Literary Rogues

by Andrew Shaffer

  When Thomas’s next poetry collection, Deaths and Entrances, was published in 1946, critics finally hailed him as the genius he believed he had been all along.

  Thomas began dedicating more and more time to his drinking. His parents moved into a house across from the Brown Hotel in Laugharne, where Thomas and his family were staying, so his mother could peer through the curtains to see if her son made it back to the hotel safely after a night of heavy drinking. Ever the gentleman, he would sometimes take off his shoes and tiptoe home so as not to wake the neighbors.

  The Thomases had a third child while living in Laugharne, but Thomas was pulled away to the United States on a lecture tour beginning in February 1950. While the Old World had been a destination for American writers of the Lost Generation, World War II had devastated much of Europe—physically, financially, and morally. The United States had stepped, red-white-and-blue balls swinging, into the power vacuum. If a writer wanted his or her work to be read and have any impact in the new, postwar geopolitical climate, the United States was the only market that mattered.

  Thomas traveled the American continent from coast to coast, lecturing, reading, and, of course, drinking. His tour manager, John Malcom Brinnin, had his hands full with Thomas. Brinnin acted alternately as an accountant, a guardian angel, a nursemaid, and a drinking buddy, depending upon the needs of his client. As essayist Elizabeth Hardwick recalled, “Would he arrive only to break down on the stage? Would some dismaying scene take place at the faculty party? Would he be offensive, violent, obscene? These were alarming and yet exciting possibilities.”

  His wife, however, was distraught that such behavior was cheered. “Nobody ever needed encouragement less, and he was drowned in it,” she wrote in her memoir. Thomas “exhibited the excesses and experienced the adulation which would later be associated with rock stars.”

  When Thomas finally made it to California, he announced at a dinner party that he had two goals: “To touch the titties of a beautiful blonde starlet and to meet Charlie Chaplin.” After actress Shelley Winters let him touch her breasts, he said, “I do not believe it’s necessary for me to meet Charlie Chaplin now.” Unfortunately, he did meet Chaplin, who complained of Thomas’s “rude, drunken behavior” while at Chaplin’s Hollywood estate. This consisted of showing up wasted with Winters and Marilyn Monroe and crashing his car into Chaplin’s tennis court. Next, he urinated in one of Chaplin’s potted plants. As Thomas once wrote, “When one burns one’s bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.”

  He propositioned any and every woman he met, a tactic that occasionally met with success. Faculty at women’s colleges worked overtime as “honor guards” to keep the poet away from the student body following his wildly popular campus lectures. His wife was not pleased with his behavior. “They ought to know what he’s really like in America,” she wrote to Brinnin. “All those fool women who chase after him while I’m left here to rot with three screaming children and no money to pay the bills he leaves behind.” Truman Capote, who only observed Thomas from afar, described the poet as “an overgrown baby who’ll destroy every last thing he can get his hands on, including himself.”

  Thomas went on several more tours of the United States. Caitlin even accompanied him once in an unsuccessful bid to keep him out of trouble. Writing about one of Thomas’s cross-country treks, a journalist from Time observed, “Thomas borrows with no thought of returning what is lent, seldom shows up on time, is a trial to his friends, and a worry to his family.” And, the reporter added, Thomas was rarely seen without a bottle of beer in hand.

  When Scottish poet Ruthven Todd introduced Thomas to the White Horse saloon in New York City, “it was all over,” Brinnin wrote. The White Horse was an English-style pub that reminded Todd and Thomas of home. When Thomas drank there, people would crowd the bar to get a glimpse of the celebrated poet on his favorite bar stool. “That kid is going to kill himself,” one of his many mistresses said. “You can’t live the way he does and not pay for it.”

  Thomas’s fourth visit to the United States would be his last. While in New York City in autumn 1953, Thomas complained of fatigue and spent much of his time in bed. He was having blackouts at frequent intervals, and doctors warned him to stop drinking. Even though he couldn’t hold his liquor down most days, he continued to drink with abandon. “I truly want to die,” he told another one of his mistresses. “I want to go to the Garden of Eden to die, to be forever unconscious.…”

  Thomas spent most of the day in bed drinking on November 3, 1953. He was having trouble breathing, as were many; more than two hundred New Yorkers would die during November from air pollution. Thomas had been receiving cortisone injections for his fatigue, but his health was still an issue. He made it out of his hotel room to sign a contract for another U.S. lecture tour that, in spite of (or because of) his continued misbehavior and reputation, would have brought him $1,000 a week—in effect, financial freedom.

  He went out for a drink at 2:00 a.m. that night to the White Horse Tavern and didn’t return to the Hotel Chelsea until 4:00 a.m. “I’ve had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that’s the record!” he proudly declared to his mistress. “I love you ... but I’m alone,” he told her before passing out.

  When he finally woke up later that morning, Thomas returned to the White Horse for a beer. He was too sick to continue drinking, however, and returned to his hotel room, where a doctor gave him a cortisone shot. After Thomas’s condition failed to improve, the doctor returned and injected him with half a gram of morphine. At 2:30 a.m. the next morning, his mistress called an ambulance. He had fallen into a coma. While doctors believed his condition was the result of long-term alcohol abuse, it was undoubtedly complicated by numerous other contributing factors.

  Thomas died five days later at St. Vincent’s Hospital. His only attendants were a nurse and John Berryman, an American poet with problems of his own.

  16

  The Beat Generation

  “Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.”

  —JACK KEROUAC

  Following the end of World War II, a flood of new consumers strengthened the U.S. economy, and the nation’s gross national product more than doubled between 1940 and 1960. Americans moved from cities to the suburbs, and car and home ownership rose significantly. While it was a time of peace and prosperity, it was also a time of rigid conformity and dissatisfaction built upon deep class and racial divisions. The nuclear family (consisting of a husband, a wife, and a small litter of children) was worshipped as the building block of society, a model that far too many men and women broke themselves financially trying to follow.

  Many men returned from the war and traded their military uniforms for suits and ties and entered the corporate workforce. White-collar jobs outnumbered blue-collar, labor-intensive jobs, and men struggled to find meaning in their work. Middle-class women, who mostly stayed at home to raise children during this era, were more isolated than ever in the suburbs as their commuter husbands left them every day. Alcohol use increased dramatically from previous generations.

  A 1955 novel by Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, peeled back the veneer on postwar America. After the protagonist, overworked husband Tom Rath, tosses a vase at a wall out of frustration, he patches the plaster and repaints the wall with his wife. “When the paint dried, the big dent near the floor with the crack curving up from it almost to the ceiling in the shape of a question mark was still clearly visible,” Wilson wrote. “The fact that the crack was in the shape of a question mark did not seem symbolic to Tom and Betsy, nor even amusing—it was just annoying.” The crack was clearly supposed to be symbolic to readers, though, who worried that the postwar confidence was wearing thin.

  A small but vocal opposition group slipped through the crack: the Beats. Just as the Decadents had shattered the façade of the Victorian era, the Beat generation was destined to agitate the postwar world.

  The Beats incorpor
ated drug experimentation, alternative forms of sexuality, Eastern religion, and a rejection of materialism into their work. They were nonconformists whose bohemian hedonism set the stage for the counterculture revolution in the 1960s. At the same time, existentialism was sweeping across Europe. Existentialist philosophy stressed individuality and freedom in the face of a meaningless and absurd world, and the French trio of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus blazed new philosophical trails in Europe while the Beat writers were expounding upon the absurdity of life in the United States.

  The Beats were, in Norman Mailer’s words, “American existentialists. If our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war or with a slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self. One is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.”

  One of the founders of the Beat movement, Jack Kerouac, said, “John Clellon Holmes and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent existentialism and I said, ‘You know, John, this is really a beat generation’; and he leapt up and said, ‘That’s it, that’s right!’ ”

  The Beats started their careers in New York in the 1950s, in “an age of writers,” journalist Brock Bower said. “Our heroes were writers. We wanted to be writers.” Novelist and model Alice Denham, who dated many of the literary heavyweights of the age, wrote, “New York in the fifties was like Paris in the twenties. Going to New York was scaling a skyscraper to a literary dream. Nobody wanted to be a movie star or a rock star. In the fifties everybody wanted to write the Great American Novel.” They were, like the Decadents, a boys’ club, relegating Denham to the sidelines.

  The Beat generation experimented with a number of different drugs, including marijuana, Benzedrine, peyote, LSD, and morphine. It was only fitting that they sample the wares, as the number of drugs available in America had expanded greatly since the early part of the century. Like outlaw writer-heroes of past eras, the writers of the 1950s were considered suspect—J. Edgar Hoover called the Beats “one of the three most dangerous groups in America.”

  Many prominent writers were caught up in the witch hunt for Communists, including Dorothy Parker and Ernest Hemingway. Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) knew a thing or two about persecution: his mother, Naomi Livergant Ginsberg, suffered from paranoid delusions (although paranoia was par for the course during the 1950s, especially for card-carrying Communist Party members such as Naomi). The president had listening devices planted in our home, she told her son. She subsequently attempted suicide by slitting her wrists, and was hospitalized in mental institutions for much of Ginsberg’s youth.

  When Ginsberg came of age, he left New Jersey for Columbia University, where he first met Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. Ginsberg had his own mental problems, however, and was suspended from Columbia at one point while he received in-patient treatment at Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute. But he didn’t believe he was “crazy,” at least not on the same level as the other patients at the mental asylum. “The people here see more visions in one day than I do in a year,” he wrote to Kerouac.

  Ginsberg had a grander vision in his head: he believed in a “New Vision” for American literature (a phrase adapted from Arthur Rimbaud). With Kerouac and Burroughs, he had the means of achieving this goal.

  “There wouldn’t have been any Beat Generation without Allen Ginsberg, who, besides being a genius poet, was a genius publicist,” Lawrence Ferlinghetti, cofounder of the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, said.

  Jack Kerouac (1922–1969), like F. Scott Fitzgerald, was a failed jock. His skill as a football running back in high school earned him scholarship offers from Boston College, Notre Dame, and Columbia University. He chose Columbia. Unfortunately, Kerouac cracked a tibia in his freshman year, abruptly ending his college football career.

  He dropped out of college but continued to live in New York City. He briefly joined the Marines in 1942 and the Navy in 1943 before being honorably discharged on psychiatric grounds after just eight days of active duty. “I just can’t stand it,” he told the military medical examiner. “I like to be by myself.”

  Kerouac married his girlfriend, Edie Parker, in 1944; they divorced just two months later. As he said, he liked to be by himself.

  Back in New York City after his military discharge and divorce, he met the trio of Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and William S. Burroughs. “What a great city New York is!” he wrote to his parents in 1947. “We are living at just the right time—[poet Samuel] Johnson and his London, Balzac and his Paris, Socrates and his Athens—the same thing again.”

  Kerouac left New York for Denver in 1947 and traveled the country for the next four years working on his debut novel, The Town and the City. After that book’s publication in 1950, he finally settled down with Joan Haverty, his second wife, whom he had proposed to after knowing only a few days.

  The newlywed Kerouac sat down at his typewriter. Fueled by coffee and pea soup (according to his wife), Kerouac pounded out On the Road in a three-week offensive, reportedly using journals from his journeys for reference and typing on a 120-foot scroll of tracing paper.

  In addition to all that pea soup and coffee, however, Kerouac was powered by something much stronger: amphetamines. First synthesized in Japan in 1919, amphetamines mimicked the stimulating effects of cocaine, increasing energy and decreasing appetite in users. Unfortunately, like cocaine, so-called “speed” was also prone to abuse.

  The Smith, Kline & French pharmaceutical company introduced one of the most popular amphetamines in 1928: Benzedrine. Although it was available only as an inhaler for the purposes of dilating nasal and bronchial passages, users caught on quickly to its stimulating properties. They cracked open Benzedrine inhalers and swallowed the paper strips inside. Not ones to look a gift horse in the mouth, Smith, Kline & French introduced Benzedrine in tablet form. Doctors began prescribing the drug as an appetite suppressant and miracle cure for fatigue. The FDA was well aware of the recreational abuse of “bennies” and other amphetamines, finally taking steps to control their usage in the 1950s.

  Biographer Ann Charters believed Kerouac took Benzedrine to intensify his awareness and make him feel cleverer. “Each of Kerouac’s books was written on something and each of the books has some of the feel of what he was on most as he wrote it. On the Road has a nervous, tense and Benzedrine feel,” she wrote. It’s not hard to see why Kerouac and other writers would fall in love with a drug like Benzedrine: when one is paid for creative output, and not for time, the pressure is on the author to put words on paper as quickly as possible.

  On the Road was a freewheeling road map for a new generation who rejected their parents’ suburban values, featuring taboo topics such as bisexuality, interracial love, and group sex. Publishers initially rejected the book as obscene, slapdash, and unpublishable.

  Kerouac’s wife left him later in the year and gave birth to his only child, a girl, in February 1952. Kerouac continued to write and travel, but he fell into bouts of depression, intensified by heavy drug and alcohol abuse. Kerouac was eternally angry, and the drugs and alcohol didn’t do much to take the edge off. One time at Ginsberg’s apartment, Kerouac agreed to test psilocybin (a hallucinogenic drug), administered by drug guru Timothy Leary. Instead of mellowing out, as Leary expected, Kerouac confronted a critic in person and threatened to toss the man out of a window over a negative review.

  In 1953, Kerouac sat back down at the typewriter for another marathon session of word-banging. He completed The Subterraneans in just three days—with the help of Uncle Benny, of course.
“Benny has made me see a lot,” he once said.

  Ginsberg, a mellow pothead for the most part, disapproved of Kerouac’s amphetamine abuse. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” Ginsberg famously wrote in his epic poem “Howl.” Ginsberg and others recognized that there was a terrible downside to speed. “The period of euphoria is followed by a horrible depression,” Burroughs wrote.

  Viking Press finally published Kerouac’s On the Road in September 1957. The New York Times proclaimed Kerouac the voice of a new generation: “Just as, more than any other novel of the Twenties, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises came to be regarded as the testament of the ‘Lost Generation,’ so it seems certain that On the Road will come to be known as that of the ‘Beat Generation.’”

  Fame was a double-edged sword for Kerouac. On the one hand, he was able to usher many of his old manuscripts into print; on the other, he was a celebrity and didn’t feel safe leaving his house. “He didn’t object to being famous, but he realized he wasn’t famous—he was notorious,” John Clellon Holmes said. According to Joyce Johnson, “People knew him all over the Village. It was exhausting to go out with him. Women wanted him to make love to them. One woman said to me at a party, ‘I have to fuck him now!’ ”