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

by Allen Ginsberg

  There are a lot of other sketches of people here. There’s an interesting moment where he connects everything. This is a kind of new consciousness for him, it’s the birth of his masculine and grown-up matured consciousness, kicked out of the womb into the world and seeing the world as a vast breathing animate place, fresh to be described, because nobody ever described the phenomenal world around his sensorium in exactly the same way. It was as if Kerouac had entered into a state of consciousness where he was one big eyeball or ear. That’s maybe a little too exaggerated. What I mean is he’s entered into a state where for the first time he’s looking on the planet as novelists had not before looked. You get it in some of Rimbaud’s prose poetry and I suppose it’s in Shakespeare but there’s a certain uncanny vibration in Kerouac’s sketching descriptions, which may be either amphetamine or some twentieth-century vibe from having been kicked out of old familiar earth and entering into a social planet that includes the atom bomb and ants and orchestras, Buchenwalds, pieces of the Buddha material, frozen and sliced microscopically. The sense of all of mankind as a giant empty anthill scurrying in a mechanic future that has been cut off from the cozy old hometown wooden parlor living room radio steaming pudding kitchen with momma, of the past. There’s no longer any home, it’s a strange open universe where there’s a possibility of being lost in infinitely large scale where thousands of people could go over a cliff and nobody would notice. Yet it’s balanced because he’s got this desire for icy joy, and shiverings of joy.

  Now, an interesting thing, one of the most amazing, I thought, in terms of psychological acuity or penetration or empathy, was the description of a girl sitting in a cafeteria eating in solitude. Kerouac entering into her solitude and trying to feel what she was feeling inside, trying to psych out or guess what the meaning of some of her gestures and attitudes and body language was.

  Now exactly in his place without knowing who was there before, the poor lost history of it, sits a pretty brunette with violet eyes and a flowing purple drapecoat—takes it off like stripteaster, hangs it on hook (back to it) and starts eating with pathetic delicate hunger her hot plate—deep in thought while she chews—­wearing cute little white collar draped over black material and three pendants, pearls; lovely mouth; she just blew her nose daintily with a napkin; has private personal sad manners, at least externally by which she makes her own formal existence known to herself as well as polite social cafeteria watchers she’s imagining, otherwise why the act though it is genuine. She took a bite off the fork and THEN and how she’d blow! she licked the side of it in a slight furtive movement of pleasure, her eyes darting up to see if anybody noticed this—as her hunger is appeased she grows less interested in outward manners, eats more rapidly, has sadder more personal bemusements with herself over the general rim and consciousness of her cunt which is in her lap as she sits—

  [ . . . ] With her head down inexpressible purity shows in her face, like a young Princess Margaret Rose, and beauty, slant-eyed young girl beauty with freshness of the cheeks and upward-­sending rosy-glow lips—she’s reading a library book! and sighing!—a freshness that comes from her lips being chastely compressed and is aura’d from the tendernesses of her neck just beneath the ear from the fragile white breakable susceptible cool brow which will never know wild sweats, just cool beads of joy—as she reads she fondles the creases that run from her nose to her mouth each side with doubly applied fingertips and is really digging her own face and beauty as much as I—turns the bookpages with small finger, so long, ridiculously far out—the book is a Modern Library!—therefore she’s probably no dumb little book-of-the-monther typist but maybe a hip young intellectual girl from Brooklyn waiting for Terry Gibbs to pick her up and take her to Birdland. She’d melt for me in two minutes, I can tell by looking at her. Big horrible middleaged Jewish couple sitting now with her—like invading Ammonites. Now she goes—beautifully, with simplicity. It no longer makes me cry and die and tear myself to see her go because everything goes away from me like that now—girls, visions, anything, just in the same way and forever and I accept lostness forever.

  Everything belongs to me because I am poor.171

  That’s a great sentence to end it with, “Everything belongs to me because I am poor.” I guess that was one of the scenes at the time, one of the key classic sentences in this book, like in On the Road, “The earth is an Indian thing” was one of the classic lines.

  CHAPTER 33

  Corso and The Vestal Lady on Brattle

  About 1950 or 1951 I ran into Gregory Corso at the Pony Stable bar, which was a dyke bar in Greenwich Village. He had just come out of jail for irrelevant juvenile delinquency problems. He was a loner wandering by himself in the Village. He was a young kid with very dark hair, it looked like a little cap of hair, bright eyes, very handsome, intelligent, lively face, a little streak of dark Italian Mafia in it, cherubic looking. Gregory was born on the corner of Bleecker and Macdougal directly across from the San Remo bar, which was the bohemian meeting place. Dylan Thomas had passed by there, and Maxwell Bodenheim had passed by there, and probably Upton Sinclair had passed by there too. [Gregory] knew the whole Italian Village as an insider and was familiar in the neighborhood, but I had no idea who he was. I was out on my own wandering around with no particular aim, probably trying to get laid or meet somebody, looking for Gregory Corso for all I know.

  When we met, I don’t know how we got into conversation, but he brought out a sheaf of poems. I had already been involved with Kerouac and Burroughs as artists, so there was some sense in my head that I had a dowsing wand for poetic beauty. When I saw Corso’s poetry, I was immediately struck by the fact that it was immortal in some funny way. The poems I saw don’t exist [anymore] and the only one that I remember is a poem that began, “The stone world came to me and said ‘Flesh gives you one hour’s leave.’” I interpreted the stone world as a world of eternity, the world I’d seen in my own Blake visions or the world of supreme reality, but I was reading into it some kind of mystical signal, which probably wasn’t there. The language was so strong and so original and also so sublime that I didn’t realize what it meant.

  He was saying that the world of ancient beauty had come to him and given him a year, or an hour, or a lifetime to accomplish the same beauty. I thought he meant eternity and he meant classical Greece and classical Rome, the statues of Aphrodite or Apollo or the Parthenon frieze. He was looking back to his own classical background. In prison he’d read a lot about Greek and Roman literature and then he went back even further and read a lot of things like Gilgamesh, and the first epics and the pre-Greek histories, Babylonian and Sumerian, going back to Ur. That always has been his specialty so he thought he should go back to the first “daddies,” the first histories. The poem was strong enough that I was immediately taken.

  It was rare that somebody took their own poems seriously enough to carry them around and pull them out. The fact that they made sense on top of it and had some kind of mortal shudder in them was more indicative, so I immediately took him seriously. I hadn’t seen anybody that wrote a classic poetry somewhat in vernacular.

  One of his earliest poems, “Sea Chanty,” is in The Vestal Lady on Brattle. It is a little book published by some rich young Harvard kids in 1955. Gregory had been hanging around there.

  Sea Chanty

  My mother hates the sea

  My sea especially

  I warned her not to

  it was all I could do

  Two years later

  the sea ate her

  I immediately interpreted that as mass unconscious, my mother hates the world of eternal mass unconscious, my exhibition of it especially, and I warned her not to go, two years later mass unconscious lapped her up. Then the next part of it is even weirder.

  Upon the shore I found a strange

  yet beautiful food

  I asked the sea if I could eat it

  and the sea said
that I could

  — Oh, sea, what fish is this

  so tender and so sweet?

  — Thy mother’s feet172

  Well, that’s really weird for a young kid. To be eating his mother’s feet and to be getting his mother’s feet back from the sea. It starts nursery rhymish, something that might be just childishness or sublime, but it has such a strange twist of mind, daring in a way, because most people wouldn’t want to imagine eating their mother’s feet, much less think that it was funny or pretty. Almost inharmonious discordant beauty, which was his genius, a genius of discord, which has been raised to monumental proportions. In the actual music of the language and the imagery, it’s the introduction of a stoppage or a break or a discord or a contradictory hit, line by line, as finding a strange and beautiful food and then finally defining it as his mother’s feet. It’s obviously fantasy and yet at the end the fantasy turns around and the image is something that’s horribly realistic. It would take a poet to find his mother’s feet as strange and beautiful food.

  Corso’s aesthetic was contradiction, discord of idea, and also music, sound of the line. Which means that he would have to be writing realistic to begin with, and taking the ideas from his own mind or his own experience rather than from an ideal of beauty, such as I had or Kerouac had. Some beautiful ideal of Melvillean Wolfe full-tongued vowelic harmony. Gregory wanted sudden disharmony as his beauty.

  Song

  Oh, dear! Oh, me! Oh, my!

  I married the pig’s daughter!

  I married the pig’s daughter!

  Why? Why? Why?

  I met her in the evening

  in the moon in the sky!

  She kissed me in the evening

  and wed me in her sty!

  Oh, dear! Oh, me! Oh, my!

  I married the pig’s daughter!

  I married the pig’s daughter!

  Why? Why? Why?

  Because I felt I had oughta!

  Because I was the one that taught her

  how to love and how to die!

  And tomorrow there’ll be no sorrow

  no, there’ll be no sorrow

  when I take her to the slaughter!

  When I take her to the slaughter!

  Why? Why? Why?173

  A very strange song done in the form of a nursery rhyme and yet the most horrible nursery rhyme conceivable. I don’t see how anybody could have thought of that. Except he did. I think those are a young man’s poems, but a really brilliant kid to be saying instead of “I married the angel’s daughter,” “I married the pig’s daughter.” Very few people would think of that. Who’d put themselves down so, put themselves in that clownish role? “I married the pig’s daughter, and I’m going to lead her to the slaughter.” Again the disharmony, which he’s working with rather than being brought down by. The unexpected surprising upside-down twist change or discord are his aesthetics. There’s very little obvious self-pity there. It’s more like a horrible comedy.

  You Came Last Season

  You came and made penny candy with your thumbs

  I stole you and ate you

  And my feet crushed your wrappers

  in a thousand streets

  You hurt my teeth

  You put pimples on my face

  You were never anything for health

  You were never too vitamin

  You dirtied hands

  And since you were stickier than glue

  You never washed away

  You stained something awful.174

  His method already begins to come in. “You were never anything too vitamin.” A kind of weird phrasing. It’s condensed, the line is tailored down, cut down. The generalization that there were no vitamins in candy is reduced almost to the archetype, single use of the word, “you were never anything too vitamin.” He’s made a noun out of the adjective. What he’s done is taken the adjective, cut off the end, and left it as a noun, “you were never vitamin.” And if you notice in a lot of his poetry, he’s condensing like that, syntactically condensing. This is one of the earliest shots where he does that.

  It’s interesting to note his particular genius of condensation and abstraction of an idea, isolating the idea to a single word, making a noun out of an adjective or a verb out of a noun and cutting out all the articles and prefixes and suffixes. “You were never too vitaminy” becomes “you were never too vitamin.” You find that tailoring and condensation of the language developing more and more into his later poetry until he becomes a real master of that and the shrewdest, sharpest master of those scissors that I know in modern poetics. Gregory called it tailoring, he cuts and snips and shapes it, sewing up, putting cuffs on his poems, putting a vest on it, making it fit the size.

  I had a girlfriend who lived next door to the New School for Social Research on 12th Street and Corso had a furnished room across the street facing her apartment. He watched her undress every night for months before we met. The night we met Corso started describing the girl and the situation and the street and the place and I realized this was my [girlfriend]. I was trying to make Gregory, and so I said, “You want me to introduce you? I have magical powers.” So we went up and visited her. She immediately took a shine to Gregory and so they had a little affair.

  Gregory was somewhat of a madcap then. He didn’t drink much, had no particular bad habits, just a little provocative line here and there. I remember he came wanting money one day with a suitcase full of crème de menthe, Pernod, and other undrinkable liquors, which had fallen into his hands somehow from some car theft. Burroughs and I were putting him down as a troublemaking kid quite a bit, mocking him. He was writing [in an] early juvenilesque style, like “my mother hates the sea,” in this weird Emily Dickinson way. Then around 1953 Burroughs left for Tangier, I left for Mexico and San Francisco. Gregory with a girlfriend, Hope Savage, went up to Cambridge, where he settled down for a year.

  Hope Savage was a tremendous influence on Corso. She was the daughter of the mayor of some mid-southern town where she had been a rebel in her early teens and had been sent to a private bughouse and given shock treatments. She came away a total idealist. Gregory recalling that she wrote “revolution is the solution” way back in 1954 or 1955, on the walls in New York and Cambridge. This was the first time anybody in my group of peers had come on with the word “revolution” as something that you put on city walls. She was Gregory’s ideal mind, the first revolutionary he ever heard of. She and Gregory went up to Cambridge and sat together reading all through Spenser’s Faerie Queene aloud, Milton’s Paradise Lost, much of Blake, and a lot of Shakespeare. Gregory spent two years in Cambridge hanging around with the high-class ashfoot legions of young diplomatic adolescents that go to Harvard. At that time, Cambridge was also a center of poetic ferment, because Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Bunny Lang, and many other poets were there. Gregory was one of the poetic heroes of that scene. Hope had some money and so they lived very elegantly in a large high-ceilinged room with velvet furniture, couches, chairs, big curtains, giant windows overlooking the street, fireplace, big poppa armchairs, smoking jackets, velvet clothes.

  From that period Gregory’s earliest work, The Vestal Lady on Brattle, poems written Cambridge Mass, 1954–55, was published by some of the rich young Harvard boys. I want to run through some of those, giving little pictures of him. First of all recollections of Greenwich Village.

  Greenwich Village Suicide

  Arms outstretched

  hands flat against the windowsides

  She looks down

  Thinks of Bartok, Van Gogh

  and New Yorker cartoons

  She falls

  They take her away with a Daily News on her face

  And a storekeeper throws hot water on the sidewalk175

  Well, that’s a bit curious for a young kid to write in the sense
that it’s realistic, not influenced by William Carlos Williams, but just some kind of naked harsh observation. Still there’s a romantic sympathy, she thinks of Bartók, van Gogh, and New Yorker cartoons. It’s almost a New Yorker cartoon itself, the stereotyping of the suicidal girl, but it’s also a shrewd appreciation of a little girl, full of funny noble ideals that ends with the Daily News on her face and hot water on the sidewalk. And a poem I thought at the time was his best poem, an early classic, which proved his human genius called:

  In the Morgue

  I remember seeing their pictures in the papers;

  Naked, they seemed stronger,

  The bullet in my stomach proved that I was dead.

  I watched the embalmer unscrew the glass top.

  He examined me and smiled at my minute-dead-life

  Then he went back to the two bodies across from me

  And continued to unscrew.

  When you’re dead you can’t talk

  Yet you feel like you could.

  It was funny watching those two gangsters across from me trying to talk.

  They widened their thin lips and showed grey-blue teeth;

  The embalmer, still smiling, came back to me.

  He picked me up and like a mother would a child,

  Rested me upright in a rocking chair.