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THE BLOWTOP
An early Beat Book?
by Jim Burns
Alvin Schwartz’s The Blowtop was published
in 1948 and has sometimes been described as an
early Beat novel, a claim that might be disputed by
historians of the movement. But it does have some
aspects that, if not necessarily placing it alongside
books like John Clellon Holmes’s Go and Jack
Kerouac’s The Town and the City, do put it in a
tradition that if analysed openly can be seen to
include Schwartz and Holmes and Kerouac. If a label
is needed perhaps “Bohemian” might be the most
useful one.
When the story starts Archie, one of the
central characters, has wandered into the 16 Bar,
described as the “smallest of the motley row of night
spots wedged within the one-block area between
Sheridan Square and Barrow Street” in Greenwich
Village. Archie is an aspiring novelist, though hasn’t
managed to produce anything of consequence and has
been reduced to acting as a ghost writer for someone
else. He hasn’t been in the 16 Bar more than a few
minutes when someone taps him on the shoulder and
he turns to see Phil White, “a local hanger-on and
occasional peddler of marijuana, from whom Archie
had sometimes purchased reefers.” Phil collapses and
when he’s picked up it’s discovered that he’s been
shot.
Archie shares accommodation with Fred, his
collaborator on the book (“an elementary science
text”) they’re supposed to be ghost writing, though
neither of them can raise much enthusiasm for the
project. Archie at one point remarks that if he “had
some Benzedrine” he might be able to apply himself
to the job. Before Archie had encountered Phil in the
16 Bar he and Fred had been visited by Giordano, an
artist who clearly has mental problems and is angry
because he claims that Phil had cheated him in a drug
deal. Archie and Fred discover that a gun they own
illegally has disappeared from their apartment and
that Giordano knew they had it. It doesn’t take them
long to realise that Giordano is a prime suspect for
Phil’s murder and that they’re likely to be visited by
the police who have possession of Phil’s address book
with details of his contacts and customers. The police
are indeed beginning to call on people, and as the
Inspector in charge of the case remarks: “Some
blowtop pulled this, all right. And the Village is full of
blowtops.”
The story as I’ve outlined it so far may give
the impression of it just being a crime novel with a
Greenwich Village background, but it is, in fact,
more than that. Without taking up too much space
with a page-by-page account of what happens (and I
don’t think it’s giving anything away to say that it was
Giordano who shot Phil) the novel details how events
have an effect on the various people involved. Archie
and Fred react in different ways to being questioned
by the police and to the suggestion that by owning a
gun that wasn’t registered with the authorities, and
allowing Giordano to obtain it, they have left
themselves open to a charge of aiding and abetting a
criminal and could be imprisoned. Archie and Fred
fight, Fred’s girlfriend, Sylvia, falls out with him and
decides that Sydney, an instructor at Columbia
University, is a safer bet than the feckless Fred who
seems to have little ambition and is evasive about
committing himself in any way to Sylvia. And Archie
visits Giordano, smokes marijuana with him, and
comes to some sort of understanding about what the
artist is aiming at with his abstract paintings. Some
commentators have seen a kind of link to what the
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