A Closer Look at David Schneider's Biography of Philip Whalen

Brian Unger reviews David Schneider's Crowded by Beauty: The Life and Zen of Poet Philip Whalen (University of California Press, 2015) for Jacket2, noting off the bat that, despite its "delightful coterie reading," the biography "suffers from several serious omissions and inaccuracies." Unger goes on to respectfully disagree with the author's representations of Philip Whalen, referencing Beat scholarship and analysis of the homosocial by Wayne Koestenbaum and Eve Sedgwick, respectively. An excerpt from this review:

A new community of friends and artistic colleagues gradually formed around Whalen beginning in early 1972 when he entered the Zen Buddhist institution for intensive monastic practice. He cultivated and became close with the young poets he met there, including David Schneider himself, Norman Fischer, Leslie Scalapino, John Bailes, Gail Sher, David Silva, Peter Coyote, Britt Pyland, Rob Lee, plus various writers, photographers, actors, artists, priests, scholars, and the fabulously droll monk Shunko Michael Jamvold, whom Whalen adored unreservedly.

His new friends and acolytes supported him through the psychologically and physically arduous years of monastic life, and Whalen wrote about them with great affection in his journals, revealing his sincere devotion to them and their intimate devotion to him. Hopefully, someone will chronicle these monastic years with more detail and candor than Schneider was able to muster, for Whalen’s version of monastic life à la Abbot Richard Baker is an astonishing lens into California’s avant-garde culture of the period, as well as a vital window on an important slice of American religious history.

It is probably a good marketing strategy to structure a book like this with ad hoc interviews with celebrity authors such as Ginsberg, Kerouac, Snyder, McClure, and Kyger, but I believe it has skewed the narrative of Whalen’s life off a more reliable and accurate textual record, undermining historical appreciation of the dozens of productive relationships he enjoyed with acolytes, colleagues, friends, and lovers who were not and are not public celebrities. Interviewing and quoting celebrities at great length is like an argumentum ad auctoritatem, but utilizing celebrity does not impute to a third party automatic intellectual authority on matters of culture and literary history...

Do read on at Jacket2.