Lew Welch
City Lights Publishers
$17.95 paperback, 256 pages
Lew Welch is the one that got away. Gary Snyder called him "the most talented, the golden boy," the poet who wrote constantly but published only one major book, the seeker who lost his way, the drinker and depressive who tried to hold it together and couldn't, the man who went in the woods and never came back.
Welch (1926-71) went to Reed College in the late 1940s with Snyder and Philip Whalen, three friends who lived together for a time in a house on Southeast Lambert Street and inhaled poetry like it was oxygen. Snyder and Whalen became famous as part of the Beat generation; Welch did a book with Jack Kerouac, who based a character in "Big Sur" on him, but didn't get the same notoriety as his peers.
Welch is best known, sad to say, for the last day of his life, May 23, 1971. He was staying at Snyder's place in the Sierra Nevada mountains and planned to build a cabin on Allen Ginsberg's land. In a deep depression, he took a revolver and hiked in the mountains.
"I never could make anything work out right and now I'm betraying my friends," was the first line of a note he left behind. "I went Southwest" was the last. His body was never found.
"Ring of Bone: Collected Poems" is Welch's major work. Exuberant, funny, dark, hypnotic, Welch's poems are as infused with nature as Snyder's and as spiritually alive as Whalen's. They're technically brilliant, grounded in form and wildly experimental. They progress from the early poems (Welch was first published in Janus, the Reed literary magazine) through the "Hermit Poems" from his time in a cabin in the Trinity Alps to his final brief prose poems.
The book was out of print until City Lights Books came through with a new edition that has a foreword by Snyder and some new material. A few more angles on Welch:
Welch, Whalen and Richard Brautigan lived together in San Francisco in 1964. Don Carpenter, another writer with Oregon ties who committed suicide, described Welch at the time to William Hjortsberg in "Jubilee Hitchhiker" as "tall, thin, handsome, always wearing a crooked smile. Welch liked to think of himself as a hip con man. He liked to drink and sit in the Jazz Workshop and listen to good music. He loved Sausalito and the No Name Bar, and he loved to play pool and skulk about the Tenderloin."
In June of that year, Welch met a woman named Magdalena Cragg at the No Name Bar. She had two sons from a previous marriage. One of them, Hugh, loved Welch and later took his name in his honor when he became a musician, Huey Lewis.
Welch was an advertising writer for a while and is credited with coming up with the slogan "Raid kills bugs dead." It's a good story, and it might be true.
Snyder never doubted that Welch killed himself. "There's always been a curiosity about him. Part of it is that his body was never found."
It's the mystery of it.
"Partly the mystery of it. I'm convinced that he did commit suicide. Lew was a social guy. He couldn't disappear and not tell us."
Whalen described Welch's writing process to Hjortsberg: "Lewie, of course, was always putting himself down all of the time. He would show you some piece of writing and say, 'Here's that thing that I started.' And you'd say, 'Well, terrific, Lewie.' Mumble, groan, mumble. 'No good, no ... good.' It's just that he was always very persnickety. He wanted everything to be absolutely perfect. He had this facility for working in his head which was really remarkable. It would take months before he would commit anything to paper, and then he wouldn't like that."
Welch to Snyder in an April 27, 1960 letter: "My long depression a dark night of the liver, not the soul."
"Sober, the world looks just the same. I have been (sneakily, not even my closest friends really dug -- though Joanne (Kyger) seems to have suspected) half-loaded since 1952. However, sober it is easier to realize that the atrocities are not arranged for my personal despair."
William Carlos Williams came to Reed in 1950 for a reading and became something of a mentor to Welch, who sent him a copy of one of his books with a note in 1960: "It's been so long since we wrote, I feel I ought to reintroduce myself: I was that kid at Reed in 1950 who wrote what you called 'the Stein script.' Then I spent a fine afternoon with you and Flossie (Williams) -- we talked about everything and Flossie cooked a fine pot roast.
"We stopped writing in 1951 or 2 when I cracked up in Chicago. From then on it's the same story: learning, in America, how to crack out not up -- many failures, a few gains, good friends though, and the continuing deep certainty about the first things: what always brings up, with a little help, through."
Welch to his mother, Nov. 4, 1950: "We do not speak the language of England and our poetry should not have the English form. We talk American, and the poet's job is to intensify this dialect, sharpen it into poetry, keep the words clean and sharp, and MAKE things out of them."
Two lines from one of Snyder's favorite Welch poems:
Guard the Mysteries!
Constantly reveal them!
-- Jeff Baker
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