1a. Today, cleaning my room, I found a photograph of myself and my ex-wife on Leviathan, the tallest steel rollercoaster in Wonderland. I look like I’m hanging on for dear life, which is what I do on rollercoasters. I can do the wooden ones now, with their lack of loops, but I can’t take my hands off the bracing when I’m a rollercoaster like Leviathan. Call it survival instinct, call me a wimp. I just can’t lift my hands up when the train goes over and the fall begins.
Anyway, I don’t scream on rollercoasters but I screamed when I found the photo. I swear to God I actually screamed aloud. It was embarrassing even though no one was home. For all my writing on here about getting over ____, seeing that picture was like an assault, or having a bucket of ice cold water thrown over me. Having just woken up, I simply wasn’t ready to see the picture out of nowhere. I hadn’t put my armour on yet, the armour needed to withstand the relentlessness of reality, the sheer pain of simply existing.
Am I over my ex-wife? Or have I just been telling myself I am?
Maybe it was the startle response. It’s built into us for when we see something we don’t like. Humans have it. Cats have it even better. Much of Buddhist training is aimed at overcoming it. I did not want to see that photo at that moment, so I balked and yelped, like a fox had just jumped out at me. This post is about pain, suffering, and the writing of the Beats, who had a profound effect on me when I was younger but whose “wisdom” I’ve drifted away from in recent years.
(Secretly, I don’t think any monk could withstand having a cat attack their face from a high perch, but that’s me.) In the early 50s, exhausted from the pain of too many heartbreaks & disappointments and disillusioned by reporter after reporter asking him to define the term “beat” (his response to Steve Allen said it best: sympathetic) Jack Kerouac decided to give Buddhism a try. Faith had always been a crucial part of Kerouac’s life,1 possibly because, shortly after his first Confession, at age six, he “heard God tell him that he had a good soul” but he that “he would suffer in life and die in pain and horror, but would in the end experience salvation.”2 Interestingly, Kerouac’s life did follow this pattern, as he did suffer, despite his success he always felt the outsider.
He spent his final few days in agony, vomiting up blood from a stomach hemorrhage. And hopefully that suffering stopped when he died at the still-young age of 47. Anne Charters, Kerouac’s official biographer, has stated that Kerouac was not just on the road but “on the path” to some kind of happiness imbued with religiosity. There is not a single Kerouac work where he does not use biblical or religious language to describe things.3 Religion is a constant presence in his work. He once told a reporter “I'm not a beatnik. I’m a Catholic.” And he told anyone who would listen that is was Herbert Huncke, the immortal Hassel, not he, who came up with the term “beat,” which to Huncke meant to “describe a person with little money and few prospects.”
Still nobody listened, with Kerouac fielding calls all throughout the 1960s of reporters asking him what “beat” meant. So he retreated. “In 1954, Kerouac discovered Dwight Goddard's A Buddhist Bible at the San Jose Library, which marked the beginning of his study of Buddhism. Between 1955 and 1956, he lived on and off with his sister, whom he called "Nin.” He stayed with her for two years, which I’m sure Nin’s husband loved and wrote Some of the Dharma while there.
So the Buddhism thing wasn’t mere dalliance. He committed full on. Just look at him!
2a. Ginsberg once wrote to Kerouac in his Dharma Bums (1958) period, saying that “[p]eople [looking] to the past to provide a narrative structure for their lives, to make sense of regretted mistakes, and to forge a sense of belonging by recalling and affirming relationships with attachment figures” was a totally sensical & reasonable, as well as a sign of spiritual growth. But Ginsberg disavowed what he saw as Kerouac delving into Buddhism to avoid the pain that life can bring, that all lives bring. He wrote a letter concerning this matter to Jack, saying (and I am paraphrasing because I cannot find the letter) that anyone embracing a religion in an attempt to move forward in life, is doing good. But a human diving headfirst into a religion for any self-absorbed, navel-gazing “poor me” reason is a ruinous path to take.
By not wanting to feel pain anymore,4Ginsberg contended, Kerouac had committed a serious sin against the human experience. This caused a rift between the two men that never really recovered, as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters shows rather than tells. After Kerouac’s turn to Buddhism in 1955, their letters, which used to arrive almost daily at each other’s mailboxes, slowed to a trickle. Ginsberg was also annoyed that Jack had called him “Carlo Marx” in On the Road, an eye-winking reference to Ginsberg’s brief flirtation with Communism in college. (Of course, when his books started making money, Ginsberg never again espoused curiosity about communism at all. What a coincidence.)
Kerouac took to the road again, now with Gary Snyder as his road buddy, taking his Buddhist beliefs with him. Fans were a little doubtful. I remember reading The Dharma Bums (1958) and being really disappointed. The book felt flat, like there was less heart and soul to it than On the Road. It reads almost as if it was written from an intentional distance. I didn’t like it and I still don’t.
As the book shows, Snyder wasn’t much of a friend to Jack, and the two lacked the effortless chemistry Neal and Jack had enjoyed. Fans of Kerouac had eagerly lapped up The Subterraneans (1958), a novella chronicling Jack’s dalliance with a married Black woman within the San Fransisco jazz club milieu, a book that Jack wrote in almost two weeks flat and that ends when the central relationship ends. The final sentences are: *SPOILER ALERT* “and so I go home having lost her. And write this book.”
Ginsberg’s attempts to appease Jack via letter rarely made it into Jack’s hands because of his constant wanderings and moving around, and so Jack did not know that Ginsberg was extending an olive branch. Or perhaps was just too drunk to give a shit by now.
Ginsberg would expand upon this rift in the 1986 film, by which time he’d been relegated (or maybe, is own view, elevated) to the “elder statesman” category in American Letters, claiming that it was no big deal, sensationalized by the media, and that they were both still fond of each other right up til Jack’s death. After all, Ginsberg was a pall bearer at Jack’s funeral. Jack told his mother everything and she wouldn’t have allowed Ginsberg to the funeral had Jack truly turned on him.
“‘Yeah! Go to Mexico! Write a book! You can use my name’ which was his way of saying, “I know you’re my daughter.” Jan Kerouac @ 5:14 of the above video.
3a. What Happened to Jack Kerouac? is also valuable because it shows the offspring of some of the Beats: Ginsberg talks at length about William Burroughs Jr, who Ginsberg helped get his first two novels, Speed (1970) and Kentucky Ham (1973) published, the second of which begins directly after the protagonist’s release from Lexington, the same place his father wrote about in Junkie (1953).
If his Wikipedia page is accurate, Burroughs Jr. underwent a liver transplant at the age of just nineteen in 1976 after developing cirrhosis. He died in 1981, at the age of 33, from alcoholism and liver failure, collapsing during family diner. From Wikipedia: “Prakriti Junction, begun in 1977, was never completed, although extracts from it were included in his third and final published work Cursed From Birth.”
Burroughs Jr. was an unrepentant drinker and died at 33. His father was an unrepentant heroin user and lived to be 83. I’m not saying alcohol is more destructive than pure morphine, not this fucking Russian Roulette fentanyl, but…alcohol is more destructive than pure morphine. It just is. I remember waking up when I was a junkie. And I remember waking up when I was an alcoholic. The two aren’t even on the same football field. A hangover is so much worse than feeling a little unsteady and kinda woozy and happy. Withdrawal doesn’t kick in til afternoon. At least it didn’t for me.
John Girono, himself a towering figure in the art world and the brains behind the Dial-A-Poem idea, called Burroughs Jr “the last Beatnik.” Well, here is one of the final photos of the so-called “last Beatnik,” looking bloated, sallow and sad. It’s a tragedy, really, dying of cirrhosis at 33. That’s two years younger than me. But he looks easily ten years older.
And Giorno’s statement was more true than he knew. Burroughs Jr. died trying to emulate his father & the Beats but ended up broken & destroyed by alcohol (which is like how many of the other Beats died out, most notably Kerouac, who drank himself to death in St Petersburg, Florida in 1969.)
4a. Like all generations, the Beats overestimated their own self-importance, a mistake we see repeated with the hippies, yippies, and Gen X. And certainly the millennials. Who is going to look at all those fucking pictures we took? The people who took them? Hah! Every generation has its sell-outs but has there ever been one as shocking as hippies, ones who “didn’t carry money, man” turning into to cliched stock brokers by the 1980s. Jerry Rubin, a seminal figure in the “yippie” movement and a defendant in the trial of the Chicago 7, became a Wall Street big shot for a while. Then he died while running across a road in Westwood, California. Wikipedia says: “He was an early investor in Apple Computer, and by the end of the 1970s had become a multimillionaire.”
How ironic that he died while running across a street and died because a person runs more slowly at 56 than in their middle ages. How ironic too that when he died he was investing in bio-research companies seeking to extend the human life.
Anyway that Do It! campaign originated by Rubin and his sycophants5, some of whom were so star struck that they asked Rubin if it was okay to use the restrooms. Shocked, Rbun told the Yippies that need not ask his permission to go to the bathroom, or to have sex, or to do anything.
“Just don’t hurt anybody, man,”
The first saw Rubin and swerved, extending his life four about two seconds, which is when a bigger & heavier truck slammed into Jerry, forever silencing
Abbie Hoffman, ubiquitous activist of the 1960s and also a member of the Chicago 67 killed himself. He’d been diagnosed as bi-polar in 1980 and next to his mattress was a journal dictating his stormy mood swings in the weeks lading up to his death. Some of his old anti-Establishment buddies claimed that he’d been murdered because his life was turning around again. David Dellinger (another member of the Chicago 7) told newspapers “I don't believe for one moment the suicide thing” and said that Hoffman had “numerous plans for the future.” There was newfound interest in Hoffman’s Steal This Book! (1971) garnered by his appearance in Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July (1989). Other friends said he never gave a shit about things like publicity6 while still expressing doubt about the actual story. From Wikipedia: However, the coroner stood by the ruling, saying, “There is no way to take that amount of phenobarbital without intent. It was intentional and self-inflicted.”
The targets of COINTELPRO, an FBI investigation that lasted from 1956-1971, with Black activists bearing the brunt of the violence, most notably the execution-style killing of Fred Hampton, who was at the time monitoring the Chicago 7 trial, in which Bobby Seale was a defendant despite being in Chicago for a mere 4 hours to give a speech. By the mid-1980s, 1960s activists had long since ceased to be monitored by government agencies, as the Reagan and Bush administrations focused on the Cold War and US-Soviet relations.
The old Sixties peace activists who claimed to be still under surveillance in the late 1980s were either self-aggrandizing jerks trying to sell “tell all” books about their stupid roles in the Age of Aquarius or they actually believed that they were being watched. Whether Hoffman was sad because he seemed to matter less now (he’d complained in 1983 that the newer generation was less into making movements and were just in it for themselves) or if his bi-polar illness finally got the better of him, we shall never know. But, like the Beats, there was a pattern of sad and lonely deaths. Another leading figure from another countercultural group was dead, this one in his apartment, with the “cause of death [being listed as] suicide by overdose from 150 phenobarbital tablets and liquor. Two hundred pages of handwritten notes were nearby, many detailing his moods.” That’s Hoffman in the denim jacket below.
5a. Like the Beats, the hippies thought they were going to change the world through, not through literature as the Beats jejunely thought but through direct action. And when the world didn’t change the hippies and yippies either changed to fit into the world, selling out their “dearly held” ideals for money. Others killed themselves.
The story of the Beats is the same, follows a similar arc, except they never really compromised artistically. Cities of the Red Night (1981) and The Western Lands (1989), both Burroughs Sr. books from the 1980s, are every bit as odd and obfuscatory as Naked Lunch is (1959).
The hippies disgusted Kerouac, and he withdrew from New York City after a bar fight on Bleecker Street left him badly wounded and afraid to go out in public. As he retreated further into himself, books flowed from him in “a torrent of words,” some coherent, some not. Doctor Sax (1959) is unintelligible. In it, Jack positions jazz as the healer, but that’s about all I can get from it. Kerouac’s Vision of Gerard and Satori in Paris were not written in conventional style. But they are readable. Same goes for (most of) Visions of Cody and October in the Railroad Earth.
So Kerouac killed himself slowly, freely admitting to anyone who asked that he couldn’t kill himself because he’d returned to Catholicism and therefore couldn’t kill himself so he was drinking himself to death (this anecdote can be seen @ 6:14 of What Happened To Kerouac?). Meanwhile Neal Cassady died playing Dean Moriarty. He did it for the Beats and he did it for the Hippies. “He was expected to dance for everybody like a trained bear,” his wife Carolyn Cassady complained. And it killed him. One time he showed up in the doorway, filthy and haggard, and collapsed onto the nearest couchL “[T]wenty years of fast living,” he slurred. “There's just not much left, and my kids are all screwed up. Don't do what I have done.”
On February 3 1968. after attending a wedding party in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico, Cassady decided to walk to the next town on the railroad tracks. It was a cold night and he was very drunk and stoned on prescription drugs. He was found the next day on those same tracks. but he didn’t die til the next die. Like his old buddy Jack, he clung to life for one more day, in agony but also unwilling to cast of his mortal coil.
Doctors said he died of “exposure,” but in Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg (1990), the second major account of the Beat women’s lives, the first being Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters (1983). (Note that both titles relegate the roles of the women to minor, or stay-at-home ones. The Beats, who were supposed to be so open-minded, were deeply old-fashioned when it came to nuclear family arrangements.) Here’s the cover photo of Neal dancing with Carolyn:
Wikipedia states that “[i]n a 2008 interview with literary magazine Notes from the Underground, Cassady stated, ‘As far as I'm concerned, the Beat Generation was something made up by the media and Allen Ginsberg.’ She went on to say that Jack Kerouac could not stand the public image that was created for him.”
The publication of On the Road also caused a rift between Cassady and Kerouac, which is heartbreaking because from the book one comes away thinking they are the two closest friends that could ever exist. But nope. More heartbreak and strife. More stumbling across photos that wound you, that stab you. In one of the final letters Kerouac wrote to Ginsberg he alludes to this by saying “I’m telling you this now that Neal hates me and wants nothing to do with me.”
Cassady, perhaps correctly, resented his portrayal of a crazed lunatic who only wanted to steal cars, fuck women, and drink alcohol. (Though, truth be told, Cassady did spend most of his early life in either the poolhalls of Denver or a juvenile jail just outside it.) In Desolation Angels, Kerouac relates a visit Neal made to Kerouac’s pad in Frisco. A box shipment of On the Road had just arrived and Jack had accidentally cut himself with a knife trying to open the box. “They had caught me literally red-handed” writes Kerouac. He notes that Neal seems curt and sullen during the visit, but it was the goodbye that really miffs him: “Suffice it to say that when Cody (Neal’s code name in The Subterraneans and Desolation Angels) said goodbye to all of us that day he for the first time failed to look me a goodbye in the eye - I couldn’t understand it and still don’t - I knew something was bound to be wrong and it turned out very wrong. hr was arrested a few months later for possession of pot and spent two years…in San Quentin.”
Cassady had been to jail before but now he was a married father with children who had settled down. The pot was for personal use but that didn’t make a difference back then in California. I’m not sure it makes one even now. So of course Cassady must have resented watching Kerouac become a celebrity while he languished behind bars. Eventually his wife divorced him to relinquish from him the responsibility of family and children. Kerouac and Cassady were never close again, not the way they had been. In On the Road, you get the sense that they’d die for each other. In Desolation Angels you get the sense Neal wants to punch Jack in the face. Just more destruction in the wake of the Beats. When Cassady was released he ran full tilt into the new counterculture, joining Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and dutifully taking on the role of the driver of their bus, which Kesey had named Further.
6a. As the Beats began dying out or withdrawing from the public spotlight, a new generation was ready to take their place. Jan Kerouac “published three semi-autobiographical novels, Baby Driver: A Story About Myself in 1981, Trainsong in 1988 and posthumously published Parrot Fever in 2000.”
In 1964, she was briefly in a girl group called The Whippets. Click the above to hear it. I don’t know who produced it but it has he classic Motown rle: ebery snare it shall be accompanied by a tambourine smack.7 The group, which consisted of Kerouac, Charlotte Rosenthal, and Bibbe Hansen, released one single, "I Want to Talk to You," a song response to The Beatles' song, "I Want to Hold Your Hand." The B-side, "Go Go Go with Ringo," also reflected the Beatlemania of the time. The single did not chart or get much airplay, and the Whippets broke up.
William Burrough’s Jr.’s works didn’t seem to capture the public’s imagination either. It seemed neither Jan Kerouac nor Billy Burroughs Jr. could get out from under the towering shadow of their fathers, and both died younger than their parents, Bill at 33 as already stated and Jan at 44, of kidney failure from years of drug use. Jack lasted til 47. William Burroughs Sr. lived to the unimaginable age of 83, considering the drugs that man took. )He did dislike uppers though, once lecturing Al Jourgenson of Ministry “why would you want some drug that keeps you up til 430 in the morning with a bunch of idiot telling the same stories over and over again.” Jourgenson relates another funny anecdote when he was going thorough Bill’s mail, all smacked out. “I don’t know how an eighty year old finds a vein, but he knew what he was doing.” Suddenly Al noticed in the pile of mail an invitation to the White House. Clinton had invited Burroughs to come say some poetry at the fucking White House.
“Hey Bill?”
“What?”
“You got an invitation to perform t the White House, Just arrived last week.”
“Junk mail. Throw it out.”
Laughing now, Al sat up. “Bill, this is real. The President has invited you to come to the White House and read some of your poetry. You need to respond to this”
Then Bill gave Al a serious look. “Who’s the President?”
“The guy didn’t even know who the President was.,” Jourgenson said in a 2013 interview, still amazed. I mean, our visit to Bill’s house was May. Clinton had been in since November. Or January if you wanna get technical. How did Burroughs manage to stay out of the loop that long? He must not have received the newspaper or had cable. And he didn’t speak to neighbours. They disliked him for his habit of shooting racoons on his property. “But they’re ruining my petunias!” he complained in a little boy voice. He was complaining about this to Al when as ida occurred to the Ministry frontman. “Hey Bill, aren’t you on the Methadone program?
“Yeah. So?”
“So leave some wafers out for ‘em. It’ll get the raccoons so high they’ll be moving too slow to escape. Then you just pick ‘em off, one by one.”
A year later, after a Ministry show in St Louis, Jourgenson’s bodyguard says “Hey Al, some old guy, says his name’s Bill Burroughs. has to speak with you.”
“Oh! Yeah! Bring him on back!”
Burroughs comes back, eyes shining, and he’s ecstatic. “It worked!”
“What worked?” I thought he was talking about the show. But Bill didn’t mention a word one way or the other about the music. He’d come all the way from his small ranch in Kansas to tell me that my idea had worked. He’d gotten those raccoons so stoned they could barely moved, and then just walked up and down his lawn, executing them.” (This must sound brutal to the reader of 2021, but Burroughs was a gun nut. He carried guns everywhere. By the end of his life, when he’d stopped writing, he’d look forward to his daily hunt with glee.) He is immortalized as Old Bull Lee in Kerouac’s On the Road as a borderline psychotic patriot living in New Orleans who tries to build “coffee tables that’ll last a thousand years!” He’d found a trunk near his property but it was full of nails. They looked like worms, apparently. He begs Kerouac to stay in New Orleans, but Jack can’t stay still. Plus his energies, which are high in morning, begin to wane in the afternoon when he emerges, glassy eyed from the bathroom. Then he naps. Then Joan and Jack and Bill eat, then drink, do drugs and talk. (There is no evidence Kerouac ever tried heroin but he joined the Benzedrine craze with fervour and aplomb. Reading the book, you almost want Sal Paradise (Jack’s name in the book, named for his penchant of finding only. Sad Paradise at the end of each road) to stay with Bill. At one point Bull Lee, having dozed off from smack, lifts his head, looks Sal/Jack in the eyes and says, mournfully, “what are you going to the coast for Sal?” Kerouac’s answer: Because it’s there and I haven’t been.
William Burrough’s Jr.’s novels show that William hadn’t just inherited his father’s appetite for drugs and booze, he’d also inherited the fast-talking hustlerspeak his Dad loved so much. One passage in the first novel describes Lexington, a farm where addicts could go, get clean, and then work the farm. It’s the exact same facility his father went to in Junkie (also championed by Burroughs, who walked Times Square every day for a month and saw not one cop0y sold, despite the robust sales reported by concluding that Burrough’s salacious tale Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict was being bought by bored suburban housewives 1953). Like father, like son however. Burroughs Jr. was largely unimpressed by the facilities at Lexington, and especially despised the weekly motivation speaker who said stuff “I know you wanna “be cool” and “fit in” - (the speaker uses scare quotes for bold font) and Burroughs Jr. replies in his mind, he does not say this aloud, for he shared his Dad gentlemanly mien: “Has it ever occurred to you, and people like you, that we simply prefer our side of the street, our spot across the river where the grass is dying and turning a straw-like yellow?”
“We’d be happy to have you,” concludes Burroughs. “Come on over. We’d be glad to have you out some night.” Remember though: there is a crucial difference between submitting oneself voluntarily and not submitting oneself voluntarily. As noted above, Burroughs the elder attended Lexington in the late 1950s of his own volition. Burroughs Jr was sentenced to 4 years there but ended up serving only two.
At night Burroughs and his literary buddies would talk about Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West and whatever samizdat had just made it out of the Soviet Union. A friend remembers that broaching the subject of Williams Jr’s father was verboten. That same friend was there the night Burroughs Jr pulled from his bag a handwritten samizdat copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In the Soviet Union, all typewriter were checked and registered with the First Department, and no two typewriters were alike. Smuggling in a typewriter from the United States or Canada was possible but incredibly dangerous. With their physical bulk, how is one supposed to hide a typewriter under clothing?8
Anyway, just as all of the Beats were venerated, many of them were still alive while being entombed in this veneer of Long Ago. Ginsberg didn’t seem to care, nor did Gregory Corso (who was content to write his poems and be left alone. Corso did not appear in On the Road. “I was at the Mets game,” he later joked with a journalist, though he appeared in Book of Dreams and Desolation Angels as Raphael Urso and in
The Subterraneans as Yuri Gligoric.)
Lawrence Ferlinghetti was by all accounts gentle and passive man who managed to avoid most of the controversies involving the Beats, but he did co-found City Light Bookstore with Peter D. Martin in 1953, which became a powerful way of getting the work of Beat writers out there. Ferlinghetti himself could be found working the aisles there as late as 2007, which was my hitchhiking year. Far from from a simple shopkeeper though, Ferlinghetti was a celebrated poet, and his poetry collection A Coney Island of the Mind (1958) was translated into eight languages and sold over a million copies.
I am sure that the issue - gah that sounds gross in the context of birth and offspring, such a medieval term9 - the children of these towering beat figures saw themselves standing in their fathers’ tremendously long shadows, even though, much of the time, the work is as good or better.
I’ve only read one Jan Kerouac’s novel, Trainsong (1988) and it’s gorgeous. She has her father’s eye for the grand sweep of things, the interconnectedness of life, but also the casual cruelty that can pop up with shocking swiftness. She had traveled the world, not just America, and drew on that experience. That she died as young as she did is a testament to the irresponsibility of the Beat Generation toward the women in their lives, whether that be daughter, wife, or girlfriend. Jan, as she details in the documentary, What Happened to Kerouac? (1986), she only met her father once. They shook hands and she noticed that their hands were identical. “All my life I’ve had these….giant…kind of…man hands.” She said she told her father she wanted to travel and write like he did, and was considering Mexico as her first stop.
“Yeah!” Jack says, becoming animated for the first time. “Go to Mexico! Write a book. You can use my name.”
According to Jan, this was the only time that he acknowledged he was he father. The only time.
The Beats left a lot of destruction in their wake. Not all, but some of them. We all know that Burroughs shot his wife Joan in the head in Mexico. It had been Joan’s idea originally that Burroughs become a writer. From Wikipedia: Before accidentally killing [his first wife] Joan Vollmer, Burroughs had largely completed his first novel, Junkie, which he wrote at the urging of Allen Ginsberg, who was instrumental in getting the work published, even as a cheap mass-market paperback. Ace Books published the novel in 1953 as part of an Ace Double (two books for the price of one, the other story, a book about the day-today doings of a cop was said by Burroughs “better than it had any right to be.” under the pen name William Lee, retitling it Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (it was later republished as Junkie).
Later on, Burroughs wrote: I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would not have become a writer if not for Joan’s death. (note the abdication of personal responsibility: “if not for Joan’s death” instead “if I hadn’t shot my wife in the face during a stupid, drunken game of Blind Willie McTell.”
They lied a lot, those Beats, from small little white lies like Kerouac saying “no, no” when Allen asked him if he was nervous, even though he clearly was. He also surreptitiously read parts of Visions of Cody (which, at the time, he was still insisting was better10) instead of On the Road, before reverting to passages from the latter.
Kerouac helped his friend Lucien Carr dispose of evidence of his murder of David Kammerer, a man who was stalking him, landing Jack in jail and a delicate situation. Edie Parker offered to pay his bail, but only if she married him. As Joyce Johnson put it in Minor Characters, Parker would tag along with the Beats immature hijinx, like rolling a trash can down 5th Street, but really just wanted to settle down and marry. And for this she picked Jack Kerouac, a man who became famous for constant restless wanderings. Through some odd legal maneuvering, Kerouac was sprung from jail and immediately married Parker at City Hall, and Herbert Huncke ended up doing two years instead.
When asked about this years later, he shrugged laconically and said “someone had to do the bid.” He is immortalized as the single-named Hassel in On the Road, the ultimate bad boy, the hustler you see in diners making ten cent bets or pounding the pinball machine because “it ain’t working right…this thing ate my quarta! Hey! This thing are my quorta!.” Kerouac used the name because Huncke always had a scam going to get money for heroin. He was closer to Burroughs than Kerouac. It is unknown whether Kerouac ever thanked Huncke for his help. In Huncke’s later years he lived “in a garden apartment on East 7th Street near Avenue D in New York City, supported financially by his friends. In his last few years, he lived in the Chelsea Hotel, where his rent came from financial support from Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead, whom Huncke never met.” Meanwhile Ginsberg ingratiated himself with the hippies as best he could, being present at the anti- Vietnam War and countercultural protests in Chicago, Illinois during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Footage shows him up front, leading the crowd, bellowing the yoga chant “ommmm” over and over. In the 1970s he began hanging with the Rolling Stones entourage (Keith Richards couldn’t stand Ginsberg and calls him a “windbag” is his memoir Life). Ginsber then joined Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, a legendary 1975-76 tour that comprised series of shows at offbeat venues and rarely played cities. Other performers included Ginsberg himself, who had trouble connecting with the younger audience, who were less patient with his rambling poetry than the 60’s activists had been. Other performers on that tour Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, Joni Mitchell, Ronee Blakely and Ramblin' Jack Elliott. At one point Ronee Blakely and Allen Ginsberg joined Dylan onstage for a song. While his former peers died or hid from the world, Ginsberg remained in the public eye, which some considered shrewd (I guess the proper word today would be “branding”) but which most readers felt affected his writing dramatically. I doubt this hypothesis. His zeal for promoting the works of others didn’t damage his writing abilities in the 1950s and 1960s, why would it in the 70s? Still, scholars and readers alike consider Kaddish and other poems to be his last truly great collection of poetry.
He dutifully showed up to any literary event or documentary interview that would have him until his death in 1997 at age 70. William Burroughs, incredibly, lived to be 93, dying the same year as Ginsberg. His reunion with Herbert Huncke in What Happened to Kerouac? is particularly emotional, though the emotion seems almost one-sided. Huncke is moved almost to tears by the sight of his old friends, while Ginsberg remains aloof, or else he is simply just concentrating on the interviewers questions. Now who was removing himself from emotion and feeling, eh Ginsberg?
This “abstract morality” being, to Kerouac, Ginsberg’s erection of great metaphors, metaphors like skyscrapers that vanish when you try to touch them. Kerouac wanted a happiness more tangible than what words on a page could give him. And once he realized happiness isn’t a terminal station on the railroad of life, he withdrew, heartbroken, to a small shack in Florida began his long descent into madness and drink.
In the documentary What Happened to Kerouac?, Ginsberg opines that “existence by its very nature is joyful, even suffering existence.” Kerouac would balk at such a statement. So do I. I could not agree less with Ginsberg. Holding that photograph in my hand morning, crying in the Hell I put myself in, I realized that most of existence is suffering punctuated by either sporadic relief from that suffering or by actual, temporary-but-real happiness. I may not look happy, but I sure as hell was when we stepped off the platform of that Leviathan together.
I’ll leave you now with my favourite Kerouac poem: October in the Railroad Earth. It is incredible. I love the description of San Fransisco as having “end of land sadness, end of land gladness.”
It’s all in California…it’s a sea…
I look up at blue sky of perfect lost purity
and feel the ward of wood of old America beneath me
He even breaks into singing, in a jazz style at 5:06. Kerouac was beginning to realize that he wouldn’t change the world with his words: the essential American out there
always finding his solace his meaning in the fellaheen street and not in abstract morality.
I do not want some intangible, esoteric “ism” to bring me contentment. I want something real. Something that feels as real as suffering always does for its duration Problem is, we never seem to recall the acuteness of our suffering once it’s gone away…and so we reach for the bottle or the syringe or whatever it is…
≠Funny then, that his first marriage to Edie Parker took place in City Hall. Kerouac was in jail (accessory to a murder after the fact) and she offered to bail him out if he married her. Amazingly, the marriage lasted four years. A forced marriage lasted longer than my own. Fuck me.
Amburn, Ellis. Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac. (1999)
From On the Road, where the word appears 19 times:
Describing Moriarty and Ginsberg meeting each other on page 5: the holy con-man with the shining mind, and the sorrowful poetic con-man with the dark mind”
2. On page 58: “life is holy and every moment is precious.”
3. Page 194. “That’s what Dean was: The HOLY GOOF”
4. Page 264: “It was our last night in Holy Denver, we made it big and wild.”
It appears nine times in The Dharma Bums, 11 times in Big Sur but just twice in The Subterraneans. These latter two are both close contenders for Saddest Kerouac Book.
Kerouac bounced back & forth between Buddhism & Christianity (Specifically Catholicism) his whole life, but his was given a final sacrament shortly before he died, and therefore, in the eyes of the Catholic Church, he died a Catholic. This wasn’t a sudden about-face either. As early as 1958 when reporters started calling him, asking him to define beat. He patiently took their questions and then baffled them with the response that to be Beat was to have a Catholic-Beatific vision. To cook the last meal in your pantry and offer half of it to someone. To have a car but toss the keys to some young, petty thief of a kid with the warning “don’t waste this.”
The above dialogue is from a Mad Men scene but it belongs in the pantheon of great American writing for its emphasis that the gift of wheels is a major, and fine gift indeed. And it’s not just the kid, who now has a Cadillac convertible, who looks pleased by Don’s shocking generosity: Don looks free and happy too, because the exchange is an American one at heart. Don has given the kid access to the continent with just one little piece of advice “Don’t waste this.” He doesn’t mean just the car. He means life.
He’s been in the driver’s seat for years. A little surrender might be good for him, the kind of patience the lonesome traveler must summon to decode the indecipherable bus /train/taxi timetables at downtown terminals. Damn things seem to be written in Navy Semaphore or hieroglyphics.
Don has become Kerouac’s titular Lonesome Traveler (1960), a novel containing the so-called “spontaneous prose” that characterized On the Road. (That is a myth, by the way, that Kerouac wrote all of On the Road in three weeks. He wrote the fist draft in three weeks, sweating so hard he had to hang his shirts up to dry From Wikipedia: It is a compilation of Kerouac's journal entries about traveling the United States, Mexico, Morocco, the United Kingdom and France, and covers similar issues to his novels, such as relationships, various jobs, and the nature of his life on the road. Some of the stories originally appeared as magazine articles.
The Aaron Sorkin legal thriller manages memorable quip after memorable quip but it foreground’s Hoffman’s epiphany. Her sister-in-law sent her a mysterious gift that is alleged to help grieving partners (and I KNOW the cliched American style of making a arms, legs, butt, dick, ears, but because all the data is off a bit.) At first, the service downloads every text msg, every email every, every instance in which you used typed words to communicate is download.
I think this is bullshit. At every major protest of the 1960s, Hoffman was front-and-centre. He made sure he was where the cameras were. He relished his role as an anti-Establishment hippie and was likely thrilled that Born on the Fourth of July was going to raise his profile after a fallow decade following years on the run for possession of cocaine, coke that Hoffman insisted was “planted.”
This was because, in the old days, the drums wee recorded first, and so they were the most degraded after all the playback needed for guitar, bass and vocal overdubs. This would often bury the snare drum entirely. So Berry Gordy came up with the idea of smacking a tambourine on every snare hit. and it worked. Simple idea by that Berry Gordy, but genius.
Reminds me of the time I shoplifted one of those Delissio pizza’s cuz I was broke and hungry. To the security standing at the front I must have looked like a walking Pop Tart. But he didn’t stop me. He knew…but he let it go anyway. What a guy.
“his issue were four sons, all of whom died of the Black Death. In his later years he became invalid and, unable to pay for his lodgings, found himself in a debtors prison, where he soon died.” From some boring biography of some Medieval priest, written with high-toned snarkiness.
Visions of Cody (Cody being the codename for Neal Cassady, who some consider the father of the Beat movement) contains some fantastically good writing but no plotline whatsoever. It is a study of Cody (Neal) and “his relation to the general America,” as Kerouac put it. Soon enough he would stop insisting Visions was better.