The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  Burroughs was the old man of the group, eight years older than Kerouac and twelve years older than Ginsberg. His grandfather had founded the St. Louis–based Burroughs Adding Machine company, but his father had sold his stake and instead ran an antiques shop while the family lived a comfortable, coddled suburban life. William had been attracted to the outlaw underbelly of culture ever since he’d read hobo hero Jack Black’s You Can’t Win as an adolescent. “The author claimed to have spent a good part of his life in jail,” he writes in his semiautobiographical Junkie. “It sounded good to me compared with the dullness of a Midwest suburb where all contact with life was shut out.” While studying at Harvard he made many trips to New York City to explore the clandestine gay scene. After Harvard he desultorily studied medicine for a year in Vienna, exploring the gay and drug scenes there. When the war broke out he enlisted in the army but was offended when not selected for officer training; his mother helped him get discharged. After he severed the tip of his left little finger to impress a man with whom he was infatuated, his parents, worried for his mental health, started giving him two hundred dollars a month to live on. It was plenty to cover a bohemian life in the Village but not enough for a junkie.

  In Junkie, Burroughs describes scoring and selling heroin in the Village’s addict subculture. “What a crew! Mooches, fags, four-flushers, stool pigeons, bums—unwilling to work, unable to steal, always short of money, always whining for credit.” In 1946 he was arrested trying to pass a script on which he’d misspelled Dilaudid. He was given probation and sent home to his parents again. He was thirty-two. (With a stake from his parents, he would buy a citrus farm and a scorpion-infested ranch in Texas, where he tried to grow marijuana. Despite his homosexuality and his professed detestation of almost all women, he brought Joan and her daughter to live with him, and had his son, William Jr., with her in 1947. In 1951, he shot and killed Joan with a .380 handgun while they were performing a William Tell routine at a party in Mexico City. Burroughs fled Mexico and was convicted in absentia of homicide. He didn’t return to New York until 1953 and didn’t live in the city again until 1974.)

  Meanwhile, his New York friends were having their own sometimes fatal misadventures. In 1949, just out from a short jail stint, perennial criminal and friend of the Beats Herbert Huncke moved himself and his petty thief friends Little Jack Melody and Vickie Russell into the sweet, hapless Ginsberg’s apartment, which they used to store stolen goods. Driving Ginsberg out to his brother’s place in New Jersey in a stolen car, Melody flipped it while trying to outrun some cops. He was arrested on the spot, Ginsberg and Huncke later at the apartment. The New York papers had a field day with the scandal of a bright Columbia student caught up in a web of drugs and crime. Huncke and his pals went back behind bars but Ginsberg went instead for a brief stay at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. There he started a lifelong friendship with a fellow patient, Carl Solomon, a brilliant but stranded young man from the Bronx who was in for electroshock treatments. Solomon, a dedicated fan of the surrealists and Dada, inspired Ginsberg’s first great poem, “Howl.” On his release Ginsberg went back home to Paterson for a short stay. While there, he made a pilgrimage to one of his poet heroes, William Carlos Williams, in Rutherford. Williams later wrote the introduction to Howl and Other Poems that ends with the line, “Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell.”

  The group continued to befriend other petty hoodlums. Neal Cassady blew into town from Denver, and Ginsberg and Kerouac both fell for him in their different ways. A car thief and womanizer, he was Kerouac’s model Beat, happily skirting the edges of society, morality, and the law, physically a man’s man but psychologically boyish, an unscrupulous and irresponsible charmer. Then Ginsberg met Gregory Corso at the Pony Stable, a lesbian bar with a tough reputation on West Third Street. Corso was twenty and just out of the Clinton state prison in Dannemora, where he’d taught himself to read and write poetry. He was a Village native, born Nunzio at St. Vincent’s to a teenage mother who abandoned him as an infant. Raised in foster homes, he’d hit the streets by twelve and was in and out of lockups ever since. He was not only Ginsberg’s type—handsome, hetero, and macho—but recognizably a poet of promise.

  Ginsberg, Kerouac, Carr, and Corso began hanging around with what Ginsberg called the subterraneans, which Kerouac later poached for his novel about the scene. (He reciprocated by giving Ginsberg the title for “Howl.”) It was his term for the downtown crowd who drank and talked at Village bars like the dark and druggy Fugazzi’s on Sixth Avenue and the smoky, livelier, but still rough San Remo, at the corner of MacDougal and Bleecker Streets. The San Remo was just another mob-backed Village bar when the bohemians and artists colonized it. “In the front they had booths,” Roy Metcalf recalled. “The bar was always crowded. It was extremely clamorous. There were two very able bartenders,” one of whom, Michael Conrad, went on to play Sergeant Esterhaus on Hill Street Blues. “In the back was a restaurant. You could go in there with a girl and get excellent prime ribs of beef. You could get a meal for two, martinis and everything, and pay ten bucks.” Some of the staff were the kind of South Village thugs and semipro hoodlums Ted Joans called Minor Mafia.

  To Sukenick, who first slipped into the Remo as an underage wannabe from Brooklyn, they projected “a leitmotif of fear.” Like the bartenders and staff at tougher bars all over the city, they kept baseball bats ready behind the bar to use on anyone who got out of hand. And like all bars at the time, the San Remo had a “no fags” policy, even though everyone knew that some percentage of the hip colonizers on any given night was gay and lesbian. The playwright Robert Patrick, who got to the Village in 1961, remembers that the bars around Bleecker and MacDougal Streets were the worst. “One had a sign that said, ‘If You’re Gay Stay Away.’ Another had a fire ax on the wall with the saying ‘For Use On Queers.’ You could go in, but you had to act straight, so why would you want to?” Eventually, Sukenick writes, the Remo got too unfriendly and dangerous, and the scene moved en masse to Louis’ Tavern on Sheridan Square. But from the late 1940s into the ’50s the Remo was one of the most popular boho hangouts in the Village, where one might encounter anyone from Jackson Pollock to Auden to the scarily life-battered Bodenheim. On and off the subterraneans included William Gaddis, Gore Vidal, Anatole Broyard, John Cage, Julian Beck and Judith Malina, Chandler Brossard, James Agee, Anton Rosenberg, and Bill Cannastra.

  Unflattering portrayals of Anatole Broyard appear in the first novels of both Gaddis and Brossard. Well liked at first—he was best man at Brossard’s wedding—over time he came to seem too much the hipster hustler, a guy too much on the make in his career, his social life, and his sex life. That’s how Brossard, a writer for The New Yorker who had moved to the Village in the 1940s and was Burroughs’s neighbor, depicted him in Who Walk in Darkness, published in 1952. Because some of the characters are based on the Beats it’s sometimes called “the first Beat novel,” which it’s not. The central character, Henry Porter, is a smooth-talking hepcat who in the original draft is rumored to be “a ‘passed’ Negro.” He was so clearly based on Broyard that Brossard’s publisher, New Directions, feared a libel suit and asked Broyard to sign a release. He refused and New Directions forced Brossard to change Porter’s secret. In the published version, Porter is merely rumored to be a bastard. Broyard got his own back twenty years later, writing a vicious review in the Times of Brossard’s 1971 novel Wake Up. We’re Almost There, which he called “transcendentally bad.” Another friend turned enemy, Gaddis used Broyard as the model for an oily Village character named Max in his first novel, The Recognitions, published in 1955. But then Gaddis mercilessly savages the whole Village scene. He describes the San Remo, which he calls the Viareggia, as “a small Italian bar of nepotistic honesty . . . taken over by the educated classes, an ill-dressed, under-fed, over-drunken group of squatters . . . all afloat here on sodden pools of depravity.”

  Cannastra, who was the Beats’ guide to the Remo
scene, was another wild man who briefly played a role as catalyst and inspiration for them. Born into a wealthy family upstate and educated at Harvard Law, he’d moved to New York the year before and was soon famous for throwing crazy orgiastic parties in his Chelsea loft with Joan Haverty, a pretty young woman who had met the bisexual Cannastra in Provincetown. Alfred Leslie recalled that you’d see everyone at Cannastra’s parties—the subterraneans, the Beats, artists like himself, Maya Deren. He first met Kerouac and the others there in 1949. Cannastra, he says, was “an interesting guy” with “tremendous energy but he was fearfully self-destructive and was always doing wild, wild things.” He’d lie down in front of traffic, dance on the edge of his building’s roof, walk barefoot on broken glass, and compete with friends “to see who could hold his or her head the longest in the oven with the gas on.” In October 1950, climbing out a window of a moving subway train, he fell and was crushed. He was twenty-eight.

  Kerouac, who had left Edie, moved into Cannastra’s loft with Haverty within days; in mid-November, on the spur of the moment, they got married. He was twenty-eight, she was twenty. When the rent on the loft came due at the end of November they decamped for Kerouac’s mother’s apartment in Brooklyn. Joan quickly realized this was a big mistake and moved back into Manhattan. When Kerouac showed up unannounced with his typewriter and a roll-top desk, she reluctantly let him move in. In her apartment Kerouac began to bang out the first draft of what became On the Road, typing it single-spaced, unrepressed and unedited, on a 120-foot scroll. He was already a published novelist: John Kerouac’s The Town and the City had been published earlier in 1950 by Harcourt, Brace, where his editor was Robert Giroux. It was a good, solid, traditional novel, clearly inspired, as everyone noted, by Thomas Wolfe, but it had gotten few reviews and sold poorly. John Kerouac was now trying something completely new, inventing Jack Kerouac and what Ginsberg called his bop prosody. As he banged away at it Joan, pregnant, kicked him out of her apartment. When she gave birth to the daughter she named Jan Kerouac, Jack refused to admit paternity. Six years later, his girlfriend Joyce Glassman saw a snapshot of the little girl and remarked on the resemblance to Jack. “Well, she’s not my daughter,” he snapped. “I don’t care who she looks like.”

  He completed the draft novel while bunking with Carr. This is the experiment of which Truman Capote would later snipe, “That’s not writing, that’s typing.” Kerouac unfurled the scroll in Giroux’s office, insisting that it must be published exactly as is, with no edits. Giroux told him no editor in town would agree to that. He was right. On the Road wasn’t published until 1957, after many rejections, and the version Viking put out was much revised by Kerouac and by Malcolm Cowley, Viking’s editorial consultant. Ginsberg complained it had been “hacked and punctuated and broken—the rhythms and swing of it broken—by presumptuous literary critics in publishing houses.” Over the decades as Kerouac’s cult grew the original scroll would be preserved and revered as a sacred document, a kind of Beat Torah. It fetched a little over $2 million at auction in 2004. On the Road: The Original Scroll was published by Viking in 2007.

  In 1952 John Clellon Holmes published his novel Go, about characters based on Kerouac and the others. Go is also sometimes cited as the “first Beat novel” but it’s more a novel about the Beats, and a relatively conventional one. Holmes had first met Kerouac at a party in 1948. They were around the same age, but Holmes was a more conventional sort than Kerouac and his pals. He was intrigued by them and was maybe the first to see them as representative of something larger than themselves—an Atomic Age nihilism, an insouciant rejection of postwar American values. Kerouac and Holmes became friends and drinking buddies. They attended literature classes at the New School together. After one of these classes they got to drinking and talking about the Lost Generation. Holmes asked Kerouac what he thought his generation should be called, and Kerouac casually responded with the term “beat generation.” He later regretted ever uttering the two words together. Kerouac and the others had often heard “beat” used by hepcats to mean sad, dragged down, worn out; in his “A Portrait of the Hipster” in Partisan Review in 1948, Broyard listed it as an antonym for “solid, gone, out of this world.” That was too negative for Kerouac, who decided it also meant upbeat, on the beat, beatific.

  It was Holmes, not Kerouac, who first went public with the term Beat Generation. In 1952, the same year Go appeared, he wrote an article called “This Is the Beat Generation” for the New York Times Magazine. He credits “John Kerouac, the author of a fine, neglected novel The Town and the City,” with coming up with the term, and explains, “More than mere weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw . . . For the wildest hipster, making a mystique of bop, drugs and the night life, there is no desire to shatter the ‘square’ society in which he lives, only to elude it.” The idea of the Beat Generation had been launched into the mainstream media but it didn’t get much notice yet.

  Burroughs was the next to get a book published. Ginsberg showed the manuscript for his autobiographical Junkie to Carl Solomon, whose uncle ran Ace, a paperback publisher that had recently begun to put out thirty-five-cent two-in-one “Ace Double” books of sci-fi, westerns, and mysteries. In 1953 Ace paid Burroughs an advance of eight hundred dollars and published Junkie (spelled Junky in later editions). It was nothing like the anti–dope fiend literature of the time but the publisher did a good job of disguising it as such. It was given a lurid cover and printed back-to-back with a more traditional exposé, Maurice Helbrant’s Narcotic Agent, the “Gripping True Adventures of a T-Man’s War Against the Dope Menace.” (A T-Man was a Treasury Department agent.) Burroughs used the pseudonym William Lee, partly for fear his parents would cut off his allowance. He returned to New York that year and stayed for a while with Ginsberg on East Seventh Street.

  They all fled New York for the next few years. Burroughs lived in Tangier, Paris, and London until the 1970s. Kerouac, Corso, and Ginsberg wandered to San Francisco and Mexico City. They found San Francisco, which was in the midst of a poetry renaissance, more hospitable than New York. Ginsberg gave the first public reading of “Howl” there in 1955, at the Six Gallery, where he appeared with Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, and Philip Whalen, while Kerouac, drunk on wine, cheered “Go!” from the audience. The next day, Ferlinghetti sent Ginsberg a telegram. He had opened the City Lights Bookstore in 1953 and just started publishing his Pocket Poet Series of books, beginning with his own Pictures of the Gone World. Hearing the unmistakable link between Ginsberg and Walt Whitman, he telegrammed, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” He published Howl and Other Poems the following year. In 1957 U.S. Customs seized a shipment of the book coming into San Francisco from Ferlinghetti’s British printer, then the police arrested Ferlinghetti for peddling smut. The ACLU argued his case, the judge found for the defense, and the national press covered it closely.

  When Ginsberg, Kerouac, Ginsberg’s San Francisco lover Peter Orlovsky, and Peter’s fifteen-year-old brother Lafcadio hitchhiked back to New York late in 1956, they stopped first at the apartment of two friends of Ginsberg’s on West Eleventh Street near the White Horse Tavern. Helen Elliott and Helen Weaver were known as the Helens. Elliott, who worked at the talent agency MCA, had come to the Village after her mother in Omaha had thrown her out. Weaver had grown up in Scarsdale feeling like an outcast. She’d followed a college lesbian affair with a quick marriage that had gone nowhere. In 1955 she found that the Village, “teeming as it was with artists, would-be artists, and oddballs like myself . . . seemed to represent the repressed unconscious—even the repressed sexuality—of Manhattan,” she recalls in her memoir The Awakener. Their visitors unrolled their sleeping bags and slept on the floor. When the others left, Kerouac stayed. In Desolation Angels, where he gives her the name Ruth Heaper, he describes Weaver’s “brown sleek hair, black eyes, little pout,” and “a strange boyish mischievous or spoiled plucky face but with rosy woman lips and soft chee
k of fairest apparel of morning.”

  He and Weaver launched into a two-month affair. She writes that she was attracted to his extravagant good looks (Salvador Dalí proclaimed him “more beautiful than Mr. Brando”) and his boyish ebullience but suspicious of his dark side: the abandonment of his wife and child, his old-fashioned ideas about women even as he sponged off them, the drunken binges, the immaturity, the way his high spirits periodically crumbled into surly brooding. She kicked him out after a late night when he and Carr, roaring drunk, refused to let her get to sleep. He spent a night or two at the Hotel Marlton before Ginsberg quickly hooked him up with the next in the line of women to take him in, the young writer Joyce Glassman. They were together, on and off, for the next two years, and Glassman, as Joyce Johnson, would write her own memoir, Minor Characters (where the two Helens are the two Virginias).

  The Beats had returned from San Francisco buoyed and triumphant. Viking was getting ready to publish On the Road and Grove Press took The Subterraneans. The New York Times, Mademoiselle, and other publications were writing about them—principally Ginsberg at this stage. In a drunk, playful interview in the February 13, 1957, Voice, the trio of Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Corso called themselves “witless madcaps” who’d left New York “to get away from cliques and snobbery here,” Corso said. “Too big, too multiple, too jaded,” Kerouac agreed. “We were saints and Villagers and we’re beautiful,” he declared.