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

by Allen Ginsberg

  When we first got together, I think supreme reality was the ideal that we were chasing after as the “new vision.” Kerouac and I both used that phrase, “new vision,” coming probably from Lucien Carr who was carrying around Yeats’s A Vision and coming from the paragraph in Rimbaud’s Season in Hell which goes, “When shall we go beyond the shores and mountains, to hail the birth of fresh toil; fresh wisdom, the rout of tyrants and demons, the end of superstition, to adore—as newcomers—Christmas on earth!” It is a little visionary moment in Rimbaud that is so poignant and sweet and sad, because he failed to make it, but we decided that we were going to make it so we wanted Christmas on earth. It was my obsession, but Kerouac used the phrase also, “supreme reality,” as being what we were chasing after.

  I thought, for instance, I heard a big fistfight and wrestling rough-and-tumble on the steel deck right over my pillow one morning, fifty guys fighting, with clubs and sledgehammers, but it was “Pueee puee pueee” the scream of the “All hands on deck” attack warning, and I realized I was listening to depth charges going off in a submarine attack. I just turned over and went back to sleep. Not because we had 500-pound bombs and couldnt do anything about anything anyhow, but because I was just naturally sleepy and I had figured out in the Navy nuthouse: “I could get killed walking across the street, if Supreme Reality’s arranged it, so why not go to sea?” And besides, ding-blast it, I WAS just simply sleepy all the time. They called me “Sleepy Dulouse.” Like Beetle Bailey, you might say . . . ZZZZZ.57

  The chapter ends with those “Z Z Z Z Z” snoring sounds. “I could get killed walking across the street, if Supreme Reality’s arranged it, so why not go to sea?” His sleepiness was a characteristic thing. It was just like cutting out of a scene which got too complicated. When he met a situation which seemed to be irresolvable, he simply dropped it and went south.

  CHAPTER 12

  Meeting Burroughs and Ginsberg’s Suspension from Columbia

  We had [each] met Burroughs individually before. Lucien Carr had brought me down to Greenwich Village where a friend of his, Dave Kammerer, lived, but he wasn’t home. Burroughs lived around the corner and we went there, so that was my first meeting with him. ­Lucien had gone out the night before, gotten drunk, and some bloody fight had erupted. He wound up on the floor fighting with some gay guy or girl and had bitten a piece of his/her ear off, which I thought was pretty shocking and amazing. I never heard of anything like that in Paterson, New Jersey. I had just arrived at Columbia and I didn’t know people went around getting drunk, biting people’s ears off.

  Burroughs was seated on a low couch near the fireplace and I was seated on an upturned log end which served as a coffee table. Lucien was telling this story and Burroughs said, “In the words of the immortal bard, ‘tis too starved an argument for my sword,’” meaning the argument is foolish and stupid so why get into a fight about it? That was Burroughs’s laconic judiciousness instantly displayed. That one quotation made me appreciate the wit of Shakespeare, the accuracy of the phrasing “a starved argument.”

  The other thing I remember that Burroughs said, the first literary recollection of his nature and conversation, was that there was a lesbian girl who lived upstairs from his apartment. Bill said he liked her because she was “straightforward, manly, and reliable.” For me, that was the determining phrase of all that later became gay liberation in my brain. It was just the ordinariness of that, judging individuals by character.

  When we all went to see Burroughs, it was for that laconic, mellowed-out, cooled-out experience. Later when we were living in Joan Burroughs’s apartment, both Jack and I spent an hour a day free associating with Burroughs acting as psychiatrist. It was a regular formal psychoanalysis with Burroughs as our listener. Mine came to a conclusion when I finally burst out and said “nobody loves me.” When I finally came out with it, I wept. Burroughs sat there, sort of impersonally, friendly, listening, accommodating, and welcoming. It was a breakthrough for me, a realization of my actual feelings.

  About a year later I was living in Hartley Hall at Columbia and had just written a long poem called “The Last Voyage” derived from reading Baudelaire’s “Voyage” and Rimbaud’s “Drunken Boat / Bateau livre.” The Baudelaire ended with a favorite quote of all of ours: “O death old Captain, raise the anchors it’s time let’s go, plunge to the bottom of the gulf, heaven or hell, what does it matter? At the bottom of the unknown to find the new.” It related to our new vision, supreme reality.

  Kerouac came uptown from seeing Burroughs and I read him my big poem “The Last Voyage.” He had just had a conversation with Burroughs in which Burroughs had said, “Well, Jack, you know, the trouble with you is, you are tied to your mother’s apron strings and it’s going to get narrower and narrower and sooner or later you’re going to be right in there, not able to move away from your mother, that’s your fate, your destiny.” Kerouac was chilled by that. It was an accurate insight on Burroughs’s part, because Jack was hung up on his mother. I didn’t realize it, but he was internalizing a great deal of his mother’s ideas. It was a prophetic night and by the time we got all this talking done it was late. Kerouac didn’t want to go back to Long Island, so he stayed over with me and slept in my bed. I was a little scared because Jack didn’t know I was gay or [that I] was interested in him. I thought he’d probably get very angry and I didn’t want to bring it up, too difficult.

  Kerouac had been banned from the campus as an “unwholesome influence on students,” according to the college. Earlier on the day Kerouac had come to see me, I had noticed that the windows were dirty. We had a blue-uniformed scrub lady that I thought was a little anti-Semitic. She hadn’t cleaned the windows in my room, so I had decorated them by finger painting [in the dirt], “Butler has no balls” (Nicholas Murray Butler was the president of the school at the time) and “Fuck the Jews,” thinking she’d wipe it off and clean the windows. It was jejune college humor. But she didn’t wipe it off, she reported it to the dean, and as Kerouac and I were sleeping off the poetic night like innocent lambs the door opened and in walked the dean. Kerouac opened one eye, saw the situation instantly, jumped out of bed, and ran into my roommate’s room. He got in the empty bed and pulled the covers over his head and went back to sleep. What reminded me of that was this thing about “and besides dang blast it, I was just sleepy all the time,” when he pulled the covers over his head during the depth-charge bombing. Then the dean left and I got dressed, ready to face some kind of music. Kerouac got up and went home, back to his mother. He wasn’t sticking around with me in this crisis, so I went into the dean’s office alone.

  I had already read Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, Burroughs had given [that to] me. The hero, Ferdinand Bardamu, and his friend Robinson are in a café, drinking, getting a little bit drunk. The time is the beginning of World War I. All of a sudden they see a big happy parade of drunkards coming down the street with bands and fifes and flags and ladies and everybody’s happy and arm in arm they get up and join the parade. They wander off to the edge of town, still drunk, where a gate shuts behind them and they find that they’re in the army. In chapter two, they’re in the field of battle and Bardamu looks around and there are all these people crying for their mommies with shells whistling overhead with insane captains issuing contradictory orders to march forward into the teeth of battle. Céline has a sentence about, “I suddenly realized that everybody around me was completely insane, and if I wanted to survive the situation, I had better take steps to disassociate myself completely with their mad schemes, or to evade completely, or make myself invisible.” It was a very funny sentence. I think it’s one of the great moments of Western literature, when the hero wakes up in the middle of the battle and realizes that everybody around him is crazy and figures he better get out of there.

  I would say that is hipness, that attitude of waking up in the midst of society and finding that everybody was crazy. It was all a mad scheme that w
as going to destroy everybody and nobody was going [to] get out alive. With that attitude in mind I walked into the dean’s office. He faced me across his desk and said, “Mr. Ginsberg, I hope you realize the enormity of what you’ve done.” I flashed on that scene in Céline where he’s surrounded by dangerous madmen in every direction. And realized, you know, you’re getting into a very dangerous situation, of getting fucked up forever for this. And I said, “Oh, I do sir, I do. If you can only tell me what I can do to make this up.” Cringing and snibbling and terrified and agreeing with him to get out of the situation.

  Afterward I went to see Trilling. I remember Trilling was very funny. He didn’t know what the whole thing was about really and at the same time he knew me and he knew Kerouac and he realized that there was something stupid about it. He said, “Well I’ve talked to the dean but there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do, he’s made up his mind.” It was finally decided that I had to withdraw from Columbia and not return until I had become more matured. I had to get a letter from a psychiatrist saying that I had worked for about a year out in the world and was now mature enough to be a member of the academic community.

  The thing that rung in my ears was “Mr. Ginsberg, I hope you realize the enormity of what you have done,” because actually I hadn’t done anything. I was afraid to do anything. I wanted to do something [with Kerouac]. I lay there longing all night, thinking and dreaming, but I didn’t do nothing.

  But back to Kerouac. There was a pretty phrase that I always liked here. He’s on the ship:

  . . . and I’m wondering, “Joseph Conrad wasn’t wrong, there are old seadogs who’ve been to everywhere from Bombay to British Columbia smoking their pipes on poops of old sea vessels, practically born at sea they are, and die at sea, and dont even look up . . . Even have cats down below for the rats, and sometimes a dog . . . What tobacco they smoke? What they do, where they go when they put on their glad rags in Macao, to do what?”58

  I thought that phrase “glad rags in Macao” was a pretty sound. I think that’s the essence of Kerouac, playful, stylish actually. His is an odd ear. The music is made there. I want to finish with one paragraph.

  And it was that last morning before we got ready to sail to Brooklyn that I devised the idea of “The Duluoz Legend,” it was a gray rainy morning and I sat in the purser’s office over his typewriter, he was having his last drunk I guess, and I saw it: a lifetime of writing about what I’d seen with my own eyes, told in my own words, according to the style I decided on at whether twenty-one years old or thirty or forty or whatever later age, and put it all together as a contemporary history record for future times to see what really happened and what people really thought.59

  “To see what really happened and what people really thought.” That’s exactly what Kerouac did. A simple idea, what people really thought, and that is the conception of his literary career. It was a big surprise to me that you could do that.

  CHAPTER 13

  Kerouac and The Town and the City

  The Town and the City is extraordinary as a first novel and it really is Kerouac prose, in and out, beginning to end. There are touches of great violins of Kerouac sound, melancholy violins of time passing. Some of the panoramic consciousness you’ll get in On the Road and Visions of Cody, awareness of October’s red sun setting at the end of the football field while the heroes are tackling each other in the dusk and the high school teacher is banging his fist on his desk in despair at growing old, simultaneously. There’s that same melancholy space-time consciousness. When I first read the opening paragraph of The Town and the City I thought it was a great monument and I cried and wrote a sonnet.

  The town is Galloway. The Merrimac River, broad and placid, flows down to it from the New Hampshire hills, broken at the falls to make a frothy havoc on the rocks. {That’s immediately Kerouac, “a frothy havoc on the rocks.”} Foaming on over ancient stone towards a place where the river suddenly swings about in a wide and peaceful basin, moving on now around the flank of the town, on to places known as Lawrence and Haverhill, through a wooded valley, and on to the sea at Plum Island, where the river enters an infinity of waters and is gone. Somewhere far north of Galloway, in headwaters close to Canada, the river is continually fed and made to brim out of endless sources and unfathomable springs.60

  From the very beginning he’s already got his mouth full of vowels. He’s enjoying that, though in this case they’re a little more romantic, more out of Thomas Wolfe’s unfathomable and vaguer vowels. From Wolfe he got these long symphonic prose sentences, and also the personal quality, the glee or joy of person that he put into all of his novels.

  There’s a passage in Wolfe, where Wolfe describes a sense of joy and glee and ecstasy that sometimes overwhelms him and makes him squeal. It was Kerouac’s favorite reference point within the universe of Wolfe, the fact that great big huge Thomas Wolfe would come up with this completely personal, intestinal squiggle of joy. It’s that little personal cry that Kerouac got out of Wolfe, as well as the large-scale canvas, many characters, endless book, like river flowing over rocks, broadening out.

  When he was writing The Town and the City, he divided himself up into three people. He wrote about his family, but in an imaginary way. His actual family was his brother, Gerard, who died as a child, his sister, Nin, and himself. In this book he broke the fictional Martin family up into a number of brothers and sisters. The brothers all represented different aspects of himself. He was very conscious of that. The three that count are actually Kerouac’s portrait of his own nature and his division of himself.

  The eldest son is Joe, at this time around seventeen years old. This is the kind of thing he does: he borrows a buddy’s old car—a ’31 Auburn—and in company with a wild young wrangler like himself drives up to Vermont to see his girl. That night, after the stamping furors of roadside polkas with their girl friends, Joe runs the car off a curve and into a tree and they are all scattered around the wreck with minor injuries. Joe lies flat on his back in the middle of the highway, thinking: “Wow! Maybe it’ll be better if I make out I’m almost dead—otherwise I’ll get in trouble with the cops and catch holy hell from the old man.”

  They take Joe and the others to the hospital, where he lies in a “coma” for two days, saying nothing, peeking furtively around, listening. The doctors believe he has suffered serious internal injuries. Once in a while the local police come around to make inquiries. Joe’s buddy from Galloway, who has only suffered a minor laceration, is soon up out of bed, flirting with the nurses, helping with the dishes in the hospital kitchen, wondering what next to do. He comes to Joe’s bedside twenty times a day.

  “Hey, Joe, when are you gonna get better, pal?” he moans. “What the matter with you? Oh, why did this have to happen!”

  Finally Joe whispers, “Shut up, for krissakes,” and closes his eyes again gravely, almost piously, with mad propriety and purpose, as the other boy gapes in amazement.

  That night Joe’s father comes driving over the mountains in the night to fetch his wild and crazy son. In the middle of the night Joe leaps out of bed and dresses and runs out of the hospital gleefully, and a moment later he is driving them all back to Galloway at seventy miles per hours.61

  I think that Kerouac was reading The Brothers Karamazov at the time, and so he divided himself up somewhat similarly into Dostoyevsky characters. Joe would be the equivalent of Dmitri, a solid, all-American (or all-Russian) man. He was the macho male involved with motorcycles, car wrecks, having girls, driving one hundred miles north for dates, and pool halls. What develops ultimately into his adoration for Neal Cassady or Dean Moriarity. That’s one element which Kerouac sees in himself, the average straight all-American guy.

  The next of the Brothers Karamazov was Ivan the intellectual, the mentalist, somewhat like Burroughs. This is a composite of Kerouac himself, the side that is sickly, city intellectual, with little elements taken from Burroughs’s character
and behavior and physiognomy.

  His brother, Francis Martin, is always moping and sulking. Francis is tall and skinny, and the first day he goes to High School he walks along the corridors staring at everyone in a sullen and sour manner, as though to ask: “Who are all these fools?” Only fifteen years old at the time, Francis has a habit of keeping to himself, reading or just staring out the window of his bedroom. His family “can’t figure him out.” Francis is the twin brother of the late and beloved little Julian, and like Julian his health is not up to par with the rest of the Martins. But his mother loves him and understands him.

  “You can’t expect too much from Francis,” she always says, “he’s not well and probably never will be. He’s a strange boy, you’ve just got to understand him.”

  Francis surprises them all by exhibiting a facile brilliance in his schoolwork, amassing one of the highest records in the history of the school—but his mother understands that too. He is a dour, gloomy, thinlipped youngster, with a slight stoop in his posture, cold blue eyes, and an air of inviolable dignity and tact.

  I think he got that “cold blue eyes, and an air of inviolable dignity and tact” from Burroughs.

  In a large family like the Martins, when one member keeps aloof from the others, he is always regarded with suspicion but at the same time curiously respected. Francis Martin, a recipient of this respect, is thus made early aware of the power of secretiveness.

  That is pretty smart writing for a kid of twenty-seven. The book was probably begun about the time we were all living together in an apartment with Burroughs, Joan Burroughs, and Hal Chase. Kerouac was coming in and out of town, like Francis coming into town, hanging around with me and Burroughs. And Joe Martin, the all-American, was hanging around with Hal Chase, going down to the bar, getting drunk, and chasing girls.