Conclusion: ‘Know that the earth will madonna the Bomb’

The book’s concluding chapter begins with an ecocritical reading Gregory Corso’s 1958 poem ‘Bomb’. The conclusion then reflects on the book’s contributions to the fields of Cold War literary criticism and ecocriticism. As part of the book’s re-evaluation of the significance of the Cold War period to contemporary ecocritical debate, this chapter also develops the book’s argument that Rachel Carson’s seminal work Silent Spring (1962) should be viewed as one of a growing number of American texts written after 1945 that present an interdependent, ecological vision of the human’s relationship to its environment.

The Beat Ecologies of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac

Chapter Four develops the previous chapter’s investigation into the substantial influence of translated Chinese and Japanese philosophical writing on presentations of an ecological Nature in Cold War American literature. However, it differs in its countercultural focus, exploring the influence of Americanised translations of Chinese and Japanese literature and philosophy on the work of the Beat Generation writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Ginsberg and Kerouac’s extensive correspondence reveals the two writers’ developing interest in Taoist and Zen Buddhist thought, and their co-development of their own Americanised and highly inauthentic ‘Beat Zen’, which was heavily influenced by Dwight Goddard’s A Buddhist Bible (1932). Taking these letters as its starting point, the chapter reveals that translated Taoism and Zen Buddhism informed each writer’s ecological depictions of the human relationship to Nature in some of their most famous contributions to Beat literature, including Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums (1958) and Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956).

Introduction: Ecocriticism and the Mid-Twentieth Century

This introductory chapter begins by contextualising the study, discussing the representation of Nature in early Cold War American culture and the emergence of modern environmentalism from 1945. The chapter also outlines the book’s argument that whilst the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) is understandably viewed as a watershed moment in terms of raising environmental consciousness in America, Silent Spring should also be considered as part of a developing trend of ecological portrayals of Nature in American literature written after 1945. This opening chapter also situates the book’s argument within the field of Cold War literary studies and introduces the book’s ecocritical methodology, including its sustained engagement with Timothy Morton’s ideas of ‘the mesh’ and ‘the ecological thought’ as outlined in The Ecological Thought (2010).

Bifurcated Nature in Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America

Chapter Five takes the temporal range of the book beyond the publication of Silent Spring, through analysis of the writing of Nature by the critic and novelist Mary McCarthy. The chapter reveals the governing influence of the French philosopher Simone Weil on McCarthy’s presentation of Nature as an ecological system in her fiction and non-fiction writing. The chapter reads McCarthy’s 1971 novel Birds of America alongside her first two Vietnam War reports, Vietnam (1967) and Hanoi (1968), which she interrupted the writing of Birds to research. This approach reveals the continuity of ideas between McCarthy’s fiction and non-fiction writing from this period, as well as the sustained philosophical and rhetorical influence of Weil. Analysis of these non-fiction texts alongside the novel illuminates McCarthy’s literary presentations of an ecological Nature and her particularly nuanced response to her fellow Americans’ growing environmental consciousness in Birds of America.

The Influence of Chinese and Japanese Literature on J. D. Salinger’s Philosophy of Nature

Chapter Three begins with analysis of the function of the American West in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951). The chapter goes on to reveal that Salinger’s literary depictions of Nature are significantly informed by the Americanised translations of Chinese and Japanese philosophical texts that he was studying from as early as 1946. The chapter uncovers the sources of translated Taoism to which Salinger was exposed, revealing that the translators Salinger mentions by name in his literary fiction all markedly foreground the role of Nature in their ‘American versions’ of classical Chinese and Japanese texts. Chapter Three then applies this research in close readings of two of Salinger’s later long stories, ‘Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters’ (1955) and ‘Seymour: An Introduction’ (1959), and offers a new reading of The Catcher in the Rye. These ecocritical readings expose the substantial influence of the ‘American versions’ of Taoist texts that Salinger studied on his literary depictions of an infinite and ecological Nature.

Attaining fana in Paul Bowles’s Infinite Landscapes

Chapter One interrogates Paul Bowles’s presentation of the human relationship to Nature in his bestselling novel The Sheltering Sky (1949). In his autobiography Without Stopping (1972), Bowles describes a “secret connection between the world of nature and the consciousness of man” that is activated by the presence of the North African desert landscape. The chapter investigates the prevalence of such interactions between the human mind and the desert landscape across Bowles’s fiction and non-fiction writing, and demonstrates the degree to which Bowles’s exposure to Sufism shaped his literary depictions of an infinite, ecological Nature with the power to influence and annihilate the human. This chapter reads The Sheltering Sky (1949) alongside Bowles’s extensive non-fiction travel writing, in order to expose the influence of Sufism on the novel’s depictions of an infinite and annihilating desert landscape.

Nature and the Nuclear Southwest: Peggy Pond Church and J. Robert Oppenheimer

Chapter Two takes as its subject the New Mexican poet Peggy Pond Church. Although Church is not a canonically recognised writer, this chapter reveals that her poetry and prose writings contain innovative depictions of an infinite, ecological Nature that is even capable of containing the new nuclear threat. Church’s biography places her at the centre of the story of the nuclear Southwest; her family was evicted from her father’s Ranch School when the US government repossessed their land to make way for the Manhattan Project in 1942. The main body of this chapter reads Church’s poetry alongside an exploration of her interest in Pueblo Native American thought, revealing the degree to which Church drew on the Pueblo worldview in forming the ecological vision of the human relationship to Nature that defines her writing. The final section of the chapter explores the relationship between Church’s writings and those of her neighbour and correspondent, the atomic physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, exposing the synergies between both writers’ contemporaneous depictions of ecology.