The obscenity trial would end with Ferlinghetti’s exoneration, setting a crucial legal precedent for the exemption from prosecution of works with “redeeming social importance.” But while it was in progress, Ginsberg wisely evaded the controversy by traveling first to Tangier, to join Kerouac and Corso in helping Burroughs finish his novel Naked Lunch, and then on to Paris with Corso to score heroin, make love “with boys and girls,” and meet Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Céline, and other heroes while Kerouac returned to New York. In Paris, the Beat writers came across Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, who had left the States as well and were busy turning Candy, a story they had developed in New York about a naïve American girl who “just wanted to love everyone,” into a novel for the renegade French publisher Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press. Girodias had recently published Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and, in the name of sexual liberation, maintained a stable of young expatriate writers to provide him with “dirty books.” Candy, with its protagonist’s series of hilarious though well-meant erotic escapades, would make for a perfect addition to his list, even if it had been conceived as a satire. Its authors tried to interest Girodias in distributing Naked Lunch as well, but once the publisher realized that there was no sex in the book until page 17, and then “only a blow job,” he turned it down.
The longer Ginsberg lingered in France, the less enthusiastic he became about returning to the United States, where the unraveling of the postwar culture was getting ugly. One read in the news of crowds yelling, “Lynch her!” and spitting at African-American students who dared to enter a formerly segregated high school in Little Rock, and of the panic in Washington with the announcement of the Soviets’ Sputnik launch. Even New York’s literary establishment seemed to be succumbing to the pressure. That fall, Mary McCarthy’s former Partisan Review colleague Delmore Schwartz had fallen prey to the delusion that his wife was having an affair with an editor of Arts Magazine, Hilton Kramer, when in fact she had slipped away to Reno to get a divorce. Descending on Kramer’s Hotel Chelsea room on Labor Day weekend, the deeply disturbed poet, red-eyed and floundering “like an old bull bison on his last legs,” had commenced hammering on Kramer’s door and shouting, “Come out and fight it out like a man!” When Kramer saw that Schwartz had a gun, he called the police, and Schwartz was soon bundled off to Bellevue, his breakdown later immortalized by his young friend and protégé Saul Bellow in the novel Humboldt’s Gift.
The signs of dissolution were everywhere. Even as far away as Paris, “I get lots of letters,” Ginsberg wrote to Kerouac in November 1957, “also from many unknown young businessmen who tearfully congratulate me on being free & say they’ve lost their souls.” He added uncertainly, “I’m afraid to come back & face all them aroused evil forces for fear I’ll close up & try making sense & then really sound horrible.” Yet Kerouac needed him. On the Road had finally been published that fall, and its New York Times review had made the author famous. After reading the review in Europe, Ginsberg wrote loyally to Kerouac, “I almost cried, so fine & true . . .” Yet he knew, as Kerouac did, that in significant ways, the book was a lie.
With Ginsberg delaying his return, Kerouac struggled alone with the bitch goddess Success, his celebrity hugely magnified in unprecedented ways by the new television talk shows and their massive audiences. These interviews, along with a number of sometimes sneering magazine profiles, brought the dreaded spotlight to shine on aspects of Kerouac’s private life that he had not yet faced himself. By mail, Ginsberg urged his friend not to let himself be manipulated by the media into helping to create a salacious fantasy of male heterosexuals on the open road, picking up “sexy chicks” at every café and gas station. But Ginsberg was in Paris, while Kerouac lived with his mother in a modest house on Long Island, facing alone the “expert” panels dissecting his lifestyle and terrified of being labeled a deviant or criminal. “Your public? Goof!” Ginsberg wrote in 1958. “How many times have you (forgotten, drunk) challenged me (& Peter & who?) in public anyway, ‘C’mon I’ll fuck you.’ Screw public relations lets be kind & truthful. Who else dare?” But instead, as Ginsberg learned to his disappointment and annoyance, Kerouac went on to portray even Ginsberg as heterosexual in the guise of the character Alvah Goldbook in his next novel, Dharma Bums.
Kerouac had no desire to sacrifice himself for the sake of social progress; he just wanted to express himself as a writer. Yet, after the uproarious response to his blurting out on the Steve Allen show, “I’m waiting for God to show his face,” he confessed to his former editor that he could almost feel the destructive energy flowing from New York toward his home in Northport. The ridicule and distortion were rendering him creatively impotent, he claimed; he had to get drunk every night “to stand the gaff with a smile.” His greatest dream now was to buy a cabin in the woods upstate, to take up his “old woods life” again, and cultivate the art of “being a bum: that’s the secret of my joy: and without my joy there’s nothing to write about.” When Gore Vidal ran into him for the first time since their Hotel Chelsea encounter—at a party celebrating Dharma Bums’s publication—he was shocked by how “thick and sullen” Kerouac looked, with bloodshot eyes and “about to lose his beauty for good.” Vidal was quick to demand of the tell-it-like-it-is writer why he had omitted their sexual encounter from his account of that evening in The Subterraneans. “I forgot,” Kerouac said and then added, “Well, maybe I wanted to.”
By the time Ginsberg returned reluctantly to New York, in August 1958, and moved into a cheap apartment on East Second Street with Orlovsky, the cultural shift that had begun with Dylan Thomas had accelerated beyond anyone’s ability to contain it. Although middle-aged men still chain-smoked and popped tranquilizers; although women still married, smiled, and sometimes submitted to shock therapy; although analysis was now de rigueur for any thinking person with a job, being homosexual remained a “psychological disorder,” and beatniks like Neal Cassady could get five years in San Quentin for possession of two marijuana cigarettes—the tide had nevertheless turned. As Arthur Miller wrote, the “siren song of freedom (or flight),” the “inchoate urge for self-realization, for re-inventing America” sounded in the “secret hearts” of people across the nation. “One felt it even then.”
At the Chelsea, Léonie Adams—a former protégée of Edmund Wilson and now a prominent poet who shared her Hotel Chelsea pied-à-terre with her husband, the critic William Troy—urged a new generation of student poets at Columbia University to read Kerouac’s On the Road. Farther downtown, a young Norman Mailer argued in his essay “The White Negro” that “hipsters, hedonistic, promiscuous and violent psychopaths, were the natural product of this crippled and perverted society” and that Kerouac and Ginsberg’s outsider community would one day produce a new kind of poet or politician who would transform the world. Barney Rosset, the fearless owner of Grove Press, disseminated the works of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Kenneth Koch, and others in the pages of his new Evergreen Review. The impact on the music community of a Town Hall retrospective of John Cage’s music, with its use of an assortment of Western, non-Western, and “found-object instruments,” along with a piano with screws, bolts, and other objects inserted between its strings, was compared to that of Stravinsky’s 1913 Rite of Spring. And in late 1958, Southern and Hoffenberg’s hilarious Candy—banned by the Paris vice squad when it was published in France—spread clandestinely through New York via Frances Steloff’s Gotham Book Mart, leading to cries of its signature phrase, “Give me your hump!,” throughout the Village.
That same autumn, Ginsberg found a perfect cause célèbre to advance his aims when the Chicago Daily News columnist Jack Mabley blasted the editors of the University of Chicago’s Chicago Review for publishing excerpts from Naked Lunch, and in response the university’s chancellor ordered the censorship or elimination of Burroughs’s and others’ submissions. With Ginsberg’s encouragement, the Chicago Review’s editor Irving Rosenthal resigned in protest, then created his own magazine to publish the su
ppressed material. Calling it Big Table at Kerouac’s suggestion, Rosenthal gave the first issue a bold red, white, and blue cover. In it, he gleefully promoted Naked Lunch as an American vision seen through the “dead, undersea eyes of junk,” and he published a letter from Corso reading, in part, “I have a funny feeling here in Paris, I feel America is suddenly going to open up, that a great rose will be born, that if you flee, it will die; so stay; nurse it with your vision, it’s as good as sunlight. Death to Van Gogh’s ear! Long live Fried Shoes!”
The public reaction in 1958 was much different from what it might have been even two or three years earlier. The press’s sensationalism of Beat culture had made the writers appear exotic and exciting to the society women who now competed to host readings by the beatniks. Even Mary McCarthy, who had claimed earlier to be “revolted” by the writing of hipsters Kerouac and Ginsberg, was delighted by what she considered priceless American vaudevillian humor in Burroughs’s story of hunting for the cannabis plant in South America. In her opinion, Burroughs’s universe of self-interested con men, tough-talking vigilantes, and whining American housewives was simply a funhouse reflection of her own maverick worldview.
When the U.S. Post Office seized the magazine’s first issue, declaring it was pornography, the Chicago civil rights attorney Elmer Gertz organized a protest and invited a panel of speakers, including Ginsberg, Corso, and the Playboy editor A. C. Spectorsky, to publicly discuss the issue. To lead the panel, he summoned the British science fiction novelist Arthur C. Clarke from the Hotel Chelsea, the writer’s American home base during his nearly annual cross-country lecture tours. Since the Sputnik launch, the lanky, bespectacled author of Childhood’s End and The City and the Stars had grown increasingly popular in the United States for his enthusiastic visions of the Space Age as the next stage in human evolution. With his cheerful manner and infinite reservoir of scientific stories and facts, Clarke came off as a kind of “carny barker for Tom Swift,” in his colleague Ray Bradbury’s words, as he predicted a time, “maybe only fifty years from now,” when, thanks to communications satellites, one could live and work anywhere and be in real-time communication with anyone else, anywhere in the world. “When that time comes, the whole world will have shrunk to a point,” he claimed, “and the traditional role of the city as a meeting place for man will have ceased to make any sense.” Men would “no longer commute, but communicate.”
Clarke was quietly but matter-of-factly bisexual, without guilt or anxiety, he later wrote, as he had ascertained from the first of the Kinsey reports, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, that his predilections were statistically normal and that “we’re all polymorphously perverse, you know.” By 1958, he had relocated from England to Sri Lanka for the part of each year when he wasn’t lecturing. There, he happily shared his life with Hector Ekanayake, a Sinhalese companion who would remain with him for nearly forty years. In the United States, Clarke had found the Hotel Chelsea staff as respectful of his private preferences as they had been of Kerouac’s and Vidal’s, and he came to rely on the hotel’s laissez-faire atmosphere to facilitate his creative work.
When Clarke received Gertz’s call, he had not yet heard of Burroughs or the Beats, but as a rationalist who supported individual freedom, he decided that going to Chicago to defend Big Table “sounded fun.” When Clarke arrived, Ginsberg and Corso were amused to note the writer’s uncanny resemblance to a Burroughs character, his eyes glinting through horn-rimmed glasses as he prattled about interplanetary cruises and geostationary satellites. On the panel, Clarke proved brilliantly disarming, adept at keeping the audience laughing and in a friendly mood. Partly as a result of his and the other participants’ efforts, Supreme Court Justice Julius Hoffman reversed the original ruling against Big Table and declared the seizure by the Post Office illegal. At the same time, Maurice Girodias, reading in Paris of the now-notorious excerpted novel, finally offered to publish Naked Lunch.
The 1950s were ending, and the Hotel Chelsea to which Arthur C. Clarke returned from Chicago had matured significantly since the days of wartime confusion and the disruptions of new ownership. David Bard and his partners had steered the hotel toward financial stability with a further expansion in the number of transient rooms, the rental of one of the old private dining rooms as a photography studio, and the lease of the former Hotel Chelsea restaurant to a clan of refugees from Franco’s Spain who had given it the new, appropriately literary name El Quijote. In the meantime, Bard’s ties to the longer-term residents had deepened. His childhood as a schoolteacher’s son in Hungary had imbued him with a great respect for intellectuals and artists, and as time passed and he won his tenants’ trust, his hours spent smoking cigars with Masters in his office, the former ladies’ sitting room; talking politics with Sloan; advising Caitlin Thomas on the best places to shop; and patiently parrying Virgil Thomson’s incessant but elegantly worded reminders of the management’s duty to paint walls, sand floors, replace refrigerators, and revarnish wood paneling and trim became one of the most pleasurable aspects of his life. Over time, he had grown so fond of these chats and so invested in his relationships with the hotel’s residents that he had sold off his other properties to commit himself wholly to the Chelsea.
For their part, the residents greatly appreciated a landlord who “tolerated everything, except, quite naturally, a deficit,” as Arthur Miller wrote. It was good to see the ban on African-American tenants lifted, as the printmaker Robert Blackburn became one of the first residents of color in the hotel. The harmonious combination of Bard’s European sensibility and the hotel’s lingering aura of French romantic socialism attracted an increasing number of artists from the Continent, including the Czech muralist Leo Katz, the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Cartier-Bresson’s protégée Inge Morath, whose friend Mary McCarthy had recommended the Chelsea when they met in Paris. The newcomers found the Chelsea residents’ political and cultural sophistication a relief after the grilling they so often received from immigration inspectors. They felt at home almost at once, relaxing in “the Chelsea charm, its unique air of uncontrollable decay,” and mixing with the influx of energetic young American artists, actors, musicians, and writers—many now working class but well educated on the GI Bill—who studied under Stella Adler or at the New School with W. H. Auden and Hannah Arendt. In other parts of the city, their peers feasted on the postwar corporate bounty, killing time in Midtown offices in exchange for luxurious pay and expansive benefits, but at least at the Chelsea, “you could be poor and think your life was worthwhile.”
And even if the Beats had stolen the lion’s share of media attention in the past few years, Virgil Thomson continued to cultivate his own ever-expanding circle. Declaring that “every artist likes to have a house poet,” he invited up the group of young members of what would come to be known as the “New York School”: handsome Frank O’Hara; his eccentric colleague James Schuyler (always “wigging in, wigging out”); Kenneth Koch, whose verse Thomson loved and would soon set to music; and later, following his long sojourn in Paris, John Ashbery, an upstate farmer’s son. The writers occasionally found their visits to suite 920 rather like being “locked up in the office with the school principal,” as Thomson demanded to know what the poets did with all their time after the half-hour they spent pouring out their passion on paper; nonetheless, they, as well as Larry Rivers, a New York School painter, were eager to mingle there with Cage, Cunningham, Bernstein, and others.
As for Thomson, he found in this young group the same “spontaneity of sentiment” and “playful libertinage” that had enlivened the circle of neoromantics surrounding Gertrude Stein in Paris. Their interest in constructing art out of the detritus of everyday life—diary entries, fragments of comic books, cigar-box logos—reflected their belief in “the beauty of true things truly observed.” Urban and modern, relying more on language than on feelings, they used satire and irony—the political equivalents of cool jazz—to maintain a certain detachment from “what horror the w
orld might daily propose.” Unlike the Beats, they did not set out to change the world; they simply ignored it. O’Hara’s poem “Homosexuality,” for instance, written a year before Ginsberg’s “Howl,” matter-of-factly compared the merits of various men’s rooms where a gay liaison might take place, without acknowledging the likely mainstream response. James Schuyler’s novel Alfred and Guinevere just as calmly presented its own scenes of sexual ambiguity and latitude. Larry Rivers perhaps best expressed the group’s cool humor with his portrait of O’Hara in nothing but a pair of boots, one leg raised and his arms behind his head, like Marilyn Monroe.
Like the Beats, however, the New York School poets and painters found strength in community, collaborating frequently with one another on novels, paintings, poems, and plays for Judith Malina and Julian Beck’s avant-garde Living Theatre, among other venues. They worked with the Beats as well, as when Rivers played the role of Neal Cassady alongside Ginsberg and Gregory Corso in the underground film Pull My Daisy, codirected by the photographer Robert Frank.
Occasionally, the two groups rubbed each other the wrong way, as during a spring 1959 reading by O’Hara at the Living Theatre when Corso, drunk, called O’Hara a “faggot” from the audience. Kerouac accused him of “ruining American poetry.” “That’s more than you ever did for it,” O’Hara shouted back, as Ginsberg tried to shut everyone up. Yet by the end of the decade, when their work was collected together in Don Allen’s New American Poetry—destined to become one of the nation’s most influential postwar anthologies—these artists had managed to cobble together what Ginsberg called “a united front” against the tight-lipped poetry that had preceded them, replacing it with a wild, rough literature accessible to all.
Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel Page 17
