Allen and Phil's last conversation

I can’t say that I had a front row seat, but I got as close as he allowed, even to his friends. I was present at all their meetings when Allen came to Hartford Street during the years that I lived with Phil. Perhaps a few others acted as his amanuensis, but I picked up the task whenever I could, knowing that it was a rare privilege. I answered the door and made the tea. It happened in what were our public room so it was appropriate to be there, but I was polite, kept my mouth shut and listened carefully. 

They were giants and yet in some ways they acted like kids on a sandlot. Of course they were older so the shouting was replaced with lots of pauses, keywords that brought a chuckle, “do you remember…” followed by the briefest notation said more than enough. They were old friends who never had enough time together, old friends at the end of their lives who realized that there was never enough time but what did remain was precious and had to be enough. They always seemed to pick up exactly where they left off. I sat trying to hear where there was perhaps new insight, but their love for one another, the appreciation and respect between them was so thick it didn’t matter.

Their meetings were like clockwork. Phil was always getting ready to go to the zendo as he did twice every day, and that took at least an hour. Allen would arrive at 3:30, 4 at the latest. It never went much past 5:30. Allen would always politely excuse himself saying that other friends were waiting. Allen was a creature of the night, and Phil only operated in daylight where he had a fighting chance of avoiding the sharp edges of furniture and the unexpected drop of steps. Dinner or lunch for some reason were never included. Perhaps it was the noise of a restaurant, or that they wanted to get to the part that mattered, being with one another.

Allen had become what he always wanted, a public figure whose opinion was sought after, a poet whose work was respected, a firebrand who fought for things he really believed in, even if it was Nambla. I cannot say if Phil was happy being a Zen monk with the same certainty. I never got the sense that he had really found a true vocation, but it was a job he relished, and he did it so thoroughly and thoughtfully that he appeared happy though there was always some dogged anger that would appear when you least expected it. There were other rewards for him, like really discovering his true nature which is not an insignificant prize. 

Phil had a small circle of devoted friends, and they were faithful. He was a great raconteur and lively companion. They would come and visit, Lou Hartman, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure,

but I only saw Phil cry twice. By the time that Issan took his last breath, it was the end of such a long difficult process that there were not many tears. Our breathing, all of us had been as hard as his as we sat by his bed. We were too worn out to cry. No tears.

But when Phil  told me the story of the search party for Lew; how Gary had organized a posse looking and hoping that he was not lost, his eyes filled with tears. He loved the guy. 

He loved the way he used words, and they had the same mistress, all words in the English dictionary. Phil is the only man I know who actually read the whole thing, page after page, line after line. 

There was no trace of Lew”s body. Maybe he’d jumped into a hidden car and escaped to Mexico. No, that was just wishful thinking  He had killed himself or fallen into a deep ravine. He and Gary had both known he was depressed. No words could help.

Tears. Just the memory and tears. It was still raw.

I was with Phil when Allen phoned to say that he was going to die. My memory says that we were sitting in the living room at Hartford Street, but I actually think we were in Phil’s small apartment in the basement of the hospice, in the small room that opened onto the garden. That is where Phil’s phone was, and I am certain that Allen used that number. Phil had been expecting a call. Allen was due to visit and Phil would have known the exact dates. Allen would have also known when was the best time to reach Phil whose schedule was almost set in stone. He smiled broadly when he said hello and then fell silent. His face lost all expression.

There were very few words, “”I’m so sorry. Yes I understand that you won’t be able to travel to the West Coast again. Give my love to Gregory. I love you. Good bye.” There are times when even words fail. They were both poets and both Buddhists so they’d pushed words’ limits. 

He put the receiver down and told me that Allen was going to die, that he had cancer and there was no hope. Then he started to cry and asked to be left alone. I knew that there were tears on both ends of the call. I told him that I was available to get anything he needed and shifted into the Maitri’s office which was in the adjacent room. At 5:30 he emerged from his bedroom in his robes and silently began up the stairs towards the zendo. Sitting was at 6.    

Lord Krishna comes to tea

 I knew that Allen was in town when there was a knock at the front door at 3:30 exactly. A young man, 21 but not a month more, clean shaven, holding a book, asked, “Is this the Philip Whalen Zendo?” I invited him into the living room where he sat down and quietly continued his reading.  Allen would be at the door shortly; I could hear Phil beginning to make his way up the stairs. He and Allen shared years of friendship. They were punctual. I began to prepare tea.

I loved when Phil’s friends came to visit. Phil was on his best behavior. Not that he was normally badly behaved though in private moments he could be angry, even insulting. Despite being one of the foremost leaders of a movement that questioned the very roots of believing and behaving what my parents taught me, when he was proper, he was extremely proper. But there was another quality to the conversations with his poet friends. Their language was careful and measured. It was literate. I was always looking for any innuendos, and I loved their laughter. It was poking fun without the slightest hint of slighting someone.

Phil of course knew Allen’s long time companion, Peter Orlovsky, and talked openly about Peter’s drug addiction. Phil joked to me about Allen being a follower of “the Cult of Boys,” but this was the first time that Allen had brought a young lover with him. Phil was not very interested in sex himself, reinforced or dictated by his isolated personal habits, but I knew I would be looking for Phil’s reaction. How would he treat a young lover?

The young man and I sat a short distance from Phil and Allen. There were barely pauses in their conversation. It doesn’t matter what it was about. It could have been Buddhism, Trungpa, Diane de Prima or other poets who passed through the Disembodied School at RMDC, or even where to get the best Chinese food in San Francisco. They were friends, and though we weren’t excluded, we were not included. What was clear is that his young companion admired Allen. He hung on every word, carefully listening to each line, laughing when it was appropriate. Allen for his part was attentive to the young man. Not condescending or at all lecherous, he was careful that his friend was treated like an invited guest

Yes I admit that I entertained the possibility that there was some kind of coercion behind the young man’s presence. The age gap was enormous, and there have always been rumors about Allen’s sexual exploits. I also had a distasteful experience of being manipulated by an older man. But at least that afternoon, I was not sitting with a boy-toy but a bright young man who genuinely liked older men.

I’d been reading Christopher Isherwood’s tribute to his guru, Swami Prabhavananda, My Guru and His Disciple. Isherwood asked the Swami a hesitant question about a new relationship with a young man. Isherwood confessed that, given his experience in the stiff Victorian world of English Catholicism, he was expecting a censorious pronouncement. Instead Prabhavananda told him to treat his lover like Lord Krishna.

Then it hit me. I’d been to tea with Lord Krishna.

A year later I was sitting with Phil when Allen called to tell him that he was dying. Phil cried. 

The Clang Birds

I was once the model for a rather unsympathetic character in a satirical novel. Most of the details have faded into distant memories before the Summer of Love, before Stonewall, and they will for the most part lie untrampled in the graveyard of failed friendships. However there are a few details that come to haunt me from time to time when I am feeling vulnerable or when I want to examine the way gay people were treated in religious life before Vatican 2, before the sexual revolution..

The novel was by John L’Heureux. I went looking for the opening passage. Here is the description of a Clang Bird. 

"The Clang Bird is a rare creature that flies in ever decreasing circles at ever increasing speeds until with a terrible clang it disappears up its own ass. It is only because of the will of God that the Clang Bird is not yet extinct.

— St. Gomer, O.S.T., Founder,

Order of St. Thomas, Novissima Verba, 1717”

This was John L’Heureux’s world. The absurd image of a bird flying up its own ass as recorded in the “newest words” of a totally fake 18th century Saint in a fictional religious order named after the disciple of Jesus who had some serious doubts. It was very clever, or pretended to be, toying with the imponderables of extinction and the will of the Force That Cannot Be Named. If it were clever enough to get a laugh, that somehow justified any cruelty. 

It was published in 1972, the year that John left the Jesuits. He’d left the Ph.D. program at Harvard and was working as an editor at the Atlantic. He had to have been writing “The Clang Birds” when we were both in graduate school at Harvard, he at John LaFarge House close to The Yard while I was living with six other Jesuits in a small house near Inman Square. Our address was 57 Oak Street. His fictional collection of “over-educated priest candidates” lived at 75 Oak Lane. 

This much was not made up. We were all to some degree involved in the Catholic resistance to the War in Vietnam as were his fictional seminarians. The most senior member of the collective was a young priest, John Galvani, who had been part of the recently closed Jesuit mission in Baghdad. He was involved in planning an anti-war action in Boston following the model of Philip and Dan Berrigan’s action in Catonsville. When the solemnly dressed men from the FBI really did knock on our door, I answered, and had been prepped what to say--nothing.  

Another scholastic, perhaps the one who’d already been selected for advancement in the Jesuit hierarchy, a bright handsome Irish kid from Queens was in the Harvard Med School. He had fallen in love with a very attractive African American nurse. There were endless conversations between his family, his New York superiors and our small living room which made for lots of real life drama. 

Another member of the group was a man from Maryland who was at the Divinity School and sang in the choir at Saint Paul’s. For some reason that was never made clear, his ordination had been postponed. Although I saw nothing overtly sexual at the time, he had a fascination about some of the adolescent boys in the choir school, and I am quite sure that his name later appeared on the list of Jesuits who have been credibly accused of sexual abuse. 

A wonderful, first generation Hungarian whose family had fled Budapest in the Uprising of 1956 was the author of the “As Per Duck Cookbook.” When he told his dad that he was going to be cooking for several other Jesuits, the dad dictated some Hungarian homemade recipes, “The first thing you do is chop some onions, garlic, celery, carrot and gently saute them, then you brown the duck skin all over. For the goulash you start the same way as you did for the duck. For meatballs, you begin the same way as you did for the duck.” And in the young academic Jesuit’s notebook at the top of each recipe read “As per duck.”

I forget my character’s name--he didn’t play an important role in L’Heureux’s plot, but people who read it recognized me. I didn’t have to be told though I did have to be reminded it was satire. It was published by Macmillan, at that point still a publishing powerhouse, so it was not a fly by night hit job. Purporting to be about some of the most controversial aspects of the post Vatican 2 religious renewal, it was also in my view so unflattering I was happy when it was widely panned. Few people got the joke, and, given the situation, I certainly thought it unfair. I found nothing to like in the way I was portrayed so needless to say, I thought it was also cruel. Needless to say,, I also got on a high horse silently telling L’Heureux in the comfy Jesuit residence on Sumner Street to go fuck himself. He found it so easy to create satire using Jesuits who were actually putting themselves in danger of following Dan Berrigan to jail while he wrote his three page daily quota. It was abusive.

The young religious me was a rather inept caricature of a homosexual who was trying to live a celibate life. L’Heureux’s disdain for the man was palpable. Up until “The Clang Birds” I had considered myself his friend, not very close, but certainly a man whom I respected and admired and as Jesuits, assumed that we shared some common goals. 

In my Junior year at Fairfield Prep, L’Heureux had been my Latin, English, French and Religion teacher. I loved studying and working with him and, for the most part, excelled. He was creative and seemed very open-minded. He was certainly brilliant. I was star struck, even falling in love in the strained way that adolescent gays do as they discover and explore their attraction to men, but it was never returned. Thank god for that, but it was a factor in my deciding to become a Jesuit.

He attracted a following. He even gave a name to the clique, the BYP, the Bright Young People which was an actual group of blue blooded high flying hipsters who emerged in London’s Mayfair after the First War. Evelyn Waugh, one of John’s literary inspirations, wrote about them in Vile Bodies, which of course was assigned reading. 

There were some perks to identifying with the BYP and supporting them in the election for our class officers. L’Heureux organized Saturday excursions to New York City. I remember Tom Baker, Jan Wojcik and perhaps Jeff Connell were part of the group. And I was included until I wasn’t. I remember how much I loved those Saturdays. I grabbed the train in Bridgeport which was further east on the New York, New Haven and Hartford than the rest of the group joined. I remember seeing Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin the Sun, Camelot and Bye Bye Birdie as well as the beefcake magazines in Times Square. 

Now the painful memory. I am standing alone in the entrance to McAuliffe Hall on North Benson Road waiting for my mother to pick me up. My mind is a blur and I can barely keep from crying. I have just seen L’Heureux in his room. He told me that I would no longer be invited to join the New York group. Perhaps there was some attempt at using the occasion for helping me “grow” in some way, but if there were, it didn’t ease the pain. I could not understand why I had been singled out. Looking back it might have been that I was just too gay, but that is hard to pinpoint amid the raging hormones of puberty and being rejected by my first crush. He probably just said that I just didn’t fit in with the group. Of course what he would not admit is that he, L’Heureux, was a conflicted bisexual. 

I had three meetings with John after The Clang Birds. I remember two extremely well or at least certain parts of our conversation, or my version of it, has stuck in my mind. Once Tom B and I visited him in his apartment in Boston’s Back Bay when he was working as an editor at the Atlantic. It was on one the blocks closest to the Boston Commons on either Marlboro or Newberry Streets. It was also the cruising block of a growing gay neighborhood. A stream of cars would slowly circle the block pretending to be searching out a parking space while lots of sexily dressed young men would be walking their dogs or just hanging out by fire hydrants or inspecting the parking meters. Eventually a driver and street walker got lucky, and an empty parking spot opened up for a connection. When John looked out the window and saw right below a connection happening, he kind of chanted, “dance away you little queer, somebody’s going to love you.” I may not have the words exactly, but I know that I have caught their exact feeling and can still feel the chill.

Much later, probably in the late 1980’s, when I had a business making custom furniture, we got a contract to supply some furniture for a new Alumni Relations building on the Stanford campus. During the installation I called L’Heureux to see if he had time to meet. He held the prestigious position as director of the Stegner Creative Writing program. He was very cordial, even friendly. He showed me a spacious office in a very beautiful Stanford building. We talked a bit about the AIDS epidemic and he admitted to a friendship with a person with AIDS. Obliquely, he was also admitting to having sex with men. I say oblique because although there was never an outright admission, his words and gestures pointed to the pain of losing a lover, and for a brief second we entered the level field of being completely honest.

As I followed his work throughout his long and productive career, I began to suspect that it was his own bi-sexuality, or totally closeted gayness that short circuited all our attempts at friendship. Of course when he was a Jesuit, all discussion of sexuality was out of bounds, and I just might not have been his type. I do know that he had sex with one man who happened to be my friend.

“The glorious thing about literature,” L’Heureux told The Stanford Daily, “is that it allows you, as a reader, to experience vicariously what you never fortunately have to undergo in real life. The same is true with a writer. It allows you to purge yourself of all the worst kind of bedeviling thoughts or ideas or even temptations without ever having to go through with them.” John, darling, this is at least to some degree wishful thinking. I know that you wrote about a man arrested for sex abuse in front of his class, but I never read the book. One of your last stories in the New Yorker, “The Long Black Line,” was about a Jesuit novice who left Shadowbrook under a cloud and committed suicide shortly after. You were there in the novitiate in 1954 and you died in 2019. That is perhaps 65 years of experiencing vicariously. It was only 63 years ago that you excluded me from a nice group of creative young men and it still stings. Perhaps I am just not as good a writer as you were. I pray that you did find some relief from living a lie. If it helps at all, I forgive you and I pledge that I will never allow my sexuality to block another person’s creativity or happiness. 

How a blind monk might respond to my piece

After reading my last post “It is Universal" Doug McFerran posed some great questions about the language of "Enlightenment.” He closed by saying, “What I would really like to hear is how a blind monk would respond to your piece.”

I would too. His name was Zenshin Philip Whalen (October 20, 1923 – June 26, 2002). He gave me lay ordination 33 years ago. I lived and sat with him in the zendo at Hartford Street for more than 6 years. Though I loved Issan and learned from living with him as he was dying, I was formally Phil’s student. Phil was the Beat poet who was known as the poets’ poet. He read at the Six Gallery the same night that Ginsberg read Howl. He was obviously upstaged. 

Phil was legally blind when I met him. He had figured out how to get around. As with other blind people I’ve known, his sense of hearing and touch had recalibrated to some degree to make up for his loss of sight. He could go up and down the stairs to the zendo and find his seat and bowing mat. He loved to eat so he certainly could locate food on the table and in the refrigerator, though he often needed help. Vague shadows were the only information that his eyes delivered. He had glaucoma which had been misdiagnosed 20 years earlier. Being perpetually broke, I imagine that he’d gone to the cut rate optometrist who had dropped out of medical school but hung out a shingle in the Tenderloin. 

I assume that Phil had a photographic memory. If I asked a question while we were sitting in his library office, he would say, “Check out old Yampolsky, page 54, third paragraph from the top of the page. You’ll find the book in the middle cabinet, third shelf, about three in from the right.” And god dammit, it would be there. He was the most well read man I have ever met. He loved books and words. He could quote pages and pages of poetry. People were always a challenge for Phil, but he tried his level best. I suppose that I had as close a relationship with him as he had with anyone, and I learned an enormous amount, but we both had to work at it.

When I write about Buddhism and search for an appropriate English word, I often ask my memory what Phil might say. This is not reliable, and perhaps as hopeless as consulting a fake optometrist so I exercise caution. Phil distrusted Plato and would always hedge his use of any philosophical language with words of caution. When it came to Buddhist terminology in English, he would usually begin with the technical Japanese word from the Soto dictionary, then he would foray into the antecedents in Ch’an, or Chinese Zen, and then finally refer to the Sanskrit terms that were developed by the early Mahayanists. 

So yes, enlightenment is just the normal way that Western Buddhists have described the the experience of Kenshō (見性), a Japanese term from the Zen tradition. Ken means "seeing", shō means "nature, essence". It is usually translated as "seeing one's (true) nature", that is, the Buddha-nature or nature of mind. Kenshō is an initial insight or awakening, not full Buddhahood. Then Phil would have directed me to the Heart Sutra, the Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya where the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara  directs Śariputra,one of the Buddha’s disciples to examine form and emptiness, and then tells him that there are no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, etc. We are off into.an examination of emptiness (śūnyatā): all phenomena, known through the five aggregates of human existence (skandhas): form (rūpa), feeling (vedanā), volitions (saṅkhāra), perceptions (saṃjñā), and consciousness (vijñāna) are empty. Bad translations and advanced philosophical study aside, in Zen temples, the 100 line version of the Heart Sutra is usually chanted, sometimes in phonetic Sinojapanese, after a meditation period. 

When I finished the last piece. “It’s Universal,” I asked myself what was missing. I had tried to lay out some of the areas and things that might be perceived differently when we have some experience of kensho, or enlightenment, but that is not a definition. Then my mind went in several directions. First I remembered the many times I had a complaint about sitting and not getting something. Phil would most often get to be the strict Zen teacher. He’d say, “You’re not sitting enough.” Or if we were sitting in his library he would say look at what old Dogen says in his Shōbōgenzō: “You should therefore cease from practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing words and following after speech, and learn the backward step that turns your light inward to illuminate yourself. Body and mind will drop away of themselves, and your original face will manifest itself. If you wish to attain suchness, you should practice suchness without delay.”

Rather than try to parse 12th century practice instructions from the monk’s hall, I will tell an old Irish joke that illuminates old Dogen. A hapless American tourist is lost in Dublin. He is looking for the Cathedral and just can’t find it. He sees a pub. Surely these guys will be able to give some direction. He stands at the end of the bar and asks “How do you get to Saint Patrick’s? The answer comes back, “You can’t get there from here.”

So we are looking for some experience in meditation. That is all the Zen means--Meditation Buddhism, but that language won’t sell soap, body oil or relaxing massage.

My friend Rob Lee lived at the Page Street Zen Center for many years. The zendo is in the basement. There are windows on the Laguna Street and Lily Alley sides and from some of the seats in the zendo, a clear view of what used to be pre Loma Prieta Earthquake the Fell Street Off Ramp. When a newcomer came for meditation instruction in the late afternoon, some bad bad zen students who were instructing them would sit them in one of those seats. At just about 5:30 cars coming off the freeway unto Fell would catch the last bit of sun disappearing over the hill and it would reflect off the windscreen. The new meditator was treated to a flash of enlightenment the first time they sat on the cushion.

Language about the experience of meditation also plays tricks. 

I will end with a memory of that Blind Monk. One morning coming up from the zendo, Phil got to the top of the stairs and a bird started chirping in the backyard. He sang out, 

The year's at the spring

And day's at the morn;

Morning's at seven;

The hill-side's dew-pearled;

The lark's on the wing;

The snail's on the thorn:

God's in his heaven—

All's right with the world!