Best Minds of My Generation

by Allen Ginsberg

  The whole idea is to sketch like a painter, to make drawings of details. He became very interested in those sketches. They were just like poems or something, the sound of a car door at midnight, a little thing on masturbation, streets of New York, long section describing the dust on a coat hanger in the elevated, or his fantastic description of the food in Hector’s cafeteria in New York. Almost an apocalypse of food. The other influence was Rimbaud’s prose poems, he intended his sketches to be like little Rimbaud prose poems from Illuminations.

  If you take William Carlos Williams’s “No ideas but in things” and carry it out to include the unconscious and relativistic mind, not just the simple middle-class doctor commonsense mind, but also uncommonsense mind and irrational mind, you’ll get to what Kerouac was doing. Sort of post-nuclear writing, post-nuclear objectivism, strictly in sketches of life. That led into his interest in writing simultaneously with the life that was going on. The next step was writing about himself going on the road, while he was actually going on the road.

  At the end of part two [of Visions of Cody] he sketches himself trying to get out of his house, abandon his world, abandon his mother, and go out to California again to meet Cody. That is followed by a whole series of sketches of him missing his ship, then sitting in a bar having missed his ship, until finally he gets out there by bus. In other words, he’s sketching his life while he’s living it. He’s developed his practice of writing like piano playing, where he can play anything he hears, where he can write anything he can think.

  By then the writing has become part of the living and the artist merges with the guy who’s living. Where he’s simultaneously trying to get a ship and writing about getting a ship. There’s some discrepancy between his fantasies about getting a ship and what actually happens, so the drama of the writing is his rueful disillusionment as he goes along with his own fantasies about getting a ship. Finally the entire matter merges with the fact that he’s sitting there talking to Cassady on a tape recorder, so there’s no longer any question of even writing, it’s actual conversation. The novel becomes life and the life becomes a novel with these two guys sitting talking on a tape recorder. They taped it and Kerouac later transcribed it from the tape.

  Then the next step structurally was to do something even more amazing. He took the same idea of the tape recorder, except that he made the tape recording in his head much more flowery and fantastically, an imitation of a tape made in heaven. The imitation of the tape is Kerouac taking off from the original, which was not entirely satisfactory as singing Shakespearean prose, although it was absolutely satisfactory as a reproduction of brilliant conversation and mental high discontinuous conversation. But it still wasn’t Shakespearean enough for Jack, so he makes an imitation of the tape, in heaven, as it were. The two characters talking in heaven in Joycean, babble language. The rest of the book is like a settlement with what’s actually going on with the wives, the children, the jobs, the families, the relations between the men and women, what really is going on.

  The book ends with a sketch of the railroad tracks, where Cody works, a blade of grass waves in the sunny Frisco afternoon. The end of the book is a little adieu to the hero, which is one of his best poems, I think. It climaxes into a style of prose that combines the fantasy language of the tape with realistic sketching, with the end of a novel, with all the classical aesthetic charms of the conclusion and farewell and adieu and coda.

  Goodbye Cody—your lips in your moments of self-possessed thought and new found responsible goodness are as silent, make as least a noise and mystify with sense in nature, like the light of an automobile reflecting from the shiny silverpaint of a sidewalk tank this very instant, as silent and all this, as a bird crossing the dawn in search of the mountain cross and the sea beyond the city at the end of the land.

  Adios, you who watched the sun go down, at the rail, by my side smiling—

  Adios, King.83

  At the end Cody’s got to go about his life and Jack’s got to go back to his own life and back to his mother. So the last line is “Adios, king. Adios kind king light of mind.”

  The next thing that he did was to apply the method of sketching to a fantasy he had since he was a kid. It was a fantasy which I had also had, so we shared that particular image, the vision of the shrouded stranger of the night or Doctor Sax. Kerouac’s book Doctor Sax opens with a sketch of “the wrinkly tar of the sidewalk, also the iron pickets of textile institute or the doorway where Lousy and you and G.J.’s always sittin, and don’t stop to think of the words when you do stop, just stop to think of the picture better and let your mind off yourself and its work.” That’s where that phrase comes from. “Don’t stop to think of the words, stop to see the picture better when you do stop.”

  By this time, you have to realize that he’s written On the Road, Visions of Cody, Doctor Sax, and “October in the Railroad Earth,” all within a period of two years. He’s just exploding at writing at this point. He’s writing every day, an enormous amount. Everything he’s writing is pure gold because of the actuality of his mind at the moment. That’s why I keep saying that this book is a crucial one for understanding modern writing to the extent that modern writing is catalyzed by Kerouac.

  Then he applied this method of total recall to recollection of his high school romance days with a girl named Mary Carney in a book called Springtime Mary, published as Maggie Cassidy. Within a year he went back to the method of writing about life while he was living it and wrote The Subterraneans. He had an affair with a black girl and he wrote the book as the affair was ending. When he brought it in to show the girl it ended their relationship. She saw what he was thinking through his eyes, which was totally different than what she thought was going on.

  Simultaneously he began using the same method to describe his own dreams, to explore the world of dream. He employed total recall and exhaustively recorded every last association going on in his mind. His Book of Dreams came from that, as well as the short novel Pic, which doesn’t appear till posthumous days. That led into his San Francisco Blues, the beginning of his writing of little poems. Then Some of the Dharma, all by 1954. A tremendous amount of matter.

  CHAPTER 16

  Kerouac in Old Age

  Kerouac in his older age was considered to be politically very reactionary. There was a funny kind of change between young and old in his attitudes, because at one time when he was a sailor he was a member of the communist party. There’s a funny line about “I can go hitchhiking down that road and on into the remaining years of my life knowing that outside of a couple fights in bars started by drunks I’ll have not a hair of my head harmed by totalitarian cruelty.” That’s his optimistic vision. There was some old radical left-wing or anarchist tradition in San Francisco, in the society he moved around in. He had been a communist and then he got into some fight with a stevedore and decided the communists were a bunch of bores.

  It was an interesting little switch. I always thought that one of the reasons that Jack did come on so holier than thou, or Americanist, later was that he realized he had so much dynamite in his heart, and in his art as well, that it did catalyze great cultural change. He didn’t know what he was dealing with in terms of the government and so there was a little edge that maybe he better not do anything too far out politically or get involved, [he should] avoid the authorities. He didn’t join in like me and the rest of the Jewish communist intellectuals. He thought that we were devising new reasons for spitefulness, that was his phrase, “new reasons for spitefulness.” I think that was true. All along Kerouac objected to the element of aggression, anger, spitefulness, resentment, un-Americanism in the younger generation that grew up. I felt very upset by that, because I thought he meant me, and he did. By hindsight I think it was a pure sharp mind, intelligent, redneck in style, but an intelligent comment.

  What was Kerouac’s final political conclusion about this? This might put his cultural political take out front
. He’s in the hospital with phlebitis caused by taking too much Benzedrine.

  In fact I began to bethink myself in that hospital. I began to understand that the city intellectuals of the world were divorced from the folkbody blood of the land and were just rootless fools, tho permissible fools, who really didnt know how to go on living. I began to get a new vision of my own of a truer darkness which just overshadowed all this overlaid mental garbage of “existentialism” and “hipsterism” and “bourgeois decadence” and whatever names you want to give it.

  In the purity of my hospital bed, weeks on end, I, staring at the dim ceiling while the poor men snored, saw that life is a brute creation, beautiful and cruel, that when you see a springtime bud covered with rain dew, how can you believe it’s beautiful when you know the moisture is just there to encourage the bud to flower out just so’s it can fall off sere dead dry in the fall? All the contemporary LSD acid heads (of 1967) see the cruel beauty of the brute creation just by closing their eyes: I’ve seen it too since: a maniacal Mandala circle all mosaic and dense with millions of cruel things and beautiful scenes goin on, like say, swiftly on one side I saw one night a choirmaster of some sort in “Heaven” slowly going “Ooo” with his mouth in awe at the beauty of what they were singing, but right next to him is a pig being fed to an alligator by cruel attendants on a pier and people walking by unconcerned. Just an example. Or that horrible Mother Kali of ancient India and its wisdom aeons with all her arms bejeweled, legs and belly too, gyrating insanely to eat back thru the only part of her that’s not jeweled, her yoni, or yin, everything she’s given birth to. Ha ha ha ha she’s laughing as she dances on the dead she gave birth to. Mother Nature giving you birth and eating you back.

  And I say wars and social catastrophes arise . . . not from “society,” which after all has good intentions or it wouldnt be called “society” would it?84

  So you see the [period] of invention and discovery that he was going through. And the eagerness to communicate, which is what this was all about. He was trying to communicate to America the unspeakable visions of the individual. The sketching thing is crucial to the whole school of poetics, because here we have the theory, or here we have the long prose preceding the theory, then we have the theory, and the examples are in the opening pages of Visions of Cody.

  Basically the theme that [held] all these sketches together was Kerouac wandering around the Bowery in New York and comparing the landscape there with the Larimer Street bum landscape of Denver. He was interpreting New York through Neal’s eyes, setting the scene for his observations of the bum, the hobo, the lost father, the deprived childhood, the kind of street experience of the lost, woeful, hopeless rejects of the land. It’s what makes anybody who survives it a genius of sympathies.

  There is a description of a diner that is quite good. It’s the first formal sketch that he’s placed in [Visions of Cody].

  This is an old diner like the ones Cody and his father ate in, long ago, with that oldfashioned railroad car ceiling and sliding doors—the board where bread is cut is worn down fine as if with bread dust and a plane; the icebox (“Say I got some nice homefries tonight Cody!”) is a huge brownwood thing with oldfashioned pull-out handles, windows, tile walls, full of lovely pans of eggs, butter pats, piles of bacon—old lunchcarts always have a dish of sliced raw onions ready to go on hamburgs.85

  It’s just simple, straightforward American pop-eye observations. Kerouac’s sketching is leisurely, like when Cézanne goes out with his sketch pad and sits on the road at Mont Sainte-Victoire. He notices everything necessary and he puts it down and finds little archetypal planes and surfaces and curves of the mountain. Here Kerouac is doing the same thing. He connects it emotionally, nostalgically, with Cassady and so it gives him some kind of an undercurrent of love or affection or empathy to connect with.

  You have to have some kind of noble vision of the world when you’re looking at it in order to get any kind of nobility into the sketching. Nobody can supply you with that noble vision of the world. They can supply you with the suggestion of how to articulate it, but nobody can tell you that this is eternity if you don’t know that already. If you don’t know that you’re in eternity and that what you’re writing about is your awareness of the presence of eternity, then there’s no way of teaching that.

  The final comment on the last pages [of Vanity of Duluoz] would be his final, high literary comment on existence.

  Forget it, wifey. Go to sleep. Tomorrow’s another day.

  Hic calix!

  Look that up in Latin, it means “Here’s the chalice,” and be sure there’s wine in it.86

  That’s the last line, and then he drank himself to death. So that’s 1967 or 1968. In the mind of the book reviewer for the New York Times, Anatole Broyard, Kerouac was a punch-drunk has-been by then. In the mind of William Buckley he was just a drunk. In his own mind, it had all been for nothing, all ashes, all ashes. He thought that he was the best writer in English since Shakespeare. If you ask me I’d say he was writing angel books in his illness. I think everybody who was interested in that kind of literature realized he had done something immense and permanent.

  CHAPTER 17

  Burroughs’s First Writings and “Twilight’s Last Gleamings”

  To begin with, [William] Burroughs didn’t see himself as a writer. He wrote only one thing when he was at Harvard [in the 1930s] with a friend and classmate named Kells Elvins. It is a sketch called “Twilight’s Last Gleamings” and it was Burroughs’s vision of America. In this routine or charade or skit, or whatever you call it, lie the seeds of almost all his later work and it’s one of his funniest pieces.

  The sinking of the Titanic, or the ship of state, is a theme that runs throughout Burroughs. How will the passengers, us Americans, react when our ship of state [goes] down? This is a jaundiced or disillusioned view of American character and it’s certainly the opposite of wrapping yourself in the flag patriotically. The original was written in 1938, Burroughs’s first piece of writing and his only piece of writing up until the time he met Kerouac and myself. He didn’t quite see himself as a writer, he saw himself as a man of action. He was more interested in learning how to roll drunks on the subway and hanging around Eighth Avenue with junkies and petty thieves. He was like Jean Genet, interested in that same area of morals or manners. He had a theory that a psychopathic person without a conscience might be an interesting mentality, so he was hanging around with them. He was so pissed off with American moralism that he was checking out the opposite, so this has a kind of cynicism of that nature.

  I think it was because Burroughs was too dry-souled and needed a lover and a little companionship and a little bit of encouragement. He wasn’t dedicated as a writer, he was dedicated to something else, he was dedicated totally and sacramentally in a sense to exploring his consciousness, in going to the end of his mind. He was going into the pit, the pit of hell or heaven, to see what was at the end.

  The outline for the sketch is that a black jazz band is playing “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” or something and the millionaires are dancing and the sailors are all drinking in the hold and all of a sudden the ship begins to sink, the Titanic sinks. The band is ordered to play “My Country Tis of Thee” while the ship of state is sinking. The captain puts on women’s clothes and jumps into the lifeboat saying “women and children first.” There is an old man based on Kells Elvins’s father who had a paretic sarcophagi, a lisp, and couldn’t talk straight. He was an uninhibited psychopath who was always jumping in his car and driving up the country roads of Texas leaving a trail of dead chickens behind him saying “bastards, thuns of bithes, they’re trying to take all my money.”

  So he [the captain] jumps in the lifeboat with a machete and while other people are trying to get into the lifeboat, he’s chopping off fingers, saying, “Bastards, pithyathed thuns of a bidth, it’s my lifeboat.” These are characters that will be developed in Dr. Benway and other
s later on, psychopaths who are out for themselves and yet have a realistic view of human nature. Burroughs’s view is comedy, but at the same time he’s a cynic, somewhere between W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers and Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Dracula.

  Twilight’s Last Gleamings

  PLEASE IMAGINE AN EXPLOSION ON A SHIP.

  A paretic named Perkins sat askew on his broken wheelchair. He arranged his lips.

  “You pithyathed thon of a bidth!” he shouted.

  Barbara Canon, a second-class passenger, lay naked in the first-class bridal suite with Stewart Lindy Adams. Lindy got out of bed and walked over to a window and looked out.

  “Put on your clothes, Honey,” he said, “there’s been an accident.”

  A first-class passenger named Mrs. Norton was thrown out of bed by the explosion. She lay there shrieking until her maid came and helped her up.

  “Bring me my wig and my kimono,” she told the maid. “I’m going to see the Captain.”

  Dr. Benway, ship-doctor, drunkenly added two inches to a four-inch incision with one stroke of his scalpel.

  “There was a little scar, Doctor,” said the nurse, who was peering over his shoulder. “Perhaps the appendix is already out.”

  “The appendix out!” the doctor shouted. “I’m taking the appendix out! What do you think I’m doing here?”

  “Perhaps the appendix is on the left side,” said the nurse. “That happens sometimes, you know.”

  “Can’t you be quiet?” said the doctor. “I’m coming to that!” He threw back his elbows in a movement of exasperation. “Stop breathing down my neck!” he yelled. He thrust a red fist at her. “And get me another scalpel. This one has no edge to it.”

  He lifted the abdominal wall and searched along the incision. “I know where an appendix is. I studied appendectomy in 1904 at Harvard.”