New York in the '50s (28 page)

“You take Jack Kerouac,” Leary said enthusiastically. “Now there's a guy who exhibited a lot of hostility, especially when he was drinking.”

I said I knew. I'd seen him a couple of times around the Village when he seemed quite angry.

“Wait'll you talk to him today,” Leary said with a grin. “You'll see for yourself—since he took the psilocybin he's been mild, calm, and very friendly.”

I said I'd really like to see that, and Leary gulped down the rest of his beer and said, “Let's go,” anxious to display the amiable new Kerouac.

Jack was standing by himself, staring out the window of Ginsberg's pad with what looked to me like the same sour, glowering expression I'd seen before. Still, I went up and introduced myself, smiling.

“Oh yeah,” Jack said, looking me up and down with evident disdain. “Didn't you write a big, bad piece about me in
Commentary?
”

“No,” I said, “it was in
The Nation
.”

“Aren't you a friend of Norman Podhoretz?” he asked accusingly. Podhoretz was one of the severest critics of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and the whole beat phenomenon.

“I don't know him very well personally, but I've written for his magazine,” I said.

“Yeah, I know. You bastards are all alike,” Kerouac said. “You know what I'd like to do?”

I didn't want to guess.

“I'd like to throw your ass out this window,” he said.

Losing my faith in the calming powers of psilocybin, I stepped away from Kerouac. Just then Leary came up, laughing nervously, and handed Jack a pencil and a piece of paper. He asked him to write something, but Kerouac made a grunting sound and turned away.

Leary then explained to Kerouac that it was part of the deal—you got the psilocybin if you agreed to write something while under its influence. This was a scientific experiment to test the effect of the drug on creativity, remember? Kerouac seemed not to care. Then Leary suggested that if Jack wrote something, he would get another psilocybin pill. At that, Kerouac's interest returned, and he took the pencil and paper. He held the writing instruments but didn't seem to know what to do with them.

“Come on, Jack,” Leary urged. “Write something in your bop prosody.”

Leary laughed nervously again, and Kerouac methodically drew a straight line. Then he drew another one beside it. Leary looked on with rapt fascination as Kerouac drew more lines across the page. Then he turned the paper sideways and drew another set of lines, intersecting the first set. When he had accomplished that task he handed the paper to Leary, who made his nervous laugh again and rewarded Kerouac with a pill. Kerouac then went and lay down. Other people I noticed, were lying down too. It didn't look as if much writing was going to take place, bop prosody or otherwise. I figured the creative part of the scientific experiment was over, and I thanked Ginsberg for his hospitality and left.

Psilocybin not only failed to produce the creative effects Leary had predicted, but Kerouac later reported, in an article he wrote for the
Chicago Tribune
Sunday magazine, that the drug “stupefies the mind and hand for weeks on end.” As his own life went downhill and deeper into drink, Jack sometimes told friends that he believed the psilocybin had had a more permanent damaging effect, that after taking it he “hadn't been right since.”

It wasn't until I read his
Desolation Angels
, published in 1965, that
I felt a real sympathy for Kerouac and appreciated the dilemma he found himself in as an unexpected “avatar” as well as a writer. He lamented in that autobiographical novel that when he fled New York for Tangier after finishing the final revisions Viking Press wanted for
On the Road
, he found himself in William Burroughs's hotel room, in a scene that made him feel guilty as well as depressed:

Just like in New York or Frisco or anywhere there they all are hunching around in marijuana smoke, talking, the cool girls with long thin legs in slacks, the men with goatees, all an enormous drag after all and at the time (1957) not even started yet officially with the name of “Beat Generation.” To think that I had so much to do with it, too, in fact at that very moment the manuscript of
Road
was being linotyped for imminent publication and I was already sick of the whole subject.… But all I could do was sit on the edge of the bed in despair like Lazarus listening to their awful “likes” and “like you know” and “wow crazy” and “a wig, man,” “a real gas”—All this was about to sprout out all over America even down to High School level and be attributed in part to my doing!

I reviewed the book in
The Atlantic:
“If the Pulitzer Prize in fiction were given for the book that is most representative of American life, I would nominate
Desolation Angels
.” It didn't win, and I never heard from Kerouac, but I hope he read the piece and that it gave him some comfort and made up for the snide nature of my earlier review of his performance at the Vanguard. I, at least, was more mellow, not from psilocybin or any other drug, but maybe just from the benefit of a few more years, or because by then I had left New York, with all its pressures that Kerouac knew too well. He left the city himself, for Lowell, Massachusetts, his old hometown, and then for St. Petersburg, where he died in 1969 at the age of forty-seven, of hemorrhaging described by one biographer as “the classic drunkard's death.”

As Seymour Krim wrote, in a tough appreciation on learning of Kerouac's premature passing, “He died lonely and isolated like a
hunched old man at only 47 with a comicstrip beer belly and faded, gross, ex–good looks, full of slack-lipped mutterings about ‘the New York Jewish literary Mafia.'” But Krim also revised his own earlier denigration of Kerouac's work. “It would not surprise me in the least,” he wrote in “The Kerouac Legacy,” “to have his brave and unbelligerently up-yours style become the most authentic prose record of our screwy neo-adolescent era, appreciated more as time makes its seeming eccentricities acceptable.”

The pity is that Kerouac didn't live to enjoy his later celebrity (assuming a mellower age would have enabled him to savor it more than the jolt of early fame): the re-publication of his books, the growing number of books about him and his works, cult followings in new generations that listen to recordings of his readings, re-evaluations from some of his critics who came, admiringly if sometimes grudgingly, to acknowledge his special role.

Re-reading
On the Road
, I find the most poignant sentence describes the author's youthful faith in the American dream: “Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.” It was, but it turned out to be a bitter pill.

Things turned out quite differently for Allen Ginsberg.

It has been almost thirty years since I met Ginsberg. I decide to go to see him again, this time to get his reflections on the era he did so much to influence, in his role as poet and co-creator (with Kerouac) of the Beat Generation. I'm also curious to see how one of the original daddies of the beats is doing at an age that would have seemed inconceivable for a man whose name, work, and image symbolized youthful rebellion not only for the beats of the fifties but also for the hippies who followed in the psychedelic decade. Merely to state the statistic sounds shocking: Allen Ginsberg is sixty-five.

On the snowy Sunday I first went to see him in 1961, Ginsberg lived in a walk-up apartment on East 2nd Street on the Lower East Side; on the snowy day I go to meet him in 1991, he lives in a walk-up on East 12th Street in the same neighborhood. Going along the block of run-down buildings and seedy stores as I search for the right address, I think how much it looks like the scene where I first found Ginsberg thirty years before.

Back then, I'd been commissioned to write a serious, no-holds-barred report on marijuana. Pot, charge, tea, hemp, gage, grass, weed—it was moving from the back rooms of jazz bars and cold-water pads of hipsters in Harlem and the East Village, seeping through the walls of college dormitories and into middle-class consciousness.

“You've got to see Allen,” said Helen Weaver, my girlfriend in the Village who was a hip editorial assistant at Farrar, Straus and knew everyone worth knowing, including Ginsberg. “Allen knows everything about it,” she said, “and he keeps these incredible files.”

Indeed, when I went to interview him, which I did several times, Allen opened a big file cabinet and pulled out reports for me to read on the medical, legal, and historical aspects of
Cannabis sativa
. He was eager to help anyone who would write objectively about this drug he believed should be legalized, offering facts and opinions and background information, all in a friendly, matter-of-fact manner. To my great relief, he did not use jargon or hip lingo (“Like, you know, I was uptight that he might jive me, but he was cool”), nor was he ever stoned when I talked with him, a possibility I'd also feared.

Explaining the role of marijuana to the poets of his own circle, he told me that “almost everyone has experimented with it and tried writing something on it. It's all part of their poetic—no, their metaphysical—education.”

He was speaking of the writers identified with the beat movement, those who had come out of the San Francisco poetry renaissance of the fifties or lived where he did, in what was just beginning to be called the East Village, instead of the Lower East Side. The poets I knew and admired lived in the West Village, hung out at the White Horse, wrote rhymed and metered verse, and got their poetic and “metaphysical” education from bourbon and beer rather than pot. But Ginsberg and his friends wrote different kinds of poems, whose lack of rhyme and reverence were shocking to the sensibility of the times, poems like the one whose title summed up in a single syllable the whole attitude and style of the new social and literary ferment: “Howl.”

This long diatribe of a poem had already made Allen Ginsberg famous (infamous, to many people) within a year or so after its
publication. This was the year of Eisenhower's re-election, the capstone of America's complacency. Nothing could have seemed more out of tune with the times than that poetic shriek of pain and rebellion, which came in a stark, black and white paperback edition:
Howl and Other Poems
, published by City Lights Bookshop of San Francisco in its “Pocket Poets Series.”

I remember when I first saw it at my drugstore-bookstore in Sheridan Square, in the winter of 1957. It didn't even look like a regular book of poetry. At first I thought it was some kind of offbeat political manifesto (the kind of thing a Dostoevsky character would have read and carried around with him in
The Possessed
), a small explosive of the mind to be hurled at the status quo. And it was.

“This poem has created a furor of praise or abuse whenever read or heard,” wrote the elder statesman poet Richard Eberhart in an explication of “Howl” in
The New York Times Book Review
of September 2, 1956. Eberhart described Ginsberg's controversial verse as “a howl against everything in our mechanistic civilization which kills the spirit, assuming that the louder you shout the more likely you are to be heard. It lays bare the nerves of suffering and spiritual struggle. Its positive force and energy come from a redemptive quality of love, although it destructively catalogues evils of our time from physical deprivation to madness.”

The “abuse” Eberhart mentioned came from leading literary critics like M. L. Rosenthal, poetry editor of
The Nation
, who howled against “Howl” as “the single-minded frenzy of a raving madwoman [
sic
],” and labeled Ginsberg the “poet of the new violence.” Norman Podhoretz, in an essay in
Commentary
called “The Know-Nothing Bohemians,” argued that “juvenile crime can be explained partly in terms of the same resentment against normal feeling and the attempt to cope with the world through intelligence that lies behind Kerouac and Ginsberg.” The novelist Dan Jacobson, writing in
Commentary
, blasted “Howl” as “incoherent, frenzied, frantic, self-indulgent,” and Herberg Gold dismissed it in
The Nation
as “blathering.”

An even more threatening kind of criticism came a year after the poem appeared, when the publisher of
Howl and Other Poems
, poet and City Lights Bookshop owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was arrested
in San Francisco, along with a clerk who sold the book to two policemen acting on orders from their captain. The alleged literary culprits were charged with obscenity, and the ensuing trial was covered by
Life
(with a photograph of the poet, described as
“WILDEYED SHOCKER
Allen Ginsberg”), which helped make
Howl
a best seller. Judge W. J. Clayton Horn, however, found the poem was not without “even the slightest redeeming social importance,” despite the fact that “coarse and vulgar language is used in treatment and sex acts are mentioned,” as well as “unorthodox and controversial ideas.”

The language and ideas in the poem (it speaks of “loveboys,” copulation, and “whoring,” madness and poverty, fixes and drugs, as well as illuminations, religion, and “the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit”) have continued to cause controversy: as recently as 1988, “Howl” was prohibited by FCC regulation from being read on the radio until after midnight (perhaps before it is read on the air, the FCC should require the “warning” about it written by William Carlos Williams in his introduction to the first edition of
Howl:
“Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell”). That same year, the beats' perennial critic Norman Podhoretz wrote in the
New York Post:
“In its glorification of madness, drugs, and homosexuality, and in its contempt and hatred for anything and everything generally deemed healthy, normal, or decent, Ginsberg's poem simultaneously foreshadowed and helped to propagate the values of the youth culture of the 1960s.”