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

by Allen Ginsberg

  Holmes got some of his ideas from Kerouac. By the time Go was published, Kerouac had finished four books, so Kerouac got mad at Holmes for stealing his theme, although he had given him the theme. Kerouac was always resentful and sometimes paranoid, thinking that he was a British Shakespeare and that [although] other people were getting their novels and poems published nobody was publishing his books.

  Another book at that time was Who Walk in Darkness by Chandler Brossard, which was about a junkie in Greenwich Village. I don’t think Go, The Horn [Holmes’s second book], and Who Walk in Darkness are the same high-quality prose, they don’t have the same kind of angelic ambition and panoramic awareness and taste of mortality and Dostoyevskean sense of confrontation of one soul with another that you find in Kerouac. They’re minor works, indicative sociologically, and aesthetically interesting occasionally, but they never would have made a generation of literature. Holmes was interested in generational literary notions, like Hemingway, Steinbeck, and all that. He was considered by Partisan Review and New York Times as the respectable Malcolm Cowley-esque literary critic, responsible spokesman, humane, pipe smoking, somewhat professorial, reliable, and defendable essayist who would explain the strange shenanigans of the new generation.

  This is Holmes’s version of Stofsky’s [Ginsberg’s] vision, Holmes’s view of this kind of metaphysical shenanigans.

  Stofsky sat, propped up like an invalid in his armchair, feverishly reading Blake by the early afternoon light through his windows. An intense silence actually seemed to grip the room as his eyes darted along the page and his mind swam.

  “I wander through each charter’d street . . . {quoting Blake’s “London”} Marks of weakness, marks of woe.”

  The pitch of the day before had not let down. He was in the midst of a sort of delirium that seemed to transform everything around him. He had spent the whole day devouring, at one and the same time, Blake and Kierkegaard, although the latter had been slow and he had skipped. But he mulled each poem of Blake’s, tracing his finger along every line of print, making a perfect, sharpened point of his mind so as to crack the images open. And then that morning, upon arising with a strange magnified emotion, he had found himself anticipating each metaphor, and the heart of the poetry seemed visible to him through a brilliant and, up until then, blinding glare.

  He tossed the book aside, tipping over a glass, and snatched up paper and pencil, and wrote without stopping—an avid and incredulous expression transfixing his features:

  “Flower of soul, flower of glare,

  Stricken Rose who is so numb:

  Is this shrunk impulse, like a star,

  A prideful light where I succumb?

  I head where dreadful wisdoms are:

  Is this the knowledge that is numb?”

  He sat there quivering a little, staring at the lines with a feeling of acute surprise, yet not really reading what he had just written. Moments came like this now: separated from all others, and from his surroundings, as by immense voids of meaning; and yet they seemed to be limp with light of a whiteness and power to illuminate unlike any he had ever experienced. He basked in these blank moments of entranced cognition as though will-less.228

  Then, the description of the character Stofsky going into the bookstore at Columbia, meandering through the bookstore, bookstore shelves and stacks.

  Lines kept on pulsing through his head and, when staring at a page, before his eyes as well:

  “The look of love alarms . . .

  The weeping child could not be heard . . .

  And her thorns were my only delight . . .”

  Then, without warning, it happened for the first time. Aware of a sudden flush of warmth, he looked up over the edge of the book he was holding, out into the store and back through its whole length in the direction he had been working, until his gaze reached the door. It seemed a terrible distance. But everything was different, doused in that same all revealing glare of whiteness, and yet also as it normally was. He seemed to have gained a sort of X-ray perception, and he peered through the stacks of books and the browsing students as though the surface of reality was some kind of film-negative. He was at once startled and paralyzed as he had been the night before.

  [ . . . ]

  A vision! A vision! The words kept stinging into his consciousness like quickening waves of fever. As he went on, almost running now, he found himself haunted by the odd uprush of pity and rage that had taken control of him during the moment in the book store. It was love! he cried to himself. A molecular ectoplasm hurtling through everything like a wild, bright light! And they were afraid, afraid, almost as if they all suspected. He had seen it clearly, in an instant of pure clarity: the chemical warm love that swam thickly beneath their dread!229

  There’s more to that later, but the thing I remember most from reading it in 1953 was “he had a remote sensation that his eyes were giving off pools of red light that changed to white and then faded palely away.” At the time it seemed like terrible hokum to me, although he was describing my experience through his interpretation of what I had described to him. My first reaction when I read it was one of cringing and embarrassment, that it had come out so corny or seemed so drugged and hallucinatory, pitifully creepy, in fact.

  The poems Holmes is paraphrasing were written between 1948 and 1950 in a book called The Gates of Wrath. His paraphrases are pretty funny, “Flower of soul, flower of glare, Stricken Rose who is so numb.”

  Rose of spirit, rose of light,

  Flower whereof all will tell,

  Is this black vision of my sight

  The fashion of a prideful spell,

  Mystic charm or magic bright,

  O Judgment of fire and of fright?

  What everlasting force confounded

  In its being, like some human

  Spirit shrunken in a bounded

  Immortality, what Blossom

  Gathers us inward, astounded?

  Is this the sickness that is Doom?230

  Mine is just as corny as his, I guess. “See the changing dolls that gaze . . . the changing . . . of dancing glare” is more his own. Probably he got that from “Voice of Rock.”

  I cannot sleep, I cannot sleep

  until a victim is resigned;

  a shadow holds me in his keep

  and seeks the bones that he must find;

  and hoveled in a shroudy heap

  dead eyes see, and dead eyes weep,

  dead men from the coffin creep,

  nightmare of murder in the mind.

  Murder has the ghost of shame

  that lies abed with me in dirt

  and mouths the matter of my fame.

  With voice of rock, and rock engirt,

  a shadow cries out in my name;

  he struggles for my writhing frame;

  my death and his were not the same,

  what wounds have I that he is hurt?

  This is such murder that my own

  incorporeal blood is shed,

  but shadow changes into bone,

  and thoughts are doubled in my head;

  for what he knows and I have known

  is, like a crystal lost in stone,

  hidden in skin and buried down,

  blind as the vision of the dead.231

  Whatever that means now. What I meant then by “voice of rock” was some kind of visionary voice of absolute, ultimate, big basso profundo rocklike prophecy. And “I can’t sleep” because this other part of my own nature wants to be heard and will not be heard until I myself personally die. Then the other doppelganger, visionary, prophetic voice of rock takes over. That is a little bit schizophrenic and maybe Holmes was right, maybe that’s the way I appear to him. What I thought were visionary experiences were more akin to the naturalistic description that Huncke gave rather than this th
eatrical version that John Holmes eloquently fictionalized. When I first read it I was absolutely horrified, and said, “Oh, my God, everybody’s going to get the wrong idea.”

  Holmes’s version is like some descriptions of acid trips, especially the electrical part. He hadn’t had acid and I don’t think peyote was on the scene when he wrote that. He’d had a lot of grass, because Neal Cassady had come to New York and we had all started smoking grass. I had turned Neal on to grass and then he picked up on it very strongly back in California. Then he went down to Mexico and brought some back maybe and turned on John Holmes and Kerouac and myself quite often. In those days smoking grass was kind of a breakthrough. I remember getting into trembling fits and giant paranoiac ecstasies, which is one of the first virgin kicks of smoking cannabis. This might have been an extrapolation from his own grass experience or just purely imaginary. We were all looking at Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, which was a book commonly read at that time for reference to states of consciousness.

  At any rate, you can see from Holmes’s book that there was a preoccupation with an altered state of mind or an enlarged or expanded consciousness, a new consciousness. That phrase “new consciousness,” or supreme reality or new vision, had been bandied about from Kerouac’s mouth to mine and a few other people from 1945 on. You can find that phrase occasionally mocking me in Kerouac poems: “So what, you got gefilte fish for the new consciousness?”

  In 1951, 1952, 1953, nobody had published anything except a few rare novels. [Kerouac had published The Town and the City] and Burroughs had published Junkie under the pseudonym William Lee. The only “artifact” of that era was an essay by John Clellon Holmes in the New York Times magazine, saying, “This is the Beat Generation.”232 It was an article that Kerouac didn’t like much, incidentally. It was an account of a conversation with Kerouac in Holmes’s apartment on Lexington Avenue in 1948 or 1949. Kerouac had very casually said, “Naw, this isn’t a lost generation, this is a beat generation.” Just meaning nothing special, not intending to make a big slogan. However, it was so apt and appropriate and poetic that Holmes picked up on it in terms of headline, or in terms of a literary generation, stylism, and wrote the article for the Times.

  Like [Norman] Mailer and [Lawrence] Lipton and almost every other intellectual commentator, Holmes dwelt at great length on violence, on the elements of psychopathic violence. Like juvenile delinquents with knives cutting their grandmothers’ throats or drowning little kittens for fun. The kind of alienation that society had better watch out for if it wanted to be healthy. They were saying that society in general had better watch out because these young people were committing actes gratuits, gratuitous acts, like murdering old ladies in empty lots. They said that this was some form of social protest and so society had better take note of what the social protest was about.

  Kerouac objected to that because he thought that the original perception had been of the lamb of mind, “kind king light of mind,” heart to heart, Dostoyevskean confrontation, mellowness. What is now being recognized as the purity of the original Beat group. [Ken] Kesey, for instance, commented that he felt more akin to the old beatniks than the later hippie phase. There does seem to be a revival these days culturally, in the punk movement, of Kerouac of the 1950s style, which is to say nonpolitical. Looking for kicks, or looking for soul, or looking for lost Saturday night personal romance mystery. Some people see this as a return to the silent 1950s, silent 1970s apathy, but other people, myself included, see it as a deepening of insight, and the entry of the void, sunyata, dharma, the entry of emptiness into our skulls, awareness of death as the original beatnik perception, and so a deepening of heart rather than a shallowness of heart.

  Holmes’s second book, The Horn, was taken from an anecdote Kerouac told about a jazz player who used to play with his horn up at the side of his mouth and as time went on, as dope and time weakened the imaginary character in The Horn, the horn became vertical. So the idea was Kerouac’s to write a novel about a horn player, “the” horn player, the Prez, the Bird. It was quite a good genre piece about jazz and is a minor classic.

  CHAPTER 47

  Peter Orlovsky

  Peter Orlovsky is an old veteran of the spiritual wars in America and a very central figure in Beat Generation cultural and literary development, both as a cultural activist and as an historically important poet. Peter was considered in 1959 by William Carlos Williams to be the most gifted lyric poet of all of the poets that were associated with the Beat Generation. This was documented in the Wagner College literary review233 when William Carlos Williams wrote a small critique of these writers on the occasion of a very early and historically interesting Beat celebration out at Wagner College organized by a young student, Gerard Malanga, who later became a poet and also an intimate of Andy Warhol and the central figure in Andy Warhol’s original movie Sleep and one of the people who worked at Warhol’s factory. At that early time [there] was a congregation of LeRoi Jones, Ray Bremser, myself, and Peter Orlovsky, out at the college on Staten Island, of all places. I think that was the first venue in New York where everybody came together. We joined with people that were involved with underground film.

  By 1954–55 Peter Orlovsky was an integral part of the San Francisco Renaissance group, and as such is memorialized by Kerouac in the book Dharma Bums as well as Desolation Angels. Peter was present at the historic reading [the Six Gallery] where I first read my poem “Howl,” and Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, and Kenneth Rexroth attended and read, all of them giving their first poetry readings at a series of historic readings that both Kerouac and Neal Cassady were a part of in the audience. That series inaugurated the new wave of poetry vocalized, before an audience, rather than read just on the page, carrying out Whitman’s instructions for a poetry that was out loud and not just for scholars and not just imitating the older literary style.

  Orlovsky went on through Europe during the early days of Beat exile and lived for a long time with Gregory Corso and myself in Paris and with William Burroughs in Tangier in 1957 and again in 1961. Then he went on his own through Greece, Cairo, Jordan, Jerusalem, Israel, and then joined with other poets including Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger on a year-and-a-half, two-year trip to India, which was perhaps the significant cultural India trip that began a whole wave of young kids with long hair going to India and smoking hashish and going up to Nepal. That particular trip is considered by historians to be one of the significant moves, along with Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, in the introduction of Buddhism to the United States by this cross-fertilization and young guys trekking back and forth. Orlovsky then went back through Persia and the Middle East before returning to New York.

  He had a long experience as a mental hospital attendant and an ambulance driver and so was quite competent to take care of people. As I said he then went on to India later and there took care of lepers and beggars in Benares in the burning grounds and marketplaces. Throughout the 1960s he has been one of the stalwart poets of the antiwar movement and a leader in the commune where he was the manager of the Committee on Poetry farm upstate New York. Ray Bremser, Charlie Plymell, Gregory Corso, Robert Creeley, and many other poets visited and stayed there. And so he’s had a long long history and knows a great deal and has a very good memory and has published his book Clean Asshole Poems and Smiling Vegetable Songs from City Lights in 1978. In 1980 Straight Hearts’ Delight was published filled with letters, literary letters, and poems exchanged between myself and him.

  CHAPTER 48

  Carl Solomon

  Carl Solomon is a graduate of Brooklyn College and an extraordinary prose poet and critic. He writes in the style of an American French surrealist dadaist. Carl and I first met almost forty years ago in the hallway of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, where we were both inpatients. I was coming in bewildered as a Columbia graduate, who had gotten caught in the usual undergraduate bust, in other words, dope. I was advertis
ed as the genius college boy who was conducting a network of organized burglaries. My parents had to choose between sending me to jail or having me put away in the booby hatch. Everyone felt that I was a middle-class kid who had just gone wrong and needed a little straightening out. So I wound up in the psychiatric institute on 168th Street.

  On my admission day I remember I had to sit waiting to be assigned a room and I ran into a fellow trudging up the hall, coming up from shock, named Carl Solomon. We didn’t know each other, so he asked me who I was and I said, “I’m Prince Myshkin” Prince Myshkin is the hero of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. Carl’s reply after I said I’m Prince Myshkin was to say that he was Kirillov. Kirillov was the political heavy in The Possessed. Carl’s orientation is interestingly and intensely political. His “Report from the Asylum: Afterthoughts of a Shock Patient” from Mishaps Perhaps was written just after getting out of New York State Psychiatric Institute in the late forties. We were classmates there and spent a lot of time discussing the nature of reality.

  While we were in the madhouse under the influence of the dadists and surrealists, we wrote a letter to T. S. Eliot. It is a totally punk letter, but there is an element of truth in it. We never sent the letter because we were basically sane, we saw ourselves as a bunch of humorists occupying the psychiatric institute for purposes of literary experimentation. One text which was influential on us in 1948–49 is the stylistic precursor of that letter to T. S. Eliot. It is the “Dada Manifesto” by Tristan Tzara, the manifesto by Monsieur Antipyrine.