The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  DAVID AMRAM REMEMBERS MEETING KEROUAC IN 1956, AT A bring-your-own-bottle party in a painter’s loft in what’s now Soho. He forgets whose loft it was. There were a lot of lofts and a lot of parties. They jammed together, Kerouac reciting a poem and Amram improvising. “We kept running into one another and continued doing this wherever we were, often until we were asked to stop,” he writes. “Eventually we formed a bond.” The Kerouac he remembers was upbeat, openhearted, playful. Dan Wakefield met Kerouac early in 1957 and remembers a darker, brooding one. They were introduced in Romero’s. Kerouac, in a “rather grumpy, desultory way,” was getting drunk on his thousand-dollar advance for On the Road, which Viking doled out at a hundred dollars a month. He “seemed more weighed down than elated” about the book.

  “I foresaw a new dreariness in all this literary success,” Kerouac wrote of this period in Desolation Angels. In that book, published in 1965, he looks back at 1957 and describes the months running up to the publication of On the Road as a time of world-weariness and foreboding. There had always been something forced about his garrulous carousing when drunk, his hitchhiking and tramp steamering around the map. It was a Neal Cassady impersonation. At heart he was a shy and withdrawn loner who was happiest at home with his mom. By 1957, the year he turned thirty-five, he’d been on and off the road for a decade. It was getting old. He was bored with himself, bored with his friends, and “wondering where to really go, what to do next—I suddenly realized I had nowhere to turn at all.” On the Road now in the hands of his editors, he escaped New York, jumping on a boat for Tangier to visit with Burroughs. Ginsberg and Orlovsky followed. Even there Kerouac found himself in a roomful of hipsters: “And just like in New York or Frisco or anywhere there they are all hunching around in marijuana smoke, talking, the cool girls with long thin legs in slacks, the men with goatees, all an enormous drag . . . Nothing can be more dreary than ‘coolness’ . . . postured, actually rigid coolness that covers up the fact that the character is unable to convey anything of force or interest.”

  He was back in New York when Viking published On the Road in September 1957 and the New York Times launched him to stardom. It started with a fluke when Orville Prescott, the paper’s conservative daily book reviewer, went on vacation and a freelancer, Gilbert Millstein, wrote the review instead. Millstein was a Villager and Voice contributor and he’d reviewed Go for the Times years before. He called On the Road’s publication “a historic occasion” and said that some of the writing was “of a beauty almost breathtaking” and the book is “a major novel.” Prescott was incensed when he read it. But just three days later the Sunday Times Book Review ran its own review, and though it was generally more muted in tone and suggested the book was a one-off, it did call the novel “a stunning achievement.”

  The phone at Joyce Glassman’s apartment began ringing constantly the morning after Millstein’s review appeared. Kerouac, after quickly downing three bottles of champagne almost single-handedly, gave his first interview that day. It was the start of a deluge of print and television coverage and commentary. After the Times’s positive reviews many other critics waded in to savage the book and its author as a “Neanderthal” and a “slob.” The two-year-old Village Voice ran a very positive review, but over the next couple of years many Voice writers tended toward skepticism or dismay when addressing Kerouac and the rest of the Beats. “They’ve nothing to say and they say it badly” was a typical comment in 1958. In Esquire Norman Podhoretz, the same age as Kerouac, aligned the Beats with juvenile delinquents, warning that “we are witnessing a revolt of all the forces hostile to civilization itself—a movement of brute stupidity and know-nothingism.” Life denounced the Beats as “talkers, loafers, passive little con men, lonely eccentrics, mom-haters, cophaters, exhibitionists with abused smiles and second mortgages on a bongo drum.” The author bizarrely compared them to fruitflies feeding off America, “the biggest, sweetest, and most succulent casaba ever produced by the melon patch of civilization.” James Baldwin rolled his moist eyes at the hype about the Beats. He didn’t see much literary merit in their conversational writing style, didn’t like their romantic ideas about blacks, and snickered at their infatuation with Zen Buddhism, calling them “the Suzuki Rhythm Boys.”

  Two older role models and early supporters of the Beats, Kenneth Patchen and Kenneth Rexroth, were driven to fits of bitter, probably jealous crankiness by all the hoopla. Both had been in effect proto-Beats some years before the Beats, both had spent time in the Village before moving to the West Coast, and both felt they’d pioneered and perfected jazz poetry before the Beats popularized it. Rexroth had been a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance that warmly welcomed the East Coast Beats in 1956 and was the emcee at the famous Six Gallery reading. By 1958 he was complaining that “incompetents looking for a fast buck” had turned jazz poetry into a fad, “a temporary social disease like pee-wee golf or swallowing goldfish.” When Time declared him “the Father to the Beats,” he snapped that “an ethnologist is not a bug.”

  Patchen was also an important figure in the San Francisco Renaissance. He’d been one of the most prolific and widely read authors in the Village during his time there between 1934 and 1946. His poetry and prose expressed a rebellious, visionary transcendentalism in the spirit of both William Blake and Walt Whitman. He was good friends with E. E. Cummings and did picture poems in a similar vein. He counted Henry Miller, Ferlinghetti, and Charlie Parker among his fans and collaborated with John Cage on the radio play The City Wears a Slouch Hat and with Charles Mingus on jazz-poetry performances that were considered paragons of the form. A committed, angry pacifist—Miller called him “the Man of Anger and Light”—he wrote some of his most striking work in the years around World War II, including his prose masterpiece, the apocalyptic anitwar novel The Journal of Albion Moonlight. After leaving the Village, he and his wife eventually settled in San Francisco, where Ginsberg, a huge fan, brought friends on pilgrimages to meet him. Patchen basked in their adulation then, but by 1959 he was disgusted with the media circus around them. In an interview in the Voice that year he railed against the Beats, calling them “the Brat Generation,” “tenth-rate juveniles in their 30s,” “irresponsible mountebanks in a freak show brought into existence through the agency of the greatest enemy of the arts and the artist in our time: the minions of Time magazine and all the rest of the mass-media distortionists.”

  Even Romany Marie piled on. Interviewed over coffee and cigarettes at the Rienzi by a reporter for the New York Daily News early in 1958, the seventy-two-year-old sighed, “This Beat Generation is truly sad. They have no dreams, no stars to follow and they live not to create but to destroy. They will soon destroy themselves. And there will be no one to take their place.”

  The ferocity of the attacks startled Kerouac, while the faddish adulation of fans and wannabes flabbergasted him. To Hettie Jones, who first met him not long after On the Road came out, “he seemed bewildered by the ardent young crowd for whom he’d spoken.” Amram has always insisted that the very idea of acting as a spokesman for a generation was antithetical to Kerouac. In Offbeat he writes: “We never dreamed that we ourselves would ever become labeled ‘Beats,’ emblematic of a nonexistent ‘movement’ whose presumed values were used to discredit us from having anything of substance to offer the world . . . [A]bove all, we were militantly free spirits who scrupulously avoided joining anything, or telling anybody what to do or how to think.”

  Kerouac drank more and more to cope and cover up. On TV he was shy and monosyllabic or drunk and incoherent, except on Steve Allen’s show. Allen, the quintessential Upper Bohemian, sat at the piano and played bluesy jazz riffs as Kerouac read. An album of their collaborations, Poetry for the Beat Generation, would come out in 1959. Kerouac continued jamming with Amram, which he still clearly enjoyed. In October 1957 the two of them, with the poets Howard Hart and Philip Lamantia, staged a jazz-poetry reading at the new Brata Gallery on East Tenth Street. They advertised the gig ent
irely by mimeographed handbills and, given all the buzz about Kerouac, easily packed the place. A few months later they took the same show out to an auditorium at Brooklyn College, where it didn’t go over so well. During a Q&A with the student audience Kerouac, drunk and high, proclaimed himself “a Zen Master” while refusing to give a straight answer to any of their questions. The students turned hostile. “Man, how come I like your book, but I don’t like you?” one asked, to “loud jeering laughter.”

  In December, Kerouac accepted an invitation from Max Gordon to give short readings between the jazz sets at the Village Vanguard. It was a very different sort of gig for him and raised some eyebrows. The bohemians stayed away from nightclubs like the Vanguard with its dollar-seventy-five beers and four-dollar drink minimum, preferring the fifteen-cent beers at the Cedar and seventy-five-cent pitchers at the Five Spot. Dan Wakefield, covering the show for the Nation, met Joyce Glassman there. She explained that “Jack didn’t like the idea of this nightclub business but thought it might help On the Road.” Wakefield reported that Kerouac “recited to a cold (as distinguished from cool) audience” made up of “one seaman, one poet” and a table of “what looked to be the leftovers of an office party from around Times Square.” If Kerouac was playing the Vanguard, Wakefield mused, Ginsberg must soon “be opening at El Morocco.” When Wakefield ran into Kerouac again a few months later, Jack was again drunk and moody. Wakefield assayed a no-hard-feelings rapprochement; Kerouac threatened to throw him out a window.

  Covering another night that week at the Vanguard for the Voice, Howard Smith saw a very different show but his report was as skeptical as Wakefield’s. He observed that Kerouac was fidgety as a cat, drinking, sweating buckets, and chain-smoking, painfully out of place. Yet the club was packed by “a few tieless buddies from the old days, a little proud and a little jealous, the fourth estate, the agents, the hand-shakers, the Steve Allens, the Madison Avenue bunch trying to keep ultra-current.” They applauded wildly, and Kerouac “ate it all up the way he really never wanted to.”

  Pete Hamill, not yet the star novelist and journalist he’d become, caught one of the performances. Afterward he was in the Cedar Tavern, jam-packed as it usually was by then, when Kerouac and friends elbowed their way through the throng to the bar. “I said hello. He looked at me in a suspicious, bleary way and nodded.” Kerouac bought drinks for all his crowd, “always polite, but his eyes scared, a twitch in his face and a sour smell coming off him . . . The painters gave him a who-the-fuck-is-this-guy? look.”

  Kerouac ended his appearances at the Vanguard after that one week. He happily rejoined Amram and the others to do Friday midnight shows at Circle in the Square, where the atmosphere was much looser and more fun. In January 1958, when the young newsman Mike Wallace interviewed him for the New York Post, Kerouac struck him as a “tattered, forlorn young man.” Kerouac spoke a lot about death. “It’s a great burden to be alive,” he told Wallace. “A heavy burden, a great big heavy burden. I wish I were safe in Heaven, dead.” The Subterraneans came out the next month, and The Dharma Bums the following fall, feeding the maelstrom of press and public attention. Using the fifteen thousand dollars MGM paid him for the film rights to The Subterraneans he bought a small house out in Northport, Long Island, for himself and his mother, the first of several hideaways from which he made his forays into the city, where he’d drink too much, carouse, fall down, make a spectacle of himself, then go hide once more.

  21

  Pull My Daisy

  “DAVID’S WRITING A NEW NOVEL ALL ABOUT YOU, BEN.”

  “BETTER NOT BE ANY OF THAT BEAT GENERATION JAZZ LIKE THE LAST ONE.”

  —Shadows

  ON NOVEMBER 11, 1959, DEMONSTRATING AGAIN WHAT A SMALL world it was, Amos Vogel’s Cinema 16 screened a double bill of John Cassavetes’s feature-length Shadows, which had premiered the previous year, with the debut of a shorter film called Pull My Daisy, which Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Amram, Orlovsky, Larry Rivers, Robert Frank, and a few others had all come together to make in Alfred Leslie’s loft on Fourth Avenue near Twelfth Street. Avant-garde filmmaker and critic Jonas Mekas was in the audience and wrote a glowing review, cheering that it “reminds us again of that sense of reality and immediacy that is cinema’s first property,” and declaring that “I consider Pull My Daisy in all its inconsequentiality, the most alive and the most truthful of films.” Other critics wrote off Daisy as a frivolous trifle compared to the somber Shadows, which they hailed as the cornerstone of a new American underground cinema.

  Different as they are in tone, Shadows and Daisy made a natural pair. Both attempted to present authentic portraits of Beat culture—or self-portrait in the case of Daisy—at a time when depictions in commercial film and television were typically sensationalist and exploitative. (For example, in the fall of 1959 Cassavetes was starring in the short-lived TV show Johnny Staccato, set in Manhattan. He played a private eye, who was also a beatnikish jazz pianist, in Greenwich Village.) Both films were shot low-budget with a black-and-white cinema verité look that was the antithesis of the Cinemascope and Technicolor epics Hollywood was making to lure viewers back from their black-and-white TV sets. Vogel screened them under the rubric “The Cinema of Improvisation,” and that’s how they were viewed for years. After all, Daisy looks like a group of Beats and artists clowning around one morning in front of a movie camera and Shadows ends with the announcement, “The film you have just seen was an improvisation.” But Daisy actually took months to plan, weeks to shoot, and more months to edit, and Cassavetes labored over Shadows for three years. In the spirit of the time, the makers of both films put a lot of effort into making them look effortless.

  Leslie and codirector Frank later had a bitter falling-out over ownership of Pull My Daisy and contesting versions of who did what. When explaining his version of how Pull My Daisy got made, Leslie starts back at the end of World War II, when he was a young painter-photographer-filmmaker freshly arrived in the Village. He would send cartons of cigarettes to a friend in occupied Germany, who sold them to buy cameras and equipment he then shipped back to Leslie. They made a film together, Directions, screened at MoMA. In 1949, feeling he had to concentrate on his painting, Leslie sold all the equipment, but by the mid-1950s he itched to make films again. His friend had died of cancer in his mid-twenties—and, in anger and despair, he had destroyed all but two frames of Directions—so, Leslie says, he invited his neighbor the photographer Robert Frank to go in with him. Frank had grown up in Zurich in a wealthy Jewish household and, after living out the war in the safety of neutral Switzerland, came to New York in 1947. He soon met and was mentored by Walker Evans, who helped him get work at some of the magazines. Bored and frustrated shooting commercial photography, Frank secured a Guggenheim grant in 1955 and spent two years traveling around the country, taking almost thirty thousand candid shots of an America that was rather more grim and bleak than most Americans liked to think of it in the patriotic 1950s. Eighty-three of them would go into his book The Americans, first published in France in 1958, then by Grove Press in New York in 1959, with an introduction by Kerouac and back cover art by Leslie.

  Leslie and Frank formed a limited partnership, G-String Enterprises. They heard a tape Kerouac had made of himself reading all the parts of a never-produced play he’d written about the Beat Generation at the request of a Broadway producer. In the last act Kerouac tells of an afternoon in 1955 when he, Ginsberg, and Orlovsky went to Neal and Carolyn Cassady’s house in Los Gatos to meet a Bishop Romano of the Liberal Catholic Church, a do-it-yourself spin-off of Roman Catholicism condemned as heresy by the Vatican. Romano was also a spirit medium who preached reincarnation. Drunk and high, the Beats went into their usual boyish hijinks, Romano and his companions were stiff and uncomfortable, and Carolyn was happy to clear the house. On the tape, as Kerouac read all the parts, Leslie and Frank could hear a radio in the background. It was Symphony Sid, the great jazz disc jockey. Listening to Jack do all the voices with jazz playing in t
he background, Leslie says, they conceived what became Pull My Daisy, a short loosely based on the play’s last act, with Jack narrating it in voice-over while David Amram played.

  Leslie and Frank raised fifteen thousand dollars, rented equipment, hired a small crew, did a script and storyboard that greatly reconfigured the story, and recruited the cast. Ginsberg, Corso, and Orlovsky played themselves; Rivers played the Cassady character Milo; Richard Bellamy, director of the Hansa Gallery (which had moved uptown by then), was the bishop; the painter Alice Neel was the bishop’s mother; and Amram was added as the jazzbo Mezz McGillicuddy. The one professional was a beautiful French actress, Delphine Seyrig, the wife of their artist friend Jack Youngerman, in the Carolyn Cassady role. They used Leslie’s loft at 108 Fourth Avenue as the set, above the Emil Strauss Employment Agency. When Leslie moved there it was filthy and full of junk. He tossed out as much as he could, then had a commercial spray-paint crew come in and told them to spray everything—walls, floor, ceiling, and anything still lying around—white. “When I went in it looked like snow had fallen over a trash heap. There were mice frozen in place. It was beautiful. I mean it was majestic.”

  Amram recalls the shoot as three weeks of barely controlled chaos, as Ginsberg et al. got drunk and high and up to their usual antics—Ginsberg dropping his pants every time the camera started to roll, Corso jumping out the window, food fights, free improvisation, horsing around. Leslie and Frank had known them for years by then and knew what to expect, so they proceeded patiently, shooting every scene three times. Kerouac dropped by a few times, drunk, dragging Bowery bums up from the street with him. Seyrig, who spoke only French, was often confused and dismayed at the apparent anarchy, which actually helped her performance as Milo’s exasperated wife.

  Leslie spent a month or so cutting the film in an editing studio near the Brill Building. He and Frank rented a sound studio and put Jack and Amram in it. As the rough cut played they recorded Kerouac and Amram riffing the narrative to music in three takes. “Jack was a little bit high, which was good,” Leslie says. “He was totally at ease.” As Mekas puts it, “Jack rambled in the dark, drunk, and produced a masterpiece.”