthy’s desire to communicate her own particular, well-­theorised version of the term. In an early note, McCarthy writes: ‘Talk about the role of Nature in the novel. Mean with a capital “N” – a personification, if you will’.10 Throughout the essay, she also refers to ‘Mother Earth’ and ‘her moods’.11 Her capitalisation and personification of the term serve to emphasise her differentiation between the physical, or material, presence of the environment, and the cultural concept of Nature. That she felt the personification of Nature was a sign of its force is explicitly stated in ‘One Touch’, in which she describes the role of Nature ‘all but personified’ as the ‘predominant force’ in the novels of Hardy, Zola and Emily Brontë.12 McCarthy enforces this distinction between the material reality of the more-­than-­human world and a powerful cultural ‘idea’ of Nature, writing: ‘I don’t mean descriptions of sunsets or mountains, though these too are signs pointing to the presence of an element or ingredient in fiction that was held to be necessary

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in art’.13 Landscape descriptions are conceived of as separate from a more elusive and foundational ‘idea of Nature’ to which they may gesture, and which McCarthy suggests is a vital component of literary art. By capitalising and gendering the term, she therefore attempts to differentiate a distinct cultural ‘idea of Nature’ from artistic representations of the natural world. McCarthy’s theorisation of Nature has at its centre a bifurcation between the cultural idea of ‘Nature’ and its physical reality, similar to that which Hannes Bergthaller argues to define Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). Bergthaller asserts that Carson’s theorisation of Nature has at its core a bifurcation between the ‘“nature” of the natural sciences on the one hand, and the “nature” of the Romantics and the environmental movement’ on the other. He also argues that Carson eventually resolved to ‘double down’ on the use of a ‘pastoral’, normative Nature in writing Silent Spring, in spite of her view that this conception of Nature was both dangerous and misguided.14 I argue in the Introduction to this book that this strategy is designed to engage Carson’s contemporary audience, and to increase the persuasive power of her text. McCarthy’s theorisation of the term contains the same split, and in McCarthy’s case too, the bifurcation of the term is strategic. However, unlike Carson, McCarthy bifurcates the term in order to argue for the beneficial significance of the ‘idea of Nature’ to human society and culture. This differentiation between the physical presence of the environment and the powerful cultural ‘idea of Nature’ that is so routinely criticised by ecocritics as hampering ecological thinking and environmentalism, also shapes McCarthy’s complex position on conservation.15 The ‘idea of Nature’, for McCarthy, is ‘something both innate and transcendent’, and goes above and beyond the material presence of the environment; she describes it in ‘One Touch’ as ‘beyond man-­in-­society’ and ‘beyond the natural sciences’.16 However, as this chapter will demonstrate, McCarthy felt the ‘idea of Nature’ to be of a significance to human moral, ethical, social and cultural development that exceeds that of the physical environment. Therefore, her decision to personify and gender Nature, which appears so archaic within the context of contemporary ecocriticism, nevertheless enhances her attempts to separate the conservation of the material environment and the

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rehabilitation of a particular idea of Nature within human society and culture. The argument of ‘One Touch of Nature’, which this chapter will show to also underpin the novel Birds, is that a trajectory of increasing estrangement from Nature is detrimental to Euro-American society and culture. However, this depiction of an increasing detachment between human and Nature in the West exists alongside the portrayal of Nature as a ‘great Whole’, of which human bodies and agencies are but ‘a part’. This overriding presentation of Nature as both infinite and ecological is expressed in McCarthy’s description of the consolation provided by Nature as ‘the sense of being in the presence of something greater than ourselves’. McCarthy references the Romantic depiction of ‘the author wrapped in contemplation of solitary Nature [. . .] [as] in fact saying a last farewell to the pantheistic illusions that fevered Wordsworth’s brain in the Simplon Pass’, and she goes on to argue that the Romantic period was followed by a turning away from Nature within Western literature and society.17 However, she also emphasises that this rejection of the influence of Nature by Western industrialised societies following the Romantic period does not signal Nature’s d ­ emise – ­rather, an elusive and enduring Nature remains, and it is human society and culture that is impoverished by its lack of close engagement with a strong ‘idea of Nature’. The bifurcation between a potent idea of Nature, and the environment as physical ­reality – a­ s ‘matter’, to borrow another theoretical paradigm from contemporary ecocriticism, motivates McCarthy’s critique of the environmental movement at the end of the essay.18 She states, in no uncertain terms, that: ‘modern moves to conserve a patrimony of mountains, gorges, rocky promontories, unspoiled beaches, are like moves to save stage scenery’.19 In other words, a societal detachment from Nature is no less damaging even when the material reality of the environment is conserved. The conservation of ‘matter’, or ecosystems, is not enough, she argues, if the idea of Nature, and its resultant moral, ethical and cultural significance, are lost. This bifurcation between the physical presence of the environment and an ephemeral or transcendent idea of Nature lies at the heart of McCarthy’s presentation of Nature across her fiction and nonfiction writing. It is significant to note that McCarthy’s

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argument is a complete reversal of that which Timothy Morton makes in his highly influential 2007 ecocritical study, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. In this text, Morton argues that the idea of Nature is a pervasive inhibitor of ecological thought and environmental action.20 McCarthy, on the other hand, depicts conservation without attendant re-­engagement with the idea of Nature as hollow and worthless. An appreciation of the contrast between these two positions helps to shed light on the complex argument that McCarthy advances in response to the fledgling American environmental movement throughout ‘One Touch’ and Birds. It also introduces an intriguing and provocative mid-­century critique of Morton’s position, which has been widely accepted within contemporary ecocritical thought. In ‘One Touch’, McCarthy also discusses the absence of Nature within the modern novel: ‘not merely [as] a painted backdrop for the action, but as a component evidently held to be necessary to the art’. She charts the trajectory of what she terms Nature in British and American, Russian and European literature, from its presence at the heart of the novel, ‘belonging to the cast of characters’, to what she assets to be its absence within modernist literature. McCarthy argues that the evocation of Nature is a vital aspect of the nineteenth-century novel, writing that: ‘In the old triad of plot, character and setting, the setting, including Nature and her moods, supplies the atmosphere in an almost literal sense; it was the air the novel breathed, like the life-­sustaining air surrounding Mother Earth’. She then proceeds to suggest that the vital role of Nature in literary art has been undermined in the modern novel, in favour of an increasingly internalised and perception-­based representation of the interaction between the human self and the environment. For instance, she writes of Joyce’s Ulysses that: ‘what is ‘outside’ for Stephen Dedalus, has lost its absoluteness and sovereignty, and appears only as a flickering series of notations on a perceptual screen’.21 In short, McCarthy contends, Nature had failed to be treated as an agential entity that existed beyond its appearance to the human as phenomena, with the advent of literary modernism.22 In her own writing, McCarthy sought to redress what she felt to be the modernist reduction of Nature to a series of ‘notations on a perceptual screen’. In Birds, she therefore attempts to revive the

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scientifically accurate, textually embodied Nature that she argues to be fundamental to the nineteenth-­century novels of Hardy and Flaubert. In this regard, ‘One Touch’ can be read as McCarthy developing the context for her own novel’s exploration of the function of Nature. For instance, in ‘One Touch’ she writes of: ‘the disappearance of what might be called the normal ­outdoors – s­ unsets, birds, trees, fields, pastures, waterfalls – from the modern novel’.23 These specific e­ xamples – ­in particular ‘birds’ and ‘waterfalls’ – are the same features of the environment that McCarthy depicts the loss of in Birds. The extensive research that she undertook during the novel’s composition is also clear from her notes; an examination of these reveal that she researched in detail all of the species that appear in the novel, including the Great Horned Owl, the American Brown Bear, and the Swan. In addition, she rigorously investigated the bird life and climate of the American East Coast, and of France, which provide the novel’s two primary settings. She even went as far as joining the ‘Groupe Ornithologique Parisien’, as Peter does in the novel, and having their journal mailed to her, in an effort to ensure a scientifically accurate portrayal of Nature of the kind that she found to be absent in earlier twentieth-­century literary texts.24 As this chapter will outline, the presentation of Nature in Birds is of an ecological system that has the infinite dimensions and interdependent structure of Morton’s mesh, and which therefore displays structural similarities when compared to the depictions of ecology found in the work of Bowles, Church, Salinger, Ginsberg and Kerouac in the previous chapters of this study.25 However, in order to appreciate the complexity of McCarthy’s bifurcated theorisation of Nature in ‘One Touch’, and her presentation of it in Birds, it is necessary to first explore the impact on McCarthy’s thought of her engagement with the French philosopher, Simone Weil. Mary McCarthy translated Simone Weil’s influential essay, ‘The Iliad, or the Poem of Force’ (1939) into English, and her translation was published in Politics in November 1945.26 In her introduction to her friend Niccolò Tucci’s The Rain Came Last & Other Stories (1946), McCarthy relates how she first came across the work of Simone Weil. This occurred when Tucci showed her ‘with some excitement the magazine Cahiers du Sud with an article in it on the Iliad by Simone Weil’, in the New York Public Library in 1940.27

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She went on to translate the essay into English, but this was not the extent of her contact with Weil’s work. McCarthy’s biographer Frances Kiernan describes her as having a ‘passionate admiration’ for Weil’s philosophy,28 and McCarthy herself proclaims with respect to the influence of Weil over her thought: ‘I can date a radical change in my mental life from my meeting with Tucci in the reading room’ in the New York Public Library.29 The essay of Weil’s that McCarthy translated is a critical reading of Homer’s Iliad, in which Weil outlines one of her founding philosophical i­ deas – ­that of the existence and function of ‘force’.30 Weil’s writings are in fact very wide-­ranging, covering spirituality, Greek literature and thought, Marxism, socialism, asceticism, Hinduism and Christian theology. She was also a contemporary of the French existentialist thinkers; she attended the École Normale Supérieure with Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, and Albert Camus was famously an admirer of her work.31 Weil and McCarthy also shared some of the same political sensibilities, in that both can be characterised as ‘non-­ Stalinist 32 Marxists’. However, Weil’s fraught relationship with Marxism is even more complex than McCarthy’s. Weil was both part of the left-­ wing intellectual tradition, and a vocal advocate of workers’ rights; however, she disagreed with Marx on one principal point: she wrote that Marxism failed to address the fundamental role of oppression within human social systems. This is the question that she takes up in the chapter ‘Analysis of Oppression’, in Oppression and Liberty (1955). She writes: ‘Marx omits to explain why oppression is invincible as long as it is useful, and why the oppressed in revolt have never succeeded in founding a non-­oppressive society’.33 Instead of economic forces being the primary cause of inequality and exploitation, Weil believed that the problem was ‘force as such’,34 and that oppression within society was a direct translation of the condition of the human within a state of ‘nature’.35 The escalating threat of the Nazi invasion of France had a significant impact upon Weil’s 1939 ‘Iliad’ essay, and on the theorisation of ‘force’ as divorced from human agency that it contains. Weil was in Paris during the German invasion of June 1940,36 and the result of the Nazis’ brutal actions in Europe caused her to abandon the pacifism to which she had adhered in earlier life.37 She saw Nazi

 Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America / 177

brutality as ‘qualitatively the same as that of the Romans’, and the existence of these two regimes prevented her from being able to credit ‘any theories about the qualitative advances in human relationships’.38 Written during the growth of Nazism in the years prior to the invasion of France, Weil concentrates her analysis of Homer’s epic on the identification of the presence of a power that McCarthy translates as ‘force’. The essay begins by stating that: The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to.

Weil describes the subjugation of the human to a greater power that is explicitly not a power of human origin or agency. This is made clear in the second sentence, in which she presents human agency as diminished by comparison to the greater power of the ‘force’ that she describes. Weil goes on to chart a dramatic and inevitable escalation from the human’s employment of ‘force’ to its enslavement and consumption by it. The ‘force’ depicted is one that surrounds and envelops the human, and within which the human is but a small, insignificant, and critically powerless, part. Later in the essay, she defines ‘force’ as: ‘that x that turns anybody that is subjected to it into a thing’.39 The essay thus argues that the transformative power of ‘force’ exposes the constructed and transitory nature of the category ‘human’. Weil writes of this transformation of human into thing occurring within a state of war, but, notably, she does not assign war human agency as a causal factor. Rather, the ‘force’ present in war is also divorced from human agency, and is described as another manifestation of the power of Nature. Weil links the concept of ‘force’ to a power situated in Nature in ‘The Iliad’, writing: ‘such is the empire of force, as extensive as the empire of nature. Nature, too, when vital needs are at stake, can erase the whole inner life’. The parallel between ‘force’ and Nature is reiterated in the next few lines, as she writes of ‘force’: ‘Its rule, moreover, is as cold and hard as the rule of inert matter’.

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The argument that pervades Weil’s ‘Iliad’ is that forces exist that are greater than the human, and in comparison to which human being and agency are revealed to be both transient and negligible; as Weil writes of the Greeks in their campaign against the Trojans: ‘they forget one detail, that everything is not within their power’.40 Her work therefore details a dramatic deconstruction of human agency, which she presents as trivialised by the presence of ‘force’. The agency and origin of ‘force’ are more explicitly situated within Nature in ‘Analysis of Oppression’. In this chapter, Weil makes clear the connection between Nature and the concept that she variously terms ‘force’ and ‘power’. George Panichas summarises the argument of the piece in the following terms: ‘man increasingly exploits his power over the universe, and thus escapes from the caprices of blind nature’. Yet, in doing so, he also ‘surrenders to the no less blind caprices of the struggle for power’.41 As this summary implies, the essay charts the translation of power from a source within Nature into human social systems, with Nature representing the base, or origin, of ‘force’. Weil situates ‘force’ within Nature much more overtly in ‘Analysis of Oppression’, grounding her discussion in the dynamic of ‘relations between man and nature’, and explicitly stating that ‘oppression is exercised by force, and in the long run all force originates in nature’. Nature is also depicted as the material origin of the human; Weil makes this clear near to the beginning of the essay, describing the death of the human as ‘the day when, through death, they drop back into the state of inert matter’.42 This configuration markedly resonates with that found in the work of Bowles (see Chapter 1 in this volume), in which the human body is described as ‘reintegrated’ into the earth at the point of death. Just as in ‘The Iliad’ Weil describes the ‘force’ of war transforming the human (back) into inert matter, ‘Analysis of Oppression’ details this transformation occurring both through the inevitable process of death, and by the exertion of the power of Nature as it is manifest within oppressive social systems. The presentation of Nature as a material, ecological system of which human corporeality is an interdependent and negligible part t­herefore lies at the heart of Weil’s theorisation of ‘force’. This definition of the human as in origin ‘inert matter’, and as capable of being restored to this origin through the presence of

 Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America / 179

‘blind force’, is indicative of the innate equality between humans within Weil’s thought. In ‘Analysis of Oppression’, she demonstrates that this equality between humans is inherent within a state of Nature, as no human is markedly stronger or more able to wield power over their fellows without the aid of the insidious mechanisms of power created by social systems. However, this base ‘natural’ equality poses difficult questions for social systems, which Weil characterises as inherently unequal. This is precisely because, she argues, such social systems are a translation of the inherently unequal power balance between the human and Nature in a state of ‘nature’.43 She goes on to analyse the methods by which systems of power distribution within human societies are deployed to create inequality. However, she also argues that this process has its origins in Nature, stating: This is what happens to begin with when the religious rites by which man thinks to win nature over to his side, having become too numerous and complicated to be known by all, finally become the secret and consequently the monopoly of a few priests; the priest then disposes, albeit through a fiction, of all of nature’s power.44

Weil argues that ‘power’ within human societies is a translation of ‘nature’s power’, and therefore originates in Nature. Her much more explicit description of this process in ‘Analysis of Oppression’ helps to illuminate its more subtle appearance in ‘The Iliad’. Comparable depictions of the ‘forces’ at work within human societies as direct translations of forces within Nature are also present within McCarthy’s theorisation of Nature in ‘One Touch’. McCarthy writes: ‘Forces are loose in the w ­ orld – w ­ ar, drink, disease, monomania, sexual ­passion – ­which behave like floods and tornadoes’. The direct comparison that she draws between phenomena that are traditionally viewed as forces of Nature, and those forces that operate within human societies, echoes the relationship between environmental and societal forces that is outlined in Weil’s work. McCarthy uses the term ‘force’ two further times in ‘One Touch’ in addition to the above comparison of social ills with forces in Nature; she writes: ‘any work of literature in which Nature is deployed as a force [. . .] is strangely twofold, at once a dark epic

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and an idyl’, and ‘it is chiefly Faulkner who sees Nature as a force in human destiny’. McCarthy also adopts Weil’s rhetoric elsewhere in ‘One Touch’, borrowing explicitly from Weil’s vocabulary in her depictions of human conflict in the abstract. She describes: ‘Tolstoy’s picture of war as a blind force, unaccountably sweeping the world and moving bodies of armed men back and forth across the map slaying and ­killing – ­like the destructive sexual passions, which rise and subside’.45 Here, her language again echoes Weil’s presentation of war as a translation of a ‘force’ that ‘turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing’.46 The pairing of Homer and Tolstoy in this extract is repeated in McCarthy’s description of the frontline of the Vietnam War in Hanoi (1968), in which she writes: ‘at the front, war itself appears senseless, a confused butchery that only the gods can understand; at least that is how Homer and Tolstoy saw the picture’.47 The influence of Weil’s thought is therefore visibly present within McCarthy’s descriptions of the Vietnam conflict, as well as in ‘One Touch’. These extracts attest to McCarthy adoption of Weil’s presentation of the ‘force’ of war as utterly divorced from human agency; her portrayal of war ‘moving’ soldiers, as opposed to soldiers moving in war, emphasises the lack of power and agency of the human subject within a state of war, as does her description of both living and dead soldiers as ‘bodies’. This level of depersonalisation contributes to McCarthy’s wider portrayal of ‘force’ as completely uncoupled from human agency, and yet capable of the infiltration and manipulation of the human. It also reflects Weil’s depictions of the transformative power of ‘force’ on the human within war.48 The continued presence of Weil’s ideas at the heart of McCarthy’s writing of war in her Vietnam journalism, many years after her initial translation of Weil’s work, attests to the continued influence of Weil on McCarthy’s writing and thought in the years after 1945. McCarthy’s framework for representing both war and Nature therefore still drew heavily on the work of Weil at the time of Birds’ composition. The presence of Weil’s philosophical and rhetorical influence within McCarthy’s Vietnam War writing also evidences that McCarthy’s literary depictions of war in the 1960s were substantially informed by her indirect engagement with the legacies of

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the Second World War. This experience was shaped by her translation of Simone Weil’s ‘Iliad’, and by her defence of her close friend and correspondent Hannah Arendt, whose literary rendering of the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1963 caused much controversy. McCarthy began writing Birds in 1964, in the wake of her ill-­ advised foray into the debate surrounding Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963).49 The book proved to be highly controversial, with a large proportion of the New York literary milieu swiftly condemning it upon its publication.50 One of the most hostile reviews of Arendt’s work was written by the Jewish-­American playwright and critic Lionel Abel, and was commissioned and published by the Partisan Review. Among other things, Abel accused Arendt of placing ‘aesthetics above morality’ in his review of Eichmann. Previously, both McCarthy and Arendt had regarded the Partisan Review as a friendly publication; McCarthy was one of its founding members and editors, and both writers were frequent contributors. As a result, McCarthy interpreted the magazine’s hostility to Arendt as treachery, and wrote her own defence of Arendt and Eichmann in Jerusalem, ‘The Hue and the Cry’ (1964). Philip Rahv and William Phillips published McCarthy’s piece in the Partisan Review’s Winter 1964 edition, but not without first warning McCarthy that her defensive piece was ‘less than persuasive’, and ‘not in the best taste’.51 Marie Syrkin responded to McCarthy’s article, also in the Partisan Review, accusing McCarthy of finding ‘the extermination of six million Jews’ ‘morally exhilarating’.52 McCarthy hit back to accuse Syrkin of grievously misrepresenting her arguments, but, as Frances Kiernan comments, the whole affair had a profound effect on her at the point of the initial composition of Birds.53 The relationship between aesthetics and morality was therefore at the forefront of McCarthy’s mind as she began the novel, and the ghost of the Second World War loomed large, although it was now 1964, both through the continued influence of Weil, and the outcry that greeted the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem. McCarthy continues to reflect on the relationship between morality and aesthetics in Birds of America.54 The novel’s protagonist, Peter Levi, spends the novel ostensibly developing his understanding and application of Kantian morality: ‘The Other is always an End: thy Maxim’ is printed on a card in his wallet, and he is

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also a member of SNCC, CORE and SANE (4). Peter’s repeated references to Kant become more relevant when it is understood that for McCarthy, questions of ethics were intimately bound up with the ‘idea of Nature’ – a position that she expands on at length in a 1971 interview with Jean-­François Revel in the New York Times Book Review. In this interview, she describes Nature as providing a moral and ethical base for human social structures. McCarthy attributes this ethical position to Kant, stating: I agree with Kant, if I understand Kant. You remember that quotation at the end about the beautiful things in nature proving that man fits into the world, etc. If ­nature – ­in the beautiful form that we normally think of it: that is, the outdoors, plants, farms, f­orests – i­f all this were to disappear, which if’s doing, there’d be nothing stable to stand on, no ground for ethics.55

McCarthy’s comments elucidate an understanding of Nature as constituting the base of morality and ethics within human societies, and this position also underpins Birds. The Kant quote to which she refers was probably the following, from his posthumously published reflections: ‘The fact that man is affected by the sheer beauty of nature proves that he is made for and fits into the world’, which appears in a translation by Hannah Arendt in her posthumously published work, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (1982).56 An early version of these lectures was given at the University of Chicago in 1964, and the finalised version was delivered at the New School for Social Research in the autumn of 1970. McCarthy and Arendt’s rich correspondence reveals that Kant figured in the pair’s discussions, and that McCarthy asked for Arendt’s help in realising the final section of Birds, in which Kant makes an appearance.57 McCarthy also assisted Roland Beiner in the posthumous publication of Arendt’s lectures on Kant after Arendt’s death in 1975.58 It is therefore highly likely that McCarthy was aware of, and privy to, Arendt’s work on Kant from which this quote comes, and that her representation of Kant’s philosophy in the novel was primarily governed by Arendt’s ­translation and interpretation of it. McCarthy makes a number of superficial references to Kant as Peter’s ethical touchstone throughout Birds, in relation to the

 Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America / 183

many moral dilemmas that his adolescence throws up. Often, recourse to Kant’s maxims is of little help in solving these issues, or even in comforting Peter in his anxiety. In fact, Peter comes to the conclusion that it is impossible to act in accordance with Kant’s writings on morality: ‘From the Kantian angle, he now realised, nearly everything he did or refrained from doing in Rocky Port was outside the moral law, strictly speaking, since he was obeying not duty, but inclination’ (30).59 However, McCarthy’s engagement with Kant is an integral part of the novel’s depiction of the relationship between Nature and human social systems at a deeper level, and again reflects the influence of Weil. McCarthy’s interpretation of Arendt’s translation of Kant, as explained in the 1971 interview with Revel, situates Nature as the moral and ethical base for human social systems, and Birds prophesies the dangers of moral, social and environmental degradation within a society that has become detached from this base. In the novel, McCarthy reproduces this argument, through Peter’s declaration that if he lost his love of Nature, then his concept of ethics would also necessarily unravel: ‘He wondered if it could happen that one morning he might wake up and find that trees, plants and flowers did not seem beautiful to him anymore. That would have to be the end of ethics’ (336). Peter’s remarks reiterate the position that McCarthy outlines in the interview with Revel, again demonstrating a view of Nature as the fundamental base of a society’s moral ­authority – a­ position that she attributes to Kant. This relationship between ethics and Nature resurfaces again in the novel’s dramatic ending, in which a hallucination of Kant tells a hospitalised Peter that: ‘Nature is dead’ (344). McCarthy depicts the cultural idea of Nature as capable of exerting a moral and ethical grounding without which, she suggests, ethics would slip into the realm of personal interpretation. This would inevitably lead, she argues, to the type of moral relativism in which Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s protagonist engages in Crime and Punishment (1866), which she summarises as: ‘why shouldn’t I kill an old ­pawnbroker – ­because there’s no longer a point of reference or court of appeals’. In the same interview, she goes on to state that: ‘Nature for centuries has been the court of appeals’.60 She also reiterates this same argument in ‘One Touch’, describing Nature as

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the ‘guarantor of value’.61 These depictions of human social structures such as morality as ultimately governed by a base in Nature reveal the continuing pervasive influence of Weil at the core of McCarthy’s conception of the function of Nature; the translation of forces and hierarchies that exist within Nature into human social relations closely echoes Weil’s view that human social systems are derived from an origin or base within a state of Nature. McCarthy’s presentation of Nature as a moral and ethical base for human social relations also underpins the novel’s announcement of the ‘death’ of Nature in contemporary America, and yet this death references the fragmentation of American society from a moral ‘base’ in Nature, rather than proclaiming the literal death of the environment. At the same time, the declaration of the death of Nature at the end of the novel also serves to highlight the novel’s overriding presentation of Nature as an infinite ecological system within which the human, and human social structures, are transient and insignificant parts. This chapter will now go on to explore both of these aspects of the novel in greater detail. Birds of America follows McCarthy’s 19-­year-­old protagonist, the nervous and serious Peter Levi, during two summers spent with his twice-­ divorced mother in Rocky Port, New England, and a year studying abroad in Paris. On their second visit, Peter and his mother find Rocky Port both disappointingly changed, and somewhat antagonistic. The disappearance of remembered flora and fauna depresses ­Peter – ­particularly the news of the death of his ‘friend’ (7), the Great Horned Owl, who he used to visit at the local nature reserve. Rosamund is equally distraught by the disappearance of their favourite waterfall, as well as the decline of traditional culinary practices in the neighbourhood. Their stay ends with the pair being thrown into the local ­jail – w ­ hich they celebrate for its Thoreauvian ­significance – ­on a charge of disturbing the peace (93).62 Peter then goes to Paris for a year of study at the Sorbonne, in order to dodge the Vietnam draft. While in Paris, he struggles to cope with almost all aspects of Parisian life, from the toilets in his guest house and the ‘clochards’ (308) that roam the streets, to the protesting students and attendant gendarmes on whom his well-­practised Civil Rights rhetoric falls sadly flat. In reaction, Peter resorts to increasingly ineffectual attempts to apply Kantian ethics

 Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America / 185

to real-­world situations, and to taking his pot plant for walks. He ends the novel seriously ill in hospital as a result of an infected swan bite. The novel foregrounds an antagonism between a modernising American culture and a portrayal of Nature that is defined by a bifurcation between cultural idea and ecological reality. These twin forces are repeatedly pitted against one another, and a trajectory emerges in which the disappearance of Nature occurs at the same rate as the modernisation of American ­culture – ­for every frozen fishcake that they are presented with, Peter and his mother fail to find the owl, or the waterfall, that they remember from former years. However, this trajectory of modernisation at the expense of the disappearance of Nature is not as straightforward as it at first sight appears. Under closer analysis, what happens to Nature in the novel is not in fact the death that the ending of the novel p ­ roclaims – ­rather, it is a disappearance, or retreat. Crucially, however, this disappearance does not signal a decline. The waterfall that Peter and his mother fail to find once the new ‘thruway’ has been constructed is not presented as having been lost to the construction of the road. McCarthy does not depict the road as having been built over the waterfall; indeed, she resists presenting straightforward cases of environmental destruction. Peter and his mother simply cannot find their way to the waterfall this year, due to the change in the layout of the road ­network – ­Peter pronounces that ‘the waterfall [is] lost’ (60), solely due to his inability to track it down. In this portrayal of Nature as ‘lost’ rather than destroyed, McCarthy dramatises the argument that she makes in ‘One Touch’: American society’s fragmentation from Nature is not simply reducible to the physical destruction of the environment. Rather, it constitutes a less visible, but more dangerous, erosion of American society’s moral, ethical and cultural standards. The disappearance of the waterfall is finalised by a neighbour, Mrs Curtis, having disposed of all of her maps of the area once they were rendered out of date by the completion of the new road (60), and McCarthy implicitly blames the readiness of Rocky Port society to over-­write the past for its loss. The novel therefore presents the indifference of Cold War American culture to Nature, as opposed to its straightforward destruction of the environment. McCarthy’s

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argument is that the ‘new highway’ can never lead to the waterfall, because it was built with no thought for the human’s relationship to the environment. This point is underscored by Peter’s account of an ‘Indian trail’ being the original access point for the waterfall; with the construction of the new road, the ‘old Indian trail [ ... ] had melted into the thruway’ (59). Peter and his mother are therefore forced to relinquish their search for the falls, as this ‘Indian trail’ was their only reference point for finding them. McCarthy’s portrayal of the original path to the falls as an ‘Indian trail’ is also politically significant, carrying connotations of settler American culture erasing and replacing a Native American presence. The comparison activates stereotypical depictions of Native American culture’s perceived closeness to Nature, which McCarthy deliberately encourages in order to stress the alienation of her own modernising American culture from the environment. In doing so, she damagingly conflates Native American culture and biocentrism in a way that recalls the work of Peggy Pond Church (see Chapter 2 in this volume).63 The argument made in Birds that a powerful Nature is nevertheless in retreat from a disengaged and disenchanted American society echoes that which McCarthy so explicitly and eloquently outlines in ‘One Touch’. Just as McCarthy writes in ‘One Touch’ that Euro-­American societies turned away from Nature after what she describes as the ‘final farewell’ of British Romanticism, in Birds she presents Nature as ‘lost’ to her contemporaries through twentieth-­ century American society’s failure to adequately incorporate a vital historico-­cultural ‘idea of Nature’ into its modernisation.64 Mrs Curtis has ‘junked’ her old maps because she has no interest in visiting the waterfall, and the builders of the new ­highway – u ­ nlike the Native Americans who made the original path – ­had no thought for facilitating access to a waterfall (60). McCarthy does explicitly depict environmentalism in the novel, through, for example, the title, taken from John James Audubon’s natural history book, the character of the young vegetarian Roberta Scott, and in references to the water pollution caused by detergents. However, her more sustained engagement with contemporary environmentalism is presented in a form that is initially harder to recognise. Developing a more complete understanding of McCarthy’s interventions into the debates surrounding the emergent American

 Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America / 187

environmentalism of the late 1960s and early 1970s requires reading Birds alongside ‘One Touch’, as well as her contemporary media interviews and Vietnam reports. When asked about ‘the reaction against the ruination of nature’ in an interview in 1971, McCarthy responds by discussing the change to ready-­basted turkeys in shops. In this interview, she argues that such changes occur because ‘people would rather have an inferior turkey and not have to work’ – an attitude that she blames for the movement towards labour-­saving culinary modernisation.65 This association sheds a new light on the protracted discussions of such culinary modernisation processes in Birds, which drew so many negative reviews from critics for what was perceived to be the triviality of their subject matter.66 McCarthy therefore makes culinary traditions a focus of her critique of her contemporary American society’s environmental record in Birds, in order to demonstrate the environmental impact of culinary modernisation, and the exponentially expanding consumer goods market that lay behind it. Peter and his mother’s first stay at Rocky Port reveals that the modernisation of culinary processes is beginning to infiltrate the rural community, to the fury of Peter’s mother. As she tries to cook traditional American dishes, she is shocked to find that ‘the Rocky Port market leaned heavily on its frozen food chests, and there were few fresh vegetables to be had’ (33). In addition to this, ‘the village hardware store did not carry bean pots’ (37) – a receptacle that is required in order to make homemade baked beans in the traditional American way. McCarthy then uses Peter and Rosamund’s return to Rocky Port, and the lapse of four years, to heighten the effect of what she depicts as a negative change over time. The sharp decline of traditional cooking ­implements – n ­ ot just bean pots now but rolling pins, ‘jelly glasses’ and ‘Mason jars’ ­too – ­is countered by the rise of the single-­course meal, frozen food, and corporate involvement in food supply. McCarthy draws attention to this last, and most pervasive, invasion at the annual celebration of the ‘Battle of Rocky Port’. At this local fete, ‘The ice-­cream concession [. . .] was given to a commercial ­company – ­the same people who handle the sale of Coca-­Cola and hot dogs’ (74). Her explicit reference to the role of a ‘commercial company’ in this final example brings squarely into the light the

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influence of the rapidly expanding market for consumer goods in the post-­war USA that is a driving force behind the culinary modernisation upon which McCarthy ostensibly concentrates.67 McCarthy’s reasons for documenting the changes in the culinary habits of the rural East Coast USA become clearer when these passages of the novel are read in conjunction with her Vietnam writings. McCarthy made two trips to Vietnam during the period of Birds’ composition, one to South Vietnam in February 1967 and another in February ­1968 – t­ his time to Hanoi in the North, which was part of the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam.68 The results of these trips were two slim books, Vietnam (1967) and Hanoi (1968).69 Vietnam and Hanoi are two entirely different texts, particularly in terms of tone. The former is an acerbic critique of Cold War American society’s prevailing capitalist ideology, which McCarthy repeatedly insinuates to be the driving force behind America’s military intervention in Vietnam. In a 1971 interview, McCarthy frankly states: ‘I think capitalism is the most successful deteriorator of ­society – ­of human life that’s been known’, and this conviction is dramatised across her Vietnam writings through the stark contrasts that she creates between the American military-­ industrial complex and North Vietnamese communism.70 There is a notable continuity between McCarthy’s condemnation of the homogenising effect of America’s strategic importation of capitalism in Vietnam, and the role of consumer capitalism in the disappearance of traditional culinary practices on the American East Coast that is described in Birds. The novel focuses on the part that market-­driven consumer demand plays in the disappearance of bean pots and other traditional culinary items within American culture, with the repetition of the phrase: ‘Haven’t had a call for them’ enforcing each item’s newfound obsolescence (66). Many of the archaic culinary items that have disappeared are those that are used in preservation, and Peter makes secret calculations of how much his mother spends in gasoline trying to find these lost items, which would have once been used to cut costs by storing food for leaner times. McCarthy portrays the loss of these culinary traditions as resulting in the impossibility of cutting costs and preserving food in contemporary American. The primary effect of this, of course, is to open up the market for companies to sell ‘frozen’ turkeys

 Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America / 189

and vegetables all year round. Another effect of these market-­led changes in food supply and demand that McCarthy indicates is the rise of single-­use packaging in A ­ merica – f­ewer bean pots necessarily leads to more baked bean cans. This in turn generates the detritus that McCarthy documents ruining the South Vietnamese environment as a result of the American military presence in the country. In Vietnam, the litter created by single-­ use food packaging becomes a dominant motif for the negative impact of the American military presence. In an effort to strengthen the argument of her polemic, McCarthy employs the theorisation of Nature that she outlines in ‘One Touch’ in order to depict Cold War America’s culture of consumer capitalism as inherently ‘unnatural’. This is evident in passages such as: Before the Americans came, there could have been no rusty Coca-­Cola or beer cans or empty whiskey bottles [. . .] this indestructible, mass-­ produced garbage [. . .] made the country, which must once have been beautiful, hideous. In the past, the natural garbage created by human beings and animals must have been reabsorbed into the landscape, like compost [. . .] The American way of life has donated this disfiguring industrial garbage to the Asian countryside, which is incapable of digesting it.71

The focus on American-­imported, mass-­produced consumer items littering the Vietnamese environment instigates a dichotomy that McCarthy develops between Vietnamese culture, which she depicts in symbiotic and harmonious relationship with the environment, and American culture, which she portrays as inherently ‘unnatural’. Vietnamese waste is described as wholly organic, and therefore able to be ‘reabsorbed’, or ‘digested’ by an again personified Nature. In contrast, American rubbish does not biodegrade, and resultantly generates litter. McCarthy conjures a pre-­ industrial vision of a symbiotic relationship between human culture and Nature within which all waste is biodegradable, and juxtaposes this with references to the post-­war American mass production and exportation of consumer goods such as the iconic twentieth-­century American product, Coca-­Cola. Stephen Schryer describes this aspect of McCarthy’s writing as part of a wider tradition of ‘Eliotic leftism’ that ‘embodied

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a nostalgic desire to return to a more natural, organic society prior to the advent of mass media and modern consumption’, both at home and abroad.72 However, in employing this trope of nostalgic American left-­wing intellectualism to describe Vietnamese culture, McCarthy also implicitly and problematically conflates Vietnamese culture with a romanticised, pre-­industrial biocentrism. This conflation, again reminiscent of Church’s writing explored in Chapter 2, exemplifies the Orientalism that colours all of McCarthy’s Vietnam reports. Indeed, her depictions of Vietnamese culture often constitute Orientalism par excellence, in that they are explicitly crafted in aid of furthering a depiction of post-­war American culture as ‘unnatural’.73 McCarthy makes a similar point about American garbage in Birds, with Rosamund voicing concerns about the impact of the volume of non-­biodegradable waste generated by post-­war American culture on the American environment. Reminiscing about wartime America, Rosamund states that: ‘Waste was considered a crime [. . .] Like burying fish bones in corn hills when you were planting, the way the Indians used to [. . .] People were conservationists, like Nature’ (34). The same tactic of portraying a society’s environmental credentials through attention to the waste that it generates is therefore present, in similar guises, across Birds and McCarthy’s Vietnam writing. In each case, McCarthy evokes a romanticised, Orientalist, and inherently racist, depiction of a non-­Euro-­American culture as an exemplary model of environmentalism, with both Native American and Vietnamese culture’s alleged biocentrism expressed purely in order to critique her contemporary, capitalist American society’s destructive and antagonistic relationship with the global environment. Throughout Hanoi, McCarthy continues to construct highly romanticised and Orientalist depictions of North Vietnamese society’s symbiotic relationship with Nature in order to enforce her politicised portrayal of Cold War American culture as inherently ‘unnatural’.74 She characterises communist North Vietnam as a society that is both built upon a symbiotic relationship with the environment, and which attaches an intense symbolic significance to Nature:

 Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America / 191 The people are proud of the trees [. . .] Near the bombed brick house where we waited during the alert there was a big bare blasted trunk, maybe an oak, which was putting out a few new leaves; my companions eagerly pointed it out, making sure I didn’t miss the symbol of resistance and rebirth.75

McCarthy presents Nature’s symbolic significance to the besieged North Vietnamese as an integral part of their continued resistance against American military force. This symbolism is in turn based on McCarthy’s depiction of the regenerative capacity of Nature. The juxtaposition of the ‘bombed brick house’ with the similarly ‘blasted oak’ foregrounds the ability of Nature to regenerate in a way that human-­made structures cannot. In its continuous rejuvenation and renewal, even in the midst of human conflict, McCarthy presents Nature as a ‘force’ that far exceeds that of human agency. The influence of Weil’s thought, within which Nature functions as both the origin of ‘force’, and as vastly more powerful than human conflict and agency, can again be glimpsed here. McCarthy also draws heavily on Weil’s theorisation of ‘force’ in an attempt to impress upon her readers an inherent strength within North Vietnamese communism, and a corresponding weakness in the capitalist American war machine. She does this by explicitly aligning North Vietnamese communism with the ‘force’ of Nature, writing: ‘a bombed oak putting out new leaves is a “reply” to the air pirates of the Air Force and the Seventh Fleet’. Such statements position North Vietnamese communism as both an ally and a beneficiary of the power of Nature, as well as suggesting Nature’s inherent opposition to the brutality of an ‘unnatural’ American culture.76 McCarthy’s politicised portrayal of an ecological Nature in her Vietnam journalism is reflected in a comparable ecological depiction of Nature in Birds. Peter’s perception of his and his mother’s relationship to Nature in Rocky Port echoes McCarthy’s descriptions of communist North Vietnamese society’s relationship with Nature in Hanoi, further exposing the shared vision of Nature present in these contemporaneous texts. McCarthy’s rendering of the North Vietnamese relationship to the environment as one within which the human looks for signs in Nature is reiterated in Peter’s reaction to his environment in Rocky Port. He takes the disappearance of

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the owl, the waterfall and the cormorants from Rocky Port to be negative signs put forth by Nature (40), but the unseasonal flowering of the apple tree across the road from his home he reads as a positive one; McCarthy writes: ‘Nature rewarded Peter for thinking of his mother. Two days before Thanksgiving, an apple tree in the yard across the street uncannily burst into bloom’ (39). Peter interprets the tree’s unseasonal flowering as affirmation of his decision to convince his mother to return to Rocky Port. He also believes it to signify that their presence in Rocky Port is of some import: ‘He was too modest to suppose that he was the Messiah, but he might be a precursor, a sort of pilot project in the wilderness’ (40). Peter reasons: ‘the mystery of the flowering apple tree, like the owl and the cormorants, had been enacted just for the two of them, in Nature’s private code’ (40). The tone in which McCarthy discusses Peter’s interpretation of these signs is quite different from the reverential and ­respectful – ­though highly ­Orientalist – ­tone that defines her discussion of the North Vietnamese reading signs put forth by Nature in Hanoi. In Birds, Peter ‘reading’ the signs of Nature is obviously intended partially to parody her protagonists’ juvenile sense of self-­importance. However, beneath the humour, these passages also imply the failure of mid-­twentieth-­century American citizens to engage with Nature, and to understand their place in relation to it. McCarthy makes the distinction between ‘tame Nature and wild Nature’ significant to her theorisation of the term in early drafts of ‘One Touch’, although she also comments that: ‘both kinds of Nature [wild and tame], when they appear in literature, were conceived in opposition to society’.77 The distinction that she sets out here between ‘tame’ and ‘wild’ Nature also impacts upon the presentation of Nature in Birds. On numerous occasions, the novel highlights this distinction, and the dichotomy created is indicative of the wholly distinct fate and function of these two different ‘types’ of Nature within the novel. The most prominent image of tame Nature is the captive ‘Great Horned Owl’, whose death is discovered in the novel’s opening pages (3). Peter is tortured by his affection for the owl, a reaction he realises his society interprets as emotional instability, and that he therefore makes every effort to conceal from both his mother and the stranger who informs him

 Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America / 193

of the owl’s death. The fate of the owl also serves to foreshadow the novel’s final, enigmatic sentence: ‘Nature is dead, mein kind’ (344). However, when the fate of the owl is viewed in light of the broader presentation of Nature in the novel, and also in connection with McCarthy’s pronouncements on ‘species’, the death of the owl at the opening of the novel can be read as symbolising not the bleak fate of Nature in the mid-­twentieth century, but the fracturing of American society from a moral and ethical base within Nature. Upon closer analysis, the owl’s death in fact contrasts starkly with the vitality of the infinite, ecological Nature that is more widely depicted within the novel. With this explicit distinction in mind, it is easy to divide the Nature in Birds into two categories: caged and wild. The contrast between these two ‘types’ of Nature is most starkly presented in the opposite fates of the Great Horned Owl and the three cormorants. At the start of the novel, the owl and the cormorants represent specific and remembered Nature, along with the waterfall, and Peter keenly feels their collective absence on his return to Rocky Port. He is initially disappointed in his search for all three, as he is told that the owl has died, and that both the cormorants and the waterfall are ‘lost’ (60). This state of affairs is later somewhat augmented, as Peter learns that the cormorants have in fact only migrated, and are thus lost only in the same sense as the ­waterfall – ­that they are no longer accessible to Peter (60). The migration of these birds enforces the stasis of McCarthy’s unhappy human protagonist in the same manner that the disappearance of the ducks does Holden in The Catcher in the Rye (1951). However, in Birds, the cormorants’ ability to leave Rocky Port is juxtaposed not only with Peter’s static position, but also with the enforced stasis of the captive owl. The distinction between the ‘tame’ owl and the ‘wild’ cormorants is further underlined by the fact that the cormorants are necessarily anonymous; they are indistinguishable from other members of their species, rather than being recognised individually. As a result, when any cormorants come back to Rocky Port, Peter views them as the same birds returning, whether or not this is in fact the case. He later states: ‘birds don’t have ­personalities – e­ xcept tame ones’. Through this perceived individuality associated with the ‘tame’ or captive animal, McCarthy establishes a

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dichotomy between the individual and the species that the novel proceeds to explore. The eternal temporality of ‘species’, and the implicit fearful comparison that this generates with the finite nature of individual human lifespans, becomes a defining feature of McCarthy’s presentation of Nature in Birds. In a conversation ‘on progressive education’ between Peter and his supervisor in Italy, Peter contrasts the concept of the collective ‘species’ in Nature, and the role of individuality within his contemporary American society. He contemplates a lack of ‘upward mobility’ (234) in Western society during the Middle Ages, and refers to the static class system that existed then as ‘a cycle of replacement and renewal, as happened in the animal kingdom with individuals in a species’ (234). Peter then proceeds to contrast this notion of the ‘species’ with his contemporary American society’s concept of individuality, telling his supervisor: ‘what interests me about birds and animals is that individuals don’t count with them. That’s one thing I’ve learned this year’ (234). He elaborates: Birds don’t have personalities, except tame ones. They only have collective personalities, like the hermit thrush or the cuckoo or the thieving jay. Or goldfinches, which are gregarious. Maybe you don’t grasp the implications of that, but if I didn’t have what’s called a personality, I wouldn’t mind death. (234)

These comments figuratively resurrect the Great Horned Owl from the novel’s opening pages: Peter’s ‘friend’, whose death inspires the addition of ‘except tame ones’ to his description of birds as lacking individual personalities. In this way, McCarthy depicts Nature as an arena within which a collective, or ‘species’, identity ameliorates both the horror of death, and the painful isolation of individualism. In a comparison reminiscent of Horwitz’s pronouncement in The Catcher in the Rye that ‘mother nature’d look after you if you were a fish’, Peter feels that he is unable to participate in the comforting cyclical and eternal temporality of replacement and renewal within Nature as a result of his individuality, or ‘personality’. McCarthy also evokes this disparity between the individual and the species in ‘One Touch’, and in doing so foregrounds the foundational role of

 Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America / 195

temporal difference within her theorisation of the human relationship to Nature. She describes that the ‘repetitive cycle of Nature is a promise of eternity. And man in Nature is aware of his singularity in the midst of species’, thereby drawing a clear distinction between the human’s conception of its own lifespan, and the regenerative, cyclical and enduring ‘collective’ temporality that defines her ecological portrayal of Nature.78 This temporal difference, she goes on to suggest, enforces human frailty; the human lifespan appears frighteningly finite and insignificant in comparison to the infinitely cyclical ‘duration’ of an ecological Nature that is characterised by a constant process of regeneration and renewal. At this point in Peter and his supervisor’s conversation, McCarthy invokes the looming presence of the Vietnam War. The novel is punctured by repeated references to Vietnam, from Peter’s argument with his American hosts in Paris regarding its morality, to the Rocky Port police demanding to see his Vietnam draft card at the end of the novel, and the  imminent presence of the conflict within the novel’s pages reflects the shadow that the war cast over the period of its composition. In relation to Peter’s pronouncement that he ‘wouldn’t mind death’ if he ‘didn’t have what’s called a personality’, his supervisor questions him on the morbid direction of his thoughts. Peter replies: ‘everybody my age does [contemplate death], I guess, if you can judge by poetry. And of course there’s the draft’ (234). Vietnam is only alluded to at this point, but the context in which McCarthy drops it in hints at the psychological impact of the escalating political situation on Americans of draft age. She also suggests that the desire of her protagonist to take solace in the larger ecological system of Nature is a direct result of the threat to life posed by his contemporary political moment. Peter’s desire to be ‘more like animals’ (234) is depicted as deriving from an impulse to erase his individuality, and this urge appears to be motivated by fear instilled by the contemplation of death that is brought on by the threat of the Vietnam War. The influence of Weil is again evident in McCarthy’s connection of the ‘force’ that causes death in war with a stronger ‘force’ located within Nature. In Peter’s eyes, the latter provides an escape from the former, but the paralleling of these two sites of force nevertheless reveals the strong influence of Weil’s philosophy.

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Peter therefore concludes that being part of a ‘species’ would ameliorate the fear of dying precipitated by his contemporary American society’s military involvement in Vietnam. This point is underscored by Peter’s insistence that: ‘in the past people had less personality and were happier for it. They were more like animals, more natural. I mean it’s natural to die, after all’ (234). The loss of individuality that is implied to be an aspect of the collective membership of a ‘species’ is once again associated with the absence of the fear of death. Significantly, this loss of identity occurs in tandem with the absorption of the human into an infinite, ecological system of Nature. As such, McCarthy’s work exhibits a trope comparable to that which has been noted in the work of all five writers covered in the preceding chapters: the idealisation of the annihilation of the self within an infinite, ecological Nature. The reference to evading death through membership of a ‘species’, in connection with the novel’s discussion of the Vietnam War, also recalls McCarthy’s deeply problematic alignment of North Vietnamese communism’s ‘collective’ organisation with its ability to withstand American military bombardment in Hanoi. The origin of this association between collective, or ‘species’, identity and survival can also be traced back to ‘One Touch’, in which McCarthy asserts that ‘it is only for men in numbers, the race, that Nature can provide survival’.79 This statement further illuminates the connections that exist between capitalism, individualism, alienation from Nature, and death within McCarthy’s thought, and her related presentation of collective or socialist forms of social organisation as more closely allied to an infinite, cyclical temporality that she situates within Nature.80 McCarthy’s portrayal of Nature as temporally eternal, or ‘infinite’, is also a defining feature of her theorisation of the term in ‘One Touch’. In this essay, she details the effect on the human mind of the perception of Nature’s infinite spatio-­temporal qualities, writing: The immemorial oaks. And though immense vistas, mountain peaks, and the [. . .]grandiose columns of defunct edifices can lift or depress the spirits by measuring the diminutiveness of man, smallness in the sentient ­world, the world of living t­ hings, ­is suggestive of time everlasting, eternal return. The immemorial bees or the dragonfly.81

 Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America / 197

McCarthy’s description of the oaks as ‘immemorial’ foregrounds her juxtaposition of human record keeping with an ‘infinite’ temporality situated in Nature that confounds the human mind. Although her presentation of the impact of an infinite Nature on the mind in this passage contains some distinct echoes of the Kantian sublime, her literary evocation of the effects of these images of sublime Nature on the human mind deviates markedly from Kant’s theorisation of the sublime in the Critique of Judgement (1790).82 Furthermore, the nature of McCarthy’s deviation from Kant again reveals the substantial influence of the philosophy of Simone Weil on her depictions of the human relationship to Nature. Kant describes the sublime as ultimately emphasising a quality of the human mind; the contemplation of the sublime results in pleasure for the observing human because the action of considering the sublime asserts the transcendental existence of reason as ‘something greater than either nature or the imagination’.83 For Kant then, the sublime in nature ultimately asserts the power and potential of the human mind as something ‘other’ than nature; as Kant writes, the apprehension of the sublime allows humans ‘to discover in ourselves an ability to resist which is of a quite different kind, and which gives us the courage [to believe] that we could be a match for nature’s seeming omnipotence’.84 However, in McCarthy’s writing, the effect of sublime Nature is to diminish human agency and identity, rather than to ultimately assert the power of the human mind through the exercise of reason. McCarthy’s depiction of an infinite Nature that diminishes the agency and autonomy of the human mind, rather than enforcing its supremacy, reflects Weil’s description of a powerful force of Nature that diminishes human identity and agency, thereby ‘turning the human into a thing’.85 In the above passage from ‘One Touch’, McCarthy describes the infinite spatio-­temporal dimensions of the more-­ than-­ human world as instigating profound changes in the human mind. This occurs, she states, not only in the presence of the ‘grandiose’ edifices of mountain peaks which ‘lift or depress the spirits’, but also through contact with more prosaic aspects of the ‘living world’. She asserts that the ‘oaks’, ‘bees’ and ‘dragonfly’ all surpass the limits of human memory or record, and that the infinite, cyclical temporality that they represent threatens

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and diminishes human agency. She then goes on to describe what she perceives to be the devastating impact of this infinite temporality situated within ‘ordinary’ Nature on the human mind, writing: [Nature] gives us the awareness of being an instant reverberant in time, clear and distant as the echoing sound of our footfall in a silent forest or the plash of a stone dropped into a pool. The repetitive cycle of Nature is a promise of eternity.86

In comparison to the cyclical and ‘eternal’ temporality of Nature, she asserts, the timeframes represented by human lives, and even by human historical records, are so fleeting that they comprise only an ‘instant reverberant in time’. In Birds, McCarthy suggests that Nature’s appeal to the human is due to this same spatio-­temporal alterity, explaining: ‘what [Peter] liked about birds and animals, moths and stars, was precisely their remoteness from himself’ (167). She describes Peter’s vision of an ideal interaction with Nature as a ‘communion with the infinite’, further underscoring the significance of infinite temporality to the novel’s presentation of Nature (297). McCarthy’s wider portrayal of Nature is therefore of an ecological structure that is defined by its infinite dimensions, recalling Morton’s contemporary theorisation of the infinite and interdependent mesh.87 Her language at this point in the novel also strongly echoes Paul Bowles’s portrayals of the human’s interaction with the desert landscape explored in Chapter 1 of this study, in which Bowles describes Port’s desire for a ‘proximity to infinite things’. In the latter stages of Birds, Peter betrays a deepening attraction to the infinite in Nature comparable to that which drives Port in The Sheltering Sky. In another of Peter’s discussions with his supervisor in Rome, he questions Mr Small on the inability of the human to find peace without immersion in an infinite, ecological Nature, stating: ‘For that you need to be alone and enclosed in something vast like an ocean. An element bigger than you that will still be there when you are gone’ (298). Peter’s comments once again evoke an infinite Nature, and suggest an ecological, mesh-­like structure within which the human is but one insignificant part. This infinite, ecological Nature effectively

 Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America / 199

subverts and annuls the human’s comparative insignificance, and its brief lifespan, by absorbing the human presence within its infinite dimensions. By being ‘enclosed in something [. . .] that will still be there when you are gone’, Peter is able to be at peace, but this feeling of peacefulness is described as occurring only at the cost of diminishing the human’s power and a­ gency – e­ ven, it is implied, its autonomous identity. This implication that the human self is diminished by contact with Nature again exposes the influence of Weil’s philosophy on McCarthy’s presentation of the human’s relationship to its environment. Weil’s description of Nature’s ability to ‘erase the whole inner life’ of the human and turn it ‘into a thing’ is repeatedly apparent in McCarthy’s evocation of the impact of the contemplation of Nature upon the human mind.88 In ‘One Touch’, McCarthy describes a ‘continuum of species’ that is ‘made up of individual deaths’, and she goes on to state that this ‘biological cycle, as witnessed by human consciousness, is full of menace’.89 For the human, the process of eternal cyclical renewal that is perceived in Nature is horrifying for two reasons: it implies the human’s finite lifespan, and it suggests the loss of human identity, which Weil and McCarthy describe respectively as a return to an original state of ‘inert matter’, and an enclosure in ‘something vast like the ocean’.90 McCarthy’s work therefore presents the loss of individuality, or self, as a necessary precursor to the human’s return to its origin as a part within an interdependent, ecological Nature, echoing similar portrayals found in the work of the Cold War writers analysed in the previous four chapters. In her work too, the human is depicted as originating in, and as constituting a negligibly significant part of, an infinite ecology, with both of these formations displaying the strong influenced of Weil’s philosophy. In the closing pages of McCarthy’s novel, Peter hallucinates the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who declares that: ‘Nature is dead, mein kind’. However, within the context of McCarthy’s complex portrayals of Nature across her fiction and non-­fiction writing, this final statement appears significantly less literal and definitive. As has already been discussed, McCarthy’s description of the Romantic authors ‘in fact saying a last farewell’ to ‘pantheistic illusions’ does not imply the literal death of Nature, but rather references what she

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saw to be the beginning of Euro-­American society’s abandonment of, and alienation from, Nature. At the same time, Nature remains the infinite, ecological origin of ‘force’ within McCarthy’s literary and theoretical writing. Her writing of Nature therefore contains the bifurcation between an abandoned idea of Nature and a depiction of the more-­than-­human world as an infinite, ecological system. However, unlike both Carson and contemporary ecocritics such as Timothy Morton, she does not present the culturally constructed idea of Nature as a negative aspect of the human engagement with Nature, or as a barrier to ecological thought and action. Instead, McCarthy argues that the cultural idea of Nature is vital as a moral and ethical base for society, and that the fracturing of society from this base in Nature will have unprecedented detrimental effects on human social relations. Understanding this bifurcation of Nature across McCarthy’s work also allows for a fuller appreciation of the novel’s enigmatic ending. Although Birds closes with Kant declaring that ‘Nature is dead’, the novel is neither announcing the literal death of Nature, nor is it demonstrating the ‘concern about the destruction of the environment’ that Stephen Schryer asserts.91 Instead, McCarthy declares the final, complete fracturing of American society from a moral and ethical base in a strong historico-­cultural idea of Nature. This alienation from the idea of Nature is depicted as causing irreparable damage to American society, and as leading to a dystopian future defined by Dostoevskian moral relativism. However, the novel also contains a measure of hope, in the form of the infinite, ecological Nature that at the end of the novel remains very much ­alive – ­its enduring vitality embodied in the vengeful swan that strikes Peter and nearly kills him in the novel’s final pages. Stephen Schryer also reads McCarthy’s assertion of the death of Nature as referring to American society’s abandonment of the metaphysical concept of Nature. It is a reading that McCarthy explicitly encourages, by referencing Nietzsche’s pronouncement of the death of God as a precursor to her declaration of the death of Nature; Peter’s first hallucination is Kant announcing that ‘God is dead’, to which he responds ‘you didn’t say that, Nietzsche did’. Schryer interprets the allusion to Nietzsche in the novel’s final sentences in the following way:

 Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America / 201 Kant, in other words, may be proclaiming the death of nature in precisely the same way that Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God. With the development of modernity, we are forced to recognize that nature, like God, never functioned metaphysically in the way that we once thought it did. This seems to be the position enacted by McCarthy’s novel.92

Schryer argues that McCarthy co-­opts Nietzsche’s thought in order to strengthen her wider presentation of her contemporary American society as having rejected Nature as a metaphysical concept. Carol Brightman also reads the novel’s final sentence in similar terms, as the death of America’s ‘faith in nature’.93 As Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science (1882) following his declaration that ‘God is dead’: ‘To the few at least whose eye, whose suspecting glance, is strong enough and subtle enough for this drama, some sun seems to have set, some old, profound confidence seems to have changed into doubt’.94 Borrowing from Nietzsche, then, McCarthy suggests that an ‘old, profound confidence’ in the role of Nature as a moral and ethical basis for society has disappeared with the advent of twentieth-­century modernity. This lack of an appreciation of the fundamental role of Nature therefore irrevocably damages how the human ‘fits into the world’, which McCarthy depicts as society fracturing from a perceived moral and ethical base.95 In view of this detachment, McCarthy argues that the conservation of the material ­environment – ­or ‘stage scenery’ – is a waste of time, as it does not go any way towards repairing the rift between Cold War American culture and the idea of Nature that ought to provide its moral and ethical base. McCarthy therefore highlights American society’s rejection of the idea of Nature in the same terms as Nietzsche describes his society’s rejection of the idea of God in the 1880s, with Birds of America demonstrating the folly of America’s failure to properly integrate a vital aspect of its cultural heritage into its modernisation. The consequences of this failure are represented to encompass everything from the ubiquity of frozen food and tinned beans, to the Vietnam war, to the increasing anxiety and alienation of McCarthy’s protagonist, who is reduced to ‘taking his pot plant for a walk’. However, the novel also powerfully deploys the other half of its bifurcation of the term Nature, in order to make a much

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broader philosophical argument about the relationship between human and environment. As this chapter has revealed, the novel’s portrayal of the death of the idea of Nature exists alongside the depiction of an infinite, ecological Nature that draws heavily on the work of Weil in its conception, and that is described as an infinite material system within which the human, and human agency, are ultimately only ‘reverberations’. The political implications of McCarthy’s ecological portrayal of an infinite Nature are only obliquely apparent in the novel. They are, however, more evident elsewhere in McCarthy’s writing from this period. At the close of ‘One Touch’, she explicitly contextualises her complex theorisation of Nature within her contemporary Cold War climate, writing: It cannot be a coincidence that modern physics, by interfering with Nature, has for the first time posed a threat to the species, and perhaps to most other forms of organic life on earth. And here is another ‘coincidence’: the scientific development leading to nuclear fission and then rapidly to nuclear ­fusion is presented as – ­and maybe really ­was – ­a logical process beyond the power of the human will to arrest, in short as possessing the resistless qualities assigned to natural phenomena such as hurricanes.96

In this passage, McCarthy reasserts her depiction of Nature as the origin of ‘force’ within human social systems, but this time the aspect of human power relations into which Nature’s force is translated is the nuclear weapon. McCarthy portrays nuclear power as ‘beyond the power of the human will to arrest’, and aligns it with displays of ‘force’ within Nature. Weil’s understanding of ‘force’ within the realm of human society as a translation of forces that originate within Nature is therefore applied to nuclear science in order to position nuclear power as a manifestation of the force of Nature. Resultantly, McCarthy argues that nuclear power is as far ‘beyond the power of the human will to arrest’ as is the force of a hurricane. These comparisons between the nuclear and ‘natural’ disasters in the face of which the human is equally powerless recall passages in Church’s writing that describe the nuclear in terms of the power of flooding rivers and lightning strikes. In each case, the comparison empowers the writer’s presentation of Nature, while at

 Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America / 203

the same time implying the potentially ‘natural’ origin of nuclear power. As has been argued previously in Chapter 2, it is too reductive to always conflate this tactic of representing the nuclear as a ‘force’ of Nature with the desire to naturalise nuclear weapons. Rather, the depiction of the nuclear as a power of Nature in these Cold War texts can be best understood as a replication of Timothy Morton’s ‘dark ecology’, in which Nature is configured as an infinite and interdependent ecological system that has the capacity to contain and neutralise even apparently ‘anti-­ecological’ elements such as the nuclear bomb. McCarthy’s presentation of the nuclear as itself a power of Nature should therefore be understood as part of her wider portrayal of ecology as an infinite system, or mesh.97 McCarthy, like Church, describes the nuclear as part of an infinite system of ecology in order to challenge the dominant, contemporary media narrative that by developing the nuclear bomb, the ‘scientific’ American had conquered Nature. She goes on to comment: ‘In fact, it appears today that hurricanes can be “salted” and epidemic disease perhaps brought under control, whereas technical advancement is a force “outside” man and “bigger” than the brain that conceives it’.98 She thus references her society’s interpretation of the nuclear as exemplifying the human’s conquest of Nature, while simultaneously applying the caveat that just because there are some aspects of Nature that the human now appears to be able to control, this does not mean that the ability to precipitate nuclear reactions should be conflated with the ability to regulate them. The presence of the word ‘force’ again betrays Weil’s influence over this configuration; McCarthy’s depiction of human agency as diminished through contact with forces that are beyond the power of humans to arrest reiterates Weil’s portrayal of the human as paralysed by a ‘force’ that originates within Nature. McCarthy’s evocation of the nuclear in this passage can also be seen to draw on Weil’s description of the human’s inability to control or dictate even the forces that it seeks to ‘employ’. In ‘The Iliad’, Weil writes of ‘force employed by man, force that enslaves man’, and of the human as inevitably ‘swept away, blinded by the very force it imagined it could handle’.99 These images of the human as unable to control the very ‘force’ that it unleashes are strongly reflected in McCarthy’s assessment of the nuclear as a power that, although

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manufactured by the human, is nevertheless ‘beyond the human will to arrest’. Through recourse to Weil’s theorisation of ‘force’, McCarthy is therefore able to depict Nature as a temporally infinite, ecological system, in comparison to which the human is negligibly significant. The influence of Weil’s philosophy also allows her to reconceptualise the nuclear presence, and to argue that despite the ‘scientific’ American’s success in manufacturing the atomic bomb, the uncontrollable reactions that nuclear weapons unleash still represent forces of Nature, and are therefore inherently beyond the control of human ‘will’.100

Conclusion:  ‘Know that the earth will madonna the Bomb’

O spring Bomb Come with thy gown of dynamite green Unmenace Nature’s inviolate eye1 Gregory Corso, ‘Bomb’

In these lines from the Beat poet Gregory Corso’s 1958 poem ‘Bomb’, Corso describes the nuclear bomb as a part of Nature, rather than presenting it as synonymous with the human’s conquest of the natural world. The poem depicts Nature as an ecological system that at once contains and defies the nuclear threat. Corso’s choice of ‘inviolate’ establishes a strength and resistance at the core of the poem’s vision of Nature, while the bomb’s ‘gown of dynamite green’ implies that the nuclear bomb either originates in Nature, or has been deliberately adorned in order to appear as if it had a ‘natural’ origin. The poem therefore suggests that the bomb is a part of Nature, or that it is being passed off as such. The reading that the bomb’s origin lies within Nature is further encouraged by the address ‘O spring Bomb’. The association of spring with the birth of new life hints that the bomb has been born out of Nature, as part of the season of birth, while the reference to the cyclical timeframe of the four seasons contributes to the poem’s wider depiction of Nature as expansive enough to contain the nuclear. Corso firmly establishes this image of Nature as the Bomb’s progenitor later in the poem, through the biblical and prophetic: ‘Know that the earth will madonna the Bomb’. The poem therefore goes as far as to

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provocatively depict the ‘earth’ as the mother of the nuclear bomb, while also portraying the bomb as a part of an expansive, ecological system of Nature. Corso’s presentation of the nuclear as both originating from, and contained within, an infinite ecology, constitutes a consummate exemplification of Timothy Morton’s ‘dark ecology’. The poem’s location of the nuclear within an ecological Nature also echoes those depictions of the ‘anti-­ecological’ nuclear bomb as contained and neutralised within an infinite ecology that characterise the work of the writers discussed in each of my chapters. This ecocritical reading of Corso’s work is both facilitated and contextualised by knowledge of the ecological presentations of Nature in the work of Corso’s contemporary Cold War writers. The wider significance of the ecological portrayal of Nature that ‘Bomb’ displays is therefore only fully visible when the poem is read in the context of this study’s appraisal of representations of Nature within early Cold War American texts. In line with this intellectual context, the preceding chapters illuminate the presence of similarly ecological depictions of Nature within other Cold War literary texts. They also allow for comparisons to be drawn between the depictions of ecology in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and in the American literature that is contemporaneous with it. When Carson’s text is reconsidered in the context of this study’s analysis, a number of parallels emerge between Silent Spring and earlier Cold War writing. Carson’s portrayal of Nature in Silent Spring is both complex and difficult to characterise, as a number of critics have previously identified. Hannes Bergthaller, in particular, has argued that Carson was aware of the bifurcation of the Romantic conception of Nature and the scientific understanding of the term at mid-­century, and that she indicated this increasingly problematic tension at the heart of the term in her correspondence. In a 1958 letter to Dorothy Freeman, for example, Carson declares that it is ‘worse than useless’ to ‘go on repeating the old “eternal verities” that are no more eternal than the hills of the poets’. She then goes on to assert that it is time ‘someone wrote of Life in the light of the truth as it now appears to us’.2 However, Bergthaller ultimately suggests that in Silent Spring, Carson ‘doubles down on [the use of] the normative concept of nature’ and insists on its

 Conclusion / 207

‘continuing universal validity’.3 I argue that Carson’s presentation of Nature is slightly more radical than Bergthaller’s analysis suggests, although she also undoubtedly employs her contemporary society’s ‘normative’ or ‘Romantic’ concept of Nature throughout Silent Spring in order to strengthen the book’s broad appeal, and its persuasive power.4 Throughout Silent Spring, Carson repeatedly reproduces the rhetoric of the Cold War ‘scientific’ American’s domination of Nature, despite her criticism of the dire consequences of this same attitude for the American environment.5 For instance, she states ‘only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species acquired significant power to alter the natural world’, as well as asserting elsewhere that the human’s power over Nature ‘has increased to a disturbing magnitude’ over the course of the twentieth century.6 In addition to these persistent suggestions of human domination and exceptionalism, she also explicitly draws a distinction between nuclear science and Nature, describing the nuclear as ‘an unnatural creation of man’s tampering with the atom’.7 However, at the same time, Silent Spring contains an overriding and progressive ecological depiction of the human relationship to the environment. Carson repeatedly refers to a structure of ecology that is reminiscent of Morton’s contemporary theorisation of the mesh, describing an ‘ecological web of life’, the ‘interwoven strands’ of which ‘lead from microbes to man’.8 The book contains a notable duality in this respect; persistent depictions of humanity as part of a ‘web of life’, upon which it ultimately depends for its survival, are juxtaposed to, and appear at times to contradict, the rhetoric of human power and ascendancy that Carson evokes elsewhere in the text.9 Carson’s ecological portrayal of Nature as a ‘web of life’ also distinctly echoes those found in the work of the writers covered in this study, all of whom depict Nature as an interdependent, ecological system within which the human, and also often the nuclear, are interdependent parts. However, in some respects, Carson’s presentation of ecology in Silent Spring is significantly less radical than those found in the work of the Cold War writers who preceded her. For example, Carson’s text contains nothing comparable to the ‘dark ecology’ found in the work of Church, McCarthy, Ginsberg

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and Corso, all of whom write ecology as infinitely expansive enough to contain even those elements perceived to be ‘anti-­ecological’.10 Conversely, in Carson’s work ‘anti-­ ecological’ elements such as organophosphates and nuclear radiation are explicitly portrayed as fundamentally ‘unnatural’.11 However, notable parallels can be drawn between the writings of Carson and Church, Oppenheimer and McCarthy, in terms of their attempts to recalibrate the relationship between scientific knowledge and Nature. Silent Spring repeatedly emphasises the dangerous folly inherent in the characterisation of Cold War science as ‘man’ proceeding ‘towards his announced goal of the conquest of Nature’.12 Carson also recasts ‘intelligent’ scientific investigation as the human witnessing and imitating Nature, stating that: ‘where man has been intelligent enough to observe and to emulate nature, he, too, is often rewarded with success’.13 These depictions of Cold War science that explicitly contradict the images of mastery that dominated in the American media at mid-­century strongly reflect Oppenheimer’s characterisation of nuclear physics as thriving most when it is ‘inspired and led’ by Nature. Oppenheimer and Carson, as well as literary writers such as Church and McCarthy, therefore openly challenge dominant depictions of Cold War American science as representative of the human’s ultimate ‘conquest’ of Nature. In doing so, these writers variously reimagine nuclear science as having its inspiration or origin within Nature, as demonstrating the power of Nature, and as rediscovering properties of Nature that are already understood within some non-­Euro-­American philosophical systems such as Pueblo Native American philosophy, Taoism and Zen Buddhism. This study has suggested that a seismic change in humanity’s relationship to Nature was catalysed by the advent of the Nuclear Age at mid-­century, and that this shift caused American writers to reshape literary depictions of the human relationship to Nature almost immediately, and often in surprising ways. It has shown that many American writers responded to the nuclear climate by depicting Nature as an infinite mesh capable of enduring and containing thermonuclear war, and possessing the power and agency to annihilate the human presence. Furthermore, a number of writers present this annihilation of the human in Nature as a positive

 Conclusion / 209

response to the pressures exerted by Cold War American culture. Increasingly material and ‘trans-­corporeal’ depictions of the human relationship to the environment also emerge in mid-­century literature, and are present to differing degrees in the work of many of the writers surveyed in this study. In her contemporary theorisation of ‘trans-­corporeality’, Stacy Alaimo assets that a ‘trans-­corporeal’ conception of the human relationship to the environment is a vital critical framework for the twenty-­first-­century human being.14 However, my chapters suggest that a ‘trans-­corporeal’ understanding of the human relationship to Nature is equally vital as an ontological framework, and as a tool of literary analysis, at mid-­century. As my chapters expose, Cold War writers reacted to the advent of the Anthropocene faster than ecocritics have so far imagined. Robert Macfarlane wrote in 2016 of the need for writers to respond to the Anthropocene by finding new ‘vocabularies and narratives [. . .] for the kinds of relation and responsibility in which [twenty-­ first-­century humans] find ourselves entangled’.15 However, as this book has demonstrated, Cold War writers began to reimagine the human relationship to the environment almost immediately after the birth of the Nuclear A ­ ge – a­ moment that will almost certainly also mark the point of origin of the geological Anthropocene.16 Significant to this mid-­century reimaging of the human relationship to the environment is the extent to which the white American writers discussed here drew upon non-­Euro-­American influences as sources of inspiration, while attempting to reconsider the relationship between the human and the environment at the dawn of the Nuclear Age. As a result, non-­Euro-­American philosophies and spiritualities in translation consistently provide influential frameworks for reimagining the human relationship to the environment. In many cases, these influences have been shown to be instrumental in forming writers’ increasingly ecological depictions of the human place with respect to the more-­than-­human world. In this respect, the actions of these mid-­century writers anticipate the persistent trope that Ramachandra Guha critiques within the deep ecology movement of the late 1980s and 1990s, which saw white American ecocritics (often indiscriminately) draw on, and advocate the ecological credentials of, non-­Euro-­American philosophies, in a bid to develop a new ‘universal’ ecological thought.17

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The most substantial difference between the writing of Nature by Cold War writers and the influential nineteenth-­century work of the Transcendentalist movement is found in the diminished role of the literary persona in Cold War encounters with Nature. In the Transcendentalist writing of Emerson and Thoreau, Nature, although the focus of literary engagements, is conceived of as both a manifestation of the power of God, and as a vessel for the power and potential of the mind of man; as John Gatta writes: ‘Emerson’s transcendentalism discounted the world’s physicality in favour of an Idealism that regarded nature as a function of human perception’.18 Transcendentalist Nature therefore functions as inspiration and stimulus for the realisation of the potential of the mind of man, and as a symbol of the divine presence of God, in a process that Harold Bloom describes as ‘culminating in self-­deification’. Indeed, Bloom goes on to note that ‘Nature [. . .] is rather perversely the wrong word, since Emerson does not mean “nature” in any accepted sense whatsoever. He means Man’.19 Conversely, in Cold War depictions of the relationship between the human and the environment, Nature is presented as an agential, ecological system, of which the human constitutes a small and transitory part. The literary persona has little or no agency within the encounter, which is often presented as culminating in a longed-­for annihilation of the human self within an infinite Nature. The threat of the total and imminent destruction of the human species with the advent of thermonuclear war is arguably reflected in this desire for the annihilation of the self through an encounter with Nature. However, although Cold War depictions of Nature differ markedly from Transcendentalist encounters in fundamental ways, Thoreau’s legacy as a countercultural icon nevertheless remained a strong influence on Salinger, Kerouac and McCarthy. Depicting the nuclear as a ‘part’ of Nature may appear to be ethically unhelpful, in that it may seem to risk naturalising, and thereby encouraging, the use of nuclear bombs. However, as this study has demonstrated, the recalibration of the relationship between the nuclear and Nature within Cold War literary texts is always facilitated by the presence of Nature as an infinite ecology. This new conception of the human and the nuclear as parts of an infinite mesh ‘without a definite center or edge’ serves to diminish the

 Conclusion / 211

power and agency of the human, not to enhance it.20 Such a recalibration therefore challenges the dangerous myth of the twentieth-­ century American’s ‘mastery’ of Nature. Redressing Euro-­American cultural misrepresentations of the human’s size and significance with respect to Nature has never been more critical, as the failure of humanity to understand its relationship to, and reliance on, the environment creates increasingly perilous and uncertain futures. Therefore, against the risk of appearing to ‘naturalise’ nuclear bombs must be set the large and pressing task of countering the misleading impression that cultural depictions of humanity’s dominion over Nature were ubiquitous, and relatively unchallenged, between the years of 1945 and 1971. In this context, highlighting overlooked mid-­century American literary portrayals of Nature as an infinite ecology, and of nuclear science as something other than a final conquest of Nature, constitutes a small step in the reappraisal of twentieth-­century American cultural ideas of Nature. In the early Cold War period, American writers struggled to respond to a seismic shift in the human relationship to the environment that was catalysed by the advent of the Nuclear Age. Today, contemporary ecocritics continue to grapple with a similarly elemental shift in the relationship between human and world caused by our growing understanding of anthropogenic climate change. The parallels that exist between these two moments in the development of the Anthropocene mean that Cold War literary representations of Nature will be of a special interest to ecocritics today. As Writing Nature in Cold War American Literature has shown, some Cold War writers were able to balance communicating the imminent threat represented by anthropogenic environmental damage with portrayals of Nature that emphasise humanity’s place within an infinite, ecological structure. As such, the field of contemporary ecocriticism should pay renewed attention to early Cold War depictions of the Anthropocene, as it struggles to combine theorisations of an agential and entangled Nature with broader debates about climate change.

NO T E S

Introduction 1. Sarah Knapton, ‘Prof Stephen Hawking: disaster on planet Earth is a near certainty’, The Telegraph, 19 January 2016. Accessed 28 January 2016: http:// www.telegraph.co.uk/​news/​science/​science-n ­ ews/​12107623/​Prof-­Stephen-­ Hawking-­disaster-­on-­planet-­Earth-­is-­a-near-­certainty.html 2. Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 1. 3. Rachel Carson, ‘To Dorothy Freeman’, 13 June 1961, in Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman 1952–1964, ed. Martha Freeman (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995), 380. 4. Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge, 16. 5. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 5. 6. 1784 references the invention of the steam engine by James Watt. See Paul Duke, Minutes to Midnight: History and the Anthropocene Era from 1763 (New York: Anthem, 2011), 11. 7. Morton, Hyperobjects, Epigraph. 8. David Dietz, Atomic Energy in the Coming Era (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1945), 175. 9. Unpublished letter to the New Yorker, 29 June 1962, quoted in Cheryll Glotfelty, ‘Cold War, Silent Spring’, in And No Birds Sing: Rhetorical Analysis of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, ed. Craig Waddell (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 157–73, 157–8. 10. Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 267. 11. Harry S. Truman, ‘Special Message to the Congress Presenting a 21-­Point Program for the Reconversion Period’, 6 September 1945, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, 1945 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961), 293.

 Notes / 213 12. David Dietz, Atomic Energy in the Coming Era (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1945), 175. 13. Francis Sil Wickware, ‘The Manhattan Project: Its Scientists Have Harnessed the Forces of Nature’, Life (20 August 1945), 91–111, 105. 14. Peter Middleton, Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 3, 7, 8. 15. Perhaps the most famous early twentieth-­century dissenter is Aldo Leopold, whose A Sand County Almanac (1949) outlined a ‘land ethic’ which contested that land use ‘is right when it tended to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community’ and ‘wrong when it tends otherwise’ (Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on Conservation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 178, 189). Leopold’s work lends weight to this book’s foundational assertion that ecological visions of Nature are a significant and prevalent aspect of early Cold War works of literature. 16. Mark Hamilton Lytle, The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 61. 17. One exception to this is found in the work of Daniel Cordle, who deals with the influence of the emergent environmental movement on Cold War literature in the years after the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring: see Cordle, ‘The Fragile Planet: Articulating Global Anxieties’, in States of Suspense: The Nuclear Age, Postmodernism and United States Fiction and Prose (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 109–22; Daniel Cordle, ‘Dust, Winter and Refuge: Environmentalism and Nuclear Literature’, in Late Cold War Literature and Culture: The Nuclear 1980s (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 113–40. 18. Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 23. 19. Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 1. 20. Dietz, Atomic Energy in the Coming Era, 175. 21. Morton, Hyperobjects, 4. 22. Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 1. This is particularly true of Morton’s field-­defining studies: Ecology without Nature, Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). The privileging of texts from the British Romantic and American Transcendentalist traditions is also particularly evident in: Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991); Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Laurence Coupe (ed.), The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2000); Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). See also Morton, Ecology without Nature, 1, 8. 23. Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 22. 24. See Greg Garrad, Ecocriticism, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2012), 24.

214 / Writing Nature 25. For analysis of African American writers’ engagements with Eastern culture at mid-­century, see Yoshinobu Hakutani (ed.), Cross-Cultural Visions in African American Literature: West Meets East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 26. Deep ecology emerged with Arne Naess’s eight-­ point manifesto: ‘The Deep Ecology Movement: Some Philosophical Aspects’, in Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century: Readings on the Philosophy and Practice of the New Environmentalism, ed. George Sessions (Boston, MA: Shambhala, 1995), 64–84. Chief among these points that set deep ecology apart from ‘shallow’ environmentalism were a controversial advocacy for global population decrease and the recognition of Nature’s intrinsic value in isolation from its economic use-­value to humans (68). The movement was also characterised by its appropriation of non-­Western philosophy and spirituality: see Garrad, Ecocriticism, 24. 27. Ramachandra Guha, ‘Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique’, Environmental Ethics, 11(1) (Spring 1989), 71–83, 74, 76. 28. Ibid. 73–4. 29. This term will be used throughout the book with reference to Edward Said’s definition in Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003), 3. 30. Guha, ‘Radical American Environmentalism’, 77. 31. See Jason W. Moore, Capitalism and the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015); Jason W. Moore, Anthropocene or Capitolocene? Nature, History and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland: PM Press, 2016); Jason W. Moore et al., Capitalism’s Ecologies: Culture, Power and Crisis in the 21st Century (Oakland: PM Press, 2017). 32. See also Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2015); Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey and George B. Handley, Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur and Anthony Carrigan (eds), Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches (New York: Routledge, 2015). 33. Elizabeth DeLoughrey, ‘Postcolonialism’, in The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, ed. Greg Garrard (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 2; Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 34. DeLoughrey is critical of this global focus in Lawrence Buell, ‘Ecoglobalist Affects: The Emergence of U.S. Environmental Imagination on a Planetary Scale’, in Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, ed. Wai-­ Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell (London: Princeton University Press, 2007), 227–49, and Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place, Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); as well as of Timothy Morton’s claim to think ‘big [. . .] as big as possible’ (The Ecological Thought, 20). 35. Joni Adamson and Scott Slovic, ‘The Shoulders We Stand On: An Introduction to Ethnicity and Ecocriticism’, MELUS 34(2) (Summer 2009), 5–24, 6; see

 Notes / 215 also Serpil Oppermann et al. (eds), The Future of Ecocriticism: New Horizons (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2011); Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan and Vidya Sarveswaran (eds), Ecoambiguity, Community, and Development: Toward a Politicized Ecocriticism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014); Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan and Vidya Sarveswaran (eds), Ecocriticism and the Global South (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015). 36. DeLoughrey, ‘Postcolonialism’, 329. 37. Recent major ecocritical studies of modernist writers include Bonnie Kime Scott, In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and Modernist Uses of Nature (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2012); Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy, Green Modernism: Nature and the English Novel, 1900 to 1930 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Joshua Schuster, The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015). 38. These include Daniel R. White, Postmodern Ecology: Communication, Evolution, and Play (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988); Serpil Oppermann, ‘Theorizing Ecocriticism: Towards a Postmodern Ecocritical Practice’, ISLE 13(2) (Summer 2006), 103–28; Michael E. Zimmermann, Contesting Earth’s Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Arran E. Gare, Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis (London: Routledge, 1995). 39. See Elizabeth DeLoughrey, ‘Radiation Ecologies and the Wars of Light’, Modern Fiction Studies 55(3) (Fall 2009), 470–95; Elizabeth DeLoughrey, ‘Heliotropes: Solar Ecologies and Pacific Radiations’, in Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, ed. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 236–52; Cheryll Glotfelty, ‘Cold War, Silent Spring’, in And No Birds Sing: Rhetorical Analysis of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, ed. Craig Waddell (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 157–73. Noel Sturgeon also highlights a connection between the Cold War and the rise of the environmental movement, and contends that ‘globalizing environmentalism is being used to replace Cold War rhetoric about global democracy’ (Noel Sturgeon, Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action (New York; London: 1997), 148, 149). 40. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 339. 41. Joel Bartholomew Hagen, An Entangled Bank: The Origins of Ecosystem Ecology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 112. 42. See, for example, Craig Waddell (ed.), ‘The Reception of Silent Spring: An Introduction’, in And No Birds Sing: Rhetorical Analysis of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 2000), 1, 17; Cordle, States of Suspense, 15. A notable divergence from this position is found in the work of Christopher C. Sellers, who identifies the work of suburbanite litigants to organise the first public trial of DDT ‘[f]ive years before the celebrated publication’ of Silent Spring: Christopher C. Sellers, Crabgrass Crucible: Suburban Nature and the Rise of Environmentalism in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 2.

216 / Writing Nature 43. Hagen, An Entangled Bank, 116. 44. See Richard P. Tucker, ‘The International Environmental Movement and the Cold War’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War, ed. Richard H. Immerman and Petra Goedde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 566; and DeLoughrey, ‘Postcolonialism’, 329. 45. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963), 169, 170. 46. For example, M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer state that: ‘Carson’s book established rhetorical conventions that would become standard fare in the environmental debate [and] endure to this day in activist writing and Journalism alike’: M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer, Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), 65. Cold War critic Daniel Cordle argues that Silent Spring instigates a new, ecological presence within American texts: Cordle, States of Suspense, 115. 47. Greg Garrard writes of Carson ‘invoking the ancient tradition of the pastoral’ in the opening chapter of Silent Spring (Ecocriticism 1) and Bernice M. Murphy describes Carson casting the opening fable in ‘distinctly gothic terms’: Bernice M. Murphy, The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture: Backwoods Horror and Terror in the Wilderness (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), 178. See also M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer, ‘Silent Spring and Science Fiction’, in And No Birds Sing: Rhetorical Analyses of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, 178, and Christine Oravec, ‘An Inventional Archaeology of A Fable of Tomorrow’, in And No Birds Sing, 42–60. 48. Carson, Silent Spring, n.p. (epigraph), 22. 49. Hannes Bergthaller, ‘“No More Eternal than the Hills of the Poets”: On Rachel Carson, Ecocriticism, and the Paradox of Nature’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 22(1) (Winter 2015), 9–26, 11. Although Bergthaller does not make the link in his essay, his characterisation of a bifurcation at the heart of the term ‘Nature’ is strikingly similar to that expounded by Alfred North Whitehead in The Concept of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1920] 1964). 50. Carson, Silent Spring, 57. 51. Morton, Ecology without Nature, 1. 52. Richard P. Tucker, ‘The International Environmental Movement and the Cold War’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War, ed. Richard H. Immerman and Petra Goedde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 565. 53. Cordle, States of Suspense, 114. 54. Adam Rome, The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013), 47–56; Michael P. Cohen, The History of the Sierra Club, 1892–1970 (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988); Frank Graham and Carl W. Buchheister, The Audubon Ark: A History of the National Audubon Society (New York: Knopf, 1990). 55. Rome, The Genius of Earth Day, 47. 56. Lytle, The Gentle Subversive, 240. 57. Ibid. 164. 58. Rome, The Genius of Earth Day, 51–2.

 Notes / 217 59. Julie Doyle, Mediating Climate Change (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 23. 60. See Rome, The Genius of Earth Day, 53–4. 61. Benjamin Kline, First Along the River: A Brief History of the U. S. Environmental Movement (San Francisco: Acada, 1997), 87. 62. Paul Kevin Wapner, Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 121. 63. Thomas Raymond Wellock, Critical Masses: Opposition to Nuclear Power in California, 1958–1978 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 92. 64. See Frank Zelko, Make It A Green Peace!: The Rise Of Countercultural Environmentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Rex Weyler, Greenpeace: How a Group of Journalists, Ecologists and Visionaries Changed the World (Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press, 2004). 65. Rome, The Genius of Earth Day, 47. 66. Middleton, Physics Envy, 18. 67. See Kenneth Knowles Ruthven, Nuclear Criticism (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1993). Ruthven comments on the tensions between the two fields of nuclear criticism and ecocriticism in the early 1990s, as the latter was emerging, noting environmentalists’ statements about the immediacy of the environmental threat compound: ‘our desire to forget about the nuclear’ (89). 68. See Paul Williams, ‘Nuclear Criticism’, The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. Mark Bould et al. (New York: Routledge, 2009), 253. 69. See Molly Wallace, ‘Will the Apocalypse Have Been Now?: Literary Criticism in the Age of Global Risk’, in Criticism, Crisis and Contemporary Narrative, ed. Paul Crosthwaite (New York: Routledge, 2011), 21. 70. Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 285. See, for example, Greg Garrard, ‘The Trouble with Apocalypse’, Ecocriticism, 104–7; Sophie Nicholson-­Cole and Saffron O’Neil, ‘‘Fear Won’t Do It’: Promoting Positive Engagement with Climate Change Through Visual and Iconic Representations’, Science Communication 30(3) (January 2009), 355–79. 71. One of the first works in this field was Paul Boyer’s interdisciplinary study By the Bomb’s Early Light (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1985). Boyer’s early work began to develop a distinctive field of Cold War studies, alongside other notable early studies including Lary May, Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) and Thomas Schaub, American Fiction in the Cold War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). 72. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic, 2008), 16. May argues that the Cold War foreign policy of ‘containment’ can also be applied to the ideological policing of the domestic sphere in the Cold War years, contending that ‘in the domestic version of containment, the ‘sphere of influence’ was the home’ (16). 73. Nadel, Containment Culture, 4, 3. 74. Cordle, States of Suspense, 1, 112, 115. 75. Daniel Cordle, Late Cold War Literature and Culture: The Nuclear 1980s (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 114. 76. Cordle, States of Suspense, 109.

218 / Writing Nature 77. Adam Piette, The Literary Cold War 1945 to Vietnam (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 107. 78. See Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 2. 79. Daniel Grausam, On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 5. 80. See also Greg Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Végso˝, Roland, The Naked Communist: Cold War Modernism and the Politics of Popular Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). 81. Cynthia C. Kelly (ed.), Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project (Singapore: World Scientific, 2006), 41. 82. Ecocritical studies of African American literature include Paul Outka, Race and Nature: From Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Kimberly Ruffin, Black on Earth: African American Ecoliterary Traditions (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010); Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace, ‘The Novels of Toni Morrison: Wild Wilderness Where There Was None’, in Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001), 211–30; Michael Bennett, ‘Anti-­Pastoralism, Frederick Douglass, and the Nature of Slavery’, in Beyond Nature Writing, 195–210; Anissa Janine Wardi, Water and African American Memory: An Ecocritical Perspective (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2011); John Claborn, ‘From Black Marxism to Industrial Ecosystem: Racial and Ecological Crisis in William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge’, Modern Fiction Studies 55(3) (Fall 2009), 566–95; John Claborn, ‘W. E. B. Du Bois at the Grand Canyon: Double Consciousness and National Parks in Darkwater’, in The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, ed. Greg Garrard (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 118–32. 83. Two chapters of Hakutani’s Cross-Cultural Visions detail the impact of Richard Wright’s engagements with the Zen Buddhist translations of R.  H. Blyth on his description of the human relationship to Nature: Peter Landino’s ‘Wordsworthian Nature Poetry, Ashanti Culture, and Richard Wright’s Haiku: This Other World’ (45–64), and Hakutani’s ‘Richard Wright’s Haiku, Zen, and the African “Primal Outlook Upon Life” ’ (3–22). 84. Recent studies that do discuss race and Nature in a Cold War context include Lorna Fitzsimmons, Youngsuk Chae and Bella Adams (eds), Asian American Literature and the Environment (New York: Routledge, 2015); Joni Adamson, American Indian Literature, Ecocriticism and Environmental Justice: The Middle Place (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001). 85. Morton, Ecology without Nature, 1. Morton’s preoccupation with the creation of terminology has also been notably critiqued by Bergthaller, who is equally critical of David Abram’s ‘more-­ than-­ human world’, Donna Haraway’s ‘naturecultures’ and Jane Bennet’s ‘vibrant matter’ (10). 86. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 3. 87. Ibid. 4, 15, 16, 28. 88. Ibid. 7, 15.

 Notes / 219 89. Ibid. 8, 29, 15. 90. Ibid. 47. 91. Ibid. 79, 41, 42, 15. 92. Ibid. 16, 59. 93. Ibid. 16, 17, 59. 94. Ibid. 29, 30, 40, 59. 95. Ibid. 59. 96. Morton, Ecology without Nature, 8; Bate, The Song of the Earth, 149. 97. Scott Knickerbocker, Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 2. 98. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012), 85. 99. For more analysis of the agential properties of matter, see Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Half Way: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 66. 100. Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 2; Morton, Ecology without Nature, 1. 101. Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 2. 102. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), xvi, 13, 20, viii, 13, xviii, 12–13. 103. Cordle, States of Suspense, 109.

1 Attaining fana in Paul Bowles’s Infinite Landscapes 1. Paul Bowles, Without Stopping (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989), 125. 2. Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Nature: Science, Environment and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 2. 3. Ibid. 2. 4. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 38, 47, 38. 5. The majority of more recent criticism on Bowles has been postcolonial in approach, including Fernando Gomes, ‘Paul Bowles’s First Insight into the Interaction with North African Alterity in “Tea on the Mountain”  ’, Mediterranean Studies 20(1) (2012), 59–70; Ian Almond, ‘Experimenting with Islam: Nietzschean Reflections on Bowles’s Araplaina’, Philosophy in Literature 28(2) (October 2004), 309–23; Erin Mercer, Repression and Realism in Post-War American Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 153, 150. Ralph Coury’s work, in particular, highlights Bowles’s Orientalist representation of Arabs across his oeuvre: Ralph M. Coury, ‘The Twain Met: Paul Bowles’ Western and Arab Critics’, in Writing Tangier, ed. Ralph M. Coury and R. Kevin Lacy (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 135. Other notable work on Bowles that focuses on the post-­war expatriate culture in North Africa includes: Michael K. Walonen, Writing Tangier in the Postcolonial Transition: Space and Power in Expatriate and North African Literature (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011); Brian T. Edwards, Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Greg A. Mullins, Colonial Affairs: Bowles, Burroughs and Chester Write Tangier (Madison: University of

220 / Writing Nature Wisconsin Press, 2002). None of these studies focus predominantly on Bowles’s engagement with the North African landscape in their analysis of his work. One exception in this regard is Anthony Channell Hilfer, who explores the function of the desert landscape and ‘its negational essence’ in Bowles’s work: Anthony Channell Hilfer, ‘5. Small Figures in Large Landscapes’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 54(2) (Summer 2012), 270–83, 271. Rob Wilson’s work on Bowles also tangentially engages with the work of this chapter in describing the human undergoing a process of ‘outer-­national deconversion into non-­Christian existential silence, as a site of primordial rebeginning’. However, Wilson largely ignores the agency attributed to Nature within this construction (Rob Wilson, ‘Masters of Adaptation: Paul Bowles, the Beats, and “Fellaheen Orientalism” ’, Cultural Politics 8(2) (July 2012), 193–206, 197). 6. Michelle Green, The Dream at the End of the World: Paul Bowles and the Literary Renegades of Tangier (London: Bloomsbury, 1992), 74. 7. Christopher Sawyer-­Lauçanno, An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles (London: Bloomsbury, 1989), 98. 8. William Burroughs first visited Tangier in 1954 and, like Bowles, he resided in the city on and off for the next twenty years: Bill Morgan, The Typewriter is Holy: The Complete Uncensored History of the Beat Generation (New York: Free Press, 2010), 82. In 1957, both Ginsberg and Kerouac also visited the city. 9. Green, The Dream at the End of the World, xii. 10. Michael K. Walonen, Writing Tangier in the Postcolonial Transition: Space and Power in Expatriate and North African Literature (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011), 10. Walonen argues that Bowles effectively laid the groundwork for the representations of the Maghreb to follow in the wake of his writing; one might go so far as to say that Bowles conditioned or ‘prejudiced’ the outlook of Western visitors to the region during the period, as least as far as their initial impressions are concerned. (10) 11. Sawyer-­Lauçanno, An Invisible Spectator, 133, 144, 155. 12. Ibid. 209, 255, 261. 13. For a detailed chronology of Bowles’s movements, see Gena Dagel Caponi, ‘Chronology’, in Conversations with Paul Bowles (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993), xix–xxix. 14. Paul Bowles, ‘An Interview with Paul Bowles’, in Conversations with Paul Bowles, 54. 15. Bowles, Without Stopping, 165. 16. Sawyer-­Lauçanno, An Invisible Spectator, 256. 17. Bowles, Without Stopping, 275. 18. Paul Bowles, ‘Pages from Cold Point’, in The Stories of Paul Bowles (New York: Harper, 2006), 86–107, 90, 93, 104. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 86. 21. This and all following parenthetical references are taken from: Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky (London: Penguin, 2000).

 Notes / 221 22. Timothy Mangan and Irene Herrmann (eds), Paul Bowles on Music (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 133–4, vii. 23. Paul Bowles, ‘No More Djinns’ (1951), in Travels: Collected Writings, 1950– 1993 (New York: Ecco 40, 2010), 64–74, 68. 24. Anne R. Pierce, Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman: Mission and Power in American Foreign Policy (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2007), 256. 25. Brian T. Edwards, Morocco Bound: Disorientating America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 12, 127, 131, 94. 26. Edwards, Morocco Bound, 92–4. 27. Denis Jonnes, Cold War American Literature and the Rise of Youth Culture: Children of Empire (New York: Routledge, 2015), 124. 28. Bowles’s work is habitually highly Orientalist, while at the same time being intensely critical of the US colonial impulse. This has led to a split of opinion in the critical field: Walonen goes some way towards defending Bowles’s approach to writing North Africa from charges of Orientalism (Walonen, 10), whereas other critics, including Ralph Coury, have emphasised that the pervasive Orientalism in Bowles’s work is no less marked as a result of the writer’s simultaneous critique of colonialism (Coury, 134–6). 29. William Cronon notes the problematic implications of the term ‘wilderness’, arguing that wilderness is ‘quite profoundly a human creation’: William Cronon, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’ in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1996), 69–90, 69–70, 89. 30. Jonnes, Cold War American Literature, 124. 31. Bowles, Without Stopping, 275. 32. Majid Fakhry, Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Mysticism (Oxford: Oneworld, 2000), 79. 33. Dalya Cohen-­Mor writes that the prevalence of fatalism, under which every aspect of life is determined by ‘the will of Allah’ is ‘inevitably reflected in the  conduct and mentality of [the people of the Arab Muslim world]’: ­Cohen-­Mor, A Matter of Fate: The Concept of Fate in the Arab World as Reflected in Modern Arabic Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 14, 47, 3. 34. Paul Bowles, ‘Africa Minor’ (1959) in Travels: Collected Writings, 252–71, 253. 35. Paul Bowles, ‘Fez’ (1950) in Travels: Collected Writings, 39–49, 48. 36. Coury, ‘The Twain Met’, 129–51. 37. Bowles, ‘Fez’, 48. 38. Bowles, ‘Letter from Tangier’ (1954) in Travels: Collected Writings, 91–9, 97. 39. Bowles, ‘Baptism of Solitude’ (1953) in Travels: Collected Writings, 75–91, 75. 40. Ibid, 75–6. 41. Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 2; Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 12–13. 42. Ibid. 2. 43. Robin Jensen, Living Water: Images, Symbols, and Settings of Early Christian Baptism (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 234.

222 / Writing Nature 44. David Waines, An Introduction to Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 136. 45. Ibid. 137. 46. Emory C. Bogle, Islam: Origin and Belief (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 43. 47. Waines, An Introduction to Islam, 146. 48. Fakhry, Islamic Philosophy, 73, 79. 49. Majid Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy, 3rd edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 265. 50. Bowles, ‘Africa Minor’, 259. 51. Ibid. 259. 52. Bowles describes himself as an ‘atheist existentialism’ in the 1966 essay for Holiday magazine: Paul Bowles, ‘Casablanca’, in Travels: Collected Writings, 384–402, 400. 53. See also Gena Dagel Caponi’s description of Bowles witnessing Sufi rituals of self-­mutilation in Caponi, Paul Bowles: Romantic Savage (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994), 167. 54. Michelle Green, The Dream at the End of the World, 80. 55. Bowles, ‘Fez’, 46. 56. Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, 3rd edn (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 321–2. 57. Bowles, ‘Africa Minor’, 259, 260. 58. Bowles, ‘Baptism of Solitude’, 75. 59. Fakhry, Islamic Philosophy, 75. 60. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 30. 61. Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 1. 62. Bowles, ‘Africa Minor’, 253. 63. Bowles, ‘An Interview with Paul Bowles’, in Conversations with Paul Bowles, 54. 64. Cronon, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness’, 80. 65. Bowles, ‘An Interview with Paul Bowles’, 54. 66. Bowles, Without Stopping, 125. 67. Ibid. 275. 68. Fakhry, Islamic Philosophy, 79. 69. Bowles, Without Stopping, 275. 70. Paul Bowles, ‘A Distant Episode’, in The Stories of Paul Bowles (New York: Harper, 2006), 24–36, 35. 71. Bowles, ‘An Interview with Paul Bowles’, 54. 72. Bowles, Without Stopping, 125. 73. Paul Bowles, ‘An Interview with Paul Bowles’, 54. 74. David Dietz, Atomic Energy in the Coming Era (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1945), 175. 75. Daniel Cordle, States of Suspense: The Nuclear Age, Postmodernism and United  States Fiction and Prose (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 1.

 Notes / 223 76. Daniel Grausam, On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 5. 77. Bowles, ‘An Interview with Paul Bowles’, 54.

2  Nature and the Nuclear Southwest: Peggy Pond Church and J. Robert Oppenheimer 1. An earlier version of this research appeared in: Sarah Daw, ‘The Dark Ecology of the Bomb: Writing the Nuclear as a Part of Nature in Cold War American Literature’, Dark Nature: Anti-Pastoral Essays in American Literature and Culture, ed. Richard J. Schneider (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 119–35. 2. Shelley Armitage, ‘Church Chronology’, Bones Incandescent: The Pajarito Journals of Peggy Pond Church, ed. Shelley Armitage (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2001), xil. 3. The most extensive biographies of Church are Shelley Armitage’s Introduction in Peggy Pond Church, Bones Incandescent: The Pajarito Journals of Peggy Pond Church, and Sharon Snyder, At Home on the Slopes of Mountains: The Story of Peggy Pond Church (Los Alamos: Los Alamos Historical Society, 2011). 4. Armitage, ‘Church Chronology’, xil–xl and Snyder, 72. 5. The Church children were only resident on the plateau for the summer of 1914, the winter and summer of 1915, and the summer of 1916, when Peggy was aged between eleven and thirteen (Armitage, ‘Introduction’, Bones Incandescent, xxxi, xil). 6. Armitage, ‘Church Chronology’, xl and Snyder, 75–6. 7. Armitage, ‘Church Chronology’, xl. 8. Church, Bones Incandescent, 4. 9. Ibid. 5. 10. Peggy Pond Church, The House at Otowi Bridge (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1960), 10. 11. With the exception of one spell in Berkeley between 1956 and 1959, where Church went for further Jungian psychological analysis (Armitage, ‘Church Chronology’, xli); Armitage, ‘Introduction’, xxxv; Snyder, 257, 260 and Armitage, ‘Introduction’, xxxv. 12. Armitage, ‘Church Chronology’, xliii. 13. Shelley Armitage, ‘Shared and Shifting Land(scapes): Making Memoir and Personal Ecology in the Pajarito Journals of Peggy Pond Church’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 27(3) (2006), 111–39, 112. 14. Church wrote memoirs of fellow woman nature writer Mary Austin: Peggy Pond Church, Wind’s Trail: The Early Life of Mary Austin, ed. Shelley Armitage (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1990) (posthumously published); of her friend Edith Warner, The House at Otowi Bridge (1960); and co-­authored a memoir of her father’s ranch school with her husband: Fermor S. Church and Peggy Pond Church, When Los Alamos Was a Ranch School: Historical Profile (Los Alamos, MN: Los Alamos Historical Society, 1974). 15. See, for example, Church, Bones Incandescent, 191.

224 / Writing Nature 16. Ibid. 185. In addition to the contemporary Pueblo Native American presence, the Pajarito Plateau was also marked by the remains of the ancient Anasazi culture. For Church’s engagement with the Anasazi influence, see Armitage, ‘Shared and Shifting Land(scapes)’, 111–13. 17. Ibid. 193. 18. Here and in all following uses, I adopt Alfonso Ortiz’s definition of ‘worldview’, as outlined in New Perspectives on the Pueblos (1972). This is a book that Church owned and consulted. Ortiz asserts that ‘a worldview provides a people with a structure of reality; it defines, classifies and orders the ‘really real’ in the universe, in their world, and in their society’, Alfonso Ortiz (ed.), New Perspectives on the Pueblos (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972), 136. 19. Cynthia C. Kelly, Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project (Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific, 2005), 154. 20. Armitage has worked in close collaboration with Church, and with her family, editing and writing the foreword and notes to a Collected Poems, This Dancing Ground of Sky (1993), and producing an edited edition of Church’s journals in 2001. Her critical essay ‘Shared and Shifting Land(scapes)’ is also an important and wide-­ranging piece, which illuminates Church’s poetic mission, and the influence of Jung, Rilke, and the Pueblo and Anazasi presences, on Church’s work. The only other recent critical work on Church is a chapter of Andrew Elkins’ Another Place: An Ecocritical Study of Selected Western American Poets (Forth Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2002). Elkins’ argument is based on a reversal of the cultural geographer Yi Fu Tuan’s precept that ‘words can call places into being’, and, like Armitage, he foregrounds the influence of Jung (xiii, xii, xiii, 2, 10). 21. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1937). 22. Turner’s thesis argues that the frontier represents ‘the meeting point between civilisation and savagery’, and that contact with the frontier forged ‘the most rapid and effective Americanization’, through which the American ‘transforms the wilderness’ (Turner, The Frontier in American History, 3, 4). 23. Audrey Goodman, ‘The Nuclear Southwest’, A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West, ed. Nicholas S. Witschi (Chichester: Blackwell, 2011), 483. See also Sarah Alisabeth Fox, Downwind: A People’s History of the Nuclear West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014). 24. Goodman, ‘The Nuclear Southwest’, 484, 485. 25. John Mack Faragher, ‘Introduction’, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 2. 26. Patricia Nelson Limerick, Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 27. 27. Goodman, ‘The Nuclear Southwest’, 483. 28. Studies of the contemporary Post-­Cold War Nuclear Southwest, such as John Beck’s Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power, and Waste in Western American Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009) and Joseph Masco’s The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico (Princeton:

 Notes / 225 Princeton University Press, 2006), also contain references to the ‘legacy of conquest’ in the region (Masco, 189), and the pervasive ‘effects of power on the land’ (Beck, 203). 29. Limerick, Legacy of Conquest, 21. 30. For literary studies on race and nuclear weapons see Paul Williams, Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War: Representations of Nuclear Weapons and PostApocalyptic Worlds (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011) and Patrick B. Sharp, Savage Perils: Racial Frontiers and Nuclear Apocalypse in American Culture (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007). 31. Valerie Kuletz, The Tainted Desert: Environmental Ruin in the American West (New York: Routledge, 1998), 16. 32. Valerie Kuletz, ‘Appropriate/​d Technology, Cultural Revival and Environmental Activism: A Native American Case Study’, Appropriating Technology: Vernacular Science and Social Power, ed. Ron Eglash et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 292. 33. See, for example, the work of Leslie Marmon Silko, Rudolfo Anaya and Simon Ortiz: Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (London: Penguin Books, 2006); Rudolfo A. Anaya, The Anaya Reader (New York: Warner Books, 1995); Rudolfo A. Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima (New York: Warner Books, 1994); Simon J. Ortiz, Woven Stone (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992). 34. See Williams, Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War. 35. See Joy Porter, Native American Environmentalism: Land, Spirit and the Idea of Wilderness (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014). 36. For discussion of the Anasazi presence and its effect upon Church’s writing, see Armitage, ‘Shared and Shifting Land(scapes)’, 111–13. 37. Church, Bones Incandescent, 185. 38. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 59. 39. See, for example, Church, Otowi Bridge, 60, 124, 142. 40. Church also studied the Pueblo worldview through a range of other sources, as her extensive research notes demonstrate. See Folder 5, Box 1, ‘Peggy Pond Church Papers, 1922–1987’, Center for Southwest Research, University Libraries, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico. 41. Church, Bones Incandescent, 177. 42. This poem isn’t dated, but Armitage refers to it as an ‘early poem’ written during Church’s ‘teenage years’ and published in St. Nicholas magazine (Bones Incandescent, 203, xxxii). 43. Peggy Pond Church, ‘I Shall Take Root Here Like the Pine’, in Bones Incandescent, 203. 44. Ortiz, New Perspectives, 143. See also Ortiz’s description of the relation of ‘self’ to world within the Pueblo worldview (154). 45. Church, Otowi Bridge, 18. 46. As Joy Porter writes in Native American Environmentalism: ‘too often [Native American intellectuals and spokespeople] find themselves confronting [. . .] stereotypes tying all things Indian to ‘nature’ in a simplistic, ahistorical and racist fashion’ (2).

226 / Writing Nature 47. See Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment, 2nd edn (Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2010), 175. 48. Peggy Pond Church, ‘San Felipe’, This Dancing Ground of Sky: The Selected Poems of Peggy Pond Church, ed. Shelley Armitage (Santa Fe: Red Crane Books, 1993), 60. 49. Ortiz, New Perspectives, 147. 50. Alfonso Ortiz, ‘Ritual Drama and the Pueblo Indian Worldview’, in New Perspectives on the Pueblos, 135–61. 51. Church, Bones Incandescent, 177, 192. 52. Ortiz, New Perspectives, 144. 53. Ibid. 144, 143. 54. Ibid. 143. 55. Porter, Native American Environmentalism, 2. 56. See Ramachandra Guha, ‘Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique’, Environmental Ethics, 11(1) (Spring 1989), 71–83, 73–4. 57. Church, Otowi Bridge, 18. 58. Peggy Pond Church, ‘Master Race’, in This Dancing Ground of Sky, 57. 59. Ortiz, New Perspectives, 142. 60. For details of the historic persecution of Native Americans see Joy Porter, Native American Environmentalism, 117–18. 61. Again, it is crucial to remember Guha’s critique of the attribution of biocentrism to non-­Euro-­American cultures by white American writers (74). 62. Church, Bones Incandescent, 49. 63. Peggy Pond Church, ‘Driven’, in Dancing Ground of Sky, 66–7. 64. Church, Bones Incandescent, 26. 65. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 30, 39. 66. Ibid. 59. 67. See examples such as Bones Incandescent, 43, 46, 47, and This Dancing Ground of Sky, 36. 68. Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky (London: Penguin, 2000), 78. 69. Church, Otowi Bridge, 112. 70. Church, Bones Incandescent, 185. 71. The nuclear bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were powered by fission reactions, whereas the sun is powered by fusion reactions, as are more recent nuclear bombs. However, both reactions derive their power from forced changes in the nucleus of atoms: John Forge, The Responsible Scientist: A Philosophical Inquiry (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), 35. 72. Elizabeth DeLoughrey, ‘Heliotropes: Solar Ecologies and Pacific Radiation’, in Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, ed. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 236–52, 237. DeLoughrey’s work also catalogues the literary reconfiguration of, and resistance to, these naturalising images of nuclear weapons within postcolonial literatures. See ‘Heliotropes’.

 Notes / 227 73. Church, Otowi Bridge, 94. 74. Ibid. 94. 75. Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy (London: Penguin, 2000), 13. 76. Church, Bones Incandescent, 39. 77. Again, it is vital to foreground the ‘Orientalism’ and racism that are inherent in the simplistic association of the Pueblo Native American worldview with biocentrism. For more detailed discussion of the racism inherent in this approach, see Porter, Native American Environmentalism, 2. 78. Ray Monk, Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (London: Vintage, 2012), 313. 79. Church wrote to Oppenheimer and also to Niels Bohr when researching The House at Otowi Bridge to ask both scientists to clarify details of their friendship with Warner: ‘Letter to J. R. Oppenheimer from Peggy Pond Church’, 11.12.54, Folder 9, Box 1, ‘Peggy Pond Church Papers, 1922–1987’, Center for Southwest Research, University Libraries, University of New Mexico, and ‘Letter to Dr Niels Bohr from Mrs Fermor Church’, 11.12.54, Folder 9, Box 1, ‘Peggy Pond Church Papers, 1922–1987’, Center for Southwest Research, University Libraries, University of New Mexico. 80. Church, Otowi Bridge, 90. 81. Ibid. 90. 82. ‘Dear Mrs Church’, 21.11.1958, Letter to Peggy Pond Church from J. Robert Oppenheimer, Folder 9, Box 1, ‘Peggy Pond Church Papers, 1922–187’, Center for Southwest Research, University Libraries, University of New Mexico. 83. Ibid. 84. Monk, Inside the Centre, 50, 327, 328. 85. Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (London: Atlantic, 2009), 28. 86. J. Robert Oppenheimer, ‘The Sciences and Man’s Community’, Atom and Void: Essays on Science and Community (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 75. Oppenheimer’s 1953 Reith lectures were published as Science and the Common Understanding (1954), and later republished alongside a collection of later essays, The Flying Trapeze: Three Crises of Physics (1962) as the posthumous book Atom and Void: Essays on Science and Community (1989). Also quoted in Church, Otowi Bridge, 112. 87. See Peggy Pond Church, ‘Acknowledgements’, in The House at Otowi Bridge, np. 88. Church, Bones Incandescent, 185. 89. J. Robert Oppenheimer, ‘Space and Time’, Atom and Void: Essays on Science and Community (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 85. 90. Church, Otowi Bridge, 112. 91. J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoted in Jon Hunner, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Cold War, and the Atomic West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009), 9. 92. Lincoln Barnett, ‘J. Robert Oppenheimer’, Life (10 October, 1949), 121–38, 125. 93. See Francis Sil Wickware, ‘The Manhattan Project: Its Scientists Have Harnessed the Forces of Nature’, Life (20 August 1945), 91–111, 91.

228 / Writing Nature 94. Peter Middleton, Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 7. 95. Church, Bones Incandescent, 101. My research has not treated Church’s interest in the I Ching because it does not find significant evidence that this influence strongly impacted her presentation of Nature. 96. Monk, Inside the Centre, 325, 202. 97. Barnett, ‘J. Robert Oppenheimer’, 126. 98. See James A. Hijiya, ‘The Gita of J. Robert Oppenheimer’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 144(2) (2000), 123–67. Accessed 2 March 2018: https://search.amphilsoc.org//sites/​default/​files/​proceedings/​Hijiya.pdf. See also Ray Monk, Inside the Centre, 202, 325. 99. Monk, Inside the Centre, 439. For further discussion of this line from the Gita and the translation of The Bhagavad Gita by Arthur Ryder that Oppenheimer takes it from, see Monk, Inside the Centre, 112–13. 100. Hunner, J. Robert Oppenheimer, 111. 101. Ibid. 9.

3  The Influence of Chinese and Japanese Literature on J. D. Salinger’s Philosophy of Nature 1. John Skow et al., ‘Sonny: An Introduction’, in Salinger: A Critical and Personal Portrait, ed. Henry Anatole Grunwald (London: Peter Owen, 1964), 13. 2. For detailed discussion of Salinger’s wartime exploits, see Kenneth Slawenski, J. D. Salinger: A Life Raised High (Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire: Pomona, 2010), 43–135. 3. Slawenski, J. D. Salinger, 80, 82. 4. Ibid. 83–4. 5. James Lundquist, J. D. Salinger (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1979), 70. 6. Skow et al., ‘Sonny: An Introduction’, 14. 7. Eberhard Alsen has assessed the influence of a whole variety of religions on Salinger’s later ‘Glass Stories’, including Vedanta, Buddhism, Christian Mysticism and Taoism, in Salinger’s Glass Stories as a Composite Novel (Troy, NY: Whitson, 1983). Dipti R. Pattanaik reads the presence of Vedanta into Salinger’s work, in ‘“The Holy Refusal”: A Vedantic Interpretation of J. D. Salinger’s Silence’, MELUS, Varieties of Ethnic Criticism 23(2) (Summer 1998), 113–27. In addition, Dennis McCort, Carl F. Strauch and Yasuhiro Takenchi have all identified the presence of Zen Buddhism in Catcher (Dennis McCort, ‘Hyakujo’s Geese, Amban’s Doughnuts and Rilke’s Carrousel: Sources East and West for Salinger’s “Catcher” ’, Comparative Literature Studies 34(3) (January 1997), 260–78; Carl F. Strauch, ‘Kings in the Back Row: Meaning Through Structure. A Reading of Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” ’, Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 2(1) (Winter 1961), 5–30; Yasuhiro Takenchi, ‘The Burning Carousel and the Carnivalesque: Subversion and Transcendence at the Close of “The Catcher in the Rye” ’, Studies in the Novel 34(3) (Fall 2002), 320–36). 8. I will use ‘Eastern’ as shorthand for ‘Chinese and Japanese’, but this is by no

 Notes / 229 means intended to conflate the different literary cultures and diverse philosophical traditions of these two countries. 9. For more details, see Heinrich Dumoulin, Zen Buddhism, Vol. 1: India and China (New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1994), 68. 10. The only study to read Salinger’s work ecocritically is C. Wang and X. Zhang, ‘Returning to Youth and Nature – The Catcher in the Rye in Ecocriticism’, Journal of Teaching and Research 1(3) (May 2010), 269–73. 11. Leonard D. Baer and Wilbert M. Gesler, ‘Reconsidering the Concept of Therapeutic Landscapes in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye’, Area 36(4) (December 2004), 404–13, 408. 12. J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (London: Penguin, 1994), 178. 13. Denis Jonnes, Cold War Literature and the Rise of Youth Culture: Children of Empire (New York: Routledge, 2015), 87. 14. For analysis of the role of ideology in shaping The Catcher in the Rye, see Sarah Daw, ‘“Ideology and the Individual”: Reading The Catcher in the Rye and The Bell Jar with an Althusserian Perspective’ (unpublished MA dissertation, University of Exeter, 2011). 15. Salinger, Catcher, 178. 16. Ibid. 178. 17. Alan Nadel, ‘Rhetoric, Sanity, and the Cold War’, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 71–89, 71. 18. Leerom Medovoi, ‘Democracy, Capitalism and American Literature: The Cold War Construction of J. D. Salinger’s Paperback Hero’, The Other Fifties: Interrogating Midcentury American Icons, ed. Joel Foreman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 255–87, 279. 19. For discussion of the dominance of suburban realism in East Coast post-­ war literature and film, see Robert Beuka, SuburbiaNation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 75–6. 20. John Beck, Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power and Waste in Western American Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 15. 21. Krista Comer, ‘New West, Urban and Suburban Spaces, Postwest’, A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West, ed. Nicholas S. Witschi (Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2011), 244–60, 244. 22. Stanley Corkin, Cowboys as Cold Warriors: The Western and US History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 9. 23. Comer, ‘New West’, 244. 24. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 1953–1956: The White House Years (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963), 445. 25. Corkin, Cowboys as Cold Warriors, 2; Drew Casper, Postwar Hollywood, 1946– 1962 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 336; Richard Hutson, ‘Guthrie’s Shane and American Culture of the Cold War’, Fifty Years After the Big Sky: New Perspectives on the Fiction and Films of A. B. Guthrie Jr (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 2001), 106; Tony Shaw, Hollywood’s Cold War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 113.

230 / Writing Nature 26. John H. Lenihan, Showdown: Confronting Modern America in the Western Film (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 25. 27. Alan Nadel, Containment Culture, 3. 28. A. B. Guthrie, Jr, The Way West (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 4. 29. Comer makes this argument with respect to Guthrie, Jr’s The Way West (244). 30. Guthrie, Jr, The Way West, 4. 31. John Mack Faragher, ‘Introduction’, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 2. 32. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1937), 205. 33. Ibid. 205. 34. Ibid. 205. 35. Salinger, Catcher, 179. 36. Ibid. 178. 37. The Thoreauvian image of retreat to a ‘little cabin in the woods’ is present within the Cold War writing of Salinger and the Beat writers. Salinger himself famously left New York in February 1953, to live in Cornish, New Hampshire in a small, remote house in the woods (Slawenski, J. D. Salinger, 235). 38. Salinger, Catcher, 179. 39. Martin Palmer, The Elements of Taoism (Shaftsbury, VT: Element, 1991), 7. 40. Pauline Yu and Theodore Huters, ‘The Imaginative Universe of Chinese Literature’, in Chinese Aesthetics and Literature: A Reader, ed. Connie H. Dale (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 1–14, 7. 41. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching: An All New Translation, trans. William Scott Wilson (Boston, MA: Shambhala, 2010), 3. 42. Palmer, Elements, 4. 43. Salinger, Catcher, 1; including the slight variation of the phrase: ‘to tell you the truth’. 44. Nadel, Containment Culture, 86. 45. Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 1. 46. Timothy Morton, The Ecologcial Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 15. 47. Zhang Yuejan and Stuart Christie, American Modernist Poetry and the Chinese Encounter (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 9. See also Robert Kern, Orientalism, Modernism and the American Poem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), especially chapter 1: ‘The European Hallucination’, 1–36. 48. See Kern, Orientalism, Modernism and the American Poem; Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Zhaoming Qian, The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003); Zhang and Christie, American Modernist Poetry and the Chinese Encounter; Josephine Nock-­ Hee Park, Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

 Notes / 231 49. One exception is Yoshinobu Hakutani (ed.), Cross-Cultural Visions in African American Literature: West Meets East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 50. Major studies include John Lardas, The Bop Apocalypse: Religious Visions of Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001); Tony Trigilio, Allen Ginsberg’s Buddhist Poetics (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 2007); Deshae E. Lott, “‘All Things are appearances of the same emptiness”: Buddhism in Jack Kerouac’s Nature Writing’, in Reconstructing the Beats, ed. Jennie Skerl (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 169–85; and essays by Jane Falk, Erik Mortenson, Tom Lavazzi and Jane Augustine in: John Whalan-­Bridge and Gary Storhoff (ed.), The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009). 51. Witter Bynner, The Chinese Translations (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1978), 7. 52. J. D. Salinger, ‘Seymour: An Introduction’, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (London: Penguin, 1994), 75. All further citations from both ‘Seymour: An Introduction’ and ‘Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters’ will be taken from this edition, and will identify the story from which they are taken. 53. Lionel Giles, The Sayings of Lao Tzu (London: J. Murray, 1905); Lionel Giles, Taoist Teachings from the Book of Lieh-Tzü (London: J. Murray, 1912); Witter Bynner, The Way of Life According to Laotzu: An American Version (New York: John Day, 1944). 54. J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (London: Penguin, 2010), 43. 55. R. H. Blyth, Haiku: Volume 1, Eastern Culture (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1949); R. H. Blyth, Haiku: Volume 2, Spring (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1950); R. H. Blyth, Haiku: Volume 3, Summer (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1952); R. H. Blyth, Haiku: Volume 4, Autumn–Winter (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1952). 56. Other prominent examples include the work of D. T. Suzuki, Nyogen Senzaki and Arthur Waley. See, for example, Daisetz Taitaro Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, Second Series (London: Rider, 1950); Nyogen Senzaki, The Gateless Gate (Los Angeles: J. Murray, 1934); Arthur Waley, Chinese Poems. 57. Witter Bynner, ‘Remembering a Gentle Scholar’, The Chinese Translations (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1978), 9, 5–6. 58. Bynner, The Chinese Translations, 340. 59. Ibid. 340, 341, 318, 341. 60. Ibid. 329. 61. See William Scott Wilson, ‘Introduction’, Tao Te Ching: An All New Translation (Boston, Shambhala, 2012), xxxiv. 62. ‘In Western languages, the first Latin translator (name unknown) interpreted the word as ratio, derived from the word “reason”. Later, more sophisticated terms like natura naturans – nature n ­ aturing – w ­ ere employed to indicate that the Tao was an ongoing process [. . .] In English, words as dissimilar as “nature”, “highest good”, or the “Path” or “Way” are common attempts to convey a sense of the word’ (Wilson, ‘Introduction’, xxxiv).

232 / Writing Nature 63. Palmer, Elements, 3; Yin Zhihua, ‘Taoist Philosophy on Environmental Protection’, Taoism, ed. Mou Zhongjian, trans. Pan Junliang and Simone Normand (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 279–93, 281. 64. Zhihau, ‘Taoist Philosophy on Environmental Protection’, 281. 65. Ibid. 280. 66. Bynner, The Chinese Translations, 42. 67. The Occident was an undergraduate publication of the University of California, Berkeley (Bynner, The Chinese Translations, 3). 68. Bynner, The Chinese Translations, 4; Although this is an unhelpfully ambiguous word choice, I understand Bynner’s use of ‘meship’ to mean human individuality, and the quotation to suggest the centrality of the idea of the human as a part within a greater ecological system to Bynner’s understanding of Taoism; Bynner, The Chinese Translations, 4. 69. Li Yuanguo, ‘Abnegating Killing and Cherishing Life’, Taoism, ed. Mou Zhongjian, trans. Pan Junliang and Simone Normand (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 263–79, 266. 70. Zhihau, ‘Taoist Philosophy on Environmental Protection’, 281. 71. Witter Bynner, ‘Translating Wang Wei’, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 19(5) (February 1922), 272–8, 272, 273. 72. It is the source of the Taoist tale in J. D. Salinger’s Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (3). 73. Giles, Taoist Teachings, 10. 74. Zhihau, ‘Taoist Philosophy on Environmental Protection’, 281. 75. Giles, Taoist Teachings, 11, 12, 12. 76. R. H. Blyth, Haiku: Volume One, Eastern Culture (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1949), v. For details of the Taoist roots of Zen Buddhism, see Heinrich Dumoulin, Zen Buddhism, Volume 1: India and China (New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1994), 68. 77. Blyth, Haiku: Volume 1, viii. 78. Bynner, The Chinese Translations, 4. 79. For discussion of the role of metonym and synecdoche in literature with a Daoist philosophical base, see Dale, Chinese Aesthetics and Literature, 6–7. 80. R. H. Blyth, Zen in English and Oriental Classics (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1942), vii, ix. 81. For an explanation of the historical relationship between Chinese literature and materiality, see Yu and Huters, ‘The Imaginative Universe’, 4. For detailed discussion of both the historical role of Nature and materiality in Japanese haiku and also in contemporary Eastern and Western criticism, see Haruo Shirane, ‘Secondary Nature, Climate and Landscape’, in Shirane, Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 1–25. For discussion of American writers’ perceptions of Chinese as a language that is ‘closer to nature’, see Kern, Orientalism, 26–35. 82. See Slawenski, J. D. Salinger, 302. 83. Salinger, ‘Seymour’, 77. 84. Ibid. 76.

 Notes / 233 85. Giles, Taoist Teachings, 114–15. 86. Salinger, ‘Carpenters’, 3, 4. 87. Ibid. 4. 88. See: Yin Zhihua, ‘Taoist Philosophy on Environmental Protection’, 281. 89. Salinger, ‘Seymour’, 76. 90. Yu and Huters, ‘The Imaginative Universe’, 3. 91. Ibid. 4. 92. For discussion of the historical role of Nature in classical Japanese literature see Shirane, ‘Secondary Nature, Climate and Landscape’, 1–25. 93. Salinger, ‘Seymour’, 75. 94. Ibid. 77. Issa (1763–1828) was a Japanese haiku poet, who was considered one of the four Japanese haiku masters, alongside Basho¯ , Buson and Shiki. His work was translated by R. H. Blyth, and one of Blyth’s translations of Issa’s haiku appears in Salinger’s long story ‘Zooey’ (1957): ‘O snail/​climb up mount Fuji/​But slowly, slowly’ (J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (London: Penguin, 2010), 115). 95. See Kern, Orientalism, 26–35. 96. Ibid. 9. 97. Dennis McCort argues that Rilke was a strong literary influence on Salinger, and the German poet is named in ‘The Inverted Forest’ as a poetic Master alongside Coleridge and Blake (J. D. Salinger, ‘The Inverted Forest’, Cosmopolitan (December 1947), 73–109). 98. J. D. Salinger, ‘The Inverted Forest’ quoted in David Shields and Shane Salerno, Salinger (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 261. 99. Salinger, ‘Seymour’, 62. 100. Ibid. 77. 101. Palmer, Elements, 7. 102. Salinger, ‘Seymour’, 62. 103. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series (London: Luzac, 1927), 155. 104. Salinger, ‘Seymour’, 62. 105. Ibid. 62. 106. Ibid. 62. 107. Salinger, ‘Carpenters’, 3. 108. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 15. 109. Ibid. 18. 110. Giles, Taoist Teaching, 11. 111. John Buchan, The Runagates Club (Kelly Bray, Cornwall: Stratus, 2001), 156. 112. Salinger, ‘Seymour’, 72. 113. Salinger, ‘The Inverted Forest’, 261. 114. Salinger, Catcher, 132. 115. Ibid. 11. 116. Ibid. 13. 117. Ibid. 74. 118. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 30.

234 / Writing Nature 119. Salinger, Catcher, 168, 153–4. 120. Salinger, Catcher, 169; Nadel, Containment Culture, 85. 121. Salinger, Catcher, 169. 122. Ibid. 138. 123. Ibid. 169. 124. Ibid. 139. 125. Ibid. 139. 126. See: Harold Bloom, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Bloom’s Modern Critical Views, Updated Edition (New York: Chelsea House, 2007), 7. 127. Daniel Grausam, On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 5. 128. Salinger, Catcher, 192. 129. Slawenski, J. D. Salinger, 133.

4  The Beat Ecologies of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac 1. Jack Kerouac, On The Road (London: Penguin, 2000), 255. 2. The term ‘Eastern’ will be used as short hand for the mixture of translated Chinese and Japanese-­origin texts that Kerouac and Ginsberg make reference to, and the combined influence of these texts and philosophies on both writers. My use of the term in no way seeks to conflate these two divergent literary and philosophical traditions. 3. Major recent studies that engage with the influence of Buddhism on Kerouac and Ginsberg include Tony Trigilio, Allen Ginsberg’s Buddhist Poetics (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007); DeShae E. Lott, ‘“All things are different appearances of the same emptiness”: Buddhism and Jack Kerouac’s Nature Writing’, Reconstructing the Beats, ed. Jennie Skerl (New York: Palgrave, 2004), and the work of: Bent Sørensen, ‘Buddhism, Madness and Movement: Triangulating Jack Kerouac’s Belief System’, Encountering Buddhism in Twentieth-Century British and American Literature, ed. Lawrence Normand and Alison Winch (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 105–23; Erik Mortenson, ‘Keeping Vision Alive: The Buddhist Stillpoint in the work of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg’, The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature, ed. John Whalen-­Bridge and Gary Storhoff (Albany: State of New York University Press, 2009), 123–39; Jane Augustine, ‘The American Poetic Diamond Vehicle: Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman Re-­Work Vajrayana Buddhism’, in The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature, 155–76. John Lardas, The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001) does treat the influence of Buddhism on both writers, but asserts it to be fleeting in the case of Kerouac, and even more so in the case of Ginsberg (239–49), at least until the poet’s trip to India in 1962. Jimmy Fazzino also touches on the influence of Buddhism on Kerouac in World Beats: Beat Generation Writing and the Worlding of US Literature (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2016). 4. Dwight Goddard (ed.), ‘Preface’, A Buddhist Bible, Revised and Enlarged (London: George G. Harrap, 1956), vii.

 Notes / 235 5. For more details, see Heinrich Dumoulin, Zen Buddhism, Vol. 1: India and China (New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1994), 68. 6. Fazzino, World Beats, 65. 7. In a 1948 conversation with John Clellon Holmes, Kerouac describes ‘beatness’ as both ‘an inner knowledge’ and ‘a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world’ (Holmes qtd in Lardas, 119). Kerouac also affirms the primacy of the movement’s spiritual agenda to the idea of ‘beatness’ in his 1959 essay ‘The Origins of the Beat Generation’: ‘it was as a Catholic [. . .] I went one afternoon to the Church of my childhood [. . .] and had a vision of what I must have really meant with “Beat” [. . .] the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific’ (Kerouac qtd in Allen Ginsberg, The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats (London: Allen Lane, 2017), 20). The Christian origins of the term attest further to the writers’ hybrid approach to the development of Beat ideology and ‘Beat Zen’. 8. Alan Watts, ‘Beat Zen, Square Zen and Zen’, The Portable Beat Reader, ed. Ann Charters (London: Penguin, 1992), 606–14, 606, 610–11. 9. Gary Snyder’s work has attracted a far larger amount of ecocritical scholarship than the work of his fellow Beat writers, including Joan Qionglin Tan, Han Shan, Chan Buddhism and Snyder’s Ecopoetic Way (Brighton: Sussex University Press, 2009); Nick Selby, ‘“Coming Back to Oneself/​Coming Back to the Land” Gary Snyder’s Ecopoetics’, Reading Under the Sign of Nature: New Essays in Ecocriticism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000), 179–97; Timothy Gray, Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: Creating Countercultural Community (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006); Tim Dean, Gary Snyder and the American Unconscious: Inhabiting the Ground (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1991). 10. Ann Charters, Kerouac: A Biography (London: Deutsch, 1974), 237, 186. 11. Ann Douglas, ‘Introduction’, The Dharma Bums (London: Penguin, 2007), xvi. 12. As Ann Charters notes, ‘while continuing to think of himself as a student of Buddhism, [Kerouac] fluctuated constantly’ between different forms of Buddhism, and Taoism (186). 13. Barry Miles, Ginsberg: Beat Poet (Plymouth: Virgin, 2010), 150–1. 14. Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, The Letters, ed. Bill Morgan and David Stanford (London: Penguin Books, 2011), 213, 218. 15. Kerouac and Ginsberg, The Letters, 278; ‘1952 edition [. . .] same as you have’. 16. Ibid. 228, 309, 243, 266, 279, 282. 17. Dwight Goddard (ed.), ‘Tao-­teh-­king, Wai-­tao’, A Buddhist Bible (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1952), 407–36. It is likely that some of the sources for the Beat writers’ study of the work of Lao Tzu and Chuang-­Tzu are the same as those sources accessed by Salinger, as both Lionel Giles and Witter Bynner brought out popular translations of the works of Lao Tzu, including: Lao-­Tzu, The Way of Life According to Laotzu, trans. Witter Bynner (New York: John Day, 1944); Lionel Giles, The Sayings of Lao Tzu (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1905). They all also read the translations of D. T. Suzuki. Ginsberg also reveals that ‘Snyder had four volumes of R. H. Blyth’s translations of haiku’; he recounts the same Issa haiku that Salinger includes in ‘Zooey’ (1957) in J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (London: Penguin, 2010), 115, and discloses that reading Blyth

236 / Writing Nature was the inspiration for Kerouac’s haiku writing (Allen Ginsberg, ‘What the East Means to Me’, lecture at Kyoto University, 2 November 1988). Accessed 24 April 2017: http://allenginsberg.org/​2013/​05/​what-­the-­east-­means-­to-­me-­ allen-­ginsberg-­at-­kyota-­seika. These points of convergence in the translations of Eastern literature and thought accessed by Salinger and the Beats further exposes the hollowness of Salinger’s snobbery towards the Beat writers’ study of Eastern philosophy and literature. 18. Charters, Kerouac: A Biography, 179. 19. Goddard, ‘The Diamond Sutra, Wai-­tao’, 87–107; Goddard, ‘The Surangama Sutra, Wai-­tao’, 108–179. Both of these sutras were translated by Bhikshu Wai-­tao, and then edited by Goddard. All citations from ‘The Diamond Sutra’ and ‘The Surangama Sutra’ will be taken from the 1956 George G. Harrap British edition of the text (Dwight Goddard (ed.), A Buddhist Bible (London: George G. Harrap, 1956), which is textually identical to the 1952 American E. P. Dutton edition consulted by Kerouac and Ginsberg. 20. Kerouac and Ginsberg, The Letters, 271. 21. Ibid. 278. 22. See also Ginsberg and Kerouac, The Letters, 269, 276, 281. 23. Ibid. 264. 24. Ibid. 222, 228. 25. Charters, Kerouac, 184. In a letter dated 20 April 1955, Kerouac describes that he is attempting to write: ‘a kind of American transcript, American explanation in plain, clear words, of the grand and mysterious Surangama Sutra’ (Kerouac and Ginsberg, The Letters, 282). 26. Lott, ‘All things are different appearances of the same emptiness’, 173. 27. See Lott, 174–6, on the critical consensus that Catholicism constituted the primary spiritual influence on Kerouac, and for Lott’s argument against the need for an ‘either/​or’ approach to Catholic and Buddhist influences. For the interaction between Buddhism and Ginsberg’s Jewish heritage, see Trigilio, 2, 13–14. 28. Miles, Ginsberg: Beat Poet, 98–9, 102–3. 29. It was not until his trip to India in 1963 that Ginsberg was finally able to fully move past the incident (Miles, Ginsberg: Beat Poet, 103). 30. Dumoulin, Zen Buddhism, 64. 31. Ginsberg misspells it as ‘samhadi’ (Kerouac and Ginsberg, The Letters, 228). 32. Ibid. 231–2. 33. Ananda is the second in line of the twenty-­five Zen Patriarchs, and entrusted guardian of the Dharma (Dumoulin, Zen Buddhism, 9–10). 34. Mahāyāna Buddhism originated in India, before spreading first to China, where Zen originated, and then to Japan. By ‘Indian Buddhism’ Kerouac is probably referring to all schools of Buddhism, including Zen, which he contrasts with what he understands to be the ‘more elastic’ Taoism. For the origins of Mahāyāna Buddhism in India and its spread to China and Japan, see Dumoulin, Zen Buddhism, 35–6. 35. In this description of Tao as ‘more elastic’ and ‘less ascetic’ Kerouac was probably referring to the Taoist practice of ‘non-­action’, which he also com-

 Notes / 237 ments favourably on in The Dharma Bums (147). ‘Non-­action’ does not mean ‘passive inaction’, but rather refers to ‘acting in accordance with the laws of nature and the nature of things’ and ‘refraining from interfering in Nature’ (Yin Zhihua, ‘Taoist Philosophy on Environmental Protection’ Taoism, ed. Mou Zhongjian, trans. Pan Junliang and Simone Normand (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 279–93, 283). 36. Kerouac and Ginsberg, The Letters, 243, 244. 37. Ibid. 263. 38. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Stephen Addiss and Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 1; Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu (New York: New Directions, 2010), 152. 39. Burton Watson, ‘Introduction’, Tao Te Ching, trans. Stephen Addiss and Stanley Lombardo (Boston, MA: Shambhala, 2007), xxvii. 40. Kerouac and Ginsberg, The Letters, 263. Watson, ‘Introduction’, xxvii. 41. In the remainder of this chapter I will use the term ‘enlightenment’ as a shorthand for both ‘unity with Tao’ (Zhihua, ‘Taoist Philosophy on Environmental Protection’, 286) and bodhi, or enlightenment in the Zen tradition (Dumoulin, Zen Buddhism, 67), as Kerouac and Ginsberg liberally mix both traditions and their respective concepts of enlightenment within descriptions of their hybrid ‘Beat Zen’. 42. Kerouac and Ginsberg, The Letters, 265. 43. Bodhisattva-Mahasattva deotes ‘an enlightened being’ (Dumoulin, Zen Buddhism, 38). Dwight Goddard, ed., ‘The Diamond Sutra, Wai-­ tao’, A Buddhist Bible (London: George G. Harrap, 1956), 87–108, 90. 44. Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 2. 45. Goddard, A Buddhist’s Bible, 88, 234. 46. Goddard, ‘Diamond Sutra’, 88. 47. Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 2. 48. Goddard, ‘The Surangama Sutra’, 112. 49. Kerouac and Ginsberg, The Letters, 219. 50. Ibid. 269. 51. Ibid. 306. 52. Ginsberg, The Best Minds of My Generation, 22. 53. Kerouac and Ginsberg, The Letters, 264. 54. Miles, Ginsberg: Beat Poet, 150. 55. Zhihau, ‘Taoist Philosophy on Environmental Protection’, 283. 56. Qi means ‘energy, the origin of life’ (Li Yuanguo, ‘Abnegating Killing and Cherishing Life’, Taoism, ed. Mou Zhongjian, trans. Pan Junliang and Simone Normand (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 263–79, 266). 57. Ibid. 282. 58. Ibid. 281. 59. For more details, see Dumoulin, Zen Buddhism, 67–8. 60. Some of the Dharma also references some quotes to Lin Yutang’s translations of Lao Tzu, which may indicate that Kerouac had access to Lin Yutang’s translations: Lin Yutang, The Wisdom of India and China (New York: Random House,

238 / Writing Nature 1942) and Lin Yutang, The Wisdom of Laotse (New York: Modern Library, 1948). 61. Jack Kerouac, Some of the Dharma (New York: Viking, 1997), 8. 62. For Whitehead’s influence on the Black Mountain poets, see Peter Middleton, Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 165–7. 63. Kerouac makes it clear in The Dharma Bums that he does not believe that women can participate in ‘Beat Zen’, describing that Japhy’s female lover: ‘wanted to be a big Buddhist like Japhy and being a girl the only way she could express it was [through having sex with Japhy]’ (28). 64. Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, 48. 65. Ibid. 59. 66. Ibid. 33. 67. The legacy of Thoreau as countercultural icon was also clearly an influence on Kerouac. He extols the virtues of Thoreauvian self-­sufficiency in similar terms to those in which he describes Muir in The Dharma Bums; in a 1949 letter to Ginsberg, he describes a desire to be a ‘Thoreau of the Mountains’ (The Letters, 82). In a later 1955 letter, he also states: ‘my final favourite writers (Dickinson, Blake, Thoreau) ended up their lives in little hermitages [. . .] Al Sublette once said what I wanted was a thatched hut in Lowell’ (The Letters, 307). He also makes a number of plans to get an adobe hut in Mexico, and a hut in the South American rainforest, before he takes up the post of fire-­watcher on Desolation Peak (The Letters, 212, 279). 68. Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, 65, 66. 69. Ramachandra Guha, ‘Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique’, Environmental Ethics, 11(1) (Spring 1989), 71–83, 74. 70. Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, 118. 71. Kerouac, Some of the Dharma, 8; Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, 8. 72. See also Japhy’s description of the ‘Dharma Bums refusing [. . .]the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming’ (83). 73. Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, 118. 74. Ibid. 83; Kerouac, Some of the Dharma, 8. 75. Yuanguo, ‘Abnegating Killing and Cherishing Life’, 266. 76. Mark Teeuwen, ‘The Lautzi and the emergence of Shinto at Ise’, Daoism in Japan: Chinese Traditions and Their Influence on Japanese Religious Culture, ed. Jeffrey L. Richey (Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2015), 103–26, 122. 77. Zhihua, ‘Taoist Philosophy on Environmental Protection’, 282. 78. Dwight Goddard (ed.), ‘The Surangama Sutra, Wai-­ tao’, A Buddhist Bible (London: George G. Harrap, 1956), 108–276, 234. 79. Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, 143. 80. Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, 123, 114. 81. Zhihua, ‘Taoist Philosophy on Environmental Protection’, 282–3. 82. Goddard, ‘The Surangama Sutra’, 234. 83. See Dumoulin, Zen Buddhism, 68. For further details on the role of ‘natu-

 Notes / 239 ralism’ in bringing together Taoism and Zen Buddhism at the time of the development of Zen Buddhism in China, see Dumoulin, Zen Buddhism, 67–8. 84. Goddard, ‘The Diamond Sutra’, 88. 85. Ibid. 88. 86. See, for example, Ginsberg and Kerouac, The Letters, 230, 264. 87. Goddard, ‘The Diamond Sutra’, 90. 88. Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, 114. 89. Ibid. 114, 117. 90. Goddard, ‘The Diamond Sutra’, 98. 91. Goddard, A Buddhist Bible, 2. 92. Kerouac and Ginsberg, The Letters, 243. 93. Stephen Little and Shawn Little, Taoism and the Arts of China (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2000), 179, 23, 178. 94. Allen Ginsberg, ‘Sakyamuni Coming Out from the Mountain’, Allen Ginsberg: Collected Poems 1947–1997 (London: Penguin, 2009), 98–9. 95. Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, 20. 96. Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, 21; Watson, ‘Introduction’, xxvi. 97. Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, 54. 98. Addiss and Lombardo, Tao Te Ching, 120. 99. Kerouac, Some of the Dharma, 5. 100. Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, 54. 101. Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, 52. 102. For an explanation of the historical relationship between Chinese literature and materiality, see Pauline Yu and Theodore Huters, ‘The Imaginative Universe of Chinese Literature’, Chinese Aesthetics and Literature: A Reader, ed. Connie H. Dale (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 4. For detailed discussion of both the historical role of Nature and materiality in Japanese haiku, and their presence in contemporary Eastern and Western criticism, see Haruo Shirane, ‘Secondary Nature, Climate and Landscape’, Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 1–25. For discussion of American writers’ depictions of Chinese as a language that is ‘closer to nature’, see Robert Kern, Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 26–35. 103. Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, 198–9. 104. Yuanguo, ‘Abnegating Killing and Cherishing Life’, 266. 105. Goddard, ‘The Surangama Sutra’, 125. 106. Kerouac and Ginsberg, The Letters, 219, 253, 269, 471. 107. Goddard, ‘The Surangama Sutra’, 126. 108. Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, 114. 109. Ibid. 199. 110. Ibid. 83. 111. Watson, ‘Introduction’, xvii. This distrust of language is shared by the Zen tradition; in Goddard’s translation of ‘The Diamond Sutra’, it is stressed that ‘words have only a figurative meaning. Otherwise the words would imply a belief in the existence of matter as an independent and self-­existent entity, which it is not’ (Goddard, ‘The Diamond Sutra’, 100).

240 / Writing Nature 112. 113. 114. 115.

Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, 132, 139. Ibid. 145. Ibid. 147. Hong Xiuping, ‘Lau Tzu, The Tao of Lao Tzu, and the Evolution of Taoism: The Cultural Significance of the “Legend of Lay-­tzu Converting the Barbarians” ’, Taoism, ed. Mou Zhongjian, trans. Pan Junliang and Simone Normand (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 87–101, 88. 116. Zhihau, ‘Taoist Philosophy on Environmental Protection’, 283. 117. Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, 14. 118. Watson, ‘Introduction’, xvii. For discussion of the relationship between Zen Buddhism and language, see Dumoulin, Zen Buddhism, 54–5; Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, 15. 119. Miles, Ginsberg: Beat Poet, 190. 120. Kerouac and Ginsberg, The Letters, 325; Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, 15. 121. Miles, Ginsberg: Beat Poet, 194. 122. For details, see Bill Morgan and Nancy J. Peters (eds), Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression (San Francisco: City Lights, 2006). 123. Dumoulin, Zen Buddhism, 123. 124. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 59. 125. Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 1. 126. Allen Ginsberg, ‘Sunflower Sutra’, The Portable Beat Reader, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Penguin, 1992), 72–4, 72, 73. 127. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 29. 128. Ginsberg, ‘Sunflower Sutra’, 72. 129. Ibid. 73. 130. Ibid. 73. 131. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 59. 132. Allen Ginsberg, ‘Howl’, The Portable Beat Reader, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Penguin, 1992), 62–70, 62. 133. Ibid. 62. 134. Miles, Ginsberg: Beat Poet, 99. 135. Goddard, ‘The Surangama Sutra’, 246. 136. Ginsberg, ‘Howl’, 69. 137. Kerouac and Ginsberg, The Letters, 315, 316. 138. Ginsberg, ‘Sunflower Sutra’, 73. 139. Ginsberg, ‘Howl’, 70–1. 140. Shirley Dent and Jason Whittaker, Radical Blake: Influence and Afterlife from 1827 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 107. 141. Kathleen Raine, Blake and the New Age (Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2011), 19. 142. Kerouac and Ginsberg, The Letters, 257, 261. 143. See more examples of the use of ‘holy’ by both writers, in Kerouac and Ginsberg, The Letters, 257, 261, 274, 295. 144. Ibid. 319.

 Notes / 241 145. Ginsberg, ‘Sunflower Sutra’, 73. 146. Ginsberg, ‘Howl’, 71. 147. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 59. 148. Ginsberg, ‘Howl’, 68. 149. Kerouac and Ginsberg, The Letters, 319. 150. Ginsberg, ‘Howl’, 68. 151. Ibid. 68. 152. Goddard, ‘The Surangama Sutra’, 234. 153. Ginsberg, ‘Howl’, 71. 154. Ibid. 68. 155. Ginsberg, The Best Minds of My Generation, 399. 156. Ginsberg, ‘Howl’, 62. 157. Goddard, ‘The Surangama Sutra’, 246. 158. Allen Ginsberg, 1988, Question and Answer Session after lecture at Kyoto Seika University. Accessed 24 April 2017: http://ginsbergblog.blogspot.co.uk/​ 2013/​05/​allen-­ginsberg-­at-­kyoto-­seika.html

5  Bifurcated Nature in Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America 1. This and all further parenthetical referencing will be taken from Mary McCarthy, Birds of America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971). 2. Carol Brightman, Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 523. 3. Frances Kiernan, Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 549. 4. Ibid. 574–5. 5. Mary McCarthy, Hanoi (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 112. For discussion of McCarthy’s political position, see Sabrina Fuchs Abrams, Mary McCarthy: Gender, Politics and the Postwar Intellectual (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 1–4. 6. Simone Weil, ‘The Iliad, or the Poem of Force’, trans. Mary McCarthy, Chicago Review 18(2) (1965), 5–30. All further quotations will be from the Chicago Review [1965] version of the text. 7. Notable recent studies include Stephen Schryer, ‘McCarthy’s Field Guide to US Intellectuals: Tradition and Modernization Theory in Birds of America’, Modern Fiction Studies 53(4) (Winter 2007), 821–44; chapter 5 of Adam Piette’s The Literary Cold War 1945 to Vietnam (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 152–208; Deborah Nelson, ‘The Virtues of Heartlessness: Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt and the Anesthetics of Empathy’, American Literary History 18(1) (Spring 2006), 86–101; Michael Trask, ‘In the Bathroom with Mary McCarthy: Theatricality, Deviance and the Postwar Commitment to Realism’, Criticism 49(1) (Winter 2007), 7–33. 8. Stephen Schryer argues that Birds of America has an ‘environmentalist emphasis’ (‘McCarthy’s Field Guide’, 825), although this is not the primary focus of his enquiries. This chapter is indebted to Schryer’s identification of the significant dialogue between Birds and McCarthy’s Vietnam writing, and his analysis of McCarthy’s engagements with Kant and with Nietzsche.

242 / Writing Nature 9. Anon., Columbia Daily Spectator CVI, 30 (6 November 1961), 3; Mary McCarthy, ‘Reflections: One Touch of Nature’, The New Yorker (24 January 1970), 39–57. 10. Mary McCarthy, ‘Notes’, Birds of America (1971), Folder 37.4, Mary McCarthy Papers, Archives and Special Collections Library, Vassar College Libraries. 11. Mary McCarthy, ‘One Touch of Nature’, The Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson), 189–213, 189. All further citations from ‘One Touch’ will be from this published version of the essay, unless they are otherwise indicated to be archive notes or draft versions. McCarthy’s decision to gender Nature female might appear at first glance to be a reductive and essentialising move. However, McCarthy depicts Nature as a power that far outstrips that of human agency, and her decision to gender Nature female in order to emphasise an ‘idea of Nature’ that is separate from the mere presence of the physical environment is an attempt to align the female with a powerful, original and dominant force. In this way, her work forms part of the tradition that Stacy Alaimo identifies of North American women writers who have ‘negotiated, contested and transformed the discourse of nature that surrounds them’ (Stacy Alaimo, Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as a Feminist Space (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 1). 12. McCarthy, ‘One Touch’, 207–8. 13. Mary McCarthy, ‘Notes’, Birds of America (1971), Folder 37.4, Mary McCarthy Papers, Archives and Special Collections Library, Vassar College Libraries. 14. Hannes Bergthaller, ‘No More Eternal than the Hills of the Poets: On Rachel Carson, Environmentalism and the Paradox of Nature’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 22(1) (June 2015), 9–26, 12, 18, 22. 15. See, for example, Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 1–2. 16. McCarthy, ‘One Touch’, 192. 17. McCarthy, ‘One Touch’, 206, 213. 18. Morton, Ecology without Nature, 1; Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 13. 19. McCarthy, ‘One Touch’, 211. 20. Morton, Ecology without Nature, 1–2. 21. McCarthy, ‘One Touch’, 189, 190, 189, 191. 22. McCarthy’s assessment of Modernism’s lack of engagement with Nature had been the dominant critical interpretation over the decades since McCarthy’s essay was published in 1971. However, this critical consensus is now beginning to be rewritten. See Introduction, note 37. 23. McCarthy, ‘One Touch’, 191, 194. 24. Mary McCarthy, ‘Research Notes’, Birds of America (1971), Folder 37.1, Mary McCarthy Papers, Archives and Special Collections Library, Vassar College Libraries. 25. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 30.

 Notes / 243 26. Weil, ‘The Iliad’, 5. 27. Mary McCarthy Introduction to Niccolò Tucci, The Rain Came Last & Other Stories (New York: New Directions, 1990), viii–ix. 28. Kiernan, Seeing Mary Plain, 227. 29. McCarthy, Introduction to The Rain Came Last, ix. 30. Weil, ‘The Iliad’, 6. 31. Margaret A. Simons, ‘Introduction’, Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Margaret A. Simons (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 2. For Weil’s influence on Camus, see Fred Rosen, ‘Marxism, Mysticism, and Liberty: The Influence of Simone Weil on Albert Camus’, Political Theory 7(3) (August 1979), 301–19. 32. John Hellman, Simone Weil: An Introduction to Her Thought (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1982), 1. 33. Simone Weil, ‘Analysis of Oppression’, The Simone Weil Reader, ed. George A. Panichas (New York: David McKay, 1977), 128. All further references from Simone Weil’s ‘Analysis of Oppression’ will come from The Simone Weil Reader version of the text. 34. Palle Yourgrau, Simone Weil (London: Reaktion, 2011), 50. 35. Weil, ‘Analysis of Oppression’, 133. 36. E. Jane Doering, Simone Weil and the Spectre of Self-Perpetuating Force (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 1. 37. Doering, Simone Weil, 13–40. 38. Hellman, Simone Weil, 65. 39. Weil, ‘The Iliad’, 6. 40. Ibid. 11, 15. 41. George A. Panichas, Introduction to ‘Analysis of Oppression’ in The Simone Weil Reader, 126. 42. Weil, ‘Analysis of Oppression’, 147, 133, 136. 43. Ibid. 133. 44. Ibid. 133. 45. McCarthy, ‘One Touch’, 208, 191, 200. 46. Weil, ‘The Iliad’, 6. 47. McCarthy, Hanoi, 75. 48. Weil, ‘The Iliad’, 6 49. Kiernan, Seeing Mary Plain, 549. 50. Brightman, Writing Dangerously, 469–70. 51. Kiernan, Seeing Mary Plain, 543, 546. 52. Marie Syrkin, ‘More On Eichmann’, Partisan Review 31(2) (Spring 1964), 253–83, 254. 53. Kiernan, Seeing Mary Plain, 546. 54. See Stephen Schryer’s detailed reading on McCarthy’s engagement with Kant (‘McCarthy’s Field Guide’, 831–2). 55. Mary McCarthy, ‘Miss McCarthy Explains’, interview by Jean-­ François Revel, Conversations with Mary McCarthy, ed. Carol Gelderman (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1991), 114–22, 115.

244 / Writing Nature

56. Immanuel Kant, trans. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Roland Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 30. 57. Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949–1975, ed. Carol Brightman (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995), 262. 58. Roland Beiner, ‘Preface’, Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Roland Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), viii. 59. Schryer persuasively argues that the novel’s epigraph from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) reveals McCarthy’s intention to portray: ‘this tendency for ideas to become “unseemly” when embodied in fictional examples’, and that ‘much of the novel’s comedy comes from Peter’s application of the categorical imperative to insignificant ethical dilemmas’ (832). 60. McCarthy, ‘Miss McCarthy Explains’, 115. 61. McCarthy, ‘One Touch’, 191. 62. Thoreau was famously arrested and imprisoned in 1846 for refusing to pay tax in protest at the Mexican war, and the institution of slavery (Milton Meltzer, Henry David Thoreau: A Biography (Minneapolis: Twenty-­First Century Books, 2007), 75–9). McCarthy’s Vietnam also ends with an allusion to Thoreau’s time in jail (119). 63. See Joy Porter, Native American Environmentalism: Land, Spirit and the Idea of Wilderness (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 2, for discussion of the problems inherent in the uncomplicated association of Native American culture with environmentalism/​an ecological worldview, and for detailed discussion of the interactions between Native American culture and environmentalism. 64. McCarthy, ‘One Touch’, 213. 65. McCarthy, ‘Miss McCarthy Explains’, 114. 66. See Anatole Broyard, ‘From the Group and the Groves to the Kitchen and the Nursery’, New York Times (19 May 1971), 45. 67. Lisabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage, 2004), 112–13, 124. 68. Brightman, Writing Dangerously, 532, 540 69. McCarthy also published a third Vietnam report, Medina, in 1972. 70. Mary McCarthy, ‘Is America a Terrible Letdown?’ interview by William F. Buckley, Jr, in Conversations with Mary McCarthy, 127–52, 130. 71. McCarthy, Vietnam, 60. 72. Schryer, ‘Mary McCarthy’s Field Guide to US Intellectuals’, 822. 73. Renny Christopher, among others, critiques the ‘Orientalist, ethnocentric and imperial vision’ of McCarthy’s Vietnam reports (Renny Christopher, The Viet Nam War/​The American War: Images and Representations in Euro-American and Vietnamese Exile Narratives (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 19). 74. It is vital to stress that what are being discussed here are McCarthy’s depictions of the relationship between Vietnamese culture and the nonhuman world. It suited the argument of McCarthy’s polemic to present Vietnamese culture’s closeness to nature. Her depictions of Vietnamese culture in these passages

 Notes / 245 must be understood as highly Orientalist depictions that replicate the racist and universalising tendencies exhibited by American writers in their uncritical conflations of Eastern cultures and biocentrism, as critiqued by Guha (‘Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation’, 76). 75. McCarthy, Hanoi, 37. 76. Ibid. 38. 77. Mary McCarthy, ‘Notes’, Birds of America (1971), Folder 37.5, Mary McCarthy Papers, Archives and Special Collections Library, Vassar College Libraries. 78. McCarthy, ‘One Touch’, 206. 79. McCarthy, ‘One Touch’, 208. 80. Again, it is vital to reiterate the problems inherent in McCarthy’s conflation of Vietnamese communism and a ‘natural’, or biocentric, form of social organisation; the alignment of non-­white societies with a closeness to Nature and resultant distance from civilisation has historically been foundational to racist Euro-­American colonial discourses (Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment, 2nd edn (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 175). 81. McCarthy, ‘One Touch’, 206. 82. McCarthy’s description that ‘the grandiose columns of defunct edifices can lift or depress the spirits’ evokes Kant’s theorisation of the effects of the dynamical sublime (Paul Guyer, Kant, 2nd edn (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 371). Her reference to the impact of the perception of an infinite temporality in Nature may also reflect the influence of the Kantian mathematical sublime (Guyer. 371–2). 83. Philip Shaw, The Sublime (Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2006), 82. 84. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 120. 85. Weil, ‘The Iliad’, 6. 86. McCarthy, ‘One Touch’, 206. 87. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 15. 88. Weil, ‘The Iliad’, 11. 89. McCarthy, ‘One Touch’, 206, 208, 206. 90. Weil, ‘Analysis of Oppression’, 136. 91. Schryer, ‘Mary McCarthy’s Field Guide to US Intellectuals’, 831. 92. Ibid. 836. 93. Brightman, Writing Dangerously, 530. 94. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2006), 155. 95. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 30. 96. McCarthy, ‘One Touch’, 212. 97. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 16, 29, 59. 98. McCarthy, ‘One Touch’, 212. 99. Weil, ‘The Iliad’, 6. 100. Peter Middleton, Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 8.

246 / Writing Nature Conclusion: ‘Know that the earth will madonna the Bomb’ 1. Gregory Corso, ‘Bomb’, The Happy Birthday of Death (New York: New Directions, 1960), 32–3. 2. Rachel Carson qtd in Hannes Bergthaller, ‘“No More Eternal than the Hills of the Poets”: On Rachel Carson, Ecocriticsm, and the Paradox of Nature’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 22(1) (Winter 2015), 9–26, 11. 3. Bergthaller, ‘No More Eternal than the Hills of the Poets’, 18. 4. See the Introduction in this volume for more detail. 5. Peter Middleton, Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 8; David Dietz, Atomic Energy in the Coming Era (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1945), 175. 6. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (London: Penguin, 2000), 22. 7. Ibid. 24. 8. Ibid. 79, 74. 9. Ibid. 68. 10. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 59. 11. Carson, Silent Spring, 24. 12. Ibid. 87. 13. Ibid. 84. 14. Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 2. 15. Robert Macfarlane, ‘Generation Anthropocene: How Humans Have Altered the Planet for Ever’, Guardian (1 April 2016). Accessed 28 December 2017: https:// www.theguardian.com/​ b ooks/​ 2 016/​ a pr/​ 0 1/​ g eneration-a­ nthropocene-­ altered-­planet-­for-­ever 16. Ibid. 17. Ramachandra Guha, ‘Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique’, Environmental Ethics, 11(1) (Spring 1989), 71–83, 73–83. 18. John Gatta, Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion and Environment in American from the Puritans to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 138. A number of ecocritics, including Ashton Nichols, Sharon Cameron and Lawrence Buell, have argued that Thoreau increasingly moves away from an Emersonian influence in his late work. Many of these critics have cited the more empirical style of Thoreau’s late nature writing as evidence that Thoreau can be claimed as an early originator of an ecological vision of the human relation to Nature. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 168–70. However, others, including David Robinson and Sean Ross Meehan, have persuasively argued that the empirical style of Thoreau’s later work does not signify a significant deviation from Emersonian Idealism. See David M. Robinson, Natural Life: Thoreau’s Worldly Transcendentalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 177–8;

 Notes / 247 Scott Ross Meehan, ‘Ecology and Imagination: Emerson, Thoreau and the Nature of Metonymy’, Criticism 55(2) (Spring 2013), 299–329, 300–1. 19. Harold Bloom, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Bloom’s Modern Critical Views, updated edn (New York: Chelsea House, 2007), 7. 20. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 8.

INDE X

Abel, Lionel, 181 Abrams, Sabrina Fuchs, 171 ‘Africa Minor’ (Bowles), 39–40, 50–2 Alaimo, Stacy, 24, 27, 137, 209, 242n Albuquerque, 77 Alsen, Eberhard, 96 America (United States), 35–6, 36 consumer capitalism, 187–9 cultural imperialism, 34–6 decaying culture, 31, 41, 61 exile from, 30–2 foundational myths, 35 frontier ideology and rhetoric, 35–6, 98–102, 224n idea of ‘the West’, 97–100 Southwest, 64–5 ‘Analysis of Oppression’ (Weil), 178–9 Anasazi culture, 67, 224n Anthropocene, 1–2, 209 Arendt, Hannah, 181–2 Armitage, Shelley, 64, 224n asceticism, 44 atheism, 51–2 Audubon Society, 13–14 Austin, Mary, 62

Baer, Leonard D., 96–7 ‘Baptism of Solitude’ (Bowles), 42–4, 48, 55 Barnett, Lincoln, 91, 94 Beat Generation writers, 28–9, 116, 129–68 ‘Beat Zen’, 130–1, 133–7, 142–52, 156–8, 161, 163–7 ideology, 139, 235n see also Ginsberg, Allen; Kerouac, Jack Beauvoir, Simone de, 175 Beck, John, 98 Bennett, Jane, 24 Bergthaller, Hannes, 12, 172, 206–7 Bethe, Hans, 4 Bhagavad Gita, 6, 93, 132, 133 birds, 118–23 Birds at Daybreak (Church), 62 Birds of America (McCarthy), 169–71, 182 depiction of environmental destruction, 185–6 depiction of waste and rubbish, 190 influence of Kant, 181–5, 199 portrayal of Nature, 175, 182, 191–4, 197–200

 Index / 249 and the Vietnam War, 180, 201 Black Mountain College poets, 142 Blake, William, 134, 140, 163–4 Blyth, R. H., 104–6, 109–10, 114–15, 119–21, 218n, 235–6n Bodily Natures (Alaimo), 24 Bohr, Niels, 86–8 The Book of Lieh-Tzü, 105–6, 108, 112–13 Bowles, Paul, 26–68, 83, 93, 127–8, 175 ‘Africa Minor’, 39–40, 50–2 ‘Baptism of Solitude’, 42–4, 48, 55 ‘A Distant Episode’, 29–30 exile from the USA, 30–1 ‘Fez’, 40, 46 influence on Beat writers, 140 ‘interior mechanism’, 41 journalism, 34, 39–40, 42, 44–5 landscape as a protagonist in his fiction, 30, 41–3 music criticism, 33 ‘Pages from Cold Point’, 30–3, 41, 60 postcolonial criticism, 219n role in drawing American writers to North Africa, 28–9 The Sheltering Sky, 28–42, 44, 47–9, 52–8, 198 ‘Tea on the Mountain’, 29–30 Without Stopping, 26, 28, 30, 43, 54, 56–7 Brontë, Emily, 171 Brower, David, 14 Buchan, John, 118, 120 Buddhism, 130, 234n Mahayana, 236n see also Zen Buddhism A Buddhist Bible (Goddard), 130, 132–3, 149, 152 Buell, Lawrence, 5–6, 16

Burroughs, William, 29, 220n Burtt, E. A., 132 Bynner, Witter, 104–8, 114, 119–21, 232n Camus, Albert, 175 capitalism, 34, 187–9 Capote, Truman, 29 Carson, Rachel, 1–5, 7, 11–14, 159, 172, 200, 206–8 Cassady, Neal and Carolyn, 132 The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger), 95–104, 111, 115, 192, 194 function of Nature in, 101–2, 119–27 Holden’s desire to go ‘out West’, 97–8, 100–103, 119, 121, 126–7 New York setting, 97, 123–7 Catholicism, 236n Cayce, Edgar, 132 Charters, Ann, 235n Cheever, John, 98 Chinese art and literature, 95, 103–6, 111–12, 150–1, 232n, 234n, 239n influence on Beat writers, 129–35, 142–3 Christianity, 44, 50–2, 109 Chuang-Tzu, 132, 235n Church, Fermor, 62 Church, Peggy Pond, 19, 61–94, 127, 175, 207 biography, 61–4 Birds at Daybreak, 62 ‘Driven’, 80–3 The House at Otowi Bridge, 62, 67, 70, 84, 86, 88–90 ‘I Shall Take Root Here Like the Pine’, 69–71, 83 journals, 68, 82, 84–5, 86, 92 ‘Master Race’, 75–80 naturalisation of the nuclear, 84–8

250 / Writing Nature Church, Peggy Pond (cont.) problematic view of Native American culture, 71–2 ‘San Felipe’, 72–5, 79 use of Pueblo world view, 69–71 Clark, Timothy, 2 class system, 194 Climate Change, 2 Coca-Cola, 34, 189 Cohen, Michael, 9 Cohen-Mor, Dalya, 39, 221n colonialism, 66 coloratura sopranos, 33, 41 Comer, Krista, 99 communism, 99, 188 Complementarity, 86–7 Confucius, 140 consciousness, 43–4, 47 erosion of, 69 and Nature, 69–71 transcendental, 162, 166 consumerism, 35, 187–9 Containment Culture (Nadel), 4, 16 Cordle, Daniel, 17, 59, 213n Corkin, Stanley, 99 Corso, Gregory, 205–6, 208 Coury, Ralph, 40, 221n Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky), 183 Critique of Judgement (Kant), 197 Cronon, William, 51–2 culinary modernisation, 187–9 cultural appropriation, 7–8, 78, 92–4, 106 cultural homogenisation, 32 cultural imperialism, 78, 187–8 dark ecology, 21–3, 67, 83, 88, 161, 164–5, 203, 206 DDT, 14, 215n deep ecology, 8, 144, 214n DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, 9, 85 Dent, Shirley, 163

desert landscapes human integration with, 53–4, 56–7 New Mexico, 61, 63 Sahara, 26–7, 30, 32, 35–44, 47, 50, 59 see also landscape The Dharma Bums (Kerouac), 116, 131, 142–8, 151–3, 156–7, 166, 238n Diamond Sutra, 133, 135, 137–9, 148–9, 239n Dietz, David, 3 ‘A Distant Episode’ (Bowles), 29–30, 57–9 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 183 ‘Driven’ (Church), 80–3 ecocriticism, 23, 217n The Ecological Thought (Morton), 21–2 Ecology without Nature (Morton), 174 ecopoesis, 23 Edwards, Brian T., 34, 35 Eichmann, Adolf, 181 Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt), 181 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 99 Eliot, T. S., 132 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 115, 210 enlightenment, 237n environmental destruction, 82, 185–6 The Environmental Imagination (Buell), 5–6 environmentalism, 8, 170, 186–7 Essays in Zen Buddhism (Suzuki), 117 ethics, 182–5 existentialism, 170 Fakhry, Majid, 45 fana, 44, 47, 49, 52, 59

 Index / 251 Fassi, 40 fatalism, 39–40, 58–9, 221n Faulkner, William, 180 Fenollosa, Ernest, 104 ‘Fez’ (Bowles), 40, 46 Flaubert, Gustave, 175 Flower Sermon, 117, 128 The Flying Trapeze (Oppenheimer), 91 food packaging, 189 force, 177–80 ‘The force that drives the green fuse through the flower’ (Thomas), 80 Ford, Ray, 115 France, Nazi invasion of, 175–6 free verse, 141 Freeman, Dorothy, 207 Friends of the Earth, 14 frontier ideology and rhetoric, 35–6, 64–5, 98–102, 224n The Frontier in American History (Turner), 64 garbage, 189–90 Gatta, John, 210 gender, 65, 171, 242n geology, 43–4 germs, 40 Gesler, Wilbert M., 96–7 Gide, André, 28 Giles, Lionel, 104, 106, 108–9, 112, 114, 119–21 Ginsberg, Allan, 29, 116, 129–68, 175, 207 environmentalist philosophy, 158–68 ‘Howl’, 140, 157, 161–5, 167 influence of Zen and Taoism, 130–41, 146–52 letters to Kerouac, 134–7, 148–50, 153, 163 ‘Sakyamuni Coming Out from the Mountain’, 151

‘Sunflower Sutra’, 157–61, 163–4, 167 Goddard, Dwight, 130, 132–3, 138, 146, 148–9, 154, 162, 239n Goodman, Audrey, 64–5 Grausam, Daniel, 17, 60, 127–8 Green, Michelle, 29, 44–7, 46 Greenpeace, 14 Guha, Ramachandra, 8–9, 74, 93–4, 143–4, 209 Guthrie, A. B. Jr., 99–101, 103 Gysin, Brion, 29, 46 haiku, 104–5, 109, 233n Haiku: Volume 1 (Blyth), 109 Han Shan, 151–2 Hanoi (McCarthy), 180, 188, 190–2, 196 Hardy, Thomas, 171, 175 Hawking, Stephen, 1–2 health, 37 Heisenberg, Werner, 87 heroin, 166 Hilfer, Anthony Channell, 220n Hindu philosophy, 92–3 Hiroshima, 4, 63, 226n Holmes, John Clellon, 235n Holocaust, 181 homosexuality, 31 The House at Otowi Bridge (Church), 62, 67, 70, 84, 86, 88–90 House Un-American Activities Committee, 99, 102–3 ‘Howl’ (Ginsberg), 140, 157, 161–5, 167 ‘The Hue and the Cry’ (McCarthy), 181 Hunner, Jon, 93 Hyperobjects (Morton), 5 I Ching, 92 ‘I Shall Take Root Here Like the Pine’ (Church), 68–9, 71, 83

252 / Writing Nature Iliad (Homer), 175, 177–8 ‘The Iliad, or The Poem of Force’ (Weil), 175–9, 203 ‘The Imaginative Universe of Chinese Literature’ (Yu and Huters), 102, 113 imperialism, 34, 78, 187–8 innocence, 97 intertransposability, 69–71 ‘The Inverted Forest’ (Salinger), 115, 121, 233n Irving, Washington, 144 Islam, 39–40, 50 and Sufism, 44–7 The Jade Mountain, 105, 107 Japanese literature, 95, 103–5, 109–12, 129–30, 234n Jonnes, Denis, 36, 97 Joyce, James, 174 Judaism, 236n Kafka, Franz, 111–12 Kant, Immanuel, 169–70, 181–4, 197, 244n on the death of Nature, 199–201 Keats, John, 12 Kern, Robert, 114–15, 153 Kerouac, Jack, 29, 106, 116, 129–68, 130–4, 175, 210 on Anglo-American philosophy, 141–2 described by Ginsberg, 160 The Dharma Bums, 116, 131, 142–8, 151–3, 156–7, 166, 238n influence of Chinese and Japanese thought, 129–30, 141–3 influence of Zen and Taoism, 130–5, 146–52, 154–7 letters to Ginsberg, 148, 154

On the Road, 129, 132 The Scripture of Golden Eternity, 133 shyness, 157 Some of the Dharma, 133, 141–2, 152, 154 spirituality, 134, 145–9, 154 use of mountain landscapes, 149–53, 156 Wake Up, 133 Kiernan, Frances, 175, 181 Killingsworth, M. Jimmie, 216n Knickerbocker, Scott, 23 Korean War, 99 Kuletz, Valerie L., 65–6 land ethic, 213n landscape human relationship to, 30, 41–3, 52–3, 56 mountains, 149–53, 156 and religion, 45–7, 50–1, 59–60 see also desert landscapes; Nature Lao Tzu, 132, 141, 152, 235n The Legacy of Conquest (Limerick), 64 Lenihan, John H., 99 Leopold, Aldo, 213n Letters to a Young Poet (Rilke), 115 Liang Kai, 131, 150–1 liberalism, 98 Limerick, Patricia, 64–5 literary criticism, 4 Los Alamos Ranch School, 61–2, 67, 89 repossessed by US government, 62–3, 75, 88–9 site of US nuclear program, 63, 77 see also Manhattan Project; Pajarito Plateau Lucia di Lammermoor (Donizetti), 33

 Index / 253 Macfarlane, Robert, 209 Mangan, Timothy, 33 Manhattan Project, 3–4, 62, 66–7, 84, 88–9 Marshall Plan, 34 Marxism, 175 Mary McCarthy: Gender, Politics and the Postwar Intellectual (Abrams), 171 mass media, 190 ‘Master Race’ (Church), 75–80 materialism, 31, 35 May, Elaine Tyler, 16, 217n McCarthy, Mary, 7, 8, 98, 169–204, 207–8, 210 Birds of America, 169–71, 180–6, 190–4, 197–201 on capitalism, 188 and gender, 171 Hanoi, 180, 188, 190–2, 196 ‘The Hue and the Cry’, 181 idea of Nature, 171–5, 182–4, 190–1, 197–204 influence of Kant, 169–70, 181–4, 197 influence of Vietnam War, 169–70, 190–2, 195–6 ‘One Touch of Nature’, 170–5, 180, 186–7, 194, 196–9, 202 Orientalism, 190, 192 Vietnam, 188–9 McCarthyism, 98, 99, 102–3, 125 McCort, Dennis, 233n meditation, 146–7, 162 Medovoi, Leerom, 98–9 memory, 43–4 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 175 mesh, 21–2, 28, 49 Metropolitan Opera, 33 Middleton, Peter, 4, 18 mimesis, 69 ‘Mind Essence’, 146, 154, 163–5 Monk, Ray, 89, 92 Montoya, Atilano, 67

Moore, Jason W., 9 Morocco, 28–30, 32, 39–40 Sufism in, 45–7 Morton, Timothy, 2, 5, 21, 28, 49, 60, 83, 103, 119, 128, 203 Ecology without Nature, 174 see also dark ecology mountains, as symbols of enlightenment, 149–53, 156 Muir, John, 9, 142–3 mysticism, 92 Nadel, Alan, 4, 16, 98, 125 Nagasaki, 63, 226n Native Americans, 62, 64, 78 land viewed as wasteland, 65–6 relationship to Nature, 71–3, 78, 81–2, 225n natural disasters, 202–3 Nature alienation or estrangement from, 61, 170, 173, 199–200 bifurcation of, 12–13, 172, 175, 185, 200 conquered or harnessed by man, 3–4, 28, 59 death of, 199–201 and ‘force’, 177–8, 191 and gender, 242n human relationship to, 2, 69–70, 71, 155–6, 158–61 in Kerouac’s writing, 144, 152–4 McCarthy’s idea of, 171–5 as a moral and ethical base, 182–4 and nuclear weapons, 63–4, 78–80, 84–8, 205–6 and Orientalism, 190–1 personification of, 171 and poetry, 115 regenerative capacity, 32, 60 reintegration with, 69–71

254 / Writing Nature Nature (cont.) and religion/spirituality, 51–2, 106–10, 146–9 as a ‘web of life’, 207 Nazism, 175–6 New Mexico, 61, 63 New Perspectives on the Pueblos (Ortiz), 68–70, 72–3 New York, 97, 123–6, 126 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 200–1 Nine Stories (Salinger), 128 nuclear science and weaponry, 2, 4, 31, 202 disarmament, 14 ‘harnessing’ nature, 28, 59, 90 and Hindu thought, 92–3 nuclear bombs, 2, 11, 30, 60, 85, 167–8 as a power of Nature, 63, 84–8, 90, 205–6 test sites, 64, 66, 77 as an uncontrollable force, 203–4 violating the order of Nature, 77 see also Manhattan Project objectification, 74 On the Road (Kerouac), 129, 132 ‘One Touch of Nature’ (McCarthy), 175–6, 180, 186–7, 194, 196–9, 202 Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 2, 6, 19, 61, 64, 84, 88–94, 140, 208 interest in Hindu thought, 92–3 Reith Lectures (1953), 89–90, 94 Oppression and Liberty (Weil), 175 Orientalism, 8–9, 40, 66, 106, 114, 144, 153, 190, 192, 221n, 227n, 245n Ortiz, Alfonso, 64, 67–8, 69–70, 72–3 ‘Pages from Cold Point’ (Bowles), 30–3, 41, 60

Pajarito Plateau, 61, 63, 64, 66–7, 75, 77, 83–4, 88–9 Palmer, Jacqueline S., 216n Panchias, George, 178 Panorama (BBC), 91 parentheses, 115–17 Payne, Robert, 132 ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ (Salinger), 111 Phillips, William, 181 Physics Envy (Middleton), 4, 18 Pierce, Anne, 34 poesis, 23 Point Four Program, 34 pollution, 159–61, 186 Pons, Lily, 33 Porter, Joy, 71, 74 Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, 128 Pound, Ezra, 28, 104, 139 ‘The Problem of the West’ (Turner), 100–1 Process and Reality (Whitehead), 142 propaganda, 85 Pueblo Native Americans, 62, 64, 67–8 Church’s problematic view of, 72–5 relationship to Nature, 71–3, 78, 81–2 worldview, 66–8, 69–71, 72–3, 78, 86–7, 129, 224n purification, 44 racism, 65, 71, 190, 227n ‘Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique’ (Guha), 8–9 Rahv, Philip, 181 The Rain Came Last (Tucci), 175 ‘Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters’ (Salinger), 96, 110–13, 118–20

 Index / 255 regeneration, 44 ‘Remembering a Gentle Scholar’ (Bynner), 107 Revel, Jean-François, 182–3 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 115, 233n ‘Rip Van Winkle’ (Irving), 144–5 road building, 185 Ruthven, Kenneth Knowles, 217n Ryder, Arthur, 92 Sahara, 32–3, 35–8, 52, 54 ‘Sakyamuni Coming Out from the Mountain’ (Ginsberg), 151 Salinger, J. D., 95–128, 175, 210 The Catcher in the Rye, 95–104, 115, 119, 121, 192, 194 influence of Zen and Taoism, 96, 102–10, 112, 116–18, 120–3, 126, 228n ‘The Inverted Forest’, 115, 121, 233n Nine Stories, 128 ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’, 111 ‘Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters’, 96, 110–13, 118–20 ‘Seymour: An Introduction’, 96, 110–14, 116–20 Time profile, 95 use of Nature, 110–11, 118 ‘Zooey’, 105, 233n Salinger’s Glass Stories as a Composite Novel (Alsen), 96 samadhi, 147 ‘San Felipe’ (Church), 72–5, 79 San Felipe Pueblo village, 72–4 San Ildefonso Pueblo village, 67 A Sand County Almanac (Leopold), 213n Sanskrit, 91 Schryer, Stephen, 189–90 Science and the Modern World (Whitehead), 141

Scientific American, 3 The Scripture of Golden Eternity (Kerouac), 133 Second World War, 32, 181 Sellers, Christopher C., 215n ‘Seymour: An Introduction’ (Salinger), 96, 104, 110–14, 116–20 Sharp, Patrick B., 66 The Sheltering Sky (Bowles), 28–34, 40, 198 and American consumerism, 35–6 death as a ‘looming’ presence, 40–1 desert landscape in, 35–9, 40–2, 44, 47–8, 57–8 Port’s death, 35–6, 48–9, 52–6 title, 38–9 use of frontier and pioneer ideology, 35–6 Sierra Club, 13–14 Silent Spring (Carson), 1–4, 11–14, 17, 159, 172, 206–8 ‘Skule Skerry’ (Buchan), 118 Slawenski, Kenneth, 103 Slovic, Scott, 10 Snyder, Gary, 131, 142, 153, 156, 235n Solomon, Carl, 162 Some of the Dharma (Kerouac), 133, 141–2, 152, 154 Soviet Union, 34 stars, 82–3 States of Suspense (Cordle), 17 Sufism, 44–7, 59–60, 140, 223n suicide, 124–5 ‘Sunflower Sutra’ (Ginsberg), 157–61, 163–4, 167 Surangama sutra, 133, 135, 138–9, 146–7, 149, 152, 154, 162–5 Suzuki, D. T., 105, 117, 131 Syrkin, Marie, 181

256 / Writing Nature The Tainted Desert (Kuletz), 65 Tao Te Ching, 102, 104–6, 130, 132, 135, 152 Taoism, 96–7, 102–10, 112, 120, 208 Americanised, 116–17 influence on Beat writers, 130–7, 141, 146–52, 154–7, 165–6 and Nature, 106–10, 117–21, 129 and non-action, 236–7n role of qi, 146, 164 ‘Tea on the Mountain’ (Bowles), 29–30 Thomas, Dylan, 80 Thoreau, Henry David, 5–6, 210, 230n, 238n, 244n Time, 95 trans-corporeality, 27, 43, 49, 53, 56, 59–60, 137–9, 148, 160 ‘Translating Wang Wei’ (Bynner), 108 translation, 105–9, 116, 218n, 231n ‘The Trouble with Wilderness’ (Cronon), 51–2 Truman, Harry, 3 Tucci, Niccolò, 175 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 35, 64, 100–1

Wake Up (Kerouac), 133 Waley, Arthur, 106 Walonen, Michael K., 220n Wang Wei, 108 Warner, Edith, 62–4, 67, 88–9 Warren, Henry Clark, 132 The Waste Land (Eliot), 132 Watts, Alan, 130–1 wave-particle duality, 87 The Way West (Guthrie), 99–101, 103 Weil, Simone, 7, 8, 170, 175–6, 181, 184, 197, 199, 203–4 concept of ‘force’, 177–80, 195, 203 the ‘West’, 97–100, 103 Westerns (film genre), 99–100 Whitehead, Alfred North, 141–2 Whittaker, Jason, 163 wilderness, 35–6 Williams, Paul, 66 Williams, Tennessee, 29 Wilson, Rob, 220n Without Stopping (Bowles), 26, 28, 30, 38, 43, 54, 56–7 Worster, Donald, 10–11

Ulysses (Joyce), 174 United States see America (United States) Updike, John, 98

Zen Buddhism, 95–6, 105, 109–10, 116, 120, 128, 208, 218n Americanised, 116–17 ‘Beat Zen’, 130–1, 133–7, 142–52, 156–8, 161, 163–7 and Nature, 146–7, 149 see also Buddhism Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics (Blyth), 109–10 Zola, Emile, 171 ‘Zooey’ (Salinger), 105, 233n

vegetarianism, 186 Vietnam (McCarthy), 188–9 Vietnam War, 169–70, 180, 184, 187–8, 195–6, 242n, 244–5n Vietnamese culture, romanticised, 189–90 vital materialism, 24

Yeats, W. B., 140 Yin Zhihua, 107