Queer Beats

  As a muse, it is hard to beat Neal Cassady, who added tremendous native intelligence and curiosity to the requisite youth and good looks. Bigger-than-life, though ultimately unreachable, he strung along both Kerouac and Ginsberg for years, drawing them out west to Denver, San Francisco, San Jose, promising a heady blend of adventure, male bonding, and admiration for their writing.53 His ambition was to write, though his gift was for speech. In one of his rambling, inspired, singlespaced, typed letters to Ginsberg, he admitted that in his earliest efforts he would change words—even meanings—rather than correct a typing error, and would gamely follow the new word wherever it led. He knew his life would make fantastic copy, if only he could stop twitching long enough to write. For Ginsberg, he was a classic object of desire—the lean, hard alpha male of his sex poem, “Please, Master,” written months after Cassady’s death in 1968:…please master order me down on the floor,

  please master tell me to lick your thick shaft

  please master put your rough hands on my bald hairy skull

  please master press my mouth to your prick-heart

  Yet it was Kerouac, the disciplined writer and notebook-keeper, who would capture the hyperkinetic Cassady on paper, absorbing his mannerisms, inhabiting his mind, serving up his stories in a brilliantly mimicked voice.

  Throughout the winter and spring of 1951, Cassady wrote hard. He worked on his memoirs, and churned out twenty- and thirty-page letters to his friends. The famous “Joan Anderson” letter emerged in these fertile months: the 23,000-word confession to Kerouac about an early girlfriend who had had an abortion for Cassady, then waited for him to pick her up while he and a friend got drunk in a nearby bar. Recognizing the power of what he’d written, Cassady explained that his method was to push ahead without stopping or questioning himself. He didn’t change a word. He wrote straight through on a Benzedrine high. Stunned by the power and fluency of the letter, Kerouac told anyone who would listen: “Neal is a colossus risen to Destroy Denver!” In April, stricken with what Ginsberg later described as “puppy love,” Kerouac sat down at the typewriter in his Manhattan apartment, inserted one end of a roll of Chinese paper, and hammered out On the Road in twenty days. It worked like voodoo. By mid-May, Cassady was complaining to Ginsberg that he hadn’t written in a month: “There is a dissatisfaction; a basic deeply disgusting impatience and feeling of overwhelming inadequacy with words.” Soon his letters dried up, too. As Kerouac took possession of his voice, gestures, and childhood memories, Cassady weakened. Even if he had managed to write more than the autobiographical fragments of The First Third (posthumously published in 1971), he would have had little fresh material.

  In a 1965 Paris Review interview, Ginsberg described William Burroughs as “a very tender sort of person, but very dignified and shy and withdrawn.” He was also the only one in the circle who seemed immune to Cassady’s charms.54 What Burroughs liked in a young man was a capacity for intimacy. He did not need to be entertained. On the contrary, he needed a receptive audience—a “receiver”—for his routines. “I don’t see myself writing any sequel to Queer or writing anything more at all at this point. I wrote Queer for Marker,” he told Ginsberg in October 1952. “I guess he doesn’t think much of it or me.” The owlish, barely bisexual Lewis Marker, Burroughs’s boyfriend in Mexico, had read the novel and told him, “Well, it’s not a bad yarn, but don’t get the idea you’re anything in the way of a writer.”55 Burroughs’s feelings of hopelessness eddied out from his writing to his chances at love: “I don’t see myself going through this deal again, and of course the possibility of mutual attraction is remote.”56

  The admiring Ginsberg made a far more satisfying receiver, especially considering that Kerouac, in an attempt to comfort Burroughs, had suggested that Ginsberg wanted him after all. Yet Ginsberg, who was traveling, did not always get Burroughs’s letters, or post quick responses. Lonely and panicked, Burroughs wrote Cassady and Kerouac from Tangier, begging for news of Ginsberg, and then confessed, in an April 1954 letter: “Dear Allen, I have written and rewritten this for you. So please answer.”

  Routines like habit. Without routines my life is chronic nightmare, gray horror of midwest suburb….

  I have to have receiver for routine. If there is no one there to receive it, routine turns back on me like homeless curse and tears me apart, grows more and more insane (literal growth like cancer) and impossible, and fragmentary like berserk pin-ball machine and I am screaming, “Stop it! Stop it!”57

  The calm, complete acceptance and deep union that Burroughs had been looking for with Ginsberg during those months in New York, Ginsberg was soon to find in San Francisco with a pretty young man named Peter Orlovsky. They met around Christmas of 1954, in the apartment of the painter Robert LaVigne, then Orlovsky’s boyfriend. In an interview in Gay Sunshine almost twenty years later, Ginsberg described the raptures of his first night with Orlovsky, of “completely giving and taking.” “With Jack or Neal,” he explained, “with people who were primarily heterosexual and who didn’t fully accept the sexualization of tenderness, I felt I was forcing it on them; so I was always very timid about them making love back to me, and they very rarely did very much. When they did, it was like blessings from heaven.”58 Orlovsky, too, was primarily heterosexual, but this didn’t seem an obstacle at the beginning. Sweet-natured and vulnerable, he made a vow with Ginsberg that they would own each other, body and soul: “Total interpossession was what we decided. It was a very strange, illuminating subjective moment, with the burden of fear and doubt falling off for both of us.”59 Ginsberg had the intellect, it was agreed, and Orlovsky the beauty. It seemed a perfect exchange.

  There was the little matter of Ginsberg’s girlfriend, Sheila Boucher, however, who got “cold and annoyed” when Ginsberg told her about Cassady and Orlovsky. “It was as if my thing with men had really bugged her, put her off,” Ginsberg recalled. “I was like saying, Why don’t we all go to bed together, but for some reason she got mad at that.”60

  There was no problem, it seemed, that group sex could not resolve. When Ginsberg brought Orlovsky with him to Tangier to visit Burroughs the next year, they decided to override the older writer’s jealousy by exhausting him sexually. “We went to Tangier to fuck Bill,” as Ginsberg put it. It worked at first, and the three got along reasonably well while Ginsberg helped pull the stained, repetitive, disordered pages of Naked Lunch into publishable form. But Burroughs was not charmed by Orlovsky, who freely approached Moroccans on the streets of Tangier and could not be convinced of his bad manners. Mental illness ran in Orlovsky’s family, and the army had discharged him as a psych case. He was a free spirit, but also, clearly, a nut. (He told Ginsberg’s biographer, Jane Kramer, that his sadhana was cleaning. He carried rags, and would wipe down surfaces wherever he went. His one volume of verse was titled Clean Asshole Poems and Smiling Vegetable Songs.) When Burroughs’s friend Alan Ansen came from Venice to help with the editing, he told Burroughs that Orlovsky was “a freeloading bitch posing as an assistant mahatma.”61 The strained trio fell apart over Burroughs’s feelings about women, which stung Orlovsky so much that he left. Relations failed to improve over the coming years, when queer friends Ian Sommerville and Brion Gysin (later, in London, the groupie Michael Portman) brought out all of Burroughs’s latent misogyny. “I think they [women] were a basic mistake,” Burroughs would write later, in The Job (1968), “and the whole dualistic universe evolved from this error. Women are no longer necessary for reproduction.”

  Burroughs’s basic discomfort with women was not dispelled by a heterosexual crisis in the late 1950s, which coincided with the loss of his boyfriend Kiki and his attempts to kick drugs. “I find my eyes straying towards the fair sex,” he confessed to Ginsberg:(It’s the new frisson, dearie… Women are downright piquant.) You hear about these old characters find out they are queer at fifty, maybe I’m about to make with the switcheroo. What are these strange feelings that come over me when I look at a young cunt’s little tits stickin
g out so cute? Could it be that?? No! No! He thrust the thought from him in horror. He stumbled out into the street with the girl’s mocking laughter lingering in his ears, laughter that seemed to say, “Who you think you’re kidding with the queer act? I know you, baby.”62

  These feelings arose for Burroughs in part because of the psychic struggle of his work on Naked Lunch. He was wrestling with his identity, and sometimes losing. But he was also lonely and disgusted with himself for wanting what he could not find: a masculine companion who could hold his interest. In moments like these, he could write that queerness was a horrible sickness—at least for him—and that he was about to cancel his “sado-masochistic visa to Sodom.” “Must have some cunt,” he exclaimed, “I was never supposed to be queer at all. The whole original trauma is out now.”63 The panic began to subside, however, when he left Tangier for the “Beat Hotel” in Paris in 1958 and formed a creative partnership with the artist and writer Brion Gysin: more a collaborator than a muse, more a friend than a receiver.

  Jack Kerouac

  “Oh, I love, love, love women!”

  from ON THE ROAD

  We were suddenly driving along the blue waters of the Gulf, and at the same time a momentous mad thing began on the radio; it was the Chicken Jazz’n Gumbo disk-jockey show from New Orleans, all mad jazz records, colored records, with the disk jockey saying, “Don’t worry’bout nothing! ” We saw New Orleans in the night ahead of us with joy. Dean rubbed his hands over the wheel. “Now we’re going to get our kicks!” At dusk we were coming into the humming streets of New Orleans. “Oh, smell the people!” yelled Dean with his face out the window, sniffing. “Ah! God! Life!” He swung around a trolley. “Yes!” He darted the car and looked in every direction for girls. “Look at her!” The air was so sweet in New Orleans it seemed to come in soft bandannas; and you could smell the river and really smell the people, and mud, and molasses, and every kind of tropical exhalation with your nose suddenly removed from the dry ices of a Northern winter. We bounced in our seats. “And dig her!” yelled Dean, pointing at another woman. “Oh, I love, love, love women!” 64 He spat out the window; he groaned; he clutched his head. Great beads of sweat fell from his forehead from pure excitement and exhaustion.

  Neal Cassady

  “I’m on a spree tonight…”

  from a letter to Allen Ginsberg, April 10, 1947

  [After escaping his affair with Ginsberg by fleeing back to Denver, Cassady sent several letters alternately rejecting Ginsberg and cajoling him into joining Cassady in the West, though on terms that could not possibly benefit Ginsberg. Ginsberg wrote back, calling Cassady a “dirty, double-crossing, faithless bitch.” But he did, in the end, allow himself to be lured across the country—more than once—for further episodes of frustration and humiliation.—ed.]

  I’m on a spree tonight, I’ll tell you exactly what I want, giving no thought to you, or any respect or consideration to your feelings.

  First, I want to stay here and drive a cab until July, second, go to Texas and see Bill and Joan for a few weeks, third, (perhaps) dig New Orleans with Jack, fourth, be in N.Y. by early Sept, find an apt., go to college (as much as they’ll let me) work on a parking lot again, and live with a girl and you. Fifth, leave N. Y. in June ’48 and go to Europe for the summer.

  I don’t care what you think, that’s what I want. If you are able to understand and can see your way clear to sheparding me around the big city for 9 months, then, perhaps, go to Europe with me next summer that’s swell, great and wonderful, exactly what I want, if not—well, why not? really, damn it, why not? You sense I’m not worthy of you? you think I wouldn’t fit it? you presume I’d treat you as badly or worse? You feel I’m not bright enough? you know I’d be imposing, or demanding, or trying to suck you dry of all you have intellectually? Or is it just that you are, almost unconsciously, aware of enough lack of interest in me, or indifference to my plight and need of you, to believe that all the trouble of helping and living with me, would not be quite compensated for by being with me? I can’t promise a damn thing, I know I’m bisexual, but prefer women, there’s a slimmer line than you think between my attitude toward love and yours, don’t be so concerned, it’ll fall into line. Beyond that—who knows? Let’s try it and see, huh?

  I like your latest poems, in fact, I like most of your poems, through reading more poetry I’ve become a bit better able to judge and appreciate your work.

  Relax, man, think about what I say and try to see yourself moving toward me without any compulsive demands, due to lack of assurance that I love you, or because of lack of belief that I understand you etc. forget all that and in that forgetfulness see if there isn’t more peace of mind and even more physical satisfaction than in your present subjective longing (whether for me, or Lucien, or anybody) I know one cannot alter by this method, but come to me with all you’ve got, throw your demands in my face, (for I love them) and find a true closeness, not only because what emotionally I have is also distorted by lonliness, but also because I, logically or not, feel I want you more than anyone at this stage.

  I’m really beat, off to bed, and a knowledge of relief, for I know that you must understand and move with me in this, you better not fight against it or any other damn thing, so shut up, relax, find some patience and fit into my mellow plans.

  Love + Kisses, my boy, opps!, excuse, I’m not Santa Claus am I?

  Well then, just—Love + Kisses, Neal

  Allen Ginsberg

  “Love is not controllable…”

  from a letter to Carolyn Cassady, June [?] 1952

  [From January to May 1952, while hiding from his wife, Joan, and her court orders for child support, Jack Kerouac lived with Neal Cassady and his family at 29 Russell Street in San Francisco. It was a rocky visit, at first, with Carolyn feeling like a household drudge, and Jack and Neal constrained to stay home and sober at least part of the time. Soon, Neal encouraged a love affair between his wife and his old friend, and, on one of Neal’s trips out of town, they complied. Thereafter, she was much happier with her houseguest—“I served whichever was in residence, according to their individual requirements,” she recounts in her memoir, Heart Beat—and also rose in the esteem of Allen Ginsberg. When Jack left, and failed to write to Neal or Carolyn for a month, and Neal reverted to depression and inattentiveness, she wrote to Allen for advice. Relishing the role, he responded in detail.—ed.]

  Jack’s attitude:

  a) As I haven’t got all his letters here, I’ll send on an anthology of statements apropos his relations with Neal when I assemble them. What I think about it is, Jack loves Neal platonically (which I think is a pity, but maybe about sex I’m “projecting,” as the analysts say), and Neal loves Jack, too. The fact is that Jack is very inhibited, however. However, also sex doesn’t define the whole thing.

  b) Jack still loves Neal no less than ever.

  c) Jack ran into a blank wall which everyone understands and respects in Neal, including Jack and Neal. It upset and dispirited Jack, made him feel lonely and rejected and like a little brother whose questions the older brother wouldn’t answer.

  d) Jack loves Carolyn also, though obviously not with the same intensity and power as he loves Neal, and this is acceptable and obvious considering all the parties involved, their history together, how much they knew each other and how often they lived thru the same years and crises. Jack is full of Carolyn’s praises and nominates her to replace Joan Burroughs as Ideal Mother image, Madwoman, chick and ignu. The last word means a special honorary type post-hip intellectual. Its main root is ignoramus from the mythology of W. C. Fields. Jack also says Carolyn beats Dusty65 for mind.

  e) Jack said nothing about sleeping with you in his letters.

  f) Jack thinks Neal is indifferent to him, however only in a special way, as he realizes how good Neal has been to him and that Neal really loves him; but they couldn’t communicate I guess. However, he would love to live all together with everybody in Mexico, I believe. He would
claim right to treat Neal as a human being and hit him on the breast with balloons. I will transmit all messages immediately.

  g) I did not think (even dream) from Neal’s note he is bitter. I was surprised to get his invitation to visit, and thought it showed great gentility in the writing and the proposal which I accept with rocky belly for sometime in the future. Had I money I would fly out immediately for weekends by plane.

  h) Perhaps Neal wants to feel like a crestfallen cuckold because he wants to be beat on the breast with balloons. I well imagine him in that position. Neal’s last confession is perhaps yet to be made, tho his salvation is already assured… however nobody seems to take seriously the confessions he has made already and continues to do so, which have alwasy had ring of innocency and childlike completeness and have been all he knows, which is more (about himself) than anybody else knows anyway. I believe Neal.

  I include his preoccupation and blankness (preoccupation with R. R., household moneying, etc., as final confessions of great merit and value, representing truth to him.