Crowded by Beauty

Starred review from July 1, 2015
An unconventional man deserves an unconventional biography. Schneider, who knew Beat poet and Zen priest Philip Whalen (19232002) during the last two decades of his life, obliges with a book that began as a journal modeled roughly on Boswell's chronicles of Samuel Johnson and is suffused with Boswellian wonder for its subject. The first half of the book views Whalen through the lenses of his great friendships with his literary peers Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Joanne Kyger, and Michael McClurethree of whom participated with Whalen (and surrealist Philip Lamantia) in the legendary October 7, 1955, Six Gallery reading during which Ginsberg read the anthemic Howl, and all of whom, except Kyger, are limned, as is Whalen, in Kerouac's roman a clef The Dharma Bums (1958). The rest proceeds chronologically from birth to death but, informed by reminiscences obtained from interviews as well as writings, retains the intimacy of what precedes it even as it shifts concentration from Whalen's literary to his spiritual development. A major figure in both American poetry and the growth of Zen Buddhist practice in America, Whalen was brilliant, erudite, humorous, earthy yet chaste, improvident, as lovable to those who knew him as he probably will be, thanks to Schneider, to those who read about him.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)