The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats

by Allen Ginsberg

  239th Chorus

  Charley Parker Looked like Buddha,

  Charley Parker, who recently died

  Laughing at a juggler on the TV

  after weeks of strain and sickness,

  was called the Perfect Musician.

  And his expression on his face

  Was as calm, beautiful, and profound

  As the image of the Buddha

  Represented in the East, the lidded eyes,

  The expression that says “All is Well”

  —This was what Charley Parker

  Said when he played, All is Well.

  You had the feeling of early-in-the-morning

  Like a hermit’s joy, or like

  the perfect cry

  Of some wild gang at a jam session

  “Wail, Wop”—Charley burst

  His lungs to reach the speed

  Of what the speedsters wanted

  And what they wanted

  Was his Eternal Slowdown.

  A great musician and a great

  creator of forms

  That ultimately find expression

  In mores and what have you.

  That was Kerouac’s later comment on those two particular solos, particularly the toot that wailed off onto little bird flight in “Night in Tunisia.”

  Next, Kerouac the philosopher, whose slow, dumb, brilliant philosophy, the meditator, was influenced by Thelonious Monk in “Round About Midnight.” The quality in that is the thoughtful simplicity, single notes, just cutting corners, abstracting the melody to its essential blueness and just playing those blue notes. There’s a kind of philosophic calm as distinct from Parker’s hyperexcited flight. It’s as if the key notes were extracted from the curve of the flight and just “plonk plonk plonk plonk bonk” put in place in right rhythmic order, just a little bit off or on, just a little bit hesitant in or after the exact bar time. In Monk’s thoughtful composition of “Mysterioso” there is a kind of mysterious quality of laconic intervention in the chords. He just makes a comment here and there at the crucial moment of tune transition.

  So far we have the instrumental, now language. The blues always were a great poetry. The great poetess of blues Billie Holiday was also a famous lover of Lester Young. Both of them were junkies, so they reflected the whole junkie-hip consciousness, the world-weary disillusionment, and at the same time a kind of homosexual sentimentality nostalgia of beautiful lesbians of yore, or bisexual sentimentality of beautiful lesbians of yore. Unfulfilled Eros, which I think historically signals that ripeness of desire which preceded the sexual revolution. It was the direct and frank emotional expression of so much feeling and so much tenderness denied, body touch unmade, that led finally to some kind of breakthrough where people finally said, “Well, why not?” On all levels, heterosexual revolution and homosexual revolution and bisexual revolution and lesbian revolution. There’s a peculiar quality of mournfulness and nostalgia and desire mixed in that, which affected everybody in the 1940s.

  The one who was the most affected by it was Herbert Huncke, who was an instructor to both Burroughs and Kerouac for their hip voyages and explorations of Times Square. His favorite records of Billie Holiday were “Lover Man,” “Don’t Explain,” and “I Cover the Waterfront.” The last one interesting because symbolically that low-down trip to the waterfront, the docks in New York, that she describes, the blues of the docks, the blues under the bridges, was directly associated in Kerouac’s mind with Hart Crane and Kerouac’s own associations as a seaman. His early novel was The Sea Is My Brother, never published,25 so Billie Holiday’s “I Cover the Waterfront” was a major icon of the Beat litterateur’s mid-forties.

  Holiday’s “Don’t Explain” is the acme of junkie forgiveness and tolerance. You just beat me for my junk and you stole my stash, hush now don’t explain. I don’t need any explanations, just love me some more and don’t leave me. It’s that junkie masochism, but it’s the crowning statement of early junkie forgiveness and tolerance of any trespass against the body and soul. There’s an element of the beat-down-dog persecuted junkie in police state morality there, which is probably one of the original Beat themes and perceptions. The law’s been changed since, but it was one of the causes of “Beatness” that produced a psychology of looking at society from the grave up, or from the ground up, looking from the underside, beyond society’s conceptions of good and evil, which in those days in matters of human emotion, sexuality, and poetry, censorship, and drugs were medieval compared to what common judgment and opinion offers now as standard understanding.

  You couldn’t read Lady Chatterley’s Lover and you couldn’t read Henry Miller in those days. Things like that were banned, illegal. You couldn’t smoke any grass without being thought a dope fiend, literally, that was the language, fiend. A variety of citizen called fiends had been invented by one of the bureaucracies of the government and Billie Holiday was one of the people that were officially classified as fiends. A producer of all this intelligence and beauty and music and melancholy and sprightliness of language, and she was officially classified as a fiend. There was a revolutionary insight into the hallucinatory nature of official government classifications and terminology. It came from the experience of junkies, sick in love with their own fidelities, nostalgias, comradeships, and arts, under circumstances that by hindsight seem as cruel as Jean Valjean being pursued by his demonic policeman, Inspector Javert, in Les Misérables. I mean that’s an old classic of a hurt right and wrong. In the 1940s and 1950s that hurt was not recognizable except by those who are down under the heel of the law.

  Last of all was King Pleasure who isn’t a great like these other artists, but he’s one that brought a lot of things to the poetic table [when] he started writing words for the beautiful solos that the musicians were making. His “Moody’s Blues” is a verbal vocalization of a saxophone solo by James Moody, which King Pleasure set words to and sang. So what he’s singing are words of a saxophone solo that he’d heard.

  There were other things similar like Slam Stewart, a bassist, who hummed sweatingly along with his bowed bass, so that you would have syllables coming from his mouth at the same time as very complicated bass figurations. The point I am making is that the musician was expressing some kind of language, talk, and then it was re-expressed from his instrument back into talk. You see how close it is to somebody actually talking with the same kind of rhythms as speech. It’s actual American speech that was being vocalized by the saxophones and then retranslated into black English.

  There was a slightly apocalyptic element at the time in all this breakthrough of new sound, new music, new rhythms, or as the great Socratic statement goes, “When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake.” That did introduce a new way of hearing, a new body rhythm. And they continued that tradition of scat singing swift-syllabled echoing of instrumental solos. You can see already a real conscious correlation of the new music in America with poetics or prose.

  Oh the pots and pans the racket of their fear, the kitchen of the sea, the Neptunes down here, the herds of sea cows wanta milk us, the sea poem I aint finished with, the fear of the Scottish laird rowing out with a nape of another fox’ neck in the leeward shirsh of S H A O W yon Irish Sea! The sea of her lip! The brattle of her Boney! The crack of Noah’s Ark timbers built by Mosaic Schwarts in the unconditional night of Universal death.26

  CHAPTER 7

  Times Square and the 1940s

  For Kerouac’s accounts of New York City in the forties, you’d have to check out the sections on New York and Times Square in The Town and the City. That’s among the best writing in that book. He’s hit his stride in that. What he was trying to do was write a big bildungsroman, like Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, a family novel that dealt with generations and social history. His big inspiration was Thomas Wolfe, as far as American prose, so it was a Wolfean-style novel. He was readi
ng a lot of Thomas Mann, and he had read a lot of Sherwood Anderson and a lot of Hemingway, and mainly Wolfe, some Thoreau. During the time he was writing, he first picked up, through Burroughs, on the prose by Louis-Ferdinand Céline and probably around the mid-forties through Burroughs some Proust, Gide, and Céline. Anderson he’d read himself, Thomas Wolfe he picked up himself.

  In The Town and the City Kerouac splits up his own nature, and his family, into a number of brothers and sisters, describing the history of the family in small-town Galloway, pretty accurate to his own experience in Lowell.

  The Town and the City begins with a study of family life in the small town, moves to the city where the family breaks up, then winds up fragmented in Brooklyn. The hero, Peter Martin, ends up walking around Times Square with strange interesting characters, or people that he’d met up at Columbia or people that he’d met in Horace Mann.27 Kerouac’s mind was already ripened and matured by 1947, his worldview had been determined. His loneliness had been established, his awareness of death had come on him because he’d sat with his father and watched his father die, which is probably the central love experience of his life, the central drama. And so The Town and the City is about that death of his father. His father died embittered and angry, apparently.

  Originally it was a Gnostic search. Then, when Kerouac’s father died, I think Jack realized the basic mortal transitoriness. Mutable sorrow of existence. And so he got interested in becoming the recording angel of the dream scene, and began recording his dreams, literally, as well as the dream of life itself. He was the recording angel of the dream of life, knowing that it was nothing but a dream. By means of swimming in the seas of prose, he would arrive at a satisfactory vision of life for the benefit of other people. In Visions of Cody he has a note as to why he’s writing. “I’m writing this book because we’re all going to die” is how it begins. He’s got the line, “In the middle of the dream my heart broke open, or my heart opened inwardly to the lord.” It’s a form of prayer, actually, for Kerouac it was prayer. Supplication to the lord and a prayer. It was spiritual but it was much more romantic and devotional and ended up Catholic devotional. Then for the period of 1953 to 1955 when he was undergoing Buddhist inspiration it was to wake people up from the dream of nightmare existence.

  Jack didn’t have to pick anything to write about, he was in the midst of a life that was interesting enough and all he had to do was look around and write about his life, he didn’t have to invent a literature. We were writing at that time in the direction of what later in poetry came to be called confessional or in prose new journalism, or a novel based on autobiography. We just looked around and took reality as the subject of the novel. There were precursors who had already realized that fiction in a sense was already dead. Or the kind of fiction that people used to practice, making up a big, huge fictional novel. Kerouac did it and did a very brilliant job with The Town and the City, but then he plunged directly into writing about the people he loved in his next book.

  It’s all recorded in The Town and the City. Kerouac is out on his own in New York wandering Times Square with postwar apocalyptic-minded characters. Mystic heads, dope fiends, sex freaks, new nature hippies. A central figure [that he meets] there is Herbert Huncke. Burroughs talks about him in his book Junkie as Herman, so you can cross-reference them.

  When we get to Burroughs we’ll cover his view of Times Square in the forties. It will intersect with Kerouac’s The Town and the City. It was a time when Kerouac and Burroughs and myself were hanging around in the company of Herbert Huncke, who was a hustler, denizen, and part-time junkie. Huncke was also an employee of Doctor Alfred Kinsey, who was hanging around Times Square taking statistical material on the sex life of the vagabond population. Huncke was one of his agents scouting, getting people to interview. And among the people that were interviewed for the original Kinsey Report were Herbert Huncke, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and myself. It was a funny historical coincidence.

  Huncke is quite an interesting writer and he influenced Burroughs and Kerouac. He was a figure in Kerouac’s writing mind, Burroughs’s and John Clellon Holmes’s as well. Encouraged by all of us, he wrote quite a few stories which are authentically good, they’re like Sherwood Anderson or something, American primitive, but so direct and in such perfect spoken language that, for me, they’ve always been classics, but not well known.

  I would say that Times Square was the central hangout for Burroughs, Kerouac, and myself from about 1945 to 1948. It was probably the most formative period of early Spenglerian mind, where that language of zap, hip, square, beat was provided over the Bickford’s cafeteria tables28 by Huncke. I would say Herbert Huncke is the basic originator of the notion of Beat Generation or notion of the ethos of Beat and of the conceptions of Beat and square, what they meant in our mouths were more or less what they meant in his mouth, because we heard it from him. I never heard the word “hip” until I heard him talking. So actually, Huncke, a man of no fortune, is a minor but seminal figure both in vocabulary and in attitudes. In fact I would say he probably is the person from whom that whole stylization and vocabulary, later known as hip including the very word “Beat,” emerged.

  Huncke spent the 1930s in Chicago, came to New York, and was there about five years when Burroughs moved down to an apartment over Riordan’s Bar on Eighth Avenue. His purpose was to explore Eighth Avenue, the gambler’s and honky-tonk bars around Madison Square Garden nearby, the old men’s bars, the hustler’s bars, the junkie and teahead and narc agent’s bars, social meeting places around Times Square. All the hustlers from 42nd Street, the car thieves, second-story men, burglars who were trying to unload hot goods, people trying to sell grass, junkies coming in and out to score, undercover narcs trying to keep track on everybody, young kids who couldn’t make it with the rodeo, black chauffeurs who smoked grass and listened to Charlie Parker and read Kahlil Gibran stopped there, Columbia students like myself or Kerouac or a few other people, old schmekers like Bill Garver who made his living and supported his junk habit by stealing overcoats from Horn & Hardart29—all used to come into the Angler Bar.30 Kerouac describes them in The Town and the City.

  At that time, Times Square was built for amphetamine heads and hustlers because there was a Horn & Hardart and a Bickford’s which had tables where hustlers and junkies could sit with a cup of coffee all night talking. They were pretty much unbothered under the marquee of the Apollo Theatre,31 which was showing Jean Gabin in Le Quai des Brumes (Port of Shadows), or Peter Lorre in M, or Children of Paradise, The Blood of the Poet. The great Jean Gabin series influenced Kerouac enormously, hairy-wristed masculine Gabin who was a man’s man, but with tenderness and sensitivity, so it had appealed to Kerouac’s nature, as distinct from overly macho American with no delicacy.

  All the Times Square hustlers were looking at those movies. The lumpen criminals were going to see Metropolis and M, and then able to stay up all night and dunk coffee with shiny blackened dirty fingers. There’s a little scene in Burroughs’s Naked Lunch which takes place in Bickford’s in which the young hustler is dunking his pound cake, and a description of “black and shiny fingers.” He’s just had a meet with a john who took him to a hotel room and got him in bed and turned into some green slimy clammy creature exuding cum all over him, and the hustler says, “Well, I guess you can get used to anything, I got a date with him tomorrow.”

  I would say that those days were the diamond point of our youthful opening up and probably the most determining experience. The aspect of eternality that was most noticeable was the sky, the openness of the sky above the cornices of the buildings. For the first time in my consciousness, I noticed the red apocalyptic glow in the sky caused by the neon lights. It gave a kind of garish, Technicolor intensity to the very heavens we were walking under. It made it seem like some biblical scene, the last of days or pre-apocalyptic moments when there was a buildup of electrical emphasis under the stars.

  At that time
almost everybody was eating Benzedrine inhalers. You could get Benzedrine by opening up an inhaler and then swallowing it with a cup of coffee. The effect was very fast and lasted for eight hours or so, very strong. Kerouac was using Benzedrine when he wrote some of the later passages of The Town and the City. Around 1945 I started using amphetamine, too, for writing. Amphetamine was introduced onto the scene by a friend of Herbert Huncke, Vicki [Russell]. [She] was a girl who hustled around Times Square, a statuesque, very intelligent girl, partly dyke, partly hustler. Vickie turned both Burroughs and Kerouac on to the Benzedrine inhalers and then Kerouac reported back to me and I found it useful for writing for a while. I’d take it and write for a whole weekend, until the writing turned to gibberish toward Sunday night.

  There are pictures of all those people in The Town and the City and there are also some visions of Times Square and that red light above. There was a Pokerino place, which had an undersea, subterranean, greenish blue light, open all night. People would go in there and play the pinball machines with an amphetamine intensity, getting deeper and deeper into the fluorescent consciousness around them. There’s a picture of that in The Town and the City and that would intersect with some of Junkie, some of On the Road, and some of Visions of Cody. In Lonesome Traveler, Kerouac also describes Times Square in a section called “New York Scenes.”

  My friends and I in New York city have our own special way of having fun without having to spend much money and most important of all without having to be importuned by formalistic bores, such as, say, a swell evening at the mayor’s ball.—We dont have to shake hands and we dont have to make appointments and we feel all right.—We sorta wander around like children.—We walk into parties and tell everybody what we’ve been doing and people think we’re showing off.—They say: “Oh look at the beatniks!”32