He, Leo: the Life and Poetry of Lew Welch by Ewan Clark
He, Leo: the Life and Poetry of Lew Welch
by Ewan Clark
Oregon State Univ.Press, 2023; 362 pages, $36.95
Review by Trevor Carolan
A major beat poet, Lew Welch is known for his still unresolved disappearance in 1971. Esteemed for his plain-talk poetics that he cultivated after studying, then meeting W.C. Williams at Reed College in Portland, with fellow students Gary Snyder and philip Whalen. The trio became an identifiable pacific Northwest contingent among writers that coalesced around San Francisco’s centrifugal force of Ginsberg, Kerouac, Duncan, Spicer, Ferlinghetti and others — and that radiated north to Vancouver through Warren Tallman at UBC.
Clark’s outstanding biographical study illustrates how Welch’s life was blighted by depression, self- doubt, and alcoholism. After trying to succeed in conventional married life in Chicago, then separating to commit fully to writing, Welch struggled haphazardly, living off cash from his mother whom he blamed for a rootless childhood and lack of love.
Welch admired Gertrude Stein’s poetics, her “accuracy and conciseness,” and wrote his under- graduate thesis on her. Welch was equally charmed by the aesthetics of Chinese poetry, its “perception and expression,” that Clark concludes were the “attributes on which he built much of his later poetic identity.”
Clark develops his analysis with insight and candour regarding the “manic swings” that led to Welch’s alcoholism and recurrent breakdowns. Devoted to fishing and nature, Welch was attracted to buddhism but, like Kerouac, lurched chronically from spirituality to the booze. Seeking poetically to “unearth Arcadia he found America instead.”
Kerouac’s On The Road was still resonating when Welch headed to San Francisco’s poetry scene, even if his own published output was minimal. While resident at East-West House, the Asian Studies centre established by Alan Watts, indirectly he was able to meet editor Don Allen, who included Welch in his revolutionary anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960.
A drive across the USA in his Jeep with Kerouac and poet Albert Saijo led to Welch viewing up close the corrosive fame that now devoured Kerouac in New York. The two became pals; like Kerouac, Welch now drank prodigiously: he was diagnosed with liver cirrhosis.
In Big Sur, Kerouac’s novel recounting his psychotic breakdown at Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s cabin, Welch is portrayed as Dave Wain. Quixotically, following his failed relationship with feminist poet Lenore Kandel, Welch experienced his own nervous collapse in the same cabin two years later. With Kandel he’d had a chance at love, worked pridefully on a fishing boat, and talked of marriage. Then, inevitably, he self-destructed. Welch wrote to Robert Duncan intimating the possibility of suicide. Yet, days later, he wrote his greatest line: “I saw myself a ring of bone in a clear stream, and vowed, never, ever, to close myself again.”
Clark details the little-known period when Welch retreated to write and dry out in reclusion before meeting his last love, Magda Cregg. Welch acted as stepfather to her two sons, one who’d achieve pop-music fame as Hughie Lewis of The News. by now, Welch was a recognized poet and in demand, but engulfed by alcohol.
Haight-Ashbury’s failed attempt at “tribal” community was a bitter disappointment to Welch, and Clark’s depiction of San Francisco’s counter- cultural crash is expertly conveyed. by 1971, he contends, “Welch was becoming impossible to live with.” The booze had him lurching. Magda left, and Welch stopped writing. “Stopped,” Clark says candidly, “as in having nothing left to say.”
Clark recounts how Ginsberg, having purchased Ridge land in the Sierras with Snyder and others, offered Welch a patch for a cabin. but there was too much pain. In May 1971, Welch left a note, set off walking from the Ridge with his revolver, and no trace of him has ever been found. Ring of Bone, his collected poems, was published in 1973.