The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats

by Allen Ginsberg

  CHAPTER 9

  Kerouac, Columbia, and Vanity of Duluoz

  Kerouac’s Vanity of Duluoz covers an early period but [was] written by late hindsight. Now as you know Kerouac was supposed to have become an old drunken stumblebum in the years before his death, incapable of any kind of artwork, totally disillusioned and screwed up. This book, with some of his finest prose and most curious hindsights, was written within a year of his death. This is one of his major novels and a departure from the romantic tradition.

  Here’s his hindsight on his youth, this is a little before the bebop era and then on into the forties, so I’ll just run through the book picking out highlights. I’m bringing it up to point out that he did not decline as an artist and his late work is a necessary addition to the early romances. If you’re going to have Kerouac, you also have to get the disillusioned Kerouac, because he’s a wise man too, though a bitter one. His book is [subtitled] “An Adventurous Education.”

  The moral of what I’m saying is, as when I said “Adventurous Education,” let a kid learn his own way, see what happens. You cant lead a horse to water. Just as I’m writing exactly what I remember according to the way that I want to remember in order, and not pile the reader with too much extraneous junk, so, let a kid pick out exactly what he wants to do in order not to grow up into a big bore rattling off the zoological or botanical or whatever names of butterflies, or telling Professor Flipplehead the entire history of the Thuringian Flagellants in Middle German on past midnight by the blackboard.

  In these cases, the mind knows what it’s doing better than the guile, because the mind flows, the guile dams up, that is, the mind strides but the guile limps. And that’s no guileless statement, however, and that’s no Harvard lie, as MIT will measure soon with computers and docks of Martian data.38

  That’s funny, almost W. C. Fields, very easy, flippant, sardonic, cynical, but delicately detailed improvisation, that “MIT will measure soon with computers and docks of Martian data.” Looking back on his youth and seeing his vanity, seeing his own karmic hollowness and his own faults, which very few writers have dared, much less dared near their deathbed.

  This [book was written] as if spoken to his wife, somewhat parallel to Herman Melville’s poems to his wife in the character of an old sailor smoking his tobacco talking to his wife. If you know Herman Melville’s poetry, that’s one of Melville’s favorite roles, the old seaman back from the sea, many years later talking about his early companion Ned Bunn, “Ah Ned what years and years ago in the South Seas” in their island paradises, but now recalling for his wife.

  The classic authors were all people that Kerouac or Burroughs or myself or others took from. That’s why I spoke of Melville, meaning Melville’s poetry there, Melville’s Billy Budd, Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Melville’s mad Ahab, Melville’s biblical prose, all these are reference points in Kerouac. Pierre, or, The Ambiguities especially because of the conscious weird prettiness of the Shakespearean prose of it.

  In this education, flow versus guile, Kerouac was actually talking about his literary method and also his method of honesty, a personal honesty in writing. He’s often been called anti-Semitic and there’s a little element of that in him. You get a good clear honest version of it here, [although] not quite anti-Semitism. This is pure Kerouac as I knew him in his relation to Jews.

  Anyway sometimes at lunch, [Jonathan Miller, my high school friend,] seeing my awful peanut butter sandwiches, he’d offer me some of his chicken sandwiches beautifully prepared by his maid, and the football team would guffaw. I was not popular with the other members of the football team because they thought I was hanging around with the nonathletic Jewish kids and snubbing the athletes, for sandwiches, favors, dinners, two-dollar term papers, and they were right I guess. But I was fascinated by Jewish kids because I’d never met any in my life, especially these well-bred, rather fawncy dressers, tho they all had the ugliest faces I ever saw and awful pimples. I had pimples too, tho.39

  It’s a very funny book, it’s very honest in that way. “I had pimples too, tho.” He’s trying to register what he really thought and be somewhat naked about it, as distinct from his earlier books where everything is romanticized. He doesn’t have second thoughts, like “I had pimples too, tho.” There’s another little passage about the Jews.

  What annoyed me was the way the football team, that is, the other ringers from New Jersey, looked down on me for playing around with the Jewish kids. It wasnt that they were anti-Semitic, they were just disdainful I think of the fact these Jewish kids had money and ate good lunches, or came to school some of em in limousines, or maybe, just as in Lowell, they considered them too vainglorious to think about seriously.40

  I think that was his basic attitude, which is that he was a goy Canuck and not used to Jews. They were strange to him and interesting and weird and pimply and slimy and faggoty, like me, and sort of threatening. At the same time romantic, because he was in love with me too, and Lucien Carr was part Jewish, [so] it was a very complicated matter for him.

  Now I begin to feel bad about football and war. And showing off. But after the game (HM 27, Garden City 0) my father is beaming and all delighted as we shower. “Come on Jacky me boy, we’re going out and hit the town tonight.” So we go down to Jack Delaney’s steak restaurant on Sheridan Square, myself little knowing how much time I was destined to spend around that square, in Greenwich Village, in darker years, but tenderer years, to come.

  Ah, it’s Good Friday night and I’m going to write what I want.41

  By showing off he means his entire career, he’s finally come to feel that that’s just showing off, which is quite a disillusioning comedown, it’s just simple when he says it. Then a separate sentence. “Ah, it’s Good Friday night and I’m going to write what I want.” Very few writers have that open accomplishment and clarity. He’s at the summit of his career, he’s already written enough to make him immortal, and now he’s playful with his disillusionment.

  By the time he wrote this, he had married Stella Sampatacus, the sister of his early best friend, Sebastian Sampas, who died in World War II. Kerouac was in love with him, as Sampas was in love with Kerouac. In those days I don’t think it ever got beyond just saying that they loved each other in a poetic way. This will give you some late statement of Kerouac’s particular kind of idealism in relation to Sebastian Sampas.

  Anyway, wifey, that’s how I finally started to talk to your brother, Sabbas, who said he was the Prince of Crete, which he probably was once, but only recently of Spartan or Maniatti, descent.

  Big curly-haired guy, thought he was a poet, and was, and as we got to be friendly began to instruct me in the arts of being interested (as they say in Mexico, interesa) in literature and the arts of kindness. I put him in this chapter (say I archly) about Columbia, because he really belongs to that period which followed the adolescence of the prep school and introduces the serious business.

  Among my souvenirs, by God, is the friendship of Sabbas Savakis.

  And I’ll tell you why in plain English poesy: he’d sing me “Begin the Beguine” in a big voice whether we were crossing the bridge, sitting in saloons or just on my doorstep or his own father’s doorstep in the Lower Highlands. He’d yell Byron at me: “So we’ll go no more-a-roving / So late into the night . . .” It’s not because he died in the war, on the beachhead at Anzio wounded, died in an Algiers North Africa hospital of gangrene, or probably broken heart, because a lot of other guys died in World War II including some I’ve already mentioned in this book (Kazarakis, Gold, Hampshire, others I dont even know what happened), but because the memorabilia of my knit just knits a knight in my night’s mind. That’s plain English poesy? Because, okay, he was a great kid, knightlike, i.e., noble, a poet, goodlooking, crazy, sweet, sad, everything a man should want as a friend.42

  Mixed with that idealistic sweetness is constantly the bathos of samsaric pain, particul
arly in relation to his father, who he sat with while his father died of cancer in the 1940s.

  In fact that was the summer, too, when Pa unexpectedly joined me and the boys on the 2½-mile walk on a particularly hot evening and he too, whipping off his clothes, yipped and ran in his shorts to the edge of the brook and jumped in feet first. But he weighed 250 pounds and the weather’d been dry all August and he landed standing in 3 feet of water and almost broke his ankle. It really almost broke my heart, to see him so happy in his yipping leap and end up toppling over in that little fetid pint of water.43

  There’s a real samsaric leap there, which is continuous through Kerouac, the constant disillusion and tragedy. And there’s a compassion and clarity there too that you find very rarely expressed anywhere in writing.

  In Vanity of Duluoz there is a visionary description by Kerouac of something that involves some sense of gap, that even at the moment of greatest pleasure or fulfillment, there’s a certain empty center of which one becomes conscious and leads one to think that the world was too full of suffering for anybody to take time out enough to realize the basic difficulty and dissatisfaction of existence. The advantage of the human world is that you can stop and think. So here’s Kerouac stopping and thinking.

  One night my cousin Blanche came to the house and sat in the kitchen talking to Ma among the packing boxes. I sat on the porch outside and leaned way back with feet on rail and gazed at the stars for the first time in my life. A clear August night, the stars, the Milky Way, the whole works clear. I stared and stared till they stared back at me. Where the hell was I and what was all this?

  I went into the parlor and sat down in my father’s old deep easy chair and fell into the wildest daydream of my life. This is important and this is the key to the story, wifey dear:

  As Ma and Cousin talked in the kitchen, I daydreamed that I was now going to go back to Columbia for my sophomore year, with home in New Haven, maybe near Yale campus, with soft light in room and rain on the sill, mist on the pane, and go all the way in football and studies. I was going to be such a sensational runner that we’d win every game, against Dartmouth, Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Georgia U, Michigan U, Cornell, the bloody lot, and wind up in the Rose Bowl. In the Rose Bowl, worse even than Cliff Montgomery, I was going to run wild. Uncle Lu Libble for the first time in his life would throw his arms around me and weep. Even his wife would do so. The boys on the team would raise me up in Rose Bowl’s Pasadena Stadium and march me to the showers singing. On returning to Columbia campus in January, having passed chemistry with an A, I would then idly turn my attention to winter indoor track and decide on the mile and run it in under 4 flat (that was fast in those days). So fast, indeed, that I’d be in the big meets at Madison Square garden and beat the current great milers in final fantastic sprints bringing my time down to 3:50 flat. By this time everybody in the world is crying Duluoz! Duluoz! But, unsatisfied, I idly go out in the spring for the Columbia baseball team and bat homeruns clear over the Harlem River, one or two a game, including fast breaks from the bag to steal from first to second, from second to third, and finally, in the climactic game, from third to home, zip, slide, dust, boom. Now the New York Yankees are after me. They want me to be their next Joe DiMaggio. I idly turn that down because I want Columbia to go to the Rose Bowl again in 1943. (Hah!) But then I also, in mad midnight musings over a Faustian skull, after drawing circles in the earth, talking to God in the tower of the Gothic high steeple of Riverside Church, meeting Jesus on the Brooklyn Bridge, getting Sabby a part on Broadway as Hamlet (playing King Lear myself across the street) I become the greatest writer that ever lived and write a book so golden and so purchased with magic that everybody smacks their brows on Madison Avenue. Even Professor Claire is chasing after me on his crutches on the Columbia campus. Mike Hennessey, his father’s hand in hand, comes screaming up the dorm steps to find me. All the kids of HM are singing in the field. Bravo, bravo, author, they’re yelling for me in the theater where I’ve also presented my newest idle work, a play rivaling Eugene O’Neill and Maxwell Anderson and making Strindberg spin. Finally, a delegation of cigar-chewing guys come and get me and want to know if I want to train for the world’s heavyweight boxing championship fight with Joe Louis. Okay, I train idly in the Catskills, come down on a June night, face big tall Joe as the referee gives us instructions, and then when the bell rings I rush out real fast and just pepper him real fast and so hard that he actually goes back bouncing over the ropes and into the third row and lays there knocked out.

  I’m the world’s heavyweight boxing champion, the greatest writer, the world’s champ miler, Rose Bowl and (pro-bound with New York Giants football non pareil) now offered every job on every paper in New York, and what else? Tennis anyone?

  I woke up from this daydream suddenly realizing that all I had to do was go back on the porch and look at the stars again, which I did, and still they just stared at me blankly.

  In other words I suddenly realized that all my ambitions, no matter how they came out, and of course as you can see from the preceding narrative, they just came out fairly ordinary, it wouldnt matter anyway in the intervening space between human breathings and the “sigh of the happy stars,” so to speak, to quote Thoreau again.

  [ . . . ]

  When I looked up from that crazy reverie, at the stars, heard my mother and cousin still yakking in the kitchen about tea leaves, heard in fact my father yelling across the street in the bowling alley, I realized either I was crazy or the world was crazy; and I picked on the world.

  And of course I was right.44

  I guess everybody’s had that daydream, or one form of it or other. He’s given very honestly, archetypically his own. But having carried his archetypal fantasy to the extreme and been mindful of it, and even playful with it, he came to a strange conclusion having played out the possibility to the very end, coming to the emptiness at the end of game. That informs almost all of his writing and all of his life from there on, the emptiness at the end. Or Mexico City Blues, “217th Chorus”:

  Rack my hand with labor of nada

  Run 100 yard dash

  in Ole Ensanada

  S what’ll have to do,

  this gin & tonics

  Perss o monnix

  twab

  twab

  twabble

  all day

  Even the writing finally is “rack my hand with labor of nada,” nada, nothing. Nice vowels. That was one of my favorite lines in Kerouac. This is an exposition of all the daydream and all the considerations and third thoughts that lead to that empty disillusionment.

  The rhetoric here is the rhetoric of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s prose. His are basic attitudinal reference books as well as prose reference books for all of Kerouac’s prose and all of Burroughs’s prose. Doctor Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches, who wrote under the pseudonym of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who had somewhat of a paranoiac attitude, just as Kerouac had a little elegant touch of in his doting old age.

  There’s a small vision of all the boys in school. He just ran away from the football team. “Okay, be back at eight.” The coach tells him, “Be back at eight.”

  And I went out and took the subway down to Brooklyn with all my gear, whipped out a few dollars from the suitcase, said goodbye to Uncle Nick saying I was going back to Baker Field, walked down the hot September streets of Brooklyn hearing Franklyn Delano Roosevelt’s speech about “I hate war” coming out of every barbership in Brooklyn, took the subway to the Eighth Avenue Greyhound bus station, and bought a ticket to the South.

  I wanted to see the Southland and start my career as an American careener.45

  And that’s how he got started on the road.

  This was the most important decision of my life so far. What I was doing was telling everybody to go jump in the big fat ocean of their own folly. I was also telling myself to go jump in the big fat ocean of my own folly. What
a bath!

  It was delightful. I was washed clean.46

  Then having gotten out into America, there is a section where he becomes disillusioned on his first trip. He’s learned from Wolfe that America [can] be seen as a poem and instantly was disillusioned with that. Which on a larger scale is reflected in Gregory Corso’s Elegiac Feelings American. That was Corso’s book written after Kerouac’s death. Like Shelley writing an ode called “Adonaïs” on Keats, Corso has an elegy on Kerouac’s death. Corso’s is in the grand tradition of great poets’ elegies for other late lamented dear poets. The point that Corso makes is that if the singer is a singer of the nation, and the nation decays, then what happens to the singer?

  It was November, it was cold, it was woodsmoke, it was swift waters in the wink of silver glare with its rose headband out yander where Eve Star (some call it Venus, some call it Lucifer) stoppered up her drooling propensities and tried to contain itself in one delimited throb of boiling light.47

  A year before his death, Kerouac is still capable of these little cadenzas about the star. It’s really pretty, I stopped and reread it. The “boiling light” is pretty, it’s just pure invention there. It’s his whole attitude toward writing over decades and millions of pages. It comes to that “delimited throb of boiling light,” easily tossed off the fountain pen.