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

by Allen Ginsberg

  Kerouac was really a solitary genius, innovating and going forward into as yet unrecognized and unmapped areas of composition all by himself, with the courage necessary to do it all by himself. He had no support, not only from “society” but also from his friends, his wife, his mother, or anyone. I was involved in an intimate way, but I was nothing but an anchor drag. I’m quite ashamed of my role. Within a few months I was writing him letters trying to apologize and tell him how much I liked it. I liked it immediately, but on the other hand it was just unsalable, and [as agent] I was thinking in terms of selling it somewhere. That was a traumatic lesson I learned about the conditions of real art. Sometimes things are messy. When you break the shell, shit comes out of the shell and it’s sometimes a mess, as it is in real birth.

  But Dean’s intelligence was every bit as formal and shining and complete, without the tedious intellectualness. And his “criminality” was not something that sulked and sneered; it was a wild yea-saying over burst of American joy; it was Western, the west wind, an ode from the Plains, something new, long prophesied, long a-coming (he only stole cars for joy rides). Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love; he didn’t care one way or the other, “so long’s I can get that lil ole gal with that lil sumpin down there tween her legs, boy,” and “so long’s we can eat, son, y’ear me? I’m hungry, I’m starving, let’s eat right now!”—and off we’d rush to eat, whereof, as saith Ecclesiastes, “It is your portion under the sun.”136

  He went seventy. I tingled all over; I counted minutes and subtracted miles. Just ahead, over the rolling wheatfields all golden beneath the distant snows of Estes, I’d be seeing old Denver at last. I pictured myself in a Denver bar that night, with all the gang, and in their eyes I would be strange and ragged and like the Prophet who has walked across the land to bring the dark Word, and the only Word I had was “Wow!”137

  My stay in San Francisco was coming to an end. Remi would never talk to me again. It was horrible because I really loved Remi and I was one of the very few people in the world who knew what a genuine and grand fellow he was. It would take years for him to get over it. How disastrous all this was compared to what I’d written him from Paterson, planning my red line Route 6 across America. Here I was at the end of America—no more land—and now there was nowhere to go but back. I determined at least to make my trip a circular one: I decided then and there to go to Hollywood and back through Texas to see my bayou gang; then the rest be damned.138

  This is kind of interesting because this was whiskey and he died of alcohol. So this is an early account of drinking.

  She was slow and hung-up about everything she did; it took her a long time to eat; she chewed slowly and stared into space, and smoked a cigarette, and kept talking, and I was like a haggard ghost, suspicioning every move she made, thinking she was stalling for time. This was all a fit of sickness. I was sweating as we went down the street hand in hand. The first hotel we hit had a room, and before I knew it I was locking the door behind me and she was sitting on the bed taking off her shoes. I kissed her meekly. Better she’d never know. To relax our nerves I knew we needed whisky, especially me. I ran out and fiddled all over twelve blocks, hurrying till I found a pint of whisky for sale at a newsstand. I ran back, all energy. Terry was in the bathroom, fixing her face. I poured one big drink in a water glass, and we had slugs. Oh, it was sweet and delicious and worth my whole lugubrious voyage.139

  One thing that occurs throughout his prose is a mellow-cellos about old October moons. Thomas Wolfe made much of October and Kerouac made a lot of October. He died in October, so there’s a kind of Octoberal, I think it was from Shakespeare, an old October barrenness everywhere. That’s where he got his October from.

  I had a book with me I stole from a Hollywood stall, “Le Grand Meaulnes” by Alain-Fournier, but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing. In inky night we crossed New Mexico; at gray dawn it was Dalhart, Texas; in the bleak Sunday afternoon we rode through one Oklahoma flat-town after another; at nightfall it was Kansas. The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.140

  There are long, long serenades about October from book to book.

  Suddenly I found myself on Times Square. I had traveled eight thousand miles around the American continent and I was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of a rush hour, too, seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream—grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island City.141

  When I got home I ate everything in the icebox. My aunt got up and looked at me. “Poor little Salvatore,” she said in Italian. “You’re thin, you’re thin. Where have you been all this time?” I had on two shirts and two sweaters; my canvas bag had torn cottonfield pants and the tattered remnants of my huarache shoes in it. My aunt and I decided to buy a new electric refrigerator with the money I had sent her from California; it was to be the first one in the family. She went to bed, and late at night I couldn’t sleep and just smoked in bed. My half-finished manuscript was on the desk. It was October, home, and work again. The first cold winds rattled the windowpane, and I had made it just in time.142

  The shrouded stranger of the night was a common fantasy we had and out of this particular image came my own poem “The Shrouded Stranger” and Kerouac’s Doctor Sax.

  Just about that time a strange thing began to haunt me. It was this: I had forgotten something. There was a decision that I was about to make before Dean showed up, and now it was driven clear out of my mind but still hung on the tip of my mind’s tongue. I kept snapping my fingers, trying to remember it. I even mentioned it. And I couldn’t even tell if it was a real decision or just a thought I had forgotten. It haunted and flabbergasted me, made me sad. It had to do somewhat with the Shrouded Traveler. Carlo Marx and I once sat down together, knee to knee, in two chairs, facing, and I told him a dream I had about a strange Arabian figure that was pursuing me across the desert; that I tried to avoid; that finally overtook me just before I reached the Protective City. “Who is this?” said Carlo. We pondered it. I proposed it was myself, wearing a shroud. That wasn’t it. Something, someone, some spirit was pursuing all of us across the desert of life and was bound to catch us before we reached heaven. Naturally, now that I look back on it, this is only death: death will overtake us before heaven. The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death. But who wants to die? In the rush of events I kept thinking about this in the back of my mind. I told it to Dean and he instantly recognized it as the mere simple longing for pure death; and because we’re all of us never in life again, he, rightly, would have nothing to do with it, and I agreed with him then.143

  I left everybody and went home to rest. My aunt said I was wasting my time hanging around with Dean and his gang. I knew that was wrong, too. Life is life, and kind is kind.144

  That’s pretty good. “Life is life, and kind is kind.” It’s a pun, like kindness is kindness, but also it takes one kind to recognize another kind, relatives are relatives, that is to say, friends are friends, types are types. That comes from a wordplay by Lucien Carr, who on an early trip down into Greenwich Village had written on the urinal of the Minetta Tavern, “Humankind-ness,” and under that, “Human-kindness,” take your choice. Life is life and kind is kind.

  Burroughs:

  Bull had a sentimental streak about the old days in America, especially 1910
, when you could get morphine in a drugstore without prescription and Chinese smoked opium in their evening windows and the country was wild and brawling and free, with abundance and any kind of freedom for everyone. His chief hate was Washington bureaucracy; second to that, liberals; then cops. He spent all his time talking and teaching others. Jane sat at his feet; so did I; so did Dean; and so had Carlo Marx. We’d all learned from him. He was a gray, nondescript-looking fellow you wouldn’t notice on the street, unless you looked closer and saw his mad, bony skull with its strange youthfulness—a Kansas minister with exotic, phenomenal fires and mysteries. He had studied medicine in Vienna; had studied anthropology, read everything; and now he was settling to his life’s work, which was the study of things themselves in the streets of life and the night.145

  Burroughs prophetic, on science. They went out to the racetrack playing the horses.

  In the car as we drove back to his old house he [Bull] said, “Mankind will someday realize that we are actually in contact with the dead and with the other world, whatever it is; right now we could predict, if we only exerted enough mental will, what is going to happen within the next hundred years and be able to take steps to avoid all kinds of catastrophes. When a man dies he undergoes a mutation in his brain that we know nothing about now but which will be very clear someday if scientists get on the ball. The bastards right now are only interested in seeing if they can blow up the world.”

  We told Jane about it. She sniffed. “It sounds silly to me.”146

  “The bastards right now are only interested in seeing if they can blow up the world.” That’s quite literally correct in terms of where the money goes. Burroughs’s contention always was that science was a great answerer. He can dig science except he thinks that all the experimental research is going into destructive science rather than something interesting and curious and worth a grown man’s attention.

  Meanwhile Dean took a carton of cigarettes from the gas station and we were stocked for the voyage—gas, oil, cigarettes, and food. Crooks don’t know. He pointed the car straight down the road.147

  “Crooks don’t know.” I don’t know quite what that meant but I always dug that insertion.

  Either crooks don’t know what karma they’re building, or else the gas station owners are all crooks and they don’t know who they’ve stolen from. It’s a weird line. It is a funny kind of intelligence that he has of one swift thought that passes by. Crooks don’t know. It’s almost like an apothem, or an axiom. He’s got another one in here, “The earth is an Indian thing,” which is a really beautiful phrase.

  Kerouac’s characters are modeled on real people, but Kerouac is a novelist and a fiction maker, so the anecdotes are embellished and exaggerated for dramatic charm. What he did was fictionalize people, or fictionalize reality, so that there’s not a one-to-one correlation. The quotations are invented by Kerouac, paraphrasing or imitating the rhythms or diction of the people talking, sometimes a little crudely and sometimes very, very wittily. They’re stereotypes of the way Burroughs talks or the way I talk or the way Cassady talked. They aren’t quotes for real, although occasionally, since he kept small swiftly writ notebooks, some of the conversation might be identical with actual words that came out of people’s mouths. For the most part, while he was typing, he had to make up speeches that sounded like the people or as he remembered it sounding. He took from real characters but he’s fictionalizing them.

  Biographers tend to assume that the incidents and speeches are one-to-one reality and construct biographies out of his novels. They’re all awry, the facts are not accurate, because he’s invented scenes and invented confrontations and exciting conversations. In this case [On the Road] the editing of the single-sentence teletype roll down to paragraphs, pages, sections, chapters of the published book involved the condensation of six cross-country trips into two for dramatic purposes.

  [My character] Carlo Marx is taken from Jack’s fictionalization, so it isn’t identical. I have to keep relating to the problem of people asking, “Are you Carlo Marx?” Well I’m not. Carlo Marx is a fictionalization. As far as I’m concerned, it’s Jack’s somewhat goofy, charming, tender invention, but not me. However, it was a picture that I thought was rather cute at the time and still do. Sometimes a bit vicious, I thought. However, it was his thing and it never bugged me, I sort of liked it. I thought it was fiction after all, and he had a right to use his imagination to express himself. One or two people got really mad, though.

  “I know,” I said, and I looked back east and sighed. We had no money. Dean hadn’t mentioned money. “Where are we going to stay?” We wandered around, carrying our bundles of rags in the narrow romantic streets. Everybody looked like a broken-down movie extra, a withered starlet; disenchanted stunt-men, midget auto-racers, poignant California characters with their end-of-the-continent sadness, handsome, decadent, Casanovaish men, puffy-eyed motel blondes, hustlers, pimps, whores, masseurs, bellhops—a lemon lot, and how’s a man going to make a living with a gang like that?148

  It’s pretty good. I would say “I write poetry” and he would say “I write poetry too, but I have a longer line,” and it really is as good as anything I can write. “Disenchanted stunt-men,” a fantastic idea. Amazing combination, “end-of-continent sadness,” well that’s just mood music, but “withered starlet,” that’s very good. That’s amazingly intense for prose, amazingly vivid and inventive as language. The concept is great, “disenchanted stunt-men.” The book is studded with these throwaway insightful, incisive phrasings. That’s his real genius, I think, because there’s some kind of extraordinary intelligence both of language and of ear. Jack Kerouac is not given credit for the sophistication of his insight into characters and stereotypes and archetypes of society. A line like this about stunt men or withered starlets, it’s not merely sophisticated, not merely society wise, but world wise. “A lemon lot, and how’s a man going to make a living with a gang like that?” That’s basic bourgeois attitude, a middle-class attitude, a lemon lot. It has humor and he’s imitating, parodying, and paraphrasing a middle-class macho all-right-nik comment here.

  The point I’m trying to make is that, whatever Kerouac’s supposed reputation as an oddball or a curious genius of beatnik prose, his attitudes encompassed the attitudes of middle America at their wittiest. Kerouac’s attitudinal rhetoric, side remarks like “a lemon lot, and how’s a man going to make a living with a gang like that?,” is so recognizably macho and at the same time understandable, simpatico, basically commonsense, down to earth, redneck aspected, is again a measure of his worldly sophistication. He’s considered a naive, or a primitive, but Kerouac had a better grasp on American manners and political manners than most writers, although some American novelists do have that kind of scope, like Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway. That quality of rueful wisdom and intelligence isn’t very often commented on in Kerouac. That’s the thing I find the most interesting despite the fact that I might have gone into a snit or put him down.

  Suffering and mutability, transitoriness, mortal poignancy or swiftness of mortal life are the most characteristic motifs of Kerouac. There’s a basic grounding in sanity with all this excitement and offset joy and puffs of grass. This is grounded in an unadulterated appreciation of pain. That’s about as good as you can get for an American exemplar of transitoriness, “withered starlets.”

  I looked out the window at the winking neons and said to myself, “Where is Dean and why isn’t he concerned about our welfare?” I lost faith in him that year. I stayed in San Francisco a week and had the beatest time of my life. Marylou and I walked around for miles, looking for food-money. We even visited some drunken seamen in a flophouse on Mission Street that she knew; they offered us whisky.149

  I walked around, picking butts from the street. I passed a fish-n-chips joint on Market Street, and suddenly the woman in there gave me a terrified look as I passed; she was the proprietress, she apparently thought I was c
oming in there with a gun to hold up the joint. I walked on a few feet. It suddenly occurred to me this was my mother of about two hundred years ago in England, and that I was her footpad son, returning from gaol to haunt her honest labors in the hashery. I stopped, frozen with ecstasy on the sidewalk. I looked down Market Street. I didn’t know whether it was that or Canal Street in New Orleans: it led to water, ambiguous, universal water, just as 42nd Street, New York, leads to water, and you never know where you are.150

  This is quite smart about 42nd Street, because when you look deep into 42nd Street you realize there’s water at both ends of the street, but when you’re in the middle of 42nd Street you think you’re in the middle of the continent with all the neon blinking and the tall buildings.

  I was delirious. I wanted to go back and leer at my strange Dickensian mother in the hash joint. I tingled all over from head to foot. It seemed I had a whole host of memories leading back to 1750 in England and that I was in San Francisco now only in another life and in another body. [ . . . ] And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic moth swarm of heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething roar which wasn’t in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn’t remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it. I realized it was only because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind that these ripples of birth and death took place, like the action of wind on a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-like water. I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein; like a gulp of wine late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled. I thought I was going to die the very next moment. But I didn’t die, and walked four miles and picked up ten long butts and took them back to Marylou’s hotel room and poured their tobacco in my old pipe and lit up. I was too young to know what had happened. In the window I smelled all the food of San Francisco.151