Best Minds of My Generation

by Allen Ginsberg

“You can’t rush Francis,” says the mother. “He’s his own boss and he’ll do what he likes when the time comes. If he keeps so much to himself it’s because he has a lot on his mind.”

  “If you ask me,” says Rosey, “he’s just got something wrong up here.” And she twirls her big finger around her ear. “You mark my word.”

  “No,” says Mrs. Martin, “you just don’t understand him.”62

  This division of Kerouac into three is not my idea, this is what he was saying at the time. He’d say, “I’m writing this book The Town and the City, and I got it all worked out, I got all different parts of myself in it.” He was very conscious of doing it and telling us he was doing it. He said, “Francis is a part of me that’s like Burroughs,” and then he would read the passage about Francis. The third [brother] is the sensitive Kerouac. Neither the decadent nor the all-American Joe, but the Christian saint or Buddhist bodhisattva.

  Thirteen-year-old Peter Martin is shocked when he sees his sister Ruth dancing so closely to another boy at the high school dance—after the annual minstrel show in the school auditorium. Looking over the entire dance floor, rose-hued and misty and lovely, he decides that life is more exciting than he supposed it was allowed. {Completely Kerouac there.} It is 1935, the orchestra is playing Larry Clinton’s “Study in Red” and everyone begins to sense the thrilling new music that is about to develop without limit. There are rumors of Benny Goodman in the air, of Fletcher Henderson and of new great orchestras rising. In the crowded ballroom, the lights, the music, the dancing figures, the echoes all fill the boy with strange new feelings and mysterious sorrow.

  “Mysterious sorrow,” I guess that’s the first noble truth of Kerouac. It’s the glimpse of little puppets of eternity, clawing each other in their vanity, with great clouds brewing overhead in an empty sky.

  By the window Peter gazes out on the brooding Spring darkness, burning with the vision of the close-embracing dancers, stirred by the tidings of the music and filled with an infinite longing to grow up and go to high school himself, where he too can dance embraced with shapely girls, sing in the minstrel show, and perhaps to be a football hero too.

  “See that fellow with the crew-cut?” Ruth points out for him. “The chunky one over there, dancing with that pretty blonde? That’s Bobby Stedman.”

  To Peter, Bobby Stedman is a name emblazoned on hallowed sports pages, a weaving misty figure in the newsreel shots of the Galloway-Lawton game on Thanksgiving Day, a hero of heroes. Something dark and proud and remote surrounds his name, his figure, his atmosphere. As he dances there, Peter cannot believe his eyes—can this be Bobby Stedman himself? Isn’t he the greatest, speediest, hardest-running, weavingest halfback in the state? Haven’t they printed his name in big black letters, isn’t there a slow pompous music to his name and to the proud dark world surrounding him?

  That’s a romantic description of a football hero.

  Then Peter realizes that Ruth is dancing with Lou White, himself. Lou White, another remote and heroic name, a figure on rainswept or snowlashed fields, a face in the newspapers glowering in exertion over the taut center position.63

  [There is] something very intelligent about that. He’s already got his archetypal thought forms picked out, his imagery of brooding spring darkness, of mysterious sorrow. Some words are a little vague, but there is an amazing amount of particular detail in all of this. The almost Genet-like rhetorical lushness, the slow pompous music to his “heroic name.” It’s somewhat ironic too, a funny humor in his rhetoric.

  And when again he sees him on the day of the big Thanksgiving game, far down on the field hunched over the ball, Peter can’t believe that this remote god has come to his house to see his sister and laugh at jokes. The crowds roar, the Autumn wind whips among the flags around the stadium, Lou White far away snaps back the ball on the striped field, makes sensational tackles that evoke roars, trots about and is cheered thunderously off the field as he leaves his last game for the school. The bands play the alma mater song, broken in the wind.

  “I’m going to be playing in this game in two years,” says Peter to his father.

  “Oh, you will, hey?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t you think you’re a little too small for that? Those boys out there are built like trucks.”

  “I’ll get bigger,” says Peter, “and strong too.”

  His father laughs, and from that moment Peter Martin is finally goaded on by all the fantastic and fabulous triumphs that he sees possible in the world.64

  The third brother is sensitive, but also like the one with celestial ambition, celestial football ambition, or celestial poetry ambition. There are also a couple of other little kids described, he’s broken the family up into a few more archetypal infants. He’s already setting the style and nature of his brooding, already beginning to try and describe the conscious subjectivity of his characters by projecting the awareness that he already has developed and which he sees in me and Burroughs and other people. The element that I was referring to as panoramic consciousness or time consciousness, like my conversation in the dorm about saying “Good-bye door, good-bye step number one,” the awareness of time passing in its own space.

  If on some soft odorous April night the twelve-year-old Elizabeth Martin is seen strolling mournfully beneath the dripping wet trees, pouting and fierce and lonely, with her hands plunged deep in the pockets of her little tan raincoat as she considers the horrid legend of life, and broods as she returns slowly to her family’s house—be sure that the darkness and terror of twelve-years-old will come to womanly days of ripe warm sunshine.

  Or if that boy there, the one with the resolute little face, who wets his lips briefly before replying to a question, who strides along with determination and absorption towards his objective, who tinkers solemnly in the cellar or garage with a gadget or old motor, says very little and looks at everyone with a level blue-eyed stare of absolute reasonableness, if that boy, nine-year-old Charley Martin, is examined carefully as he goes about the undertakings of his self-assured and earnest young existence, dark wings appear above him as if to shade a strange light in his thoughtful eyes.

  And finally, if on some snowy dusk, with the sun’s sloping light on the flank of a hill, with the sun flaming back from factory windows, you see a little child of six, a boy called Mickey Martin, standing motionless in the middle of the road with his sled behind him, stunned by the sudden discovery that he does not know who he is, where he came from, what he is doing here, remember that all children are first shocked out of the womb of a mother’s world before they can know that loneliness is their heritage and their only means of rediscovering men and women.

  This is the Martin family, the elders and the young ones, even the little ones, the flitting ghost-ends of a brood who will grow and come to attain size and seasons and huge presence like the others, and burn savagely across days and nights of living, and give brooding rare articulation to the poor things of life, and the rich, dark things too.65

  That’s pretty good for a young man. I can’t write like this, it’s too big, too much detail. It was criticized for being too brooding and vast, as On the Road was. Naturally that dross slowly disappears. His awareness of the details of life and the enormous attention to detail remains.

  Like one sentence, “Young Peter Martin hears the long echoing hoot of the Montreal train broken and interrupted by some vast shifting in the March air.” That’s very odd, that “vast shifting in the March air,” because there is a funny sensitivity to the outer panoramic consciousness of the universe I was talking about. “Panoramic consciousness” is a phrase taken from Buddhist meditation terminology. It describes the transitional point between quieting the mind and extending the mind out into awareness of panoramic space around. One of the things that always struck me when I first came across the Buddhist notion of panoramic consciousness was how early and how greatly Kerouac displayed tha
t awareness of vast space.

  Young Peter Martin hears the long echoing hoot of the Montreal train broken and interrupted by some vast shifting in the March air, he hears voices coming suddenly on the breeze from across the river, barkings, calls, hammerings, which cease almost as soon as they come. He sits at the window awake with expectation, the eaves drip, something echoes like far thunder. He looks up at broken clouds fleeing across the ragged heavens, whipping over his roof, over the swaying trees, disappearing in hordes, advancing in armies. There’s a smell of gummy birch, rank and teeming smells like mud that’s dark and moist, of dark unlimbering branches of last Autumn’s matted floor dissolving in a fragrant mash, of whole advancing waves of air, misty March air.66

  It’s lyrical and it’s new, because it’s oddly appropriate even though the language is very loudmouthed romantic, not softmouthed romantic. It’s amazingly well balanced for being youthful springtime recollections of childhood. It’s detailed and hard and precise, for the purposes of making a long powerful sentence with vowels that end it.

  The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov were our favorite books then, because those books dealt with heroes who were constantly rushing up to each other and looking in each other’s eyes and asking about each other’s souls and getting into big conspiracies or crimes or emotional climaxes together. That served as a model for our own behavior toward each other. We associated Alyosha from The Brothers Karamazov somewhat with Kerouac, or somewhat with me, or somewhat with Lucien, composites. Dostoyevsky’s description of his mystical experience of auras before his epileptic fits was very intriguing to us. Little glimpses of visions, because we were talking about visions all the time.

  Kerouac was always talking about visions. He was having them every other day. By vision he meant a perception [whereby for example he] suddenly sees his family moving around him, or he comes into the city and sees all of us cramped in our apartment conspiring, so he has a vision of us as a bunch of Dostoyevskean creeps conspiring. His visions were sort of like in Dostoyevsky.

  I was involved with supreme reality and Kerouac was involved with his raw youth fantasy about becoming the greatest writer since Shakespeare, or Thomas Wolfe, one or the other. In fact when we went to visit Burroughs, it occurred to us that we were raw youths going to visit Versilov.67 We couldn’t figure out why Bill didn’t declare himself an artist, why he insisted that he was just an exterminator or a remittance man. Why didn’t he have the romantic notion of being an artist like we did?

  Continuing on the same theme in Vanity of Duluoz, Kerouac’s first glimpse of Burroughs.

  Someday, in fact, I’ll write a book about Will just by himself, so ever onward the Faustian soul, so especially about Wilson Holmes Hubbard I dont have to wait till he dies to complete his story, he above all’s best left marching on with that aggressive swing of his arms thru the Medinas of the world . . . well, a long story, wait.

  But in this case he’s come to see me about Claude, but saying it’s about the Merchant Marine. “But what was your last job?” I ask.

  “Bartender in Newark.”

  “Before that?”

  “Exterminator in Chicago. Of bedbugs, that is.”

  “Just came to see ya,” he says, “to find out about how to get papers, to ship out.” But when I had heard about “Will Hubbard” I had pictured a stocky dark-haired person of peculiar intensity because of the reports about him, the peculiar directedness of his actions, but here he had come walking into my pad tall and bespectacled and thin in a seersucker suit as tho he’s just returned from a compound in Equatorial Africa where he’d sat at dusk with a martini discussing the peculiarities . . . Tall, 6 foot 1, strange, inscrutable because ordinary-looking (scrutable), like a shy bank clerk with a patrician thinlipped cold bluelipped face, blue eyes saying nothing behind steel rims and glass, sandy hair, a little wispy, a little of the wistful German Nazi youth as his soft hair fluffles in the breeze— So unobtrusive as he sat on the hassock in the middle of Johnnie’s livingroom and asking me dull questions about how to get sea papers . . . Now there’s my first secret intuitive vision about Will . . .

  That’s the way that Kerouac uses the word “vision,” it was very common that use of rhetoric and that attitude. It always baffled me because Jack was always having visions and I never had any real visions and I didn’t know what he meant by visions, except maybe some big take on things.

  Now there’s my first secret intuitive vision about Will, that he had come to see me not because I was a principal character now in the general drama of that summer but because I was a seaman and thus a seaman type to whom one asked about shipping out as a preliminary means of digging the character of said seaman type. He didn’t come to me expecting a jungle of organic depths, or a jumble of souls, which b’God on every level level I was as you can see, dear wifey and dear reader, he pictured a merchant seaman who would belong in the merchant seaman category and show blue eyes beyond that and a few choice involuntary remarks, and execute a few original acts and go away into endless space, a flat, planed “merchant seaman”— And being queer, as he was, but didnt admit in those days, and never bothered me, he expected a little more on the same general level of shallowness. Thus, on that fateful afternoon in July of 1944 in New York City, as he sat on the hassock questioning me about sea papers (Franz smiling behind him), and as I, fresh from that shower, sat in the easy chair in just my pants, answering, began a relationship which, if he thought it was to remain a flat plane of an “interesting blue-eyed dark-haired goodlooking seaman who knows Claude,” wasnt destined to remain so (a point of pride with me in that I’ve worked harder at this legend business than they have)— Okay, joke . . . Tho, on that afternoon, he had no reason to surmise anything otherwise than shoptalk from your aunt to mine, “Yes, you’ve got to go now and get your Coast Guard pass first, down near the Battery . . .”68

  It’s funny self-intelligence there, a little bit out of Dostoyevsky. The characters are very conscious of their relation to each other, as on a stage. Not the self-consciousness of guilty skulking, fearful, but more a humorous, playful self-consciousness. In 1967, all I wrote was a nice poem on acid, “Wales Visitation,” an exorcism of the Pentagon, and a couple little squiggles of poetry, but Kerouac wrote this whole thing. It’s amazing, year after year, book after book, all comprising what he called the Legend of Duluoz. “I’ve worked harder at this legend business than they have,” he said.

  CHAPTER 14

  Kerouac and Visions of Cody, Part 1

  Visions of Cody was finished in the early 1950s. It was one of the books I brought [with me] to San Francisco when I left New York in 1953, because I couldn’t find a publisher in New York. My first reaction to it was of horror, dismay, disgust, and anger, because it didn’t seem like a novel. It took me about a year to get used to it, but the publishers could never get used to it. There’s a long Thomas Wolfean, Proustian, introductory section about Denver and Cody in Denver, the panoramic consciousness of the football field. That was submitted as a sample of a novel, at the time called On the Road, to A. A. Wyn Company with Carl Solomon as editor. On the basis of which they gave Kerouac an advance to write a novel.

  Visions of Cody, really visions of Cassady, is a collection of illuminative moments or perceptions. The structure of the book was the great moments placed in whatever chronological order they fell into. It was to be intense epiphanies. Since we were reading James Joyce’s Stephen Hero and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, there was a notion of epiphany, a moment of clear perception.

  I had the idea that Kerouac was influenced by Neal reading Proust aloud. In 1947 when Cassady was in town we had a copy of Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Proust and Neal would read that aloud when we were high on grass. He read Proust very beautifully and he enjoyed the long organic sentences that were inclusive of many varieties of thought forms and associations that rose during the composition of the sentence. In other words, as in Milton, P
roust used long sentences to include everything in his mind. I remember Neal reading aloud while we were all high on tea one long sentence in Proust, which was a description of Baron de Charlus, which began with a description of his curly Jewish French European oily ringlets, black hair, and ending with some glimmering image of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, all in one sentence. At the time Neal was talking about how our consciousness went down six levels at once, our conversation and awareness. It was the first idea I ever heard about a thought being that spacious and that complicated and that infoliated, not just being simple declarative statements. Neal seemed to be enjoying that particular meditation, which grew out of his specialty, which was driving. While paying attention to the road and the car and the mechanics of the car and the sound of the car, Neal simultaneously smoked grass, listened to “Open the Door, Richard” or some rhythm and blues number coming out of the radio, kept time with one hand to the dashboard, maybe even trying to get his thumb up the cunt of whatever girl he had sitting next to him, while trying to keep up some metaphysical conversation with me, or with Kerouac, about Edgar Cayce, or Buddhism, or prose, pointing out the interrelatedness of all the different elements going on at once, pointing out there’s a kind of ecstatic swing to the whole process of thought and car motion and physical activity. That influenced Kerouac, that kind of prose, meaning simultaneity of mind.

  Kerouac thought he would try and do it in Thomas Wolfean prose, or Proustian prose, or logical syntactical prose, and so that chapter in Visions of Cody which ends with a description of a tackle in the red October sun on the football field was given to Carl Solomon as a sample of the novel for which he got a contract. I forgot what he submitted to Carl, it was either this or On the Road itself. He turned in the great mass of On the Road as a single continuous sentence on a scroll. He went off to San Francisco or maybe Mexico, finished the book, including all of the typing of tapes that were made of him and Neal, plus all the other visions of Neal he had, and then turned it in. That freaked me out because it wasn’t anything like a novel that I had expected and I was acting as his agent. I was stupidly in the role of an agent and expected him to turn out what he promised to turn out, a normal symphonic syntax sentence, and I got freaked out and wrote him abusive letters, saying, “How dare you pull this on us!” I was running around to crazy Carl Solomon trying to peddle Jack’s book and Jack sends in a book even crazier than Carl Solomon. My reaction was shameful. Later I got into it and it seemed to be the greatest work that he did.