Literary Rogues

by Andrew Shaffer

  The reporter, Jane Howard, spent a rainy afternoon with Berryman at a Dublin pub. “When he first walked in, he didn’t know a single soul there, but in short order he was the spellbinding—and exhilarated—friend of all,” she wrote, captivated by the bearded poet of the people. Berryman not only drank like a real man, but he made writing sound, well, cool. “Writing is just a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to make it come out right,” he said.

  At the time of the interview, Berryman was on his third wife, a woman twenty-five years his junior. He’d made her legally change her name from Kathleen to Kate. Why? Why not! “I should know women—I’ve been married to three of them, and had dozens of affairs,” he bragged to the interviewer. He worried about going to teach at an all-girls school because he would fall in love with his students too easily. “That would be bothersome for Kate,” he said. He also worried that his daughter might also become a poet, because, in his words, “Lady poets are mostly spinsters or lesbians.”

  “He sweats a lot and swears a lot. Sometimes he plunges into silent, private gloom,” the reporter wrote. “Sometimes he won’t eat. Even the most succulent of steaks grow cold before him.” It was an unflattering portrait, but what was left on the cutting-room floor was even more unflattering.

  The reporter failed to mention, for instance, that on the evening Berryman first arrived in Iowa City on February 4, 1954, to start his new job, he got drunk and fell down the stairs of his apartment and through a half-glass door. He broke his left wrist in the fall. Likewise, there was no mention of Berryman’s firing, which happened the next September after he argued with a colleague, got stinking drunk, yelled obscenities at his landlord, and spent the night in jail after shitting on the landlord’s porch.

  The University of Minnesota, another Big Ten school, quickly scooped him up after his embarrassing exit from Iowa, and it was in Minneapolis where he wrote the Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning The Dream Songs.

  Still, his struggles continued in Minnesota and on sabbatical in Ireland. Berryman went in and out of hospitals for treatment of his alcoholism. He complained of memory loss and struggled to write even an eight-line stanza most days. It’s not difficult to see why he had trouble doing any sustained writing: he was drinking a quart of whiskey a day on binges that often lasted for several months at a time.

  He never seemed to fully grasp the nature of his addiction until he was in his fifties, when he was well on his way to drinking himself to the grave. Alcoholism was a game: his wife hid bottles from him, and he in turn hid bottles from her. When he was told by a doctor he had no choice but to quit drinking, Berryman told the doctor not to worry: he had things under control. He planned to write prose for a few months, which he deemed less exhaustive to his nervous system than poetry.

  In a letter to his father, he blamed his alcoholism on “the way Americans mistreated their poets.” America could drive anyone out of their skull, he told a reporter—and this was especially true for poets, who had “every right to be disturbed.” In another letter, he called his hospitalizations “payment” for his poetry.

  Like Hemingway, the truth of Berryman’s life was that it wasn’t easy being such a man’s man. At his heart, Berryman was little more than a frightened child. “We have reason to be afraid,” he said. “This is a terrible place, but we have to exert our wills. I wake up every morning terrified.”

  When Berryman learned of Hemingway’s suicide in 1961, he remarked that the “poor son of a bitch” had finally blown “his fucking head off.” Berryman was further dismayed when Lowell’s former student, Sylvia Plath, killed herself two years later.

  Plath, who had never struggled with substance abuse but once wrote that she could see herself becoming an alcoholic if “given the chance,” nevertheless succumbed to the same darkness that Berryman was fighting. In September 1962, Plath separated from her husband after she discovered he was having an affair. Less than five months later, Plath asphyxiated herself while her children slept, leaving behind a small body of work, including the novel The Bell Jar.

  Anne Sexton was less sympathetic than Berryman upon hearing the news of Plath’s suicide. “That death was mine!” she complained to her psychiatrist.

  Almost nine years after Plath’s suicide, Berryman would take his own life. On January 6, 1972, after eleven months of sobriety—the longest since he had begun drinking some thirty years earlier—he bought a bottle of whiskey and drank half of it. He called in sick to his AA meeting. The next morning, Berryman walked to the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis and climbed a five-foot barrier. Students on their way to their morning classes began to form a crowd. He waved to them without turning around and dove off the bridge onto the rocks below on the banks of the frozen Mississippi River. He was fifty-seven. His widow found a suicide note scribbled on the back of an envelope in the trash:

  O my love Kate, you did all you could.

  I’m unemployable & a nuisance.

  Forget me, remarry, be happy.

  Two years later, Anne Sexton donned her mother’s fur coat, poured herself a glass of vodka, and locked herself in her garage inside her running car. She died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

  While both Plath and Sexton are Pulitzer Prize winners, Plath is fixed in the popular imagination as the pretty, thirty-year-old poet on the verge of mainstream success. As Woody Allen said in Annie Hall, Plath is an “interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic.” Sexton, by contrast, grew into middle-age and experienced a longer career of ups and downs. She has led a far less exciting posthumous life, relegated to the pages of poetry anthologies and subjected to allegations that she molested her own daughter.

  Poetry is still read and studied, but its cultural relevance peaked in the 1950s and 1960s. “What ended that was Bob Dylan,” former music journalist Elizabeth Wurtzel tells me. “What is a better way to reach a person besides music? Up until Bob Dylan, songwriting wasn’t confessional.” This wasn’t a cultural shift that went undiscussed by the confessional poets, who felt the need to defend their territory. Anne Sexton formed a jazz-rock group, Her Kind, which backed her as she read her poetry. A Boston Globe review of a 1969 concert by Sexton and Her Kind praised the group for its “deep and moving work about insanity, lost love, death and life. The Jordan Hall audience loved them, and so will you for what they can tell you about yourself and your happy, hurting life.” The reviewer noted, however, that Bob Dylan (born Robert Zimmerman) had largely stolen the audience for poetry—“and ever since the poets have been trying to get it back.”

  For a while, poets and songwriters coexisted on the national stage. In the 1970s, Allen Ginsberg toured with Bob Dylan. Some poets could see the writing on the wall and refused to give ground. Berryman, who never forgave Zimmerman for “stealing” his friend Dylan Thomas’s name, called Bob Dylan a young upstart. Berryman said the singer’s poetry was decent; now “all he had to do was learn how to sing.”

  19

  The Merry Pranksters

  “People don’t want other people to get high, because if you get high, you might see the falsity of the fabric of the society we live in.”

  —KEN KESEY

  The beatniks who had settled in San Francisco’s North Beach area began to leave in 1960 because of police harassment and rising rents. They moved to the Haight-Ashbury district and slowly evolved into “hippies” (a contraction of “hipsters”). The hippies slipped through the cracks in the veneer that the Beat generation had widened and became a full-blown youth movement. Allen Ginsberg compared them to “the whole gang around Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald” in 1920s Paris. “Haight-Ashbury was a continuation, another manifestation of things that had happened before in history. It was just gangs of friends getting together.”

  Like their literary counterculture elders, the hippies rejected conformity and “dropped out” of America’s success- and status-driven culture. The invention of the birth cont
rol pill radically altered cultural sexual dynamics, and “free love” became a rallying cry for the hippie movement. The youthful John F. Kennedy entered the White House in 1961 and brought a new activist approach to the government. Compared to the 1950s, the 1960s and 1970s were a time of dramatic change, not just in the United States but around the world.

  Ginsberg was the link between the Beats and the new counterculture. His support for the legalization of marijuana earned him major brownie points with the hippies. Ginsberg had been smoking pot since the 1940s, and he was one of the first people to address marijuana’s legal status on television in a February 12, 1961, appearance on a TV talk show, where he discussed “Hips and Beats” with Norman Mailer. There’s even a famous photograph of Ginsberg from 1965, where he’s standing on a New York City street at a protest with a cardboard sign around his neck that reads: POT IS FUN.

  Ginsberg also won notoriety as a pioneer in the field of “consciousness expansion.” He had begun a personal quest to expand his mind after hearing the voice of William Blake during a particularly intense masturbation session in 1948. He was so excited by his experience, in fact, that he crawled onto the fire escape of his East Harlem apartment and screamed at the women in an adjacent apartment, “I’ve seen God!” When he called his psychiatrist and told him the same thing, the psychiatrist hung up.

  Afterward, Ginsberg made it a personal mission to find “God” by any means necessary: peyote, psilocybin, mescaline, heroin. He was one of the first people in the United States to try LSD, as part of a trial at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, California. “Acid is just a chemical illusion, a game you play with your brain. It’s totally meaningless in terms of a genuine expansion of consciousness,” horror author Stephen King once said. Ginsberg came to a similar conclusion in 1963 and turned to meditation and other natural methods of expanding his consciousness. Still, he continued to proselytize for the counterculture, appearing naked (with a hand covering his genitals) on a poster advertising his friend Ken Kesey’s “Trips” festival in 1966.

  The Trips festival was part of a series of parties, dubbed “acid tests,” orchestrated by Ken Kesey (1935–2001) and “the Merry Pranksters” in San Francisco in the mid-1960s. Kesey administered LSD to anyone who showed up at these parties, and musical groups such as the Grateful Dead provided live soundtracks.

  Kesey was a former psychiatric hospital orderly who, like Ginsberg, had been turned on to LSD when he volunteered for a research study. Kesey wrote portions of his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, on hallucinogens such as acid and peyote. Critics hailed the book as an instant classic when it was published in 1962; Jack Kerouac called Kesey “a great new American novelist.” One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was adapted into a successful stage play in 1963, and later into a film starring Jack Nicholson.

  Kesey and his Merry Pranksters took their message on the road in 1964, traveling from California to New York City in a bus as part of a “book tour” for the publication of Kesey’s second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion. Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac’s friend who had provided the inspiration for the titular character of Dean Moriarty in On the Road, served as the bus driver and resident father figure. When they reached New York City, Cassady introduced Kesey to Ginsberg and Kerouac. Despite the friendships Kesey formed with the Beats, he never believed he was truly a part of their clique. “I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a hippie,” he later said.

  In 1965, Kesey was arrested for marijuana possession—his second offense, for which he would surely face jail time. He faked his own death and fled to Mexico. Authorities, however, stayed on his case and nabbed him when he returned to the United States after eight months in exile. He spent five months locked up before being released on bail, and the charges were later dropped. LSD was outlawed in the United States in late 1966.

  Kesey lived out the rest of his life on his family farm in Oregon, occasionally appearing as a celebrity guest at rock concerts. “I write all the time. I just don’t publish that much,” he told a film crew. “I’ve got four kids, and there’s a lot of the same energy that goes into raising a family that goes into putting together a book. Either that, or I’ve fried my marbles, just like everybody thinks.”

  Ginsberg did not believe that poets should be recluses. He believed in putting himself right in the action, which earned him the designation “the bravest man in America” from Norman Mailer.

  “Allen Ginsberg is a tremendous warrior,” Kesey once said. “He’s a warrior first, a poet second.” Ginsberg helped organize Chicago’s “Festival of Life” in 1968, a protest of the Democratic Party’s support of the Vietnam War. Six months before the protest, Ginsberg told Norman Mailer he had a bad feeling about it.

  Ginsberg’s nervousness was justified: the protest, coinciding with the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, was a bloodbath. Police indiscriminately clubbed the protesters, who fought back with bricks. Amidst the chaos, Ginsberg seated himself in the lotus position and began chanting. When an officer raised his billy club to beat the bald, bearded radical, Ginsberg looked him in the eyes and said, “Go in peace, brother.” The cop, disgusted and frustrated by Ginsberg’s admonition, lowered his club and said, “Fucking hippie,” before moving along to beat another protester.

  The 1960s, however, came and went, and the Merry Pranksters barely registered on the cultural radar when compared to the Beat generation before them. Rock music was the defining medium for the rebellious young messengers of the 1960s and 1970s. Like all other youth movements, the hippies were tied to a generation in a specific time and place, and they grew up.

  “I used to think we were going to win in the sixties,” Kesey said. “Nixon went out and I thought we won.” Even with the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 and Nixon’s disgraced exit from the White House the previous year, the U.S. government’s drug war continued. Free love did not transform the world.

  Ginsberg passed away from complications of liver cancer on April 5, 1997, exactly three years to the day after the death of another generation’s spokesperson, Kurt Cobain. Kesey died in 2001, also the result of liver cancer. “We’re only a small number and never with the popular vote,” Kesey said in 1992, reflecting upon the counterculture. “We have to keep this little flame going and pass it on. All it takes is one person.”

  20

  The New Journalists

  “I’m an alcoholic. I’m a drug addict. I’m homosexual. I’m a genius.”

  —TRUMAN CAPOTE

  Eager to make friends with his literary elders, novelist Norman Mailer (1923–2007) invited Dorothy Parker over to his place to meet his pregnant wife and their dog, a ferocious German shepherd named Karl. Parker was a fan of The Naked and the Dead, Mailer’s debut novel that fictionalized his World War II experience. The book was an enormous critical and commercial success for its twenty-five-year-old author, selling two hundred thousand copies within three months of its publication in 1945. “Part of me thought it was possibly the greatest book written since War and Peace. On the other hand I also thought, ‘I don’t know anything about writing. I’m virtually an impostor,’ ” Mailer said.

  Parker visited the young writer at his Los Angeles home one afternoon. Their meeting went awry when Mailer’s German shepherd took one sniff of Parker’s dog and flew into a frenzy, frightening both the timid dog and its owner. Parker appears to have taken the dog’s aggressiveness personally and referred to Mailer years later as “that awful man who stabbed his wife”—an incident we’ll get to shortly.

  Parker wasn’t Mailer’s only critic. Reviewers attacked his second and third novels for not living up to the promise of The Naked and the Dead. This didn’t stop Mailer from being commercially successful and winning fans in high places: his sexually progressive third novel, The Deer Park, reportedly had a cherished place on President Kennedy’s nightstand.

  Mailer drifted through New York and New England in the early 1950s. He tried using marijuana to stimulate his cr
eativity, and wouldn’t write without first using a can of beer to “prime the pump.” He was running—from himself, from his critics, and from his troubled marriage (which ended in divorce in 1952). In an effort to refocus his energy on his writing, Mailer would eventually cut back his alcohol consumption and stopped smoking pot altogether. Like Hemingway, Mailer loved drinking, but he loved writing even more.

  He remarried and settled in New York City in 1955, where he cofounded the Village Voice, an alternative newspaper. He used his new platform to become an outspoken cultural critic and journalist. Mailer was infamous for getting drunk at the annual Voice holiday party and punching out some unsuspecting sucker. It seemed that “not a weekend went by that Mailer wasn’t in the news for punching someone in an expensive Manhattan restaurant,” Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate Glenn Schaeffer later remarked. “Word was he even trained for these bouts.” Mailer was willing to take on anyone anytime—with words or with fists. He was a throwback to the literary lions of the Lost Generation, whose egos were as big as their books.

  By 1960, twelve years had passed since Mailer’s literary debut. Now a tenured fixture of the American literary scene, Mailer had taken to hosting raucous literary parties with his second wife, Adele, where he and his male writer friends would get falling-down drunk.

  One time, after asking a model for her number within earshot of his wife, Mailer was treated to a strip show. Adele, furious at the model (Alice Denham, later a Playboy playmate and novelist), ripped her own shirt off. “Take off your clothes and we’ll see who’s the best woman,” Adele said. “You think Norman’s up for grabs?”

  Soon a crowd gathered around the two women. Mailer, egging his wife on, began stripping his own clothes off. Eventually both he and Adele were stark naked. Denham, refusing to strip for free (she was a professional, after all), left with her date. “At least it ought to be a good night for you two,” she said to the Mailers on her way out.