Masterpieces of Beat Literature

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Masterpieces of Beat Literature

Michael J. Dittman

Greenwood Press

MASTERPIECES OF BEAT LITERATURE

Recent titles in Greenwood Introduces Literary Masterpieces Masterpieces of French Literature Marilyn S. Severson Masterpieces of Modern British and Irish Drama Sanford Sternlicht Masterpieces of 20th-Century American Drama Susan C.W. Abbotson Masterpieces of Classic Greek Drama Helaine L. Smith Masterpieces of Philosophical Literature Thomas L. Cooksey Masterpieces of American Romantic Literature Melissa M. Pennell Masterpieces of British Modernism Marlowe A. Miller

MASTERPIECES OF BEAT LITERATURE

Michael J. Dittman

Greenwood Introduces Literary Masterpieces

GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut • London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dittman, Michael J. Masterpieces of Beat literature / Michael J. Dittman. p. cm. — (Greenwood introduces literary masterpieces, ISSN 1545–6285) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–313–33283–5 (alk. paper) 1. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. 3. Beat generation. I. Title. PS228.B6D58 2007 810.9’0054—dc22 2006029546 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2007 by Michael J. Dittman All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2006029546 ISBN-10: 0–313–33283–5 ISBN-13: 978–0–313–33283–8 ISSN: 1545–6285 First published in 2007 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10

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Contents Timeline

vii

Introduction

1

1.

John Clellon Holmes, Go

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2.

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

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3.

Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

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4.

Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems

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5.

William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

77

6.

Neal Cassady, The First Third

99

7.

Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

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Index

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Timeline 1944

First meeting of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Herbert Huncke in New York City, around Columbia University and Times Square. Kerouac marries Edie Parker while held in jail as a material witness in friend Lucien Carr’s murder trial (marriage lasts a few months). Kerouac and Burroughs write novel together entitled, And the Hippos were Boiled in Their Tanks.

1945

At Columbia University, Allen Ginsberg is expelled for harboring Jack Kerouac in his room and for writing offensive words on his dormitory-room window.

1946

William S. Burroughs and common-law wife Joan Vollmer move to Texas. Neal Cassady meets Kerouac and Ginsberg in New York City. Kerouac begins writing The Town and the City after the death of his father.

1947

Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Cassady live in Denver for summer. Cassady meets future wife Carolyn Robinson. Ginsberg and Cassady visit Burroughs in Texas.

1948

John Clellon Holmes meets Kerouac and Ginsberg in New York City around Columbia University where Ginsberg has re-enrolled and graduates.

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Timeline

Ginsberg begins his series of William Blake visions. Kerouac and Cassady take the road trip later described in On the Road. 1949

Ginsberg is arrested in New York City for harboring stolen goods and sent to New York State Psychiatric Institute for eight months where he meets Carl Solomon. Ginsberg visits William Carlos Williams. Burroughs in Mexico City.

1950

Lawrence Ferlinghetti moves to San Francisco. Gary Snyder, Lew Welch, and Philip Whalen enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon; Rexroth conducting weekly soiree in San Francisco home. Burroughs begins writing Junky. Kerouac’s The Town & the City is published.

1951

Ginsberg and Kerouac meet Gregory Corso in New York City. Kerouac writes initial draft of On the Road in three weeks, becomes interested in Buddhism. Burroughs accidentally shoots and kills his wife.

1952

Kerouac completes Visions of Cody while living with Neal and Carolyn Cassady in San Francisco, writes Dr. Sax while living with Burroughs in Mexico. Go by John Clellon Holmes is published. Holmes follows it with “This Is the Beat Generation” for the New York Times.

1953

Ferlinghetti begins publishing City Lights Magazine. Burroughs’ novel Junky is published. Kerouac writes Maggie Cassidy and The Subterraneans in New York City.

1954

Allen Ginsberg arrives in San Francisco and meets Peter Orlovsky.

1955

Ginsberg organizes Six Gallery Reading in San Francisco. Ferlinghetti launches City Lights Books with Pocket Poets Series. Kerouac writes Mexico City Blues.

1956

Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems is published as City Lights’ Pocket Poets Series #4.

Timeline

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Kerouac spends summer as lookout on Desolation Peak, Washington. Ginsberg’s mother, Naomi, dies. 1957

U.S. Customs seizes Howl and Other Poems in San Francisco. Kerouac’s On the Road is published. Kerouac visits Burroughs in Tangier, helps with Naked Lunch manuscript.

1958

Cassady serves two-year jail term in San Quentin for possession and sale of marijuana. Kerouac publishes The Subterraneans and The Dharma Bums, begins work on Lonesome Traveler.

1959

Burroughs’s Naked Lunch is published. Beat film Pull My Daisy is produced and directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, with Kerouac’s narration, and Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Corso in leading roles. Kerouac’s Dr. Sax, Maggie Cassady, and Mexico City Blues are published. Ginsberg records “Howl” for Fantasy Records and is writing Kaddish.

1960

Burroughs begins using cut-up techniques in Minutes to Go and Exterminator; Ginsberg in South America.

1961

Kerouac writes Big Sur.

1965

Kerouac writes Satori in Paris. Naked Lunch faces trial for obscenity.

1966

Kerouac marries Stella Sampas and moves back to his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts.

1967

Kerouac writes Vanity of Duluoz.

1968

Cassady dies in Mexico.

1969

Kerouac dies.

1971

Cassady’s The First Third is published posthumously.

1986

Ginsberg is appointed Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College.

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Timeline

1992

Ginsberg receives the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Artes et des Lettres.

1994

Ginsberg sells his archives to Stanford University for one million dollars.

1997

Ginsberg dies.

Introduction The Beat Generation movement is a uniquely American movement. Its great texts helped to define post–World War II American culture and continue today to inspire readers to search for meaning and adventure. If, as Hemingway suggested, all American literature began with the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, it may actually be wiser to go a short step further back to find the beginning of the Beat Generation in Thoreau: I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to find only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it.1 But what makes these writers who are sometimes disparate in style and subject a cohesive whole—a generation? Critics not only enjoy reducing art to movements or generations, but they also delight in trying to affix a point of beginning to such movements. When did the Beat generation begin? Was it at the Six Gallery reading? When Burroughs met Kerouac and Ginsberg? When Cassady swaggered into the urban canyons of New York City from the

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seemingly endless American West? Did the Generation end with the death of Kerouac? With the ascendancy of Leary and Kesey? Or with the death of Burroughs, the final member of the original Beats? Did it end at all, or merely transmogrify into the New Journalists of today? John Clellon Holmes, in his essay “The Philosophy of the Beat Generation,” describes the difficulty of trying to pin the generation down: “Providing a word that crystallizes the characteristics of an entire generation has always been a thankless task.… But to find a word that will describe [the Beats]… is even more difficult, because this group includes veterans of three distinct kinds of modern war: a hot war, a cold war, and a war that was stubbornly not called a war at all, but a policy action.”2 It may help to define what critics mean by a generation. The word here refers not to writers born at the same time (as in the “Baby Boom Generation”) but rather refers to a point in time when artists rebel against their older more-established peers. So, to many, the Beat Generation is classified as a generation because its writers were looking to break free of some of the constraints of an older tradition (metrical poetry, for example). Their shared philosophy also brings them together. To much of mainstream America, their philosophy seemed to be an irresponsible anything-for-a-kick ideal, but the writers saw themselves on a religious quest, looking for sense out of the senselessness of modern life and trying to quiet their anxiety, as the world entered the looming danger of the atomic age. In the 1950s families built fallout shelters, and children practiced duck and cover drills against what seemed like the very real possibility of nuclear annihilation from the Communist U.S.S.R. Communism was an all-purpose bugaboo. Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed, falsely it turned out, to have hundreds of names of communists who infiltrated the highest ranks of the arts and government. The guilt of people like the Rosenbergs, executed for spying for Communist Russia, is still debated today. Although you were free to choose your political affiliation in 1950s America. if it wasn’t Republican or Democrat, it could cost you the ability to make a living. The 1950s had plenty of issues for the Beats to internalize and react against. The trauma of World War II and the baby and economic boom that followed it, meant that many of the political gains of the 1930s in areas like women’s rights and civil rights were shoved to a back burner. The Beats picked up on this simmering resentment and gave it a voice. The 1950s politically were dominated by conservativism and reliance upon the power of being white and male. The Beats undermined that behavior by rejecting the benefits that being born white and male in American society provided them, and chose instead to ally themselves with the segment of American

Introduction

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society who, by choice or by birth, were downtrodden and rejected from the mainstream American society. Socially, the Beats helped to change the face of the world as well. It’s hard for many of us to imagine a time when simply admitting that you were gay would cause the world to come crashing down around you. Students who admitted to being gay could be expelled from school, and professors could lose their jobs and be blackballed. Once facts like that are made clear, the courage of Ginsberg’s admissions becomes all the more clear. The Beats were also, in a very traditional way, rebelling against the authorities currently in power—the New Critics. When John Crowe Ransom, one of the shining lights of the New Critics, wrote, “Art is more cool than hot, and moral fervor is as dangerous to it as a burst of passion itself,”3 the Beats cringed. In his novel Go, John Clellon Holmes made sure that he depicted just the opposite. The character Paul Hobbes begins to lose a sense of himself and the ability to care about others, because he has become “cool” rather than passionate. It may be difficult when reading the Beats today to understand just how new and shocking their language was simply because their tradition lives on through writers like Tom Wolfe, and this exposure has created a sense of familiarity. Certainly there were blind spots in the Beat Generation (and in much of the scholarship that followed it). The Generation, the art they created, and the scholarship that sought to explain it, was largely a boy’s club, and it took decades and the hard work of scholars like Nancy M. Grace and Ronna C. Johnson to bring to the forefront the female artists who helped to make up the Beat Generation. Women like Diane di Prima, Joyce Johnson, Hettie Jones, Janine Pommy Vega, and many others were active artists, not just passive stereotypes of pretty girls in black turtlenecks. Although Kerouac would have been loath to have seen himself as inspiration for hippies, many of their concerns echoed his own. His desire to understand the lives of African Americans and Hispanic Americans greatly anticipated the same sort of emotions that would bring many young people to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The argument could be made that without Kerouac’s interest in Buddhism that the Beatles would never have begun their love affair with eastern religions. Likewise the frank freedom that Kerouac and the other Beats used in discussing their drug and sexual experimentation paved the way for the Summer of Love and the Stonewall revolt. Kerouac’s impact was also felt artistically as well. There could not have been the popular acceptance of Sylvia Plath’s and Anne Sexton’s confessional poetry without Kerouac’s roman à clef novels, as well as Ginsberg’s

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intensely personal poetry. Even Tom Wolfe’s playful use of language, slang, and punctuation recall Kerouac’s later, more-experimental writings. Would Wolfe have chosen Kesey to immortalize, without the antecedent of Kerouac’s adoration of Neal Cassady in On the Road? It seems unlikely. By 1968, the Beats had faded out of the public eye in favor of the hippies, but the influence of these few but very powerful artists continued to and continues to resonate. It was Gary Snyder who joked that there was no such thing as the Beat Generation, that it was only a group of people that could fit in one living room at once, but certainly Americans are living in a freer society today than they were 50 years ago, and the Beat Generation had a lot to do with fighting for and establishing that freedom. NOTES 1. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden; Or, Life in the Woods. New York: Dover, 1995: 2. 2. Charters, Ann, ed. Beat Down to Your Soul. New York: Penguin, 2001: 228. 3. Filreis, Al. “Ransom on Art as Cool.” The Literature and Culture of the American 1950’s. University of Pennsylvania, http://www.writing.upenn.edu/afilreis/ 50s/ransom-quote.html.

SELECTED SUGGESTED READINGS Charters, Ann, ed. The Portable Beat Reader. New York: Penguin, 1992. ———. A Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 16, The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America. Detroit, MI: Gale, 1983. Gifford, Barry, and Lawrence Lee. Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac. New York: Penguin, 1978. Grace, Nancy M., and Ronna C. Johnson, eds. Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Watson, Steven. The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944–1960. New York: Pantheon, 1995.

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John Clellon Holmes Go BIOGRAPHY Paradoxically, John Clellon Holmes has never fit into the generation that carries the name he popularized. Holmes was born on March 12, 1926 in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Holmes and Kerouac shared a birthday, although Holmes was four years younger. Holmes moved 20 times in his first 18 years of life. His parents, John McClellan Holmes Sr. and Elizabeth Holmes, divorced when he was 17. His father, John, was a salesman, and his mother, Elizabeth, a housewife. Holmes was married to Marian Miliambro in 1944 and then, after divorce, to Shirley Allen in 1953. Moving to New York City after completing service in the United States Navy’s Hospital Corps in 1944 through 1945, Holmes began studying at Columbia University in the fall of 1945. By the late 1940s, Holmes found himself in the same Columbia University orbit as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and the rest of the writers who would come to be known collectively as the Beat Generation. Unlike the rest of the Beats, by the time Holmes began associating himself with the group of friends who would become the Beat Generation, he was already married, a family man by the time he became famous, and of all the Beats he had the earliest success, and, at the time, was the most successful financially. This difference between Holmes and the rest of the Beats (not only Holmes’s success, but also his refusal to adopt the stereotypical Beat lifestyle), eventually caused friction between Kerouac and himself.

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Indeed, throughout their lives, Holmes and Kerouac kept an uneasy, love/ hate relationship. Holmes’s books were overshadowed in terms of popularity and (especially) notoriety by Kerouac’s work, but Kerouac felt an intense insecurity and rivalry towards Holmes, fueled in part by Holmes’s financial stability, as opposed to Kerouac’s own penury. Eventually Kerouac, while in the throes of drink, took to writing rambling, inflammatory letters warning Holmes to stay away from certain topics (such as jazz, while Holmes was working on The Horn, the tale of a bebop saxophonist and junkie)—topics which Kerouac considered to be his own. For years, though, the relationship between Kerouac, the King of the Beats, and Holmes, the Father of the Beat Generation, was warm, friendly, and a meeting of equals. Holmes later wrote in an essay profiling Kerouac, collected in Gone in October, that he and Jack felt as if they were brothers (a powerful metaphor for Kerouac, considering his younger brother’s, Gerard’s, childhood death was a lifelong source of both inspiration and guilt). Kerouac and Holmes were born on the same day, had been raised in Massachusetts, and both felt, according to Holmes, “dogged by a dark sense.”1 This relationship, which would become responsible for giving the world the Beat Generation, began congenially. However, it was Holmes who, in 1949, had begun Go, the novel that would be recognized as the first Beat novel. In fact, while Holmes was crafting his tale of urban artistic experiments with culture and alienation, Kerouac was putting the final touches to his very conventional novel, The Town and the City. Kerouac finished The Town and the City, his first book, in 1949. It is a sprawling novel inspired by Thomas Wolfe’s novel Look Homeward Angel, and as such, it bears little resemblance to the later, intensely personal work that would bring him notoriety. As James Atlas, former editor at the New York Times Book Review, notes in his introduction to the 1980 edition of Go, one night in 1948, during the time Holmes was working on Go, he attended a party at Allen Ginsberg’s Spanish Harlem apartment. At Ginsberg’s party, Holmes met Kerouac, then 26. The two began a long conversation about their friends and their sadness at the general condition of the world. At one point in the conversation, Kerouac proposed that all the people at the party and everyone like them were all a “beat generation.” It was a phrase that would change not only Holmes’s and Kerouac’s life, but the history and culture of the world as well, by its inclusion in Holmes’s first book, Go. Go is an autobiographical work covering the lives of pill-popping hipsters, including thinly veiled characterizations of the people who would later populate Kerouac’s novels, including Neal Cassady and Herbert Huncke.


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The influence of Holmes’s subject matter and roman à clef technique is an unmistakable influence on Kerouac’s work. After reviewers noticed Holmes’s use of the Kerouac’s word “beat” in Go, the term, if not the ideas behind it, slowly began to gain popular culture purchase. After the book was reviewed in the New York Times, Holmes was asked to write an essay-length explanation of the term. The essay, entitled “This Is the Beat Generation: A 26-year-old Defines His Times,” appeared in the New York Times Magazine on November 16, 1952 and cemented Holmes’s reputation as the premier (and most cold-eyed) chronicler of his generation. Even today, this essay creates controversy. The labeling of the Beat Generation was a two-edged sword. While on one hand it helped to bring together and clarify the goals of these like-minded writers, it also helped to expose them to ridicule (including San Francisco columnist Herb Caen and his coinage of “beatnik,” meaning a lazy, goateed, turtlenecked, bongo-playing hipster—an image which led Kerouac, for one, to disavow the entire Beat movement by the end of his life). The term also, like any sweeping generalization, was unable to fully encompass the thoughts, hopes and beliefs of the entire group—especially one as varied as the Beats. Because of this, the definition is, by nature, reductive towards the goals of the movement rather than expansive. Holmes acknowledges that reductiveness, writing in the essay, “Any attempt to label an entire generation is unrewarding,” but, nonetheless, he goes on to try to define the term “beat,” claiming that although many Americans might be unfamiliar with the word, they are familiar with the state of mind it describes: “More than mere weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and, ultimately, of soul; a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness. In short, it means being undramatically pushed up against the wall of oneself.”2 Unlike earlier generations, Holmes suggests, the Beats are not spiritually empty; instead, reduced to the level of hopelessness by their culture, they choose to turn away from that culture and towards the larger questions of spirituality. However, even while considering the spiritual, within the essay, Holmes touches upon the decidedly corporeal markers of the Beat Generation, which would become stereotypical in the mind of the general public—the use of drugs and drink, the interest in non-mainstream sexual practices, and, always, the obsession with movement, usually in an automobile. However, Holmes suggests that the Beats embrace these things not out of despair, but rather in order to more fully experience life. He writes that “the giggling nihilist, eating up the highway at ninety miles an hour and steering with his feet, is no Harry Crosby, the poet of the Lost Generation who planned to fly

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his plane into the sun one day because he could no longer accept the modern world. On the contrary, the hotrod driver invites death only to outwit it. He is affirming the life within him in the only way he knows how, at the extreme.”3 To Holmes, the sharp division he saw between the Beats and “square” society was a cultural creation. The only reason such a division existed, he writes, is that people want it to exist. If the “Young Republican” would look within himself, Holmes suggests, he would find the same dissatisfaction with society and the same hunger for experience. Holmes finishes the essay with an idea undoubtedly inspired by Kerouac that “the problem of modern life is essentially a spiritual problem.” Indeed, although the essay brought fame to Holmes as the spokesman for a generation—someone to whom both Beats and Young Republicans could talk to and relate, the ideas contained within the essay bear the tell-tale philosophical fingerprints of the man who would come to represent the “beatnik” in popular culture, Jack Kerouac. Kerouac and Holmes continued to be loosely involved with each other’s work while it was being drafted. They read each other’s drafts and more importantly, helped to refine each other’s artistic sensibilities and philosophy. For Holmes, this would eventually lead to a gentle, but firm rejection, not of the writers of the Beat Generation as people, but of the sloppy excess that came to be associated with the literary movement. Go was first published in America in the fall of 1952. It sold around 2,500 copies and then quickly went out of print—resurrected only when On the Road achieved notoriety. Although Holmes’s book was the first published to use the term “Beat Generation” in the text, it is attributed to the Kerouac character—Pasternak. After On the Road achieved such success, Ace Books, which originally rejected Holmes’s work, published a lightly edited version in paperback in 1957. Holmes was a perfectionist in his work. In letters to students, he claims that reading his work was painful and that by the time he was teaching at Brown he found the writing in The Horn unsatisfactory; too concerned with rhythm and overconscious of its subject matter—jazz and drugs, a topic that had, truthfully, been covered ad nauseum by the time of the debut of the novel. In the introduction to the 1980 edition of Go, he writes that upon reading his first book he now finds it, “full of solemn gaffes, technical awkwardness, excesses of pessimism, and uncertain prose.” However, William Barrett, in an essay looking back at Go wrote, “[Go is] . . a better and more mature presentation of the Beat Generation than the highly touted novels of Jack Kerouac.”4


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After Go, Holmes continued to write without the critical success enjoyed by his first novel. The Horn (interestingly enough pilloried by Kenneth Rexroth, the same poet who would take every chance he had to make Jack Kerouac’s life difficult. By this time, Rexroth was transferring his hatred of Kerouac to anything associated with the Beats with the occasional exception of Ginsberg.) was the story of the tragic decline of an African American jazzman named Edgar Pool, loosely based on the lives of Lester Young and Charlie Parker. The Horn was met with mixed reviews. Gene Baro, in the New York Herald Tribune Book Review, wrote that, “Here and there he has been betrayed by complexity in carelessness.”5 In a June 1977 interview conducted with Tim Hunt at Holmes’s home and collected in The Beat Journey, the author said that although he was “somewhat embarrassed by the lyricism of the writing because it didn’t find the flow that he was looking to associate with the subject of the jazzman, finding instead that it was too confined by the traditional rhythms of English—iambic pentameter.” He added however that “[The Horn] was earnest . . . I’m not ashamed of it at all.”6 Holmes followed The Horn with Get Home Free, a novel which Holmes describes as two novellas, which he was able to meld together, describing the lives of Dan Verger and May Delano, two of the characters from Go, and their relationship’s dissolution and rebirth. Get Home Free was more kindly received than Go. The New York Times Book Review critic Hansel Frankel wrote, “the excitement of [Holmes’s] creative ability overrides his grim trip from futility to resignation.” After his novels, Holmes published his poetry and creative nonfiction albeit through much smaller presses. The collection of essays, Nothing More to Declare, collected Holmes’s seminal essays on the Beat Generation, including “This is the Beat Generation” and “The Philosophy of the Beat Generation.” The book also included profiles of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. That motif would continue in both of Holmes’s nonfiction collections: Visitor: Jack Kerouac in Old Saybrook in 1981 and Gone in October: Last Reflections on Jack Kerouac in 1985. Gone in October is noteworthy because of its attempt, building upon Holmes’s journalistic strength, to move public perception away from Kerouac the “Beatnik,” to Kerouac the writer, driving home persuasive parallels between Kerouac and classic American writers such as Emerson (the Beats, according to Holmes, were “transcendentalists with hangovers”).7 Taking a new tack in 1987, he published a collection of travel essays: Displaced Person: The Travel Essays of John Clellon Holmes.

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In addition to his nonfiction writing, unlike many of the other Beat Generation writers, Holmes eventually found a home in academe. Before settling at the University of Arkansas, Holmes also taught at the University of Iowa from 1963–1964, Brown University from 1971–1972 and Bowling Green State University in Ohio in 1968. (He would later relish telling the story of his dislike of Bowling Green, eventually writing an extended and extremely unflattering poem sequence, The Bowling Green Poems, about the experience.) He was also, atypical for the Beats, a recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976. By the 1980s, Holmes had settled into a routine, spending half of the year teaching at the University of Arkansas and the other half at this home in Old Saybrook in Connecticut (purchased with the advance for the paperback edition of Go, an edition that was not published at the time, but nonetheless, a fact which never failed to goad Kerouac. Paradoxically, this house that drove Kerouac into spasms of jealousy was also where he would spend some of his last days, drinking brandy by the mason jarful in one of the Holmes’s overstuffed chairs). Through Holmes’s painstaking attention to detail and his love for imagery wound into factual descriptions, Holmes seems to have been the writer responsible not only for helping to establish the philosophy of the Beat Generation, but also for beginning the trend of school of literary journalism. Scott Preston in his article for the American Book Review wrote that he believed that, because of this, Holmes, more than any other of the Beat writers serves as a cultural bridge between the avant-garde writers of the 1940s, and the New Journalists of the late 1960s and the 1970s. His final book of poems, Dire Coasts, was published in 1988, the year he died at the age of 62 in Middleton, Connecticut. He left behind manuscripts for several books of poetry, essays and memoirs. Because of his unique place in the Beat pantheon, his rich legacy of unpublished work, and his function as a bridge between academe and the Beats, as well as the fact that he has gone generally under-researched when compared to the rest of the Beat Generation, the time seems ripe for a Holmes reconsideration and revival. SYNOPSIS For many people, reading Go as a Beat book, indeed the first Beat book, is an unnerving and unsatisfying experience. It doesn’t fulfill our expectations of how a Beat book should read. It does not have the high-manic energy of the work of Kerouac or the spacey-hallucinatory quality of Burroughs or the wit and political engagement of Ginsberg—instead it’s dark and moody;


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much like Dostoyevsky, a writer by whom Kerouac claimed to have been most inspired, but whose lineage is much clearer in Holmes’s work. The Beats, led by Holmes, basked in the reflected light of Dostoevsky’s vision of beautification through suffering. It was, after all, Dostoyevsky who wrote in the 1880s that “young Russia is talking of nothing but the eternal questions now.”8 And Holmes who answered, in his “This is the Beat Generation” essay, “Thirty years later … the generation of which Dostoyevsky wrote was meeting in cellars and making bombs. This generation may make no bombs; it will probably be asked to drop some, and have some dropped on it, however, and this fact is never far from its mind. It is one of the pressures which created it and will play a large part in what will happen to it.”9 The hysteria is apparent in Go—witness strange Kathryn gripping Hobbes, as if to hold on to a life preserver in the last scene in the novel, but the portrayal of altered states of mood and consciousness is a much clearer, almost journalistic approach. Even Holmes’s detached journalistic society plugs into a continuation of youthful young adult despair and a sense of alienation; those qualities of despair and alienation make Go very attractive for many young readers today, even though the book itself belongs to another time. To historicize the novel, Beat scholar Anne Charters notes, in her afterward to the 1980 edition of Go, that 1952 was also the year that Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Piano Player, were published and yet today these all seem like “old” books, books belonging to another age. Students are required to read The Old Man and the Sea, but they choose to read Beat novels. Holmes himself wrote in a letter to Charters that “cerebral young men (and women too, I’m sure) are attracted to the spontaneous, the improvised, the random, thus the wondrous. Also to everything beyond the pale, outside the firelight, everything that has escaped the circumscribed.”10 Go’s working title was The Daybreak Boys, a name for one of the vicious gangs that prowled New York City during the days of the Five Points (so named for the points created by the intersection of Park, Worth, and Baxter streets), a neighborhood known as a center of vice and debauchery throughout the nineteenth century. Holmes had chosen his allusion carefully. Like the 1950s New York City Spanish Harlem and East Village neighborhoods of the Beats, according to the National Park Service, “outsiders found Five Points threatening and fodder for lurid prose.”11 Presaging Holmes’s description of the area Charles Dickens wrote, describing a visit in 1842 to the area that, “Such lives as are led here, bear the same

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fruit here as elsewhere. Many . . . pigs live here. Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright in lieu of going on all-fours? And why they talk instead of grunting?’ ”12 Like so many other pieces of Beat writing, Go is a roman à clef—a novel whose characters are based on real-life people. The character key for the book looks like this: David Stofsky—Allen Ginsberg Gene Pasternak—Jack Kerouac Albert Ancke—Herbert Huncke Hart Kennedy—Neal Cassady Paul Hobbes—John Clellon Holmes Dennison—William S. Burroughs Agatson—Bill Canastra Marilyn—Carolyn Cassady (nee Robinson) Dinah—LuAnn Cassady (nee Henderson) Paul Hobbes, the character based on Holmes, stands out from the supporting players. Hobbes is sober, thoughtful, less interested in kicks than in salvaging his failing marriage. The book is slower than Kerouac’s coverage of the same material with a greater attention to the overt craftsmanship of the language. To Holmes, the lust for experience, drugs, and sex, as embodied by his friends, was caused by what he felt as the ever-present specter of nuclear war. This was a time that Holmes would describe in his book of essays, Nothing More to Declare, as a “feeling of expectation without reasonable hope, of recklessness without motivation, of uniqueness seeking an image.” The book is broken into three parts, with a religious-based quote for each. Part 1 entitled “The Days of Visitation” begins with an epigraph taken from the Old Testament book of Hosea: The days of visitation are come, the days of recommence are come; Israel shall know it: the prophet is a fool, the spiritual man is mad. (Hosea 9:7)13 Holmes uses this epigraph in a variety of ways. The first is to provide a prediction of what the book will contain, a prediction that a time of reckoning is at hand. But also he uses it to introduce the concept of change, that his is a new time, a new era, and a new day has come. Finally, it predicts and begins to explain the nature of Stofsky and his visions or visitations.


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In chapter 2, Holmes introduces one of the main conflicts of the tale—the relationship between Hobbes and Kathryn, his wife, to whom he’s been married for six years. When she comes home from work, it’s clear where the conflict in this marriage lies. At night, Kathryn, after working all day, wants to be alone, while Hobbes, after being alone all day writing, wants to go out at night to the parties with his Beat friends, looking for “kicks.” This closely mirrors the difficulty Holmes was having in his own marriage. Kathryn acquiesces, and chapter 3 takes place at a party at Stofsky’s, where we are introduced to this mad prophet. Pasternak, Hobbes, Kathryn and Christine, a girl Pasternak meets at the party, go back to Hobbes’s home. Kathryn tells Hobbes that she doesn’t want Pasternak to bring girls by anymore. She finds it demeaning, and two strange undercurrents begin to develop—one of jealousy from Kathryn for the freedom with which Pasternak lives his life, and the other suggesting that she fears that Hobbes will begin to emulate his friends’ sexual profligation. At the same time though, Kathryn is simply upset with the lifestyle that Hobbes’s and his friends live; she feels that he is being sucked into the Beat life away from the more conservative, conventional family life, which she desires. In chapter 4, the background of Hobbes’s and Kathryn’s relationship is revealed. They were married after Hobbes returned from boot camp. There is the sense that the relationship, as well as the marriage itself, was rushed. Adding to this sense is the fact that both of the Hobbes believe that they may have made the wrong choice in marrying. After military service, Hobbes enrolled in Columbia. There, after meeting and talking to Pasternak and Stofsky at school, Hobbes begins to believe, as Pasternak does, that the stress and horrors of World War II have led to the world undergoing a revolution of the soul. But revolution or not, the more mundane fact of domestic arguments continue. Kathryn comes home in a bad mood and tells Hobbes that she is frustrated. She feels that the books he spends all day writing, while she is at the office working, will never make enough money to support them. Their argument eventually turns into sex. Afterwards, Kathryn is satisfied and happy enough to allow him to go out with his friends without complaint. The concept of madness is introduced in chapter 6. Stofsky visits a friend from the Merchant Marine, who has gone mad. The man asks Stofsky for marijuana (which Stofsky doesn’t have), before the workers for the asylum, to which he committed himself, come to pick him up. The man is obsessed with the topic of time, rambling on and on about the nature of time and how its passage affects us. Stofsky is deeply affected and the seeds of his own coming visions are foreshadowed.

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Meanwhile, Pasternak is becoming obsessed with Christine (the young woman he met at Stofsky’s party). The more infatuated Pasternak becomes, the more Hobbes realizes that he is unhappy with his own relationship with Kathryn. At the same time, a simmering jealousy towards Pasternak begins to develop on the part of Hobbes. On a walk, Kathryn and Hobbes witness a violent fight between two men. Kathryn calls for help, but Hobbes pulls her away. Hobbes’s reluctance to help reflects his overall feeling that he is separated from the rest of humanity, that he has become cold and brittle, and even intercourse with his wife is nothing more than an attempt to feel a connection with another human being. On the other hand, Stofsky’s madness has begun to bloom, and he feels connected with everyone. So much so in fact that Stofsky tells Hobbes that he is done with therapy—a treatment upon which he has relied for years. Surprised by Stofsky’s announcement, Hobbes allows himself to be drawn into a debate about the existence of God. Unsettled after arguing with Stofsky, Hobbes goes to visit his friend Agatson and Agatson’s girlfriend Bianca. Agatson seems to be going through narcotic withdrawal. Depressed and feeling empty after his visit, Hobbes calls Pasternak, telling him that he’s decided to go to Mexico—a place he and Pasternak often refer to as their magic place—the place they’ll go to when all else is over. Pasternak believes Hobbes’s lie and begins to make his own plans to get there. When Pasternak hears that Hobbes is leaving the States, he also believes that Hobbes has left Kathryn. Finally, physically and emotionally exhausted, and depressed, Hobbes returns home to await Kathryn’s return from a weekend to her mother’s home in Westchester, New York. Meanwhile, Stofsky has been reading the works of the poet William Blake. Echoing the real-life experiences of Ginsberg, Stofsky leaves his apartment, and roams the city, experiencing visions brought on by Blake. Believing that the poets of old are calling, trying to talk to him, he begins to feel that he has gone completely mad. At this, the end of the first part of the book, Stofsky has been established as the mad prophet of the Beat Generation. Stofsky feels filled to the brim and connected to everyone. Hobbes, in comparison. feels empty, nihilistic, and disconnected. Between the two aspects of their personalities, Stofsky and Hobbes exhibit the Beat philosophy in toto. Having established Stofsky as the voice in the wilderness for the Beat Generation and the book Go itself, part 1 draws to a close. Part 2 is entitled “Children in the market.” Drawing a connection with the book’s earlier epigraph, the first chapter of part 2 begins with a quote from the New Testament book of St. Matthew. It reads: “But where unto shall I liken/This generation? It is like/unto children sitting in the/markets,


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and calling unto/their fellows,/And saying, We have piped/unto you, and you have not/danced; we have mourned unto/you, and ye have not lamented” (Matthew 11:16–17).14 Again, Holmes uses this passage in a variety of ways. The first is to set up the question of how to explain the Beat generation, a question, which he will answer by the end of the text. Holmes also adopts the persona of a watcher outside of the generation—the role that both Hobbes plays in the book and that Holmes took on in real life. The epigraph also makes a suggestion that would soon become a stereotype of the Beats—one of them as a children, or certainly childish. Clearly, the Beats feel, at this time, that they have an important mission, but neither their joy nor their sadness seems to be able to move square society. Finally, the quote also foreshadows some of what part two will be about—the continued disillusionment with the dominant culture and its refusal to acknowledge the philosophies of the Beat Generation. The second chapter of the second part brings another party. But, this one seems to be a dud. Hobbes is in a bad mood and feels that Kathryn gets along better with Ketcham, the man accompanying them to the party, than with him. However, once the marijuana comes out, the party enlivens, and with the lowered inhibition that comes with the drug use, the turmoil in the Hobbes’ marriage comes to a head. Kathryn and Pasternak begin to kiss. Disheartened and looking for revenge, Hobbes walks a girl named Estelle to her bus and kisses her as well. But, when Hobbes returns, the party is over. He finds that Kathryn has passed out after vomiting from too much to drink. In the middle of it all, Stofsky tells Hobbes he’s done with marijuana now that he has seen God. The next morning, Kathryn claims not to remember anything that happened. She pussyfoots around until finally Hobbes explodes, asking her if she thinks he is angry about her infidelity. He insists that he is not, that he is glad that she was acting “naturally”; however, internally, it does seem to bother him. Yet, Hobbes is so removed from his own emotions, let alone how he feels for other people in his life, that it is impossible for him to understand what “natural” means to him. The chapter ends with the suggestion that their lives have begun to change because of the people they know. Just as in On the Road, the arrival of the character based on Neal Cassady serves as a catalyst for the heightened emotional interaction for Go’s characters. Here, the character based on Cassady, Hart Kennedy, arrives in New York City and impresses Hobbes with his tremendous nervous energy. Just as this segment underscores the interrelatedness of the two stories, it also reveals how the two writers’ styles influenced each other.

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To help to understand the debt Holmes and Kerouac owe each other, note that the last paragraph on page 117 (in the 1980 edition) reads just like something from On the Road. For example, this sentence, describing the two men heading to the bars to eventually find a connection to buy marijuana: “They would increase the beat, bouncing up and down in their excitement until the car rocked and people in neighboring ones craned out toward them curiously and Hart would yell at each crescendo: ‘Yes, yes!. . . That’s right!’ ”15 The staccato rhythm of the words, the energy that course through the sentence, pushed on by the periodic uses of “until” and “and” read like the writing of Kerouac. While chapter 4 of part 2 helps flesh out the stylistic relationship between Kerouac and Holmes, chapter 5 is an important chapter in the overall history and scholarship of the Beat Generation, as it is the first time the word “Beat” is used in publication to describe this group of friends and their outlook on life. In the first paragraph of the chapter, the character Hobbes is writing a letter to his friend Liza. In it, Holmes writes that Hobbes “wrote on and on about ‘this beat generation, this underground life!’ ” Here, Holmes uses the term “beat” to describe Hobbes’s feeling of a stifled discovery, of a feeling of wanting to connect with others, but of being unable to do so. With Hart’s continued presence in New York City, the frenetic pace of life continues. Chapter 6 picks up on the Fourth of July weekend. The party at which the characters find themselves gets wilder and wilder until, as a sort of climax and catharsis, a window is broken. Hobbes, Hart, and their dates spill out into the night looking for more booze and weed. This chapter ties the word “Go” to the characters and their situation, just as Holmes did earlier with “beat.” Hart, for instance, chants the word “go” at the jazz records they listen to, and when high on Benzedrine, mumbles the word to himself as a sort of mantra, a hyped-up version of the Buddhist’s “om.” After leaving the party, the four go to an African American after-hours club, but the drug connection is not there. The chapter finishes as the sun comes up, and they head home on the subway, with Hobbes seemingly having doubts about his choice of lifestyle. He sees business people on their way to work, as he and his friends are coming home from a night of debauchery and asks himself if there must not be a middle ground between the lifestyle of the workers and the lifestyle of the artists. The day after the party, Hobbes continues to question the life he’s living. Holmes continues, in chapter 7, to describe the development of Hart’s personality. When the characters find themselves, at around 9 p.m. at Ketcham’s, Hart continues to act as a guide to the world of the Beats. Holmes uses this


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character to describe the difference between the highs created by the Beats’ two trademark intoxicants—Benzedrine and marijuana—saying that speed makes Hart mean and compulsive, while marijuana makes him mellow. When they toke up, Hart demonstrates his technique for stealing gasoline and in doing so reveals himself as almost the opposite of Stofsky. While Stofsky feels connected with everyone, Hart is so disconnected from society and the feelings of others that nothing is forbidden to him; he presents himself as completely amoral, or perhaps as completely animal in his appetites and in the lengths he is willing to go to fulfill them. Meanwhile, the character of Hobbes finds himself somewhere in between these two polar opposites, uncertain of which path to follow, if either. Although chapter 8 focuses on Stofsky going to his friend’s, Verger’s, home to settle some debts, and Verger’s refusal of the money, the chapter’s real purpose is to continue to flesh out Stofsky’s character. An important distinction begins to unfold in this chapter. Contrasted against Verger, Stofsky is less intellectual, but more passionate about art and life. Although Stofsky is “mad,” it seems as though many around him, including Verger, are more crazy. Certainly the majority of his peers are more cynical than Stofsky. A distinction is made between mad passion and the crazy behavior that separates one from intense emotional experience. And for Holmes, within this book, it is cynicism that ultimately poisons the hopefulness of the Beat Generation philosophy. Chapter 9 reinforces the multi-layered nuanced meanings of the word “Go” once again by introducing a Time Square club called “The Go Hole.” It’s a “hip” club, a place where, when Pasternak, Hart, Ketcham, Ben, Dinah and Kathryn arrive, they feel themselves being evaluated by the other patrons. These people have adopted Bebop jazz as their common language. The music has become, according to Hobbes, “a way of walking, a language and a costume; and these introverted kids (emotional outcasts of a war they had been too young to join, or in which they had lost their innocence), who had never belonged anywhere before, now felt somewhere at last.”16 Further emphasizing the difference between Stofsky and Hart, part 2, chapter 10 begins with Hart telling a story about trying to meet a woman for sex, Stofsky calls him a liar and a manipulator and criticizes him, saying that he’s not “straight” with anyone. Stofsky, perhaps in love with Dinah, goads Hart into telling Dinah the story, leading to a violent moment, in which Hart breaks his thumb punching Dinah (echoing a real life occurrence of domestic violence with Neal and LuAnn Cassady). Hart is remorseful on the way to the hospital, but later that week Dinah leaves on a bus headed for California without saying good-bye.

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Later, on a hot summer night, Hobbes, Kathryn, Pasternak, Hart and Stofsky sit drinking beer. The party has a strange, manic vibe, and Kathryn goes off with Pasternak. Hobbes waits until she comes home at 4 a.m. She had sex with Hart, and Hobbes says that he forgives her—that it makes no difference to him—and this time something seems to snap closed within him. Hobbes seems to be swinging to the crazy, cold, unemotional side of the philosophic dichotomy that Holmes has established in the novel. Their marriage seems finished. Ketcham and Hobbes find Verger in the middle of a binge; they take him to Agatson’s to sober him up. Verger is coughing blood and seems as if he is near death. Verger says that he’ll stay for an hour until he’s strong enough to go, and Verger gives Ketcham and Hobbes the $10 he owes Stofsky for them to give it to him Interestingly enough, in this section, Holmes uses the visit to Agatson’s apartment to make a prediction about the Beat Generation. On page 195, Ketcham says, speaking of Agatson, “he might become part of the culture, a kind of black prophet, his apartment something of a shrine . . . instead of it all turning into a playful joke, something to be hawked to every new crop of Villagers for a dollar ninety eight, an aging clown.”17 In these few sentences in the middle of the first Beat book, Holmes successfully predicts what will happen to the Beat Generation. The world would eventually come looking for them, but as entertainers and clowns, as cartoon beatniks with goatees and bongos, black turtlenecks, and long cigarette holders. Even at this early date in the Beat movement, Holmes could already see what would become of the commercialization of the Beat culture. For instance, rather than the true acceptance and reverence of Kerouac’s philosophical stance, the man, who, in all the Beat’s opinions, should have been recognized as a prophet of both style and culture, was instead commercialized, symbolically defanged, neutered, and made safe for commercial consumption. Perhaps the fact that Holmes was able to see this commercialization process already at this early date was the reason he was able create a life (albeit a much less famous one) away from both the Beat popularity, as well as the Beat backlash. Near the end of the second part of the novel, Hobbes and Pasternak meet for coffee, before Pasternak leaves with Hart for a trip out West. Hobbes and Pasternak argue back and forth; Pasternak feels (or rather seems to feel, while claiming he isn’t) guilty about sleeping with Kathryn, and Hobbes continues to insist that he doesn’t care about his wife’s infidelity with his best friend. In a moment of honesty, cutting through all of their dreaming and philosophy, Pasternak says he feels that Hobbes is always watching him, and always


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judging him. Nothing is solved, and they leave feeling uncomfortable with each other and their friendship. With Kathryn out of town at her mother’s, Hobbes makes rather halfhearted arrangements for an assignation with Estelle, a woman he has met at a party. Hobbes bounces from the Go Club, to a bar, to Estelle’s apartment where, during an attempted seduction, he finds himself unable to achieve an erection. He leaves and feels tortured by the “cool” person, who he now feels he is becoming. More importantly, in this chapter, Holmes defines “cool” as the antithesis of “beat,” continuing to refine the connection between Stofsky’s passionate madness and Hobbes’s disassociation. “When the music is cool, it’s pleasant, somewhat meditative and without tension. Everything before, you see just last year, was “crazy” “frantic” “gone,” now everyone is acting cool, unemotional, withdrawn. . . What can one designate the moment that comes after ‘the end’ after all? I suppose it’s complete passivity, oblivion.” Even more than just creating a definition and understanding of “cool,” Hobbes feels himself becoming cool rather than beat. He feels so disconnected from everyone that even surrounding himself with people only proves to reinforce his emotional withdrawal. Part 2 ends with the reinforcement of the feeling of isolation and the continued dissolution of the Hobbes’ marriage. Kathryn, Hobbes, and Ketcham wander out into the night for a drink. They run into Stofsky and relay Verger’s message and the $10. The interpersonal conflict continues to grow within the group of friends. They go to Bianca’s apartment where she tells them Christine (the young married woman Pasternak has been secretly seeing since the start of the book) is pregnant and in therapy and that all these troubles should be blamed on Pasternak. Bianca tells Kathryn that she needs to “cultivate” Hobbes, and that he is holding everything emotionally inside. Offended, Kathryn leaves to go home where she finds and reads the love letters Hobbes writes to Liza. Immediately, she calls Hobbes at the party to tell him that she is leaving him. Hobbes lies to the others saying he needs cigarettes and runs home to his wife. It’s an awkward, uncomfortable scene. For Hobbes, these letters have been merely therapeutic rather than seductive. Because he is emotionally bottled up and unable to express himself to others, he uses these letters, which were never sent or meant to be sent, to try to stop himself from becoming “cool.” Kathryn however, because she herself has been unfaithful, assumes that Hobbes is writing these letters with the intention of sending them and thus is being unfaithful as well. Part 3 begins with a quote from Father Zosima, the holy man from Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov: “Fathers and teachers, I ponder,

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‘What is hell? I maintain that is the suffering of being unable to love.”18 The message of Father Zosima is of particular importance in this book. The priest is reminding his followers that simply because they have assumed a monastic life does not imply that they are more blessed than other people. He also reminds his listeners that each man is responsible for every other man and that “he is responsible to all men for all and everything, for all human sins, national and individual.”19 Repudiating the concept of “cool,” a life a seclusion does not test one’s strength if he is to be a representative of Zosima’s theories. The elder’s ideas can be tested only in the midst of busy society. Holmes uses this quote to reinforce the danger of the continuance of Hobbes transformation to the cool man from the beat man, and Kathryn’s recognition of that switch—although she describes it in terms of Hobbes hiding his internal emotional life. The Brothers Karamazov is written on two levels: on the surface it is the story of a patricide in which all the murdered man’s sons share varying degrees of complicity, but, more importantly, to the purposes of Go, it is a spiritual drama of the moral struggles between faith, doubt, reason, and free will. Hobbes rushes home from the party to confront Kathryn. In contrast to the cold conversation they had when Kathryn admitted her infidelity, now they have a very conventional marital spat. At first Kathryn’s fury seems to be over what she perceives as Hobbes straying from her; however, her anger seems to be an expression of her own guilt, as well as her frustration at their failure to sustain their relationship. Fighting themselves into exhaustion, they decide to go to sleep, but first, have sex as another failed attempt at connecting. Stofsky leaves Bianca’s apartment, angry about Hobbes’s abrupt exit from the party. He runs into Ancke, who is crumpled in a doorway. He brings Ancke into his apartment, but is horrified at the junkie’s condition of narcotic withdrawal. Stofsky begins a long jumble of words saying that he thinks that after his “vision” or visitation that everyone is fearful of him. Ancke tells him that people judge, not because of what they think of others, but because of what they think of themselves. He seems to be reinforcing the situation in which Hobbes finds himself. That night, Stofsky has a dream in which he talks to God. Chapter 3 of part 3 switches back to the story of Hobbes. The editor to whom Hobbes has given his book takes Hobbes out to lunch to tell him thanks, but no thanks, his company cannot use Hobbes’s book. Hobbes walks, emotionally crushed, back to the apartment. Pasternak calls and they agree to meet. Pasternak has returned from his trip through the American West with Hart and is back in town (a description of the same journey that


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Kerouac would immortalize in On the Road). Hart, meanwhile, has stayed in San Francisco. Pasternak tells him that his book (in reality, Kerouac’s The Town and the City) has been sold. Once again, something that Hobbes wants badly has been snatched from him and given to Pasternak. Upset about his rejection, Hobbes walks to Stofsky’s. Since Stofsky has brought Ancke home, the junkie has begun to take over Stofsky’s apartment, unnerving Stofsky. To make matters worse, two criminals, Little Rock and Winnie, begin to frequent Stofsky’s apartment to visit Ancke. Hobbes drops by, recognizes the criminals as part of the “cool” crowd from the jazz club, the Go Hole, and is peeved that they are there. Hobbes sees them as being without a future, but Stofsky, ever compassionate to all living things, makes excuses for them. In a moment of supreme cynicism and self-loathing, Agatson begins planning a party to celebrate what he is calling his “Last Birthday.” Likewise, Hobbes also seems to be falling apart. Hobbes and Pasternak decide to head to Agatson’s, but, after being there for a short time, Hobbes, Pasternak, May, and Agastson decide to walk over to Bianca’s. Agatson commits casual vandalism on the way. Agatson, like Hart, seems to be completely nihilistic. Unlike Hart though, Agatson does it to keep from connecting with others, as opposed to Hart’s attempts to experience life in a more raw way. While there, they get a call telling them that Stofsky, Ancke, Little Rock, and Winnie have been arrested. Part 3, chapter 6 flashes back to the story of the theft leading to the arrest of Stofsky and the others. For weeks, Ancke has been fencing the items stolen by Winnie and Little Rock, using Stofsky’s apartment as a warehouse for the goods until he can unload them. Eventually, the “business” is too much for Stofksy’s nerves, and he insists that Ancke stop running the scam from his home. Together, with Little Rock and Winnie, they load the items into the car to get rid of them. However, convinced that the police are on to them, Little Rock panics and almost runs over a policeman, thereby initiating a chase. They wreck the car and Stofsky makes a run for it. He goes back to his apartment, where he is apprehended by the police. Stofsky is out on bail and comes to visit Hobbes. He tells Hobbes the whole story (it actually seems to be one of the more clunky parts of the book with long choppy, and unnecessary, bits of exposition); finally Stofsky leaves and Kathryn calls and is short with Hobbes Kathryn is still snappy at Hobbes when she gets home. She brings up the letters he wrote to his old sweetheart; Stofsky drops by again, to Kathryn’s displeasure, to tell Hobbes about his lawyer and defense. Kathryn insists Stofsky get rid of the stolen radio that he has given her and Hobbes. Hobbes

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begins to get the impression that he is at the end of one part of his life and at the beginning of another. In the final chapter of the book, Agatson finally fulfills his death wish when he is killed when he drunkenly and senselessly tries to climb out a subway window. News of his death circulates among his friends. The whole group of them head to a dingy bar in Hoboken for a sort of wake. Hobbes spirals into panic and depression with the realization that perhaps the only proper end to a “beat” life is an absurdly tragic death like Agatson’s; Hobbes begins to look around and believe that there is no hope left for any of them. CRITICAL RECEPTION The differences in the ways that Kerouac and Holmes saw their compatriots is illustrated in the way in which the characters are described differently between the seminal On the Road and Holmes’s Go. Holmes seems to have a clearer, less romantic eye. For example, the Dutch literary critic Jaap van der Brent points out that while Kerouac’s version of Neal Cassady (or Dean Moriarty, as he is named in On the Road) is “a young Gene Autry—trim, thin hipped blue eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent—a side burned hero of the snowy West,” Holmes’s Cassady (or Hart Kennedy as he is named in Go) gives off “an expression of shrewd masculine ugliness.” Kerouac sees only the promise and the energy of the generation as embodied by the Cassady character. Holmes, on the other hand, is able to see beyond the surface and predict the ugliness and self-centeredness that would grip the scene eventually. Likewise, it is Stofsky, the young poet, modeled after Ginsberg who is the main character of Go, not Pasternak, the Kerouac character, who we have to come to expect will dominate in all things Beat. For Holmes, Stofsky, with his mad passions and drug and sexual excesses, which eventually lead to madness (or enlightenment depending on your opinion), is a character to be fascinated by and to study, but not necessarily to emulate. In a 1953 letter to Neal Cassady, Ginsberg wrote, “[Holmes] is nothing but an empty-headed idiot & he makes everything sound like rattlebrained gossip.”20 In the 1976 reissue of Go, Ginsberg, by now an international star, refused when asked to write the forward to Go. He was, he admitted, embarrassed of the person that he was at the time and the person portrayed in the novel—a rare moment of humanity for a poet who spent most of his time trying to prove that there was never anything of which to be ashamed. Within Go, it’s clear that what Holmes has, that the vast majority of the Beat Generation did not, is objectivity—the ability to see the movement with a lucid eye, while still believing wholeheartedly in what they were all


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trying to accomplish—nothing less than the introduction of a new way of thinking and understanding and creating literature—a revolution of letters. Critical receptions of the book were mixed. Frederic Morton in the New York Herald Tribune wrote, “Mr. Holmes’ style is almost appropriately slack and erratic. Occasionally it bulges out into a cramped lyricism—only to retreat fatigued into a bare transcription of happenings. ‘A beat generation,’ philosophizes Paul Hobbes towards the end. We hope he is not right. But the adjective seems useful. This is a beat novel.” Scott Preston, in the American Book Review, suggests, “In his adaptation of spontaneous beat prose technique, weaving immediate almost random naturalistic imagery into sudden profound insight, Holmes now appears to have been a most intuitive pioneer of the so called New Journalism as more popularly expanded by Tom Wolfe.”21 SUGGESTED DISCUSSIONS OR PAPER IDEAS 1. How does Holmes define the term “Beat”? How does his definition compare and contrast to that of Kerouac or the other Beats? 2. Holmes describes the differences he sees between the “cool” and “beat” lifestyles in the 1950s. Do these distinctions still exist today? How and why? 3. What sort of conclusions does Holmes draw by the end of the book about obligations humans have towards each other?

NOTES 1. Holmes, John C. “Gone in October.” Playboy. February 1973: 96. 2. Holmes, John C. “This Is the Beat Generation.” New York Times Magazine. November 16, 1952: 10. 3. Ibid., 11. 4. Barrett, William. “Talent in Search of a Subject.” The Atlantic Monthly. June 1964: 136. 5. Baro, Gene. “A Novel Centered in the World of Jazz.” The New York Herald Tribune Book Review. July 20, 1958: 3. 6. Knight, Arthur and Kit Knight eds., The Beat Journey. Berkeley, CA: Unspeakable Visions, 1979: 153. 7. Holmes, John C. Displaced Person: The Travel Essays. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2002: 381. 8. Dostoevsky, Fydor. The Brothers Karamazov. trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2002: 381. 9. Holmes. “This Is the Beat Generation,” 11. 10. Charters, Ann. “Afterward.” Go. By Holmes. New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1993: n.p.

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11. “What Is Five Points?” Five Points. National Park Service. http://r2.gra.gov/ fivept.htm. 12. Dickens, Charles. American Notes for General Circulation. New York: Quiet Visions, 2004: 172. 13. The Holy Bible. King James Version. Camden, NJ: Nelson, 1970. 14. Ibid. 15. Holmes, John C. Go. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1997. 16. Ibid.,161. 17. Ibid.,195. 18. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 512. 19. Ibid. 20. Gifford, Barry ed. As Ever: The Collected Correspondence of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. Berkeley, CA: Creative Arts, 1977: 149. 21. Preston, Scott. “Analytic Yankee Cerebralness.” The American Book Review. March/April 1989: 12.

SUGGESTED READINGS Holmes, John C. Displaced Person: The Travel Essays. Little Rock: University of Arkansas Press, 1987. ———. Get Home Free. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1988. ———. Go. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002. ———. The Horn. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999. ———. Passionate Opinions: The Cultural Essays. Little Rock: University of Arkansas Press, 1988. ———. Visitor: Jack Kerouac in Old Saybrook. San Francisco: Unspeakable Visions, 1980.

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Jack Kerouac On the Road BIOGRAPHY When Jack Kerouac was asked in a psychiatric examination to explain what the doctor termed as his bizarre behavior, he responded happily that he was committed to “dedicating my actions to experience in order to write about them, sacrificing myself on the altar of Art.”1 Kerouac maintained this commitment to art throughout his life until he died, bitter, angry, and alcoholic on October 21, 1969, in St. Petersburg, Florida. The art for which he sacrificed himself lives on and paints a vivid picture of the life of the Beat generation as it searched for fulfillment in stagnant post–World War II America. Jean “Jack” Louis Kerouac was born to French Canadian immigrants in the city of Lowell, Massachusetts, on March 12, 1922. His parents Leo and Gabrielle created a tightly knit family for their brood. Jack had an older brother, Francis Gerard, and an older sister Caroline (called “Ti Nin”). Although English was not his first language, nor the language spoken in the house, “Ti Jean,” as he was known in his family, would become famous for his facility with the English language. As a youth, Kerouac was not only highly intelligent, but also gifted athletically, which brought him a football scholarship to Columbia University. After his freshman year at Columbia, he dropped out of school and signed up for a hitch with the Merchant Marines, before attempting to join the Navy in 1941. After finding that the discipline was too much for him in the Navy, he claimed insanity, and took therapy sessions with the aforementioned psychiatrist, earning an honorable discharge from the Navy for “indifferent character.” He then headed back

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to New York City where, in 1944, he met the people featured in his book On the Road: Allen Ginsberg, called Carlo Marx in the book; William S. Burroughs, called Old Bull Lee; and, perhaps most importantly, a twentyyear-old ex-con named Neal Cassady, who would appear as Dean Moriarty in On the Road. Inspired by this group, Kerouac offered his sacrifice to the altar of art, by forsaking middle-class America for a life of varied experience, turning his life into material for his writing. For all his books, but most famously for On the Road, Kerouac preferred not to characterize his work as fiction because he hadn’t created invented experiences, but rather had allowed his imagination to embellish remembered lived events. On the Road was first deemed unpublishable, not only because of its writing style and the difficulties he had obtaining libel waivers, but also because of the narrator’s empathy and longing for the life of the minority and downtrodden. Kerouac believed the ancestor of the white hipster of the 1950s was the African American jazzman, or, more generally, the African American, and, to some extent, members of other minority races. His many road trips with Cassady inspired him to begin reworking a novel that he came to call On the Road. In 1950, his first book, The Town and the City was published. John Brooks in the New York Times Book Review called The Town and The City, “a rough diamond of a book.”2 It’s the story of the dissolution of a family. Importantly for Kerouac, it also is the story of his own father and his inability to live the life of a rich small-town burgher, that both Leo and his son, “Ti Jean,” wanted the older man to have. There is a sense of innocence lost and the idea of losing one family (the biological) and finding a new one (of friends) that many adolescents undergo. More than any other Kerouac text, this one reflects the conservative political ideals that Kerouac would revert to later in his life. Unlike his other works, The Town and the City uses a very traditional style—although some critics have suggested that his more experimental style was realized by the time he wrote this and he fought to submerge it, the book is most likely best understood as a step in Kerouac’s development as his writer. He uses, for example, his roman à clef technique; Kerouac creates the Peter Martin character after himself—an amateur writer and better than average athlete who finds himself torn between the town (i.e., Lowell) and the city (i.e., Manhattan). Peter has a deep love and lust for life and experience. The Manhattan-based sections of the text introduces the reader to the nascent Beat Generation. Among the thinly veiled characters are the portrayals of Leon Levinsky, Will Dennison, and Junky (Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Herbert Huncke, respectively).


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Junky utters the phrase which would soon bring Kerouac fame and misery. “ ‘Don’t you know,’ Junky the Times Square habitué says, ‘I’m beat.’ ”3 In 1951, high on coffee and Benzedrine, in a stylistic breakthrough, Kerouac threaded a roll of teletype paper through his typewriter and began typing the third draft of On the Road using what he later came to call his “spontaneous prose” method. Six years passed before On the Road was published, and many critics point to its publication as the beginning of the end of a normal life for Kerouac. Sometime in the late 1940s, the term “beat” acquired cachet, and pseudo-beatniks started to appear in movies and television, all claiming Kerouac as their spiritual father. In 1952, Kerouac wrote Dr. Sax in Mexico City while staying in William S. Burroughs’s apartment. The drugs that Kerouac was taking and the paranoia that was setting in can be seen in the work. Dr. Sax is a fable set in Lowell, and it builds upon superhero stories that he imagined as a youth. It is another Kerouac work relying on sound, rhythm, and impression over traditional plot and characterization. Kerouac attempts to blend reality and dream right from the start of book 1, entitled “Ghosts of the Pawtucketville Night.” The book is mostly concerned with capturing the moment when an individual hovers between child and adulthood. The book has the air of death around it. Death exists in the text (in Kerouac’s mind the death of his brother Gerard) as a symbol of loss of innocence. Of special interest in the book, beyond Kerouac’s marijuana-influenced surrealism experiments, is the description of Doctor Sax’s castle at the end of the book and its strong resemblance to The Wizard of Oz’s castle of the Wicked Witch of the West. Also worth noting is the fact that Kerouac himself wrote that he felt this to be the greatest of his books and that he could never do better. But it was poorly received by critics and the general public. David Dempsey writing in the New York Times on May 3, 1959, wrote about Dr. Sax: “Written in 1952, before ‘On the Road’ established Jack Kerouac as a young man of considerable talent, this is one of the author’s earlier novels, which publishers heretofore have had the good sense not to publish. ‘Dr. Sax’ is not only bad Kerouac; it is a bad book. Much of it is in bad taste, and much more is meaningless. It runs the gamut from the incoherent to the incredible, a mishmash of avant-gardism (unreadable), autobiography (seemingly Kerouac’s) and fantasy (largely psychopathic).”4 In 1953, Kerouac jumped ship in New Orleans and headed back to New York City, where he writes The Subterraneans. The term “subterraneans” was coined by Allen Ginsberg to describe the patrons of a Greenwich Village bar. Kerouac felt out of place among these hipsters. Echoing Holmes’s Go,

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Kerouac felt the hipsters were “cool”—dispassionate about life and emotion, while Kerouac himself was deeply and passionately in love with all life had to offer. The one kindred soul Kerouac was able to find among the group was Alene Lee, the woman who he characterized in The Subterraneans as “Mardou Fox.” Holmes said that she was the first woman he had seen who was a match for Kerouac when it came to emotional intensity. However their passion only lasted for a month. Although she felt that Kerouac should act more his age (he was 31, she 22) and settle down, he felt the need to be “on,” to be “Jack Kerouac, King of the Beats,” to perform. Finally, she turned away from Kerouac and to his friend, Beat poet Gregory Corso, prompting Kerouac to sit down at his typewriter and record his version of the affair—a manuscript that would become The Subterraneans. By the time of the publication of The Subterraneans, poet and essayist Kenneth Rexroth was no longer a fan of Kerouac’s work or his person. Rexroth wrote, “[The Subterraneans] has all the essential ingredients of a bad book. It is sentimental, naïve, pretentious and full of shocking lack of understanding of the world it describes. Since this is presumably the world of the author’s own life, this is a pretty serious indictment . . . there are two things Jack knows nothing about—jazz and Negroes.”5 Undaunted, in 1954, Kerouac wrote a collection called San Francisco Blues, and a spiritual book, Some of the Dharma. San Francisco Blues, though much beloved by other Beat poets, is most notable for its form. Kerouac limited each poem to the size of one of his pocket notebook pages—about 3 inches by 5 inches. Although the form, in opposition to the title, shows little relationship to the traditional African American blues, it was a poetic form that Kerouac would return to repeatedly, eventually collecting them all into one tome: The Book of Blues. Begun as a series of notes addressed to another Beat Generation star, Allen Ginsberg, Some of the Dharma is an ambitious effort to translate Kerouac’s understanding of Buddhism into an American idiom. After promising to send Allen the 100-page manuscript, Jack wrote, “I haven’t sent you the Notes on the Dharma because I keep reading it myself, have but one copy, valuable, sacred to me … Besides it is not finished, I keep adding every day.”6 Indeed there are several times in this book where Kerouac writes as if he is done with it, only to pick it up again not long after. Of course there’s a certain paradox inherent in this book of “wisdom” by Kerouac, a man who drank himself to an early death. It becomes a “do as I say not as I do” kind of teaching, but that does not negate its validity or negate the poignant fact that during the three-year period of his life while he was writing Some of the Dharma, Kerouac was practicing his own version


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of Buddhist dhyana (meditation) and achieving some happiness and peace of mind. It didn’t last though. By 1959, as he wrote to Philip Whalen, “Myself, the dharma is slipping away from my consciousness and I can’t think of anything to say about it anymore.”7 Kerouac traveled back to Mexico in 1955 where he wrote Mexico City Blues, collecting 244 of his reactions to Mexico in his blues poetic form, and began his novel Tristessa. Rexroth continued to be violently anti-Kerouac in his reviews. Of Mexico City Blues, he wrote in the New York Time Book Review, “In the last three years Jack Kerouac has favored us with his observations about hitchhiking, riding freights and driving other people’s fast cars across country. It would seem he did these things poorly and that doing them frightened him severely . . . Now, in this book of poems, he has turned to Buddhism and dope with similar results . . . The naïve effrontery of this book is more pitiful than ridiculous. Mr. Kerouac’s Buddhism is a dime-store incense burner, glowing and glowering sinisterly in the dark corner of a Beatnik pad and just thrilling the wits out of bad little girls.”8 Rexroth and Kerouac soon would meet under friendlier conditions. Later in the year Kerouac headed back to San Francisco where he attended Ginsberg’s first pubic reading of Howl, at the San Francisco Six Gallery reading—an event where Rexroth played emcee. This reading which is now well established in Beat mythology, featured a happy Rexroth acting as master of ceremonies with Kerouac in the audience whipping them up into a frenzy. Afterwards, they all went out for celebratory dinner in Chinatown where the conversation was cordial, and it seemed as if the old guard of radical poetry had finally made peace with the new generation. In 1956, Kerouac finished Visions of Gerard while in North Carolina. Kerouac told biographer Ann Charters that he wrote the book in 12 days and that it was highly influenced by Henry V. Reading the book today it’s hard to find the influences, outside of Kerouac’s idiosyncratic understanding of Shakespeare as a literary outsider. Visions of Gerard is perhaps most important as part of the collection that Kerouac came to call “the Duluoz Legend,” the grand scheme he saw connecting all of his works with a grand narrative, a sort of American outsider version of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Kerouac’s work that was published at the time of his death can be read as one large Proustian tale, which Kerouac had always suggested he was trying to create. To do this one should ignore the publication dates of the work, and instead focus on the dates when the work is set. Potential readers of Kerouac approaching the texts in this manner begin with Visions of Gerard, move on to his youth with Dr. Sax, and to his teen years with Maggie Cassady. His time at Columbia and

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early meetings Ginsberg are related in the Vanity of Duluoz, and then on to the most vital meeting, that of Cassady in On the Road, then in quick order Visions of Cody, Lonesome Traveler, and The Subterraneans. Then moving on to his time in Mexico City with Tristessa, then The Dharma Bums, and Desolation Angels. His later years and slow deterioration are detailed in Big Sur, and finally in Satori in Paris. Visions of Gerard is a thinly veiled discussion of the death of Kerouac’s brother, who, within the confines of the Kerouac family, achieved a saintlike reputation due in part to his having visions during his short, sickly, but highly emotionally charged life. According to Gerald Nicosia, Gerard, nine years old at the time of his death, was a kindhearted child, drawn to caring for stray and hurt animals. Like a young Christ, he would lecture the other children on the importance of caring for each other. As Gerard grew sicker and sicker from rheumatic fever, Jack, four years old at the time, began to have visions, which he felt were as a result of Gerard’s saint-like behavior. Gerard’s death was a serious blow to the family. Kerouac internalized the pain his family felt as guilt—believing that it should have been him who died, rather than Gerard. Jack always felt guilty about the death of his brother and he often described his adult male relationships in the context of brotherhood. Visions of Gerard allowed Kerouac to reflect on his youth and the sights, smells and feelings of Old Lowell, as lost to Kerouac as surely as his brother was. Kerouac finished drafting his novel Tristessa in Mexico City in 1956. In it, Kerouac disguises himself as “Jack Duluoz.” Tristessa bears strong resemblance to The Subterraneans, another doomed love affair story. In this one however, the unlikely love interest is a morphine-addicted prostitute who lives in filth in Mexico City. Likewise the book ends similarly to The Subterraneans with the affair ending and the author/protagonist sitting down to record and publish the events. In 1957, living in Orlando, Florida, Kerouac wrote The Dharma Bums. By the time of the writing of Dharma Bums, Kerouac was in the throes of heavy drinking. The book describes Kerouac’s time spent as a fire lookout in the Sierra Nevada mountains; it is also a lionization of poet and Buddhist Gary Snyder as a true, self-reliant American revolutionary, in the same ways as Emerson and Thoreau. The book also serves to allow Kerouac to predict what he saw as America’s future “rucksack revolution,” which many commentators have seen realized in the hippie movement. By the time Kerouac finished the book, he continued to spiral deeply into alcoholism. A vicious cycle emerged. Kerouac needed money and so would agree to public appearances at places like the Village Vanguard nightclub.


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At these shows he was expected to perform, in other words, to be the Beat writer portrayed in his books. The stress of these performances encouraged him to drink more to get through the public adoration. The more he drank, the more his “legend” increased and the more the legend increased, the more he had to drink in order to fulfill his fan’s expectations of seeing a wildman. Kerouac felt the popular representation of Beatniks misrepresented what he meant by the term “beat,” which he linked to the word “beatific,” a word meaning angelic or saint-like. Always a shy man, he found that he could not explain himself to reporters. He clashed with fans, who came looking for Salvatore Paradise and Dean Moriarty, expecting to stay and party all night and instead they found a bloated florid drunk. As an escape, Kerouac turned increasingly to bottles of Johnny Walker Red, confessing to his friend and fellow Beat writer, John Clellon Holmes, “I can’t stand to meet anybody anymore. They talk to me like I wasn’t me.”9 All of this left little time for any writing, and certainly no time for any productive writing. In 1960, Kerouac traveled to California. While staying at Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s cabin, Kerouac suffered from alcohol withdrawal and a nervous breakdown complete with violent behavior and terrifying visions. He would capture this breakdown, along with his re-embracing of Catholicism in the book Big Sur. In 1961, Kerouac received a blow that he would find difficult from which to recover. Events seemed to be snowballing all around him. In 1961 he had tried, and violently disliked, LSD with Ginsberg and Timothy Leary in Ginsberg’s apartment. He lapsed into depression afterwards. At almost the same time, he was informed that his ex-wife Joan Haverty, was suing him for child support for her daughter Jan, who Kerouac denied was his. Kerouac published the Books of Dreams, a transcription of Kerouac’s actual dreams recorded as soon as he woke up; following publication, the book was largely ignored. He then wrote book 2 of Desolation Angels, and then moving to Florida, he wrote Big Sur. Big Sur ranks among Kerouac’s most disturbing works. The text describes a struggle between good and evil, most of it an internal struggle within the Kerouac character, “Jack Duluoz.” For one of the first times in his novels, Kerouac honestly describes what it’s like to an alcoholic: the binge drinking, the degradation and shame of the next morning, and what it’s like to suffer through the delirium tremens. The book is also noteworthy because of its revelation of the swing in Kerouac’s religious philosophy. From his earlier adoption of Buddhism, there’s a stronger combination of Buddhism and his childhood Catholicism, presaging what would eventually be a shift at the end of his life to a far rightwing Catholicism.

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This book too is obsessed with loss, death, and alcohol. It’s easy to see this book as a bookend to his career, which began with On the Road, a book filled with a sense of wonder and life. In his first, trademark book, alcohol was necessary fuel and the key to passion and “kicks,” but in Big Sur, Kerouac describes what happens after a lifetime of alcoholism. From the ruined friendships, to the destroyed physical condition, to the hallucinations, the book is unrelenting and brutal to read. It’s also important to note how far the chasm between Kerouac and the other Beat writers had grown by the time. In 1961, while Kerouac was undergoing the horrors recorded in Big Sur, Ginsberg had become an international star and Burroughs’s reputation had grown so far that he was finally able to publish his earlier work. Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Cassady had all met Leary and were well on their way from making the transition from Beat Generation icons (the Beat Generation at this point, a defanged caricature of itself in the media) to hippie objects of veneration (the hippies new and in the eye of the public dangerous, and thus more exciting to the youth of America). Kerouac had been left behind. In 1965 Kerouac visited Paris, France and uses those experiences to write Satori in Paris. Satori in Paris reveals one of Kerouac’s quests late in his life, genealogy, or more specifically his quest to prove that the Kerouac family name was one of royalty. He became convinced, or allowed himself to be convinced by hucksters at various points, that he was descended from Native American royalty, or that his ancestors were royal-blooded Bretons. Kerouac noted in the introduction to Lonesome Traveler that after Breton Baron Alexandre Louis Lebris de Kerouac took advantage of a Canadian land grant, he soon took to marrying the local Indians. To find his roots, Kerouac headed to Paris to do genealogy research at the National Library. Ironically, drunk and disheveled, at one point he was mistaken for a homeless alcoholic while at another low point, he drunkenly confronted a priest to explain what the priest didn’t understand about religion. Finally, his behavior and appearance convinced the librarian that he was too unstable to be allowed to handle any of the books. At the end of the book, he is touched by the friendly gestures of a stranger he meets and claims that he finds enlightenment in the understanding of the interconnectedness of all people and all beings. Yet many readers had difficulties finding themselves in Kerouac’s attempt at a universal narrative, and the book was poorly received. Back in the United States, he writes Pic, a disappointing mish-mash of ideas and fragments of old writing sewn together in an alcoholic haze into a Frankenstein monster of a book. Pictorial Review Jackson, the title character,


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is a young African American who seems like a stand-in for Kerouac the man. For someone who spent a lifetime obsessing about the role of African Americans in American society, the stilted minstrel show dialogue of the book reinforces what many critics have said about Kerouac—that he is only interested in African Americans as a symbol of the outsider in American society, not as actual people. This was not the first time the complaint had arisen. Regarding On the Road, James Baldwin famously said, “I would hate to be in Kerouac’s shoes if he should ever be mad enough to read this from the stage of Harlem’s Apollo Theatre.”10 In 1967, living in Lowell, Massachusetts, Kerouac writes Vanity of Duluoz. This loosely thrown together text has been seen by many critics and readers as Kerouac’s attempt to explain his early days, and the man those days created, to his third and final wife Stella. While Kerouac scholar Gerald Nicosia suggests that he sees a connection with the book and Tristam Shandy, to most critics it is an uneven rehashing of well-covered territory. The persona Kerouac creates is one of the holy goof—a man who is well-educated in the ways of the word and spirituality, but can laugh at himself and his own shortcomings. Once he finished the book, Kerouac went on an epic bender complete with drunken long distance phone calls to far flung friends. He vacillated between love and hate with his friends, especially Ginsberg, alternately calling Ginsberg a good man and an evil Jew. In November of 1967, his daughter, Jan (who he had long argued was not his child), showed up at his door—following in her father’s footsteps, she was 15, pregnant, a drug user and heavy drinker, and was headed to Mexico. During their brief visit (which agitated Kerouac’s mother) Kerouac encouraged her to become a writer, to use the Kerouac name, and that going to Mexico would be a good idea for her. In February of 1968, Kerouac got the news that his friend Neal Cassady had died of a drug overdose in Mexico. The news crushed Kerouac and at first he refused to believe that it was true. In the summer of 1968, a reporter from the Boston Globe, according to Nicosia, found Kerouac at the end of his rope, drinking fourteen boilermakers an hour all day long. In August of 1968, Kerouac made his last, saddest, and perhaps most notorious public appearance. William F. Buckley had invited Kerouac to appear on his TV show, The Firing Line. With Kerouac’s politics well to the right of the political spectrum and thus in agreement with Buckley’s, he agreed, albeit with some reluctance. Kerouac was drunk by the time he reached New York City, the day before the interview. He stormed into his agent’s, Sterling Lord’s, office to berate him for not promoting his books as he should have. The next day, gulping Scotch as fast as he could find it, he met with William

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S. Burroughs who had stopped on the East Coast to see Kerouac after reporting on the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention for Esquire. Ginsberg showed up as well to accompany Kerouac to the show. After making it to the studio, he stopped to insult Truman Capote (who had famously referred to Kerouac as a “typist” rather than a writer) and Ed Sanders, lead singer of The Fugs and fellow Firing Line panel member. Kerouac is noticeably drunk during the show, sipping from what appears to be a mug of whiskey and making gestures of thumbs down to reflect his opinions of Ed Sander’s ideas. Perhaps saddest of all, he loudly attempted to disassociate himself from the other Beat writers saying that he didn’t want his name associated with Ginsberg’s. On October 19, 1969, Kerouac’s wife found him doubled over, vomiting blood in the bathroom of the St. Petersburg, Florida home that they shared with his mother. Rushed to the hospital, his body refused the many transfusions he was given and he died on October 21, 1969 from an abdominal hemorrhage. He was 47. It was a night in October, in the fall, a time Sal Paradise, his alter ego in On the Road, said always made him feel like moving somewhere new. In death, controversy still haunts the Kerouac name. His daughter, Jan Kerouac, became a respected novelist after years as a junkie and prostitute before dying unexpectedly. Little Paul, his sister Carolyn’s son, who he loved so dearly has been homeless now off and on for more than five years. Jan and Paul Jr. both became embroiled in a controversy over Kerouac’s estate. When Jack died, his estate went to his mother. When she died, a will surfaced leaving everything to Stella Sampas. This seemed unbelievable to many. There is a letter in existence, for example, from Kerouac to Little Paul in which he says that when his mother dies he wants everything to go to Paul, a blood relative, and states specifically that he does not Stella or her family to get any of it. Whether or not Kerouac was in sound mind when writing the letter, just 24 hours before his death, is also still being debated. Even the Sampas family felt this was odd because Gabrielle had never shown anything but animosity towards Stella, frequently calling her, even when the woman was nursing her, “Jack’s Trash.” When the witness to the will admitted that he never actually saw Gabrielle Kerouac sign it, Jan Kerouac leapt in with a law suit, which, at the time of writing, has not yet been resolved. Certainly, many Kerouac scholars and friends are not happy at the way the archives have been shut off and the fact that the letter collections and forthcoming journal collections must be okayed by the Sampras family before publication.


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Today Kerouac’s literary reputation continues to grow, although not without controversy from all sides of the political spectrum. His objectification of women and minorities, the perceived glorification of a subversive lifestyle, and his effusive writing style still raise the hackles of some readers and critics. However, his work has achieved perhaps the ultimate compliment in Western popular culture—name recognition. Today, Kerouac fans can even go to his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts to take in the Jack Kerouac Commemorative—a series of eight granite blocks along Eastern Canal Park with passages from his books engraved upon them. The smokestack factories, which once provided landmarks for his jaunts around town, now sit idle, but visitors can go and see the rucksack, notebooks, and typewriters he took on his trips to the American West when living the events immortalized in Dharma Bums. To those who visit his hometown and to his scores of international fans, Kerouac’s name and the title On the Road have become shorthand for freedom, and, abroad, shorthand for America itself. SYNOPSIS On the Road is a simple story of two young men searching for good times and inner calm. In 1946, Sal Paradise hooks up with Dean Moriarty, a young man from the West, who reignites the spark of life in a despondent Paradise. The plot of the book begins with the narrator, Sal Paradise, meeting the manic Dean Moriarty at a time and place in the narrator’s life when he feels that everything is falling apart. Dean’s presence ignites a wanderlust in the narrator and sets him off in a series of cyclic adventures. Dean Moriarty is a wild man; he steals cars and spends as much time as possible naked. But to Dean, people are to be used; his friends are seen only through the lens of what Dean can get out of them. When he’s done with them, he abandons them. Yet, people continue to be drawn to him. Paradise and Morarity visit Chicago where Kerouac helps to install one of the defining motifs of On the Road—Bop Jazz. By the end of the book, Paradise realizes that he is searching for the concept of “IT,” which, according to Morarity, can is defined as the understanding of wholeness, of spirituality, of being happy. The book itself is divided into five separate books, or segments. The first four segments detail Sal’s actual road adventures—the time he spends traveling, hitchhiking, and riding on Greyhound buses, all the while with the shadow of Dean’s influence laying over him, his thoughts and his actions— while the last section draws the cycle to a close.

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In part 1, after meeting Dean, Sal sets out to see the frontier, which he, at this point, still identifies with the American Dream. In Denver (which is also Dean’s hometown), he meets up with a group of people spanning the artistic spectrum, including Carlo Marx, who had stood as a bridge between Dean and Sal before they had actually met in the flesh. From Denver, Sal heads off to San Francisco where, meeting up with his old friend, Remi Boncourer, he signs on as a security officer but finds himself ill-equipped emotionally for the job. He heads back East on a Greyhound, where he meets a Mexican girl, Terry, with whom he spends a few weeks with, before returning back to the East. He decides, the frontier, wildness, and freedom that he sought in the West is still available and open to him in the East; that it exists more in his mind than in a locale. Part 2 begins with Sal and his aunt (with whom he lives) visiting relatives in Virginia. Suddenly, Dean appears in a roaring car with his friend Ed Dunkel and Dean’s teenaged exwife Marylou, and sweeps Sal off on another wild adventure. In Sal’s eyes, Dean has matured from the manic, jittery kid who first asked Sal to teach him to write, to something much more in the line of a Holy Seeker, a pilgrim on a quest. The group drives from Virginia to Paterson, New Jersey, back to Virginia, and then back to New York City to see Carlo Marx, and then down to New Orleans to see friends of Sal, Old Bull Lee and his wife. From there the group runs on to California. In California, Dean does an about-face and deserts Sal and Marylou while he runs off to a new girlfriend, Camille. Sal is crushed and eventually heads back to New York, never caring if he sees Dean again. Sal’s still depressed at the beginning of part 3. He goes back on his previous decision to never seek out Dean again, and decides to track him down, in hopes of alleviating his slump. Together, they make a pact to do everything that they had ever dreamed of, but were previously unable to—go to Italy, find Neal’s’ father—with all the excitement of two boys planning a camping trip. Times have changed, however, and now almost everyone who had previously been so drawn to Dean now finds him annoying at best, dangerous at worst. As Dean’s friends, one by one, begin to abandon him, only Sal is willing to stand by him. However, by the end of the section, Dean and Sal are fighting. Dean makes an off- the-cuff joke which enrages Sal. In Denver, Sal begins to wonder if the others are right about Dean, as he watches Dean’s family abandon him. By the time they make it to New York City, the end of their trip, Dean once again abandons Sal for a woman, this time a model named Inez. Part 4 describes Sal’s last attempt at finding the perfect moment on the road. This time he and Dean head south of the border to Mexico City


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bringing with them a new friend, Stan Shepherd. In Mexico, Sal believes he’ll find free and innocent humanity, free of societal rules and constraints. In reality, what they find is cheap booze, drugs, and teenage prostitutes. When after streaming through the jungle, they finally make it Mexico City, Dean again abandons Sal, this time racked with dysentery, to speed back to New York, having received his Mexican divorce from Camille. In the last section, Sal’s life has reached fruition. He has found the girl for whom he has looked so long and has settled down. This time, when Dean shows up to take him back in search of adventure, he refuses. The last image he has of Dean is from the rear seat of a Cadillac, in which he is riding on the way to the opera. At the same time though, Sal realizes that he will always think of Dean when he sees the sun going down in the West. THEME The theme of On the Road begins with a phrase that many Kerouac critics suggest sets up a pattern of “collapse and rebirth”; “I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.”11 The narrative, which begins with an image of collapse, spirals out to rebirth and then collapse and then continues to follow these long circular patterns throughout. The book is heavy with symbolism. Change in the life of characters is marked by the change of seasons. “New York City, the South and New Orleans in spring; Iowa, Nebraska, Denver, Nevada, St. Louis and Indiana in the fall; and Butte, North Dakota, Portland and Idaho in winter.” In addition, there is also a complex pattern of color imagery and highly personal symbolism. Finally, there is the most often commented element of religious symbolism within the text—the narrator’s progression towards “IT,” an archetypal quest image. CHARACTER The character of Sal, the narrator, describes himself as a slightly naive college boy, a serial monogamist, who while eschewing one-night stands, runs from one to another deeply felt, but short-lived relationships. Curiously, Sal admits and knows that he can’t trust Dean, that Dean will take advantage of him and leave him, yet he still feels as if he must follow along behind him. Sal is set up as the passive observer (an important change from one of the earlier manuscripts wherein the two main characters seem to be fighting for dominance, and the question of just whose story is being told is in doubt.).

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At the end however, it seems as though Sal is the one who has used Dean. Once Sal has gathered material for the book he is writing and finds his newest girl, Sal leaves Dean alone in the rain. The initial description of the character of Dean reveals the charisma that makes him irresistible to both men and women right away. He is a flatterer and craves the acceptance of the people around him, and yet, his life has been interesting enough that the people around him want to know more about him. For Sal, Dean’s exotic nature and the fact that he is in many ways a social outcast, which while at first is off-putting, soon becomes a major point of attraction for Sal. Dean’s pace of life is so intense though and requires so much sacrifice of personal relationships that very few people are willing or able to stay with him for very long. In fact, the life that he lives is so isolating that by the middle of the book, he has been deserted by everyone, leaving only Sal to defend his way of life as a “holy goof ”. It is only after Dean mocks Sal’s aging that Sal too is done with him. Although they make up, there has been a switch in the relationship and a wedge has been driven between Dean and Sal. When Dean walks away at the end of the book, it is as if the character is speaking for the entire Beat Generation—a life lived so brightly is not easily lived or ended. CRITICAL RECEPTION One of the advance copies of On the Road made its way into the hands of fill-in New York Times Book Review writer Gilbert Millstein, who reviewed it for the September 5, 1957 issue. It was a lucky break—Millstein was young and had already recognized what he felt was the importance of the Beat writers. The usual reviewer, Orville Prescott, was a hide-bound traditionalist, and the book would have suffered a much more brutal fate had it fallen into his hands. Instead, when Kerouac opened the newspaper, he found Millstein’s review praising the publication of his work as a “historic occasion . . . On the Road is a major novel.” Millstein added that “On the Road is the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago.”12 Ironically, Rexroth, who would later do his best to undermine Kerouac’s work, also had wild praise for On the Road, writing, “It is by a new author, the best prose representative of the San Francisco Renaissance which has created so much hullabaloo lately. On the Road has the kind of drive that blasts through to a large public. Finally, and this is what makes the novel really important, what gives it that drive is a genuine, new, engaging and exciting prose style. The subject may be catchy, the publication may be


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timely, but what keeps the book going is the power and beauty of the writing.”13 Other publications weren’t so kind. Just three days after Millstein’s review appeared in the New York Times, David Dempsey wrote in that the New York Times Book Review that, “one reads [On the Road] in the same mood that he might visit a sideshow—the freaks are fascinating although they are hardly part of our lives.”14 As time passed, the reviews only got more brutal. The Herald Tribune called it, “infantile perversely negative”; the Hudson Review said that reading it was like talking to “a slob running a temperature”; while the Encounter simply identified it as a “series of Neanderthal grunts.” Regardless of the smaller publications venom, when the New York Times talked, people listened, and in the following months, a flood of articles, explaining, expounding on, or simply taking about the Beat Generation appeared in Life, Saturday Review and many other publications. On the Road, a book Kerouac had written six years before, a book that even he admitted to his friends should be classified in the juvenilia category of his work. He felt his had developed and matured greatly in the previous six years, and that On the Road presented him as a completely different individual than the one he was when On the Road was on the best seller list for five weeks, and tens of thousands of people read it and allowed it to change their lives. KEROUAC’S “ELEMENTS OF SPONTANEOUS PROSE” In 1953, after Kerouac’s disastrous affair with Alene Lee, which would end up mythologized in his novel, The Subterraneans, Kerouac sought solace among his friends. Allen Ginsberg was hosting a party at his apartment to welcome William S. Burroughs back to the states after his long self-imposed exile in North Africa. Kerouac brought the manuscript of The Subterraneans with him and Burroughs, always fascinated with experimental prose techniques, began to pepper Kerouac with questions about his technique. After Ginsberg jumped in, the two writers’ amazement at Kerouac’s claim that he had written The Subterraneans in only three days made him realize that he had captured something in his writing technique, something beyond his own personal technique, something that others were interested in, and something, he felt, that needed to be codified. He entitled the document explaining this style, “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.” Much of what he captured in the polemic, he said, was inspired by letters, like the Joan Anderson letter that Neal Cassady was famous for writing. Within this short document, split into nine

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sections including “SET-UP, PROCEDURE, STRUCTURE OF WORK, and MENTAL STATE,”15 Kerouac lays out how he feels writing should be performed. He, however, rarely followed his own rules. The chief effect of this document, which includes lines like, “No pause to think of proper word but the infantile pileup of scatological buildup words till satisfactions gained,” was to increase the Kerouac mystique. Dense and intensely personal, this short document reinforces, to those already biased against the movement, the negative view of Beats as fools spouting meaningless words and, to those enamored of the Beats, its impenetrable prose is seen as a further mark of Kerouac’s genius. Clearly, though, Kerouac’s technique certainly did work for him in the time between The Town and the City and the sloppy writing he created at the end of his career, during his slide into terminal alcoholism. Works like Visions of Cody push this technique of spontaneous prose to its very limits, but Visions of Cody also seems almost impossible to read and understand, at least in a conventional method. However, by teasing some of the meaning out of the text and comparing it with Kerouac’s published work, a savvy reader is able to begin to make sense out of what Kerouac was trying to say. For Kerouac, the first step, which he calls the “SET-UP,” is buried in memory. Invention does not occur out of midair, but instead in real experiences that serve as sketches do for the visual artist: outlines to be filled in with specifics. Even wild fantasies like Dr. Sax are set within familiar contexts (Kerouac’s hometown of Lowell disguised as Pawtucketville—a name which is itself a reference to Kerouac’s childhood memories—his father Leo, worked as manager of Lowell’s Pawtucketville Social Club) and told from the viewpoint of Kerouac’s own childhood memories. Unlike the visual artist though, speed is essential to Kerouac’s theory. In the step called “PROCEDURE,” Kerouac makes the first reference to jazz music, which has led critics to reinforce their notions that Kerouac attempted to capture the frenetic rhythms of Be-Bop in his writing. Yet, looking at his life and interests and those who surrounded him, we can tease out other inferences as well. Athletes too live in the moment. There is practice and practice and then, in competition, only one moment to perform. Kerouac, with his youth revolving around athletics. had to be aware of this, and the reference must be brought out and acknowledged. There is also the nascent sense of Kerouac’s own version of Buddhism in his insistence on living in the moment. For Kerouac, to achieve enlightenment was to give up the anchors of worry and doubt that held him, and to truly be able to live in the moment.


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As far as the actual style of writing goes, Kerouac reinforces his public persona of “first word, best word” (although archival evidence suggests that Kerouac actually spent a good deal of time working and reworking material) all in the attempt to capture and relate his work and his theory of writing closer to the flow of Bop jazz. To reinforce the idea of living in the moment, in “TIMING,” Kerouac suggests that there can be “no revisions.” To write without revising, Kerouac postulates, will allow the writer to capture the true themes of life. However, style itself, he argues, is beyond experimentation. Ironically—for a man who wrote Dr. Sax, a long fantasy of a memory—Kerouac says that “bizarre structures (science fiction, etc.) arise from language being dead.” In an apparent contradiction, Kerouac claims that experimentation in writing comes from the stagnation of language and that his writing is an attempt to reinvigorate language. Yet, in his most experimental works, he also uses the most fantastic of structures. KEROUAC’S ROMAN À CLEF TECHNIQUES Literally, a roman à clef (book with a key) is a text that describes real-life events using the structure of fiction. The names are changed, even the location, but the plot is based in actual events, the truth of which becomes clear once one has the “key”—the explanation of the relationship between the plot and characters in the text and the participants and their actions in real life. The roman à clef, even more so than the picaresque style (a prose genre capturing the misadventures of a protagonist who lives outside the rules of everyday society) was a touchstone style for the Beats. Later New Journalists like Tom Wolfe would push the daringness of the roman à clef by not only using real names and events, but occasionally by writing profiles of people who had never been met. Kerouac’s use of this technique forces the reader to take into condition the nature of truth and perception. Importantly for Kerouac, the roman à clef technique also enables the author the opportunity to take license with the events. Since the descriptions are ostensibly fiction, the author is permitted to tell the story explicitly from his point of view, allowing him to explain what he thinks did (or should have) happened, rather than an objective recitation of the facts. The use of this technique was upsetting to Kerouac’s personal relationships as well. While Neal Cassady was, initially, pleased to be immortalized in On the Road, even using his pseudo-fame to cadge free drinks, not all those depicted in Kerouac’s books were so pleased. Ann Charters says that not only was Alene Lee, the model for The Subterraneans’ Mardou Fox, angry because

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of the way Kerouac described her naked body and her relationship with him, but also because she felt that Kerouac had plagiarized some of her own work for the book. In an interview, Charters said, “One of the things she’s angry about is that he takes some writing she’s done about her own life and puts it into his book without making it clear that she actually wrote this section.”16 Regardless, she signed the papers releasing the publishers from any claim of libel, but subsequently refused to speak to Kerouac. Likewise, Ginsberg’s anger at his character as Stofsky in Holmes’ Go helped to greatly delay a paperback edition of the book. Kerouac, however, was not coy about the fact that his work was based upon lived experiences. Indeed, when he spoke about the “Duluoz Legend” that he envisioned, he not only made the point that future biographers would be able to read these books to learn more about his life, but he also made clear that he was taking contextual control. The legend is just that, a myth—Kerouac was not content to dryly explain the facts of life, instead the books that make up the legend, relay his life they way he thought it should be. Knowing this fact may be the key to unlocking a deeper understanding of Kerouac’s reliance upon the roman à clef technique and his melding of autobiography into literary works. SUGGESTED DISCUSSIONS OR PAPER IDEAS 1. How does knowing that a book is a roman à clef affect your reading and understanding of the text? Does the way you read the text differ when you know they “key” the identity and actions of the characters portrayed? Why or why not? 2. How does the concept of race and gender function in On the Road? Is Sal a bigot? A misogynist? 3. After examining On the Road and “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” how do the ideas contained within these texts reinforce each other?

NOTES 1. Phillips, Rodney. The Hand of the Poet. New York: Rizzoli, 1997: 229. 2. Brooks, John. “Of Growth and Decay.” New York Times Book Review. March 5, 1950: 19. 3. Kerouac, Jack. The Town and the City. New York: Harvest, 1970: 402. 4. Dempsey, David. “Beatnik Bogeyman on the Prowl.” New York Times Book Review. May 3, 1959. 5. Rexroth, Kenneth. “On the Road.” San Francisco Chronicle. September 1, 1957.


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6. Charters, Ann, ed. Jack Kerouac: Selected: Letters 1940–1956. New York: Viking, 1999: 409. 7. Ibid., 207. 8. Rexroth, Kenneth. “On the Road.” 9. Nicosia, Gerald. Memory Babe. New York: Penguin, 1986: 568. 10. Quoted in Maylock. “Wiggers with Attitude.” Guardian. October 31, 1997, natl. ed.: 2. 11. Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Penguin, 1976. 12. Millstein, Gilbert. “Books of the Times.” New York Times Book Review. September 5, 1957. 13. Rexroth, Kenneth. “Discordant and Cool.” New York Times Book Review. November 29, 1959. 14. Dempsey, David. “In Pursuit of ‘Kicks.’” New York Times Book Review. September 8, 1957: 4. 15. Kerouac, Jack. “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.” The Portable Beat Reader. Ed. Ann Charters. New York: Penguin. 1992: 57. 16. “A Life in Letters: Ann Charters on Jack Kerouac.” Cover to Cover KPFA, Berkeley. December 14, 1999.

SUGGESTED READINGS Cassady, Carolyn, and David Sandison. Jack Kerouac: An Illustrated Biography. Chicago: Chicago Review, 1999. Cassady, Carolyn. Off the Road. New York: William Morrow, 1990. Charters, Ann. Kerouac. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1973. Charters, Ann, and Tim Hunt. Kerouac’s Crooked Road: Development of a Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. French, Warren. Jack Kerouac. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Holman, C., and William Harman, eds. A Handbook to Literature. New York: Prentice Hall, 1996. Holton, Robert. On the Road: Kerouac’s Ragged American Journey (Twayne’s Masterwork Studies, No 172). Boston: Twayne, 1999. Johnson, Joyce. Minor Characters. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983. McDarrah, Fred. Kerouac and Friends: A Beat Generation Album. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1985. Nicosia, Gerald. Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Phillips, Rodney. The Hand of the Poet. New York: Rizzoli, 1997. Weinreich, Regina. The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac: A Study of the Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.

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Jack Kerouac The Dharma Bums SYNOPSIS The Dharma Bums is a 1958 novel by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. The semifictional accounts in the novel are based upon events that occurred years after On the Road. The main characters are the narrator Ray Smith, based on Kerouac, and Japhy Ryder, based on the poet, essayist, and Buddhist Gary Snyder. The book largely concerns duality in Kerouac’s life and ideals, examining the relationship between his country life of mountaineering, hiking and hitchhiking through the West, and his city life of jazz clubs, poetry readings, and drunken parties. One of the most important episodes in the book is of Smith, Ryder and Henry Morley (based on Kerouac’s real-life friend John Montgomery) climbing Matterhorn Peak in California. The real-life episode was Kerouac’s first introduction to this type of mountaineering and would serve as inspiration for him to spend the following summer as a fire lookout for the National Park Service on Desolation Peak in the North Cascade National Park in Washington State. Highlighting the duality of the novel, one of the other most important episodes in the novel is an account of the legendary 1955 Six Gallery Reading, where Allen Ginsberg gave a debut presentation of his poem “Howl,” and other authors associated with the Beat Generation, such as Snyder, Michael McClure, and Philip Whalen, performed, while Kenneth Rexroth, a representative from an older generation of artists, performed as the master of ceremonies.

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Ray Smith’s story is driven by Japhy, the Gary Snyder character. In reality, Kerouac was greatly influenced by Snyder’s penchant for the simple life and Zen Buddhism. When not writing, Kerouac spent his time at his rural cottage owned by the McCorkle family meditating under eucalyptus trees, captivated by the sound of the wind in their branches. His shack was bare and empty, and Snyder would stop by and help lead Kerouac through his Zen meditation exercises. In addition, he helped Kerouac to secure a position as a fire lookout, deep on the peak of Desolation Mountain and in complete solitude. Snyder moved to Japan on May 15, 1956. Before he left though, Snyder warned Kerouac about the amount of wine he had been drinking. Kerouac’s worsening alcoholism had led to yet another falling out with Rexroth when he made a drunken pass at Rexroth’s young daughter and was thrown out of a party being held at the Rexroth’s. Rexroth began to explicitly exclude Kerouac from his promotions of younger writers, saying when asked, “He’s too drronk [sic] all the time.”1 Finally on June 18, 1956, Kerouac said goodbye to the McCorkle’s and set off hitching from San Francisco to Washington State. Here, he would find the solitude for which he had claimed so many times that he wished. Desolation Mountain is one hundred miles from Seattle, and thirty-five miles from the nearest town. There was a boat ride from the ranger station, then a six-mile horseback ride to the mountain top. Kerouac believed that here, so isolated, he would be able to find God and discover what was “the meaning of all this existence and suffering and going to and fro.” But telling those around you that you desire true solitude and actually experiencing it are two different things. He arrived on July 5 and quickly ran through his reading material. He tried to pray but found himself plagued by nightmares, and began to have anxiety attacks. Obsessively, he sat up late into the nights wondering how we could have left his mother. He began, against his Buddhist belief, to kill the mice that inhabited the cabin. In all fairness, a fire lookout cabin is not a simple hike in the woods with friends, Suspended in the sky, it feels like you are naked in the clouds when thunderstorms roll in, which is also one of the busiest times for fire lookouts as they watch for lightning strikes which could start fires. The days passed slowly with nothing to fill them except his simple chores of eating, cleaning, and gathering wood. Worse, although he had planned on doing much writing while separated from the world, he found himself almost unable to do any. He spent two months alone just writing a letter to his mother. He was there for sixty-three days and had almost nothing, in the form of writing, to show for it. After two months, Kerouac left and never returned again.


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Kerouac had bitten off more than he could chew. The woods can be terrifying for city dwellers. Far from the quiet sylvan paradise as often shown in the popular media, the woods are a noisy place where even a foraging chipmunk’s movements can sound like a rampaging grizzly. Add this to the fact that Kerouac, a drug user and alcoholic, had not brought any of these sorts of supplies with him, and therefore he also had to deal with symptoms of withdrawal. It was, by all accounts, a poorly thought-out refuge. For decades, Kerouac had looked to others, to jazz, to alcohol and drugs to drown the noises that were inside him, to lose the sense of himself. On Desolation Mountain, he was confronted with himself and his own thoughts and selfdoubt, without anyone or anything there to distract him from self-examination. It was not a pleasant time. The first thing he did after returning to civilization was to head immediately to the noise, the hustle, and the booze of Seattle, Washington. Kerouac drank his fill of port in Seattle and hopped on a bus to San Francisco. There, as part of a “San Francisco Poetry Renaissance” photo shoot for Mademoiselle magazine, he, Cassady, Corso, Ginsberg, and Ginsberg’s lover Orlovsky, had their pictures taken. A little later, the New York Times Book Review ran a article called “West Coast Rhythms” highlighting the same group. Kerouac was invited to dinners with more established writers, where he felt uncomfortable and after a few weeks of being in San Francisco, decided to hitchhike to Mexico City again. In 1957, Malcolm Cowley wrote Kerouac, who was living in Florida at the time, asking for a childhood book of Lowell, free of the stylistic conceit of Dr. Sax. But Kerouac’s once nearly photographic memory had begun to be destroyed by the decades of alcohol abuse. He simply couldn’t remember enough of such a long time ago to put a book together. Instead, he fueled himself on amphetamines once more and sat down at his typewriter to complete the story of his meeting Gary Snyder and his time in the fire tower. He called it The Dharma Bums and finished it by December 9. Kerouac’s life did not get any easier once the book was finished though. He fought with Viking Press, the publisher of The Dharma Bums, who had inserted commas into his long sentences to, in their idea, make the text more manageable. Kerouac felt it was butchery and when he insisted that the original sentence structure be restored, Viking did it, and then charged him $500 that he didn’t have for the printer’s fees. Kerouac was incensed and that charge (which he refused to pay) as well as their refusal to publish Visions of Gerard led to his separation with the publisher. The plot of The Dharma Bums takes place six years after the events relayed in On the Road. The main characters, based on Kerouac, Cassady and

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Ginsberg, reappear (under different names) in the text and are joined by the new hero, Japhy Ryder (based on the Californian poet, Gary Snyder). The character key for Dharma Bums is: Ray Smith—Jack Kerouac Japhy Ryder—Gary Snyder Cody Pomeray—Neal Cassady Evelyn—Carolyn Cassady Alvah Goldbook—Allen Ginsberg George—Peter Orlovsky Reinhold Cacoethes—Kenneth Rexroth Warren Coughlin—Philip Whalen Nin—Caroline Kerouac Also telling as to how the two books are related is the fact that the Kerouac character, the narrator of Dharma Bums, is named Ray Smith, the same name that Kerouac had originally used in an early draft of On the Road in place of “Sal Paradise.” Kerouac tells the story through 34 chapters, although the text does lend itself to being split into three parts. In the first section, Ray Smith meets Japhy Rider and their friendship develops in episodes detailed in San Francisco, Berkeley, and the High Sierras. The first section begins with a description of one of the most famous poetry readings of the twentieth century—the Six Gallery Reading at which Allen Ginsberg first read “Howl” and then all the major members of what would come to be known as the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance performed. Interestingly, Kerouac downplays the reading of “Howl” (which he calls “Wail”) and focuses on the reading of quiet, self-assured woodsman-poet Gary Snyder who he calls Japhy Ryder. In fact, the entire reading is downplayed in favor of a long descriptive rendering of Kerouac’s climbing of the California Matterhorn. Smith then takes off across the country hitchhiking to spend the winter in North Carolina with his mother and sister and her family. Before long though, Smith’s new Buddhist ways start to conflict with the mother’s vision of what he should be doing. In response, Smith gets back on the road again, back to the West Coast where he meets up again with Ryder and shares a cabin with him before Ryder sets off on a ship for a stay at Zen monastery. Japhy impresses Ray with his simple lifestyle and the easy nonchalant way in which he attracts women, even though he is committed to chastity outside of his relationship with his girlfriend. On their second trip to the mountains (joined this time by new


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friend Henry Moore), the two climb joyously shouting haikus and Zen koans (riddles without answers designed to shock the mind into emptiness). In the second third of the novel, Kerouac introduces the concept that most readers remember from the book—the “rucksack revolution”— Kerouac’s idea that by embracing Japhy’s ideal of living life simply, millions of American youth will feel free to hit the roads with their backpacks and abandon the consumer culture that was just starting to take over America at the time of the writing. Ray comes back to California and finds himself unable or unwilling to adapt to civilization. Ray heads to North Carolina to spend Christmas with his mother and sister’s family, and stays there until spring, meditating in the woods and beginning to see visions of himself as Buddha. This experience refuels Ray’s desire to see Japhy again and he begins to make plans to head to California. The beginning of the third section finds Ray in what he terms as heaven— he’s back in California and has found free shelter, staying with a Buddhist family in wooded, beautiful Marin County. He soon tires though of the endless drunken parties and wants to head back to the woods. Japhy feels sick of this culture too, and heads to Japan to study in a Buddhist monastery there which has agreed to accept him. Smith takes Ryder’s advice and heads off to the Washington State woods to find himself by isolating himself completely, by working as a fire ranger in a mountaintop tower. The last advice Japhy gives him, Ray accepts—he applies for and is chosen for a job as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak, a mountaintop in Washington’s Cascade mountains. Here he feels that he receives another vision of heavenly perfection before he heads back to the culture of the city. The book seems to end abruptly—although as readers we are led to believe that the climax of the book, the central episode will take place at the fire lookout—it never occurs. In actuality, Kerouac had a difficult time in the fire tower—he felt the isolation was overwhelming—he had a hard time drying out from his alcohol abuse, and he was tortured with guilt after killing a mouse. He, like Smith, was relieved to go back to Seattle, pick up some cheap port and check into a Skid Row hotel to get drunk. THEME Like the majority of Kerouac’s books, Dharma Bums deals with the theme of life lived outside the mainstream of American culture. While in On the Road the focus of that life was the criminality and manic behavior of Dean Moriarty, the cool knowledgeable calm of Japhy Ryder is the focus of Dharma Bums. In Japhy, Ray sees an opportunity to help define his life through

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Buddhism. However, Ray’s (and Kerouac’s) interest and practice of Buddhism is much different from Japhy’s (and Snyder’s) lived practice of Buddhism. To Ray, Buddhism is something that intrudes upon the life he wants to live—one of excess. While the Kerouac character feels drawn to Buddhism, he feels that to embrace the tenants of Buddhism, is a process of denying himself of what he wants most. Ryder however, has made a connection with Buddhism, which means that he lives his life as he feels he is called to through the teaching of Buddha. Beyond that Kerouac, through the character of Smith, describes a view of America where the youth have embraced Buddhism and have rejected materialism. “A world full of rucksack wanders, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming all the crap they didn’t really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway.”2 But the theme also has to do with accepting one’s place or role or destiny in life. Dharma can be loosely defined as the religious and social obligations that a Buddhist is required to fulfill. So the title itself, Dharma Bums, suggests that some are meant to live the Beat life. As such, we come to understand that the constraints that Smith tries to place upon himself to be a “good” Buddhist really has more to do with Kerouac reacting to Buddhism from the context of his early learned Catholicism. Finally, the theme of family weaves its way through the book (as it does most of Kerouac’s work). In finding Japhy, Ray has found a brother or father figure echoing the search for Dean’s father in On the Road. The concept within the book that his own family does not understand him, forcing him in protest to sleep outside (an adolescent move to be sure of a man who was in his mid-thirties at the time of the book), sets up the search for Japhy and the rest of the West Coast poets as a surrogate family. This is a family that is not only willing to accept him, but that also wants to help him grow in his Buddhism as well. CHARACTER Ray Smith is a man torn between the two lives he wishes to lead. On one hand he wishes to live a quiet, contemplative life, yet at the same time, any time the opportunity to get drunk and wild presents itself, he takes it. He wants to travel, yet when he is gone, he longs to be home with his mother. Alternately, in the character of Japhy Ryder, Kerouac has created a whole character—Japhy is at home wherever he is and is always self sufficient.


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Kerouac writes that Ryder was “from the beginning a woods boy, an axman, a farmer, interested in animals and Indian lore . . . Finally he learned Chinese and Japanese and became an Oriental scholar.”3 He is, of course, most happy in the woods—a comfort level that makes Ray envious. Perhaps most importantly, The Dharma Bums functions as a simple record of life in artistic America in the 1950s—we’re treated to a wide view of what it was like to be with the Bay Area writers and artists in 1955. This strength though is oftentimes the book’s downfall—too many of his sketches are never fleshed out, and never fully developed. The book was finished in ten coffee- and speed-fueled typing sessions and passed effortlessly into the editorial stream at Viking. Since it is bereft of Kerouac’s experimental style, it didn’t require the extensive editorial wrangling that many of his books did. In one way, Kerouac wrote it for a quick paycheck under the advice of editor Malcolm Cowley. Without the stress on experimental style, it represents the sort of book that Kerouac could have churned out endlessly, providing him with a comfortable means of support had he not turned his efforts strictly to what he would have termed art over commercialism. At the same time, however, the popularity of On the Road and The Dharma Bums, with their relatively clear language and plots, set Kerouac up for disaster when the works that followed with their much more complicated plots, language, and style failed to fulfill the reading public’s expectations. CRITICAL RECEPTION Overall, the reviews of The Dharma Bums were no better than those of his previous novels. This one suffered because the book seemed calculated to achieve a popular reading audience, so that those who had begun to accept Kerouac as an experimental artist were disappointed that he had written such a traditionally formatted book. Seymour Krim wrote in his article “King of the Beats” in Commonweal magazine on January 2, 1959 that, “Ray Smith, the hero of the present chapter in Kerouac’s nonstop gush . . . adds mountain climbing and meditating to the typical Kerouacian staple of batting madly around the country … Literary teetotalers and nice little old ladies . . . forget that he loves (but loves, man!) his booze and sex as much as ever; his next book may very well revive the original horror and condemnation.”4 Kerouac had insulted the poetry editor of the Saturday Review, and, accordingly, its review was passionately hateful. The reviewer suggested that the book was nothing more than a pastiche of long-rejected manuscripts that had been awkwardly stitched together. However, Nancy Williams Ross in the

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New York Times review was overwhelmingly positive, ranking the story line as enjoyable as On the Road and finding within the writing itself the controlled beauty of the haiku. Perhaps tellingly, The American Buddhist magazine, had a positive review, suggesting that Dharma Bums was part of the answer for which so many young people at the time had begun searching. KEROUAC’S BUDDHIST BELIEFS At both the beginning and the end of his life, Kerouac saw himself as a staunch Roman Catholic. But, at the midpoint of his life, during the most productive time of his life, Kerouac was fascinated with Buddhism. He became so enamored of the religion that he even endeavored to translate a large portion of sacred Buddhist texts into his characteristic prose (apropos of Kerouac’s end of life fascination with genealogy, at the time of his death, according to Nicosia’s Memory Babe, Kerouac was working on a family tree that traced his lineage past Cromwell to end in Persia among the same caste that produced the Buddha). Because of the relatively tight grasp the Sampras family continues to wield over Kerouac’s archive, it is difficult to trace his fascination with Buddhism back to a single event. But, by 1953, he had written the manuscript of The Subterraneans and had produced his manifesto, “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose.” At the same time, his friend Allen Ginsberg had begun his own study of Eastern cultures, and he and Kerouac had begun corresponding about these ideas. By the end of 1953, Kerouac himself wrote that he was a “big Buddhist” and, according to Nicosia, he was familiar with story of Buddha’s life as early as 1951 and perhaps earlier since Burroughs had given him a copy of Spengler’s Decline of the West, where the story of Buddha is also analyzed. In January of 1954, Kerouac headed to San Jose, California once again to spend time with Neal Cassady and his family. When he arrived, he found that Cassady had found religion—albeit of a non-mainstream variety. Cassady felt that he had found truth—the truth that he and Jack had gone looking for during the events that would end up in On the Road—in the works of Edgar Cayce, the “sleeping prophet,” an American psychic who channeled answers to questions on subjects such as astrology, reincarnation, and Atlantis while in a trance. Kerouac had no time for Cayce’s ideas and, perhaps to be better prepared during the debates about spirituality that he found himself engaging in with Cassady, he found a copy of Goddard’s A Buddhist Bible. It was then that Kerouac began meditating. He described the experience of his first meditation in a column he wrote for Escapade magazine. He saw


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what he describes as “golden swarms,” which, he said, represented for him the idea of nothingness, a life beyond desire. In Kerouac’s own understanding of Buddhism he saw his worldview reflected in two concepts, that of the Tathagata and the Bodhisattva. The Tathagata is an enlightened being who has no attachments to anything, who simply lets the world revolve around him and keeps nothing with him. A Bodhisattva is an enlightened being who refuses to accept his own enlightenment until all imperfect beings have been made perfect. However, ironically, one form of Buddhism that Kerouac couldn’t agree with was Zen Buddhism, seeing their koans as silly. In Dharma Bums, Kerouac scorns Zen-style Buddhism. But by 1955, Kerouac was finishing up his book of poems that would be collected as Mexico City Blues, a collection of poems that is seen by critics to be the most explicit in his discussion of what had become his struggle with Buddhism. It’s easy to see that Kerouac had placed himself in an impossible spot by adopting a religion that required asceticism when he himself was a binger of epic proportion. In these poems, a theme begins to emerge, a theme of understanding and realizing that the Buddhist goal of tranquility and escape from desire is diametrically opposed to the poet’s goal of being inflamed with passion. What these poems do show is an understanding and explication of the poet and the Buddhists’ search internally for meaning— although, it seems to Kerouac, the end results are very different, the process of finding meaning in life or in art is very similar. Following completion of the book, Kerouac left Mexico City and went to Berkeley to see Ginsberg. Here in California he found, much to his surprise that the group that had formed, centering around Ginsberg’s cottage, had several knowledgeable Buddhists, among them Gary Snyder, as well as California poet Kenneth Rexroth, who, accustomed to being the voice of authority in the room, grew to quickly dislike Kerouac’s goofy behavior and erratic jokes. When Kerouac expressed joy at meeting a group of people who had read the same Buddhist texts as he had, Rexroth snidely responded, “Everybody in San Francisco is a Buddhist, Kerouac! Didn’t you know that?”5 The joy of being among like-minded people soon faded though, as Kerouac often found himself at odds with Snyder’s view of Buddhism. Snyder, in turn, felt that Kerouac had merely adopted the idea of Buddhism without the real tenants, including the central idea that all life is suffering. In 1956, under Snyder’s encouragement, Kerouac put together his first Buddhist sutra, which he called The Scripture of the Golden Eternity. (Sutra itself is a Sanskrit word that translates literally as “thread,” but in this sense means rules that hold an idea together. The term here is used lightly since

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in Buddhism, “sutra” specifically refers to the actual oral teachings of the Buddha.) In this text, Kerouac, unsurprisingly, draws a connection between the act of creation and the act of movement. Interestingly, as a text, it seems to be a failure. Snyder felt that it betrayed Kerouac’s lack of deep understanding about Buddhism beyond the concept of compassion for all things. Kerouac himself would admit that he was more comfortable with a religion that was built around the idea of a central authoritative god rather than one that required the adherent to find god within himself. After completing the text in his Berkeley cottage, Kerouac told his host Locke McCorkle that, “While I was writing this, I thought I knew what it meant, but now I don’t know anymore.” The book was first published in 1960. Tristessa is an important Kerouac work that is often looked over. Its importance lies not in its plot or its style, but in the fact that it is a pivotal work because it is the first book Kerouac writes after he has discovered Buddhism and has begun to see the world, his writing, and himself almost exclusively within the confines of his search for Buddhist understanding. Within Buddhism, Kerouac found an expansion of the ideas contained in Spengler that Burroughs had introduced him to so many years ago in their apartment hangout. He was drawn to the concept of the Kalpas, or epochs of time that act cyclically. Likewise, within the Buddhist concept of compassion for all living things, he felt a strong echo of what his brother Gerard had taught him so many years ago. Still, fellow Beat poet Michael McClure wrote that Mexico City Blues is “the finest long religious poem of the twentieth century.” Kenneth Rexroth, continuing his vendetta against Kerouac, was characteristically cruel in his November 29, 1959 New York Times review of Mexico City Blues, “The naive effrontery of this book is more pitiful than ridiculous. Mr. Kerouac’s Buddha is a dime-store incense burner, glowing and glowering sinisterly in the dark corner of a Beatnik pad and just thrilling the wits out of bad little girls.”6 Some of the Dharma is a book that Kerouac had put together, but failed to find a publisher for while he was alive during the period in which he was most influenced by Buddhism. It includes not only poems but also notes, ideas, stories, letter fragments, dialogues, journal entries and even sketches, which Kerouac had made in the margins of his journals. One can make many assumptions as to why Some of the Dharma was never published during Kerouac’s lifetime—certainly he was before his time when it came to an interest and openness towards Eastern religions. It’s non-narrative and experimental, a type of writing for which an audience has just begun to develop. The book, like so much of Kerouac’s work is wildly uneven and while


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there are moments of true clarity and beauty, there is also the old Kerouacian problems of self-indulgence (evident in the lengthy discussion of what he saw at this point of his youthful failings and his discussions of his losing battle with the alcoholism that would eventually kill him) and misogyny. The book’s comprehensiveness is double-edged. While it’s valuable to Kerouac scholars because of the unedited nature and rawness of thought within—it’s prohibitive to the general reader because of its tendency to collect everyone of Kerouac’s stray thoughts on the minutiae of his life within Buddha. By 1957, when he realized he had misplaced the manuscript of The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, he told his friends he didn’t care. Gary Snyder said that when he met Kerouac a month after Mexico City Blues was completed, Kerouac was no longer Buddhist, but had made a swing back to mainstream Roman Catholicism. Even today, Kerouac’s Buddhists writings are relatively poorly known among his readers. It is also difficult for many to understand just how Buddhism fit into his life within the confines of Catholicism, a life of excess, and a tightening right-wing political view. However, for Kerouac and Snyder (and later Ginsberg, whose fascination with Buddhism continued to grow as Kerouac’s bottomed out), Buddhism remained an interesting subject for their work, and the seeds were planted for the not only the explosion of interest in world religions evidenced by the generation that came of age in the 1960s in America, but also the later popularity of so-called New Age religions in American popular culture as well. SUGGESTED DISCUSSIONS OR PAPER IDEAS 1. To whom does the term “Dharma Bum” apply to in the book? How does Kerouac make that clear? What are the requirements for being named a Dharma Bum? 2. Did the “rucksack revolution” that Kerouac envisions come to fruition in the United States? How, when, and where? 3. Does Ray Smith rely too heavily upon Japhy Ryder for guidance? In what terms does Kerouac describe the relationship between the two? Does this relationship hinder or progress Smith’s search for a more authentic Buddhist existence?

NOTES 1. Nicosia, Gerald. Memory Babe. New York: Penguin, 1986: 552. 2. Kerouac, Jack. Dharma Bums. New York: Penguin, 1971: 180. 3. Ibid., 140.

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4. Krim, Seymour. “King of the Beats” Commonweal January 2, 1959: 359. 5. Nicosia, Memory Babe, 491. 6. Rexroth, Kenneth. “Discordant and Cool” New York Times Book Review November 29, 1959.

SUGGESTED READINGS Snyder, Gary. Earth House Hold: Technical Notes and Queries to Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries. New Directions: New York, 1969. Suiter, John. Poets on the Peaks: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen & Jack Kerouac in the Cascades. Counterpoint: New York, 2002. Tonkinson, Carole, ed. Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation. The Buddhist Ray: New York, 1995.

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Allen Ginsberg Howl and Other Poems BIOGRAPHY Allen Ginsberg was born on June 3, 1926 in Newark, New Jersey. Both of his parents, Naomi, an ardent Communist, homemaker, and sometimes teacher, and Louis, a lyric poet and high school educator, would play vital roles as both critics and subjects for some of his most famous and stirring works of literature. Indeed it is difficult to separate the life, madness, and death of Naomi from the genius and career of Allen. By 1935, when Allen was nine, Naomi’s madness had become largely debilitating. Like a migraine sufferer, she found herself unable to stand loud noise or light. Soon this developed and worsened into an intermittent paranoia. She began to have auditory hallucinations and believed that her relatives were trying to kill her. As recounted later in Allen’s poetry, she began shedding her clothes in the home, walking naked in front of him and his older brother Eugene. Although never aggressive in her madness towards her children, her behavior was nevertheless terrifying to such young boys. The family began setting up shifts to watch her—to keep her out of the hospital in the hopes that a loving environment would help bring her around. This was a hope that was, sadly, not to be realized. By 1937, she had been in and out of mental asylums. With Eugene a senior in high school and preoccupied with his own traumas of adolescence, Allen was left to take care of Naomi and amuse himself. Already nicknamed “The Professor” by his classmates, Allen retreated even more deeply into his own cultural world, surrounding himself with books and radio and movies. Finally

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in June of 1937, the boys watched as, early one morning, their father kicked in the bathroom door to find their mother had slit her wrists. The cuts were shallow and Louis tended to them, cleaning and binding them, and then sent the boys and Naomi back to bed. When dawn finally came, Louis committed his wife to the Greystone Hospital, where she would remain for the next two years. A few years later, at only 17, Ginsberg began attending Columbia University where he would meet the other members of the Beat Generation and his life and the world would be changed forever. It was at Columbia that Ginsberg met Lucien Carr. Carr was older than Ginsberg, worldlier and much better looking. Carr spent much of his time introducing Ginsberg to the influences he had already felt—Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and the visual arts as well. They carried on long philosophical discussions late into the evening almost every day. Along with art and books, Carr also introduced him to a much more dangerous influence: David Kammerer. Kammerer was a former teacher of Carr’s who had fallen deeply in love with him, going so far as to quit his job so that he could follow Carr from city to city. But Carr was heterosexual and had no interested in Kammerer. This rejection would eventually lead to an obsession that would turn deadly and once again change the direction of Ginsberg’s life. When Carr brought Ginsberg to meet Kammerer, another tall, thin fussily dressed man who Carr had met in St. Louis was already there in the apartment. William S. Burroughs was to Carr what Carr was to Ginsberg: a much more experienced older man who at 30 had known and experienced a world much larger than the one with which they had been presented. Although it would be months before Burroughs and Ginsberg would engage in any sort of extended conversation, Carr continued to make the rounds of New York City, introducing Ginsberg to his other friends. Among these new relationships was the one cultivated between Ginsberg and Edie Parker, a young woman whose roommate, Joan Vollmer, talked endlessly about Parker’s boyfriend, an intense, athletic young man named Jack Kerouac. Carr and Kerouac had been quick friends because of their similar philosophies; both of them saw the need for a new voice in literature and art. In spring 1944, when Ginsberg came by Edie Parker’s apartment, Kerouac was there. The initial meeting was not auspicious. Ginsberg was put off was Kerouac’s rough demeanor (drinking a beer with his breakfast), and Kerouac felt that Ginsberg was, perhaps, a little too effete to truly embrace life. It took only a short time however, for these first impressions to burn off, and before


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long, the two of them were taking a walk around New York City sharing their childhood secrets and thoughts about art and life. The two became fast friends and Ginsberg began spending more and more time at Parker’s apartment in the hopes of catching Kerouac there. In just a few months though, by the time the summer of 1944 rolled around, the circle of friends who had brought Ginsberg so much joy began to complicate his life in ways far beyond questions of art and philosophy. Still largely a closeted homosexual, he found himself with a painful, unrequited crush on his seemingly hyper-masculine new friend, Kerouac. Later, in the winter of 1945, Ginsberg confessed his love to Kerouac, who was surprised and, for the moment, refused to engage in a sexual relationship with Ginsberg. For the first time, the deeply insecure Ginsberg had confessed his sexual orientation. Kerouac’s reluctant acceptance and later acknowledgment of the bravery such a confession took, helped release a flood of emotions from Ginsberg’s dammed-up psyche. However, at this point, Kammerer’s own unrequited crush on Carr had come to a head of its own. On the evening of August 13, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Carr and a few others had gathered at a Greenwich Village bar. Carr was drunk and when Kammerer walked into the bar and approached the group, Carr went to a separate table with him. Then, after last call, the two struck off into the night with a bottle to share. Eventually they found their way to Riverside Park where Kammerer aggressively repeated his love for Carr and began to try to force Carr to have intercourse with him. In the struggle, Carr stabbed Kammerer in the heart with a penknife, killing him almost instantly. Panicking, Carr stripped the body, weighted it with rocks, and threw it into the Hudson River. Still panicked, Carr fled to Burroughs’s apartment. Burroughs told him to turn himself in and present the murder as an act of self defense. Too distraught to see the wisdom in Burroughs’s suggestion, Carr lurched back into the light of the early dawn to find Kerouac. At Kerouac’s, the now frantic Carr asked for help disposing of the evidence he was still carrying with him—Kammerer’s glasses and the bloody knife. Never one to miss out on some drama, Kerouac agreed to accompany him back into the city to help drop the knife down a grating and bury the incriminating glasses. Perhaps ill-advisedly, trying to restore some sense of normalcy to Carr’s life, Kerouac took him out for a day on the town— watching movies, eating hot dogs, and drinking beer. Finally, at the end of the day, they split so that Carr could find an attorney who would eventually advise his client to turn himself in two days later and come completely clean to the police.

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The crime was front-page news in New York City and shook Ginsberg to his core, further unbalancing his already somewhat tenuous sense of proportion. This flood brought with it a storm of creativity, and controversy as well. Already on thin ice with Columbia because of his involvement in Kammerer’s circle, when Ginsberg began a novel on the Carr/Kammerer incident, he was told by Columbia’s associate dean, McKnight, that college policy prohibited him from writing about the subject. The dean also encouraged him to stop his associations with Kerouac (who had also started a novel with Burroughs about the Kammerer murder entitled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks). Complaints about Ginsberg and Kerouac drinking until all hours had made the way to the ears of the dean, and while Ginsberg agreed to modify his behavior, the groundwork had been set for the dean to take much more drastic measures in the future. The events finally came to a head when Columbia dean Ralph Furey burst into Ginsberg’s room on the tip of a cleaning woman who had been offended by Ginsberg’s childish, but obscene, scrawlings on his room’s filthy windows. There he found not only Ginsberg but Kerouac as well—an unregistered guest. Accordingly, Ginsberg was almost immediately suspended from Columbia and evicted from his dorm. Ginsberg took the news hard, but instead of protesting, moved into Joan Vollmer’s apartment where he had first met Kerouac. Being suspended from college and finding himself without the structure of school and only a selection of mindless jobs to keep him busy, the lifestyle of the apartment opened a world of exploration for Ginsberg, with drugs, philosophy, and sexuality. Eventually however, the introduction of hard drugs into the scene would destroy that innocent freedom. When Vollmer was committed for psychosis brought on by amphetamine abuse, Ginsberg felt that it was time for change in his own life as well. In 1946, Ginsberg re-applied and was back at Columbia for the fall semester. By December of 1946, a new friend was introduced into his circle. With the introduction of Neal Cassady, Ginsberg’s life would again change both personally and artistically. Cassady was a small-time car thief and sexual dynamo from the American West who rolled into New York and affected everyone with whom he came into contact. Although he himself did very little in the way of writing, he was, in many ways, the muse behind much of the Beat Generation’s writing. By January 1947, when Ginsberg and Cassady met a second time, now under the influence of marijuana, they found each other not only sexual attractive (although Ginsberg was at this time avowedly homosexual, Cassady was omnisexual, open to any experience), but also felt as if their


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separately traumatic childhoods provided a common ground. That night, however, Ginsberg was introduced to the dark side of Cassady, by opening himself emotionally and sexually (their sexual relationship was consummated that night), Ginsberg felt as though he was creating an intimacy between the two. Cassady, on the other hand, had been a hustler for too long. Where Ginsberg saw a soul mate, Cassady saw, in the young poet, a needy young man who he could manipulate; the two of them began a codependent and sadomasochistic relationship that would span decades and cause Ginsberg some of his deepest heartache. By March 4, when Cassady left New York to return to the American west, Allen was still confused about his feelings for the thin-hipped cowboy. Finally, filled with mixed feelings at Neal’s leaving, Ginsberg agreed to meet Cassady in Denver as soon as the Columbia Spring semester ended in May. In an incident that would find its way into Beat mythology, the two had their photo taken in a bus-station booth and in a rare act of kindness on Cassady’s part, they tore the photo in half, each keeping the other’s image until they would meet again. However, that meeting in June of 1947 didn’t provide Ginsberg with much, if any, solace. Here on Cassady’s home turf, he treated Ginsberg much more coolly. While Ginsberg seemed to think he was going to be reunited with a lover, Cassady treated him as a friend, mostly to keep his new love Carolyn Robinson (later Carolyn Cassady, an educated, articulate woman who would gain some notoriety from her memoir of her time with Cassady, Ginsberg, and Kerouac entitled Off the Road) in the dark regarding his homosexual experiences. Although Cassady had told Carolyn that Ginsberg was gay and had a crush on him, Carolyn would learn the truth about her husband-to-be only later that summer when she walked in on Cassady in bed with both Ginsberg and Cassady’s teenaged ex-wife, LuAnne. The event created enough tension in their extended circle of friends that the center splintered, sending them reeling off. Carolyn returned to Los Angeles. Kerouac, who had also been visiting Cassady (and to complicate matters further had developed a crush on Carolyn) hitchhiked to San Francisco. Ginsberg set off for Pharr, Texas in August of 1947 to visit Bill Burroughs, who had purchased a farm where he hoped to grow marijuana (even though farming was one of the few topics on which Burroughs knew absolutely nothing). With the promise of adventure, Cassady agreed to accompany Ginsberg to what they hoped would be a happy sort of reunion. It was not to be though. By the time the two hitchhiked their way there, they found that Burroughs’s plans had gone astray. Farming was much more work than he had anticipated, and it no longer interested him. He had

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married Joan Vollmer, an unrepentant multi-substance addict at this point, and was concerned as he watched her slip deeper and deeper into psychosis. The sexual tension between Neal and Allen and the overall tension of the household finally proved too much, and Ginsberg headed off to Houston to find passage on a ship to New York. Due to his attempt to spend one last night with Cassady, Ginsberg missed the ship to New York and instead signed on as crew on the SS John Blais headed for the destination of Dakar. It was his first trip out of the United States and would inspire him in later years to continue to seek a world larger than the one he knew. His trip to Africa would inspire him to write the poems later collected in Dakar Doldrums, but by February 1948, he was back in New York City, readmitted to Columbia and still feeling isolated. It was this sense of isolation, along with a renewed mind-set of studying art, consciousness, and philosophy that led to not only one of the most important events of his young life, but also one of the touchstones of Beat lore. In the summer of 1948, as Ginsberg was lounging in his apartment after reading Blake’s poetry, Ginsberg had a vision. In this vision, he heard a basso profundo voice reciting three of William Blake’s poems: “Ah Sunflower,” “The Sick Rose,” and “Little Girl Lost.” Ginsberg believed that this was literally the voice of Blake, and he suddenly felt as if everything had slowed down and he was able to see the component parts of what made up the universe. Through this vision, he began to believe that poetry was the only universal and immortal state of being. He began to formulate a theory that even though he and Blake were separated by years, their poetic goals were the same and thus eternal. Still isolated socially though, Ginsberg had no one to tell of his discovery (and indeed when he did finally tell Kerouac and the others, the general consensus was that Ginsberg was in real danger of following his mother into madness and institutionalization). So he roamed the streets, danced in his apartment, and then, after another vision in the Columbia bookstore where he saw his fellow shoppers transformed into halfhuman, half-animal beings, Ginsberg returned to writing poetry. He had started writing a new sort of poetry that captured not only these visions but equipped him to share their meaning with the world as well. A year later, after Ginsberg had made amends with both Kerouac and Cassady (indeed he was closer with them than ever), Kerouac and Cassady left him setting off on the road once again. This time, it was a man named Herbert Huncke who showed up at his apartment and once again sent Ginsberg’s life spiraling in a new direction. Huncke was another small time grifter with poetic ambitions. He had met many of the Beat Generation writers in the all night cafeterias of Times


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Square where he was known as the “Mayor of 42nd Street.” When he showed up at Ginsberg’s home in February of 1949, he was just coming off a repeat jail stint. Released but homeless, he wandered the cold New York City winter streets until his body, weak and battered from years of drug abuse, had given up, and he was close to death. Ginsberg nursed him back to health and then, goodhearted to a fault as always, even offered to let Huncke stay there. In a letter to Ginsberg, Burroughs strongly advised him against playing the role of host; Huncke had stayed with Burroughs and, upon leaving, had stolen him blind. Indeed, even before going to jail, Huncke had already earlier robbed Ginsberg. Upon regaining his health, Huncke fulfilled all prior expectations and patterns of behavior by promptly meeting up with some other small-time hoods and using Ginsberg’s apartment as a place to store stolen goods until he could fence them. Finally, in an ill-advised “big score” Huncke had robbed a policeman’s home of thousands of dollars of jewelry. Once again, Ginsberg’s friends advised him to immediately expel Huncke and get rid of all the evidence. But Ginsberg found himself unable to confront Huncke and finally decided the easiest thing to do would actually be to go and visit Burroughs until the heat died down. When Huncke expressed his plans to continue using the apartment (which after all was in Ginsberg’s name) as a warehouse, Ginsberg finally broke and said “no more.” But it was much too late at this point. On April 22, 1949, Huncke’s partners in crime offered to drive Ginsberg to the bus station. In the last of a long string of bad decisions, they chose to use a car that they had stolen a few weeks earlier and that was still loaded with stolen goods. When the group turned the wrong way down a one-way street, the police followed and Ginsberg’s driver panicked. After a high-speed chase where a beat cop was almost run over, the driver finally lost control of the car flipping it multiple times before it came to rest on its roof. Once he realized that he wasn’t injured, Ginsberg immediately panicked, knowing that the police would be headed to his apartment, still filled with Huncke and his loot. Without his glasses, Ginsberg stumbled across town finally bumming enough money to call Huncke and tell him to get rid of everything. When he got there though, Huncke had gotten rid of nothing, claiming that it was hopeless—busted was busted. It turned out to be a fair assessment and once again, Ginsberg found himself on the periphery of a front page New York Times crime story. Although hard time was almost a certainty for the others (and indeed a five-year sentence was handed down across the board for the major players), Ginsberg pled that he was simply a writer gathering research and color details for a book he was writing. Columbia’s deans stepped in with letters suggesting

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that although Ginsberg was almost certainly insane, he was not criminal. The court agreed and Ginsberg was remanded to a psychiatric hospital rather than prison. To make matters worse, Ginsberg’s father, to whose custody he had been remanded, was furious at him. At the same time, his mother announced that she was being released from her own committal. By the time Ginsberg was headed inside for his own mental treatment, he was almost certainly clinically depressed. But it was here, inside the walls of the asylum that he would meet the man who would provide an opening for the Beat writers to show their work and philosophy to the world. A man being wheeled into insulin shock therapy looked up at Ginsberg and asked him who he was. In an exchange that would become part of the Beat legend, Ginsberg said, “I’m Myshkin” (Dostoyevsky’s simple-minded prince in his book The Idiot). “I’m Kirilov,” the man, Carl Solomon, responded (Dostoyevsky’s suicidal, shut-off character in The Possessed). During the eight months Ginsberg spent at the Psychiatric Institute, he spent most of his free time with Carl Solomon. Solomon was yet another older, well-educated, worldly man from whom Ginsberg sought acceptance and approval. Solomon had been a child prodigy and had lived and worked in Europe. Solomon had been committed for a seemingly innocuous act. He had stolen food from the cafeteria of the college he was attending and then confessed his crime to campus police. His hope had been to stir up his life a bit; the result had been committal to the Columbia Psychiatric Institute. To make matters worse, Solomon had been placed in a regime of insulin shock treatment, a medical procedure which has since been discontinued. His presence and questions of what reality meant and if it was wise to follow the paths that society set out for us, would come to dominate Ginsberg’s best-known work, “Howl.” Solomon was also related to the publishers of Ace Books—the company that would, under Ginsberg’s heavy persuasion eventually publish William S. Burroughs’s book Junky. (Burroughs found Solomon to be a boorish and ineffectual editor. On a visit to New York City in 1954, Ted Morgan relates, Burroughs ran into Solomon, who had been slow in sending him his royalties. Solomon was dressed in a Good Humor Ice Cream man uniform, and when Burroughs asked him what he was doing, Solomon replied that he was hiding from his family who wanted him dead. Burroughs wrote him off as quite insane). Ginsberg found himself newly invigorated and confident after leaving the asylum and after attending a reading given by fellow New Jersey poet, William Carlos Williams. In late March of 1950, Ginsberg wrote the older poet a long letter introducing himself and his poetry. Williams, himself still


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fighting for acceptance in his new form of writing, was glad to hear from the young poet, but didn’t find Ginsberg’s work especially interesting. At the same time, however, Williams could see that the young man had enthusiasm and talent and asked Ginsberg to send him more examples of his work. In September of 1951, Ginsberg decided that he was ready to travel again, accompanying Lucien Carr (now on vacation from his steady journalism job) to Mexico City in the hopes of visiting Burroughs. Arriving there though, he found Burroughs gone on a trip and Joan Vollmer in worse shape than ever. She seemed empty inside, the drugs robbing her of any desire beyond her next fix. She seemed to be courting death at every turn. Although saddened about the circumstances, neither of them was surprised to hear that, soon after their visit, Vollmer had died in a shooting accident with Burroughs himself pulling the trigger. In the winter of 1952, still mourning over the shocking death of Vollmer, Ginsberg had his most remarkable stylistic breakthrough, finally embracing the long breath lines for which he has become so well-known. He had sent Williams ten prose poems from his journal. Because Williams had been critical of his metrical and formal poems, Ginsberg attempted something completely new and confessional. Williams was blown away. He wrote Ginsberg back saying that he had to collect more poems like this to place into a book and telling him that he wanted to include one of Ginsberg’s pieces in his new and experimental book length work, Paterson (Book Four). Williams began contacting all his poetic friends introducing them to Ginsberg’s work and beating the drum to find a publisher of Ginsberg’s poems, now totaling about 100, all taken from his journals and broken into breath lines. In 1953, Ginsberg went to see his mother, who was back in the Pilgrim State Hospital. He hadn’t seen her in two years and was surprised to see an old woman looking back at him upon arriving at the hospital. She had been lobotomized (Ginsberg himself had signed the authorization papers, an act that would haunt him for life) and had suffered a stroke. She didn’t recognize him at first and Ginsberg began to realize that his mother would not be alive much longer. Perhaps in partial response to the whiff of mortality around him, Ginsberg began to move away from his almost complete introspection and began to ask himself the larger spiritual questions that had preoccupied his friends like Kerouac for some time. Under Kerouac’s urging and his own reading, Ginsberg began studying Buddhism in 1953. By Christmas time in 1953, Ginsberg had decided to travel again. He headed from Washington DC where his hopes to meet poet and friend of William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, were dashed, when Pound, who was

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not much interested in Ginsberg’s work, refused to see him. He headed to Florida (spending time with Burroughs’s parents), then on to Cuba, and finally Mexico where he lost himself in the jungle, finding silence, solace, and subjects for poetry in the lushness of the vegetation, and removal from the demands of industrialized life. He was relaxed and happy, and the exchange rate meant that he could live much better than he could in the United States. Finally, he left Mexico and headed north to California to reunite with Neal Cassady (who had settled down with Carolyn once again, had children, and was working full-time). Finally, though, Ginsberg could not deny his love for Cassady, and as before, his restful time with the family came to an end when Carolyn walked in on the two of them mid-intercourse. Carolyn insisted that Ginsberg leave the house, but was gracious enough to drive him to Berkeley, where Ginsberg had decided to take graduate classes. Graduate school was a good choice for Ginsberg. He had plenty of time to spend putting together another volume of poems. It allowed him to further his connections with the artistic counterculture that was thriving in California by the mid-1950s. He introduced himself to Kenneth Rexroth, the grandfather of the countercultural scene in San Francisco and began to attend Rexroth’s salons at his home. Here, Ginsberg continued to meet writers, thinkers, and artists. Likewise, Ginsberg would prove to be a vital conduit to the East Coast Beats as they began heading west. It was also here, at this time, that Ginsberg would meet the partner in one of his strangest yet most enduring of his relationships, Peter Orlovsky. By 1955, Ginsberg had fallen deeply in love with the bisexual Orlovsky, a troubled man whose drug and alcohol abuse would cause both of them much pain in the future. In a ceremony, he and Ginsberg exchanged vows to stay and protect and help one another for the rest of their lives. This time of personal growth and change also bought artistic development. 1955 also found Ginsberg writing what would become his most famous poem, “Howl.” In June 1956, Ginsberg’s happiness was interrupted with the news of his mother’s death; she died from a cerebral hemorrhage. Making the event even more traumatic was the fact that Ginsberg, out of the country at the time, was unable to attend the funeral. His father had kept much of the family in the dark about the service and because of that, there were not enough men present to say the Jewish prayer of mourning, the Kaddish, at the graveside. Ginsberg would be so upset by this fact that he would eventually express his pain in writing, through his epic poem “Kaddish.” In early 1957, Ginsberg was beginning to feel the spotlight of fame a bit too brightly and decided that a trip to Tangier to visit Burroughs (who had


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settled there) would be just the thing. Kerouac agreed and they all planned to meet in Africa. Orlovsky and Ginsberg arrived in Tangier a day before Kerouac was moving on. Ginsberg picked up where Kerouac had left off, organizing and editing the manuscript that would become Burroughs’s breakthrough book Naked Lunch. Although initially jealous of Orlovsky, Burroughs was glad to have the company so much so that when Ginsberg and Orlovsky moved on to Paris, after first visiting Spain and Italy in 1958, Burroughs joined them. In Paris, all of them lived at the infamous “Beat Hotel,” a fleabag of a cheap rooming house at 9 rue Git-Le-Coeur. Here while Ginsberg began drafting what would become his epic poem “Kaddish,” Burroughs continued work on refining Naked Lunch. Ginsberg, acting again as an agent and cheerleader for the other Beats, hoped to sell Burroughs’s manuscript to Olympia Press, a press known for publishing so-called dirty books. Before long though, Ginsberg and Orlovsky lit off again, visiting Amsterdam and England before returning to New York in late 1958 while Burroughs stayed behind in Paris. Upon returning to the States, Ginsberg found that his life had changed course. Since “Howl,” the poem that would thrust him into the spotlight and make him a household name, was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Poems as part of the Pocket Poet series in 1956. Much controversy had arisen over the work, and with that controversy much publicity. By 1959, Ginsberg had become so important as a literary figure and such a voice of controversial and public protest that he discovered a new audience. He moved away from the coffeehouses and galleries and began booking himself at universities. The money was much better, the respect level much higher, and the audience was completely untapped for his poetry and ideas. That same year Ginsberg also opened himself up to a new experience when he took LSD for the first time. The drug would change how he saw the world around him, influence his poetry, and further cement his countercultural reputation. For Ginsberg, the effect was instant satori and inspired him to set off for other hallucinatory experiences, including yage, a South American herb which years earlier, William S. Burroughs had experimented with, a time captured in The Yage Letters, an epistolary book between Burroughs and Ginsberg. Ginsberg also began experimenting with “magic mushrooms” with LSD proponent Timothy Leary. This relationship with Leary would also lead Ginsberg deeper into the political realm when the poet began lining up other artists and public figures to take part in Leary’s psychedelic experiments. After Leary was arrested for his drug-related offenses in 1965, Ginsberg began hosting benefits and protests against Leary’s imprisonment on what he felt were trumped-up charges.

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Burroughs encouraged Ginsberg to keep stretching himself with drug experiences, but he felt that Ginsberg’s political aspirations and influence were dangerous, making him a target for being co-opted into groups that he, in his open-heartedness would embrace and later regret. Burroughs’s prediction proved to be true, for instance, in the firestorm that was raised when Ginsberg became involved promoting free speech on behalf of the North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). Ginsberg ignored his old friend’s concerns and by the sixties his and the Beats’ relationship with America had already begun to change. America and the media’s short attention span had begun to be bored with idea of the dangerous Beat and had settled on the goofy pothead beatnik as exemplified by the television show, The Adventures of Dobie Gillis. Ginsberg now found himself fighting this caricature at readings and in interviews. By 1963, after a long period abroad, Ginsberg returned to the States a much different man. He had now completely embraced his earlier view of poet as divine force and became near obsessive about spirituality. In early 1964, he met Bob Dylan for the first time. A fellow traveler in the world of spirituality and searching, his friendship with Dylan would help to provide an important link for Ginsberg between his Beat past and the hippie movement that moved so quickly to embrace him as one of their own. Dylan would also prove influential to Ginsberg in a completely unexpected way. By presenting Ginsberg with the gift of a recorder, the poet found himself able record his thoughts and drafts of poems and then have them transcribed later—coming closer to his desire to fully implement in poetry Kerouac’s idea of spontaneous prose (although Ginsberg himself saw little difference between Kerouac’s prose and the genre of poetry). In 1968, Ginsberg was an important presence at the Chicago Democratic Convention. There Ginsberg witnessed the violent clashes between protestors and police, and the experience helped to inspire Ginsberg to put to practice his earlier-written manifesto, “How to Make a March/Spectacle,” which owed more than a little to Kerouac’s “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” in its presentation, if not its subject. The convention would also lead to Ginsberg being asked to testify in the trial of the “Chicago Eight”—radicals who had been charged with conspiracy. During the trial, which oftentimes dipped to the ludicrous, Ginsberg chanted mantras and played his harmonium, a keyboard-like Indian instrument. By 1970, Ginsberg sought the relative calm of the West Coast. There, through mutual friends he met a new controversial guru, Chogyam Trungpa. An alcoholic Tibetan religious leader who had been exiled by the Chinese government following their overtaking of Tibet, Trungpa liked


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the finer things in Western culture and had married an American woman after founding the first Buddhist meditation center in the United States. Trungpa had also founded The Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. With Ginsberg’s involvement, it would become a home to the free-form creative writing school known today as the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Ginsberg felt that in this new drunken wildman he had found a replacement for his deceased friend Kerouac, and took the Trungpa’s word as law. The Naropa Institute, while Ginsberg taught there, would also be the scene of several ugly incidents, culminating in a November 1975 seminar led by Trungpa. During a party, Trungpa stripped naked and encouraged his students to do the same. The poet W. S. Merwin and his girlfriend, who had little experience with traditional Buddhism, let alone Trungpa’s rather unorthodox interpretation, left the party and went back to their room a bit chagrined. Trungpa sent his personal security after them and had them stripped of their clothes forcibly, under duress. The incident caused a stir among the students, faculty, and art world. The school lost money from donors, and Ginsberg, his loyalty strained to the breaking point, did not know what to do. Trungpa insisted that it was a viable Buddhist technique, Merwin said it was fascism. and Ginsberg’s old friend Burroughs checked in with perhaps the most astute interpretation—these are the things that happen when people drink too much. In early July of 1976, Ginsberg received the news he was dreading—his father, Louis, who had battled cancer, had finally died. Louis and Allen had created a strong relationship, often performing at readings together and keeping up a lively correspondence, which was later collected in the book, Family Business: Selected Letters between a Father and Son. Allen took the death of his father hard and carried the grief with him, expressing it through poems. Additionally, his relationship with Orlovsky, whose sexual component had long since cooled, deteriorated along with Orlovsky’s mental condition as he continued abusing drugs and alcohol. While Allen needed someone to love him and to accept his sexuality, it always seemed to many observers of the relationship that Peter’s instincts had been a bit more pragmatic—he needed someone to take care of him. By 1978, Ginsberg was appearing regularly at anti-nuclear protests in the West. He used the experiences (and the subsequent arrests) as material for his poetry. With the leisure that comes with fame, Ginsberg spent the next few years traveling and writing, performing his poetry, and enjoying the adulation of ever-replenishing groups of youth who all felt that they were the first to discover him.

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By 1979 though, this happy time came to an end as the forcible stripping of Merwin and his girlfriend returned to the forefront with the publication of two books on the subject: Ed Sanders’s The Party: A Chronological Perspective on a Confrontation at a Buddhist Seminary and Tom Clark’s The Great Naropa Poetry Wars. A devoted friend of Trungpa to the end, Ginsberg spent much time, energy, and money defending the reputation of his friend and guru. Kenneth Rexroth complained that the incident, the Institute, and Trungpa in general had, “done more harm to Buddhism in the United States than any man living.”1 Ginsberg finally made the decision in 1981 to move to Boulder, Colorado, in order to take a more active role in the school that he helped found. While there, Ginsberg helped to organize a gigantic celebration for the 25th Anniversary of On the Road. In a homecoming of sorts, most of the remaining Beats showed up at the celebration to perform and pay their respects to Kerouac. In 1985, Ginsberg created discord again in the small press/underground art world by signing an enormously profitable six-book contract with mainstream publisher Harper & Row. Furthering his move into the mainstream, moving back to New York City, Ginsberg received an appointment as Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College. As a even stronger note of his acceptability as a grand old man of American Letters, his first biography, Ginsberg: A Biography is written by his old friend Barry Miles. By 1992, Ginsberg had been inducted into the French Chevalier de l’Ordre des Artes et des Lettres. In 1994, he sold his carefully created and tended archives to Stanford University for one million dollars. Allen Ginsberg died on April 5, 1997, succumbing to liver cancer via complications of hepatitis. SYNOPSIS OF TEXT Breaking away from the technique that had won him Williams’s admiration, for “Howl” Ginsberg focused on improvisation, creating the lines for the poem on the spot instead of culling them from journals or letters. Here he was embracing what Kerouac had called “spontaneous composition.” Kerouac’s technique was something that Ginsberg found fascinating, but had always been unable to perform himself. With “Howl,” however, he began a clear and permanent break with his previous metrical work and the reimagining of journals as poetry. The poem itself is broken up into three sections. The first part of “Howl” relies upon the listing technique that Ginsberg learned from Whitman.


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Part 1 breaks down through the technique of listing the names of the evils that he and his friends have seen. “Howl” itself begins with a dedication to the other Beat writers: Neal Cassady, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac. Here, Ginsberg describes the atrocities that have been visited upon and witnessed by him and his fellows. Within the list, the word “who” provides a steady metronome allowing a rhythmic beat to be established within the long breath lines. The second part details the effects of a peyote trip taken with Orlovsky, in which Ginsberg had an impression of the evil in the world, embodied for Ginsberg in the poem as the demon Moloch. Moloch is the demon named in the Old Testament to whom children are sacrificed. A parallel is meant to be drawn between Moloch and the establishment in America, and between the child sacrifices and the lives of the friends Ginsberg names in the first section. The third part focuses on his friend Carl Solomon, and Ginsberg depicts his insanity as a sane response to an ugly irrational world. Stylistically, instead of the pronoun “who,” this section uses the repetition of “I’m with you in Rockland” as the refrain to keep the intensity and falling-feeling of the poem intact. The word “Holy!” serves the same purpose in the footnote, which also seems to propose a mystical viewpoint on the world –an interconnectedness of the good and the bad and the futility of value judgments in a world where all things are connected and thus, the same. THEME The poem itself represents a tabula rasa for different generations. While earlier generations read it as if looking into the abyss, as if the writing was that of a prophet calling doom down upon a sick land, by the 1980s, according to William A. Henry III at readings of “Howl,” “The audience is laughing. . .They are howling, but in pleasure rather than anger, as [Ginsberg] thrusts an arm up for each of the jokes. They hear satire, not nobly expended pain.”2 After completing the rough draft, Ginsberg sent it off to Kerouac (who was at the time, living in Mexico City). Ginsberg considered the draft complete, but few people had seen it. Kerouac was impressed and offered revisionary advice. So, late that year, everything needed to propel “Howl” to national attention had started to come together. While working on the poem, Ginsberg had met another poet, Gary Snyder, a fellow Buddhist (although one much more advanced in his study

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of the religion). Snyder introduced him to the poet Philip Whalen and Ginsberg introduced Snyder to Kerouac (who would immortalize Snyder as Japhy Ryder in his book Dharma Bums). After bringing in poet Philip Lamantia to the circle, the stage was set for the infamous Six Gallery Reading on Thursday October 13, 1955. The promotional material Ginsberg made up summed up the event: “Six poets at the Six Gallery. Kenneth Rexroth, M. C. Remarkable collection of angels gathered at one in the same spot. Wine, music, dancing girls, serious poetry, free satori. Small collection for wine and postcards. Charming event.”3 Ginsberg read fourth in the lineup. Almost no one in the standing- roomonly audience had read his drafts or knew what was coming. Ginsberg started slowly and let the rhythm, power, and intensity of the poem grow until at the end, the audience exploded in a collegial catharsis. The poets there felt as though new doors had been unlocked for them; the audience felt as if they would never attend, hear, or understand a poetry reading in the same way. Today with shocking images commonplace in accessible media, it is easy to agree with some of the contemporary critics who see the legendary Six Gallery reading as “no more threatening than a cap pistol.”4 Ginsberg himself is partially responsible for this response. As he aged, he continued to tone down his image. Ferlinghetti felt that he had been coopted by mainstream culture. Ginsberg made claims that suggested that the Beat Generation had never had any political objectives. By the time of his readings in the 1980s and 1990s, he adopted a coat and tie, and kept both his clothes on and his beard trimmed. However, in an initial review no less than Kenneth Rexroth during on of his “on” phases in his “on-again off-again” love affair with Beat writing said that “Howl” is part of “[o]ne of the oldest traditions, that of Hosea or the other angry Minor prophets of the Bible.”5 When the after-reading party moved to a Chinese restaurant (also detailed by Kerouac in The Dharma Bums), Rexroth told Ginsberg excitedly that “Howl” would be the poem that would make Ginsberg famous in America. Ferlinghetti, the owner of San Francisco’s City Lights Books and the publisher of the Pocket Poets series, immediately returned to his home and wrote Ginsberg a letter celebrating his reading and asking, “when do I get the manuscript?”6 With the idea of the poem being published, Ginsberg returned to revising it. After dozens of drafts, Ginsberg still felt that there had to be an upbeat end. Finally he crafted the coda to Howl, the section that uses the touchstone word “Holy” around which to revolve. In late 1955, Ginsberg felt the poem was ready to be seen by more than just his West Coast cronies and sent copies to both his father (nervously


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because of the intense personal nature of the poem) and to his old mentor William Carlos Williams. Williams was enthusiastic overall, but did suggest some revisions, noting that he had agreed to write the introduction to Ferlinghetti’s volume of Ginsberg’s work as soon as it as completed. Louis Ginsberg read it with enthusiasm, although, presaging the furor to come, advised his son to use a much lighter hand when it came to obscenities. Finally in April 1956, the manuscript came together. Williams’s introduction had arrived and it was insightful and funny as well. Writing that he had worried about Ginsberg’s ability to “survive” after meeting him for the first time, he added that “Howl” was a poem not about the evil of the world, but about the responses to the evil of the world—love. CRITICAL RECEPTION In August 1956, Ginsberg had seen the galleys of Howl and Other Poems and found himself, after a few small changes, overall pleased with this work. When the book hit the stands, others agreed. Poet Richard Eberhart singled out Ginsberg as the best young poet working on the West Coast at the time. Rexroth compared him to populist poets like Vachel Lindsay. However, many poets and reviewers did not see the genius within it. James Dickey, nationally known poet and author of Deliverance, called it “adolescent.”7 But the critic who may have been most important to Ginsberg’s mental well-being, was positive. In the letters that Ginsberg and his father exchanged, it was clear that Louis Ginsberg was proud of his son. Not everyone felt the same though, and a split began to develop between the poets who had lived on the West Coast their whole lives (Rexroth for instance and most vehemently) and those who had recently, because of media exposure, come to be associated with the San Francisco scene. Following the positive critical reception of Howl and Other Poems, the obscenity trial of the poem itself, and the overall popular acceptance of Ginsberg, reviewers tended to treat his work, even his lesser attempts, with kid gloves. Kaddish and Other Poems was released and received mixed reviews that, more than criticizing the actual writing, showed the public’s disillusionment with the Beat movement. The London Observer review read in part, “Kaddish and Other Poems…includes a series of pieces on a Beat’s best friend, his drugs.”8 Even the reviews that were generally positive were still somewhat backhanded. Harvey Shapiro in a review admitted, “Ginsberg has become such a public issue that it’s difficult to read him naturally.”9

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In 1971, City Lights released his volume of poetry Planet News. The book, a collection of poems dating from 1967, was released to, overall, more acclaim than ever. However, by the 1980s, it seemed as though Ginsberg’s best work was behind him. Like so many of the Beats before him, during his public appearances he often seemed to playing the part of Allen Ginsberg rather than forging new ground. His Collected Poems and an annotated version of Howl were the two major pieces of the time, as well as the most financially successful projects that he had undertaken. PROBLEMS OF PORNOGRAPHY The cognitive leap that lead Williams to understand that the poem was about how artistic minds respond to an unjust world would prove too far a leap for most readers to make. Howl and Other Poems would lead to fame, obscenity charges, and the opportunity for world travel. The first printing of Howl and Other Poems was prepared in England and then was originally passed through U.S. Customs before being sent on to San Francisco. It was the second edition that actually caused the uproar. This shipment while being shipped to San Francisco was examined by customs and was found to be obscene. In the meantime, to circumvent the problem, Ferlinghetti arranged for yet another edition of Howl and Other Poems to be printed in the United States, thus ensuring that the Customs Service would have no jurisdiction. At the same time, the American Civil Liberties Union (which had been supplied a copy of the book by Ferlinghetti himself) made a formal objection to the charges being put forth by Customs. On the local level, San Francisco plainclothes officers had purchased copies of Howl and Other Poems at City Lights bookstore and then promptly arrested the clerk and served a warrant for Ferlinghetti’s arrest. Captain William Hanrahan of the San Francisco Police, an outspoken proponent of censorship, claimed the arrest and adjudication of the obscenity charge was to provide precedent to ramp up the prosecution of obscene materials in the future. At first, the trial did not seem promising for Ginsberg—hearing the case was a judge who had recently sentenced five women to watch Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments movie after being convicted of shoplifting. Merits of the poem aside, the national press who flocked to the case overwhelmingly saw it is a comedy of errors and a case of overreaching on the part of customs and police. Both the prosecutors and defense brought in experts from local colleges.


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Like Kerouac’s work and its experience with fame, Ginsberg found the majority of America less interested in the poetic merit (or lack thereof) of his new poem, but rather which “dirty words” it contained and the sight of this wild-haired and patriarchal-bearded man who wrote them. However, like so many efforts such as these, the effort to silence Ginsberg’s poem because of obscenity only fueled the frenzied fire that led to its skyrocketing sales. Ferlinghetti himself admitted as much in an article in the San Francisco Chronicle writing that custom’s interference and the resulting publicity meant that “10,000 copies of Howl were in print by the time [customs] finished.”10 One of the most effective arguments against “Howl” being obscene is that of “journalism”; that is, the poet himself is only reporting the events of an obscene world—they are not products of his fevered imagination, but rather the result of what the Beats saw as the general sickness of the world (brought on in their opinion by the threat of nuclear annihilation).11 Finally on October 3, 1956, the judge issued his verdict, finding no basis in the claim that Howl and Other Poems was obscene, but he took the opportunity to add some guidelines to judging a work to be obscene, stating that even material that had the “slightest redeeming social importance”12 could not be found obscene and that language itself could not qualify a work of literature as obscene. SELECTED DISCUSSIONS OR PAPER IDEAS 1. “Howl” was written expressly as a response to what Ginsberg saw as the encroaching abuse of authority. How is that power presented in the text of the poem? In what ways does Ginsberg subvert that authority in the poem? 2. Does the use of obscenities make a work obscene? Does the obscenity trial of “Howl” weaken or strengthen the theme of the poem? 3. What is it about Ginsberg’s work that made his personality so attractive to the youth of many generations?

NOTES 1. Clark, Tom. The Great Naropa Poetry Wars. Richmond, VA: Cadmus, 1980: Back cover. 2. Merrill, Thomas. Allen Ginsberg, Boston: Twayne, 1998: 53. 3. “About ‘Howl’ in Performance,” Modern American Poetry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, http://www.english.uiuc.eou/maps/poets/g-l/ginsberg/ performance.htm.

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4. Merrill, Allen Ginsberg, preface. 5. Ibid., 50. 6. “A History of ‘Howl,’” City Lights Bookstore, http://citylights.com/his/ clhowlhist.html. 7. Dickey, James. “Review of Howl and Other Poems.” Sewanee Review. 65 (Summer 1957): 510. 8. Alvarez, A. “The Hero Instinct.” On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg. Ed. Lewis Hyde. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984: 185. 9. Shapiro, Harvey. “Exalted Lament.” Midstream. August 1961: 754. 10. Merrill, Thomas. Allen Ginsberg. Boston: Twayne, 1998: 61. 11. Ibid., 53. 12. Schumacher, Michael. Dharma Lion. New York: St. Martin’s, 1992: 264.

SUGGESTED READINGS Ginsberg, Allen. Collected poems: 1947–1980. New York: Harper and Row, 1985. ———. Howl and Other Poems. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1956. ———. Kaddish and Other Poems, 1958–1960. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1961. Schumacher, Michael. Dharma Lion. New York: St. Martin’s, 1992.

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William S. Burroughs Naked Lunch BIOGRAPHY “As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow ponge silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.”1 So begins a previously unpublished autobiographical sketch written by Burroughs, revealed in Ted Morgan’s biography of Burroughs’s Literary Outlaw. In a nutshell, the passage defines Burroughs and his writing—the dreamlike, yet acerbic quality of the writing and the deep sense of social satire that is easily missed by those reading strictly for the “truth.” Of all the major Beat writers, William S. Burroughs is the least critically explored. For all of his love both platonic and Dionysian for Kerouac and Ginsberg, Burroughs would often say that he didn’t feel quite comfortable being placed within the category of “Beat.” Ann Douglas, in her essay “Punching a Hole in the Big Lie,” suggests that not only was Burroughs’s methodology different from the Beats (he an ardent reviser of texts, whereas Kerouac and Ginsberg were believers in “first word, best word”) but also that Burroughs was uncomfortable even the meaning of the word “Beat.” Where Kerouac sought to align the old language of those down on their luck with the concept of beatific, Burroughs refused to see the concept of beatific as anything but an empty state of having “no fire, no intensity, no life.” Additionally, although elements of his life would show up in his own novels

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(although less and less as time passed), he wrote in the essay “Remember Jack Kerouac,” “To what extent writers can and do act out their writing in so-called real life, and how useful it is for their craft are open questions. That is, are you making your universe more like the real universe, or are you pulling the real one into you.” For Burroughs it was a zero-sum game, “Winner take nothing,” he concluded.2 Burroughs was born in 1914 to a prominent family in St. Louis, Missouri. His grandfather, William Seward Burroughs I, founded the Burroughs Adding Machine company, which evolved into the Burroughs Corporation. Burroughs’s mother, Laura Hammon Lee, was the daughter of a minister whose family claimed to be related to Robert E. Lee. His father, Mortimer Perry Burroughs ran an antique and gift shop, first in St. Louis and then in Palm Beach, Florida. Burroughs attended John Burroughs School (no relation) in St. Louis, Missouri, where his first published essay, “Personal Magnetism,” was published in the John Burroughs Review in 1929. He then attended The Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico. This period, although unexpectedly stressful for him, proved formative. There was a rifle range for practicing his marksmanship, a hobby he would keep up with his entire life. The range was open enough that he could prowl the ranch, throwing knives at trees. Artistically and sexually, he began to develop as well. He kept journals documenting an erotic attachment to another boy. These journals and the sentiments recorded within remained undiscovered, and he did not come out as a homosexual until well into adulthood. However, he was soon expelled from Los Alamos for poor morals of another kind—taking the sedative chloral hydrate in Santa Fe with several fellow students. He finished high school at Taylor School in St. Louis and, in 1932, left home for an arts degree at Harvard University. At Harvard, he began to perfect his el hombre invisible persona. Feeling out of place among the wealthy Easterners, he withdrew and did as little as possible and spoke to as few of his peers as possible. Primarily, his claim to fame at Harvard was the keeping of a pet ferret, Sredni Vashtar (named after a gruesome Saki short story), that terrorized both his few friends and the cleaning lady. His fascination with firearms continued and nearly cost his friend Richard Stern, another wealthy Midwestern, his life when in a moment of horseplay, Burroughs pulled the trigger on a his handgun believing that it wasn’t loaded. Luckily, just moments earlier, Stern had knocked the barrel away and the bullet came to rest in the wall, rather than in Stern’s stomach. Burroughs graduated from Harvard University with a degree in English Literature in 1936. After leaving Harvard, Burroughs traveled to Europe,


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which provided a window into Austrian and Hungarian Weimar-Era homosexuality; he picked up boys in steam baths in Vienna, and moved in a circle of exiles, homosexuals, and runaways. In Austria, Burroughs met Ilse Klapper, a Jewish woman fleeing the country’s Nazi government. The two were never romantically involved, but Burroughs married her in Croatia to allow her to gain a U.S. visa. She made her way to New York City, and eventually divorced Burroughs, although they remained friends for many years. Burroughs enrolled as a graduate student of Anthropology at Harvard and later enrolled briefly at Medical School in Vienna, Austria. In the early 1940s he lived in New York City and worked for an advertising agency. He found himself deeply in love with a man named Jack Anderson. When Anderson broke off their relationship, Burroughs methodically purchased a pair of poultry shears and cut off the end of his left little finger. After taking the tip to his analyst, Burroughs found himself committed for close to a month before being released to the custody of his parents, still in St. Louis. To escape the dullness of St Louis after the life of hustlers in New York, Burroughs decided to join the war effort. He failed the Navy physical and was turned down for the American Field Service and the new O.S.S. (forerunner of the C.I.A.). Burroughs felt that if he were able to get a pilot’s license, despite his poor eyesight, he might be able to enter the Glider Corps. However, even though he was awarded his pilot’s license, the Glider Corps did refuse him, because of his eyesight. Finally, after being rejected by his chosen methods of helping in the war effort, Burroughs, through strings pulled by his father, took a job at a New York Advertising Agency. But ironically, in the late winter of 1942, Burroughs was drafted into the Army. He was sent back to St Louis for Basic Training. Furious that he was being drafted into the Infantry as I-A after being unable to volunteer in the capacity of his choice, he called his father who bailed him out by releasing his psychiatric papers to the military who had to admit that even during wartime they weren’t interested in someone with all of Burroughs’s problems. Free of his military obligation, Burroughs headed to Chicago, where he felt jobs would be available because of the lack of ablebodied men. He was right, but he hadn’t anticipated how much he would hate work. He took a variety of jobs that lasted no more than a couple weeks before he left or was fired. The only job, tellingly, that he was able to hold for months rather than weeks was that of an exterminator—a figure who would show up in his later writing.

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While living in Chicago and shifting in the wind, he was visited by his friends Lucien Carr and his constant, adoring shadow, David Kammerer. Carr was a well- to-do, attractive, ne’er-do-well, and Kammerer was a heavily bearded man twice Carr’s age, who had not only been Carr’s teacher, but was deeply in love with the avowedly heterosexual Carr. Although a seemingly innocent visit, their arrival would put an array of wheels into motion. Carr was drinking heavily, Burroughs was at loose ends, and Kammerer had dedicated his life to his insane pursuit of Carr. Finally, after a long drinking jag, Carr made a half-serious suicide attempt and his family whisked him off to New York City’s Columbia University in the spring of 1943. With nothing holding them in Chicago, both Burroughs and Kammerer followed Carr to the city. Rejecting his background, Burroughs plunged into an alternative lifestyle that included drugs, odd jobs, and bisexuality. While working in the shipyards of New York, he became addicted to heroin. In New York, he met Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. By this time, Burroughs had already been developing the mode of dress that would be commented on by so many of those who met him. Deliberately confounding the expectations of those meeting an artist whose writings were exercises in excess, Burroughs presented himself as a simple aesthete. In Writers at Work, he is described as well-dressed, in his typical Brooks Brothers three-piece suit: “At the age of fifty, he is trim: he performs a complex abdominal exercise daily. . . He did not smile during the interview and laughed only once…He might have been a senior partner in a private bank [or] a diplomat.”3 In 1944, Burroughs began living with Joan Vollmer in an apartment they shared with Kerouac and Edie Parker, Kerouac’s first wife. Vollmer was married to a GI with whom she had a young daughter, Julie Adams. Like Burroughs, Vollmer also became a drug addict, but her drug of choice was an amphetamine, Benzedrine, which was sold over-the-counter as a decongestant inhalant at that time. Vollmer would become Burroughs’s common-law wife. It was here and at this time, that Burroughs began what he would call his “routines.” The germinating Beat Generation players would improvise farcical skits. Burroughs, for example, would act out the role of a prissy English Governess. He would call out in a high falsetto, “My dear, your just in time for tea!” Or, rapping the offender on the knuckles shriek, “Don’t say those dirty words in front of everybody!” He would also don a skirt and wig and play a “sinister old lesbian” contessa/art dealer with Jack Kerouac as his bumpkin shill. Another of Bill’s favorite roles was Old Luke, the Southern


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sharecropper, rocking on the front porch with his shotgun over his knees (in real life Burroughs was obsessed with guns).4 When Lucien Carr killed his deluded stalker, David Kammerer, in self-defense, it was Burroughs whom he turned to. While Carr ignored Burroughs’s sound advice—to turn himself in and explain that the killing was done only after Kammerer had threatened violence and attempt to force sex upon him, the contact was enough to land Burroughs in questioning for failing to report a murder. Soon, Burroughs began using morphine and quickly became addicted. Later, in many interviews, he would say that he became an addict simply because he was bored. He eventually sold heroin in Greenwich Village to support his habit. In 1945, Burroughs and Kerouac collaborated on And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a mystery novel based on the Carr-Kammerer incident that was left unpublished. They took turns writing the chapters in a hard-boiled noir style. Although they did find representation for the (by Burroughs’s later standards) very traditional text, it was unable to sell. Years later, in the documentary What Happened to Kerouac?, Burroughs described it as “not a very distinguished work.”5 However, as late as 1952, Kerouac was still trying to find a home for the manuscript. In a letter to the editor Carl Solomon, Kerouac attempted to sell the virtues of the book suggesting (perhaps falsely) that it was shocking and sensational, adding, “Bill [Burroughs] himself would approve of this move, we spent a year on it, [sic] Lucien was mad, wanted us to bury it under a floorboard.”6 Despite the shabby way he had been treated, Burroughs still kept in touch with Jack Anderson. Burroughs was feeling bored and directionless, when Anderson mentioned that he knew a man who had stolen a submachine gun and boxes of morphine Syrettes. (A medical device from World War II, Syrette is the proper, trademarked name for a small tube of morphine with an attached hypodermic needle. The drug is injected by shallowly piercing the skin with the needle then squeezing the tube.) Burroughs, always in love with the idea of being a part of the underworld, impulsively said that he would take it off his hands even though up to this point he had not experimented with narcotics. Once they were delivered, Burroughs, through a friend of a friend, found someone who was interested in buying the stolen goods—Herbert Huncke. Huncke was a hustler, hood, and junky, who hung out in the all-night diners of Times Square, becoming known as the “Mayor of 42nd Street.” After meeting and associating with the Beats, he published work of his own. His autobiography, Guilty of Everything, was written during the heyday of the

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Beat Generation, but not published until 1990. Sometime after first meeting Burroughs, he became a friend to the rest of the Beat Generation writers, and his crimes were instrumental in the series of events that led to Ginsberg’s committal. Before delivering the goods to Huncke and his friend Phil White, Burroughs tried one of the Syrettes and found it to be a pleasurable experience. When White showed up to pick up the gun and drugs, Burroughs pulled four of the fourteen boxes of Syrettes out of the deal for his own personal use. Soon that pleasant experimentation led to an addiction. The addiction led to Burroughs’s arrest for forging a narcotics prescription. Being in jail and in withdrawal must have seemed like hell to Burroughs, but before long, Joan Vollmer showed up to bail him out and give him the unpleasant news that his parents, who had up to this point had little notion of what their youngest son was up to, had been informed of the arrest and charges. He was sentenced to serve a four-month suspended sentence by returning to his parents’ care in St. Louis. While back in Missouri, Burroughs met up with an old friend Kels Elvins and the two of them developed a plan to get into farming in East Texas. Burroughs convinced his parents, under the guise of making a fresh start to pay for the purchase of 50 acres of land and Burroughs made his move to become a farmer, which he knew little to nothing about. While in Texas, he received the news that Joan Vollmer had been committed due to extreme psychosis brought on by Benzedrine addiction. Burroughs returned to New York, released Vollmer from the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital, and moved with her and her daughter to Texas. On the drive back to Texas, they hatched upon the idea of growing a new cash crop, marijuana. Leaving Elvins behind to help manage the east Texas farm, Vollmer and Burroughs moved into a new farm, almost twice the size of Burroughs’s old one, north of Houston, with a dilapidated house. Shortly thereafter, Huncke joined them, and the marijuana crop was planted; the farm became a very strange vision of domestic farming life, Beat generation style. Although the marijuana grew well, no one at the Burroughs’s ranch knew how to process it—combining all the plants, stalk and all, male and female together; they drove it, uncured to sell in New York City. No one would touch the ditchweed, and all of Burroughs work and planning was sold for $100, much less than 10 percent of what he had expected to make. He announced that he was done with farming. Vollmer soon became pregnant with Burroughs’s child. Their son, William S. Burroughs Jr. was born in 1947. Burroughs’s saw no reason to stay on the


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farm if he wasn’t going to be a farmer, so he put the land up for sale and the family moved to New Orleans in 1948. Here the family deteriorated. Burroughs was in the midst of a particularly deep narcotic addiction, and Joan was spiraling further down into Benzedrineinspired madness. The children were filthy and wild. The house itself was clean because Joan, while in the midst of a tooth-grinding amphetamine high, would attempt to expend some of her energy through housecleaning. In 1949, Burroughs was arrested after police searched his home and found letters between Burroughs and Ginsberg referring to a possible delivery of marijuana. The illegal search infuriated Burroughs. He was continuing to develop his ideas about political control and the concept of a lost frontier where identity was fluid and laws few. Finally, Burroughs fled to Mexico to escape possible detention in Louisiana’s Angola state prison. Vollmer and their children followed him to wait out the statute of limitations on his case. Burroughs felt that Mexico was more libertarian in its views towards the private lives of individuals; this was a country where he hoped to able to make a new start. He did made a new start, although it was of a horrible type, which he could not have envisioned. He would not move back to America for almost a quarter century. While in Mexico he took advantage of his honorable discharge to sign up for GI Bill money, enrolling at Mexico City College. Although he was happy with his new freedom and source of income, Joan found the going a bit rough. Without a steady supply of her asthma inhalers to crack to get at the Benzedrine, she tuned to drinking more and more and attempted to find some solace in illegal thyroid-treatment pills. The relationship between Burroughs and Vollmer was a strange one. Burroughs claimed to be misogynistic, and distrusted women strongly. He was almost entirely homosexual in his preference and showed little to no physical affection towards his wife. Vollmer, who, before drug abuse had ravaged her, had been a beautiful young woman, was happy to make house for Bill and seemed to love him deeply. In On the Road, Kerouac captured their relationship: “She loved that man madly, but in a delirious way of some kind; there was never any mooching and mincing around, just talk and a very deep companionship that none of us would ever be able to fathom. Something curiously unsympathetic and cold between them was really a form of humor by which they communicated their own set of subtle vibrations. Love is all; Jane was never more than ten feet away from Bull and never missed a word he said, and he spoke in a very low voice, too.”7 Beyond that though, Burroughs felt that he was connected in some mystical way to Vollmer. They had a well-honed party trick in which they would

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each draw figures on a piece of paper and often the figures were the same, as if they were one person split into two, or as if there was a metahuman link between the two. Finally, though, Burroughs himself would break that link. In 1951, Burroughs accidentally shot and killed Vollmer in a drunken game of William Tell at a party above an American-owned bar in Mexico City. Vollmer placed a glass on top of her head, and Burroughs shot at it with the gun he carried—missing tragically and Vollmer fell dead. Searching to understand what happened, Burroughs delved deeply into his belief in magic, fate, and altered states of time and reality, and in the end he believed that he had, literally, been possessed by an evil spirit. He said this not in an attempt for absolution, but as an explanation of personal weakness. If he had fought more strongly, the demon would not have been able to overtake him and Joan would still be alive. Burroughs later said that shooting Vollmer was a pivotal event in his life, and one which instigated his writing: “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would have never become a writer but for Joan’s death . . . I live with the constant threat of possession, for control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invador [sic], the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a life long struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.”8 It was a theory that a court, even a corrupt Mexican one, was unlikely to take. His lawyer advised him immediately to begin distributing bribes and claim that the gun had gone off as he was showing it off to members of the party. He spent 13 days in jail before posting bond. The killing was ruled accidental, but as a condition of his release, Burroughs was expected to stay in Mexico City until the case was tried, when in all likelihood, he would be deported back to the United States, where a Louisiana prison awaited him. In April of 1952 though, with all the concerns piling on him, Burroughs was contacted by Ginsberg. Ginsberg relayed the good news that the publisher A. A. Wyn had purchased the Junky manuscript for $1,000. By the 1960s, Burroughs would say that he was not too impressed with Junky in retrospect, because there wasn’t much to it and he did not know enough about writing at the time, but at the same time it brought him a windfall when he needed it the most. However, the happiness would not last for long. Burroughs’s lawyer was involved in a fatal traffic accident and skipped the country rather than face charges himself. In an act that in retrospect seems self-destructive, Burroughs willingly forfeited his $2,000 bail and instead drove north, back into the United States. He was able to make a border crossing without problems. He headed for Palm Springs, Florida to spend Christmas with his parents and


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son, (who was being raised by Burroughs’s parents; Vollmer’s daughter from her previous marriage had been returned to her maternal grandparents) and then headed back to South America, one step ahead of the charges he now had pending against him in two countries. Burroughs drifted through South America for several months, looking for a hallucinatory drug called yage, or ayahuasca, which could supposedly ease opiate addiction. He produced his novel Queer (a book exploring his homosexuality) during this time, and also compiled his correspondence with Allen Ginsberg about his search for and experiences with yage as The Yage Letters. In 1953, Ace Books published his first novel, Junky, under the pen name William Lee. The Yage Letters and Queer were not published until 1963 and 1985 respectively. In 1954, he moved to the place that he came to be most identified with— Tangier, Morocco. With all that he had lived through, he was still only 40 years old. Tangier, at the time, was a place where Burroughs felt he would be able to be free. When Burroughs moved there, Tangier was officially an international zone (a term Burroughs would use in Naked Lunch, truncating it to “Interzone”). Tangier had a multi-national government, including more than one currency and a polyglot population. It was a free port with few rules on citizenship or taxes or even banking regulations. Drugs were openly available, as were male prostitutes of all ages. It was a hotbed of smuggling and lawlessness. Tangier was a place where people found themselves after aimless wandering or where they were forced to go to keep a low profile. Very few people chose Tangier as a destination; it seemed as though Tangier chose them. One of the people who Burroughs met in Tangier was the artist Brion Gysin, a high-living artist who would not only be a close friend to him, but also a strong, invaluable influence on his textual experiments. Not only that, Gysin introduced him to American expatriate writer and Tangier resident Paul Bowles. Bowles enjoyed Burroughs’s company but felt that Burroughs never really made his home in Tangier. Bowles felt that Burroughs never made an attempt to understand Tangier or made a move to understand the Islamic culture. Burroughs left Tangier in September 1956 and headed for London for a new experimental treatment for heroin addiction using the drug apomorphine to blunt withdrawal. Although he hated London, he found the cure remarkably effective and was able to kick his addictions for the first time in years. Ironically, for a man whose name would become synonymous with heroin addiction, Burroughs did not feel that drugs were necessary, or even helpful

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to the artistic endeavor, saying in the Writers at Work interview, “[Drugs] are absolutely contra-indicated for creative work, and I include in the lot alcohol, morphine, barbiturates, tranquilizers—the whole spectrum.”9 Returning to Tangier, he began writing manically. Although off narcotics, Burroughs was freely consuming marijuana. As he wrote, he tossed the typewritten pages on the floor behind him as if once written the thoughts had been exorcised and could be left behind. Paul Bowles, on a visit, was appalled at his lack of care and amazed when Burroughs said that when he assembled the pages they would work themselves out. A section of this large body of text, that he personally referred to as The Word Hoard, would later become Naked Lunch. The trunk of manuscripts known as The Word Hoard that produced Naked Lunch also produced the later works The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket that Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1963). In 1957, Burroughs was pleased to hear that Kerouac would be coming to visit him in Tangier. Under the influence of marijuana, Ginsberg and Kerouac helped Burroughs edit the free-form writings into Naked Lunch. However, the writing and the subject matter were so foreign and strange to Kerouac, that at night he suffered from nightmares of having his guts drawn from his mouth like sausages. When he asked Burroughs what the book meant, Burroughs told him that he wasn’t sure, “I’m apparently some kind of agent from another planet but I haven’t got my orders clearly decoded yet.”10 Burroughs’s ideas on writing have never been orthodox. “My basic theory is that the written word was actually a virus,” he once said, “that made the spoken word possible. The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host.”11 Kerouac stayed in Tangier for about a month. He left the day after two more visitors showed up to see Burroughs: Allen Ginsberg and his lover Peter Orlovsky. Ginsberg picked up where Kerouac had left off, helping Burroughs to organize and edit the manuscript. Although Burroughs was glad to see them both, there was some tension—Burroughs had nursed a crush on Ginsberg for sometime and a few years earlier, Ginsberg had humiliatingly rejected him. To see Ginsberg now with Orlovsky was difficult for Burroughs. Finally, Ginsberg and Orlovksy moved on to Europe. A short time later, in January of 1958, Burroughs left Tangier, which he had grown to dislike (familiarity breeding contempt), and went to Paris to meet up with Ginsberg. In Paris, Burroughs stayed at the infamous “Beat Hotel,” a run-down boarding house where the rooms were cheap, and the proprietress didn’t concern herself with what her guests did in their private lives. Brion Gysin followed


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him soon after and it was here that the two would begin to develop the “cut up” and “fold in” theory of writing. Early in 1961, the transition between Beat and hippie continued to grow. Timothy Leary, under the suggestion of Ginsberg wrote Burroughs and asked him if he would like to try the hallucinogenic mushrooms that Leary was dispensing to various people as part of a psychological study. When Burroughs said yes, it was an important moment, at least culturally. Ginsberg, Cassady, and Burroughs all agreed to experiment with psychedelics, and thus, were more easily embraced by the nascent hippie movement. Kerouac was not embraced by the hippie movement, and by the time of his death, had become largely irrelevant culturally. However, Burroughs did not have good experiences with mushrooms or acid, and soon came to see Leary as nothing more than a showman looking for the adulation of the youthful. He had little sympathy for Leary when he was fired from Harvard. Back in Tangier in 1963, Burroughs’s son Billy, now 16, came to live with him, but they could not get along. Burroughs Sr. indulged himself endlessly in easily available drugs and sex. He was easy on his son when Billy Jr. dropped out of school, and he turned a blind eye as his homosexual friends made advances on the boy. He let Billy Jr. smoke marijuana along with the others. Because of his philosophy about rules and power relationships, Burroughs Sr. was not a fatherly authority figure, and he rarely prohibited Billy Jr. from doing anything. Billy Jr. soon found that a lack of availability of rebellion lead to apathy. A few months later Billy returned to Palm Beach to live with his grandparents again. Burroughs Sr. stayed in Tangier until early 1965 when he moved back to his home country and settled in New York City. This move would also spark a dramatic change in Burroughs’s life. He quickly became an underground star, and artists wanted to meet him. Burroughs was solicitous, mostly. According to Ted Morgan, he found Andy Warhol and his entourage rude and boorish, and left in the middle of dinner. He would stay in New York for only a year, but his short stay planted seeds for his return a few years later. In 1966, he moved to London, a city which he had never shown much affection for previously. While he was there, writing and hobnobbing with the Beatles, his son Billy, unbeknownst to him, had started a run of selfdestruction, which was impressive even within the Beat community. He was an alcoholic and a drug taker and had been arrested repeatedly. When Burroughs found out, he made plans for Billy to come stay with him in London, but Billy backed out every time arrangements for the move was solidified. Burroughs came to the United States and with the help of a lawyer, convinced a judge to give Billy probation if he agreed to detox treatment.

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Billy agreed and went to the Federal Narcotics Farm in Lexington, Kentucky. He was not yet 20 years old. Burroughs flew back to London. In 1974, Burroughs moved to New York City where Ginsberg helped him find work, teaching writing at City College of New York, and while in New York City, he got hooked on heroin again. When his appointment was up at City College, the University of Buffalo offered him a position, but it was also in the early 1970s that his fame within the popular culture exploded, mostly due to astute public relation moves on the part of his former lover and then personal secretary James Grauerholz. In 1973, Burroughs had met James Grauerholz. At first he was Burroughs’s lover, then his manager, and it was through Grauerholz’s care and suggestions that Burroughs was able stay off narcotics and to make a living, not only as a writer, but by simply being Burroughs. He started reading tours, like Ginsberg, and realized that audiences ate up his deadpan, gravel-voiced delivery of his characters. Grauerholz helped convince Burroughs to take his reading on the road, telling him that people would pay to see him do his routines. The combination of Burroughs’s conservative dress and voice, with the outlandish subject matter made a Burroughs’s performance irresistible. Colleges like Notre Dame began asking him to come. According to Ted Morgan, “between 1974 and 1984 [Burroughs] had done 150 readings . . . for a total income of $75,000.”12 It was a healthy move for Burroughs emotionally as well as financially. Being on the road forced him to meet new people, to network and to break away from his old habit of sitting in rooms and staring at the walls. He read on double bills with writers from Stephen King to Tennessee Williams, LeRoi Jones and John Ashbery. The 1970s also saw Burroughs join, then leave, the Church of Scientology. His subsequent critical writings about the church and his review of a book entitled Inside Scientology by Robert Kaufman led to a battle of letters between Burroughs and Scientology supporters that played out in the pages of Rolling Stone. By 1974, Billy Burroughs Jr.’s behavior had worsened to the point that his body was beginning to give up on him. Vomiting blood, he was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver. Living at the Naropa Institute at the time, he was close to Colorado General Hospital in Denver—only one of two places in the United States at the time that would consider a liver transplant. Billy went on the list, and at the last possible moment in 1977, received a liver transplant. Although, perhaps, it would have been kinder for him not have. Psychologically Billy could not adjust. He felt like the liver (which was from a woman) was an invader that made him somehow less than himself.


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The surgery had scarred him brutally and left him with an colostomy bag. He left the hospital and immediately began drinking again with his friend John Steinbeck Jr., another son of a famous, though troubled American author. Amazingly, he lasted for another four years. Four years proved to be enough time for countless painful surgical procedures, countless fights and a few visits with his father and a tell-all article for Esquire, in which he said that his life was “ruined” by his father’s actions and that his father’s friends had molested him in Tangier. Finally in 1981, he shaved his head (after long cultivating scraggly hair and beard giving the appearance of a wino) and went for a walk. He was found the next morning, dead in a ditch. The estrangement between father and son was never reconciled. In spite of that, Burroughs wrote an afterward to a 1993 compilation of his son’s books. While his son was doing his best to end his own life, Burroughs was also taking a backslide. The stress of New York City was uncomfortable for Grauerholz. and in 1979, he told Burroughs that he was moving back to his hometown of Lawrence, Kansas for a little while, to get his bearings. Burroughs was saddened to see him go, but continued his life as an underground art world star in Manhattan. However, without Grauerholz to help him organize his life, he became, once again, addicted to heroin. The late seventies were a renaissance for heroin and junkies. Prices were less expensive than they had been in decades and availability was up. Beyond that, the drug had gained a foothold of cool within the art scene of New York City. Being a junkie had become a punk badge of honor, rather than a shameful weakness. Saddled with the tragedy of his son’s life and surrounded by a coterie of junkie friends, Burroughs was soon addicted again. In late 1980, Burroughs took the methadone cure; this was last time the most famous addict in America would have to kick junk. A few months later in March of 1981, he received the news that his son had been found dead in a ditch. He threw himself into his work and readings, widening his audience until in November, Burroughs appeared on the popular American TV show Saturday Night Live, where he was introduced as America’s greatest living writer. A few months later, he began the last chapter of his life, by moving to be with Grauerholz in the countryside outside Lawrence, Kansas. In May of 1981, the gentrification of the Beat Generation continued with Burroughs’s acceptance to an induction invitation from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. That acceptance continued in both the underground and traditional entertainment worlds. Burroughs collaborated with director Robert Wilson and musician Tom Waits to create The Black Rider, a play which opened at the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg,

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Germany in 1990, to critical acclaim, and was later performed all over Europe and the United States. He also worked with groups like Nirvana and film directors like Gus Van Sant. As his writing output slowed to books like The Cat Inside, a short volume discussing his affection for the cats who had shared his life and what the cat represented in society, he turned to other media for his creative output. He exhibited so-called action paintings, produced by shooting cans of paint with a shotgun. They were warmly received and sold out as soon as they were hung in the gallery—many times, even before. Burroughs died at age 83 in Lawrence, at 6:50 p.m. on August 2, 1997, from complications of a heart attack he had suffered the previous day. He is interred in a family plot in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri. It is a testament to how mainstream the Beat generation has become that Burroughs was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame in St. Louis, Missouri along with Joe Garagiola and Joseph Pulitzer. Not that his induction would have phased Burroughs. He told his biographer, Ted Morgan, “Twenty years ago, they were saying I belonged in jail. Now they’re saying I belong in their club. I didn’t listen to them then, and I don’t listen to them now.”13 In 2006, the final, and one of the most important developments in the continued life of Burroughs’s writing, took place. The New York Public Library purchased his archive of 11,000 pages, much of it unseen by anyone. The archive also includes diaries, artwork, and tape recordings. The archive is planned to be opened to researchers in 2007 and the resulting books, essays, and articles that will flow from the previously unseen work will continue to change the understanding of this most protean member of the Beat Generation. SYNOPSIS OF NAKED LUNCH It is difficult to summarize a text that is almost anti-novelistic. However, because some sort of structure must be imposed upon a book for it to be readable, several plot elements can be sifted out. Echoing and parodying popular American writing of the time, such as hard-boiled detective stories and science fiction, Burroughs added more than few nightmarish images as well. The characters include secret agents, mad doctors (Dr. Benway, whose cures almost always seem worse than the disease), gangsters, and extraterrestrials, who are not only wound up in plots to take over the universe, but also stop from time to time to take part in vast sadomasochistic orgies. Naked Lunch is regarded as Burroughs’s masterpiece, the template for all his work. It is, at the same time, a roman à clef autobiography, a literary


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experiment in form, and a social critique, which takes the form of wicked black humor and satire. But, for a first-time reader, the book can seem impenetrable. Naked Lunch is a text that demands a plan of attack. Tim Murphy in his essay “Intersection Points: Teaching William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch,” suggests that to understand the strangeness of the book, first one much understand its familiarity. “Burroughs’s formal experimentation will appear less radically alien if it can be compared with one of Gertrude Stein’s permutational narratives, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Dos Passos’s USA, or Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Likewise, Burroughs’s scatology will appear less shocking and unprecedented if it can be juxtaposed to the carnivalesque sexuality of Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood or the heterosexism of Henry Miller and Norman Mailer.”14 Edward Ahearn, in his essay “The Sordid Sublime,” points out that in Naked Lunch’s “Atrophied Preface,” the general story line is abstracted, “Lee the Agent. . .is taking the junk cure.”15 This “junk cure,” as well as the experience of drug use leading to addiction, involves hallucination and a bending of time and space. However, it may be best understood as a weakly connected collection of the “routines” that had their genesis in the strange plays that Burroughs and Kerouac were so fond of in the early days of their friendship in Manhattan. Naked Lunch consists of many loosely related vignettes (what Burroughs called “routines”), in which several characters, such as the sadistic, sociopath and borderline-incompetent Dr. Benway, reappear. The main character is agent Bill Lee, a pseudonym for Burroughs—Lee was his mother’s maiden name. (Burroughs also appears in Kerouac’s On the Road as “Old Bull Lee” and used the pseudonym William Lee for his first novel, Junky, and for his second novel, Queer). The other characters that fill out the ranks are all in some way outsiders to the American mainstream consciousness: Lee’s friend Bill Gains; Clem and Jo, who are vaudevillians; AJ, a grifter; and Doc Parker, a Southern drawl-inflected pharmacist. The book’s structure anticipates the cut-up technique Burroughs would later employ in novels, such as the so-called “Nova Trilogy” (The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express). The stories draw from his experiences in Tangier and his life in America and Mexico, as well as the tour through South America he undertook after shooting his common-law wife Joan Vollmer in the head while playing a drunken game of William Tell. Throughout this period he became addicted to several drugs (notably heroin and morphine). The novel’s mix of taboo fantasies, peculiar creatures (like the predatory Mugwumps), and eccentric personalities, all serve to unmask mechanisms and processes of control—to “reveal what is at the end of every

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fork.” The title was suggested by Burroughs’s friend Jack Kerouac. The novel is a particularly grand illustration of Burroughs’s skill with dialogue. Much of its structure was planned by Allen Ginsberg, who gathered the scraps of paper that he found scattered around in Burroughs’s room. The book consists of 21 satirical pieces that purport to lay bare the horrors of reality; hence the title, a naked lunch allows the diners to “see what they eat.” The book also tries to find from its use of drugs and homosexuality a philosophical statement—addiction as metaphor for the human condition. BURROUGHS’S TEXTUAL EXPERIMENTS When examining Burroughs’s work as a whole, it becomes easier to see a trend emerge in terms of stylistic experiment. His first books, Junky and Queer are straightforward novels with linear narratives and traditional exposition. Naked Lunch, represents a leap forward in experimental work and, although still retaining certain characteristics of traditional work (a repetitive pattern, for example, as well as somewhat of a structural format, and the use of a first person narrator) begin to use Burroughs’s emerging cut-up theory. Burroughs’s later work would vacillate between these two poles. Whereas Junky and Queer were conventional in style, Naked Lunch is his first venture into a non-linear style which shortly thereafter led him into experimenting with his “cut-up” technique—physically slicing manuscripts into phrases and words to create new sentences. He was inspired by his friend, Brion Gysin, who had been employing the same technique with his paintings. Scenes were slid together with little care for narrative. In September of 1959, when Burroughs was living in Paris, close friend Brion Gysin accidentally sliced through a stack of newspapers and some back issues of Time and Life magazines. (He had been using them to buffer some cutting he was doing with a utility blade.) Gysin noticed that where the cutup strips had rearranged and overlapped, they created new texts. He realized that gluing the resultant texts onto a blank page generated a new kind of text, with strange new ideas, words images, and connections. He was not the first to experiment with the concept. Both the artist Marcel Duchamp and the economist Von Neumann had introduced protocut-up ideas about art and culture, but Burroughs became obsessed with his friend’s new “cut-ups” technique. He cut up his own texts and those of poet friends, reveling in the startling new meanings and insights that resulted from these chaos infused texts. Although it may be too generous to say that the approach prompted the true understanding of the actual


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meanings of words, it is true that certain thematic elements—sex, drugs, power relationships—became predominate in these experiments. Like the Deconstructionist literary critics, who would rise to prominence decades after Burroughs began his cut-ups, he soon began to believe that “the only way to find out what people were really saying was to cut up their words and get at the meanings hidden inside.”16 In an interview with the Paris Review in 1965, he suggested that the cut-up method interested him, because he felt it was a way of decoding, and thus defeating the carefully selected, pre-planned, and “spun” messages the Western World fed to its population. Burroughs then expanded his cut-up theory to involve other media. He spliced tape recorded conversations and then transcribed the results. He created collage-like film by splicing together film stock. He eventually created installments involving spliced together multi-media, combing films, photographs, newsreels, and recorded conversations. Burroughs became convinced that everyone was so conditioned by language that even that which they believed to be straight perception (via sight, sound, touch) was in fact an illusion, or a filtered version of reality, with the filters embedded in our language. (As Ginsberg wrote in his poem “America,” “America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.”) For Burroughs, via his “word virus” theory, the voice inside your head does not belong to you—rather it has been placed there by the messages we have internalized. One of the only ways to silence that controlling voice is by destroying logic in the associations it uses to control. These associations, however, are, in fact, illogical and exist only to perpetuate themselves. That logic can be interrupted via the cut-up. This theory of the cut-up is also tied into his ideas about addiction. Burroughs saw the drug addict as one who has given into allowing power to be wielded over him (also found in his interest in depicting sadomasochistic acts in his writings)—likewise, Burroughs believed that words themselves had been turned into tools of power and that by passively accepting media messages, people were allowing their minds to be controlled. He believed that consumers of media were allowing their thoughts and speech to be locked in step with conventional society. To Burroughs, the cut up was a way of exposing the message behind these words and stepping outside of the messages that society wanted its members to consume and replicate. Additionally, the cut-up serves to reinvent the English language by destroying its reliance on either/or dichotomies. To Burroughs language creates the being (rather than vice versa); therefore, this recreation of language could serve to recreate the entire human race.

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NAKED LUNCH AND OBSCENITY However, the novel’s sexually explicit language and grotesque images resulted in a ban, which was not lifted until 1966. Naked Lunch is considered Burroughs’s seminal work and one of the landmark publications in the history of American literature. Extremely controversial in both its subject matter and its use of (often obscene) language, the book was banned in many regions of the United States, and was one of the last American books to actually be put on trial for obscenity. The book was first published in France in 1959 by the infamous Olympia Press, with an English language edition by Grove Press followed soon after. The book was banned in some parts of the world for approximately ten years, though it found a quick release in France where Olympia Press published it soon after completion. The first American publisher to take a chance with the novel was Grove Press. In January of 1963, Boston police arrested a bookseller in a seedy part of town for selling Naked Lunch. In a brilliant move, the lawyer for the defense convinced the judge to try the book and not the seller and also waived his right to trial by jury. From the start, the trial was not quite as charged as the earlier trial of “Howl.” The prosecutor admitted off the record that he felt he had more important crimes to spend his time on than the charges against Naked Lunch. Witnesses compared the book to Dante’s Inferno and attempted to explain that the theme of the book was the abuse of power, rather than just a catalog of depravities. But even though the case looked favorable, it was not to be won. On March 23, 1965, the book was banned by Boston courts due to obscenity (notably child murder and pedophilic acts). The publisher immediately appealed the case to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, which heard arguments on October 8, 1965. Before they came to a decision however, the United States Supreme Court heard three obscenity cases and as a result, passed down the following guidelines. To be considered obscene, “The dominant theme of the material taken as whole appeals to a prurient interest in sex; the material is patently offensive because it affronts contemporary community standards relating to the description of representation of sexual matters; the material is utterly without redeeming social value.” A book had to be guilty of all three to be considered obscene. The Massachusetts court could not say that it was without social value (even though a dissent judge said that he found it to be “literary sewage”), and so the book was ruled not to be obscene. The rules set down meant that this was the last major literary censorship battle in the United States.17


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Upon publication, Grove Press added to the book supplementary material regarding the censorship battle, as well as an article written by Burroughs on the topic of drug addiction. In 2002, a “restored text” edition of Naked Lunch was published, with some new and previously suppressed material added. CRITICAL RECEPTION OF NAKED LUNCH In 1962, American writer Norman Mailer claimed that Burroughs was “the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.”18 Several literary critics treated Burroughs’s work harshly. For example Anatole Broyard and Philip Toynbee wrote devastating reviews of some of his most important books. In a short essay entitled “A Review of the Reviewers,” Burroughs answers his critics in this way: Critics constantly complain that writers are lacking in standards, yet they themselves seem to have no standards other than personal prejudice for literary criticism. . . . Such standards do exist. Matthew Arnold set up three criteria for criticism: 1. What is the writer trying to do? 2. How well does he succeed in doing it? . . . 3. Does the work exhibit “high seriousness”? That is, does it touch on basic issues of good and evil, life and death and the human condition. I would also apply a fourth criterion. . . . Write about what you know. More writers fail because they try to write about things they don’t know than for any other reason.19 Burroughs clearly indicates that he prefers to be evaluated against such classic criteria over being reviewed based on the reviewer’s personal reactions to a certain book. He specifically criticized Anatole Broyard for reading authorial intentionality into his works where there is none. Thus he distanced himself from the movement around New Criticism, by referring to the old school (as exemplified by Matthew Arnold). The state of Burroughs’s literary reputation is hotly debated. While often called one of the greatest and most influential writers of the twentieth century, a good number of critics consider him overrated. Still others consider his ideas and attitude towards life more influential than his actual prose. Prominent admirers of Burroughs’s work have included British critic and biographer Peter Ackroyd, and the authors J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Jean Genet, and Ken Kesey. Burroughs’s later works include The Soft Machine in 1961 and Nova Express in 1964. The Wild Boys, published in 1971, is set in the year 1988. The book tells the story of packs of adolescent guerrillas routing the forces of civilized

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nations and ravaging the earth. When wholesale slaughter erupts, the battle continues underground where the survivors evolve into The Wild Boys, hordes of pitiless homosexual warriors who move in and destroy the cities. Christopher Isherwood proclaimed Burroughs’s 1981 novel, Cities of the Red Night, as a masterpiece. Although it mixes a virus plague and CIA with a missing boy, intergalactic conspiracy, and an eighteenth-century pirate captain, it is considered one of Burroughs’s most coherent novels. The Place of Dead Roads in 1983 features gay cowboys. The Yage Letters, which was published in 1963, was based on Burroughs’s travels through the Amazon region of South America in search for the drug yage, the notorious “final fix.” Burroughs continues to be named as an influence by contemporary writers of fiction, including New Wave writers, and writers from cyberpunk schools of science fiction, including William Gibson. SUGGESTED DISCUSSIONS OR PAPER IDEAS 1. Most critics consider Burroughs to be the third leg of the Beat triumvirate, which includes Kerouac and Ginsberg. How does Burroughs’s work break away from the assumptions and stereotypes of the Beat Generation? 2. Although Naked Lunch is deliberately anti-novelistic in many ways, what characteristics does it share with more typical novels? 3. In what ways does Burroughs’s acceptance into popular culture (including the use of his image and voice in popular movies and commercials) reveal America’s overall view towards the Beat Generation?

NOTES 1. Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw. New York: Henry Holt, 1988: 39. 2. Grauerholz, James and Ira Silverberg eds. “Remembering Jack Kerouac.” Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader. New York: Grove, 2000: 382. 3. “William Burroughs.” Writers at Work. Ed. Malcom Cowley. New York: Viking, 1997: 143. 4. Morgan, Literary Outlaw, 98. 5. What Happened to Kerouac? Dir. Richard Lerner and Lewis Macamus. Short Factory, 2003. DVD. 6. Charters, Ann, ed. Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters 1940–1956. New York: Viking, 1995: 341–342. 7. Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Penguin, 1976: 146. 8. Morgan, Literary Outlaw, 198. 9. “William Burroughs.” Writers at Work, 146. 10. Morgan, Literary Outlaw, 263–264.


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11. Odier, Daniel Ed. The Job. New York: Penguin, 1989: 156. 12. Morgan, Literary Outlaw, 479. 13. Ibid., 13. 14. Murphy, Timothy S. “Intersection Points: Teaching William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch.” College Literature. Winter 2000: 89. 15. Ahearn, Edward. Visionary Fictions. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996: 104. 16. Miles, Barry. William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible. New York: Virgin, 2002: 227. 17. Morgan, Literary Outlaw, 346–347. 18. Ibid., 343. 19. Burroughs, William S. “A Review of the Reviewers” The Adding Machine. New York: Seaver, 1986.

SUGGESTED READINGS Burroughs, William, S. The Adding Machine: Collected Essays. Toronto: Arcade, 1993. ———. Junky: The Definitive Text of Junk. New York: Penguin, 2003. ———. Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs. New York: Grove Press, 2001. ———. Naked Lunch. New York: Grove Press, 1992. ———. Queer. New York: Penguin, 1987. ———. The Soft Machine. New York: Grove Press, 1992. ———. The Ticket That Exploded. New York: Grove Press, 1992. ———. A William Burroughs Reader. New York: Grove Press, 2001. ———. The Yage Letters. San Francisco: City Lights, 2006. Burroughs, William S. Jr. Cursed from Birth: The Short, Unhappy Life of William S. Burroughs Jr. San Francisco: Soft Skull Press, 2006. Johnson, Rob. The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs: Beats in South Texas. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2006. Miles, Barry. William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible. New York: Virgin Publishing, 2002.

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Neal Cassady The First Third BIOGRAPHY In July of 1959, Allen Ginsberg was asked to write a letter supporting Neal Cassidy’s parole from San Quentin prison. In part, he wrote, “Cassady has already a considerable literary reputation in [San Francisco] among local writers, since his identity as Dean Moriarty in the Kerouac book is well known. He was the subject of a study by the NY Post as a literary hero and his name is mentioned & discussed . . . in Germany, France, Denmark, etc. … He’s taken quite seriously & is well known as a U.S. literary figure in Europe.”1 What makes Ginsberg’s praise all the more interesting is the fact that at this time Cassady had published nothing. His writing consisted mostly of long rambling letters, which were passed from Beat to Beat like samizdat. His reputation was as a figure in literature, rather than a figure of literature. Neal Cassady was an icon of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the psychedelic movement of the 1960s, perhaps best known for his autobiographical work, The First Third, and as the inspiration for the character of Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s classic, On the Road. He is the figure who most clearly spans generations and most clearly provides a link between the countercultures of the 1950s and 1960s. Ironically, he is the least prolific and published of the Beat writers. Born in Salt Lake City on February 8, 1926 and raised in Denver by his father, who was an alcoholic barber, Cassady spent much of his youth bouncing between skid-row hotels and reform schools for car theft.

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In 1946, Cassady met Kerouac and Ginsberg at Columbia University in New York and quickly became friends with them and the circle of artists and writers there. He had a sexual relationship with Ginsberg that lasted off and on for the next twenty years, and he later traveled cross-country with Kerouac. Cassady was six when his parents separated and he went to live with his father in the slums of Denver. Exposed at an early age to poverty, alcoholism, and the despair to which men can be driven, young Cassady learned to use his intellect to move up in the world. As relayed in the book, Cassady learned how to survive in rough spots at an early age. At a young age, his brothers instituted a Darwinian relationship. His older brother, Jimmy, a boy who was cruel enough to flush kittens down the toilet and physically domineering enough to pummel his father, also took great joy in torturing young Cassady. Jimmy would close Cassady inside the wall within the framework of a Murphy bed. While trapped there, he would later recall, he was first able to begin to capture and manipulate his time and energy, eventually turning him not the restless dynamo who would make such an impact on the Beats. Neal became a good reader with an excellent memory, and eager to be liked by authority figures, he did well in school and pushed himself to be a good athlete, playing football and running track. While he was impressing teachers and coaches at school, he was also becoming involved in petty crime, eventually becoming a car thief. He had been arrested six times by the age of 21. Cassady frequently ran away from home, and around the age of 15, he began trading in on his good looks and working as a male prostitute. An attorney, the nephew of one of Cassady’s clients, took an interest in his welfare and endeavored to help him better himself. Besides helping him out of legal difficulties, he introduced Cassady to Hal Chase, a student at Columbia University. In 1946, Cassady moved to New York, along with his new 16-year-old wife, LuAnn Henderson. He was to have entered Columbia in the fall, thanks to the intervention of Chase, but did not reach the city until December. Though angry that Cassady had thrown away the opportunity to go to college, Chase introduced him to his friends, including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Both men took an interest in Cassady, and he and Ginsberg became lovers, though Cassady, like Kerouac, denied being homosexual and, unlike Kerouac, only had sex with men for money or some other consideration. In the case of Ginsberg, Cassady used him both as a tutor and as an entry into the intellectual crowd he admired. According to an interview with Carolyn Cassady completed after Neal’s death, “both Allen and Jack admired Neal’s brilliant mind and memory, as


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well as his energy. Allen, of course, was in love with Neal physically, but his descriptions of their coupling are Allen’s fantasies. As for Jack and Neal, in some ways it was a case of opposites attracting. Jack was terribly selfconscious, shy and gauche. Neal was confident, polite. He could relate to anyone on their own level. Neal approached women easily—Jack had great difficulty, so he admired and envied all these things in Neal that he lacked himself. Neal admired Jack’s writing ability and his way of describing sensory perceptions.”2 Cassady only remained in New York for a few months before returning to Denver. In 1948 he finalized the annulment of his first marriage and married Carolyn Robinson, who was pregnant with his child, took a job with the Southern Pacific Railroad (later he would buy a home in the comfortable suburb of Monte Sereno with a $20,000 award from the railroad after he was injured chasing down a runaway boxcar at the rail yard). Cassady loved working as a railroad brakeman. The hard work fitted his energy level and he was respected (at least until the word of his drug use began to circulate). He also helped Kerouac find work on the railroad. Kerouac, however, found that the life was not so romantic as Cassady had described, and did not last long. Cassady’s attempt to settle down into a more conventional lifestyle was not very successful. He felt stifled by the responsibilities and over the next several years, he would take off on several road trips, often with Kerouac, and often lasting for months at a time. In 1950 he married Diane Hansen, who was pregnant, but he had not divorced Carolyn and within a few months, he abandoned Diane and returned to Carolyn and his job on the railroad. In 1951, Diane gave birth to a son and Cassady began to feel his life spinning out of control. He wrote a long, confessional letter to Kerouac, which altered the way Kerouac viewed writing. Although much of this letter was lost, a surviving remnant was published in an early 1964 edition of John Bryan’s magazine, Notes From Underground, the only time Cassady was published during his lifetime. Cassady’s great fame among the Beats was not only of his physical and sexual prowess, but of his letters, which stretched on into manuscript length. However, reading The First Third, it seems as if Cassady was unable to make the transitions from these letters to actually writing a book. Deep within Beat mythology is the story of the so-called Joan Anderson or Cherry Mary letter. The letter was a 40,000 word letter written from Cassady to Kerouac. In it, Cassady describes his latest conquests. His girlfriend, Joan, has been hospitalized after attempting suicide, and he tries to visit her. Later in the story, an amorous 16-year-old, “Cherry Mary,” invites him over to visit while she babysits. The two end up being caught by Mary’s parents while making love, and Cassady is forced to run out through the window and down the fire

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escape. Kerouac loved the language in the letter and credited it for giving him the impetus for finishing On the Road and helping to develop his spontaneous prose theory. The letter would later be made into a film entitled, The Last Time I Committed Suicide. Cassady wrote in a spontaneous and unedited manner, which conveyed a breathless rush to get the words onto paper. Kerouac was inspired by the method, later calling it spontaneous prose, and he used it for the rest of his writing career. Throughout the fifties, Cassady’s behavior grew more erratic. He ceased to even try to hide his affairs from Carolyn, and though he managed to keep his job and support her and their three children, it was clear that he was heading towards some sort of crisis. In 1955, he moved to San Francisco with another woman, and in 1958, was arrested on narcotics charges and spent two years in San Quentin. Following the publication of On the Road in 1957, word soon leaked that the wild man character of Dean Moriarty, was, in fact, Neal Cassady. According to Kerouac biographer Gerald Nicosia, Cassady began immediately reminding people of the fact that he was the hero of this best-selling book and used his new found notoriety to cage free drinks. Carolyn Cassady, however, has a very different view of her ex-husband’s reaction to the fame brought to him by On the Road, saying in an interview, “Neal had mixed emotions about his role in On the Road . . . mainly he was unhappy about it because Jack glorified all the aspects about his character he was trying so hard to overcome.”3 But, while in prison on marijuana charges in 1958, according to Ann Charters, Cassady wrote a letter to Father Harley Schmitt, in which he described his pride in becoming a legend in his lifetime as a major character in Holmes’s Go, the hero of Kerouac’s On the Road, and what Ginsberg called “the secret hero” of “Howl.” Following a 1958 arrest for possession of marijuana, Cassady served a difficult prison sentence at San Quentin. Although Ginsberg took pains to appear as guest speaker in Cassady’s prison World Religion class in order to see him for a few minutes (the court had cut Cassady off from contact with his “degenerate” friends), Kerouac failed to make good on his plans to do the same, further increasing the rift between the two men, who had once been as close as brothers. In Grace Beats Karma, Cassady’s prison letters, he writes of how his Roman Catholic faith helped him survive San Quentin. Although he was at this point, suspicious of dogma and still much more interested in American mystic Edgar Cayce’s teachings about reincarnation and ESP, Carolyn Cassady claims that Cassady used Roman Catholic prayers such as the rosary as a form of meditation.


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Following his release, Cassady was a man changed for the worse. His wife felt that he held resentment against her. His incarceration had blackballed him from the railroad work that he loved so much, leaving him only with the grueling work of tire recapping and the solace of more drugs. After being paroled, Cassady found work as a tire recapper (upon seeing Cassady at work, Kerouac wrote that with Cassady’s chiseled looks, bulging muscles, and soot-covered goggles, and surrounded by flame that he looked like the god Vulcan). The work was a good demonstration of his physical strength. He became well-known with the Merry Pranksters for juggling sledgehammers, and at the shop he was one of the few men who could bounce a 250-pound truck tire onto the top of a six- foot-tall rack. Finally, as his behavior grew more and more reckless, Carolyn felt that she had no recourse left but divorce. With the things that he had held dear—his railroad work and his family—lost to him, he spiraled into more wild behavior. In an interview, Carolyn claimed that after being released from prison, Cassady was suicidal. She saw the antics he undertook at that point, “rolling buses, taking any offered drug, behaving as he has been depicted, and filled with self-loathing” as unconscious ways to commit suicide.4 After his release in June 1960, he struggled to meet family obligations, and Carolyn divorced him when his parole period expired in 1963, about the same time he quit his job as a recapper and went looking for new adventures. During the summer of 1962, Cassady met Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion, and the two men became friends, sharing an interest in sports, drugs, and literature. Cassady was deeply admired by Kesey’s group of young acolytes, the Merry Pranksters, and he joined their group on many cross-country bus trips. In 1964, he served as the crazed driver of the bus Furthur, which was immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. He later played a prominent role in the explosive California psychedelic scene of the 1960s. Carolyn Cassady sees Cassady’s time with the Pranksters as him being nothing more that a “performing bear.” Adding that since Kesey didn’t know Cassady when he was a vibrant driving force behind the Beat Generation that he had no idea how dark and negative Cassady’s energy had become. Cassady also makes an appearance in Hunter S. Thompson’s book Hells Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, in which he is described as “the worldly inspiration for the protagonist of two recent novels,” drunkenly yelling at police during the famed Hells Angels’ parties at Ken Kesey’s residence in La Honda, an event also chronicled in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Although his name was removed at the insistence

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of Thompson’s publisher, the description is clearly a reference to Cassady’s appearances in Jack Kerouac’s works, On the Road and Visions of Cody. In 1963, after dragging his heels, he reluctantly agreed to a divorce from Carolyn, but continued to return to see her and their children, until Carolyn asked him to stop in 1965. During the next year, Cassady’s life became increasingly peripatetic. He left Mexico in May, traveling to San Francisco, Denver, New York, and points in between; then he went back to Mexico in September and October, visited Kesey’s Oregon farm in December, and spent New Year’s with Carolyn in the home they had shared years ago near San Francisco. In January 1968, he went to Mexico to make an avant-garde film. At a cast party on February 3 he took a fatal mixture of alcohol and tranquilizers. He was found unconscious the next morning on nearby railroad tracks and died a few hours later. Kesey retells the story of his death in a short story named The Day after Superman Died (in his collected short stories published as Demon Box), where Cassady is quoted mumbling the number of ties he had counted in the rail (64,928) as his last words before dying. In countless interviews, both his wife and his children say that his death came as a relief to them. SYNOPSIS OF THE FIRST THIRD The First Third is just that: the prologue and three chapters of what Cassady saw as an autobiographical trilogy. (In an interview after Cassady’s death in the New York Times, one of Cassady’s sons would claim that all three of the books were finished, but the manuscripts for parts 2 and 3 were left in a car that was later stolen from Kesey’s farm and never recovered). The book describes the first nine years of Cassady’s life in Denver. The book has its shortcomings. Cassady’s view of language of rolling out without stopping was a much greater influence on Kerouac than Kerouac’s more codified spontaneous prose theory was on Cassady. Cassady also did not have the same deep immersion in language that Kerouac did, and the language of The First Third can sometimes sound like someone learning English through reading classical literature—a little pretentious, a little overblown, a little unsure. In a recording made by Kerouac, Cassady admits that a great deal of the autobiographical information is simply made-up. Ferlinghetti, who wrote the preface to The First Third, wrote that its value was mostly historical in capturing a part of the West that no longer exists and that “the homespun, primitive prose has a certain native charm, at once antic and antique, often awkward and doubling back upon itself.”5 Ferlinghetti saw this as a positive note, that Cassady was able to capture in his writing the


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energetic voice that inspired the other writers of the Beat Generation, but many readers see that folksy voice as a deterrent. Cassady’s autobiography The First Third was published posthumously. His complete surviving letters are published in Grace Beats Karma: Letters from Prison and Neal Cassady: Collected Letters, 1944–1967. SUGGESTED DISCUSSION OR PAPER IDEA 1. Is the “character” of Cassady in The First Third recognizable in the portrayals of Cassady in Go, On the Road, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test?

NOTES 1. Gifford, Barry, ed. As Ever: The Collected Correspondence of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. Berkeley, CA: Creative Arts, 1977: 197. 2. “American Legends Interviews American Authors.” American Legends. July 7, 2006. http://www.americanlegends.com/Interviews/carolyn_cassidy_allen.html. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. Forward. The First Third. By Cassady. San Francisco: City Lights, 1971: n.p.

SUGGESTED READINGS Cassady, Carolyn. Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac, and Ginsberg. New York: Penguin, 1990. Cassady, Neal. The First Third. San Francisco: City Lights, 1981. ———. Grace Beats Karma: Letters from Prison. Berkeley, CA: Blast, 1993. ———. Neal Cassady: Collected Letters, 1944–1967. New York: Penguin, 2004. Plummer, William. The Holy Goof: A Biography of Neal Cassady. New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1981. Sandison, David, and Graham Vickers. Neal Cassady: The Fast Life of a Beat Hero. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2006.

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Tom Wolfe The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test BIOGRAPHY Thomas Wolfe (not to be confused with the author of the same name who wrote Look Homeward Angel and was a great influence upon Kerouac’s early writings) was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. Helen, his mother, worked as a landscape designer. His father, Tom Wolfe Sr., held down a variety of jobs that served as great influence on the young boy. His father not only taught at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, but also wrote for the agriculture journal, The Southern Planter. Wolfe received a BA from Washington and Lee College and a PhD from Yale in American Studies in 1957. American Studies was good preparation for the young Wolfe. The major brings together the disparate theories of a variety of fields such as literature, history, and sociology, among others, in an attempt to create a unified theory or understand of the American worldview and culture as a while. As a field of study, it is also notable for bringing scholars and specialist of different fields into contact with each other, a rarity in American academe. Essentially, Wolfe has continued this technique throughout his career, attempting to find a theory to best explain the contemporary American experience. In December 1956, he took a job as a reporter at the Springfield Union, in Massachusetts. This was the beginning of a 10-year newspaper career, most of it spent as a general assignment reporter. For six months in 1960, he served as the Washington Post’s Latin American correspondent and won the Washington Newspaper Guild’s foreign news prize for his coverage of Cuba.

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In 1962, he became a reporter for the New York Herald-Tribune and, in addition, one of the two staff writers (the other was Jimmy Breslin, a journalist who would win the Pulitzer years later for the Newsday column he became famous for writing) of New York magazine, which began as the Herald-Tribune’s Sunday supplement. In New York, Wolfe found a plethora of sources on the matter that intrigued him the most—social class in the United States. In 1965, while still a daily reporter for the Herald-Tribune, Wolfe collected essays he had written for New York and Esquire magazines into his first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. Working for the Herald Tribune in 1963 he began to see the story he was assigned to cover—the New York Automobile Show—to be not just about cars, but also about an American youth culture that had found a way to express both its dissatisfaction with contemporary American materialistic culture by undermining that very culture by taking a pillar of it—the automobile—and subverting the way it looked sounded and performed. To Wolfe, the hot-rod was as clear of a confrontational expression as was “Howl.” In the book that came from that article, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, Wolfe directly echoed Kerouac when we wrote that he saw these cars as emblematic of everything American mainstream conservative culture sought to suppress in their youth—“freedom, sex, power, [and] motion.”1 The book became a bestseller and established Wolfe as a leading figure in the literary experiments in nonfiction that became known as New Journalism. In 1968 he published two books, both bestsellers, on the same day: The Pump House Gang, made up of more articles about life in the sixties, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a nonfiction story of the hippie era. In 1970, he published Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, a highly controversial book about racial friction in the United States. The first section was a detailed account of a party Leonard Bernstein gave for the Black Panthers in his Park Avenue duplex, and the second, portrayed the inner workings of the government’s poverty program. Even more controversial was Wolfe’s 1975 book on the American art world, The Painted Word. Artist, dealers, and aficionados all reacted violently, partly because Wolfe described not an art world, but an “art village.” In the book, Wolfe describes a provincial network made up almost entirely of New Yorkers numbering no more than 3,000 people. In 1976 he published another collection, Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine, which included his well-known essay “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening.” Published in 1979, his next book, The Right Stuff, and the resulting movie made Wolfe a household name. It was hardly an overnight success though. On this single book, Wolfe had been working for more than six years. The


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book recounts the American Space Program from the early World War II era rocket experiments, and it delves into the psychology of and the competition between the astronauts of the early space program. The Right Stuff became a bestseller and won the American Book Award for nonfiction, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Harold Vursell Award for prose style, and the Columbia Journalism Award. Wolfe’s influence also was felt in the lexicographic world. Wolfe added the terms “the right stuff,” “the Me Decade,” and “good ol’ boy” to American lexicon. Wolfe’s talent extends to artwork as well. In 1977, he began doing a monthly illustrated feature for Harper’s Magazine called “In Our Time.” The column led to a book by the same name and put Wolfe’s artwork out to a wider audience. Wolfe’s next writing project was his first attempt at fiction. Through the years 1984 and 1985, Rolling Stone magazine published, in serial form, the story that, in 1987 would be published as the book, The Bonfire of the Vanities. Wolfe’s first novel helped to brand the 1980s as a decade obsessed with wealth, greed, and power. The Bonfire of the Vanities was number one on the New York Times bestseller list for two months and remained on the list for more than a year, selling over 800,000 copies in hardcover. It also became the number-one bestselling paperback, with sales above two million, and it was made into a film. In 1989, Wolfe’s essay, “Stalking the Billion-footed Beast,” published in Harper’s Magazine created a furor among writers, publishers, and other members of the literary community, just as his art book had done years earlier. The essay argued that literature’s only hope was for novelists to take Wolfe’s approach, a New Journalism approach, to their writing. Following the success of The Bonfire of the Vanities, Wolfe used the same serialization technique in 1996 to write the novella Ambush at Fort Bragg for Rolling Stone. For years, the story was only available as an audiobook in the United States, although it was published as traditional book in some European countries. The book tells the story of a network television magazine show’s attempt to trap three soldiers at Fort Bragg into confessing to the murder of one of their comrades. Originally it was not planned as a standalone piece, but as a part of Wolfe’s next novel, 1998s A Man in Full. Ever seeking to capture the zeitgeist, in A Man in Full, Wolfe focuses once again on class and power relationships at the turn of the millennium. by telling the story of a late middle-aged real estate developer in Atlanta and a young day laborer in California and the questions they have to answer about themselves, their actions, and their choices.

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Wolfe had another best-seller on his hands, as A Man in Full was number one on the New York Times bestseller list for ten weeks, selling close to 1.4 million copies in hardcover. The book’s tremendous commercial success, its enthusiastic welcome by reviewers, and Wolfe’s appearance on the cover of Time magazine in his trademark white suit, white homburg hat. and white kid gloves—along with his claim that his sort of detailed realism was the future of the American novel, if it was going to have one—provoked a furious reaction among other American novelists, notably John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving. Still feeling the sting of being criticized for “Stalking the Billion-footed Beast,” John Updike wrote a critical review for Harper’s Magazine, in which he wrote that the novel “amounts to Entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form.” This touched off an intense war of words in the print and broadcast media between Wolfe and Updike, John Irving, and Norman Mailer. Wolfe would later publish an essay referring to these three authors as “My Three Stooges.” In October 2000, Wolfe published Hooking Up, a collection of fiction and nonfiction concerning the end of the millennium. It included “Ambush at Fort Bragg” and, for the first time since their original publication in the Herald-Tribune, his famous essays on William Shawn and The New Yorker: “Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead!” and “Lost in the Whichy Thickets: The New Yorker.” These essays had gained notoriety when Shawn refused to be interviewed for the profile, but Wolfe wrote it regardless, using interviews of Shawn’s co-workers and second-hand descriptions of the character of The New Yorker office. Shawn’s strong objections and the controversy the essays caused, solidified Wolfe’s reputation. In 2005, he published a novel regarding the sexual promiscuity of contemporary college students entitled, I Am Charlotte Simmons. The book was met with a mostly tepid response by critics, but it won praise from many political conservatives, who saw the book’s disturbing account of college sexuality as revealing moral decline. Wolfe himself has “come out” as a staunch rightwinger, further irritating his fellow artists. Currently, Wolfe lives in New York City with his wife, Sheila; his daughter, Alexandra; and his son, Tommy. NEW JOURNALISM New Journalism is characterized by nonfiction stories that use fictional story-telling techniques like extended dialogue, scene-setting and detailed


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characterization of subjects’ thoughts. New Journalism also often focuses on the marginal elements of American society rather than the luminaries. New Journalism often was presented to the public (and still is today) within the pages of magazines, rather than newspapers. For Wolfe, there were four points that made New Journalism different from traditional reportage. In New Journalism, the writer told the story using scenes rather than narrative. Dialogue was captured in full, with a concentration on colloquial speech, rather than carefully chosen sound bites; there was a shifting point of view, including limited third person; and the use of social status, revealed through what the character owned, was a driving force in the work. In New Journalism, Wolfe believes that a summation of the facts is not enough, because it is the aim of the New Journalist to explain, as in literary fiction, the purpose or theme of the work. However, like traditional journalism, Wolfe felt that New Journalism had to be true and accurate and that the reporter, even though sometimes appearing in the text as a character, was still responsible for asking hard questions to get to the truth of the matter, rather than surmising or creating out of whole cloth. In Wolfe’s seminal article about New Journalism entitled “The New Journalism,” he writes, “It showed me the possibility of there being something ‘new’ in journalism. What interested me was not simply the discovery that it was possible to write accurate non-fiction with techniques usually associated with novels and short stories. It was that—plus. It was the discovery that it was possible in non-fiction, in journalism, to use any literary device, from the traditional dialogisms of the essay to stream-of-consciousness, and to use many different kinds simultaneously, or within a relatively short space . . . to excite the reader both intellectually and emotionally.”2 There doesn’t seem to be a clear etymology for the term “New Journalism.” However, in Wolfe’s essay, “Not Half Bad Candidates,” he explains that New Journalism isn’t necessarily new. Wolfe finds antecedents of his techniques in the other 1950s authors like Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember and Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day. He traced the impulse even further back to Boswell’s tales of Dr. Johnson. Interestingly, he does not mention the Beat Generation as a influence on his work and technique even though it clearly is. It is not unreasonable to suggest that since Wolfe started honing his technique during the Beat backlash and that he wished to be seen as a writer of the future rather than the past that he deliberately chose not to align himself or his technique with the overthrown regime of the Beats. Wolfe took his first newspaper job in 1956 and eventually worked for the Washington Post and the New York Herald Tribune, among others. While there, he experimented with using fictional techniques in feature stories.

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While Dwight MacDonald was a strong critic of New Journalism techniques, he did make the perceptive point in his review of The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby that New Journalism can draw a line back to “Daniel Defoe … whose Journal of the Plague Year [sic] was a hoax so convincingly circumstantial that it was long taken for historical record, to the gossip columnists, sob sisters, fashion writers, and Hollywood reporters of this century.”3 During a New York newspaper strike, Wolfe approached Esquire about an article on the hot rod and custom car culture of southern California. He struggled with writing the article, and editor Byron Dobell suggested that Wolfe send notes to him so they could work together on the article. Wolfe sat down and wrote Dobell a letter saying everything he wanted to say about the subject, ignoring all conventions of journalism. In the same way that Neal Cassady’s infamous Joan Anderson letter would be recognized as great writing and published as such, Dobell simply removed the salutation “Dear Byron” from the top of the letter and published the notes as the article. The result was The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. This was the inception of New Journalism, in which some journalists and essayists experimented with a variety of literary techniques, mixing them with the traditional ideal of objective reporting. Typically, new journalists rely upon techniques fiction writers use, such as “stream of consciousness, extended dialogue, shifting points of view, and detailed scene setting.”4 SYNOPSIS OF TEXT The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a New Journalism novel written by Wolfe early in his career, telling the story of Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters, including Neal Cassady, as they drive across the country in a 1939 International Harvester DayGlo-painted school bus they named “Furthur,” reaching personal and collective revelations through use of LSD and other psychedelic drugs. It is widely considered to be the finest portrayal of the 1960s drug culture. Wolfe’s goal when writing The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was to explain the Merry Prankster subculture to an American audience that had largely already made up its mind about the Merry Pranksters. The book’s challenge to the author was to go beyond that “peacenik” stereotype that had been perpetuate by the mainstream media, to break that control (as Burroughs would have seen it) over the audience’s mind, in order to explain the Pranksters as an almost religious committee. The book covers the Pranksters’ cross-country road trip, as well as their acid tests, early performances by The Grateful Dead, and the arrest and


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eventual exile of Kesey to Mexico. Wolfe is primarily concerned not with narrative, but with relating the Pranksters’ intellectual and quasi-religious breakthroughs. The story goes back to Kesey’s first experiences with drugs, when he volunteered to take part in a study at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital on the effects of psychoactive drugs, such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and IT-290 (AMT). It follows him to Perry Lane, where he introduced the surprised intellectuals to the mind-altering powers of drugs. After that it follows him to La Honda, where, with a few of his Perry Lane friends, they set up their new base of operations. Throughout the course of the story more and more people join into their small group, and one can see parallels between the forming of their group and the forming of a new religion. As they hurtled across the continental United States, adopting nicknames like “Mountain Girl,” “Ramon Rodriguez, famous Mexican guide,” and “Cowboy Neal,” as symbols of their inclusion into this mystic brotherhood, they slowly segregated those who were “on the bus,” people who synched with everything they do, from those who were “off the bus.” As the group gained an almost psychic connection, they decided to try to bring their message to the masses, and set up the first of many “Acid Tests.” These tests were giant parties with blacklights, dayglow paint, colorful costumes, and massive amounts of LSD. It was at one of these parties that The Grateful Dead (then called the Warlocks) first played as a band. It was also at one of these parties that the Pranksters met Owsley Stanley, who would soon become the preeminent producer of acid. The Pranksters slowly built up sometimes uneasy and controversial alliances with groups, such as the Hells Angels. As the Pranksters become more and more well-known, they also become more and more infamous with the FBI. Eventually, Kesey was captured on a roof with Mountain Girl, another prankster, with a small stash of marijuana. He was arrested, and while out on bail, tried to fake his own suicide and flee to Mexico. However, the attempt was botched and the government continued to press their case. The longer Kesey lived in Mexico, the more violent his mood swings became. Vacillating widely between paranoia and megalomania, Kesey alternated between hiding in the unfamiliar Mexican jungle so that imaginary FBI agents couldn’t find him to believing that he could control the will of insects, by using his own mind power. It is telling then, as Wolfe describes it, that eventually, when the Merry Pranksters drove the bus down to Mexico to visit him, Kesey’s vision of return was one of wild fantasy, and he decided to make his triumphant return,

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slipping through the United States-Mexico border disguised as a drunken country-western singer on horseback. His success, however, only furthered his wild sense of invulnerability. After returning to the U.S., he spent some time taunting the U.S. police and FBI. After a number of months, U.S. law enforcement eventually caught up to him, but not before he and his Merry Pranksters planned out a number of pranks, all leading up to the “Graduation from Acid,” where Kesey planned to get people to try to get the LSD experience without the LSD. Kesey was finally arrested by the FBI a few months later. As part of a plea bargain, Kesey agreed to stop proselytizing the use of LSD and instead, use his position as leader of a counter-culture to stress the drawbacks of using LSD. Ironically, this had been Kesey’s plan all along. He wanted to use the final acid test to explain to people that there was no need for acid anymore. Kesey had come to believe that people were capable of capturing the feelings of happiness and closeness associated with using LSD, without actually using drugs. The graduation went through as planned, but then after the first few hours, Kesey told everyone that the party and drug philosophy had drawn to a close, and anyone who didn’t want to be part of the new experiment was free to go. Those who remained gathered around him and in an almost religious atmosphere joined hands. It was his final attempt to make people understand his new philosophy, but as he waited for them to see and understand the world, without resorting to drugs, as they had with drugs, he was filled with the understanding that it would not work. He had waited too long and the positive energy that the Pranksters had once been filled with had leached off. At the end of the story, Wolfe shows Kesey almost as he was in Mexico. He is alone, dressed in a ridiculous costume. His followers are confused at what didn’t happen and slowly but surely, everyone drifts away from him. Finally, they are all gone and he sits in the empty warehouse, talking to himself and listening to the echo. THEME Just like many of the traditional Beat writers, Wolfe’s novels are filled with characters who live outside of traditional American society. Just as Burroughs believed that he was able to find some temporary autonomous zone while breaking free of traditional discourse with his cut-ups and fold-ins, Wolfe feels the members of the subcultures that he portrays in his work seek that same autonomous place through their hobbies or their outside lives. Just as Ray Smith attempts in the Dharma Bums to shoehorn Buddhist beliefs, only


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to find the Japhy Ryder is much happier seeking the road of least resistance— the member of the Pranksters find themselves more contented by doing what they want, rather than doing what they feel they should be doing. CHARACTER Unlike Beat Generation writers like Kerouac and Holmes, Wolfe uses the true names of his subjects under the guise of journalism. In doing so, however, there is much blurring of lines. While Kerouac and Holmes had extensive libel worries, but they felt free to present the facts as they saw them, or more properly the way they wanted them to be, Wolfe had a requirement to present the events and characters they way he saw them, not necessarily the way he wanted them to be. Kesey was a writer who had gained fame with his book One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1962. But, he left the world of literature to spend his life proselytizing the use of LSD. Because of his friendship with Cassady, many see him as picking up where Kerouac left off, and turning the nation’s youth away from the ideas of the Beats and to the ideals that would define the hippie movement. Kesey died in 2001 from liver cancer. CRITICAL RECEPTION Such a new technique was bound to be controversial, especially with the decision to publish The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Pump House Gang on the same day. To many critics, this hubris was too ripe a fruit not to pluck. In the New York Review of Books, Dwight MacDonald went so far as to call the technique “para-journalism” and predicted (incorrectly, it would seem) that it was a fad that would die off quickly. MacDonald believed it to be a “bastard form” taking the worse traits of fiction and journalism and mashing them together in a vapid shallow attempt at entertainment.5 C.D.B. Bryan was much more enthusiastic in the New York Times Book Review saying that he found it to be an “astonishing” book,6 but presaging what many would say about the New Journalist movement, he took Wolfe to task for refusing to make value judgments. If, the argument goes, New Journalists are explicitly pushing the concept of objectivity to the wayside, then there is a moral imperative to draw conclusions. In this case, Bryan felt that in the segment of the book that explains how Kesey allowed people to be dosed with LSD unwittingly, that Wolfe should have suggested the danger and unfairness of Kesey’s actions. In a bit of a backhanded compliment, Neil Compton in Commentary suggested that The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test “deserves at least a minor place

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in the literature of American self-exploration—a little below On the Road.”7 Compton clearly saw the connection between the Beat Generation and the New Journalists. Finally, John Hellman focuses not on the novelty of New Journalism, but on the genre as one of reinvention suggesting that while the way Wolfe uses American language (focusing on slang and irregular punctuation for instance), the story and the way he tells it is not new or experimental (as is the case with the work of Burroughs). Instead, Hellman sees clear antecedents in the work of Edgar Allen Poe, particularly the story “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” at work in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. WOLFE AS BRIDGE BETWEEN BEAT AND HIPPIE One of the most striking examples of this idea is Wolfe’s The Electric KoolAid Acid Test. The book, while being a narrative account of the adventures of the Merry Pranksters, is also highly experimental in its use of onomatopoeia, free association, and eccentric punctuation—such as multiple exclamation marks and italics—to convey the manic ideas and personalities of Ken Kesey and his followers, including Neal Cassady. However, Carolyn Cassady, one of the Neal’s wives, has said that, “I don’t think [Wolfe] had any clue about Neal. Kesey told me he hated that book, so maybe that indicates something similar. It was so out of Wolfe’s milieu.”8 Besides his forays into this new style of journalism, Wolfe also edited a collection of New Journalism with E. W. Johnson, published in 1975 and entitled simply The New Journalism. This book brought together pieces from Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, and several other well-known writers, with the common thread of a new kind of journalism that incorporated literary techniques and could be considered literature. SUGGESTED DISCUSSIONS OR PAPER TOPICS 1. How does Wolfe’s style of writing confirm or challenge Kerouac’s spontaneous poetics? 2. How does the portrayal of Neal Cassady in this book (and life on the road in general) differ from the portrayal of Cassady in both On the Road and Go? What factors, aside from different authors, might account for those differences? 3. How does Wolfe fulfill or challenge our expectations for descendents of the Beats?


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NOTES 1. Wolfe, Tom. The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. New York: Bantam, 1999: 132. 2. Wolfe, Tom and EW Johnson eds. The New Journalism. New York: Picador, 1975: 15. 3. MacDonald, Dwight. “Parajournalism, or Tom Wolfe & His Magic Writing Machine.” The New York Review of Books. August 26, 1965: 4. 4. “Tom Wolfe.” Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol 35, 1985: 448. 5. MacDonald, “Parajournalism,” 4. 6. Bryan, C.D.B. “The Same Day: Heeeeewalk!!!” New York Times Book Review. August 18, 1968: 2. 7. Compton, Neil. “Hijinks Journalism.” Commentary. February 1969: 77. 8. “American Legends Interviews American Authors.” American Legends. July 7, 2006. http://www.americanlegends.com/Interviews/carolyn_cassidy_allen.html.

SUGGESTED READINGS Wolfe, Tom. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. New York: Bantam, 1968. ———. The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. New York: Bantam, 1965. ———. The Painted Word. New York: Bantam, 1975. ———. The Pump House Gang. New York: Bantam, 1968. ———. Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. New York: Bantam, 1970.

Index Anderson, Jack, 79 Anderson, Joan, 101 Baldwin, James, 33 Beat Generation, definition of, 31 The Beat Journey, 9 Blake, William, 62 Bowles, Paul, 85 Buckley, William F., 33 Burroughs, William S., 34, 39, 58, 64, 65, 66, 71; The Black Rider, 89; The Cat Inside, 90; Cities of the Red Night, 96; cut up technique, 91, 92–93; And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, 60, 81; Junky, 84, 92; Naked Lunch, 67, 86, 90–95; Nova Express, 86, 95; The Place of Dead Roads, 96; Queer, 85, 92; “Remember Jack Kerouac,” 78; The Soft Machine, 86, 95; The Ticket that Exploded, 86; The Wild Boys, 95; The Word Hoard, 86; The Yage Letters, 67, 85, 96 Burroughs, William S., Jr., 82, 87 Caen, Herb, 7 Carr, Lucien, 58, 59, 65, 80, 81 Cassady, Carolyn (Robinson), 61, 100, 102, 104

Cassady, LuAnne, 61 Cassady, Neal, 15, 22, 33, 41, 60, 66, 71; The First Third, 99; Grace Beats Karma, 102; Neal Cassady: Collected Letters, 1944–1967, 105 Charters, Anne, 11, 29, 41, 42 Chase, Hal, 100 “Cherry Mary,” 101 Cowley, Malcolm, 47, 51 Dickens, Charles, 11 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 11, 19, 64 Douglas, Ann, 77 Dylan, Bob, 68 Elvins, Kels, 82 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 31, 67, 74 Ginsberg, Allen, 28, 33, 42, 80, 83, 99, 100; Buddhism, 65; Collected Poems, 74; Howl and Other Poems, 29, 34, 39, 53, 66, 73, 102; “How to Make a March/Spectacle,” 68; Kaddish, 66, 73; Planet News, 74 Ginsberg, Louis, 57 Ginsberg, Naomi, 57, 65 Grace, Nancy M., 3

120

Index

Grauerholz, James, 88 Gysin, Brion, 92

Kesey, Ken, 103, 115 Klapper, Ilse, 79

Holmes, John C., 31; The Bowling Green Poems, 10; character key, 12; The Daybreak Boys, 11; Displaced Person: The Travel Essays of John Clellon Holmes, 9; early life, 5; Get Home Free, 9; Go, 6, 8–9, 10, 12–22, 102; Gone in October, 6, 9; Gone in October: Last Reflections on Jack Kerouac, 9; The Horn, 9; Nothing More to Declare, 9; “Philosophy of the Beat Generation,” 2; rivalry with Kerouac, 6; “This Is the Beat Generation,” 7; Visitor: Jack Kerouac in Old Saybrook, 9 Huncke, Herbert, 62–63, 81

Leary, Timothy, 67, 87 Lee, Alene, 28, 39, 41 Lord, Sterling, 33 McClure, Michael, 45 Merry Pranksters, 103, 112 Merwin, W. S., 70 Miles, Barry, 70 Morgan, Ted, 77, 90 The Naropa Institute, 69, 88 New Journalism, 108 Nicosia, Gerard, 30, 33, 52, 102 Notes from Underground, 101

Inside Scientology, 88

Orlovsky, Peter, 66, 71

John Burroughs School, 78 Johnson, Ronna C., 3

Parker, Edie, 58, 80 Pound, Ezra, 65

Kammerer, David, 58, 59, 80, 81 Kerouac, Gerard, 30 Kerouac, Jan, 33, 34 Kerouac, Jean Louis “Jack,” 71, 80, 100; alcoholism, 30–31; Big Sur, 30, 32; The Book of Dreams, 31; Buddhism, 31, 52–55; Catholicism, 31, 55; character key, 48; Desolation Angels, 30; The Dharma Bums, 30, 45, 72; Dr. Sax, 27; early life, 25; “Elements of Spontaneous Prose,” 39, 68, 70; And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, 60, 81; Lonesome Traveler, 30; Maggie Cassady, 29; Mexico City Blues, 29, 53, 54, 55; On the Road, 27, 30, 35–39, 99, 102, 104, 116; Pic, 32; rivalry with Holmes, 6; San Francisco Blues, 28; Satori in Paris, 30, 32; The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, 53, 55; Some of the Dharma, 28; The Subterraneans, 27, 30; The Town and the City, 6, 26; Tristessa, 29, 54; Visions of Cody, 29, 40, 104; Visions of Gerard, 29–30 Kerouac, Stella, 33

Ransom, John Crowe, 3 Rexroth, Kenneth, 28–29, 45, 46, 53, 54, 66 Rolling Stone, 88, 109 Roman à clef technique, 41 Sanders, Ed, 34, 70 “San Francisco Poetry Renaissance,” 47 Saturday Night Live, 89 Six Gallery Reading, 45, 72 Snyder, Gary, 4, 30, 45, 71 Solomon, Carl, 64, 71, 81 Stern, Richard, 78 Taylor School, 78 Thompson, Hunter S., 103 Thoreau, Henry, 1 Trungpa, Chogyam, 68 Vollmer, Joan, 58, 60, 65, 80, 82–84 Whalen, Philip, 29, 45, 72 What Happened to Kerouac?, 81

Index Williams, William Carlos, 64, 73, 74 The Wizard of Oz, 27 Wolfe, Tom, 103; Ambush at Fort Bragg, 109; The Bonfire of the Vanities, 109; The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, 103, 108, 112; Hooking Up, 110; I Am Charlotte Simmons, 110; The KandyKolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline

121 Baby, 108, 112; A Man in Full, 109; Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine, 108; “Not Half Bad Candidates,” 111; The Painted Word, 108; The Pump House Gang, 108; Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, 108; The Right Stuff, 108; “Stalking the Billion-footed Beast,” 109

About the Author MICHAEL J. DITTMAN is Instructor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Butler County Community College. His previous books include Jack Kerouac: A Biography (Greenwood, 2004).

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