Though seemingly bereft of content, 4’33” is, like the void, rich with possibilities. At Maverick, during the first movement, listeners heard the sound of wind in the woods. During the second movement, there were raindrops on the roof. In the final movement, the audience added its own baffled murmurs and perplexed mutterings. “It is one of the most intense listening experiences you can have,” David Tudor later reported. “You really listen. You hear everything there is. It is cathartic: four minutes and thirty-three seconds of meditation.” Not all shared Tudor’s assessment: according to Earl Brown, who was also on the program, most of the audience left “infuriated.”
Cage often cited 4’33” as his all-time favorite piece and regarded it as his most important work. “I use it constantly in my life experience,” he said. “No day goes by without my making use of that piece in my life and in my work. I listen to it every day.” For Cage, 4’33” was the answer to the riddle of cool, it was the sound of one hand clapping, the sound of one hand, the sound of one. 4’33” is the simplest gesture, the barest hint, a finger pointing at the cool new moon.
At the end of 1953, Jack Kerouac was staying at Neal and Carolyn Cassady’s house in Los Gatos, California, near San Jose, just coming off the most sustained period of creation he would ever experience. In the previous two years, he’d written the original three-week teletype-roll version of On the Road, a vast meditation on America called October in the Railroad Earth, and four novels: Visions of Cody, Doctor Sax, Maggie Cassidy, and The Subterraneans. Though he knew himself to be a great writer, he was still unpublished. His emotional life was in turmoil. He was thirty-one years old, drinking hard, and hiding from Joan Haverty, the pretty model with whom he’d lived while he was writing On the Road, and her insistence that he pay child support for Jan, their baby daughter. Meanwhile, he had become involved with Carolyn—with Cassady’s apparent blessing. As Carolyn Cassady recounts in the movie What Happened to Kerouac?, her husband encouraged her and Kerouac to have an affair. On his way out the door one day in his Southern Pacific brakeman’s uniform, Cassady suddenly turned to Jack and Carolyn and grinned “my best gal, my best pal...” at which Carolyn laughs. “After that it was not hard to arrange.” For Kerouac, the affair had to have been bittersweet. He knew that Carolyn wasn’t going to leave Neal. And while he loved to play daddy with the Cassadys’ small children while Neal was working on the railroad, he knew he could never take care of them—he wouldn’t even acknowledge the daughter he already had.
Yet although Cassady gave Kerouac asylum—and Carolyn—by 1953, the blood-brother bond that the two had shared and which Kerouac celebrated in On the Road was beginning to fray. Sick of listening to Neal and Carolyn rattle on about Edgar Cayce’s theories of reincarnation—a popular subject at that time in an America grappling with the specter of a thermonuclear war—Kerouac began hanging out at the San Jose Public Library reading room, where he happened on Dwight Goddard’s A Buddhist Bible (dedicated to D. T. Suzuki), the first popular collection of Buddhist writings published in America. The book launched Kerouac into a three-year period of concentrated Buddhist study and sitting meditation, even as he crisscrossed the continent.
March 1954 found Kerouac living in a skid-row hotel in San Francisco near the railroad station at Third and Townsend, working as a brakeman on the Southern Pacific. A month later, he was back with his mother in Richmond Hills, New York, working on a railroad at the Brooklyn docks. In the winter and spring of 1955, he was at his sister and her husband’s place in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. In the early part of summer he was in Greenwich Village, sleeping on the couch at Lucien Carr’s—Carr was on parole and working at United Press International—then he hitchhiked to Mexico.
That fall, after riding buses, hopping freights, and hitchiking from Mexico City, Kerouac showed up at Allen Ginsberg’s rose-trellised backyard cottage in Berkeley with a backpack full of new manuscripts, including Tristessa, a novel about his friendship with a Mexico City junkie whore, and Mexico City Blues, 242 choruses of meditative Buddhist jazz poetry: “I have no plans/no dates/no appointments with anybody/so I leisurely explore/souls and cities.” Ginsberg lost no time introducing Kerouac to his neighbor, Gary Snyder, then twenty-five, whom he’d met the year before though Kenneth Rexroth, a poet, anarchist, and leading figure of San Francisco bohemia. Snyder was living in a tiny, sparsely furnished Berkeley cottage of his own while studying classical Chinese and contemporary Japanese at the University of California.
He had grown up in the state of Washington, on a dairy farm that his grandfather homesteaded not far from Puget Sound. On a visit to the Seattle Art Museum when he was eleven or twelve, he saw Chinese landscape paintings for the first time. He was struck, he remembers, by how much the landscapes reminded him of the Cascades, the mountains he’d been exploring since he was a kid, and he felt “an instantaneous, deep respect for something in Chinese culture that always stuck in my mind.” From the paintings and the interest that they sparked, Snyder moved on to the T’ang dynasty poets and to Zen.
The first time he read D. T. Suzuki, Snyder was twenty-one years old and on his way to grad school in anthropology at the University of Indiana. As he recalls, “It was September of 1951, and I was standing by the roadside in eastern Nevada hitchhiking the old Route 40,” when he fished a copy of Essays in Zen Buddhism out of his rucksack. “I didn’t know it at the moment, but that was the end of my career as an anthropologist.” The next year, he hitchhiked back to the Bay Area and enrolled at Berkeley.
Snyder and Kerouac became fast friends. For the next year, until Snyder left for a Japanese monastery and they never met again, they shared a burlap-lined cabin with no utilities at the top of a hillside horse pasture above Mill Valley, California. They rolled Bull Durham, slugged wine from a jug, and debated Buddhism deep into the night. Kerouac’s Buddhism focused on the first Noble Truth, that suffering is the basis of existence and man’s only reason for being on earth is to practice kindness. He claimed not to be interested in Zen, terming it “mean,” on account of “All those silly Zen masters throwing young kids in the mud” just because they couldn’t unravel the meaning of their koans. Snyder responded with big friendly grins and a twinkle in his eye; and the next morning Kerouac would roll out of his sleeping bag with a hangover to find Snyder hours-deep into sitting meditation.
Politically, Kerouac and Snyder couldn’t have been further apart: Kerouac was a rabid defender of Senator Joe McCarthy’s anticommunist witch hunt, while Snyder reflected his anarchist–left-wing roots in the Pacific Northwest. Nevertheless, Kerouac saw the flinty Snyder as the real deal, a new kind of American hero, the first of what Kerouac named “dharma bums”: a “great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ’em Zen lunatics. . .”
In April 1956, just before departing for Daitoku-ji monastery, Snyder threw a big going-away party for himself at the Mill Valley cabin. As immortalized in The Dharma Bums, it was a sprawling, seventy-two-hour hoot: people got drunk, played guitars, sang, and danced naked around a bonfire. Among the guests was the prodigiously gifted writer and self-described “religious entertainer” Alan Watts.
In the late fifties, according to Philip Kapleau, one of the first American-born Zen teachers, “hardly a cocktail party was given at which some Zen aficionado did not spout his latest self-devised koan.” If anybody was responsible for this “yen for Zen” (a phrase coined by another American-born Roshi, Robert Aitken)—part of a late fifties enthusiasm for all things Japanese, which Gary Snyder says included “Sunset magazine garden books, the game of go, Samurai movies, and a single flower in a bottle, sitting on the floor”—it was the erudite, raffish Watts, who was already becoming famous in the Bay Area for his Buddhist seminars and radio rambles. In his aptly titled autobiography, In My Own Way, Watts credits his own “easy and free-floating attitude to Zen” for the “notorious ‘Zen boom’ . . . which flourished among artists and ‘pseudointellectuals’” in the era.
Born in 1915, Alan Watts grew up in Chislehurst, Kent, England, in a house full of Korean celadon vases, Japanese embroidered cushions, chinoiserie, and Indian curios—gifts his mother received from her boarding-school students, the daughters of Protestant missionaries serving in the far-flung reaches of the British Empire. When he was sixteen, he dropped out of King’s School, Canterbury, the incubator for the Anglican church, without graduating and turned his back on Oxford in favor of London’s Buddhist Lodge where, amidst Persian rugs, wafting incense, and golden Buddhas, a mystical barrister named Christmas “Toby” Humphreys introduced him to D. T. Suzuki’s Essays in Zen Buddhism. Watts’s first book, The Spirit of Zen, a highly precocious attempt to explain Suzuki’s concepts to the masses, was published when Watts was eighteen.