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

by Allen Ginsberg

  CHAPTER 30

  Kerouac and The Subterraneans

  So Jack had written The Town and the City by 1950 and then he’d written the first part of Visions of Cody, “In the pool halls of Denver long ago in the red sun . . .” Then he wrote On the Road before returning to Visions of Cody, all the sketches. His next work was The Subterraneans. In 1953 Burroughs arrived in New York after having been absent since the late forties. [He’d lived in] Texas, New Orleans, Mexico, and South America by then. He stayed with me for a couple of months on East 7th Street where we put together all of his letters of the previous three or four years for The Yage Letters. A lot of his early work was in the form of letters, written mostly to me. They were just straightforward letters, which he wrote half to be informative and half just to be a writer.

  Burroughs fell in love with me around that time. Probably because of all the people that he’d known since 1945 I was the one that was most in contact with him. I was still insistent on him writing, so he came up to put together The Yage Letters. Kerouac was in Long Island so he came in visiting. Corso was in New York so he was in and out of the apartment. There was a young lady around, who had been my girlfriend for a while. She had been hanging around the San Remo tavern and living in a place called Paradise Alley at 11th Street and Avenue A. Mardou Fox of The Subterraneans was a very good typist, so Bill and I hired her to type up The Yage Letters. Jack began having an affair with her. So that’s the background of The Subterraneans.

  Kerouac’s method for writing was to take some amphetamine, Benzedrine generally, and just sit down and stay there at the typewriter, exhausting his mind completely, everything in his mind, everything he could think of relating to the subject. Not at random, it would have to be a subject that he was obsessed with, that he’d thought about and maybe at some point had realized, “Ahh I could write a whole novel about this.” He sat down and did it like an athlete, like an athletic event.

  That period of Maggie Cassidy and The Subterraneans and Doctor Sax is, in a sense, Jack’s most energetic, dense prose period. He’s gone through the obsessional romantic material of Neal Cassady in a total experimental explosive form in Visions of Cody. He’s already written thousands of pages of mad prose. “Adios, King” is the last line of his farewell to his youthful hero. He’s already disillusioned, he’s already looking out to the grave.

  Then he goes back to the madness of the present moment in The Subterraneans. At this point he’s mature with his ax and he also looks back at his high school girl friend [in] Maggie Cassidy. That’s a book about actual life in high school, a humble subject, but some of his prettiest prose. He’s still young, he’s thirty-one years old. He’s in his prime, not affected unnaturally by the disillusionment of chemical alcohol. Though that’s not well known as his prime material, it really is, I think. He’s in his prime as a novelist and he’s just writing for his own soul at this point.

  He realizes he’s had some success with his heroic young novel The Town and the City, had nice reviews, and then a total flop failure with On the Road, which nobody would publish. Even worse, even I hated Visions of Cody. Jack’s in there writing all by himself, for himself, for his own ear or for some universal consciousness, just for pure art. Springtime Mary / Maggie Cassidy is a rare thing, one of the few large pieces of prose since Herman Melville written in isolation and solitude by somebody accomplished. Kerouac was writing in eternity, for eternity. He wasn’t writing for publication, not even for friends, because we were an unreliable ear too.

  CHAPTER 31

  Jack Kerouac and Fame

  Then in 1956, [Kerouac] began to write an account of the scene and called it Desolation Angels. It was going to be a big novel but he only finished part one of it. He returned to it five years later, after his books were published, after On the Road was published, after he was famous, after there was a Beat Generation. In the middle of that, just at the crest of the Beat Generation, he wrote a novel describing from the inside the mass hallucination of publicity and how all that affected him and his family and his friends. That was Desolation Angels, his fourteenth book.

  In addition to all that, Mexico City Blues is worth reading. Michael McClure and I and Gary Snyder think it’s one of the great seminal books of poetry of midcentury because it’s the loosest and most open free form of all poetry written at a time when people were experimenting with open form. Kerouac had such a good ear and he’d written so much already that in writing these little ditties there was always some electrical connection in the rhythm. He was such an experienced writer that tossing them off was high fun. His model on that was none other than Herman Melville because it was after the disappointment of Melville’s career as a writer that he turned to writing little poems for his own soul.

  Kerouac, like Melville, was also a total failure, he couldn’t get anything published. By 1955 Jack had written all the books that are now classics, but no publisher understood them. Then he started [writing] little poems, because we were all poets actually. We were babbling about poetry all the time and Kerouac said, “I’m an epic poem writer. What’s the difference between what I write and what you write? You keep calling it poetry as if it was something special. I write poems a thousand feet long, page after page of poems. I’ll show you poetry.” So he wrote this little book of poems, just to show his poetry skills.

  Finally On the Road was published, but instead of following up by publishing everything chronologically, like they should have, Malcolm Cowley said, “Well we have all this furor about the Beat Generation, Jack, and we should do something about that. The public is confused, they don’t know what this is all about, your writing is very confusing in a sense, we can’t publish Visions of Cody because it’s too dirty and nobody understands it anyway. Why don’t you write a book in nice simple sentences?” After he’d gone through all of this and he’d finally written Old Angel Midnight with all this heavenly gibberish, they’re asking him to write a book with simple sentences. For him it’s child’s play. So he said, “Well, I think I will,” and he did. He wrote this exquisite little novel, Dharma Bums, presenting the notion of beatniks and knapsack revolutionaries and long-haired kids and marijuana and parties and mountain climbing and tin cook pots for mountains, and muesli, and granola. Everything that everybody wants to know about it. Beautiful, crystal clear prose, but sweeter than Hemingway as far as directness of description. And it also has little cadenzas of nonsensical composition.

  After Dharma Bums he wrote a play, which was called The Beat Generation in Three Acts. Robert Frank and some other people made the first act into a scenario for the movie Pull My Daisy. Jack narrated that spontaneously and it was later published as a book. Yet another brilliant little composition.

  Then he drove back to New York from San Francisco with Lew Welch and Albert Saijo, another Jap poet, and wound up at my apartment in New York. They kept a little notebook called Trip Trap, full of haikus and nonsensical musings on the road. It was actually chaotic at the time, but is kind of a charming journal now, very brief.

  Then Kerouac put together the Lonesome Traveler book, which is early and late writings. Very early writings from the fifties, the brakeman on the railroad, and then little essays. Then he put together all his poems for City Lights and called it Pomes All Sizes. The second part of Desolation Angels, an accounting of the years of fame, is kind of interesting. It is a fascinating subject, because everything else was written in solitude. Here he’s writing about the big world and radio and TV and Madison Avenue and how his friends all interacted with that and going to Tangier and going to Paris.

  The next work written in October 1961 is a monumental work. Crash of fame and alcoholism, Big Sur. It is one of the most amazing pieces of writing that I’ve ever heard of, because he was totally sick with the DTs, but still he had the presence of mind and the physical stamina to face all that depression and compose a giant work, a huge book. It is very closely written and brilliantly written, full of inventi
on and full of poetry, full of shudders and nightmares too. Prior authors who were considered great celebrities, like F. Scott Fitzgerald or Hemingway, were never able to get aside from themselves sufficiently to compose their own requiems, so to speak. Fitzgerald started a book called The Crack-Up, and I don’t think he was ever able to finish it, about the same subject. Hemingway never was able to completely write about himself cracking up, but Kerouac did it several times. The complete story of his own physical and emotional degeneration, Big Sur, after the disillusioned second half of Desolation Angels. That’s twenty-three books in a period of eleven years, an incredible amount really, as well as endless journals, poems, and notebooks.

  Then a big hiatus, 1961 to 1965, during which time he was typing up all his prior work, actually working editing journals, poems, novels, and preparing one by one all these for publication. And all that brings us back to Vanity of Duluoz.

  CHAPTER 32

  Kerouac, Sketching, and Method

  I want to pick up again on Kerouac’s idea of sketching and look at it one more time with his 1952 letter to me describing his method. It’s a crucial moment for him when he’s discovered something and is simultaneously commenting on it to his friends. It’s like a frame, a great moment to tune in. I think this was his big breakthrough period, during the time of Visions of Cody, particularly when he arrived at sketching.

  . . . Sketching (Ed White casually mentioned it in 124th [Street] Chinese restaurant near Columbia, “Why don’t you just sketch in the streets like a painter but with words?”) which I did . . . everything activates in front of you in myriad profusion, you just have to purify your mind and let it pour the words (which effortless angels of the vision fly when you stand in front of reality) and write with 100% personal honesty both psychic and social etc. and slap it all down shameless, willy-nilly, rapidly until sometimes I got so inspired I lost consciousness I was writing. Traditional source: Yeats’ trance writing, of course. It’s the only way to write. I haven’t sketched in a long time now and have to start again because you get better with practice. Sometimes it is embarrassing to write in the street or anywhere outside but it’s absolute . . . it never fails, it’s the thing itself natch.

  Do you understand sketching?—same as poetry you write—also never overdo it, you should normally get pooped in fifteen minutes’ straight scribbling—by that time I have a chapter and I feel a little crazy for having written it . . . I read it and it seems like the confessions of an insane person . . . then next day it reads like great prose, oh well. And just like you say the best things we write are always the most suspected . . . I think the greatest line in On the Road (tho you’ll disagree) is (apart of course from description of the Mississippi River “Lester is just like the river, the river starts in near Butte Montana in frozen snow caps (Three Forks) and meanders on down across states and entire territorial areas of dun bleak land with hawthorn crackling in the sleet, picks up rivers at Bismarck, Omaha and St. Louis just north, another at Kay-ro, another in Arkansas, Tennessee, comes deluging on New Orleans with muddy news from the land and a roar of subterranean excitement that is like the vibration of the entire land sucked on its gut in mad midnight, fevered, hot, the big mudhole rank clawpole old frogular pawed-soul titanic Mississippi from the North full of wires, cold wood and horn.”)

  How do you think I arrived at last four five words if not in trance?

  But here’s that (best) line “The charging restless mute unvoiced road keening in a seizure of tarpaulin power . . .” This is obviously something I had to say in spite of myself . . . tarpaulin, too, don’t be frightened, is obviously the key . . . man that’s a road. It will take fifty years for people to realize that that’s a road. In fact I distinctly remember hovering over the word “tarpaulin” (even thought of writing tarpolon or anything) but something told me that “tarpaulin” was what I’d thought, “Tarpaulin” was what it is . . . Do you understand Blake? Dickinson? and Shakespeare when he wants to mouth the general sound of doom, “peaked, like John a Dreams” . . . simply does what he hears . . . “greasy Joan doth keel the pot; (and birds sit brooding in the snow . . .”).167

  So that’s the specific explanation there. Ed White the architect suggesting sketching. In Jack’s Book, White said, “‘I think I was actually using a sketch pad then and just suggesting he could do the same thing with notes. I think he thought about it. I don’t think he said much about it, but then he began carrying his little notebooks around, filling them up. He printed faster than most of us can write. He would show up with his notebook sometimes in the evening, after he’d been downtown all day—at the library, in my apartment, or wherever we happened to be at the time; and he’d read parts aloud he’d been writing. We’d usually end up drinking beer and going out and listening to music.” These little notebooks provided raw materials of two kinds: diaristic details, like a reporter’s notes, about events at hand and an endless retracing in memory of all the events of his life, reaching back to his earliest childhood memories in Lowell.”168 He applied that exhaustive sketching to total mind’s eye, interior dream recollection.

  It’s amazing, I used to know very clearly what came first in the sequence of Kerouac’s books, but at the time I never toted it up in terms of thinking of teaching it or trying to expound it. I just knew it was of some historic importance, you know one thing came after another, what were the different stages. It is interesting to pick up on these different stages, because if you do, then you understand it much better. The method of composition, how you can get there to do what he was doing, because most of my writing in the fifties, including “Howl,” “Sunflower Sutra,” “Transcription of Organ Music,” and all that, are primarily just imitations at his direction of this form of sketching, and the prose poems that he has are as good as anybody’s poems. They aren’t broken up into little lines, but they could be if you wanted to and made to look like William Carlos Williams or something. Basically they are prose poems.

  Jack’s prose considerations were Melville at the time and there’s a little hint of that.

  Roaming those subways I see a Negro cat wearing an ordinary gray felt hat but a deep blue, or purplish shirt with white shiny pearl-type buttons—a gray sharkskin suit jacket over it—but brown pants, black shoes, deep blue ordinary one-strip socks and gabardine topper short and beat, with edgebottoms rain-raveled—carrying brown paper bag—his face (he’s sleeping) is big powerful fighter’s sullen thicklipped (thick Afric lip) but strangely pudgy sweet face—dark brownskin—his big hands hang, his fingernails are pink (not white) and are soiled from a laboring job—Looks like Joe Louis only a Joe Louis who has known nothing but the freezing cold Harlem winter mornings when old blackbums infinitely beater than old Cody Pomeray of wino Denver go by with wool caps pulled over their ears with no prospects for the future whatever except below zero filthy snows—169

  “Thick Afric lip” is from Melville’s poem “A Night Piece,” a description of the cannons that were bombarding Vicksburg in the Civil War. And the kind of prose he’s writing here derives from Melville’s Moby-Dick and Pierre for the subtleness and the playfulness of the thought. The author having enough leisure to talk to himself and to talk to you the reader, instead of just telling the story, also stops and gossips with you on the way. As you can see here, Kerouac is endlessly gossiping with himself and his reader about the phrasing he’s using, or about the vision he’s having, or about the face he’s seeing. Little thoughts that go off into a shudder at the end because they’re so horrible, like this “wool caps pulled over their ears with no prospects for the future whatever except below zero filthy snows.” While reading [aloud], he had a very funny habit of reading to the end of an exhalation or breath, and ending with a shudder of laughter, at the extremity of the thought and outrageous exquisiteness of the language he arrived at, like “tarpaulin power.” The next thing was sketches of people and faces.

  The poor lonely old ladies of Lowell who come out the five
-and-ten with their umbrellas open for the rain but look so scared and in genuine distress not the distress of secretly smiling maids in the rain who have good legs to hop around, the old ladies have piano legs and have to waddle to their where-to—and talking about their daughters anyway in the middle of their distress.

  People going by. The big cowlick Irishman with camel’s hair belted coat who lumbers along, his lips loosened in some sullen thought and as though it wasn’t raining in his huge dry soul—

  The fat old lady incredible-burdened not only with umbrellas and rain cape but underneath bulging pregnantly with hidden protected packages that stick so far out she has trouble avoiding bumping people on sidewalk and when she gets in the bus it will create a major problem for the poor people who are now, in their own parts of the city headed for the bus, unsuspecting of this—

  The sharp little rich Jewish lady in a fur coat who lofts an umbrella that catches the eye it’s so expensive and designed (red on brown) so beautifully, cutting along with that surefooted bandy legged gazotsky waddle that distinguishes her from other ladies, the great high civilization peasant woman of swank apartments with a hairy husband Aaron who deals in high finance with the gravity and hirsute slowness of an ape, she’s headed home with a package and the rain like other things does not distress her—

  The Irish gentleman all bundled tightly in a dark greenslick raincoat, collar up, tight at his raveled chin, hat, no umbrella, a little anxious as he proceeds somewhat slowly to his objective and lost in thought of his job or wife or by God anything including feelings of homosexual deterioration or that Communists are secretly controlling his life at this very moment by thought-waves from a machine projecting from a submarine five miles offshore, maybe a teletype operator at U.P., thinking this as he goes down Sixth Avenue the name of which was changed to Avenue of the Americas some years ago to his complete disgust, going along surrounded by this entire night of dark rain in this moment of time that he occupies with a white scared sidelook at something on the bottom of the sidewalk (which isn’t me) —170