Literary Rogues

by Andrew Shaffer

  One night in New York City, three men assaulted Kerouac outside the San Remo Bar on Bleecker Street. His friend Cassady was arrested for selling marijuana, possibly as a result of his association with On the Road. Critics attacked Kerouac’s subsequent “Duluoz Legend” books, Big Sur and Desolation Angels, more for Kerouac’s personality than the books’ content. In a letter to Ginsberg, he wrote, “I hitchhiked and starved, for art, and that makes me the Fool of the Beatniks with a crown of shit. Thanks, America.” Kerouac wrote to another friend that it was “no wonder Hemingway went to Cuba.”

  Kerouac moved back to his home state of Massachusetts, where he was able to avoid the spotlight. He withdrew from daily life, sedating himself with alcohol. His once-handsome face bloated nearly beyond recognition. At his local watering hole, Mello’s Bar, Kerouac was just another drunk. He loved to enter the bar and proclaim, “I’m Jack Kerouac!”

  The bartender would playfully chide him by saying, “How much do you make a year?”

  “About as much as you do,” Kerouac replied.

  “That’s nothing,” the bartender would say. “If you’ve published all them books you told me about, how come you don’t make more?”

  Kerouac’s decline was in sharp contrast to the romantic image of the drunken writer that was pervasive in the 1950s. In a time when alcohol and cigarette use was de rigueur, a bottle of whiskey was as important as a typewriter for aspiring writers.

  Still, Time praised Kerouac’s 1968 novel Vanity of Duluoz as his best work. Atlantic Monthly paid tribute with an unpublished section of the novel. The media seemed to have turned a corner in its antagonistic relationship with Kerouac. But just days after the novel’s publication, Kerouac learned that Cassady had been found dead in Mexico, his body lying beside a railroad track.

  Kerouac refused to believe the news. “Guys like Neal just don’t do things like that,” he told his friend Charles E. Jarvis, a literature professor.

  “You mean like dying?” Jarvis said.

  “That’s right. I mean, not at this point. Neal is in his prime,” Kerouac said. (Cassady was forty-one.) “Any day now, I’ll get a letter from Neal wanting to know if I’m wearing a black band around my arm!”

  Unfortunately, no letter was forthcoming.

  Kerouac’s own end was not far off. While he’s frequently misquoted as saying, “I’m Catholic and I can’t commit suicide, but I plan to drink myself to death,” that’s not far from the truth. Kerouac died from internal bleeding in 1969, a result of years of alcohol abuse. He was forty-seven. Despite writing thirty books, only three were still in print.

  At the funeral, Eric Ehrmann asked Sterling Lord, Kerouac’s agent, why he never tried to intervene and put an end to his client’s drinking. “Jack liked his scotch” was all Lord could say.

  “I learned one of the unwritten rules of the writing profession,” Ehrmann wrote. “When somebody wants to check out, friends honor boundaries and rarely intervene. Nobody stopped Ernest Hemingway from pulling the trigger. Nobody stopped Jerzy Kosiski from doing himself in. Or Tennessee Williams from guzzling the booze and pills. And nobody stopped Jack.”

  17

  Junky

  “Artists, to my mind, are the real architects of change.”

  —WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

  William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) first shot morphine in 1944. As he wrote in Junky, “Morphine hits the backs of the legs first, then the back of the neck, a spreading wave of relaxation slackening the muscles away from the bones so that you seem to float without outlines, like lying in warm salt water. As this relaxing wave spread through my tissues, I experienced a strong feeling of fear. I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving, as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it. I felt nauseous.”

  While an addiction to needle drugs like morphine carries a greater stigma than, say, alcoholism, the Harvard-educated Burroughs knew that it was all just a different shade of the same color. “The needle is not important. Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction,” he wrote.

  In 1944, Burroughs moved into an apartment with his girlfriend, Joan Vollmer, and her daughter. Vollmer was married to a GI serving overseas in World War II. When her husband returned home to find his wife addicted to amphetamines and sleeping with a drug-dealing morphine addict, he quickly divorced her. Astonishingly, Vollmer kept custody of her daughter.

  Burroughs and Vollmer became common-law husband and wife, and had a child of their own. Burroughs, however, ran into legal problems as a result of his drug dealings, and he crisscrossed the United States with his new family in search of sanctuary. After stops in St. Louis, Texas, and New Orleans, they finally settled in Mexico, where Burroughs hoped to stay for at least five years to escape Louisiana’s statute of limitations.

  In the world of awful career moves, becoming a junkie is only a close second to committing homicide, but that’s just what Burroughs did. In September 1951, Burroughs accidentally shot and killed Vollmer while entertaining some friends at their home in Mexico.

  Tired of her husband’s constant bragging about his marksmanship, Vollmer balanced a highball glass of gin on her head and dared Burroughs to take a shot. They were both drunk.

  “I can’t watch this—you know I can’t stand the sight of blood,” Vollmer said, giggling as she closed her eyes.

  Burroughs took aim at his wife with his .38 caliber pistol and fired. The bullet missed the glass and hit Vollmer squarely in the head. She died instantly.

  Burroughs received a two-year suspended sentence but fled Mexico anyway. “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would have never become a writer but for Joan’s death,” Burroughs wrote in the preface to his 1984 novel, Queer. “The death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.”

  Remarkably, Burroughs didn’t stop playing with guns. He collected and fired them his entire life, going so far as to sleep with a loaded gun under his pillow. He later added a sword cane to his weapons cache. “He shot like he wrote—with extreme precision and no fear,” according to Hunter S. Thompson, who shot with Burroughs on occasion.

  Meanwhile, Allen Ginsberg was working at a Manhattan advertising agency. His therapist asked him what he really wanted to do.

  Quit his job and become a poet, he answered.

  “Well, why don’t you?” the therapist asked.

  So Ginsberg moved to San Jose, California, in 1954, where his old New York pals Kerouac and Cassady were living at the time. Ginsberg and Cassady had been lovers in New York, and they renewed their relationship. There was just one problem: Cassady was married, and his wife was none too pleased when she returned home one day to find her husband’s cock in Ginsberg’s mouth. She drove Ginsberg to San Francisco, where she dropped him on the street corner with $20.

  The move was fortuitous: one of San Francisco’s best-known poets, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, had opened City Lights, the country’s first all-paperback bookstore. Ferlinghetti was also publishing local poets, and a scene was beginning to take shape. In August 1955, Ginsberg sat down at his typewriter in his small San Francisco apartment and typed the opening lines of his most famous poem, “Howl.”

  Allen Ginsberg read from “Howl” for the first time in October 1955 at an art gallery in San Francisco. “A barrier had been broken,” poet Michael McClure remarked. “A human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America and its supporting armies and navies and academies and institutions and ownership systems and support bases.”

  City Lights published Howl and Other Poems, and the poem’s graphic depictions of both heterosexual and homosexual sex acts made it a lightning rod for prosecutors looking to clamp down on the pervasive sexuality emerging in youth culture. According to the New York Post, “Howl” was nothing more than a “glorification of madness, drugs, and homosexua
lity” that reveled in its own “contempt and hatred for anything and everything generally deemed healthy, normal, or decent.”

  Customs officials seized 520 copies of Howl and Other Poems on March 25, 1957, that were being imported into the United States, on the basis that lines such as “who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy” were obscene. Prosecutors in San Francisco brought obscenity charges against Ferlinghetti, the publisher, arguing that the book contained “filthy, vulgar, obscene, and disgusting language.”

  The judge, however, ruled in favor of Ferlinghetti, deciding that the poem was of redeeming social importance. In a poetic phrase of his own, the judge asked, “Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms?”

  Later that year, Ginsberg and his new boyfriend, Peter Orlovsky, left San Francisco for Morocco and, ultimately, Paris. Ginsberg made a pilgrimage to Baudelaire’s grave, where he placed a copy of Howl. Ginsberg was well aware of Paris’s reputation as the city that had given birth to the Realists and the Decadents, and was looking for inspiration.

  Ginsberg and Orlovsky moved into a cheap hotel. Gregory Corso soon joined them, nicknaming their lodgings “the Beat Hotel.” Burroughs later visited, finishing his breakthrough novel, Naked Lunch, during his stay at the Beat Hotel. The one-star hotel provided only the bare necessities—hot water was only available three days a week, and bed sheets were changed once a month.

  If Ginsberg and his fellow Beat writers had sought on some level to re-create the Lost Generation’s journey, their Parisian reign was short-lived. Paris was a very different city in the postwar world than it had been in the 1920s. While it was still one of the world’s most literary cities, its influence was eclipsed by the sheer might of the United States. The Beats stayed through 1963, when Ginsberg and company packed their bags and returned home.

  Burroughs published Naked Lunch in 1959. He summarized the response to it as: “‘Disgusting,’ they said. ‘Pornographic.’ ‘Un-American trash.’ ‘Unpublishable.’ Well, it came out in 1959, and it found an audience. Town meetings, book burnings—that book made quite a little impression.”

  Ginsberg and Norman Mailer were among those who testified on behalf of Burroughs in front of the Massachusetts State Supreme Court. Although Burroughs was found guilty of obscenity, the ruling was later overturned on appeal.

  “Sure, he romanticized drug use as joyous, and terrible, and wonderful. Did anybody read Naked Lunch and try heroin? Probably. So what? That doesn’t mean that that book shouldn’t be read. I’m for anybody that writes about their obsession,” film director and author John Waters said.

  Burroughs, for his part, didn’t slow down. He spent his $3,000 advance for Naked Lunch on heroin, and once even sold his beloved typewriter to buy smack, forcing him to write by hand. He quit narcotics several times over his long career and took methadone—a treatment for heroin addiction—from 1980 until his death.

  Burroughs inspired generations of writers and musicians. In 1993, Burroughs and Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain collaborated on a nine-minute, thirty-three-second spoken-word recording titled “The ‘Priest’ They Called Him.” “When I was a kid, when I was reading some of his books, I may have got the wrong impression. I might have thought at the time that it might be kind of cool to do drugs,” Cobain said.

  While they recorded their parts for the album separately, they later met in Burroughs’s adopted hometown of Lawrence, Kansas. They talked about everything except their mutual obsessions: handguns and heroin. “There’s something wrong with that boy,” Burroughs told his assistant following their meeting. “He frowns for no good reason.”

  Cobain killed himself on April 5, 1994. “The thing I remember about him is the deathly gray complexion of his cheeks,” Burroughs said. “As far as I was concerned, he was dead already.”

  Burroughs died on August 2, 1997, at the age of eighty-three.

  18

  Dead Poets Society

  “Even without wars, life is dangerous.”

  —ANNE SEXTON

  By the time the poet John Berryman (1914–1972) checked into New York City’s Chelsea Hotel in 1953, he had already checked out of life. He was separated from his wife and was quickly drinking his way through his savings. He first started drinking heavily six years earlier, in the midst of an extramarital affair. Overcome by guilt, he became, by his recollection, “murderous and suicidal.” He heard voices. He made “passes at women drunk, often successful.”

  After eleven years of marriage, his wife finally left him in 1953. Berryman, drunk and alone in New York City, wrote to her that he was thinking of jumping off the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River. He worried that he might hit someone or splatter on the pavement, though if that didn’t happen and his body went quietly into the river, no one would be burdened with the cost of burial. He ended the letter by asking her to talk to him when she was next in New York—if he was still alive, of course.

  When Berryman returned to the hotel from a visit to Princeton on November 5, 1953, a note was waiting for him at the Chelsea’s front desk: his friend Dylan Thomas was in the hospital. Berryman rushed to St. Vincent’s and stood vigil until one in the morning. Berryman would have stayed longer, but he had a lecture to give at Bard College the next day. At a post-lecture party near the campus, he waited near the telephone for word from the hospital of Thomas’s condition. If Thomas died, poetry would die with him! Berryman drunkenly wailed.

  At the end of the weekend, Berryman again checked in on his friend after visiting hours on November 8. Thomas was still unconscious. When Berryman visited St. Vincent’s the next day close to one o’clock in the afternoon, Thomas was dead. Berryman ran from the room, hysterical at the sight of his friend’s lifeless body.

  “Dylan murdered himself w. liquor, though it took years,” Berryman wrote to their mutual friend Robert Lowell, a visiting professor at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Although he clearly saw how alcohol had killed Thomas, Berryman lacked the insight to recognize that he was headed down the same path. “Something can (and has) been said for sobriety, but very little,” he wrote.

  Lowell recommended that Berryman take his place at the university after the fall semester, and, amidst Berryman’s grieving over his friend’s death, the director, Paul Engle, called Berryman to offer him the job. He accepted. He would once again have some direction in his life. It would also take his mind off his estranged wife, Lowell hinted, as the “best students there were really hot.”

  In 1954, a middle-aged housewife and mother of two was hospitalized following her first manic episode. The next year—after a string of nervous breakdowns and suicide attempts—the woman landed in the care by Dr. Martin Orne, who would change the course of her life with a simple suggestion. The doctor asked his patient if there was anything she thought she was good at.

  “Prostitution,” she said.

  Dr. Orne disregarded her flippant remark and suggested instead that she write as part of her therapy.

  Her analyst’s couch was a fitting place for Anne Sexton (1928–1974) to begin her career. She used her poetry to grapple with her demons—mental illness, her incestuous family relationships, the pressures of keeping a middle-class household running in the 1950s and 1960s. Her poetry was not only confessional but also confrontational: “Menstruation at Forty” combated middle-aged female sexuality head-on, while other poems covered topics such as adultery, abortion, and female masturbation. Her work was accepted at The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine, making an instant star of the formerly unknown housewife.

  While she enjoyed the success, Sexton worried that she was a failure as both a mother and a wife. Her eldest daughter, Linda Gray Sexton, recalled that “I wanted to cuddle in her lap, but she wanted to concentrate. In desperation she would put on a record or set me down in front of the television and go back to her desk.” Anne Sexton told her psychiatrist, “Any demand is too mu
ch when I’m like this. I want her to go away, and she knows it.”

  Part of Sexton’s problem was that she was addicted to sleeping pills, which she dubbed her “kill-me” pills. “There’s a difference between taking something that will kill you and something that will kill you momentarily,” she told Dr. Orne. She risked overdose with the massive amounts of Nembutal that she took nightly, but she figured she had no choice. “I ought to stop taking these pills, but I’d be in a state of panic,” she told a friend in 1963.

  She was probably right.

  The next year, Sexton was prescribed Thorazine for her mania. Unfortunately, the mind-numbing sedative left her unable to concentrate. She went off the drug in order to write, which increased her risk of bipolar episodes. Although she once wrote, “Poetry led me by the hand out of madness,” it was clear that her continued pursuit of her art form led her back into madness.

  She upped her intake of alcohol and sleeping pills to control her mood swings. In her poem “The Addict,” she wrote that she was an athlete training her body, “staying in shape” for her eventual suicide. Still, even as she struggled to keep her mind and household together, her work became increasingly popular. It was excerpted in Cosmopolitan and Playboy and won a Pulitzer Prize. She was readily acknowledged as the next Dylan Thomas or John Berryman. Critics had no way of knowing just how right their comparisons were.

  “Whisky and ink, whisky and ink. These are the fluids John Berryman needs,” began the July 1967 Life magazine story that solidified the Berryman legend in the popular imagination. “He needs them to survive and describe the thing that sets him apart from other men and even from other poets: his uncommonly, almost maddeningly penetrating awareness of the fact of human mortality. . . . His consumption of alcohol is prodigious and so is his writing.”