This Is the Beat Generation

by Campbell, James

• ISBN13: 9780520230330
• ISBN10: 0520230337
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-11-01
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr

Summary

Beginning in New York in 1944, James Campbell finds the leading members of what was to become the Beat Generation in the shadows of madness and criminality. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs had each seen the insides of a mental hospital and a prison by the age of thirty. A few months after they met, another member of their circle committed a murder that involved Kerouac and Burroughs as material witnesses. This book charts the transformation of these experiences into literature, and a literary movement that spread across the globe. From "The First Cut-Up"--the murder in New York in 1944--we end up in Paris in 1960 with William Burroughs at the Beat Hotel, experimenting with the technique that made him notorious, what Campbell calls "The Final Cut-Up." In between, we move to San Francisco, where Ginsberg gave the first public reading ofHowl. We discover Burroughs in Mexico City and Tangiers; the French background to the Beats; the Buddhist influence on Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and others; the "Muses" Herbert Huncke and Neal Cassady; the tortuous history ofOn the Road;and the black ancestry of the white hipster.

Table of Contents

Foreword	ix
PART I: I can feel myself drifting . . .	1	(150)
Crazy wisdom	3	(8)
The first cut-ups	11	(28)
Behind the beat Hipikats	36	(3)
The muses: Huncke-junkie and Neo-Cassady	39	(29)
Behind the beat Naked Neal	65	(3)
The little auto	68	(29)
Behind the beat Neurotica	93	(4)
The place of dead roads	97	(39)
Behind the beat The scroll	134	(2)
Beat, in black and white	136	(15)
Behind the beat Broyard	147	(4)
PART II: . . . further and further out	151	(135)
Sutra on the subway	153	(34)
Behind the beat City Lights	184	(3)
You're a Genius all the time	187	(27)
Behind the beat As good as Proust	211	(3)
Death to Van Gogh's Ear	214	(31)
The birth of the beatnik	245	(29)
Behind the beat as he leaps Updike swing	272	(2)
Terminal cut-up	274	(12)
Notes	286	(24)
Index	310

Excerpts

Foreword

In 1979, living in Edinburgh, Scotland, I set out to write the story of the Beat Generation and its descendants. I had published only a little--a few poems and articles in literary magazines--but my projected book had a grand scheme. It would be divided into two parts: the first would describe the Westward trail blazed by Jack Kerouac and his mildly criminal gang in the late 1940s, while the other would trace the journey to the East made by the proliferating Beat children--hippies, heads, freaks--in the 1960s and 70s. I was among them, and therefore felt entitled to say "I am the man, I was" etc. The book would be called "Going West, Going East". I had thumbed my way across half the world, but had not yet set foot in the United States, so, in Edinburgh University Library, I studied maps to find the best way out of Queens, New York, where Kerouac waved goodbye to his mother on his first trip to Denver in July, 1947; filleted old newspapers for current events (was there any significance in the fact that both Henry Ford and Al Capone died that year?); and tried to see the bestseller list as Kerouac the would-be novelist might have seen it. The book people were talking about The Plague by Albert Camus, a carefully crafted political allegory, not his sort of thing at all. After a faltering start, Kerouac got on the road. I traveled with him all the way across a quire of foolscap before running out of steam.

Much later, in December 1994, in London, I interviewed Allen Ginsberg for a newspaper. Ginsberg was promoting his new collection of poems, Cosmopolitan Greetings, and we met in the deserted bar of a hotel just a few doors from the house in which Henry James had lived at the turn of the century. Ginsberg came shuffling across the floor of the lobby towards me, dressed in a suit, well-pressed blue shirt, and tie. I have always enjoyed such reversals of the popular image (Kerouac and Burroughs were also unlike many of the inventions imposed on them). The thing that impressed me most about Ginsberg had nothing to do with political subversiveness or beatness; it was his ability to memorize great chunks of English and American verse of every era. He talked more or less uninterruptedly for two hours, managing to seem self-effacing, even modest, all the while. When I asked if I might take his photograph, he composed his arms and legs and smiled ingenuously, as if for a family snap, then offered to take mine. He passed on a tip Robert Frank had given him on how to pose a sitter (keep the hands in check). Then he decorated my copy of Cosmopolitan Greetings with a drawing of a stern-looking Buddha floating above a skull with flower in its mouth. That evening, Ginsberg gave a reading at St James's Church, Piccadilly, where William Blake was baptized. He was exuberant and spontaneous, yet had everything under control. I learned later that his assistants would provide the organizers of every reading with a list of stipulations ("Plain chair with flat seat, not cushioned, not contoured. . . . Premixed chamomile tea in pot or thermos. . . . Modest vase of flowers--preferably wild flowers in season. . . . Payment is due when services have been rendered . . . "). We went home full of Allen Ginsberg, daring anyone to say a word against him.

In fact, I had worried that he might accuse me of speaking ill of him and his Beat colleagues. A few months earlier, I had published a book, Exiled in Paris (issued in the UK as Paris Interzone ), which contained a chapter on the Beats. The subject of the book is the English-language literary scene in Paris after the Second World War. It is composed of two narrative threads which run concurrently and barely intersect: one concerns the black writers who sailed from America in the wake of Richard Wright in the late 1940s and early 50s--James Baldwin, Chester Himes, William Gardner Smith--while the other involves the group of Europeans and white Americans who clustered around the Olympia Press, the firm which sponsored serious poets and novelists to write pornography, and at the same time published dubious works by some of the great avant-garde writers of the era: Lolita, The Ginger Man, Beckett's Trilogy, the first translations of Genet, and much else besides. Ginsberg and Burroughs were then in residence at the Hotel Rachou--later known as The Beat Hotel--and Ginsberg worked hard at persuading the roguish proprietor of the Olympia Press, Maurice Girodias, to take on the most dubious of all his books, Naked Lunch. (The Olympia edition was called The Naked Lunch. )

I was less than happy with the chapter on the Beats in Exiled in Paris, but it was through them that I came closest to weaving my two strands together. I concocted an imaginary scene in which an earlier resident of the Hotel Rachou, the black novelist Chester Himes, smart-suited, knife-carrying, as cool as life is short, met Allen Ginsberg, boyish, drug-taking, sophomorically hip, in the lobby. I called the chapter "Black and White Negroes", finished the book, and prepared to move on.

But to what? After meeting Ginsberg, I began to see this slightly unsatisfactory chapter as the foundation for another story. Exiled in Paris had itself been shaped from a rib taken from an earlier book, Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin (1991), which contains a lengthy section on Baldwin's life in Paris in the 1950s. Now, a fragment of the Paris book provided the bones for This Is the Beat Generation. The word "trilogy" sounds too grandiose, but I think of the three of them as a family.

During one of my research trips to New York, I rang up Ginsberg to ask for his cooperation (I had written in advance). He was friendly but wary, and--more than anything--weary. He said he might--he emphasized might--have some time at the weekend.

The next day, I tried to ring Gregory Corso. He was out. He had just gone out. He was expected back in an hour's time, or an hour ago, or at some hour in the unforeseeable future. Over on the West Coast, Michael McClure was similarly elusive, while the editor of a seminal Beat magazine agreed at first to meet me, then changed his mind when I declined to provide a list of questions from which there would be no deviation.

I couldn't blame them. They had been interviewed far too many times already. And so I decided to dispense with interviews. In any case, "personal testimony", like the tape recorder itself, can be a false friend. It is frequently unreliable. One person I had thought of interviewing in New York was Diana Trilling, the wife of Lionel and the author of "The Other Night at Columbia", a lively account of a reading given by Ginsberg, Corso and Orlovsky at the University in 1959. Later, I read her memoir, which contains anecdotes about Ginsberg visiting the Trillings' apartment on Riverside Drive, and found her portrait of him to be bedeviled by misunderstanding of his aims and motives. Had she been gracious enough to agree to be interviewed, I might have included her misplaced emphases in my version of Ginsberg's relationship with the Trillings, simply because "this is how she says it was". I had discovered while writing both Talking at the Gates and Exiled in Paris that people involved in any literary history often have a piece of property for hire, the price of which is that you believe their version and not someone else's.

Freed from the entrapping spools of the cassette tape, I concentrated on reading the books, ferreting out letters and other personal scraps of paper (the most precious of research materials), sifting through contemporary newspapers, tracking down a ton of weird and wonderful magazine articles spawned by "beatnik", the kitschification of Beat, and walking up and down the avenues of New York and the hills of San Francisco, imaginatively superimposing old landscapes, old styles of talk, old ways of seeing the world, on to the streets of today.

This account of the Beat Generation--for which the working title was "Going West, Going East"--begins in 1944, with the coming together of the three principal characters, and ends around 1960-61, with the publication of Burroughs' cut-up books and Ginsberg's travels to the East. These events seemed to me to mark the end of the "beat" part of the story.

Jack Kerouac never resolved the troubles which beset him from the mid-1950s onwards, and which are described here; he died in front of a television set, a year and a half after the death of his muse and driver, Neal Cassady. Ginsberg and Burroughs continued their remarkable exploratory careers, remained devoted friends, and died, a few months apart, in 1997. Burroughs's early partner in crime, Herbert Huncke, had expired the previous year. Many others who were associated with the Kerouac-Ginsberg-Burroughs troika, and who feature in this book, continue to thrive.

As always, my major debt is to Vera Chalidze for consistent help and advice. I wish also to thank Carolyn Cassady, Tom Clark, Paul Duguid, the late Allen Ginsberg, Michael Greenberg, Wendy Lesser and the Threepenny Review , where a portion of this book first appeared in different form, Antony Harwood, Gerald Mangan, Geoffrey Mulligan, Andrew O'Hagan, Kevin Ring and Beat Scene , the late Leopold and Bobby Ullstein, Lotte Lundell for hospitality in San Francisco, and Roger Rosen, Avery Russell and Rima Shore for the same in New York. I am also grateful to Steve Mandeville-Gamble of the Department of Special Collections at Stanford University, and to the staff of the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, and the Butler Library, Columbia University.

Many books have been used in the writing of this one. For basic information, I could not have done without Ginsberg: A biography , by Barry Miles; Memory Babe: A critical biography , by Gerald Nicosia; Literary Outlaw: The life and times of William S. Burroughs , by Ted Morgan. I also wish to make grateful mention of Ann Charters's edition of Kerouac's Selected Letters , and Oliver Harris's volume of Burroughs's letters.

Excerpted from This Is the Beat Generation by James Campbell. Copyright © 1999 by James Campbell. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.