Two Novels

by Philip Whalen, Paul Christensen (Introduction)

Beat poet Philip Whalen's portraits of Berkeley and San Francisco.

You Didn't Even Try / Imaginary Speeches for a Brazen Head

272 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1985

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author with this name in the Goodreads database.

Philip Whalen was born in Portland, Oregon on October 20, 1923. He roomed with future poets Gary Snyder and Lew Welch at Reed College in Oregon.

Whalen did not pursue a career in poetry, but fell into it after Snyder asked him to take part in the famous Six Gallery poetry reading in 1955. A good portrait of Whalen, Snyder's slightly older and chubbier Zen-poet friend, appears in 'The Dharma Bums' by Jack Kerouac (the character's name is Warren Coughlin).

Like Snyder and Kerouac, Whalen took Buddhism very seriously, and also like them he found spiritual enlightenment as a fire lookout in the Cascade Mountains in the Pacific Northwest. Whalen published many highly respected works of poetry, as well as two novels, "You Didn't Even Try" and "Imaginary Speeches for a Brazen Head". He was ordained as a Zen monk in 1973. He suffered from severe eyesight problems in his later years. He lived as a Buddhist in San Francisco until he died on June 26, 2002.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_...

Reviews

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

You Didn’t Even Try (1963) and Imaginary Speeches for a Brazen Head (1967) are poet’s novels, ill-structured and strong on the evocative fragment, that skew many received truths about Beat San Francisco. Whalen’s Bohemians aren’t your bearded North Beach jazzbos looking for an angry fix. They throw elegant dinner parties and win beefy university grants; have Ivy League friends and play Cesar Franck on organs; swap partners in various chemical combinations but wrestle with conventional dreams of kids and hot suppers and someone to settle down with as they grow old. Whalen’s especially good at depicting how hard these competing demands are on women, all intelligent and talented, faced with the threat of pregnancies or stigma of divorce, balancing creative work and childrearing, gulping gin and diet pills but refusing to quite knuckle under to New Yorker cartoon-type success. It’s a more middle-aged, middle-class, upwardly mobile kind of world than Ginsberg’s or Kerouac’s that shows how permeable the borders were between hipsters tempted to go square and squares dreaming of being hip. By the ‘70s, Whalen was out of the game altogether as a Buddhist, but given his attention in these novels to friendship, attachment, interpersonal relationships, and the aimlessness of military-industrial America, maybe his Buddhism was the same game played on a different board.

[C Rex]

Dragonmobile!

[Mills College Library]

813.54 W5523t 1985