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Number 73<br />
Summer 2014<br />
£4.50<br />
Lew Welch<br />
John Wieners<br />
Billy Burroughs<br />
Jack Kerouac<br />
Allen Ginsberg<br />
Robinson Jeffers<br />
Douglas Woolf<br />
Robert Duncan<br />
Joyce Johnson on<br />
Jack Kerouac’s<br />
Half-American Life<br />
..........<br />
Allen Ginsberg on<br />
Kerouac
John Clellon Holmes (pictured here in 1949) died<br />
in 1988. Novelist and essayist, he was a great New<br />
Yor<br />
ork friend of Jack Ker<br />
erouac, a writer and companion<br />
that Kerouac stuck with perhaps the longest of all his<br />
friends.<br />
Clellon Holmes published novels such as Go, Get<br />
Home Free, The Horn and also a series of essays in<br />
various collections through the Univ<br />
niversity of<br />
Arkansas Press. His Ker<br />
erouac eulogy, Gone in October<br />
John Clellon Holmes (pictured here in 1949) died<br />
is widely regarded as one of the very best Kerouac<br />
inJohn Clellon Holmes (pictured here in 1949) died<br />
tributes. Ann and Sam Charters published a<br />
in 1988. Novelist and essayist, he was a great New<br />
biography of Holmes<br />
Brother Souls in 2010. Liz Von<br />
Yor<br />
ork friend of Jack Ker<br />
erouac, a writer and companion<br />
Vogt, John<br />
ohn’s s younger sister, , is also a novelist.<br />
that Kerouac stuck with perhaps the longest of all his<br />
friends.<br />
Clellon Holmes published novels such as Go, Get<br />
Home Free, The Horn and also a series of essays in<br />
various collections through the Univ<br />
niversity of<br />
Arkansas Press. His Ker<br />
erouac eulogy, Gone in October<br />
is widely regarded as one of the very best Kerouac<br />
tributes. Ann and Sam Charters published a<br />
biography of Holmes Brother Souls in 2010. Liz Von<br />
Vogt, John<br />
ohn’s s younger sister, , is also a novelist. 1988. Novelist and essayist, he was a great New<br />
Yor<br />
ork friend of Jack Ker<br />
erouac, a writer and companion<br />
that Kerouac stuck with perhaps the longest of all his<br />
friends.<br />
Clellon Holmes published novels such as Go, Get<br />
Home Free, The Horn and also a series of essays in<br />
various collections through the Univ<br />
niversity of<br />
Arkansas Press. ess. His is Ker<br />
erouac eulogy, Gone one in October<br />
is widely regarded as one of the very best Kerouac<br />
tributes. Ann and Sam Charters published a<br />
biography of Holmes Brother Souls in 2010. Liz Von<br />
Vogt, John<br />
ohn’s s younger sister, , is also a novelist.J<br />
elist.John Clellon Holmes (pictured ed here e in 1949)<br />
died<br />
in 1988. Novelist and essayist, he was a great New<br />
Yor<br />
ork k friend of Jack Ker<br />
erouac, a writer and companion<br />
that Kerouac stuck with perhaps the longest of all his<br />
friends.<br />
Clellon Holmes published novels such as Go, Get<br />
Home Free, The Horn and also a series of essays in<br />
various collections through the Univ<br />
niversity of<br />
Arkansas Press. ess. His is Ker<br />
erouac eulogy, Gone one in October<br />
is widely regarded as one of the very best Kerouac<br />
tributes. Ann and Sam Charters published a<br />
biography of Holmes Brother Souls in 2010. Liz Von<br />
on<br />
Vogt, John<br />
ohn’s s younger sister, , is also a novelist.
Number 73<br />
Summer 2014<br />
Editor<br />
ditor...Kevin Ring<br />
Deputy Editor<br />
ditor...Jim Burns<br />
Beat Scene in America...<br />
Richard Miller, 1801 D Spruce<br />
Street, Berkeley, California<br />
94709, USA.<br />
Resear<br />
esearch<br />
ch...Pauline Reeves & Erin<br />
Ring<br />
Layout...Scarlet Letters<br />
Contributors this issue<br />
Eric Baizer, Jim Burns, Colin<br />
Cooper, William Corbett, Brian<br />
Dalton, Reywas Divad, Lee<br />
Harwood, Joyce Johnson, Carl<br />
Landauer, Kevin L. Mills, Richard<br />
Peabody, Dawn Swoop, Stephen<br />
Vincent, Eddie Woods, Edwin<br />
Forrest Ward, Lewis Warsh, John<br />
Wieners<br />
FIRST WORDS<br />
Looking at a photograph of Lewis<br />
Warsh, Bill Corbett, Lee Harwood<br />
and John Wieners in the fairly<br />
recent issue of Mimeo/Mimeo -<br />
taken in 1972 on a winter day at<br />
Walden Pond, I got intrigued.<br />
Wanted to know more. Through<br />
Jim Burns I managed to contact<br />
Lee Harwood and Bill Corbett.<br />
And then Lewis Warsh. There are<br />
little stories, history at every turn.<br />
The kind of history I enjoy and<br />
hopefully you do too. Certainly, if<br />
I pressed them there would be<br />
untold history with them all.<br />
Naturally the aim is to bring you<br />
fresh aspects, but the back stories<br />
exist and wait to be uncovered. So<br />
many crossroads to go to at<br />
midnight, so many connections.<br />
Enjoy this issue. A special edition<br />
next time. More on that in due<br />
course. As ever, tell your friends.<br />
Kevin Ring<br />
Beat Scene, 27 Court Leet,<br />
Binley Woods, Near Coventry,<br />
England CV3 2JQ<br />
Telephone 02476-543604<br />
Email<br />
kev@beatscene.freeserve.co.uk<br />
Front cover image of Jack Kerouac<br />
taken in 1963. Back cover image<br />
Joyce Johnson’s In the Night Cafe, a<br />
novel published in 1989 by<br />
Washington Square Press.<br />
- For Beat Souls, Dharma Bums, everywhere -<br />
4....Boston Eagles...John Wieners, Lee Harwood, Lewis Warsh, Bill<br />
Corbett...a photograph, Walden Pond, 1972<br />
6...Gesamthunstw<br />
esamthunstwer<br />
erk in a Vitrine<br />
itrine...Robert Duncan, Jess and Friends<br />
by Carl Landauer<br />
11...Bill Burr<br />
urroughs in Amsterdam<br />
by Eddie Woods<br />
14...A Half-American<br />
Writer<br />
...Joyce Johnson - a personal take on<br />
Kerouac’s sometimes alienation in America<br />
20...Really Lost Books ...Fade Out by Douglas<br />
Woolf<br />
oolf...by Kevin<br />
Ring<br />
22...The Blowtop...an Early Beat book? by Jim Burns<br />
24...Jeffers Is s My God<br />
....Kevin L. Mills looks at one of Bukowski’s<br />
big influences<br />
28...Ginsberg on Ker<br />
erouac<br />
ouac...an interview by Richard Peabody, Reywas<br />
Divad and Eric Baizer<br />
34...Le<br />
Lew Welch: A Journal of Remembrance<br />
by Stephen Vincent<br />
42...Write rite A Madder Letter if You ou Can...Jack Kerouac and Ed White<br />
the letters - by Kevin Ring<br />
47...Billy illy Burr<br />
urroughs<br />
oughs’ ’ Prediction<br />
....a curious remembrance by Edwin<br />
Forrest Ward<br />
50...The Beat eat Scene Revie<br />
eview w Section<br />
ection...Robert Creeley, Jack Kerouac,<br />
Amiri Baraka, Ed Dorn, Jim Burns, Neeli Cherkovski, Boxed Beats,<br />
the Garden of Eros<br />
William Burroughs....<br />
Eddie Woods provides a<br />
first hand account of him<br />
in Amsterdam. Burroughs<br />
obviously thought a lot of<br />
Europe, living in London<br />
for prolonged periods, the<br />
Beat Hotel in Paris, his<br />
regular and hugely<br />
popular readings in<br />
Germany, Netherlands -<br />
there is nothing better<br />
than a personal, close up<br />
account. A young<br />
Burroughs here - Woods<br />
encounters him in the last<br />
days. Is this the face of a<br />
sheep killing dog?
Boston Eagles<br />
John Wieners, Lee Harwood,<br />
Lewis Warsh, William Corbett<br />
interviews by Kevin Ring<br />
With the help of writer Iain Sinclair I was able<br />
to contact English poet Lee Harwood who lives on<br />
England’s South Coast. I wanted to ask Lee about a<br />
photograph I’d seen in The Lewis Warsh issue of the<br />
American small press magazine Mimeo/Mimeo,<br />
published by James Birmingham and Kyle Schlesinger.<br />
The photo dates from 1972 and features Lee<br />
Harwood, Lewis Warsh, Bill Corbett and the late John<br />
Wieners. As you can see, it captures Wieners in a<br />
seemingly positive frame of mind. The picture is<br />
taken at Walden Pond. It is a winter’s day, I’m led to<br />
believe. Intrigued, I asked Lee Harwood about his<br />
recollections of the day the picture was taken by<br />
Judith Walker. (Lee Harwood’s second wife). But, let<br />
Lee Harwood relate his recollections, “It was in the<br />
winter of 1972/73. From left to right it’s John<br />
Wieners, me, Lewis Warsh and William Corbett.<br />
We’re standing by a frozen Walden Pond, Massachusetts.<br />
I remember John W had a gold lame jacket. At<br />
that time Warsh, Corbett and I edited a “little mag”<br />
called THE BOSTON EAGLE and included quite a<br />
bit of John Wieners’ poetry in it. We were all living in<br />
Boston then.<br />
Lewis and I used to go round and visit John at<br />
his apartment at 44 Joy Street, Boston. He served us<br />
with champagne and chocolate peppermint cremes on<br />
one occasion! He was a very dear and gentle man, but<br />
also subject to bouts of distressing mental illness.<br />
When he came out of hospital he was fine, but then<br />
he used to slowly go downhill. He organised some<br />
really good things, such as a sort of free open university<br />
at the Stone Soup Gallery where various people,<br />
mainly poets, such as Warsh and me, gave talks and<br />
readings of poets like O’Hara, Ashbery, etc. I think<br />
John W talked about Olson. He also co-edited, with<br />
Jack Powers, in 1973 an anthology/magazine titled<br />
Stone Soup Poetry. The gallery was what you might now<br />
call “left wing,” though at that time there was a lot of<br />
radical thinking and demonstrations going on in the<br />
USA.<br />
That early (Wieners) book, The Hotel Wentley<br />
Poems, just bowled me over when I first read it and<br />
still does. The power and emotion and tenderness of<br />
those poems is, for me, quite exceptional when<br />
compared with a lot of the Beat poets.”<br />
Talking to Lee Harwood let me to both<br />
William Corbett and Lewis Warsh. Both remembered<br />
the time well and gave me a few of their memories.<br />
Bill Corbett: Here’s the photo I have on my<br />
wall. There is at least one other with John resting his<br />
arm against a tree and me in the background.<br />
Were the photo in color you would see that the light<br />
patches on John’s jacket are gold lame. There must be<br />
an accent there! I don’t remember why we settled on<br />
Walden Pond except that it’s such an obvious literary<br />
landmark. It was an unremarkable afternoon but for<br />
the photo.<br />
I asked Bill Corbett why were all four of you<br />
together that day by the pond?<br />
Bill Corbett: Lee, Lewis and I had started the mimeo<br />
magazine The Boston Eagle. One of our reasons was to<br />
feature John’s work. We wanted a photo of the editors<br />
and John for the back cover thus the trip to Walden<br />
Pond. The magazine was the first, and one of a very<br />
few, mimeo mags published in Boston. Lewis, who<br />
had come from NYC to live in Cambridge, came up<br />
with the idea. The magazine lasted three issues. I<br />
doubt that I have a single copy.<br />
From Bill Corbett, I spoke to Lewis Warsh,<br />
with whom I’ve had fleeting contact with in the past.<br />
He features on the front cover of Beat Scene 51 with<br />
Anne Waldman. I asked him - Lee Harwood talks of<br />
you and he going to Joy Street. Peppermint cremes<br />
and champagne. Stone Soup Gallery, The Boston<br />
Eagle, etc. What can you recall of the photo?<br />
Lewis Warsh: Lee Harwood and I first met in<br />
the mid-1960s in New York, and Angel Hair Books,<br />
which I was co-editing with Anne Waldman, published<br />
his book The Man With Blue Eyes in 1967. In<br />
4
fall 1972 I moved from California to Cambridge,<br />
Ma. with Mushka Kochan, my partner at the time.<br />
Soon after I arrived, I met John Wieners for a drink<br />
in a bar near Harvard Square. I had also known John<br />
in the late 60s, and had worked on publishing two of<br />
his books, Asylum Poems and Hotels. It was at the bar<br />
that I first met Bill Corbett, and he told me that Lee<br />
was in Boston. Lee and I connected soon after and we<br />
all had dinner at Bill and Beverly Corbett’s big house<br />
at 9 Columbus Square. It wasn’t long after that we<br />
decided to edit a magazine together, The Boston Eagle.<br />
The first issue was just the four of us: Bill, Lee, John<br />
and myself. I think we must have gone out to Walden<br />
Pond with the idea of taking a photo for the magazine—it<br />
appeared on the back cover of the first issue.<br />
Jude Walker was the photographer. We went on to<br />
publish three issues of the magazine, before we<br />
dispersed: I went to New York, and Lee, I believe,<br />
back to England.<br />
○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br />
Lewis Warsh, speaking a few years ago<br />
remembered Sun & Moon Press, Los Angeles<br />
publishing The Journal of John Wieners is to be called<br />
707 Scott Street for Billie Holiday 1959. ‘ln 1972,<br />
William Corbett and I visited John in his apartment<br />
at 44 Joy Street in Boston with the hope of getting<br />
poems from him for our new magazine (edited with<br />
Lee Harwood), The Boston Eagle. I remember John<br />
opening a trunk filled with ledger-sized journals with<br />
old-fashioned marble covers. “I’d love to read them<br />
someday,” I said, thinking out loud, but Wieners<br />
caught the genuine interest in my tone and presented<br />
one to me. [. . .]<br />
When I was finished [transcribing] I had 77<br />
manuscript pages, a book. On the inside cover of the<br />
ledger there was the title: 707 Scott Street, for Billie<br />
Holliday. I published a few pages of the journal in an<br />
issue of The World, the literary magazine of the Poetry<br />
Project (an issue devoted to autobiographical writing<br />
which I was guest-editing); then, for almost twenty<br />
years, the transcript of the journal disappeared. It was<br />
the interest of the poet Peter Gizzi who had heard<br />
that such a journal existed, that made me go<br />
searching for it. I never presented John with a<br />
finished copy of the transcript, though I do<br />
remember visiting him again and returning the<br />
original, not that it would have mattered (or so he led<br />
me to believe) whether I’d kept it or not.’<br />
A few extracts from Wieners’ diaries were<br />
published.......<br />
26 July 1958<br />
‘On the road again. America<br />
does not change. Nor do we,<br />
Olson says. We only reveal<br />
more of ourselves. Riding in<br />
the car with all the windows<br />
open. How can I rise to the<br />
events of our lives. I am a<br />
shrew and nagging bitch as<br />
my mother was. I am filled<br />
with doubt and too passive. I<br />
go where I am told.<br />
Anywhere. Take pleasure in<br />
doing what I am told. There is<br />
no comfort in Nature or God<br />
except for the weak. It is my<br />
fellow men that deliver me<br />
my life. Otherwise I wrap up<br />
in myself like an evening<br />
primrose in the sun. Nature<br />
is good for analogy. We think<br />
we learn lessons from her<br />
but she deserts us at the<br />
moment of action. That is<br />
why we remain savages.<br />
Underneath. And our civilization remains a jungle. Live it at<br />
night and see.<br />
But traveling on the road to Sausalito, San Francisco<br />
then Big Sur, I see how much the earth still surrounds us.<br />
Willow Road juts out in my memory. Mission San Rafael<br />
Archangel. Redwood Highway. Where man is going now, who<br />
knows. The earth no longer need be his home. Maybe this<br />
means the end of the old world. And man, on the minutest of<br />
planets may and can range thru all of space. To the very<br />
frontiers, limits, barriers of outer worlds. Lucky Drive. End<br />
construction project. With what frightening speed we move<br />
ahead. This must be necessary: Paradise Drive. The children<br />
are quieting down now. The witch drives her old Chevrolet, her<br />
long black hair blowing out the window.’<br />
5
Gesamtkunstwerk<br />
in a Vitrine<br />
Robert Duncan, Jess,<br />
and Friends<br />
by Carl Landauer<br />
T<br />
he exhibition, An Opening of the Field: Jess,<br />
Robert Duncan and Their Circle, curated by Michael<br />
Duncan and Christopher Wagstaff, includes a film<br />
that tours Jess and Duncan’s Victorian home at 3267<br />
Twentieth Street in San Francisco, starting with the<br />
entry hall and winding through all the rooms until you<br />
get to the third storey marked by the sloped roof of<br />
the house. The tour is essentially a microcosm of the<br />
exhibition because it encapsulates their artistic lives<br />
and so many of the people close to them. The front<br />
parlor with its stained glass includes a pen drawing by<br />
Jess, a profile drawing of Wallace Berman (the<br />
assemblage and collagist who published Semina, which<br />
would include visual and literary work by Philip<br />
Lamantia, Michael McClure, and Artaud in addition<br />
to Duncan and Jess), a piece of folded dollar bills by<br />
Dean Stockwell coiling more like one of Berman’s<br />
kabala letters than a snake, and a whole corner<br />
devoted to George Herms, one of the central figures<br />
of California assemblage. The music room, with the<br />
couple’s classical collection, is also full of the art of<br />
friends, including a wonderful baguette and coffee-pot<br />
painting by Lyn Brockway, one of the standouts of the<br />
show and an artist who should get more attention, as<br />
well as art that simply made an impact on them,<br />
including a print by the great art nouveau poster<br />
designer Alphonse Mucha and a William Blake<br />
reproduction. The hallway and the stairwell include a<br />
fantastic gray oil painting by Edward Corbett, Jess’s<br />
teacher at the California School of Fine Arts (now the<br />
San Francisco Art Institute) and one of the leading<br />
figures of the San Francisco Abstract Expressionism<br />
that exploded out of the school, along with a couple<br />
of Bruce Conner works, and a colorful painting by<br />
their friend, Jack Boyce.<br />
Jess’s studio resonates with the iconography<br />
of his “Paste-Ups,” his famous collages, with files of<br />
sorted images cut out of magazines and scientific<br />
books and carefully labeled, so that one box lists<br />
“Forms” and then subsections on “spheroid,”<br />
balloon,” “sphere,” “knob,” “egg,” an “lens.” Another<br />
includes “bigot,” “police – prison – execution,”<br />
“rebel-terrorist,” and “militarist.” And, significantly,<br />
there is the “working board” for his multi-decade<br />
collage, Narkissos. Their bedroom is full of works Jess<br />
and Duncan loved, including a dramatic, primitive<br />
sculpture of a head by their friend Miriam Hoffman,<br />
whose works dominate the first exhibition at the King<br />
Ubu Gallery that the couple opened for a year with<br />
their friend Harry Jacobus.<br />
The top floor includes the “Gertrude Stein<br />
Room,” the “French Room,” and Duncan’s office<br />
with its tacked-up iconic photos of Sigmund Freud,<br />
Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, as well as poets Charles<br />
Olson, Robert Creeley, and Jack Spicer (Spicer<br />
despite their decades-long quarrel). There are books<br />
throughout, including camera pans of the collection<br />
of original L. Frank Baum books, whose Oz series<br />
6
Robert Duncan, Jess, and Friends<br />
Duncan and Jess loved to read and re-read, and the<br />
large letters “H.D.” stick out in the pan of the<br />
bookcase in the Gertrude Stein Room simply because<br />
of the size of the lettering and reminds us of Duncan’s<br />
long, never-completed book on HD. For this we can<br />
turn to Lisa Jarnot’s biography of Duncan, which<br />
gives a tour of the couple’s library including the<br />
science books with its substantial collection of books<br />
by and about Darwin; a room full of books by a range<br />
of classical authors, like Ovid and Homer, as well as a<br />
Freud collection and books by a favorite philosopher,<br />
Alfred North Whitehead; a wide range<br />
of children’s books; the large collection<br />
of Joyce and Gertrude Stein in<br />
Gertrude Stein Room, and the<br />
foreign-language books of the central<br />
kabalistic text, the Zohar, in the<br />
“French Room.” It is well known that<br />
Duncan’s letters, interviews, and<br />
lectures – along with his conversation<br />
– are packed with a vast array of<br />
authors. There’s little surprise about<br />
his in-depth reading of the Western<br />
tradition, as well as his twentiethcentury<br />
forebears, such as Yeats,<br />
Pound, Williams, Louis Zukofsky,<br />
Rexroth, Patchen, D.H. Lawrence,<br />
H.D., Anaïs Nin, Dylan Thomas, and<br />
Henry Miller, only the way he read<br />
them and the obsessiveness with<br />
which he read and wrote about some<br />
like H.D. There is also his long<br />
reading of anarchist writers, so that early letters to<br />
Pauline Kael include lists of anarchist books he was<br />
trying to obtain. There are also endless references to<br />
philosophers and social scientists from Emile<br />
Durkheim to Arnold Toynbee, and from the<br />
philosopher Ernst Cassirer to Herbert Marcuse, who’s<br />
Eros and Civilization was part of the background<br />
reading on the Narcissus myth for Jess’s enormous<br />
collage project. And we are often told about Jess and<br />
Duncan’s shared love of fairy-tales and children’s<br />
literature, endlessly reading the fairy-tale writings of<br />
George MacDonald, the science fiction of J.L. Lloyd,<br />
C.S. Lewis, and J.R. Tolkien along with constant<br />
frame of the Oz books. But of particular interest was<br />
the oft-cited fact that Jess and Duncan – before they<br />
met each other – became intense readers not just of<br />
James Joyce but in particular of Joyce’s nearly<br />
unreadable Finnegan’s Wake with its non-stop allusions<br />
and puns, and puns making illusions. Finnegans Wake<br />
is just one, but perhaps a particularly illuminating<br />
touchstone for the work of both men.<br />
Similarly, Duncan was deeply invested in the<br />
visual artistic background of Jess’s work and not only<br />
by having given Jess an original copy of Max Ernst’s<br />
Surrealist collage book, Une semaine de bonté, as a<br />
birthday present in 1952, which became so important<br />
to the aesthetics of Jess’s “Paste-Ups.” He traces Jess’s<br />
work in a “tradition” leading back to Hieronymous<br />
Bosch, and including artists like Henry Fuseli,<br />
William Blake, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and Odilon<br />
Redon. Even Jess’s teachers from the California<br />
School of Fine Arts, Edward Corbett and Hassel<br />
Smith, make appearances in Duncan’s poetry. It was,<br />
indeed, the immense impact of Clyfford Still’s show<br />
at the artist-run Metart Gallery in 1950 that Duncan<br />
attributed to his not following through with plans to<br />
go to Europe but rather to stay in San Francisco,<br />
where obviously important things were happening.<br />
At the core of An Opening of the Field is an<br />
interdisciplinary collaboration. That collaboration<br />
only starts with the pairing of Jess’s illustrations for<br />
Duncan’s poetry, as in the Duncan’s book of poems,<br />
Caesar’s Gate in 1955. Jess illustrated a children’s<br />
book written by Duncan, The Cat and the Blackbird,<br />
in the 1950s published by White Rabbit Press in<br />
1967, as well as illustrations for Michael McClure’s<br />
children’s book for his daughter, The Boobus and the<br />
Bunnyduck, in 1958. And Jess created cover art for<br />
numerous friends’ books, like Michael Davidson’s The<br />
Mutabilities & Fould Papers and Lynn Lonidier’s A<br />
Lesbian Estate: Poems 1970-1973. Significantly, he<br />
contributed art reproduced in a wide range of little<br />
magazines by friends of the couple, such as a comic<br />
7<br />
Robert Duncan by Jess
Robert Duncan, Jess, and Friends<br />
for Jack Spicer’s mimeographed J, and a cover for the<br />
mimeographed Floating Bear created by Diane di<br />
Prima and LeRoi Jones. Even Duncan got into the<br />
part, writing text in his own hand in Jess’s work and<br />
even creating the cartoonish colophon bunny rabbit<br />
used for the White Rabbit Press – as well as writing<br />
numerous essays for exhibitions for Jess, Herms,<br />
Berman and others. And it was Berman’s photograph<br />
of McClure with a lion mane and fur glued to his face<br />
that graced the cover of Ghost Tantras. These<br />
collaborations in their original versions are exactly the<br />
sorts of ephemera that fill the vitrine space of the<br />
exhibition. But the exhibition, the accompanying<br />
catalog, and the two men’s lives – along with those of<br />
their friends – is filled with a much more important<br />
form of collaboration, an important interdisciplinary<br />
symbiosis, or rather multibiosis, of art forms and<br />
media.<br />
Film was also a critical part of this<br />
multibiosis. Pauline Kael – best known for her<br />
decades as the doyenne of film criticism at The New<br />
Yorker – was a close friend of Duncan’s starting as an<br />
undergraduate at Berkeley. In 1955 she introduced<br />
European films as well as pairing unlikely films at the<br />
Cinema Guild and Studio on Berkeley’s Telegraph<br />
Avenue, and it was natural that Jess produced posters<br />
and flyers, such as, for her showings of Jean Cocteau’s<br />
Orpheus and Jean Renoir’s The Golden Coach. One of<br />
the key elements in the development of the art film in<br />
the San Francisco Bay Area was the creation in 1946<br />
of the Art in Cinema series at the San Francisco<br />
Museum (which would last for nine years) by Frank<br />
Stauffacher under the museum’s pioneering director,<br />
Grace McCann Morley, who organized the first solo<br />
museum shows to numerous Abstract Expressionists<br />
from San Francisco (Jess’s teachers) and New York,<br />
including Jackson Pollock. So it is very much part of<br />
the Jess-Duncan story that James Broughton, the poet<br />
and filmmaker (also Pauline Kael’s lover who had a<br />
child with her) met with Duncan, Jess, Madeline<br />
Gleason, Even Triem, and Helen Adam in an ongoing<br />
poetry group as the selfproclaimed<br />
“Maidens,”<br />
had the premier of his<br />
short film made with<br />
painter/photographer<br />
Sidney Peterson The<br />
Potted Palm in the first<br />
year of the Art in<br />
Cinema series. If Jess<br />
and Duncan rented<br />
Broughton’s house while<br />
he was away from San<br />
Francisco, the<br />
experimental filmmaker<br />
Stan Brakhage lived<br />
briefly in the basement<br />
of Jess and Duncan’s<br />
house, just as<br />
Brakhage’s high-school<br />
friend from Denver, the<br />
filmmaker Lawrence<br />
Jordan, lived with<br />
Michael and Joanna McClure. With Bruce Conner,<br />
who worked in a multitude of media, including film,<br />
and became one of the stars of California assemblage,<br />
Jordan started Camera Obscura, a film society, as<br />
well as a theater devoted to 16 mm films, simply<br />
called the Movie. And Jordan collaborated with a<br />
number of the Jess and Duncan crowd, as well as<br />
collaborating directly with Jess on a film using Jess’s<br />
collages, Heavy Water, or The 40 & 1 Nights, or Jess’s<br />
Didactic Nickelodeon in the 1960s.<br />
Perhaps at the center of the story of the<br />
multibiosis around Jess and Duncan should be their<br />
creation, along with Jess’s classmate, Harry Jacobus,<br />
of the former garage turned into a gallery space and<br />
named by them the King Ubu Gallery after the 1896<br />
play by that forerunner of Dada and Surrealism,<br />
Alfred Jarry (copies of the New Directions translation<br />
with Jarry’s drawings can be found in the Dada-<br />
Surrealist bookcase across from the City Lights cash<br />
register for impulse buying like gum and candy at a<br />
supermarket checkout counter). King Ubu showed a<br />
Artworks by Jess and photo of Duncan<br />
& Jess © The Jess Collins Trust.<br />
8
Robert Duncan, Jess, and Friends<br />
range of artists, many from the California School of<br />
Fine Arts, and, as Christopher Wagstaff noted in an<br />
exhibition just on the gallery, artists were often paired<br />
who would contradict each other. And for the<br />
opening show, in addition to the uneven hanging of<br />
the artwork and murals painted on the walls creating<br />
a Dr. Cagliari imbalance, Miriam Hoffman’s<br />
sculptures created further dimensionality. And Jess<br />
later displayed a number of “Necrofacts,”<br />
assemblages of “real junk off the rubbish pile” in the<br />
gallery. But the gallery was also the venue for poetry<br />
readings for the likes of Jack Spicer, Philip Lamantia,<br />
Kenneth Rexroth, and Weldon Kees (who worked in a<br />
wide range of arts and music). Stan Brakhage’s first<br />
two films were played at the King Ubu. And Duncan<br />
put on Gertrude Stein’s The Five Georges complete<br />
with crayon-drawing backdrops by Duncan, of which<br />
King George III is in the current exhibition. One<br />
almost wishes that the exhibition could create the<br />
atmosphere of the King Ubu for the performance –<br />
because, after all, Duncan, Jess, and their friends<br />
were engaged in their own form of Wagnerian<br />
Gesamtkunstwerk – a combination of all the arts. It<br />
would be in the Six Gallery, which took over the<br />
space of King Ubu after its one-year run, that Allen<br />
Ginsberg first read his Howl (while Duncan and Jess<br />
were in Majorca) and Duncan put on his play Faust<br />
Foutu with Lawrence Jordan as the poet Faust, Jess<br />
playing his mother, and Michael McClure, Jack<br />
Spicer and other friends in various roles. It’s not that<br />
San Francisco with Jess and Duncan’s interlocking<br />
group of friends were alone in amalgamating the arts.<br />
Black Mountain College – where Duncan taught in<br />
the last year of its existence and put on plays (many of<br />
his final cast coming back to San Francisco with him)<br />
– offered a wide range of arts, with a faculty that<br />
included Josef Albers, modern dancer Merce<br />
Cunnningham, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, and<br />
Charles Olson. It’s just that the amalgamation of the<br />
arts were particularly important in San Francisco.<br />
Duncan himself remarked that poetry – before<br />
Ginsberg’s reading – was particularly a performative<br />
art in San Francisco. Although he was talking about<br />
the performance of the reading, Duncan notably<br />
wrote Medieval Scenes in 1947 in ten nightly sessions<br />
in a séance-like atmosphere with his poet friends<br />
around him – he wrote as performance. The art<br />
exhibition could also be a “happening” avant la lettre,<br />
such as Wallace Berman’s Semina Gallery exhibitions<br />
that lasted typically for a single night on a houseboat,<br />
which followed his friend George Herms’s “Secret<br />
Exhibition” in Southern California.<br />
Arguably, Jess is best known for his collages<br />
– with the multi-decade Narkissos at the apex. Jess<br />
himself claimed in an interview published as an<br />
appendix to An Opening of the Field: “I first thought<br />
of collage when I visited Brockway’s mother in<br />
Naples, near [Alamitos Bay] in Southern California,<br />
not far from where I grew up . . . and she said, ‘Look<br />
at he collage I’ve just done.’ She had cut pictures of<br />
flowers from magazines, and it was at that moment I<br />
saw collage for the first time.” Never mind that<br />
Brockway’s mother knew the term “collage.” Never<br />
mind the long tradition of collage in modern art by<br />
the likes of artists like Picasso and Braque. In fact,<br />
collage and assemblage – and I think they should be<br />
seen as two-and three-dimensional siblings, or rather<br />
of a piece – seemed to generate in both northern and<br />
southern California. If one writer on Jess dismissed<br />
as a joke the 1949 “Museum of Unknown and Little<br />
Known Objects” by the California School of Fine<br />
Arts teacher Clay Spohn – the same man who urged<br />
Calder to use wire – that is simply to forget that<br />
humor is quite a serious tool in art. Similarly, Hassel<br />
Smith, an important teacher of Jess, had done his<br />
own assemblages and held a party in the late 1940s<br />
where he asked his each of his guests to bring a Dada<br />
object. As Richard Diebenkorn noted about the late<br />
1940s, “Assemblage was just in the air” – as were<br />
various forms of collage. So Jess’s collage did not<br />
spring full-bodied like Athena out of the head of<br />
Brockway’s mother.<br />
More important, however, is to recognize<br />
that both collage and assemblage are by themselves a<br />
form of the multibiosis around Jess and Duncan for<br />
the very reason that they take their elements from all<br />
parts of life, past, present, future, as well as the<br />
esoteric and the mythological, and pull them together<br />
in concert and disconcert. In Jess’s log for the<br />
creation of Narkissos, he delves – and Duncan would<br />
partner in this research – deeply into the Narcissus<br />
myth as well as its offshoots, various echoes, such as<br />
in Chaucer as well as the flower. And his large collage<br />
is full of images reflecting each other as well as<br />
integrating large numbers of popular culture elements,<br />
such as a Krazy Kat cartoon, Chicago’s Monadnock<br />
building, and a frame from Fritz Lang’s film<br />
Metropolis. So too would his The Chariot: Tarot VII<br />
(1962) cram an enormous number of images, only<br />
starting with ancient Eastern and Western sculpture<br />
(including Dionysus with grapes), umbrellas, old cars,<br />
train engines, owls, a fox, lobster claws, the hull of an<br />
ancient boat, and various eyes. In fact, the various<br />
eyes – and eyelike images – looking from various<br />
perspectives (even upside down) and in various<br />
9
Robert Duncan, Jess, and Friends<br />
directions – that add one of the elements that pull the<br />
viewer’s eye within the collage. With the Oakland<br />
Museum’s important Pop Art U.S.A. show in 1963,<br />
Jess was added as an important predecessor but felt<br />
the fit wasn’t right and offered: “I’m afraid I’m too<br />
romantic, and perhaps worse yet, sentimental.” But<br />
more than that, Jess’s work had much greater depth<br />
and cultural layering than Pop Art. He might have<br />
turned a feminine hygiene advertisement “Modess . .<br />
. because” into Goddess Because Is Is Falling Asleep<br />
(1954) but the collage is hardly a one-liner. His work<br />
brings in much more. Similarly, Duncan famously<br />
described his own poetry as a “grand collage” made<br />
up of so many found pieces and allusions. In an<br />
interview Duncan stated that he did not have “any<br />
style” and ventured more broadly that, in fact, “the<br />
American style is polyglot assemblage” because<br />
“Americans have no history.”<br />
Duncan wrote for an exhibition of Jess’s<br />
“Translation” series:<br />
The set of Translations and their Imagist<br />
Texts as they are presented in this show in<br />
this complex game of associations, in which<br />
the paintings are cards, the arcana of an<br />
individual Tarot, a game of initiations, of<br />
evocations, speculations, exorcisms, may be<br />
related to the field of dream and magic in art<br />
which we inherit in the tradition of the<br />
Surrealists. A play at once sinister and<br />
rightful, like Lewis’s Carroll’s play with<br />
words, but here, a play with the properties of<br />
paints and picturing.<br />
Just as Jess’s Abstract Expressionist<br />
teachers tended not to give titles to their paintings<br />
because they didn’t want to limit their meaning, Jess<br />
often gave his “Translations” titles starting with “Fig.”<br />
or “Ex.,” suggesting, as Ingrid Schaffner has<br />
observed, that they were figures or examples of<br />
something outside the painting - in essence, an<br />
invisible text led them. And just as Jess’s art was a<br />
constant playing with meanings, so Duncan called his<br />
own poetry “multiphasic.” In addition to Jess and<br />
Duncan’s shared love of Finnegan’s Wake, Duncan<br />
offered that “[i]n the archeologist’s sense, the OED<br />
had opened up the layers of language, and the OED is<br />
another one of the complicating factors at every step<br />
of writing, because that gives me the layers of very<br />
single English word through its layers of time. . . .”<br />
In fact, he asserted: “After all, Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake<br />
is drawing directly on the OED all the time.” One of<br />
his problems with Milton’s Paradise Lost is that<br />
Milton “has an outline” and poetry should not – for<br />
that reason, he points to Williams’s Paterson as<br />
coming to an end and Williams discovering that it<br />
had not ended yet. And Duncan was fond of<br />
McClure’s beast language because it was a way of<br />
“using sound to disturb language.” Duncan and Jess<br />
and many around them were deeply involved in<br />
various esoteric traditions but they were particularly<br />
fond of the Zohar (David Meltzer’s introduction to<br />
kabala came when Duncan burst out of a restroom in<br />
the store where Meltzer worked, indignant that a<br />
library copy of Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in<br />
Jewish Mysticism had been left there). Duncan would<br />
talk about the world being made of letters in the<br />
kabalistic tradition – and, in a sense, that is symbolic<br />
for the range of artists around Duncan and Jess.<br />
Duncan, Jess and their friends were all, in a sense,<br />
engaged in a world made of symbols and letters and<br />
symbols and letters made up of the world.<br />
Notes<br />
“An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their<br />
Circle,” exhibition organized by the Crocker Art Museum<br />
and curated by Michael Duncan and Christopher Wagstaff.<br />
Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, June 9 – September 1,<br />
2013<br />
Grey Art Gallery, New York University, January 14, March<br />
29, 2014<br />
Katzen Arts Center, American University, April 26 – August<br />
17, 2014<br />
Pasadena Museum of California Art, Sept. 14, 2014 – Jan.<br />
11, 2015<br />
Michael Duncan and Christopher Wagstaff, An Opening of<br />
the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle (Pomegranate<br />
Communications, Inc., 2013)<br />
Lisa Jarnot, Robert Duncan: The Ambassador from Venus: A<br />
Biography (Univ. of California Press, 2012)<br />
Christopher Wagstaff, ed., A Poet’s Mind: Collected Interviews<br />
with Robert Duncan, 1960-1985 (North Atlantic Books,<br />
2012)<br />
Michael Duncan, ed., Jess: O! Tricky Cad & Other Jessoterica<br />
(Siglio, 2012)<br />
10
BILL BURROUGHS<br />
IN AMSTERDAM<br />
by Eddie<br />
Woods<br />
William S. Burroughs and I performed at<br />
the same major Amsterdam literary event back in<br />
1978, Soyo Benn Posset’s first One World Poetry<br />
festival, P78. Whose closing night, where WSB and I<br />
took to the big stage separately, I wrote about in a<br />
long rapid-fire prose poem entitled “Poetry & the<br />
Punks: An Apocalyptic Confrontation” which was<br />
published in P78 Anthology. But that’s not when I got<br />
to meet the author of Naked Lunch, Junkie, and Queer<br />
up close and personal. Same as with Bill’s friend and<br />
partner in experimental cut-ups crime Brion Gysin,<br />
that would come later. In the case of William it was<br />
the following year, when Benn again brought Bill to<br />
Holland, and not for the last time either. On this<br />
occasion Benn asked the Dutch poet Harry<br />
Hoogstraten to organize a special reading at the<br />
Melkweg multi-media center for Burroughs and other<br />
outlaws. Those others being Jules Deelder (aka ‘the<br />
night mayor of Rotterdam’), shamanic legend Simon<br />
Vinkenoog, the rock star Herman Brood, and of<br />
course Harry. While to emcee this extraordinary<br />
happening Harry chose me.<br />
The day of the evening reading began with<br />
an afternoon dinner on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal, a<br />
mere stone’s throw from the red-light district. With<br />
some of the attendees (albeit not William) gathering<br />
beforehand in the bar next door for nerves-settling<br />
drinks. Among whom was Brood, front man of the<br />
hugely popular band Wild Romance. Onstage,<br />
Herman (who in 2001 ended his life by flamboyantly<br />
leaping from the roof of the Amsterdam Hilton) was<br />
confidently outrageous. Yet in person he could often<br />
be incredibly shy. A trait I encountered whenever we<br />
bumped into one another and chatted at Padrino’s, a<br />
gangster restaurant near the Melkweg that didn’t start<br />
serving meals until midnight (and was also one of<br />
Soyo Benn’s favorite eateries). And who was Herman<br />
Brood’s junkie hero? You guessed it, Bill Burroughs.<br />
So much so that Herman, a talented artist as well as<br />
an accomplished singer/songwriter, had produced a<br />
series of comic strips for various underground music<br />
‘zines with the unnamed Burroughs as a main<br />
character. (Where are they today, these strips? God<br />
alone knows.) Now suddenly they were performing on<br />
the same program. And even sooner, Herman could<br />
connect one-on-one with his idol over dinner. Alas, it<br />
never happened. Nor did they get to exchange even a<br />
word. Shy Herman bottled, pure and simple.<br />
“Time to go eat,” I said to Herman in the<br />
bar.<br />
“Sorry, man, I gotta go get me some<br />
Angels. See you at the gig.”<br />
And off he sped to the nearby Hell’s Angels<br />
HQ, high on shots of speed and natural adrenalin.<br />
It was a narrow restaurant with a single<br />
long table accommodating a couple of dozen (mostly<br />
Dutch) writers and visiting firemen. William sat at<br />
the head, his back to the door. ‘Brave,’ I thought. ‘He<br />
must be packing a rod.’ (A love of guns was<br />
something Bill and I had in common.) I was at his<br />
left, Harry to his right. Benn had discreetly placed<br />
himself down at the end. William ate in silence, as<br />
did I. The rest blathered away, but not in our<br />
direction. Coffee and digestifs quickly segued into<br />
several writers coming forth to present Bill with<br />
books. Books in Dutch, a language Bill couldn’t read.<br />
Always the gentleman, Bill politely growled his thanks.<br />
That parade over and done with, I turned to Bill and<br />
11
Bill Burroughs in Amsterdam<br />
said: “I’m afraid I don’t have a book for you, but I do<br />
have this.” Whereupon I popped a gram ball of<br />
opium into the palm of his hand.<br />
“Oh, I know what this is,” he said,<br />
dividing the ball in two and immediately swallowing a<br />
half.<br />
“Say,” he then said, “allow me to return<br />
the favor.”<br />
And reaching into his jacket pocket, he<br />
withdrew a slim plastic container full of little pink<br />
pills and handed it to me saying: “Here, this is for<br />
you. I scored them in Paris, but have more at the<br />
hotel.”<br />
They were codeine, a drug I wasn’t much<br />
familiar with.<br />
“Much obliged,” said I. “But ah, how<br />
many should I take?”<br />
I’m a thin chap. In those days with<br />
particularly gaunt facial features. And so my question<br />
somewhat startled William.<br />
“How many? Dunno. Ten, maybe twelve.<br />
Hell, take as many as you like, you’re an old veteran!”<br />
Haha, Bill Burroughs reckoned I was a<br />
fellow junkie!<br />
There was still plenty of time to kill before<br />
the reading, and everyone headed to the Melkweg by<br />
William Burroughs, possibly Herbert Huncke’s<br />
pal Louis Cartwright took the picture<br />
12<br />
varied means, some individually, others in small<br />
groups. By then Bill and I had gotten into conversing,<br />
and so found ourselves walking together at a slow<br />
pace far behind the rest. We discussed heroin (“How<br />
much does it go for here?” Bill queried); guns (“In<br />
New York if you’re carrying and shoot someone in<br />
self-defense, no one will bother you,” he insisted,<br />
much to this New Yorker’s surprise); his son Billy,<br />
who was less than two years away from dying at age<br />
33; Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the founder of<br />
Naropa University and Allen Ginsberg’s guru<br />
(“He definitely has powers,” William stated<br />
unreservedly, adding he saw that clearly<br />
when Trungpa visited Billy in hospital). That<br />
and all sorts of groovy stuff, with me doing<br />
most of the asking and listening.<br />
The event itself was a blast. With<br />
the packed-house Fonteinzaal audience<br />
paying rapt attention throughout. Deelder<br />
rapped rhythmic Chicago-style jazz poetry;<br />
Vinkenoog machinegun-delivered his usual<br />
high-powered mixture of psychedelic magic;<br />
Harry recited poems in English (the language<br />
he’d adopted for his writings during a<br />
lengthy stay in Ireland); William gravelyvoiced<br />
read a number of short tracts,<br />
including “Bugger the Queen” (that I<br />
eventually arranged for International Times in<br />
London to publish); with me reeling out my<br />
own verses in between making the<br />
introductions. Herman, who was nowhere in<br />
sight until I caught a glimpse of him up in<br />
the balcony sound room, I’d decided to save<br />
for last. And now it was time.<br />
“Ladies and gentlemen,” I called out, “let’s<br />
give an uproariously warm welcome to the one and<br />
only Herman Brood.”<br />
“I told you to wait, fucker!” screamed<br />
Herman from God knows where. (He hadn’t told me,<br />
but never mind.)<br />
“Seems Herman’s not quite ready, folks,” I<br />
laughed into the microphone. “So while he’s<br />
powdering his nose [more discreet than saying<br />
‘shooting up,’ eh], I’ll read a poem by Ira Cohen that<br />
I’m sure Herman will especially appreciate hearing.<br />
It’s entitled ‘A Brickbat for Herman Brood or P78<br />
Meets Wild Romance in Paradiso.’”<br />
I’ve no idea if Herman bothered to listen,<br />
but the crowd was stunned as I belted out lines like<br />
‘Let the bread stay in the breadbox, Herman’ and
Bill Burroughs in Amsterdam<br />
‘Patti Smith queens your pawn - Anarchy prevails - It<br />
is poetry which breaks the bars of jails!’<br />
No sooner had I finished than a<br />
thoroughly stoned Herman comes strolling towards<br />
the stage, his face beaming with a broad smile.<br />
“Alles okay, baba? I ask.<br />
“I’m fine, man, just fine,” he drawls.<br />
Followed by, “I brought some friends with me.”<br />
The friends were half a dozen wellseasoned<br />
Hell’s Angels, each of them holding a large<br />
bottle of beer. Herman would be knocking out<br />
poems, not singing songs. And minus his band, these<br />
dudes were his backup boys.<br />
They accompanied his<br />
recitations by stomping their<br />
feet in cadence to his words. It<br />
was a perfect performance that<br />
saw the audience cheering and<br />
howling for more. They got<br />
more, though not from Herman.<br />
He’d disappeared with all but<br />
one of the Angels, the tallest of<br />
the lot. Who then approached<br />
me and politely asked if he could<br />
recite a poem. I said sure,<br />
introduced him, he stepped up<br />
to the mike, pulled a tiny slip of<br />
paper from his jeans’ bicycle-key pocket, and<br />
“In New York if<br />
you’re carrying<br />
and shoot someone<br />
in self-<br />
defense, no one<br />
will bother<br />
you.”<br />
William<br />
Burroughs to<br />
Eddie Woods<br />
proceeded to recite an unbelievably sweet love poem.<br />
A pin-drop silence gave way to a round of applause.<br />
Bringing the reading to a close, I made a<br />
point of thanking William for the many hours of<br />
reading pleasure he’d afforded me over the years.<br />
“Pleasure?” Simon snarled loudly. “He’s<br />
trying to stick a knife in your heart!”<br />
“And if I get a kick out of that,” I snapped<br />
back, “what’s it to you?”<br />
The audience filed out...to the main hall,<br />
the café, the bar, the house dealer’s counter, wherever.<br />
We participants, sans Herman, adjourned to the<br />
Melkweg office, with the Angels tagging along.<br />
“Where’s Jack?” Angel Jack demanded to<br />
know from William.<br />
“He’s wherever you care to find him,” Bill<br />
responded, in his mind meaning Kerouac.<br />
“I’m Jack,” said Jack, stabbing at his own<br />
chest with a forefinger.<br />
“Oh, yes, I know what you mean,” Bill<br />
replied with a wise nod of the head. “It’s all in the<br />
Tibetan Book of the Dead.”<br />
“Eddie, get those guys out of here,” Soyo<br />
Benn pleaded with me, “before they drive William<br />
nuts.”<br />
I forget how exactly, but I got them to<br />
leave without a fuss.<br />
William made his exit shortly afterwards.<br />
We shook hands. Then referring to the remainder of<br />
the opium he’d already gulped down, he said: “Thank<br />
you, Eddie, I’m well away.”<br />
William and I next saw each other in 1985<br />
when he and his manager James Grauerholz, in<br />
company with Benn, visited Ins & Outs Press for a<br />
long afternoon into early evening.<br />
Plus we spoke on a live telephone<br />
hookup (that the audience could<br />
hear) during a 1993 Soyo Bennorganized<br />
Burroughs Tribute at the<br />
Melkweg that I co-emceed. And I<br />
had Bill affirm that I was not the<br />
Eddie Woods who witnessed him<br />
accidently shooting and killing his<br />
wife Joan Vollmer Burroughs in<br />
Mexico. (Literary Outlaw, Ted<br />
Morgan’s biography of William, had<br />
many people seriously believing it<br />
was me.)<br />
“No, Eddie,” Bill said<br />
dryly, “it wasn’t you.” And went on to describe my<br />
infamous namesake. Red hair, short, a good nine<br />
years younger than I, et cetera. I wrote about all of<br />
this in the essay “Thank God You’re Not Eddie<br />
Woods” that I delivered at the William Burroughs<br />
conference Naked Lunch@50 in Paris, 2009, and was<br />
subsequently published in Beat Scene.<br />
Btw, I was only half-joking when I said that<br />
Burroughs and Gysin were partners in cut-up crime.<br />
1) I don’t much care for the technique. (Neither did<br />
Gregory Corso, who collaborated on Minutes to Go<br />
only reluctantly); 2) To the extent it has any validity, I<br />
consider Harold Norse to be its real master. As<br />
exemplified in his ground-breaking novella Beat Hotel;<br />
3) I by far prefer Burroughs’ straighter writings to any<br />
of the cut-ups. None of which negates Norman<br />
Mailer’s 1962 appraisal of Burroughs as “the only<br />
American novelist living today who may conceivably<br />
be possessed by genius.” Hear, hear. That’s my Bill<br />
Burroughs, all right.<br />
© 2014 by Eddie Woods<br />
EDDIE WOODS is at http://eddiewoods.nl/<br />
13
A “Half-American”<br />
Writer<br />
Joyce ce Johnson<br />
I<br />
t is possible to know someone and not know them,<br />
especially when you are twenty-one and in love, and when<br />
there are painful things the other person never talks about.<br />
For about two years, starting one January night in<br />
1957, nine months before the publication of On the Road,<br />
Jack Kerouac came and went in my life. I knew, of course,<br />
that he was of French Canadian extraction, had a mother<br />
he called Memere, who spoke to him in French, that he was<br />
very fond of French cooking and that he still held on to his<br />
old dream of going to live someday in Paris, a dream he<br />
would never realize. In the spring of that first year I knew<br />
him, he finally did pass through there, completely broke as<br />
usual—but Paris, like nearly all his dreamed of destinations,<br />
was a disappointment. “It didn’t seem to want me,” was<br />
how he put it. (Perhaps part of the problem was that<br />
Parisians didn’t think much of the way Jack spoke French.)<br />
Before that he’d been in London, where he’d made a point<br />
of looking up his family’s Breton coat of arms in the British<br />
Museum Library. There he’d found the motto, Aimer,<br />
travailler, soufrir. Which he felt was the perfect summation<br />
of his life, as he told me when he was back in New York.<br />
I often heard him speaking in a low voice to my grey<br />
cat, to whom he’d given a French Canadian name, Tigris.<br />
He would feed Tigris in a way that never failed to charm<br />
me. Like a small boy, he’d lie flat on his belly with his chin<br />
against the rim of the cat’s bowl, murmuring encouraging<br />
words, half in French, half in English. Many years later<br />
when I read Vision of Gerard, the eerie significance of these<br />
little scenes dawned on me for the first time when I came to<br />
the lines: When the little kitty is given his milk, I imitate<br />
Gerard and get down on my stomach…”You happy, Ti Pou? –<br />
your nice lala.” I realized then that without knowing it I had<br />
witnessed a secret sacrament, heard Jack Kerouac calling up<br />
his dead nine-year-old Franco American brother, who was in<br />
some ways the submerged half of himself.<br />
Jack never explained to me that when he was a kid in<br />
Lowell, Massachusetts, he had only spoken the French<br />
Canadian language in his household and that he had not<br />
been a fluid English speaker until his late teens. I would<br />
have been astonished to learn that all his life, to one degree<br />
or another, he had been translating the French words in<br />
which he dreamed and thought into their English<br />
equivalents. Like most people who read On the Road when<br />
it came out six years after Jack had written it, I would<br />
certainly never have thought of Jack Kerouac as a bilingual<br />
writer, for I could think of no contemporary novelist who<br />
seemed so completely in the American grain and my ear did<br />
not pick up the French overtones in Sal Paradise’s voice,<br />
which was one of the things, I now realize, that gave Jack’s<br />
first-person prose such a distinctive quality. That first<br />
person voice seemed so natural and effortless, in fact, that I<br />
did not realize it had taken Jack ten years and piles of<br />
discarded manuscripts to finally arrive at it — or that it was<br />
a voice he’d kept suppressing in his writing, until, in the<br />
spring of 1951, he’d finally embraced and accepted its<br />
power, and written On the Road in the now legendary 21<br />
days of concentrated effort in one long typed paragraph on<br />
a 120-foot scroll of paper. Jack did not mention Franco<br />
Americans in the book I first read in its much edited version,<br />
although its narrator, Sal Paradise, apparently Italian<br />
American, expressed powerful feelings of identification with<br />
black and Hispanic people.<br />
14
A Half-American<br />
Writer<br />
During the period I was involved with Jack, his<br />
publisher, Viking Press, despite the huge recent success of<br />
On the Road, turned down his first Lowell novel, Dr. Sax,<br />
which dealt with his Franco American childhood and<br />
opened with the blatantly French-sounding sentence, “In<br />
Centralville I was born.” It did not occur to me that the<br />
book’s ethnic subject matter may have been one of the<br />
reasons for this rejection and for the Viking editors’ lack of<br />
interest in any novel about Jack’s boyhood, though he was<br />
encouraged to write Dharma Bums as a followup to On the<br />
Road. Now that I’ve written my Kerouac biography, I am<br />
sometimes amazed by how much I didn’t understand<br />
during the time I knew Jack.<br />
Until it was possible for me to<br />
read Jack’s journals in the Kerouac<br />
archive at the New York Public<br />
Library, I had never seen this<br />
revelatory passage he wrote at 23<br />
shortly after the war had ended, just<br />
after he taken a walk through his<br />
neighborhood in Queens:<br />
Today, Labor Day, a clear sunny<br />
day with the tender blue char in the sky<br />
hinting of October. I felt a resurgence of<br />
the old feeling, the old Faustian urge to<br />
understand the whole in one sweep and<br />
to express it in one magnificent work—<br />
mainly America and American life.<br />
Bunting, flying leaves, families<br />
drinking beer in their own backyard,<br />
cars filling the highways…Children<br />
tanned and ready for school, the smell of<br />
roasts coming from the cottages on the<br />
leafy street, the whole rich American life<br />
in one panorama. I had the feeling<br />
that I was alien to all this…that all this could never be mine,<br />
only to express…All of this America, not for my likes, never. It’s<br />
strange, since I’m aware that I understand all this far more than<br />
the people who do have the American richness in<br />
them.”Acknowledging the fact that because of the Breton<br />
bleakness in his soul, he would always feel like an outsider in<br />
this country, Jack called himself only half-American. Six<br />
years later, when it came time to write a novel that would<br />
sweep its readers westward across the American landscape,<br />
that novel would be written with the passion of an outsider.<br />
All this America, not for my likes, never. Doesn’t that line<br />
sound directly translated from the French? And isn’t that<br />
feeling of not entirely belonging here very American itself?<br />
In the fall of 1940, the incoming freshman John L.<br />
Kerouac arrived at Columbia on a football scholarship after<br />
spending two terms at the Horace Mann prep school<br />
where he had been sent to make up some courses. This was a<br />
milestone in Jack’s American journey. His entry into a<br />
university was the goal he had set himself by the time he<br />
started high school, already knowing he wanted to be a<br />
writer, already aware there was no way he could use the<br />
French Canadian language for the books he dreamed of<br />
writing and that he would have to find a way of leaving<br />
Lowell, Massachusetts where he had grown up in one of the<br />
insular French-speaking communities that could be found<br />
throughout New England. In his sophomore year, however,<br />
he would disappoint his family by walking away from his<br />
opportunity to get a college education. Football practice had<br />
left him little time for his studies<br />
and no time to write and he had<br />
fallen under the spell of Thomas<br />
Wolfe. He took a bus southward,<br />
then changed his mind and went<br />
north. He found a job in a garage<br />
in Hartford, rented a small room<br />
and an Underwood typewriter,<br />
wrote one story after another and<br />
experienced hunger for the first<br />
time.<br />
Not even the barrier of<br />
language could extinguish Jack’s<br />
inborn need to write. From the<br />
time he was eleven, he began<br />
working to make himself fluent<br />
in English—a process that<br />
continued into his adult life—<br />
and wrote a little novel, Jack<br />
Kerouac Explores the Merrimack,<br />
heavily influenced by<br />
Huckleberry Finn. His juvenilia<br />
includes some remarkable handprinted newspapers, inspired<br />
by the racing papers, his father constantly consulted for tips<br />
on horses. Calling himself Jack Lewis, Jack imagined himself<br />
its publisher, its chief reporter, a celebrated jockey and the<br />
owner of a prizewinning horse named Repulsion—he<br />
evidently loved the forceful sound of that word without<br />
knowing it meant the opposite of what he intended.<br />
Making a similar mistake, he made up a wizard named Dr.<br />
Malodorous—MaloDORus was probably how he<br />
pronounced it –he considered this the most beautiful word<br />
he knew. At seventeen, when Jack was trying to write like<br />
William Saroyan, he papered the walls of his room with lists<br />
of words he’d found in the dictionary. At twenty-two, in<br />
what he called his ne-Rimbaudean period, he was still<br />
working at increasing his vocabulary, writing the definitions<br />
of calescent, ectogenic, dysphasia and surah into his notebook,<br />
15<br />
above, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir by Joyce Johnson,<br />
which originally appeared in 1983, published by Houghton<br />
Miflin. Note Joyce standing in the shadows of love behind<br />
Jack Kerouac.
A Half-American<br />
Writer<br />
in case he should ever need to use them. “Smooth as surah”<br />
he wrote years later in Visions of Gerard, describing the skin<br />
of a character named Mr. Groscorp.<br />
In Lowell, Jack had begun his education at the<br />
neighborhood parochial school, St. Louis de France.<br />
There the morning classes were taught in French and the<br />
afternoon classes were taught in English. The students<br />
pledged allegiance to la race Canadienne as well as the<br />
American flag. The huge redbrick mills along the<br />
Merrimack River pointed to the fate that awaited many<br />
of Jack’s classmates and that Jack would become determined<br />
to escape. Very few young Franco Americans in Jack’s day<br />
left the communities they had been raised in or succeeded in<br />
going to college; very few attempted the kind of lonely<br />
journey Jack would take into the American mainstream. (“I<br />
don’t even look like a<br />
writer,” Jack would later<br />
confess to his journal. “I<br />
look like a lumberjack.”)<br />
There was still tremendous<br />
prejudice against Jack’s<br />
people, with most<br />
Americans believing they<br />
were backward. Up where<br />
Jack came from they were<br />
called “white niggers” of<br />
“the Chinese of New<br />
England.” “Dumb<br />
Canuck” was a common epithet that I even heard used<br />
teasingly by one of Jack’s friends. But even in the 1950’s,<br />
Franco Americans still kept to themselves for other reasons:<br />
the almost mystical belief that they must uphold the old<br />
ideals and customs of what they called la survivance and<br />
continue to speak their distinctive language, which was so<br />
woven into their religion.<br />
Lowell, the birthplace of the American industrial<br />
revolution, was a melting pot, where people from various<br />
ethnic groups—Irish Catholic, Greek, Syrian, as well as a<br />
sprinkling of Jews—had come in the last decades of the 19 th<br />
century to make their living in the mills, and where the<br />
French Canadians, escaping from starvation on their<br />
hardscrabble potato farms in Quebec, had been willing to<br />
take the worst jobs. People from these different groups<br />
mingled in the mills and the bustling downtown streets and<br />
went home to their separate neighborhoods; their children<br />
met each other in Lowell’s public schools and on the<br />
baseball fields. There were handsome pubic buildings in<br />
Lowell, such as the Public Library and the Atheneum that<br />
had been built by wealthy New England mill owners; there<br />
were also neighborhoods of wooden tenements where there<br />
were frequent fires and epidemics of cholera and meningitis<br />
and where many of the workers in the textile mills, where<br />
the windows were nailed shut, suffered from emphysema<br />
and tuberculosis. The deaths of children were not at all<br />
uncommon in Lowell. Jack’s mother had grown up in the<br />
nearby town of Nashua and gone to work in a shoe factory<br />
at the age of fifteen; she could write English quite fluently<br />
but never learned to speak it well. Jack’s. Father, Leo<br />
Kerouac, was bright and enterprising, and his command of<br />
English was unusually good. He was a reader, who believed<br />
that nothing compared to French culture, and worshipped<br />
Balzac and Victor Hugo. Until he lost it during<br />
the Depression, when the Kerouac’s became poor, Leo had<br />
his own small printing business, which did not confine itself<br />
to the Franco American community. Compared to most<br />
French kids, Jack’s early years were relatively privileged,<br />
although they were<br />
darkened by the death of<br />
his nine-year-old brother<br />
Gerard—a traumatic event<br />
that haunted Jack his entire<br />
life...<br />
Jack picked up his<br />
first words in English from<br />
the only Irish Catholic boy<br />
in his French-speaking<br />
kindergarten. He learned<br />
more from the half days of<br />
instruction in his parish<br />
school, St. Louis de France, but he undoubtedly would<br />
have continued his French education through high school,<br />
if the rezoning of his French Catholic middle school had not<br />
forced him to transfer to Bartlett Junior High School in<br />
Seventh Grade. If this had not happened, his grasp of<br />
English might have remained uncertain and handicapped<br />
his writing. His parents registered him at Bartlett as a<br />
commercial student.<br />
Embarrassed by his accent, one of the contributing factors<br />
to his lifelong shyness, he rarely spoke in his classes.<br />
Fortunately a discerning English teacher noticed how<br />
surprisingly well Jackie Kerouac could write. She advised<br />
him to start going to the Public Library and recommended<br />
that he read Longfellow and Twain. Every Saturday he took<br />
home an armload of books. He was a book-hungry kid,<br />
who read indiscriminately and ravenously—everything from<br />
The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come to the novels of<br />
Jack London, Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle. At<br />
sixteen, when he was cutting school to spend days at the<br />
library, he would discover Goethe, who had a lasting<br />
influence on his thinking. He was also addicted to pulp<br />
fiction, absorbing the American vernacular from The Shadow<br />
series, as well as from comics, sports novels and westerns.<br />
A happy Jack Kerouac<br />
16
A Half-American<br />
Writer<br />
Another important factor in Jack’s Americanization were the<br />
movies he saw every Saturday from the balcony of Lowell’s<br />
Royal Theater. There he watched cowboys gallop across the<br />
screen, heard the twang of W.C. Fields and the New Yorkese<br />
of Groucho Marx. His novels would be filled with cinematic<br />
references.<br />
Jack later admitted that the more he set himself to<br />
master English, the more he felt he lost some of his French.<br />
“I have no language of my own,” he would tell Yvonne<br />
LeMaitre, who had reviewed his first novel, The Town and<br />
the City for a Franco-American newspaper. It would take<br />
Jack a long time before he instinctively made the transition<br />
from one language to another. A note in his 1945 journals<br />
shows that it was still a process accompanied by a very<br />
conscious shifting of gears. First Jack had to remind himself<br />
that he was not writing in French; then he had to figure out<br />
how to capture his “simultaneous impressions” in English.<br />
Then, because he was aiming at what he called “sense<br />
thinking,” he had to take care not to fall into the English<br />
literary tradition of reporting on what the writer was feeling.<br />
Jack’s father believed that his son could rescue the<br />
family from poverty by becoming a football star. In his<br />
estimation, writers and artists were parasites. “There’s no one<br />
with a name like Kerouac in the writing game,” he told Jack,<br />
convinced that only a Frenchman like Victor Hugo with a<br />
mastery of classical French could become a writer. The<br />
French Canadian language, as it was spoken in Lowell, was<br />
not the French spoken in Paris, or the French spoken in<br />
Montreal, where it was called joual. It was a richly expressive<br />
oral language that varied from place to place and, even in<br />
the early 20 th century lacked fixed spellings. Joual had<br />
developed from the regional dialects the French settlers<br />
brought to Canada in the 17 th and 18 th centuries, plus an<br />
accumulation of words picked up the Iroquois and the<br />
English. The Parisians said pommes de terres for potatoes; the<br />
Quebecois said patates. Jack’s mother said mue for me; Victor<br />
Hugo said moi. Even as he was preparing himself to leave it<br />
behind, Jack was proud of the richness of his native<br />
language. “The language called Canadian French is the<br />
strongest in the world when it comes to words of power,” he<br />
wrote at nineteen. “It is too bad that one cannot study it in<br />
college, for it is one of the language languages in the<br />
world…it is the language of the tongue and not of the<br />
pen…it is a terrific, a huge language.” In his thirties, he<br />
would defiantly begin to write passages in that language in<br />
his novels.<br />
In 1941, just as Jack began his second year at<br />
Columbia, he read Look Homeward Angel by Thomas<br />
Wolfe—a writer with whom he felt an immediate<br />
psychological affinity and whose depictions of small town<br />
and urban America and richly lyrical, maximalist prose style<br />
would have a tremendous influence upon the fiction Jack<br />
would attempt to write himself, as he worked toward<br />
producing his own Great American Novel. All through his<br />
years of apprenticeship, Jack started many novels that he<br />
would decide to put aside, only completing three of them,<br />
the most important of which was The Town and the City,<br />
published in 1950. All of them were novels with an<br />
autobiographical base in which Jack heavily fictionalized his<br />
own experiences; all of the protagonists were given typical<br />
American names, and in none of these books did Jack deal<br />
with his Franco American identity. Envisioning The Town<br />
and the City as a “universal American story,” Jack deliberately<br />
avoided emphasizing the Martin family’s half Franco-<br />
American background and their devout Catholicism. “Isn’t it<br />
true,” he wrote to Yvonne LeMaitre, who had astutely raised<br />
questions about these issues, “that French Canadians<br />
everywhere tend to hide their real sources?” They were able<br />
to do that, Jack thought, because unlike other minorities,<br />
such as Jews or Italians, they could pass as “Anglo Saxon.” A<br />
fiction writer today, in our multi-culturally minded era,<br />
would make the most of his hyphenated background and in<br />
fact would probably consider it an asset. But sixty years<br />
ago, the label “Franco America” would have been a liability<br />
for an ambitious novelist.<br />
In 1946, while writing the opening chapters of The<br />
Town and the City, Jack had an idea for a road novel that he<br />
had to put aside for the time being. It would be a book in<br />
which a lone traveler, recovering from a serious illness, would<br />
take a journey across America encountering a series of<br />
symbolic characters. Jack had yet to meet Neal Cassady, who<br />
would inspire the character Dean Moriarty (the all-American<br />
alter ego of the secretly French Sal Paradise). When Jack<br />
returned to this idea two years later, after finishing The Town<br />
and the City, he found himself unable to get the novel off to<br />
a good start and had to discard one manuscript after<br />
another, which is certainly the most brutal form of revision.<br />
He planned to make the story, with its all American cast of<br />
characters, even more elaborately fictionalized than the one<br />
in his first novel. But he seemed unable to find the right<br />
voice in which to write it. He still deliberately avoided using<br />
the first person and clung to the Wolfean third-person<br />
omniscient narration he had been using before.<br />
In 1950, following the disappointing reception of<br />
his first novel, the issue of obscuring his ethnic identity in<br />
his writing began to torment him. In May of that year, guilt<br />
Jack had not previously acknowledged rose to the surface.<br />
He recorded in his journal a dreamlike visitation from a<br />
Franco American older brother, who scolded him for trying<br />
to defrench himself. “He hinted I should go to Lowell, or<br />
Canada, or France, and become a Frenchman again and<br />
write in French and shut up. He keeps telling me to shut<br />
17
A Half-American<br />
Writer<br />
up. When I can’t sleep because my mind is ringing with<br />
gongs of English thought and sentences, he says, Pense en<br />
Francais, knowing I will calm down and go to sleep in<br />
simplicity.” Jack saw this older brother as “my original self<br />
returning after all the years since I was a child trying to<br />
become un Anglais in Lowell from shame of being a<br />
‘Canuck.” He wrote that it was actually the first time he<br />
understood that he had “undergone the same feelings any<br />
Jew, Negro or Italian feels in America, so cleverly had I<br />
concealed them, even from myself, and with such talented,<br />
sullen aplomb for a kid.”<br />
Jack spent that summer in Mexico City, a place that<br />
in many ways reminded him of Lowell with its poverty and<br />
its many Catholic churches. There he continued to struggle<br />
with the road novel that was giving him so much trouble.<br />
After his mother forwarded him Yvonne LeMaitre’s review<br />
of the The Town and the City, in which she praised his<br />
writing but called his novel a tree without roots, he<br />
immediately started on a new book called Gone on the Road<br />
about a 15-year-old Franco American kid from New<br />
Hampshire called Freddie Boncoeur, who hitchhikes across<br />
America with an older and wiser cousin in search of<br />
Freddie’s lost father. This novel too he put aside after<br />
returning to New York in the fall and resuming his<br />
frustrating attempts to write his road novel with American<br />
characters. It was a wonder the Jack didn’t completely wear<br />
out his material or his desire to write On the Road.<br />
In December, however, something very important<br />
happened that immediately opened up a new direction for<br />
his work. Jack received a 40-page confessional letter from<br />
Neal Cassady that immediately made him decide to<br />
renounce both “fiction and fear.” Energized by the power<br />
and fluency of working directly from memory, Jack<br />
responded to Neal with a series of memoirlike letters about<br />
his Lowell childhood and the death of his brother Gerard.<br />
It was the most stunning writing Jack had ever done, and he<br />
could feel it. “The Voice is all!” he wrote Neal triumphantly.<br />
He was finally starting to use the richly evocative first-person<br />
voice he had been suppressing in his fiction.<br />
In March of 1951, Jack went even further—<br />
experimenting for the first time in writing entirely in<br />
French. His first experiment was the opening section of a<br />
projected novel called “Sur la Route” in an awkward French<br />
literary style he apparently had difficulty sustaining. His<br />
second experiment, La Nuit Est ma Femme, which he also<br />
called Les Travaux de Michel Bretagne (Michel Bretagne’s Jobs)<br />
was far more successful—in fact, it’s a wonderful piece of<br />
writing that has never been transcribed from his notebook,<br />
and needs to be carefully translated and published so that<br />
everyone can read it. Written in a strong, direct,<br />
conversational first-person voice, with great immediacy and<br />
intimacy, it tells the story of an unsuccessful Franco<br />
American writer who has sacrificed everything to his creative<br />
work and feels the need to account for himself.<br />
In this manuscript, Jack wrote about his lifelong<br />
dilemma—the conflict between what a man had to do in<br />
order to survive and the dreams of immortality that kept<br />
him an artist child, preventing him from making the<br />
compromises others made out of necessity and causing him<br />
to walk away from one demeaning job after another. He<br />
wrote about the mill whistles he used to hear in Lowell and<br />
his fear that he could end up as one of the workers trudging<br />
toward the factories that made him get a scholarship and<br />
start writing, and how the die was cast once he’d discovered<br />
the classic American writers, Twain, Melville, Thoreau and<br />
Wolfe, who wrote what he called “unknown, unsoundable<br />
books.” Jack translated one important passage from this<br />
book into English: “I wanted to write in a large form which<br />
was free and magnificent like that, a form which would give<br />
me a chance to go out the window and not stay in the room<br />
all the time with old ladies like Henry James and his<br />
European sisters.”<br />
He wrote the sixty pages of La Nuit Est Ma Femme in<br />
mid-March. In mid-April, when he sat down to write On<br />
the Road he would keep the ingenuous-sounding<br />
forthrightness of the Michel Bretagne voice as well as the<br />
overtones of its cadences and the tinge of melancholy that<br />
washes through it even when its energies seem highest. The<br />
voice he gave his first-person narrator would seem to Jack’s<br />
future readers as American as apple pie, but it had been<br />
born in French. But very soon after finishing On the Road,<br />
Jack felt dissatisfied with it. He knew he had still not been<br />
really truthful in the way he portrayed the protagonist he’d<br />
based on himself, even though he’d called him Jack<br />
Kerouac, for he had only dealt with the question of his<br />
ethnicity between the lines—notably in a rueful passage<br />
about having “white ambitions,” which could only have<br />
been written by someone who did not feel “white,” with<br />
the privileged status that that word implied.<br />
In Kerouac’s third novel, Visions of Cody, Jack would<br />
finally openly inhabit his Franco American identity and<br />
never conceal it again, and he would boldly and deliberately<br />
include passages and expressions in the French Canadian<br />
language. The Jack Duluoz of Cody would be a further<br />
exploration of that melancholy, half-American outsider<br />
Michel Bretagne of La Nuit Est Ma Femme.“<br />
The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac by Joyce<br />
Johnson - was published in recent times by the Viking Press.<br />
18
CONVERSATIONS<br />
with KEN KESEY<br />
edited by Scott F. . Par<br />
arker<br />
(University Press of Mississippi)<br />
Seventeen interviews from a man who<br />
apparently didn’t enjoy them much at all. They stretch<br />
from the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital in 1959, with<br />
Kesey having taken LSD, to his last interview in 1999<br />
with Mike Finioa. As editor Scott Parker points out,<br />
there is an air of regret that can be traced in Kesey,<br />
throughout these interviews, a regret that his extracurricular<br />
activities took him away from a fuller<br />
writing life. Put simply, he wished he had written<br />
more books.<br />
Kesey was more than a novelist of course. An<br />
iconic trailblazing figure, an integral personality at the<br />
head of this thing loosely called the ‘Sixties Revolution.’<br />
Furthur was his bus and<br />
his aim. His Paris Review<br />
interview in 1993 highlights his<br />
ambitions after graduating from<br />
the famous Wallace Stegner<br />
writing program at Stanford<br />
University. A course that also<br />
included Robert Stone, Wendell<br />
Berry and Larry McMurtry.<br />
Stegner and Kesey clashed over<br />
the direction Kesey took after<br />
the course. Kesey theorised that<br />
Stegner contented himself with<br />
Jack Daniels and Kesey opted<br />
for LSD.<br />
To some, Kesey remains<br />
a one hit wonder. That wonder<br />
being One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s<br />
Nest. The big advantage that<br />
epic novel had was being filmed<br />
and given widespread promotion<br />
with Jack Nicholson in the key role of Randell P.<br />
McMurphy. That film fixed the book in a wider<br />
consciousness and cemented Kesey’s reputation. Yet it<br />
was a big thing to live up to. There are many who cite<br />
Sometimes a Great Notion as a better book. Again that<br />
book was turned into a film, with Paul Newman<br />
involved. Somehow it never quite captured the<br />
imagination in the same fashion. The film royalties<br />
must have provided a cushion financially for Kesey,<br />
perhaps taking away the urgency to write. Certainly<br />
there were issues he had with the film of Cuckoo’s<br />
Nest. In an interview with Allan Balliett for Beat Scene<br />
(not included in this collection) some years go, Kesey<br />
talks of not being invited to the film premiere.<br />
Kesey has any number of gripes, but he gripes in a<br />
good natured way, he seems to be a man without a<br />
malicious bone in his body. Talking to Terry Gross in<br />
1989 he discusses the Tom Wolfe depiction of him in<br />
The Electric Kool Aid Test book, a work which fixed<br />
Kesey’s image firmly in a much wider public view.<br />
Kesey is at pains to point out his admiration for<br />
Wolfe, who, he says, didn’t have a tape recorder with<br />
him, he simply possessed a keen, observant nature.<br />
However, he stresses that Wolfe<br />
only relayed part of who Kesey was<br />
in his book. The picture is incomplete.<br />
What is evident from these<br />
intriguing interviews is that like<br />
Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey was a<br />
thorn in the side of right wing,<br />
repressive factions inside the<br />
American government. He was<br />
adept at exposing CIA funded<br />
initiatives - supposedly innocent<br />
organisations, that the covert<br />
government departments utilised to<br />
infiltrate everyday American life. It<br />
might have taken Ginsberg and<br />
Kesey, who was initially sceptical of<br />
Ginsberg’s CIA allegations, twenty<br />
years or more to expose the covert<br />
CIA operations, but they were both<br />
dogged individuals. Ken Kesey may<br />
have written but a few books but they all made their<br />
mark. These interviews reveal a man of high ideals.<br />
ISBN 978-1-61703-982-9 - Paperback $25<br />
University Press of Mississippi, 3825 Ridgewood<br />
Road, Jackson, MS 39211-6492, USA<br />
www.upress.state.ms.us/books/1666<br />
Colin Cooper<br />
19
Really Lost Books<br />
Fade Out<br />
Douglas Woolf<br />
(Penguin)<br />
by Kevin Ring<br />
It took twelve years for Douglas Woolf to see<br />
his 1959 novel Fade Out get publication in England as<br />
a mass market paperback. It had limited circulation<br />
through Weidenfeld and Nicholson in England in<br />
1968. The paperback copy I have here on the table<br />
was issued in 1971 in this country. He’s been locked<br />
in my memory banks for a considerable time. His<br />
name cropped up first in New<br />
American Story back in 1965, issued<br />
“Was born<br />
in 1956 in<br />
an Arizona<br />
ghost town,<br />
where I<br />
wrote most<br />
of Fade<br />
Out...”<br />
in the USA by Barney Rosset’s Grove<br />
Press. Again Penguin got that book<br />
out in England in 1971. Douglas<br />
Woolf maybe felt 1971 was going to<br />
be his breakthrough year in Europe.<br />
My copy of New American Story was<br />
found in a used bookstore about<br />
1978, the previous owner’s name<br />
‘Mark Vallance’ is inscribed neatly<br />
inside and he’s dated it 1972. This is<br />
where Woolf comes in for me. Edited<br />
by Donald Allen, he of Grey Fox Press<br />
fame and Robert Creeley, the<br />
anthology collects work by such names<br />
as William Burroughs, Hubert Selby Jr., Ed Dorn,<br />
John Rechy, William Eastlake, Leroi Jones, Michael<br />
Rumaker and Jack Kerouac. And Douglas Woolf. I<br />
wondered where Woolf fitted in that picture? He<br />
doesn’t seem to have mixed with the Beats. There are<br />
no photos of him with Creeley, or Dorn. He seems a<br />
maverick in a true sense.<br />
The Woolf stories in New American Story<br />
are The Flyman and The Cat. It is illuminating to read<br />
what I assume is Woolf’s self penned mini biography<br />
at the rear of that book, “Began in Lower Manhattan<br />
in 1922, and at a tender age was taken to the foot of<br />
Rockingstone Hill, in the suburbs. Moved back and<br />
forth until I went to Massachusetts for school and<br />
Harvard. Left childhood scenes for three years in AFS<br />
and AAF, as ambulance driver and airplane navigator,<br />
and have seldom returned except for short visits. Tried<br />
L.A., Denver, Miami, Chicago, joined by my wife on<br />
the way. Two daughters followed, and a degree from the<br />
University of New Mexico. Was born in<br />
1951 in a lookout tower on Cibola<br />
National Forest, and returned next two<br />
summers, during the last and best of<br />
which I wrote the Hypocritic Days in<br />
three sleepless months sitting on a ruptured<br />
disc. Have since moved through most of<br />
the far and southwest states as itinerant<br />
worker in ballparks, coliseums, icecream<br />
trucks, beanfields, etc, etc, settling for as<br />
long as a year at a time. Was born in 1956<br />
in an Arizona ghost town, where I wrote<br />
most of Fade Out. Was born in an<br />
Arizona copper town in 1958, and wrote<br />
Wall to Wall. Born in an Idaho lead and<br />
zinc town, 1960 and in San Isabel Forest,<br />
1962, but it gets harder every time. Died Spokane in<br />
1964, when John – Juan was born.”<br />
His name crops in the recently published<br />
Selected Letters of Robert Creeley. Woolf is mentioned<br />
by Creeley in passing in a note to Ed Dorn in<br />
September 1960, it is possibly in connection with<br />
New American Story. The mention is fleeting. By<br />
January 1961 Creeley is recommending Woolf ’s work<br />
to English poet and magazine editor Tom Raworth,<br />
listing Woolf’s address as Box 4321, Spokane 31,<br />
Washington. Raworth is looking for writers to fill the<br />
pages of his Outburst magazine. Woolf is in good<br />
20
company alongside Charles Olson, Robert Duncan,<br />
Denise Levertov, Michael Rumaker, Edward<br />
Dahlberg and William Eastlake. Creeley seems to rate<br />
Woolf. By August 1963 Creeley, in a letter to Paul<br />
Blackburn, describes Woolf as ‘…an exceptional man<br />
in all senses.’<br />
The year moves on and in November<br />
Creeley is corresponding with another English poet<br />
and small press publisher Andrew Crozier. Here<br />
Creeley mentions The Moderns. That book is<br />
published by Corinth and edited by Leroi Jones.<br />
Creeley lists Kerouac, Dorm, Burroughs, Selby<br />
alongside Douglas Woolf.<br />
Fade Out isn’t in any sense a ‘Beat’ novel, far<br />
from it. Yet it deals with the afflictions of 1950s<br />
America in a subtle unassuming<br />
manner. The chief character is a Mr.<br />
Dick Twombly. A man of seventy<br />
four years old. He is a retired bank<br />
worker from Baltimore and he finds<br />
himself living with his daughter Kate<br />
and her less than lovable husband<br />
and daughter. Henry Miller might<br />
have called it an ‘air-conditioned<br />
nightmare.’ Mr. Twombly is a kindly,<br />
reflective man and he tolerates being<br />
patronized by his family with good<br />
grace, they watch his every move.<br />
Mr. Twombly has a friend, an elderly<br />
retired ex boxer, Behemoth Brown,<br />
who lives in similar circumstances<br />
with his own family. After being<br />
falsely accused of abducting two<br />
young children Mr. Twombly’s family<br />
pack him off to a residential home. Somehow he and<br />
Behemoth escape, they actually do have to escape,<br />
and then begins a series of adventures as they<br />
hitchhike to Phoenix in Arizona. Twombly really<br />
looks forward to the sun in Phoenix.<br />
The escapades of Midnight Cowboy spring to<br />
mind and the blurb on the back of my paperback<br />
actually mentions ‘Ratso,’ from that 1970s film. The<br />
innocence of Fade Out certainly echoes that of Dustin<br />
Hoffman and John Voight in their quest to the big<br />
city. Ed Dorn labels him “the nicest ironist since<br />
Swift.” (John Latta – Isola di Rifiuti – 2010)<br />
The Village Voice said of Fade Out, ‘….the<br />
comic masterpiece of one of contemporary America’s long<br />
neglected geniuses.” And the book, on the surface a<br />
simple tale of escape is doubly a satire on the<br />
consumerism of 1950s America. Easy to lampoon<br />
now from a distance of sixty or more years, but then<br />
a state of mind that held a stranglehold over a country<br />
hellbent on that new fridge was rampant. And the way<br />
ahead to luxury.<br />
Ed Dorn said of the book, “A very exciting<br />
work, and touching, but full of the cruelty of seeming<br />
casual life. You hold your breath in the reading.”<br />
Obviously the link with Creeley was strong; Creeley’s<br />
Divers Press had originally published Woolf ’s<br />
Hypocritic Days in 1955. Woolf also appears in Black<br />
Mountain Review No 2. So the pair had history as<br />
they say.<br />
There was another Woolf story, Bank Day, in<br />
The New Writing in the USA edited by Creeley and<br />
Allen and issued by Penguin in 1967. Again he was in<br />
the company of Kerouac, Snyder, Olson, and many<br />
others familiar to readers of Beat<br />
Scene. And there are references to<br />
him in the Ed Dorn and Amiri<br />
Baraka letters from New Mexico<br />
University Press.<br />
Fade Out is partially a tale<br />
of growing old in an America that is<br />
fixated on youth and money. Dick<br />
Twombly and Behemoth Brown<br />
escape the clutches of that<br />
materialistic nightmare and set out<br />
for a free life with dignity. America<br />
may have still had segregation in<br />
many states back then, but there also<br />
existed the ignominy of growing old<br />
in a country that didn’t have any<br />
time for it. Creeley said, “Woolf’s<br />
hero is a Don Quixote, who even<br />
when defeated still hears the echoes of<br />
his transforming dreams.”<br />
Woolf dedicated Fade Out to Creeley. The<br />
book remains in print, it was released by John<br />
Martin’s Black Sparrow Press in 1995. I understand it<br />
is that edition still. Woolf has been rediscovered any<br />
number of times over the years. His talents are<br />
regularly recognized by his peers, respected, praised<br />
and he certainly found a level of commercial and<br />
critical success without ever achieving the profile of<br />
the company he kept in New American Story or The<br />
Moderns. Fade Out is a little gem in Post war<br />
American writing. Douglas Woolf died in 1992 aged<br />
70.<br />
Notes<br />
John Latta’s comments can be found at...http://isola-dirifiuti.blogspot.co.uk/2010/06/ed-dorns-douglas-woolf.html<br />
The cover shown here is the 1971 Penguin copy I have on my<br />
shelf here.<br />
Thanks to Jim Burns for input.<br />
21
THE BLOWTOP<br />
An early Beat Book?<br />
by Jim Burns<br />
Alvin Schwartz’s The Blowtop was published<br />
in 1948 and has sometimes been described as an<br />
early Beat novel, a claim that might be disputed by<br />
historians of the movement. But it does have some<br />
aspects that, if not necessarily placing it alongside<br />
books like John Clellon Holmes’s Go and Jack<br />
Kerouac’s The Town and the City, do put it in a<br />
tradition that if analysed openly can be seen to<br />
include Schwartz and Holmes and Kerouac. If a label<br />
is needed perhaps “Bohemian” might be the most<br />
useful one.<br />
When the story starts Archie, one of the<br />
central characters, has wandered into the 16 Bar,<br />
described as the “smallest of the motley row of night<br />
spots wedged within the one-block area between<br />
Sheridan Square and Barrow Street” in Greenwich<br />
Village. Archie is an aspiring novelist, though hasn’t<br />
managed to produce anything of consequence and has<br />
been reduced to acting as a ghost writer for someone<br />
else. He hasn’t been in the 16 Bar more than a few<br />
minutes when someone taps him on the shoulder and<br />
he turns to see Phil White, “a local hanger-on and<br />
occasional peddler of marijuana, from whom Archie<br />
had sometimes purchased reefers.” Phil collapses and<br />
when he’s picked up it’s discovered that he’s been<br />
shot.<br />
Archie shares accommodation with Fred, his<br />
collaborator on the book (“an elementary science<br />
text”) they’re supposed to be ghost writing, though<br />
neither of them can raise much enthusiasm for the<br />
project. Archie at one point remarks that if he “had<br />
some Benzedrine” he might be able to apply himself<br />
to the job. Before Archie had encountered Phil in the<br />
16 Bar he and Fred had been visited by Giordano, an<br />
artist who clearly has mental problems and is angry<br />
because he claims that Phil had cheated him in a drug<br />
deal. Archie and Fred discover that a gun they own<br />
illegally has disappeared from their apartment and<br />
that Giordano knew they had it. It doesn’t take them<br />
long to realise that Giordano is a prime suspect for<br />
Phil’s murder and that they’re likely to be visited by<br />
the police who have possession of Phil’s address book<br />
with details of his contacts and customers. The police<br />
are indeed beginning to call on people, and as the<br />
Inspector in charge of the case remarks: “Some<br />
blowtop pulled this, all right. And the Village is full of<br />
blowtops.”<br />
The story as I’ve outlined it so far may give<br />
the impression of it just being a crime novel with a<br />
Greenwich Village background, but it is, in fact,<br />
more than that. Without taking up too much space<br />
with a page-by-page account of what happens (and I<br />
don’t think it’s giving anything away to say that it was<br />
Giordano who shot Phil) the novel details how events<br />
have an effect on the various people involved. Archie<br />
and Fred react in different ways to being questioned<br />
by the police and to the suggestion that by owning a<br />
gun that wasn’t registered with the authorities, and<br />
allowing Giordano to obtain it, they have left<br />
themselves open to a charge of aiding and abetting a<br />
criminal and could be imprisoned. Archie and Fred<br />
fight, Fred’s girlfriend, Sylvia, falls out with him and<br />
decides that Sydney, an instructor at Columbia<br />
University, is a safer bet than the feckless Fred who<br />
seems to have little ambition and is evasive about<br />
committing himself in any way to Sylvia. And Archie<br />
visits Giordano, smokes marijuana with him, and<br />
comes to some sort of understanding about what the<br />
artist is aiming at with his abstract paintings. Some<br />
commentators have seen a kind of link to what the<br />
22
abstract expressionist painters were doing in the<br />
1940s in the descriptions of Giordano’s ideas. Even<br />
the detective involved appears to have been affected<br />
by his encounters with people like Archie and<br />
Giordano, though he does finally remark, “You<br />
fellows sure lead a queer life over there in the<br />
Village.”<br />
There are in certain of the discussions that<br />
take place between characters in The Blowtop<br />
interesting ideas raised about the nature of art, the<br />
relationship between criminals and the police, and the<br />
role of bohemians in society. When the detective calls<br />
on Giordano and notes that<br />
the painter is “high as a kite,”<br />
Giordano responds with a<br />
speech defending drug use:<br />
“You see me as a drug fiend,<br />
a man shorn of his senses and<br />
consequently an enemy of<br />
society. Arrest me then. Put<br />
me away. Shield your timid<br />
world from the devastating<br />
visions of my Olympian<br />
scorn. But remember – you<br />
cannot kill us all. There will<br />
be others to take my place.”<br />
It sounds not unlike some of<br />
the arguments put forward by<br />
certain of the Beats to justify<br />
their use of stimulants.<br />
As I remarked<br />
earlier, describing The Blowtop as an early Beat novel<br />
may be an exaggeration, but it can certainly be<br />
located within a category best referred to as a<br />
“Greenwich Village novel,” or a novel of Bohemia, if<br />
that’s preferred. There are little asides which provide<br />
descriptions of bohemian life, such as the broken<br />
chair and worn-out fridge in Archie and Fred’s<br />
apartment, the scene in Giordano’s studio, and the<br />
atmosphere in the 16 Bar. And both Archie and Fred<br />
may be seen as the kind of would-be writers<br />
frequently found in bohemian circles who aren’t ever<br />
likely to do more than leave behind some fragmentary<br />
records of their existence.<br />
So, who was Alvin Schwartz? He was born in<br />
1916 in New York, and worked at various jobs while<br />
attending night classes at C.C.N.Y. and publishing a<br />
little magazine. He also contributed poems and<br />
reviews to other little magazines. And he admitted to<br />
doing hack writing, like Archie and Fred, to make<br />
money. The Blowtop, his first novel, was published by<br />
the Dial Press, New York, in 1948. When it was<br />
published in France it became a best-seller, possibly<br />
because it was seen as having links to ideas about<br />
existentialism. In the early 1950s he had several<br />
other books published, one of which, a novel called<br />
Sword of Desire, under the name Robert W. Tracey,<br />
dealt with aspects of Wilhelm Reich’s theories which<br />
were fashionable among some bohemians in the late-<br />
1940s and early-1950s. Later, however, Schwartz<br />
became better-known for his involvements with<br />
comic-book versions of Batman and<br />
Superman. And he moved into<br />
corporate research development. He<br />
died in 2011. He should not,<br />
incidentally, be confused with another<br />
Alvin Schwartz who was a noted<br />
writer of books for children.<br />
Before leaving the subject of<br />
what the police in the book refer to as<br />
“blowtops,” and its general use in the<br />
1940s, it might be interesting to look<br />
at a song that Dinah Washington<br />
made popular in 1945. Entitled<br />
“Blowtop Blues,” and originally<br />
recorded by Etta Jones in December,<br />
1944, it was written by Leonard<br />
Feather, an Englishman who moved to<br />
New York in the late-1930s and<br />
composed songs, organised recording<br />
sessions, and wrote about jazz. He<br />
was never one to miss an opportunity to promote his<br />
own work and was involved in the 1944 date when<br />
Etta Jones sang “Blowtop Blues,” and again in the<br />
1945 date when Dinah Washington recorded it. It<br />
will perhaps give a flavour of the lyrics if I quote just<br />
a few lines of the song: “When someone turned the<br />
lights on me,/It like to drove me blind./I woke up in<br />
Bellevue,/but I left my mind behind./Last night I was<br />
five feet tall,/today I’m eight feet ten,/and every time<br />
I fall downstairs, I float back up again.”<br />
Should anyone be interested in listening to<br />
the complete lyrics of “Blowtop Blues,” they can be<br />
found on the Etta Jones version on Greenwich Village<br />
Sound (Pickwick CD PJFD 15005) or on the Dinah<br />
Washington version on Dinah Washington: The Queen<br />
Sings (Properbox 43). Her version proved to be the<br />
more popular of the two, though the Etta Jones<br />
recording is not without interest, her rather plaintive<br />
singing suiting the nature of the lyrics.<br />
23
Jeffers is my God<br />
“Jeffers, I suppose, is my god – the only man since Shakey to write the long narrative poem that does<br />
not put one to sleep...Jeffers is...darker, more...modern and mad.”<br />
Charles Bukowski - in a letter to Jory Sherman, April 1st, 1960<br />
from Screams From the Balcony (Black Sparrow Press, 1993)<br />
by Kevin L. Mills<br />
○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○<br />
Bukowski knew what he was talking about. It’s<br />
a telling letter. The modern madness he saw in Jeffers’<br />
poetry was something Bukowski could easily relate to.<br />
That Bukowski refers to Jeffers as his ‘god’ -<br />
as well as being a generous compliment- it is also<br />
indicative of his sensitivity and self-awareness, that he<br />
saw in Jeffers poetry a kindred spirit; of the two<br />
bards walking the same paths. At this point in his<br />
nascent career as a poet, Bukowski was still quite<br />
obscure. But in his letters at this time he almost<br />
always mentioned how much he admired Jeffers<br />
work. During much of the 1960s, for example, he<br />
peppered his letters to Ezra Pounds erstwhile muse,<br />
Sheri Martinelli, with numerous references, and<br />
exhortations, to read Jeffers. (Beerspit Night and<br />
Cursing – the correspondence of Charles Bukowski and<br />
Sheri Martinelli 1960 – 1967, Black Sparrow 2001).<br />
Thirty years later, Bukowski demonstrated<br />
his abiding respect for his one-time god in a poem<br />
entitled simply Jeffers in Septuagenarian Stew – Stories<br />
& Poems (Black Sparrow 1990). In this mature and<br />
elegant poem, Bukowski tells us<br />
‘his voice was dark<br />
A rock-slab pronouncement<br />
A voice not distracted by<br />
the ordinary forces of<br />
greed, cunning and need’<br />
John Robinson Jeffers was born in Pittsburgh<br />
in 1887, the son of a respected theologian, who<br />
taught him Greek and Latin at a young age. He was<br />
sent to a string of European boarding schools where<br />
he studied French, German and Italian. In 1903 his<br />
family moved to California, where Robinson enrolled<br />
at the University of Southern California. It was here<br />
he met a married woman, Una Custer, and he fell in<br />
love. Una was three years older than Jeffers, and she<br />
was married to a prominent LA attorney. But Jeffers<br />
found in Una intellectual and emotional stimulation,<br />
and it deepened their mutual attraction. Una divorced<br />
her husband and Jeffers married her, which made The<br />
Los Angeles Times, March 1 st 1913, under the<br />
sensational headline, ‘Two Points of the Eternal<br />
Triangle’. Big news indeed.<br />
The newly-weds moved to the coastal town of<br />
Carmel, and here Jeffers built –with his own handsthe<br />
house they were to live in, Tor House, just fifty<br />
yards from the crashing ocean. He was a man of the<br />
elements.<br />
Carmel had a rich heritage of artistic and<br />
bohemian characters. Robert Louis Stevenson had<br />
lived in the area; the beaches of Carmel gave him the<br />
ideal setting of Treasure Island. In 1905 the poet<br />
George Stirling was there, the protégé of Ambrose<br />
Bierce. Stirling was at the centre of an artistic colony<br />
that included, for various lengths of time, a number<br />
of distinguished writers, including Jack London and<br />
Upton Sinclair, and the tragic poet Nora May Finch,<br />
who committed suicide after a soured love affair. But<br />
it took a good few years for Jeffers work to really<br />
ignite. His first published volume of poetry, Flagons<br />
and Apples (1912) was self-financed, and failed to<br />
attract much of a readership. And soon after it<br />
arrived from the printer he lost almost complete<br />
24
Jeffers is my God<br />
interest in it. He was painfully aware that he had not<br />
written anything of lasting value. However, his<br />
second book appeared in October 1916, published<br />
commercially by Macmillan; still Jeffers was not<br />
satisfied with the poems it contained. But with the<br />
publication of Tamar and Other Poems in 1924, Jeffers<br />
began to be lauded as a great American original, and<br />
critical acclaim was fulsom indeed. The following<br />
year, Boni & Liveright brought out an expanded<br />
edition which included the epic Roan Stallion – a<br />
poem, almost conversational in style, brimming with<br />
what was rapidly becoming Jeffers key imagery:<br />
falcons, incest, blood and madness.<br />
Jeffers words are bare<br />
bones stripped of all pretention,<br />
revealing the often stark and ugly<br />
truth beneath. Life is seen<br />
cosmically, from the nebulous<br />
beginnings through apocalypse.<br />
In this sense he is prophetic; his<br />
treatment of humanity bordering<br />
on the misanthropic. His entire<br />
poetic universe is uneasy,<br />
brooding and disdainful. He does<br />
not talk about the modern world,<br />
because he knows that<br />
civilizations come and go, and<br />
nothing is permanent.<br />
That Jeffers inspired<br />
Bukowski there is no doubt.<br />
Hank actually took a line from Jeffers poem<br />
Hellenistics for the title It Catches My Heart in its<br />
Hands, which was published in 1963 by the Loujon<br />
Press. For the still-obscure Charles Bukowski there<br />
was much in Robinson Jeffers that he could get to<br />
grips with. Bukowski was an outsider, as was Jeffers;<br />
and neither thought very much of humanity. It<br />
seemed to let them down time and again. Yet there<br />
was an iron determination in both poets to succeed,<br />
despite the loneliness and disappointments they went<br />
through.<br />
When his wife died in 1950, Jeffers<br />
contemplated suicide. He began to drink heavily, but<br />
it could never ease his pain. Of course, Bukowski had<br />
his own pain, and you could say he spent a life-time<br />
diluting it. The ritualistic beatings he took from his<br />
father permanently scarred a childhood that was<br />
deprived and lonesome. How can anyone come out of<br />
that unmarked? Yet, as a mature writer, Bukowski<br />
seemed to leave any lingering bitterness behind him,<br />
for an increasing clarity in his poetry. And this is<br />
where Jeffers influence seems most prominent, in<br />
Bukowski’s later verse.<br />
In a December 21, 1960 letter to Sheri Martinelli,<br />
Bukowski writes:<br />
“Do especially read Roan Stallion.<br />
Robinson Jeffers. If you haven’t. Please do this for<br />
me...”<br />
And again to Martinelli in January 1961:<br />
“I SAID, I COMMAND THEE:<br />
READ ROAN STALLION.”<br />
And in a hand-written p.s. to that<br />
same letter:<br />
“-there was<br />
‘communication’ between horse<br />
and woman (other than spiritual)<br />
in Roan Stallion. Gd. Damn u,<br />
Sheri, why don’t you READ this<br />
book!”<br />
And that said<br />
‘communication’ is of an erotic<br />
nature; not bestial, but rather<br />
celestial. The heroine of the<br />
poem, California, is a mystic; she<br />
falls in love with the stallion and<br />
regards it as Divine.<br />
(I don’t want to elaborate<br />
on this poem too much; I don’t<br />
want to spoil anyone’s fun – and it’s more than fun<br />
when you discover it yourself).<br />
I think Bukowski loved Robinson Jeffers<br />
mainly for the elder poet’s direct, non-lyrical<br />
approach to verse. It’s encouraging to read heavy<br />
themes that anyone can understand. And it is the best<br />
way into Jeffers’ personal philosophy –Inhumanism.<br />
Herein Jeffers takes his cue from Whitman and<br />
Nietzsche, though he was criticized for being<br />
misanthropic. He wished to leave the human world<br />
behind and embrace nature to the limits of<br />
experience. The intensity of his vision made him a<br />
prophet, which nourished his isolation from the<br />
human race.<br />
And this is where Bukowski found the<br />
darkness and insanity in Jeffers’ work. In<br />
“Mockingbird Wish Me Luck” (Black Sparrow,<br />
1972), Charles published the poem ‘he wrote in<br />
lonely blood’:<br />
25<br />
above...Robinson Jeffers
Jeffers is my God<br />
Sitting here<br />
Typing<br />
At a friend’s house<br />
I find a black book by the typer:<br />
Jeffers’: Be Angry at the Sun.<br />
I think of Jeffers often,<br />
Of his rocks and his hawks and his<br />
Isolation.<br />
Jeffers was a real loner.<br />
Yes, he had to write.<br />
I try to think of loners who don’t break out<br />
At all<br />
In any fashion,<br />
And I think, no, that’s not strong,<br />
Somehow, that’s dead.<br />
Jeffers was alive and a loner and<br />
He made his statements.<br />
His rocks and his hawks and his isolation<br />
Counted.<br />
He wrote on lonely blood<br />
A man trapped in a corner<br />
But what a corner<br />
Fighting down to the last mark.<br />
“I’ve built my rock,” he sent the message to<br />
The lovely girl who came to his door,<br />
“you go build yours,”<br />
This was the same girl who had screwed Ezra,<br />
And she wrote me that Jeffers sent her away like that,<br />
BE ANGRY AT THE SUN,<br />
Jeffers was a rock who was not dead,<br />
His book sits to my left now as I type,<br />
I think of all of his people crashing down<br />
Hanging themselves, shooting themselves,<br />
Taking poisons...<br />
Locked away against an unbearable humanity,<br />
Jeffers was like his people:<br />
He demanded perfection and beauty<br />
And it was not there<br />
In human form, he found it in non-human<br />
Forms, I’ve run out of non-human forms,<br />
I’m angry at Jeffers. No,<br />
I’m not, and if the girl comes to my door<br />
I’ll send her away too, after all,<br />
Who wants to follow old<br />
Ez?<br />
Talk about hitting the nail on the head! One<br />
of the many splendours of Charles Bukowski is his<br />
ability to tell it like it is, and this marvellous poem<br />
really does the job beautifully. Name-checking Jeffers<br />
volume, Be Angry At the Sun (Random House, 1941),<br />
Bukowski does what he does best, almost effortlessly,<br />
writing poetry that could be taken as a homage to his<br />
revered ‘god’. He faces Jeffers’ apocalypse head-on,<br />
one loner to another. Yet Bukowski recognises the<br />
loners that ‘don’t break out at all, in any fashion’, the<br />
same kind of people he’d known for years in the bluecollar<br />
world of rough jobs and tough breaks. And he’s<br />
scared and angry at that world, and just glad to be out<br />
of it, because he knew all along that that world meant<br />
death, suicide or madness.<br />
And these were themes that Bukowski knew<br />
well and which he saw and responded to in the older<br />
poets work. He seems to pinpoint Jeffers’ main<br />
imagery, the rocks and the hawks, and indeed the<br />
sheer isolation of living in such austerity, that Buk<br />
could recognise himself there very easily while living a<br />
very different life. For at the time he wrote the above<br />
poem Buk was becoming famous and gaining a cult<br />
following on the reading circuit, he would never<br />
forget where he was from, nor the factory floors he’d<br />
had to shuffle across through seemingly endless, backbreaking<br />
years. And it is really from these years of<br />
working the 9 – 5 jobs that Bukowski developed as a<br />
poet; the poet as outsider. And it is from the mindnumbing,<br />
day-in, day-out; grind of the working<br />
world; of the relief through alcohol and sex and<br />
writing, that Buk came across that kindred something<br />
in Robinson Jeffers.<br />
Then Sheri Martinelli crops up again in the<br />
poem; ‘the same girl who had screwed Ezra’. As she<br />
explains in a letter to Bukowski from December 28 th ,<br />
1960, “Jeffers is in the bowels of life & so on but I’ll<br />
go to him again”. There is a certain ambiguity here,<br />
yet its plain Jeffers wasn’t too impressed with Sheri,<br />
for whatever reason. Probably because she popped up<br />
with Pound in tow, and the two American originals<br />
appraised each other through gritted eyeballs.<br />
From the previously quoted poem from 1992,<br />
Bukowski’s Jeffers, he informs us about his hero:<br />
“he would never be a popular<br />
Creator: people need to be<br />
26
Cajoled<br />
Not notified of ancient<br />
Curses<br />
Still true for our<br />
Untuned<br />
Actuality”.<br />
And Bukowski is bang on the money again;<br />
that Jeffers is not a poet who spoon-fed his readers is<br />
quite correct. The more thought the reader puts<br />
into reading, the deeper the rewards. Robinson<br />
Jeffers aesthetic universe could be variously described<br />
as anything from Gothic to Beat; Gothic because of<br />
the obvious blood-red imagery, and Beat due to the<br />
fact that Jeffers was an archetypal individualist, at<br />
odds with society, and wrote with a certain cosmic<br />
exhaustion. He could almost qualify as a hip<br />
existentialist, and the overall mood of his verse is<br />
down-beat, hermetic yet prophetic. So Bukowski<br />
certainly was in tune with Jeffers modern madness in<br />
the early 1960s.<br />
Turning once more to Bukowski’s “he wrote<br />
in lonely blood”,<br />
“I think of all his people crashing down<br />
Hanging themselves, shooting themselves,<br />
Taking poisons...<br />
Locked away against an unbearable humanity”<br />
Bukowski here describes what could be seen<br />
as an almost unbearable nightmare world, harsh and<br />
austere in the extreme. Jeffers quest was for some<br />
kind of eternal Truth which was often painful, and as<br />
he tells us in his poem Cassandra from the volume<br />
The Double Axe (Random House, 1948):<br />
“Truly men hate the truth, they’d<br />
Liefer<br />
Meet a tiger on the road.<br />
Therefore the poets honey their truth with lying...”<br />
And the truth is that human beings cannot<br />
accept much truth and usually keep their senses<br />
dulled with a provincialism bordering on the inane.<br />
Like Robinson Jeffers, Charles Bukowski dared to<br />
face the truth head-on, and this brings with it a level<br />
of awareness that is almost psychic in its intensity.<br />
On a day to day basis, human beings rarely, if ever,<br />
contemplate their lives with such stark insight. And<br />
that is why we need the poets to remind us of the<br />
abyss beneath us, because they are the unofficial<br />
legislators of the world. In a thousand years’ time,<br />
when capitalism has finally crumbled, and the petty<br />
politicians have dried up for good, poetry will still<br />
exist in all it’s glory.<br />
When Jeffers died on January 20 th , 1962,<br />
there was a minimum of fuss; there wasn’t even a<br />
funeral or a memorial service. He was cremated, his<br />
ashes now with Una’s, buried beneath a yew tree. But<br />
Jeffers left more than ashes: his granite-like verse will<br />
endure for many, many years to come –as will<br />
Bukowski’s. To show us, beneath an already vanishing<br />
world, what really went on in those small, haunted<br />
places? Bukowski will forever live with stars bursting<br />
through his soul, while Jeffers cold appraisal will leave<br />
the phonies standing.<br />
Bibliography:<br />
And all without a safety-net.<br />
Jeffers is my God<br />
Robinson Jeffers –Poet of California by James Karman (1987)<br />
Chronicle Books<br />
Robinson Jeffers –A Portrait by Louis Adamic (1929)<br />
Kessinger Legacy Reprints<br />
Against Oblivion by Ian Hamilton (2002) Penguin Books.<br />
Charles Bukowski by Barry Miles (2005) Virgin Books<br />
Charles Bukowski – Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life by<br />
Howard Sounes (1998) Rebel Inc.<br />
Hank – the Life of Charles Bukowski by Neeli Cherkovski<br />
(1991) Random House<br />
The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (2001) edited by Tim<br />
Hunt, Stanford University Press<br />
Beer Spit Night and Cursing –the correspondence of Charles<br />
Bukowski and Sheri Martinelli 1960 – 1967 (2001) edited<br />
by Steven Moore, Black Sparrow Press<br />
Septuagenarian Stew –stories & poems by Charles Bukowski<br />
(1990) Black Sparrow Press<br />
Mockingbird Wish Me Luck by Charles Bukowski (1972)<br />
Black Sparrow Press<br />
27
Ginsberg<br />
on Kerouac ...<br />
An Interview<br />
by Eric Baiz<br />
aizer<br />
er, , Reywas Div<br />
ivad, and Richard Peabody<br />
Back in 1978 Eric Baizer, Rick Peabody and Reywas Divad spoke to Allen Ginsberg about Jack Kerouac,<br />
who had died nine years earlier. At that point Kerouac’s reputation was beginning to recover from the<br />
critical battering he’d suffered during the 1960s and in the immediate years after his death.<br />
Ginsberg outlines the Kerouac landscape of the late 1970s for them. The interview appeared originally in<br />
Peabody’s tremendous literary journal Gargoyle. Big thanks to him for allowing Beat Scene to republish it<br />
here.<br />
Interviewers: When going over the media of the<br />
time it appears to me that Jack Kerouac was one of<br />
the most slandered and libeled writers of recent<br />
times.<br />
Ginsberg: It’s very interesting that you say that, I read<br />
an essay on that last night. There are two large books<br />
on Kerouac coming out, a biography by Dennis<br />
McNally of Random House, a considerable<br />
biography; and a big book, from St. Martin’s Press in<br />
New York. archived (by Barry Gifford) documents<br />
and interviews with everybody who knew Kerouac.<br />
The thing that the McNally biography is great at is<br />
accounting and itemization of all the reviews that<br />
Kerouac got for all the different books, and it’s one of<br />
the most vicious things I’ve ever seen what they did to<br />
him.<br />
Interviewers: It really was.<br />
Ginsberg: And some of it, incidentally, by CIAfunded<br />
literary magazines like Encounter, by the way.<br />
Not that the CIA had a plug in Kerouac. They had<br />
that kind of mentality that would take Kerouac’s open<br />
wit, Whitmanic beauty and honesty of person and<br />
find that creepy and subjective and egotistical or<br />
irresponsible. It’s a conservative, stupid party line.<br />
Inter<br />
ntervie<br />
viewers:<br />
ers: Though countless people have e read<br />
and like his work, it seems that to this day he is<br />
still regar<br />
egarded as a second class writer. The word<br />
“Literature” is rarely applied to Big Sur or<br />
Desolation Angels<br />
or Scripture e of the Golden Eter<br />
ternity<br />
nity.<br />
You have e consistently defended him over the years.<br />
Looking back at it now, , what kind of place will<br />
Kerouac take in literature? Is he still treated<br />
unfairly by critics? What should his reputation be?<br />
Ginsberg: There’s a guy, Anatole Broyard, of the N.<br />
Y. Times Book Review, who’s still chasing Kerouac’s<br />
corpse with a stiletto. Even posthumously denouncing<br />
Visions of Cody, which I think was Kerouac’s great<br />
prose creation. Full of beautiful cadenzas and<br />
exquisite sketches of cafeterias and subways and els<br />
(elevated lines). I still would say that Kerouac was one<br />
of the most beautiful composers of vowels and<br />
consonants, one of the most mindfully conscious<br />
writers dealing with sounds. As Warren Tallman the<br />
essayist pointed out in his great essay in the late<br />
fifties, “Kerouac’s Sound,” Kerouac had a fantastic<br />
ear and a tremendous appreciation of modern black<br />
music and black tongue and Okie tongue and<br />
provincial speech, and his rhythms and sentences are<br />
organized after the models of excited conversation,<br />
probably rhapsody. . . exclamatory delight, you find<br />
that built into his prose. He was an athletic prose<br />
writer and he was tremendously honest. He gave<br />
himself to his art and I think he was one of the great<br />
prose writers in America. Perhaps in America, itself,<br />
the single greatest in the twentieth century. His<br />
breakthrough to a realization of spontaneous mind<br />
and the enormous inventive perceptive capacity of<br />
raw mind—”first thought is best thought-is something<br />
so noble that only a few great Buddhist poets have<br />
achieved that. Chogyarn Trungpa, who’s my<br />
meditation teacher, a Tibetan lama, thinks that<br />
Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues book of poems is “a great<br />
exposition of mind,” spontaeous mind, and good<br />
28
Ginsberg on Kerouac<br />
Buddhism, too, as Gary Snyder, the trained Buddhist,<br />
thinks.<br />
All of my poetic practice is founded on<br />
Kerouac’s notion of non-revising, “spit forth<br />
intelligence at the moment.” It’s in the tradition of<br />
twentieth century thought, actually, Western thought.<br />
From Heisenberg who said if you stop to observe a<br />
wave you impede its function: Einstein who said if<br />
you want to know the shape of the Universe, you had<br />
to examine the measuring instrument. So what<br />
Kerouac was doing was examining his own mind. The<br />
thoughts of the mind as they proceeded, rising<br />
“unborn” in the mind. He was able to notate on the<br />
page and it created a great<br />
extraordinary poetic panoply of<br />
what comes up from the naked<br />
mind, what the naked mind is<br />
capable of when it’s not trying<br />
to sneak over an arty,<br />
academic, shamed, revised<br />
version of reality.<br />
What does the mind<br />
really think? What is the poetry<br />
of pure mind? And he was the<br />
first person to have that great<br />
breakthrough of consciousness<br />
in art. Well, not the first, it is a<br />
tradition. Gertrude Stein was<br />
into that. It actually was a<br />
main tradition in American<br />
letters from Whitman on.<br />
When Whitman said, “We<br />
don’t have to pay the<br />
immensely overpaid accounts<br />
on the Battle of Troy anymore.<br />
The muse is here in America.<br />
She’s here installed amidst the<br />
kitchenware, that’s “ordinary<br />
mind.”<br />
Williams relied on ordinary speech in his<br />
practice of imagism. Gertrude Stein explored the<br />
ordinary mind moment by moment in her vast<br />
experiment with The Making of Americans in writing<br />
creation and composition. Stein is, in a sense, the<br />
innovator.<br />
But Kerouac applied that ordinary mind<br />
rhapsody—that is to say, the unimpeded flow of<br />
intelligence—in prose, to telling a narrative story, and<br />
there was something monumental about that. I would<br />
say he created a monumental “artwork,” despite the<br />
hostility of academia, despite sneering journalistic<br />
jealousy. Despite the smog of the secret police which<br />
29<br />
scared him, too, and made him withdraw from public<br />
front. Despite my own incomprehension and the<br />
incomprehension of his friends who sometimes didn’t<br />
understand how far he was goin,. ‘cause my first<br />
reaction to Visions of Cody was of shock—Where was<br />
this? Where was this coming from? It wasn’t like a<br />
novel I’d ever heard of. Despite his publisher’s<br />
money-grubbing boorishness in not publishing his<br />
novels when they were written, in not publishing<br />
them in the right order and leaving many to be<br />
published posthumously. Despite repression from his<br />
family. Despite an attack in the media that was so<br />
vast it looks like organized psychosis when you look<br />
back on it—friends like Kenneth Rexroth saying that<br />
he couldn’t write<br />
poetry; Norman<br />
Podhoretz<br />
attacking him as a<br />
juvenile<br />
delinquent, instead<br />
of seeing him as an<br />
artist. Despite all<br />
that, one single,<br />
lonely tearful guy<br />
created this<br />
masterpiece against<br />
everything. He had<br />
to follow his heart,<br />
and that’s pure art.<br />
His intelligence<br />
was extraordinary<br />
that way. ‘Cause he<br />
read, he was very<br />
learned. He had<br />
read Shakespeare,<br />
a lot of Sir Thomas<br />
Browne, read all<br />
through Rabelais<br />
and Celine,<br />
listened to Bach’s<br />
B-Minor Mass night<br />
after night, and St.<br />
Matthew’s Passion. The amazing thing is that even in<br />
his illness in the sixties when he was drinking too<br />
much, he created a body of work at a time when he<br />
was supposed to be in “decline,” a phase that people<br />
still insult, this fantastic record of his own breakdown<br />
and degeneration from alcohol in Big Sur in 1961. He<br />
went on to complete the second part of Desolation<br />
Angels, which was a great retrospective of his situation<br />
with fame and with “the San Francisco Renaissance”<br />
with all the poets (Whalen, Snyder, McClure,<br />
Lamantia, Duncan, etc.)<br />
Inter<br />
ntervie<br />
viewers:<br />
ers: Those books are e both out of print<br />
here in the U.S.<br />
Kerouac, Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Lafcadio<br />
Orlovsky and Gregory Corso. Mexico, 1956.<br />
Photographer unknown.
Ginsberg on Kerouac<br />
Ginsberg: They’ll be in print now soon. Actually,<br />
almost everything’s now in print, or will be soon.<br />
That’s coming out actually, Desolation Angels and<br />
Vanity of Dulouz. Desolation Angels filled in the story<br />
in the late fifties as well as The Dharma Bums, that is,<br />
the story proceeding from the forties up to the late<br />
fifties. Then the capstone of all that, the great arch, is<br />
Big Sur, where he tells of his own breakdown. Then<br />
after Big Sur he wrote Desolation Angels Part II,<br />
finished that book. Then he did a retrospective view<br />
of his own romantic idealistic illusory follies, sort of<br />
outside the great Dulouz legend, outside the great<br />
panorama. He looked back as in old age, in a book<br />
which is so loose and free and funny in its prose, The<br />
Vanity of Dulouz, (The Vanity of Kerouac), that it’s<br />
actually a revelation on his early style, and a change,<br />
in enormous growth, and new depth. Literarily it’s<br />
curious because the tone developed from Herman<br />
Melville’s poems John Marr and Other Sailors, in<br />
which Melville in his old age writing poetry is taking<br />
on the persona of John Marr, an old retired sailor<br />
sitting with his pipe of bohee tobacco talking to his<br />
wife saying “Well Wifey, let me tell you about<br />
Bridegroom Dick when we were back there,<br />
Bridegroom Dick the Sailor he’ll not come by no<br />
more . . .” and they’re beautiful poems, retrospective,<br />
love poems to all the old sailor friends he sailed<br />
around the south seas with.<br />
So people don’t recognize that cultivation.<br />
They think it’s just sloppy Kerouac talking to his wife<br />
or something, not realizing he finally came down to<br />
home nitty-gritty as Melville did; and he read<br />
Melville’s “John Marr,” we used to talk about it all the<br />
time. So then after that he united both his youths: he<br />
had written a short book called Pic. Then he did<br />
Satori in Paris, which was a completely funny,<br />
drunken comedy on himself, a brief vignette of going<br />
to Paris to find his ancestors’ names and<br />
backgrounds. Then he did the last chapter of Pic<br />
which was about a little picaninny, a little black boy<br />
coming from the south which he’d written before, and<br />
he put on a last chapter which was “hitch-hiking<br />
north,” whom does he run into on the road but Neal<br />
Cassady (Dean Moriarty)! But his mother didn’t like<br />
it, or his wife didn’t like it, so he put on another little<br />
ending and it was published with that other ending,<br />
but there is in his manuscripts a very funny little<br />
thing where he reunites his early springtime youthful<br />
Pic book with a retrospective view of the young kid<br />
meeting the Heroes in his youth. In addition,<br />
McNally in his biography says he wrote all the time<br />
so he’s got innumerable notebooks, poems, God<br />
knows what, that nobody knows about.<br />
Inter<br />
ntervie<br />
viewers: ers: Aren<br />
en’t t legal battles with his heirs<br />
holding up publication of some of his manuscripts?<br />
Ginsberg: No not quite. I’ll explain that. What is<br />
really interesting is that on the day he died, 10:30 in<br />
the morning, he was looking at television with a<br />
notebook open on his lap still writing and he got up,<br />
laid the notebook aside, his wife wanted to fix him<br />
some tuna fish or some lunch, he said no. He opened<br />
a can of tuna fish, ate it, went into the bathroom,<br />
started vomiting, called “I’m hemorrhaging, I’m<br />
hemorrhaging, help!” His wife came in and took him<br />
to the hospital and he died. So he was writing on the<br />
very moment of his death. Kerouac has always been<br />
pointed to as “ degenerating, “ “ he failed, “he “didn’t<br />
do anything,” he “wasted his last years.” But he<br />
produced a body of work in the sixties that rivals<br />
anybody’s. He wrote more than I did. And also work<br />
that was seasoned, disillusioned and interesting; you<br />
know like his retrospective, puncturing all the<br />
balloons and follies of youth. So there is still a terrific<br />
study to come. And all of the dream books and<br />
notebooks and haikus and poems and journals that he<br />
kept, all through the sixties and fifties and forties are<br />
still unpublished. We still don’t know the extent of his<br />
art.<br />
The legal problem is: his wife, Stella, has a<br />
lot of manuscripts left or in the bank, or up in Lowell<br />
with the family. She won’t let anybody see them.<br />
What’s known of them is Some of the Dharma, a long<br />
series of essays and haikus and poems he wrote on<br />
Buddhist subjects when he was studying that which he<br />
kept for maybe eight years. You know, writing for<br />
Gary Snyder’s ear and for mine. The San Francisco<br />
Blues (1954), written in a rocking chair from flop<br />
house hotel Mission Street, Third Street. There’s a<br />
great notebook that he kept while writing On The<br />
Road which is in the University of Texas, a journal of<br />
writing On The Road which is in perfect fat print,<br />
very legible, and Andy Brown of Gotham Book Mart<br />
wants to publish a facsimile copy but he can’t get<br />
permission from the family. Stella, his wife and<br />
widow, her view is “aaah leave something for Ph.D.<br />
scholars in another ten years. He’s got enough out<br />
already.” They still haven’t republished yet all his<br />
books that are already in print. What’s coming out<br />
now—Viking, I believe is bringing out something, I<br />
forget. I got the advance proofs about a half year ago.<br />
Vanity of Dulouz is in reprint, Desolation Angels in<br />
reprint, I think Tristessa and Maggie Cassidy, two other<br />
books hard to get are coming out McGraw-Hill or<br />
something like that. So I think by the end of the year<br />
every single published work will be back in print.<br />
Which is amazing, actually, because it’s about<br />
nineteen books. They’ll all be available finally again<br />
30
Ginsberg on Kerouac<br />
after being in and out. That was his publisher’s<br />
stupidity and his agents’. The problem was he wrote<br />
On the Road, that was a big experimental thing after<br />
publishing his first book The Town and the City. It was<br />
turned down by everybody, Louis Simpson, John Hall<br />
Wheelock who just died the other day. Malcolm<br />
Cowley had to fight for years to get it published by<br />
Viking. So it wasn’t published, he wrote it in ’51 and<br />
it wasn’t published until ’57 or ’58. Jack was broke all<br />
this time. He had to work and had to be dependent<br />
on his mother. Even after all these things were<br />
published he didn’t have any money. A $1,000<br />
advance for On the Road or something, $2,000. He<br />
never got any money. $7, 000 for<br />
Tristessa. But that’s a high school<br />
teacher’s income, half a college<br />
instructor’s income, and he’s<br />
supposed to live on that. Finally<br />
he was going to sign a contract<br />
toward the end of his life to<br />
deliver a novel and I said “Don’t<br />
do that, don’t indenture yourself<br />
like that, sell my letters.” So<br />
instead of signing a contract for<br />
$7 1/2 thousand, he sold my<br />
letters to Texas and had a few<br />
years of like, a little cash to buy a<br />
house for his mother.<br />
What they should have<br />
done was first published On the<br />
Road, and then they should have<br />
followed that with Visions of Cody,<br />
and they should have followed it<br />
up with The Subterraneans, and<br />
they should have followed it up<br />
with Maggie Cassidy, and they<br />
should have followed it up with Doctor Sax, and they<br />
should have followed it up with Tristessa, and they<br />
should have followed it up with Mexico City Blues . . .<br />
Then he wrote The Dharma Bums after On<br />
the Road was published because they said, “Why don’t<br />
you write something simple to explain what all these<br />
people are about?” So he should have had everything<br />
published in a readable order just as he wrote them<br />
so people could follow the development of his mind<br />
and not confuse them. There was a publishers’<br />
boorishness, that’s why I said “publishers’ moneygrubbing<br />
boorishness.” They didn’t realize they had a<br />
great prose artist on their hands and they were just<br />
looking at him as a social phenomenon or money or<br />
something.<br />
Inter<br />
ntervie<br />
viewers:<br />
ers: What do you think of Ann Charters<br />
ters’<br />
biography?<br />
Ginsberg: The problem with the Charters’ book is:<br />
because of a contract that Aaron Latham the “official<br />
biographer” had gotten with Random House which<br />
shared the money with the family, Ann Charters’<br />
book was “unofficial” and she was not given access to<br />
his original manuscripts, nor given permission to<br />
quote directly from anything in his estate. She had<br />
written the book without knowing this, or without<br />
thinking seriously that they could have dared do a<br />
thing like that to literary material. So at the last<br />
minute the proofs of the book was in the hands of<br />
Straight Arrow Press, she was having a baby, went to<br />
Sweden, and the quotations were made into<br />
paraphrases by secretaries at<br />
Straight Arrow Press sort of<br />
like with a meat axe. So that<br />
what was once somewhat<br />
delicate in her book was<br />
transformed into a long<br />
narrative basically Kerouac’s<br />
own words which were made<br />
into paraphrase, and it sounds<br />
like she is “kvetching” or<br />
coming on superior to Kerouac<br />
and he sounds depressing, when<br />
actually the long narrative<br />
passages are his own humor<br />
and wit and intelligence<br />
criticizing himself in a rueful<br />
burlesque manner.<br />
For instance, there is a<br />
section that begins “Kerouac<br />
came up from Big Sur and all<br />
that he could see were nasty<br />
American housewives staring at<br />
him through the windows of<br />
their cars and looking the other way as if he were an<br />
axe murderer. . .” Well, that’s Kerouac saying “I got<br />
up on the road and all I could see were these nasty<br />
American housewives looking at me as if I were an<br />
axe murderer or something. . .” So it was Charters<br />
without quotation marks saying “all he could see were<br />
nasty American housewives. . .” So it makes him<br />
seem like a depressing fool instead of a witty fellow.<br />
So the phrase I use for that is “he’s not given credit<br />
for his own intelligence” in that book. And the<br />
biographer seems “superior” to him in moral<br />
perception, whereas she’s relying on his own moral<br />
and psychological perceptions of himself, and long<br />
passages in her book are deceptive to the reader<br />
because the reader thinks it’s her accounting of him<br />
in writing biography, whereas it’s him telling what<br />
happened to himself very truthfully, very honestly. So<br />
the whole book’s out of focus. One gets the<br />
impression that he’s a depressed case, whereas<br />
31
Ginsberg on Kerouac<br />
actually it’s the depressing case of American<br />
commercialism getting a text screwed up.<br />
Interviewers: Do you have any comment on the<br />
Jar<br />
arvis book, Visions of Ker<br />
erouac<br />
ouac?<br />
Ginsberg: Well, Jarvis is kind of funny. It’s a lot of<br />
local gossip. Kerouac kept patiently answering foolish<br />
questions by Jarvis who’s a prurient questioner. So it’s<br />
a kind of funny book. It’s useful for you know that<br />
phase of Kerouac when he talked to local Charlie.<br />
Charlie’s very shocked about my sleeping with Jack;<br />
he says he doesn’t believe it or something. It’s kind of<br />
naive. But it’s useful source material. The new book<br />
by McNally I think is the best<br />
account of his life. That’ll be coming<br />
out in a year or so.<br />
Inter<br />
ntervie<br />
viewers: ers: Music is fascinating<br />
with some of your poems. When I<br />
read things I put on music in the<br />
background. Do you write much<br />
with music going on, or are you<br />
consciously aware e that you<br />
ou’re<br />
putting music on at all, no matter<br />
what kind it is?<br />
Ginsberg: Well following the example<br />
of Hart Crane who wrote “The<br />
Bridge” with a lot of Bessie Smith<br />
records on or jazz or Bach, I used to<br />
do that, but I find it interrupts my own rhythm. I get<br />
a lot of influence through Kerouac by music,<br />
particularly for that long breath saxophone cry that<br />
you might get out of Lester Young, solos of Coleman<br />
Hawkins, Charlie Parker’s long bird-flighted tunes<br />
that begin and end finally at the end of a sentence-<br />
MAWP! So the long breath, which is derived<br />
somewhat from Black American speech and which<br />
has been the inspiration to poets in America for the<br />
last fifty years. Lately I’ve been working with<br />
musicians. Well, not lately—I’ve been working with<br />
Don Cherry since 68-69-70. We recorded together. I<br />
set Blake’s “Songs of Innocence” to music. And I’m<br />
still working on it. This past month I’ve been working<br />
on Blake’s “Tiger” to get that together. It’s a<br />
heartbeat. “Ti-ger, Tiger, burn-ing boom-boom,<br />
boom-boom. . .” (chants part of the poem). And I’ve<br />
been working with Bob Dylan who’s been teaching me<br />
chords. So I’ve been singing blues and I put out a<br />
book called First Blues and I worked with John<br />
Hammond, Sr., who recorded Billie Holiday and<br />
some Bessie Smith and Dylan and I made two<br />
records of First Blues. And this last long poem I<br />
have (The Rune) has a four chord rhapsody. Mostly<br />
with music I’ve been working on rhymed matter. I<br />
don’t know how to handle the long line with music, as<br />
in -Howl-. I could in sort of Hebraic-Indian form “I<br />
saw the best minds of my generation. . . .” (chants<br />
“I get a lot of<br />
influence through<br />
Kerouac by music,<br />
particularly for<br />
that long breath<br />
saxophone cry that<br />
you might get out<br />
of Lester<br />
Young....”<br />
32<br />
first couple of lines from “Howl” in C chord). But I<br />
don’t know ... could get something going that way, I’d<br />
like to.<br />
Lately what I’m into through the influence of<br />
Ed Sanders—he being a classics specialist—is digging<br />
the tremendous dance music rhythms of Greek<br />
prosody, where they had feet that went BA-DAM<br />
BAM BAH . . . BA-DAM BAM BAH. Ionic meters,<br />
they’re called. Or DUN DA-DUN DA ... DUN DA-<br />
DUN DA. “Moloch” was built that way. “Mo-loch<br />
whose eyes are a thou-sand blind win-dows.” The long<br />
feet, which are basically ancient Greek dance<br />
rhythms. I didn’t know that—I just got my own ear.<br />
But Sanders is making me more and<br />
more conscious of that. He said that<br />
he read “Howl” in Kansas City and<br />
he’d been studying classics and<br />
recognized old Greek dithyrambic<br />
rhythms and that was his specialty. So<br />
we’ve been working on that and he<br />
may teach that at Naropa. So I’ve<br />
been influenced by both irregular<br />
asymmetrical rhythmical run-on bop<br />
and the symmetrical meters of the<br />
Greeks, as well as Poe and things like<br />
that.<br />
One other thing. We’ve been<br />
talking about rhythm. Now tone,<br />
notes. The big discovery I had in<br />
putting Blake together, I realized that when I<br />
pronounce my poetry I try to follow William Carlos<br />
Williams, try to use the whole gamut of what does a<br />
normal voice talk like. How many different tones do<br />
we use? In his preface to Basil Bunting’s poems back<br />
in the fifties, Pound wrote a poet should “follow the<br />
tone leading of the vowels.” One vowel leads to<br />
another in different tones and those tones are<br />
emotional tones, for emphasis. We don’t in America<br />
have a study of the vowel lengths like classical<br />
prosody. The traditional measure of the line is accent,<br />
rather than the length of the vowels which Pound<br />
returned to American practice, emphasizing<br />
particularly the tone leading of the vowels. So when I<br />
began putting Blake to music I tried to figure out how<br />
you’d go about saying it if you had to say it “Ti-ger,<br />
Ti-ger,” high-low, high-low. So actually if you’ve got a<br />
really good poem and you pronounce it as you would<br />
speak it, you’ll get the different tones of the vowels<br />
and you can actually make melody or you can<br />
extrapolate it or project it into melody or into tunes<br />
real easy but you gotta first be able to pronounce it<br />
natural, because if you pronounce it like poetry it all<br />
runs out to monotone—there’s no variation. If you<br />
say “Ti-ger, ti-ger,” you’ll get a different tone and<br />
you’ll be able to get a melody out of it.
Ginsberg on Kerouac<br />
Inter<br />
ntervie<br />
viewers: ers: Semantic structur<br />
ucture, but it’s s natural.<br />
Ginsberg: Right, it’s structural and it’s natural as all<br />
good structures are, or enduring structures are.<br />
Inter<br />
ntervie<br />
viewers:<br />
ers: You are e one of the only poets in the<br />
U.S., and I would imagine in the history of the<br />
world, who has been able to survive financially<br />
from reading and writing poetry. . A lot of us would<br />
like to know if you have any advice for anybody<br />
else.<br />
Ginsberg: Write good poetry. . .Now wait a minute, I<br />
want to put a little clip into that. First of all, I didn’t<br />
anticipate this, I got pushed into this situation when<br />
the customs seized my book and the vice squad<br />
descended on Howl and put it through a trial so<br />
notorious that people started buying it because they<br />
thought it was a dirty book. Normally, when Howl<br />
was printed in a thousand copies by City Lights like<br />
any other book of poetry, that’s all they expected to<br />
sell.<br />
So it’s just an accident that I got pushed by the<br />
government into this situation. Before that, I made<br />
my living washing dishes in Bickford’s or mopping<br />
the floor of the May Company or vacuum cleaning,<br />
or working as a welder in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, or<br />
I had a year’s time on the ocean as a merchant<br />
seaman. I have several years’ time in market research.<br />
So I had whole different kinds of careers as a day<br />
laborer, night laborer, blue collar worker, white collar<br />
worker, and I always figured that I’d have to make my<br />
living some other way beside teaching or writing<br />
poetry. I think people should figure on that because<br />
there aren’t so many poets that can make it. And I<br />
don’t make enough money writing poetry and<br />
publishing it to support myself really—if I live real<br />
cheap, which I do, I live in penury, not poverty. Like<br />
the suit I’m wearing which is beautiful is Salvation<br />
Army, $12, including the alterations to make it look<br />
distinguished so I can wear my National Institute<br />
medal with it. But it’s all Salvation Army. I live on the<br />
lower East Side of New York in a real terrible slum<br />
rat street where the garbage is all over the street and<br />
I’ve been mugged and shot at with B.B. guns. So I’m<br />
not exactly living the life of luxury. But all I get from<br />
City Lights (which is my main publisher) is probably<br />
$7,000 a year. See I don’t make a lot of money. For<br />
years I used to read free. From 1955-65 I made it a<br />
business of reading for free and supporting myself by<br />
sailing in merchant ships up under the DEW line.<br />
Cause I didn’t think poetry and gold should mix.<br />
Particularly in that kind of America, where everybody<br />
was competing for gold, things would get too mixed<br />
up, I thought poetry should be something outside the<br />
system. I read now for money and I try to recycle the<br />
money to other poetic projects like this reading I’m<br />
doing in Washington. I get some money for reading<br />
when I’m broke and strapped and I have to pay off<br />
my debts. Cause I get extravagant like $200 phone<br />
bills and call Ann Arbor, call Ira Lowe* in<br />
Washington, call Ed Sanders, call Marty Lee of the<br />
Assassination Information Bureau here. You know to<br />
get it all together, call Princeton and get FBI Cointel-<br />
Program, Xeroxes from The Princetonian, call back<br />
to Ann Arbor to the Daily Michigan. “Have you got<br />
your story out, can you send me a copy so I can send<br />
it to the Assassination Information Bureau?” So I’ve<br />
got phone bills, and taxi bills and plane bills. My<br />
actual living expenses are pretty cheap. So I wouldn’t<br />
suggest anybody anticipate making money on poetry.<br />
Your college prof makes anywhere between $15,000<br />
and $25,000-$30,000, and the super college prof,<br />
$35,000 . . .Vonnegut or Schlesinger . . . special<br />
chair at CCNY. I could do that if I wanted but I’d<br />
rather be at Naropa Institute where I get $1,000 for<br />
the whole summer. Because there’s a live scene there<br />
with student meditators and great teachers and Zen<br />
masters and Tibetan lamas. Kerouac didn’t make any<br />
money. In his biography I saw some years he had<br />
nothing. A thousand dollar check from his agent, two<br />
thousand. He had to sell my letters to move to<br />
Florida. William Burroughs doesn’t have any money,<br />
now, for instance. Burroughs, with all his books. He<br />
has money you know like a high school teacher, he<br />
doesn’t have a lot.<br />
Inter<br />
ntervie<br />
viewers: ers: Didn<br />
idn’t t he get anything for the film<br />
rights to Junky<br />
unky?<br />
Ginsberg: He got I think twenty grand, which<br />
stretched over a two-year period, which is about<br />
$10,000 a year, which is what? A grant from the NEA<br />
gets that, Guggenheim, or something. Gregory Corso<br />
has no money and he’s a productive poet. He’s a<br />
world figure, sort of, but he gets what? I think his<br />
royalties from New Directions are a couple thousand,<br />
if that. From City Lights maybe $500, $400, $300 a<br />
year. He has to live by his wits. So I would suggest<br />
poets learn to live by their wits. Or best like Gary<br />
Snyder, get some kind of honest labor job, carpentry,<br />
something planting trees, something involving<br />
reforestation. Or applying for grants, maybe that’s the<br />
way to do it.<br />
*Ira Lowe, a lawyer engaged in extracting the author’s<br />
dossiers from FBI, CIA and Secret Service files.<br />
Editors Note: Dennis McNally’s biography is entitled<br />
Desolate Angel. The Warren Tallman essay on “Kerouac’s<br />
Sound” is available in Open Letter, Third Series, No, 6,<br />
Coach House Press, 401 (rear) Huron St., Toronto, Ontario.<br />
Rick Peabody is the editor of A Different Beat: Writings by<br />
Women of the Beat Generation. Published by Serpent’s Tail.<br />
he can be found at www.gargoylemagazine.com<br />
33
Lew Welch –<br />
A Journal of<br />
Remembrance<br />
Stephen Vincent<br />
March 1, 1971<br />
Dear Lew,<br />
I’m in the beginning of teaching a course<br />
at the Art Institute that I’m calling BAY AREA ART<br />
& POETRY since WWII. (I come out of the poetry<br />
end of it and am learning a lot about the art). Anyhow<br />
we started down around Point Lobos with Jeffers,<br />
moved over into the Valley with early Everson, then<br />
up into the mountains with Rexroth & going north<br />
with the earlier Snyder and Roethke. Coordinating<br />
poets, painters and photographers where possible<br />
(Weston, Morris, Graves , Toby). Anyway, in a couple<br />
of weeks, we’ll be coming down the coast to finally<br />
get into the City.<br />
Here’s where I’m hoping we can get together. I’ll be<br />
having the class read ON OUT, and The Song Mnt.<br />
Tamalpais Sings. What I want to propose is bringing<br />
the class over to Marin County, say either the Muir<br />
Beach or somewhere on the Mountain and spend a<br />
morning with you reading and rapping about the<br />
poems, anyway you would like to handle it. I’d like to<br />
suggest Monday, March 22. About ten in the<br />
morning. Some students have studio classes in the<br />
afternoon, so I don’t want to cut them out, case the<br />
thing should extend into the afternoon…<br />
Sincerely<br />
Stephen Vincent<br />
3/20/71<br />
Dear Stephen<br />
Unfortunately I’ll be in the state of<br />
Washington till April 1 st or maybe 15 th . The class<br />
sounds really great & I regret to have to miss it.<br />
I’ll phone you when I return to S.F. Is it possible to<br />
do my part in April? Ginsberg will be in town at the<br />
end of April, too.<br />
I can be reached c/o Wm. Yardes, 606 Englebert Rd.,<br />
Woodland, Wash., till April 1 st .<br />
I’ll be talking to you soon.<br />
II<br />
WOBBLY ROCK RE-FELT<br />
Wobbly Rock<br />
1.<br />
for Gary Snyder<br />
“I think I’ll be the Buddha of this place”<br />
and sat himself<br />
down<br />
It’s a real rock<br />
(believe this first)<br />
Resting on actual sand at the surf’s edge:<br />
Muir Beach, California<br />
Lew Welch<br />
(like everything else I have<br />
somebody showed it to me and I found it by myself)<br />
Hard common stone<br />
Size of the largest haystack<br />
It moves when hit by waves<br />
Actually shudders<br />
(even a good gust of wind will do it<br />
if you sit real still and keep your mouth shut)<br />
Notched to certain center it<br />
Yields and then comes back to it:<br />
Wobbly tons<br />
34
-----------<br />
It’s Monday morning. All weekend I’ve been<br />
looking for Lew Welch. A month ago we exchanged<br />
letters, tentatively agreeing that he will meet the class.<br />
However, we have lost touch. I fail to get a letter off<br />
to him in time to his temporary address in<br />
Washington. The letter I leave at Serendipity<br />
Bookshop gets rightly forwarded to Gary Snyder’s<br />
place above Nevada City while I’m off to New York<br />
at Easter, but apparently doesn’t get back to him.<br />
Back in the Bay Area, I work on a<br />
few leads. Jack Shoemaker, at the<br />
Bookshop, says to try the No Name<br />
bar in Sausalito. A week ago I start.<br />
One day one bartender says he saw<br />
him on Saturday. But that he’s gone<br />
to Nevada City. A couple of days<br />
later another bartender says he saw<br />
him last night. I leave a message for<br />
him to call. No luck. On Friday<br />
night I hear Allen Ginsberg has<br />
come to town. Lew mentioned that<br />
in his letter. Perhaps they’re together.<br />
Ginsberg must be going to the Peace<br />
March. On Saturday at the Polo<br />
Grounds, I look all over for Allen,<br />
half expecting him to be leading<br />
chants in the middle of somewhere.<br />
No luck. Just people, people, people.<br />
I call City Lights and get a clue that<br />
he might be staying up at the<br />
publishing office, up on Grant.<br />
On Sunday afternoon, I go to the<br />
door, but no one is there. I go to the<br />
store. Ask the clerk who knows<br />
nothing. I write a note. While I’m at<br />
it, a short olive complexioned guy<br />
with a girl who has a woolen cap<br />
pulled tough style over her head,<br />
come in. The guy, happy smile on<br />
his face ups to the counter and says,<br />
“Have you seen Allen,” as if he were<br />
getting ready to put his hands on a<br />
gift. The young oriental clerk with<br />
shoulder length black hair, says,<br />
“No.” The guy, almost taking a<br />
dance step back, says, “Is he staying over the<br />
publishing office?”<br />
The clerk, honest, says “I don’t know. I just<br />
heard he got into town.”<br />
And I’m flashing, maybe I’m gonna pin this<br />
note on the wrong door, if Ginsberg is upstairs. So, I<br />
say to the guy, “Say, I’m trying to get a note to Allen.<br />
Did you say that place is upstairs?”<br />
The guy, continuing to back out the door, puts<br />
a slow smile on his face, as if he were courtier to the<br />
now secret guest, says, “I’m afraid I can’t tell you<br />
that.” Smack.<br />
“Elitist.” The word comes flash out of my<br />
mouth. Bam. He backs out the door where his hard<br />
chick is waiting. “Elitist,” she repeats, as if trying to<br />
disown the accusation. But it’s only re-enforced when<br />
it bumbles out of her mouth. They split.<br />
Lew Welch used to speak a lot about only<br />
writing what is ‘accurate.’ That made me feel foul<br />
after.<br />
I leave the note on the front door, asking Allen<br />
to please call, if he can help in the search. I get home<br />
and wait. Nothing happens. I give the No Name one<br />
more call. Yes he was in Saturday night. No, they<br />
don’t know where he’s staying. I simply give up,<br />
saddened by the failure of the whole process.<br />
----------<br />
Lew Welch<br />
About ten students show. We all decide to go<br />
anyway. We’ll go to Muir Beach and find Wobbly<br />
Rock. Four cars and we’re over there by ten o’clock.<br />
35
Lew Welch<br />
Don, one of the students, brings out a big bottle of<br />
Red Gallo, and between us we have homemade bread,<br />
oranges and apples. It’s an overcast day, what the<br />
radio calls, ‘high clouds,’ but not too cold. I’ve been<br />
told that the rock is at the south end of the beach, so<br />
I figure we can find it from the evidence within the<br />
poem. (Charles Olson, I hear, thought Wobbly Rock<br />
was Lew’s best thing.) So off we go across the curve<br />
of sand, then into rocks, until we come to a large<br />
rock that stands on the edge of water, below the dirt<br />
cliff, at the beginning of the beaches inward curve. I<br />
look around its base. Sure enough the rock is wedged<br />
into a crater of several rocks. And yes, before this<br />
bare trunk got wedged between the high rock and the<br />
crater must have rocked back and forth from the<br />
pressure of the waves, at least when they began to lap<br />
hard against it, during high tide.<br />
“This is it. This must be it,” I announce, as if I<br />
just discovered a lost landmark, or an old gold mine.<br />
Suddenly I’m self conscious in the role of teacher. The<br />
first section of the poem says, “Shut up.” And here I<br />
am talking about it, a little like the morning, after<br />
sleeping in the temple of Athena at Delphi. I woke to<br />
find an Encyclopedia of Britanica filming crew<br />
making a film of the grounds, the members of the<br />
crew mimicking the different gods they remembered<br />
from school, but that I thought still inhabited the<br />
place. I was still too afraid to tell them to ‘Shut Up.’<br />
But even now, at the Rock, with Lew’s books in hand,<br />
I still feel like the uptight French tourist being led<br />
around by his Guide Bleu.<br />
Anyway I don’t feel right about it. It is comic<br />
that the Rock in the book wobbles, and the one here<br />
doesn’t. And I want to read the poem. And it’s a<br />
jarring contrast. The poem suddenly feels very<br />
innocent. But I work my way through it, speaking as<br />
loud as I can, giving language space there on the<br />
rocks and ledges that surround the stone. Here and<br />
there I stop to give explanation as best I can of a Zen<br />
means of perception. But it still doesn’t feel right and<br />
I wish to hell Lew were here to justify this situation<br />
I’ve put myself in. Something is all wrong. Instead of<br />
getting right away into the reading of the poem, we<br />
should have climbed around, and got a literal feel and<br />
respect for the place.<br />
I’m doing all this standing up with my back<br />
against a shelf of rock that faces Wobbly. Some<br />
students are standing, others have sat down on<br />
different stones, or on the log up close to the cliff. To<br />
try and make my sense of relationship to the poem<br />
more human, I finish this part of the morning by<br />
reading part of a little thing I wrote on Lew’s book,<br />
ON OUT, a few weeks back:<br />
…in Jeffers (Robinson) the plea is to enter<br />
nature, become divorced from human kind. Nobility<br />
is the vital identification with energies that emanate<br />
from natural and non-human forces. Man’s presence<br />
is most often viewed as evil, plunging the planet into<br />
failure. The tone is pessimistic, excessively<br />
individualistic, isolationist. Welch comes close to<br />
Jeffers when he views how man exploits the<br />
environment, turning the planet to smoke. However<br />
he sees a community of possibility. When people are<br />
free, i.e., relate to nature unselfconsciously, there is a<br />
balanced achieved, man becomes an implicit and<br />
beneficial element of nature. The sea within becomes<br />
the sea without. A harmonious intercourse. A bliss<br />
achieved.<br />
Much of ON OUT is designed to explore<br />
perception. How, or what is the right way to view the<br />
world, the immediate location of our existence. What<br />
is accurate. Notably he rejects artificial impositions,<br />
things that get in the way. Obviously he would be<br />
against surrealism, closer to a ‘rose is a rose is a<br />
rose.’ Again, the rose within yields to the rose<br />
without.<br />
Then it relies on oriental meditative stance.<br />
Exhaust all excess materials out of the head.<br />
Make the moment of contact with reality purest by<br />
not thinking of all that other shit, past tenses and<br />
wishes.<br />
The word is purity.<br />
So I shut up. We bring out the bread, wine, apples<br />
and cheese. And people begin to feel the place out.<br />
I sit watching and eating, trying to chew the<br />
rhetoric off my tongue, and just get a sense of being<br />
there. The grey above begins to break and sun comes<br />
casually through on the waves and rocks. I sense the<br />
ocean more and the light sharpens the white color of<br />
the foam on the waves, as the tide begins to lap in.<br />
But, good academic soul, I keep running into irony.<br />
In section four of the poem, it begins:<br />
Yesterday the weather was nice there were lots<br />
of people. Today it rains, the only other figure is far<br />
up the beach.<br />
(by the curve of his body I know he leans<br />
against the tug of his fishingline: there is no<br />
separation)<br />
Below the flat rock where the wine and food<br />
sit, I reach down and pull up the broken handle of a<br />
fishing rod. Craig, looking between two other rocks,<br />
finds the split and shredded yellow-white bamboo of a<br />
complete rod. We give a weird chuckle at what seems<br />
like another break in the poem. While Jim and<br />
Donna are up climbing around the edge of Wobbly,<br />
36
they discover a dead seal and say, “God, it stinks!”<br />
Later Jim comes from another sandy part of the<br />
beach with little pieces of plastic, from bottles and<br />
such, that he says he keeps finding all over the place.<br />
Jeff and Ken, both from New York, lean against a<br />
boulder and talk about New York. Only Wen, a<br />
Chinese girl from Hong Kong, who rarely ever<br />
speaks, appears content. She is wearing an orange<br />
sweater and brown corduroys. She sits on the rough<br />
shaped stones and, first, juggles two oval shaped<br />
stones back and forth in little loops in the air. I ask<br />
her if she knows how to juggle. She says no and stops<br />
and begins to build what looks like one dimensional<br />
pagodas beside her knees. It’s nice to watch as Don,<br />
the large photographer and I talk about sailing and<br />
photography, and how photographers can be<br />
exploitive and sadistic. He tells me a story of how his<br />
class came out to this same place a month ago with<br />
three models. And how one must have really been<br />
loaded on something, the way she kept moving<br />
around all afternoon, jumping across and diving into<br />
the surf. The models were all nude and this one<br />
scratched herself horribly, scraping herself bloody<br />
against the rocks. But how she was the best one, the<br />
way she got into it and kept moving.<br />
-----------------<br />
“It sounds horrible,” I say.<br />
“It was.”<br />
And now all the students come back, except<br />
Wen who’d wandered by herself down the beach. The<br />
sun is out full now and she’s picking up rocks and<br />
going through the slow motions of discus thrower. I<br />
pick up Lew’s most recent book, THE SONG MNT.<br />
TAMALPAIS SINGS, and between the stanzas, as I<br />
again read out loud, I occasionally look down the<br />
beach at the orange and brown figure going through<br />
the careful smooth motions of throwing the rocks.<br />
There is such a disciplined, quiet grace about her<br />
whole sense of movement.<br />
From the book I take, “SONG OF THE<br />
TURKEY BUZZARD.” I read the poem strong. The<br />
fresh air has finally filled and relaxed my lungs, so I<br />
feel deeply into the making of each phrase.<br />
Everything in it feels tangible:<br />
I hit one once, with a .22<br />
heard the “flak” and a feather flew off, he<br />
flapped his wings just once and<br />
went on sailing.<br />
Bronze<br />
(when seen from above)<br />
as I have seen them. All day sitting<br />
on a cliff so steep they<br />
circled below me, in the up-draught<br />
passed so close I could see his<br />
eye.<br />
However, as I tell the class, the completion of the<br />
poem really disturbs me;<br />
II<br />
Praises Gentle Tamalpais<br />
Perfect in Wisdom and Beauty of the<br />
sweetest water<br />
and the soaring birds<br />
great seas at the feet of thy cliffs<br />
Hear my last Will and testament:<br />
Among my friends there shall always be<br />
one with proper instructions<br />
for my continuance.<br />
Let no one grieve,<br />
I shall have used it all up<br />
used up every bit of it.<br />
What an extravagance!<br />
What a relief!<br />
On a marked rock, following his orders,<br />
place my meat.<br />
All care must be taken not to<br />
frighten the natives of this<br />
barbarous land, who<br />
will not let us die, even,<br />
as we wish.<br />
With proper ceremony disembowel what I<br />
no longer need, that it might more quickly rot and<br />
tempt<br />
my new form<br />
NOT THE BRONZE CASKET BUT THE BRAZEN<br />
WING<br />
SOARING FOREVER ABOVE THE O PERFECT<br />
O SWEETEST WATER O GLORIOUS<br />
WHEELING<br />
BIRD<br />
-------------------------------------<br />
Lew Welch<br />
37
Lew Welch<br />
And I read to the class what I had written in<br />
response:<br />
………..Lew’s tone changes here, Religious, priester<br />
taken his vows, no more questioning, but into that<br />
Jeffers thing so deep that the world is beyond human<br />
repair, because of basic, human flaw (i.e., witness<br />
what we have done to the planet). Only the vultures,<br />
again as in Jeffers, are pure, clean. Though he doesn’t<br />
reject what has been joy in his own life, the negative<br />
thrust is there; the only dignity that remains is owned<br />
by those birds who turn human garbage into the<br />
beauty of their own flight. Though I think the poem<br />
stands on a language of its own, I don’t see the point<br />
of view as terribly different from Jeffer’s poem,<br />
Vulture:<br />
… how beautiful he looked, veering away in<br />
the sea – light over the precipice. I tell you solemnly<br />
That I was sorry to have disappointed him. To be<br />
eaten by that beak and become part of him, to share<br />
those wings and those eyes –<br />
What a sublime end of one’s body, what an<br />
enskyment;<br />
What a life after death.<br />
But the class disagrees when I say the poem<br />
comes off to me as weird death wish that I can’t<br />
understand. Welch is still in his forties, and seems to<br />
me as strange time for a man to be making a last will<br />
and testament. When I ask what people feel about the<br />
poem, and if they agree with my sense of it, several<br />
people shake their heads, as if my viewpoint is too<br />
narrow. Paul seems to sum up the objection quickly.<br />
“As I see it,” he says, “the poem is just one more<br />
acceptance of Death,” and the poem, from his<br />
hearing of it was, “more just an acceptance of the<br />
cycle of Death and it was liberating to listen to<br />
because it didn’t try to reject Death as part of the<br />
cycle of things.” The way he paints it is that both Lew<br />
and the poem are at just one point in a large pattern<br />
that is only partly visible to us. And the act of the<br />
poem is just preparation and acceptance of the next<br />
step.<br />
Suddenly the poem becomes Oriental again.<br />
Bigger than I had ever been willing to accept it or see<br />
it. My original response now was coming off as the<br />
thin, Western humanist. That is, operating out of a<br />
concern for daily and secular obligation. (Maybe<br />
that’s the answer that lies behind Lew’s refrain, ‘What<br />
are we gonna today/today, today, today’). In any case,<br />
in a funny way, Paul’s response brought me out of the<br />
bind I felt myself in when I brought my class down to<br />
the rock in the first place. That is, my weird<br />
consciousness of having to perform some academic<br />
pedagogic duty, or, literally do something to the stone<br />
to make it valid. But now gradually I was getting to a<br />
point where I could see things in a way that wasn’t<br />
always ironical (the rock that wouldn’t rock, etc). Of<br />
course Wen had already begun to locate me there, to<br />
make the event literal, as opposed to literary.<br />
So, since all ears feel open, I finish by reading<br />
all of the HERMIT POEMS. Then I get up and really<br />
begin to enjoy the place, the feel of wind, the sun. I<br />
climb up the side of Wobbly, check out the smell of<br />
the seal, its skin rotting in the crevice of the crator.<br />
Everybody is climbing all over the place now, up the<br />
cliff, the other shelves of rock. I climb up one shelf,<br />
sit Yogi style, and figure this is the one the poem was<br />
meditated upon. A full view of the beach, the rock,<br />
and the way the ocean ripples across the stone<br />
boulders that appear planted in the sand:<br />
2<br />
…<br />
….<br />
Sitting here you look below to other rocks<br />
Precisely placed as rocks of Ryoanji:<br />
Foam like swept stones<br />
My mind flashed back to Wen building the<br />
little rock houses. Lew is right. They do look like<br />
photographs I’ve seen of boulders in Buddhist rock<br />
gardens:<br />
Or think of the monks who made it 4 hundred<br />
and 50 years ago<br />
Lugged the boulders from the sea<br />
Swept to foam original gravel stone from sea<br />
(and saw it, even then, when finally they<br />
all looked up the<br />
instant after it was made)<br />
And there is a beautiful flash that takes place<br />
in my head and body when I suddenly equate the fact<br />
of the poem with the glazed water and foam drifting<br />
between the black boulders and sand. It’s so rare to<br />
find. I hear the word ‘legitimate.’ Any how.<br />
After a while, it feels like ‘time to go.’ I turn<br />
around and look up the cliff. Ken, the New Yorker, is<br />
up in a tall, shallow cave. His elbows are at his sides<br />
with his hands up in the air, looking like the tucked<br />
in wings of a vulture. Everybody else is climbing<br />
around the beach playing with stones, or just<br />
watching the movement of the ocean. Nobody has a<br />
watch when I ask what time it is. Somebody says,<br />
“How does a mountain or a rock tell time.” Then I<br />
say, Wouldn’t it be surreal to put a watch around a<br />
mountain.” And somebody says, “we better go.”<br />
38
We pick up all our garbage and split, several of<br />
us saying it would be better if we had all our classes<br />
…………………….<br />
III<br />
Outside<br />
The Monday after the visit to Wobbly Rock, I<br />
get a telephone call in the middle of the class. It’s<br />
Lew. His voice sounds flat and distant. It’s difficult<br />
for me to talk because we are in the middle of an<br />
hour with Jack Gilbert who is talking about his sense<br />
of the fifties. Lew wants to know if he can still come<br />
to the class. I have to tell him it’s too late. David<br />
Meltzer is scheduled<br />
to come the next<br />
week, and there are<br />
no classes after that<br />
one. Actually it’s more<br />
complicated. In truth<br />
I’m telling him he can’t<br />
come because we<br />
already spent two<br />
weeks on his work,<br />
and we have three or<br />
four more poets to<br />
cover. A history of<br />
local literature in<br />
miniature that, at one<br />
time, he could have<br />
parodied (as in, “A<br />
Round of English” for<br />
Philip Whalen in ON OUT). At the same time I feel<br />
guilty because I’m telling a human voice that I value<br />
that he can’t, even if he wants to, come up with his<br />
goods anymore. I tell him we went to Muir Beach last<br />
week and I wrote something on it and would he like<br />
it, if I sent it to him? He says sure and to send it in<br />
care of Don Allen, his editor. I complete the call by<br />
saying we’ll get him a reading this fall at the Art<br />
Institute to which he seems interested. Then I get<br />
back to the class and Jack Gilbert.<br />
That was the first Monday of May and the last<br />
time I ever spoke to him. Three weeks later, on May<br />
28, the San Francisco Chronicle reported his<br />
disappearance:<br />
BAY POET MISSING – BIG SEARCH<br />
Sheriff’s deputies and a band of Bay Area friends<br />
searched the rugged hills above Nevada City<br />
yesterday for Beat Generation poet Lew Welch, who<br />
was reported missing last Sunday night….<br />
Early in April, when I first tried to get in<br />
touch with Lew and had been reading his works as<br />
closely as I could, I had this dream:<br />
It’s not a happy dream. Actually cold. I’m on a<br />
beach that I’ve never seen. A blankness, an<br />
unkempt quality about it. It is an era of desolation.<br />
I’m waiting there for no particular reason. Like<br />
there is nothing else to do. I’m with a couple of<br />
friends but our friendship does not even seem to be<br />
particularly significant. Then Lew shows up.<br />
He’s dressed only in his trunks. A tall, slender<br />
figure, tanned by the sun. His head is higher than<br />
mine, and his neck is craned back like that of a<br />
horse permanently broken by unkind reins. It is<br />
impossible to establish any sense of personal<br />
location with him. His face will not receive the<br />
personal or, any longer, reciprocate with such. He<br />
does not say a word.<br />
So I am still lonely on the beach. He’s merely a new<br />
figure on the beach for me to watch. He knows<br />
what he wants to do. There is a low platform made<br />
out of white driftwood. It’s on the upper – edge of<br />
the beach facing the horizon. It’s early afternoon.<br />
He walks over and out to the platform where he lies<br />
down with his knees bent up in the air.<br />
It’s the end of his part in the dream. It’s as if he’s<br />
waiting to be carried across the sea in some ancient<br />
rite. There’s no use talking anymore. It’s only time<br />
to wait, to bake in the sun, before taking that<br />
ultimate journey.<br />
I lose interest in watching. There is a fence across<br />
the beach. On the other side is the beautiful wife of<br />
an ex-friend. She is smiling that I come to her.<br />
When I go around the fence, we take hands and<br />
begin to dance, like spiders, back and forth across<br />
the hot sand. Lew’s muse. She must be, Lew’s<br />
muse. He has left her. I pursue her in love. She is<br />
black. The dream dissolves in dance.<br />
-------------------------------------------<br />
In May, and over the summer, there are<br />
reports in the newspaper and by word of mouth that<br />
Lew has re-appeared. That he was seen in Nevada<br />
City, that he was in Sausalito, that people had talked<br />
to him, etc. By September, it’s obvious to most, that<br />
he’s never coming back.<br />
----------------------------<br />
Lew Welch<br />
39
Lew Welch<br />
How did we get here? How did we get to this<br />
voice? Why Lew Welch? Why should he be important<br />
to me, to us?<br />
For me it goes back. To 1965. I was in the<br />
City, just beginning to hear my own voice, in my own<br />
poems. I was just 24 and had two poems published.<br />
A very tenuous entrance into the world of poets. I<br />
and my friends had given a couple of readings at the<br />
Blue Unicorn, a coffee shop on the edge of the<br />
Haight, where I and my girlfriend also lived. None of<br />
us know where we are going. I was in the writing<br />
program at State, but that was coming to an end. In<br />
the world there was the war, the draft, the question of<br />
what to do. My body refused to<br />
continue to go to school. In<br />
music there was Dylan, Coltrane.<br />
But they were far away. Local<br />
examples seemed remote. Spicer,<br />
Loewinsohn, Meltzer, Snyder,<br />
Whalen. They all seemed large<br />
and unapproachable. Especially<br />
to those of us still in school.<br />
Actually I only met and<br />
talked to Lew once in my life. I<br />
shouldn’t say talked. I really<br />
listened, but maybe it was the<br />
first time I learned I could get<br />
high listening to someone, just<br />
through rhythm and voice. It was in April of ’65. I<br />
had just heard him read and sing in the Gallery<br />
Lounge at the College. It was a benefit for Dizzie<br />
Gillespie for President campaign. There, I had loved<br />
it, the phrasing of his line, a cross between song and<br />
natural voice. Plus, what he was using in terms of<br />
content, related a lot to the feel I got from living in<br />
the City. The language was airy and salted, from<br />
somebody who really liked to relate to the public life<br />
of the street. It had a clean, liberated feeling about it.<br />
Plus there were also poems about driving cab which I<br />
was also doing at the time. Like the poem “IN<br />
ANSWER TO A QUESTION FROM P.W.,” how it<br />
ends:<br />
------------------------------------<br />
Like the sign over the urinal: “You hold your future<br />
in your hand.”<br />
Or what the giant negro whore once said, in the back<br />
of my cab:<br />
Man, you sure do love diggin’ at my<br />
titties, now stop that. We get where<br />
we going you can milk me like a Holstein,<br />
but I gotta see your money first.<br />
“I had just heard him<br />
read and sing in the<br />
Gallery Lounge at the<br />
College. It was a<br />
benefit for Dizzie<br />
Gillespie for<br />
President<br />
campaign....”<br />
Lew was someone who actually had dug and<br />
given form to what I was digging, listening to all those<br />
40<br />
stories out of the back of the cab, while I was doing it<br />
for a living.<br />
So one night when I and Margaret (my girl<br />
friend at the time), and Tom Schmidt and Maria and<br />
Bill Howard, three other friends, were in the Juke<br />
Box, a bar on the corner of Haight and Ashbury,<br />
when I saw Lew up at the bar, it was about ten<br />
o’clock, I naturally went up and invited him to come<br />
back and sit and talk with us. When I got to the bar, I<br />
had to wait a minute. The Juke Box was on,<br />
something by Dinah Washington, and he was busy<br />
describing to Harry, the black bartender, how Dinah’s<br />
voice was sounding just like a trumpet at this one<br />
point in the song. It was obvious that<br />
he not only loved music, but lived in<br />
relationship to it like a warm coat that<br />
kept his feelings alive and intact. The<br />
pleasure he took in depicting the<br />
quality of her voice, made the music<br />
seem like a nipple that he sucked with<br />
precise and everchanging delight.<br />
But he was happy to come back<br />
with me to the table. He was terribly<br />
high from teaching. He had just come<br />
from the Medical Center where he was<br />
giving a course on Gertrude Stein. It<br />
was the sound of a voice of a man in<br />
love. It was ten o’clock and for the next three hours<br />
he rapped on everything imaginable. Starting with<br />
Gertrude, moving to music, then relating to poets, he<br />
talked of people, things he had done. Much of it I<br />
guess was preachment. He was asserting a way to live.<br />
Definitely not like his mother, gripping his hand out<br />
in front of us, “She wanted us to be clean as a bar of<br />
soap. She’d even say that!” How he was in awe of<br />
John Handy, the alto – saxophonist, who knew so<br />
much about the history of jazz, that he was still afraid<br />
to approach him. And how poets could be like jazz<br />
musicians around younger artists, cooking as hard as<br />
they could to keep the younger ones out of the circle.<br />
Six years later now it’s hard to recapture content. I<br />
just know and remember how well it felt to listen.<br />
Our questions and remarks were like drum beats<br />
behind the musical pictures they helped provoke him<br />
to draw.<br />
I felt great for at least three days after. Energy<br />
coming out of every pore. Completely free from all<br />
that City Paranioa. He’d given us all a good start.<br />
We got to literally see each other a few days later. At<br />
that time Doug Palmer and Gary Snyder had started<br />
an IWW local for poets and other artists. On that<br />
Saturday, down in a Second St. alley loft, we had a<br />
benefit to pay the rent, I was one of several people<br />
scheduled to read, Lew and Gary were the top
eaders. Since I was driving taxi, I could only come<br />
in for an hour in which I could read and listen some.<br />
I read at Nine – thirty and Lew was there. I read for<br />
ten minutes as well as I could, or perhaps the best I<br />
had ever done. When I finished, there was a good<br />
applause and I felt pleased, in fact proud. Lew was by<br />
one wall with a couple of people. Instead of walking<br />
over to him, I just looked across the room and smiled<br />
hello, half way imagining that he’d walk over to me<br />
and say what he thought. He didn’t. He just raised his<br />
eyes, with a tight lipped grin hello. He looked<br />
pleased. But I still didn’t go over. My own pride<br />
holding me and turning me to talk to a friend.<br />
I remember that. Anyway, I soon left the City.<br />
The Peace Corps as my out. Two years in Africa,<br />
Nigeria, I shared ON OUT with anybody I thought<br />
liked poetry, often telling my friends of that night in<br />
the Juke Box.<br />
Coming back to the City, however, in 1968,<br />
the relationship stopped feeling the same. Though I<br />
heard through other poets Lew was not writing any<br />
new stuff, the bottle was overtaking him, I still held<br />
him in the same kind of awe that I believe he held for<br />
John Handy. I was afraid to get close, because I felt<br />
he knew so much, and I wanted to know more before<br />
I approached him again. I didn’t want to be in the<br />
position of disciple. At the same time, the city and<br />
the country were going through heavy changes. The<br />
Panthers, the Strike at State, the dissolution of the<br />
Haight-Ashbury, changes from acid to speed,<br />
everything going at collision force, as both political<br />
and artistic off-spring from the revolutionary<br />
prophecies of the late fifties and early sixties, it was<br />
getting terribly difficult to keep our heads above<br />
water. In getting away from poetry, Lew had gotten<br />
into visionary prose. It was always beautiful to read,<br />
the few pieces that I saw in the Digger papers and the<br />
Oracle. He had become a cross between an urban<br />
anthropologist and ecologist. I remember he read one<br />
of them at an event in the Nourse auditorium. The<br />
passage always sticks in my mind where he talks of<br />
walking through the Mission with Philip Whalen and<br />
he goes into a bar to take a leak and his shoes are an<br />
inch deep in piss on the john floor. It was his<br />
metaphor for decline and fall, the erosion of San<br />
Francisco. But everything he was writing was going in<br />
that direction. Out from the City. Long hairs, in new<br />
families and tribes, leaving for the country, to create<br />
new and decent lives, while the cities destroyed<br />
themselves. On the surface, the vision of survival was<br />
optimistic. It was still as if the holiness of the vision<br />
that takes place in Wobbly Rock could come to pass.<br />
But underneath it was despair. It might have been<br />
deeply personal, but in rejecting the City, he was also<br />
rejecting the source of his music, and the source of<br />
his language. The voices and sounds that fed him<br />
were from the City, and he no longer felt he could be<br />
fed.<br />
And I was, and continue, to try to hold on in<br />
the City. And the visions, no matter how accurate in<br />
description, now failed to pull me. I wanted to hear<br />
the old voice singing a more personal song. If the<br />
social whole was quite literally falling apart,<br />
revolutionary energy aside, I wanted to hear a local,<br />
an immediate voice help get us through, at least, one<br />
to one. But in 1969, I hadn’t even got that far yet, I<br />
was, in consciousness, somewhere between the<br />
Panthers, the State Strike and People’s Park, I had<br />
stopped writing. The answers for me had become<br />
urban and collective. I wasn’t heading for any woods.<br />
Then I didn’t hear of him for a long time. By<br />
Nixon year II, energies on a social level had really<br />
begun to collapse. Collective visions had become a set<br />
of fictions, or, at most, commercially opted. I had<br />
begun writing again. Quiet exile in Berkeley and<br />
Oakland after a heavy house rip off in the City. My<br />
despair.<br />
Then, out of nowhere, it happened. An<br />
ecology benefit that was given in the Pauley Ballroom<br />
in November of 1970. It was probably the best poetry<br />
reading to a large audience (at least a 1,000), that has<br />
been given in the Bay Area in some time, Gary<br />
Snyder, Howard McCord, David Meltzer, Mary<br />
Korte, Keith Lampe and Richard Brautigan. There,<br />
Lew read much of THE SONG MNT TAMALPAIS<br />
SINGS. It was an incredibly beautiful performance.<br />
The voice sounding pure and full, so that you could<br />
sense the audience rising, falling and moving in the<br />
direction of the line, language being the hypnotic<br />
master of the event. He took us up the mountain and<br />
made it speak in such a way you could hear the wind<br />
touch the shapes and crevices of the rock:<br />
…<br />
This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.<br />
Once again we celebrate the great Spring Tides.<br />
Beaches are strewn again with Jasper,<br />
Agate and Jade.<br />
The Mussel-rocks stand clear.<br />
This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.<br />
Once again we celebrate the<br />
Headland’s huge, cairn-studded fall<br />
into the Sea<br />
Lew Welch<br />
This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.<br />
41
Lew Welch<br />
For we have walked the jeweled beache<br />
at the foot of the final cliffs<br />
of all man’s wanderings.<br />
This is the last place.<br />
There is nowhere else we need to go.<br />
………..<br />
There was something convincingly Holy about<br />
the experience which now makes his final despair, no<br />
matter what might have been his personal problems,<br />
be very legitimate. When you have found the Altar,<br />
and through the Altar, you hear such pure, life giving<br />
sounds, it must be next to impossible to acknowledge<br />
and live with forces that you are convinced are going<br />
to completely wipe out that Altar, or what has become<br />
the singular source of your life.<br />
IV<br />
The ecological awareness must have worked<br />
heavily to destroy him. The other forces are more<br />
clearly viewable in the interview with David Meltzer.<br />
But, it appears, I’m having trouble ending this. What<br />
did he mean to me? Why do I feel like I’ve grown<br />
away from the first offering? Why do I still want to<br />
stand back?<br />
I hope this comes off as praise. What he<br />
uncovered and opened up, the energy there gave me<br />
my first genuine lift into the whole act and love of<br />
poetry, not as a diversion - but an on-going statement<br />
of life. It’s just that the statement finally got too<br />
narrow for me. In a sense Lew became his own<br />
mountain, high and removed from the world of the<br />
City, the language of his which first attracted me to<br />
both the man and his work. Indeed he was deadly<br />
accurate about the forces of erosion, those who would<br />
eliminate the possibility of what is gentle and pure<br />
and only act in terms of greed and destruction, the<br />
vision or the place of the vision simply got too<br />
narrow. Not that he lost consciousness of the world,<br />
but he lost that urge to participate, to try and become<br />
at one with us in participation in that world. In short,<br />
we no longer need the voice of the teacher (and God<br />
knows we’ve had too many martyrs). We need, if I<br />
can preach, voices that can listen to each other and,<br />
again, make possible survival here.<br />
But let me end this in praise. Praise for a<br />
voice, a mountain of a voice. I loved to hear.<br />
January 15, 1972<br />
This essay first appeared in Earth Geography Booklet No 4, an<br />
edition of Io magazine edited by Richard Grossinger in 1973<br />
HARRY’S HOUSE<br />
Vol II (Fast Speaking Music)<br />
A label driven, I think, by a fast speaking woman.<br />
Anne Waldman is a figure central to the Naropa<br />
School in Colorado. (That’s her on the cover with<br />
Harry Smith). It’s still called ‘The Jack Kerouac<br />
School of Disembodied<br />
Poetics.’ Harry’s House?<br />
Well Harry Smith lived in<br />
a place on the campus. You<br />
might recall Harry,<br />
musicologist, irascible<br />
figure on the Allen<br />
Ginsberg scene in NY.<br />
Harry passed on. And in<br />
recent times his place has<br />
been converted to a<br />
recording studio. So, if<br />
you enjoy an eclectic mix<br />
of poets and sounds, you<br />
might be in the right place<br />
here. I wish someone<br />
would tell me what Amiri<br />
Baraka was doing in later<br />
years, all this apparent provocative anti semitic stuff?<br />
But here he’s brilliant with I Liked It Better. It’s regret<br />
42<br />
for a time when he says you knew your enemies. He’s<br />
talking about the god awful Klan. Now, he says,<br />
they’ve tucked their robes into their executive briefcases.<br />
There’s Ginsberg’s old guitarist Steven Taylor<br />
riffing on Ezra Pound. A song<br />
by Anne Waldman, Bardo<br />
Corridor, performed by Junior<br />
Burke. Joanne Kyger, a straight<br />
uncluttered poem. NY school<br />
poet Bill Berkson (who’s been ill<br />
lately). Eileen Myles, Ron<br />
Silliman, Reed Bye, Jack<br />
Collom, Thurston Moore.<br />
These are the more familiar<br />
names to me. Often poets are<br />
backed by sympathetic music. It<br />
adds dimensions. Tracks range<br />
from the personal poetics to the<br />
highly political, with more than<br />
a couple of experiments with<br />
sound.<br />
www.fastspeakingmusic.com<br />
Michael Kearns
Write a<br />
Madder<br />
Letter<br />
if You Can<br />
by Kevin Ring<br />
This little essay is so late. It should have been<br />
written, done and dusted and featured in Beat Scene<br />
well before now. I’d heard through Beat Scene friend<br />
Richard Miller that the upmarket USA bookseller<br />
Glenn Horowitz Inc were handling the sale of sixty<br />
three letters and postcards from Jack Kerouac to his<br />
old Columbia University and Denver friend Ed<br />
White. The correspondence from Jack lasted from<br />
July 15, in 1947 through to May 12, 1969. They were<br />
a mixture of letters and postcards, the majority<br />
written in the later 1940s and early to mid 1950s.<br />
Keen observers will know that Ed White is<br />
something of an inspirational figure in the Jack<br />
Kerouac story, for it was White who suggested to Jack<br />
that he ‘sketch’ while writing. By that he meant, write<br />
spontaneously on the spot, as an artist might do<br />
preliminary sketches in preparation for a big<br />
painting. It would be no understatement to say that<br />
White’s suggestion, borne out of his artistic<br />
background, changed Jack Kerouac’s future. In a<br />
letter dated August 7, 1961 Kerouac reminded Ed<br />
White about his thoughtful comments, “Did you know<br />
you were the one who gave me the idea about my new<br />
prose? Just sketch, ‘from memory’ etc…’<br />
In fact Kerouac knew and fully realized<br />
White’s prophetic words even later on and had<br />
recalled the exact moment, as he was inclined to do,<br />
that’s the beauty of Jack Kerouac, when, in a March<br />
1, 1965 letter he again reminded White, “To think<br />
that all that crazy stuff I’ve written since 1951 in a way<br />
started when you casually suggested, in a Chinese<br />
restaurant on Amsterdam and 124 th , remember? To try<br />
“sketching,” which I did, and it led to discovery of<br />
modern spontaneous prose.”<br />
Kerouac took time - sat and typed Ed a letter<br />
explaining this and thanking him again for the<br />
direction White set him off on. To me, it seems that<br />
White never really got enough credit. Kerouac was<br />
struggling with his writing; he knew what he wanted<br />
to say, but how to say it? White was the catalyst for<br />
his new style. And, it must be noted, Kerouac seems<br />
fully aware that ‘the discovery of modern spontaneous<br />
prose,’ (as Jack framed it) - has a moment in history,<br />
it is something and Kerouac is proud of the fact. But<br />
he never forgets White’s place in the big scheme of<br />
his things.<br />
What I have here in front of me, on the<br />
desk, is a nicely done bookseller catalogue aimed at<br />
43
Write a Madder Letter if You Can<br />
prospective purchasers of this sizeable collection of<br />
letters from Kerouac to White. There are extracts<br />
from every single one of them, they are carefully<br />
annotated, dated, documented and then they all have<br />
a commentary note from White. With White<br />
explaining what he wrote to Jack that might have<br />
prompted a certain response from him. Ed White<br />
kept Jack up to date on his network of friends and<br />
associates in Colorado, especially Denver. Of course<br />
Denver was Neal Cassady’s hometown and a place<br />
Jack gravitated to as a young<br />
man in his twenties. It was a<br />
landscape in drastic contrast to<br />
the one he was familiar with on<br />
America’s East Coast. The<br />
region inspired his imagination<br />
and quickly made it into his<br />
writing.<br />
Architecture had<br />
become White’s career<br />
eventually, after considering<br />
painting and teaching. It seems,<br />
from John Leland’s introduction,<br />
that both Kerouac and White<br />
suffered bouts of depression,<br />
they refer to it in their letters.<br />
But they had originally<br />
connected while both students at<br />
Columbia University in 1946.<br />
Kerouac never finished his<br />
degree but White followed it through to the end. It<br />
was where the Denver connection began for Kerouac,<br />
with White connecting with Hal Chase, Bob Burford<br />
and others. It was a fortuitous meeting for the<br />
budding writer from Lowell.<br />
John Leland, in his introduction, gets close<br />
to nailing Kerouac’s character, listen to this, “He was<br />
a celebrated traveler who needed to live at home with his<br />
mother; a rule breaker with a reverence for tradition; a<br />
slacker with a mad work ethic; an experimental writer<br />
with a dim view of modernism.” Leland is in tune with<br />
the capricious mind of Jack Kerouac, alive to the<br />
pulls and tugs going on inside him, the inner turmoil<br />
and debate. These letters to Ed White were a therapy,<br />
a working out, tilling over of ideas and argument.<br />
White and Kerouac were up for it. There is a raw<br />
honesty being played out over the decades. And<br />
White was no passive recipient of manna from<br />
Kerouac’s mountain. He was no backslapper content<br />
to tell Kerouac how wonderful he was, listen to this<br />
advice from White in a letter in 1948, “….you are<br />
concerned with personalities, which is exactly the right<br />
way to be, provided you set aside some small part of your<br />
mind for objective appraisal – a small portion whose task<br />
it is to look for weaknesses and limitations as well as<br />
strength and greatness. It is there that you will<br />
distinguish between the trivial and the essential…”<br />
Ed White became ‘Tim Gray’ in On the<br />
Road, a personality in that lively Denver crowd that<br />
also included Neal Cassady. It has become evident<br />
over the years that White, Hal<br />
Chase and others, while they<br />
knew and sometimes mixed with<br />
Cassady, were something<br />
different. White and his crowd<br />
were law abiding, career minded<br />
young people who steered clear<br />
of Cassady’s car stealing<br />
hedonist direction. Kerouac was<br />
torn between the faction around<br />
Cassady and Ed White’s group,<br />
it all returns to John Leland’s<br />
observations about Kerouac’s<br />
personality doesn’t it?<br />
White, as early as 1948<br />
is exhorting Kerouac to come<br />
over to France to be with him in<br />
his adventures there. Kerouac,<br />
the man who penned On the<br />
Road, the vagabond, hobo,<br />
sainted traveler, is reluctant to leave America. There<br />
are all kinds of reasons why he can’t join White in<br />
Europe. Kerouac admitted the situation and felt he<br />
was ‘a little bird that you have to put salt on…’<br />
Kerouac saw White having adventures in Europe<br />
while he was at home writing ‘…sad letters…’ Of<br />
course this was 1948. Kerouac was all of 26. We now<br />
know the next few years would see him step into the<br />
big wide world.<br />
As Kerouac moved towards 1957 and the<br />
onset of a published writing life that was to make his<br />
name and probably kill him, White was still stretching<br />
out his hand to provide a safe haven for a beleaguered<br />
Kerouac. In late 1957 just as On the Road was about<br />
to fill the bookstores, White invited Jack out to stay<br />
in a property close to the White family home, “I<br />
remained in New York until July, 1955 when I returned<br />
to Denver because of my father’s terminal illness. In early<br />
August Anne Waring and I were married, in Moose,<br />
Wyoming, where the Warings were on vacation. After<br />
44
Write a Madder Letter if You Can<br />
honeymooning in Wyoming and California, we moved<br />
into the Waring summer house south of Denver, where<br />
our first son Ted was born two years later, on September<br />
28, 1957. Jack was invited to come and stay in the<br />
studio on the “farm’ property, but he was distraught and<br />
ill at that time, and unfortunately didn’t recognize that<br />
this offered an opportunity for a quiet, restful country<br />
retreat in which he could have gathered together his<br />
deteriorating life.”<br />
This would have been the time when the<br />
media spotlight was fully trained on Kerouac in the<br />
curious event that partially stemmed from old<br />
friendships when Neal Cassady and girlfriend turned<br />
up at the White household in the spring of 1968.<br />
White got home from an architect’s meeting to find<br />
an unknown car parked outside his house. But let<br />
him take up the story, this, in part, a commentary on<br />
one of Jack’s late in the day missives, “In the spring of<br />
1968 I returned home from a meeting with the Garland<br />
School Board on the design of the new Foundation<br />
building to find an incredibly dilapidated Pontiac Sedan<br />
parked in front of the garage door. It was completely<br />
“But since (childhood) I have learned that the really great man is someone like Wm. Blake, in whose time there<br />
was nothing heard from him, but silence. All the Carlyle heroes (…) were ‘men of silence and darkness.’ But in<br />
this age of noontime and noise (revolving doors, advertising agencies, blurbs, traffic, small talk) such men are<br />
not even wanted. and are laughed at. I like to think of Mark Twain as the one truly great mediator between<br />
silence and darkness (…) I derive my life from the existence of a Twain and not from the existence of the<br />
psychological fact that he who wants to be a great man suffers from delusions of inferiority within. What<br />
difference does it make after a Huck Finn, a Journey to the End of the Night, a Song of Innocence is<br />
written? Those works are foremost; the ‘great man’ is but a victim of universal mortal limits, after all.”<br />
Jack Kerouac – excerpt from a letter to Ed White on March 5, 1950.<br />
wake of On the Road being published. Those close to<br />
the events, such as Joyce Johnson, have commented<br />
that Jack was finding solace in drinking ever more<br />
heavily and that this essentially shy, quiet man was<br />
having big trouble coping with all the attention. Joyce<br />
Johnson speaks of Jack not turning up for<br />
promotional events, lying on her floor in a kind of<br />
stage fright. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but a<br />
quiet refuge in Denver might have been just the<br />
ticket for him at that stage.<br />
This and the many other commentaries from<br />
White make this paperback an unlikely valuable<br />
source of insight into Kerouac’s life. Ed White was a<br />
relatively conventional friend for Kerouac. He went<br />
on to be a prominent figure in Denver, responsible<br />
for some crucial work in designing how the city<br />
looked. Others like Burroughs, Cassady, Ginsberg<br />
enjoy the close focus and scrutiny; yet it is refreshing<br />
to read of other friends and allegiances. Not enough<br />
work is done in this area. I’m certain it would<br />
provide fresh perspective on Kerouac. Put simply, it<br />
is another slant on Kerouac; it prods us into<br />
rethinking who he was.<br />
The notes back and forth diminish and<br />
become briefer with the passage of time. There is one<br />
filled with what appeared to be bags of laundry. I<br />
hurried into the house, and Anne told me Neal Cassady<br />
was upstairs taking a shower in the boys’ bathroom, and<br />
his girl companion was in the master bathroom. I think<br />
our boys, then 10 and 8, were in their bedrooms. With<br />
the experience I had from Neal’s past visits to other<br />
friends, it was apparent he hoped to move in for a<br />
while.”<br />
White goes on to describe how Neal had two<br />
different boots on. Neal explains it by telling the story<br />
of another vengeful girlfriend and of his hopes for the<br />
immediate future. It involved much travelling. It is<br />
plainly obvious that while White and Cassady went<br />
back a long way, the prospect of Neal Cassady, wired<br />
as he was at that late point in his life, and a girlfriend<br />
staying in his house was not an option. And who<br />
could blame him?<br />
White concludes his remembrance by<br />
commenting, “Luckily, to, we were able to get Cassady<br />
and his friend back on their way before they could<br />
unpack all their belongings.”<br />
There are many warm letters between Ed<br />
White and Jack Kerouac. Naturally the emphasis here<br />
is on Jack’s letters; however White’s contribution is an<br />
invaluable aspect of it all. He pushes and prods<br />
45
Kerouac, is witness to his changing<br />
moods, the roads not taken, the<br />
yawning inevitability of Kerouac’s<br />
decline and the fleeting victories,<br />
fresh books, renewed optimisms. Yet<br />
at the conclusion, Kerouac being 47<br />
and White 44, it fades away into a<br />
kind of paranoia on Jack’s part. Bob<br />
Burford and Robert Lax are at<br />
White’s house, White wants to reunite<br />
Jack with old friends and phones him,<br />
but Burford is drunk and it descends<br />
into chaos. Jack tells White to make<br />
sure he doesn’t give out his phone<br />
number or home address to anyone.<br />
White feels the distance in Jack’s<br />
voice.<br />
Being from a sober working<br />
background, pillar of the community<br />
is a phrase that springs readily to<br />
mind here, it is debatable whether<br />
White ever composed that ‘madder<br />
letter’ to his friend Kerouac. What is<br />
evident is that White was a loyal ally<br />
for Kerouac. White was quite capable<br />
of flights of imagination that spurred<br />
Kerouac on, especially in their<br />
younger days, when in reality White<br />
was the footloose traveller in Europe<br />
and Kerouac, to an extent was the<br />
stay at home. Though of course<br />
Kerouac was subjecting himself to a<br />
writerly discipline and taking<br />
enormous pride in his daily word<br />
count of writing amassed.<br />
A very warm collection of<br />
letters from both men. It would be an<br />
absolute bonus if this little paperback<br />
sparked fresh interest in the friends of<br />
Kerouac who went to the nine to five<br />
jobs. There’s a mountain there, new<br />
revelations about Kerouac to be<br />
uncovered. It doesn’t all have to be<br />
Beat.<br />
The letters are on sale for one and a<br />
quarter million dollars. I don’t know<br />
yet if they have found a buyer.<br />
info@glennhorowitz.com<br />
RUTH WEISS<br />
Make Waves<br />
(Edition Exil)<br />
Released in 2013 at Temple studios in her town of Albion in California.<br />
Ruth Weiss, a pocket dynamo. She’s an inspiration, a survivor. A<br />
plethora of books in recent years, more often than not published in<br />
Europe, have raised her profile after ‘swinging in the shadows’ as<br />
Wallace Berman once talked of poets and artists languishing. This<br />
compact disc might be a surefire way to get a handle on Weiss. She’s<br />
an enthusiastic poetry with jazz exponent. Others may have abandoned<br />
the form but Weiss embraces it, luxuriates over her words. She<br />
reads the very first poem she ever wrote. She draws upon her Desert<br />
Journal work, some of her best writing in my view. She blends well<br />
with the band, a sax, a flute, acoustic bass, percussion. It is a subtle<br />
blend. Weiss and the band would have made an apt house band for the<br />
Walter Salles film adaptation of On the Road methinks. A lot more<br />
appropriate. She’s fluid, fluent, expressive, as she chuckles at the<br />
conclusion of her poems, she’s having fun. It all sounds very ‘live’ to<br />
these ears, no studio trickery here. There is no diminishing in her<br />
delivery, you might expect being 80 years old she’d be struggling,<br />
there’s no sign of that. In some respects what you have here are the<br />
sounds you might have encountered descending the stairs in some<br />
smoky cellar bar in North Beach, San Francisco back in 1956, as the<br />
San Francisco poetry renaissance was in full swing. I can’t think of a<br />
better compliment. It’s just so......authentic.<br />
Running time approximately 40 minutes.<br />
www.editionexil.at<br />
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46
Billy<br />
Burroughs’<br />
Prediction<br />
by Edwin Forr<br />
orrest<br />
est War<br />
ard<br />
We meet, Billy Burroughs and I, at Steve<br />
Tilson and Larry Lake’s BOWERY BOOKS on Old<br />
South Pearl Street in Denver.<br />
I am hanging out with Larry even though<br />
conflict between journeyman and apprentice flavors<br />
our friendship. As there is in the world, there is<br />
tension in our relationship for many reasons. The<br />
Seventies have ended. The Beats have been lionized,<br />
canonized and beatified while Hippies have been<br />
written off as “children who stayed too long at the<br />
party.” In the world that hasn’t tuned in, turned on,<br />
and dropped out, greed grows like a weed in the<br />
garden that once was America.<br />
Larry and I are discussing the literary merit<br />
of his Nineteen Seventy-one small press magazine<br />
forte Mano-Mano 2 which lies open to pages thirteen<br />
and fourteen on the glass counter top of his display<br />
case. We’re both rereading the printed facsimile of the<br />
Neal Cassady to Justin Brierly letter wherein the<br />
incarcerated Neal writes from the Colorado State<br />
Reformatory in Buena Vista to his former probation<br />
officer and friend in Denver and asks Justin to pay a<br />
small overdue bar tab at a Platte Street saloon.<br />
Currently the home of Brothers Bar, the site<br />
is one of the better hot spots serving food to waiters<br />
and waitresses getting off work late night in Denver.<br />
Hence, my familiarity with the place. Legendary and<br />
rightly so are the jalapeno cheeseburgers served there.<br />
As it so happens, Brothers Bar is one of numerous<br />
establishments from which Larry Lake, himself, is<br />
currently eighty-six-ed, mostly for reasons of art and<br />
alcohol, anger and disrespect. Larry once lived across<br />
Fifteenth Street, catty corner from Brothers, where he<br />
transformed an empty warehouse loft into a noteworthy<br />
second story walk-up art gallery and bohemian<br />
crib. The grand opening of his Bowery Gallery is the<br />
subject of an early Seventies’ independent film,<br />
entitled The Bowery Gallery. Despite Larry’s artistic<br />
infamy and fame, and his dogged ability to attract<br />
media attention, for more than one reason, all<br />
unknown to me, Larry and the two brothers who own<br />
Brothers Bar, they had a tumble of mythic proportions<br />
some time back, the facts and fictions of which I only<br />
know as rumor. Its odd-ball ironic that a page torn<br />
from Larry’s magazine, to this day, lends notoriety to a<br />
place Larry’s not allowed to enter! Next to the pay<br />
phone in the back hangs page twelve from Larry’s<br />
Mano-Mano 2, a shard of beat debris, something the<br />
brothers who banished Larry cherish.<br />
I am confessing to Larry that I’m mostly<br />
ignorant of Neal’s stature and importance in the<br />
literary world. Because Jack Kerouac and the antics of<br />
his anti-hero, Dean Moriarty, were neither part of my<br />
Jesuit high school curriculum nor on the reading lists<br />
of generously loaning, book buying friends, I only<br />
know of Neal Cassady as the driver of the bus<br />
FURTHER in Ken Kesey’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid<br />
Test, a text my old girlfriend M laid on me. Believe it<br />
or not, just as I’m saying the words Neal Cassady, into<br />
the storefront bookshop walk two of Neal Cassady’s<br />
real life existential pals: his own legendary partner in<br />
beatitude and pop culture myth, the eminent poet,<br />
Allen Ginsberg, (who, as it turns out, happens to be<br />
William S. Burroughs Jr.’s not so unlikely godfather);<br />
47
Billy Burroughs’ Prediction<br />
and the author of Speed and Kentucky Ham, himself,<br />
William S. Burroughs Jr., Billy B. As a gesture of<br />
goodwill and friendship towards and kinship with<br />
Larry and Steve, Allen has come to Bowery Books to<br />
autograph some first editions thereby increasing the<br />
value of Bowery Books’ Beat literature collection, and<br />
Allen is giving Billy, who has moved here to Denver,<br />
Allen’s version of the Poetry Tour of Denver.<br />
When Allen Ginsberg introduces William S.<br />
Burroughs, Jr. to Larry Lake and me, the reader/<br />
writer/junkie in Larry immediately recognizes the<br />
reader/writer/junkie in Billy, and, thus, the proprietor<br />
of Bowery Books and the publisher of Bowery Press,<br />
Larry Lake, he turns on the charm for his celebrated<br />
guests. For the next hour Larry and Allen banter and<br />
gossip tales of mutual friends: Stuart Zane Perkoff and<br />
James Ryan Morris, Diane Di Prima and Robert<br />
Creeley, Tony Scibella and David Meltzer, while Billy<br />
B and I, we mostly listen.<br />
And naturally, or as this story will demonstrate,<br />
preternaturally, Billy likewise recognizes the<br />
kindredness between himself and Larry; and when<br />
Larry suggests that Billy should sometime read<br />
something from his novels at Café Nepenthes, the<br />
poetry reading that Marcia and I host in lower<br />
downtown Denver, Billy, who is known to demand big<br />
bucks for a reading, accepts, all without discussing<br />
payment. I figure he’s hoping to score in terms of<br />
reading material, turn-ons and connections.<br />
Over the course of the next year or so I<br />
pursue a friendship with the creature that is Billy<br />
Burroughs. I say creature, because not unlike Frankenstein,<br />
Billy B, he’s come back from the dead.<br />
Another’s liver keeps him alive, that of a woman<br />
named Virginia whose brain failed at about the same<br />
time that Billy’s original liver did.<br />
Billy lives at the Oxford Arms, one of a pair of<br />
sixteen-plex apartments just south of University<br />
Hospital on the east side of Colorado Boulevard. On<br />
Number Sixteen, his door, is a handwritten announcement<br />
that emphatically states “If you’re not from<br />
Boulder, you’re NOT WELCOME. Go Home. This<br />
means YOU!” When I read the admonition for the<br />
first time, I’m annoyed, wondering if I’m to be<br />
dismissed as not from Boulder, for from what I’ve<br />
learned from my study of modern American poetics,<br />
Denver, my adopted hometown, is, in fact, the<br />
birthplace of beat sensibility. I even have an unredacted<br />
copy of a letter to Ed White that I got from<br />
Larry in which Jack Kerouac, himself, does declare<br />
the rank of Denver’s own Neal Cassady’s writing to be<br />
among the greatest of America and modern Europe.<br />
Billy’s furnished apartment is as messy and<br />
muddled as is his health. A couch lines the south wall<br />
out of the center of which sticks the non-business end<br />
of a bayonet, the blade buried to the hilt in the cotton<br />
stuffing with its tip in the wall behind. Above the<br />
couch is an assemblage of magazine photo cutouts.<br />
Now the number of cigarette burn holes in the seat of<br />
the couch is alarming, given the number of people<br />
who live in this building. One generally doesn’t<br />
consider the possible carelessness of others when<br />
signing a lease, and the burn holes spell jeopardy and<br />
danger. On the stove sits a stew that never really runs<br />
out as Billy B adds to it whatever edibles he has on<br />
hand. When I lift the lid I am reminded more of<br />
slurry sludge than food. Whatever vegetables might<br />
have been in the mix have over time and reheating<br />
been reduced to mush. Even the remains of a hot dog<br />
that Billy claims to have added just yesterday seem<br />
about to liquefy. Needless to say, neither my ex Italian<br />
mother-in-law or my current German mother-in-law<br />
would be caught dead in Billy’s kitchen. Skieve!, Filth!<br />
would be their refrains.<br />
Billy and I, we do literary events together, and<br />
Billy, per the arrangement we made the day we met,<br />
does read at Café Nepenthes, my current Tuesday<br />
night Market Street gig. I collect twenty when I pass<br />
the hat and add thirty myself so Billy’s pay turns out to<br />
be a cool fifty bucks for a half hour’s reading.<br />
Better pay than my lawyer’s, I remark when I<br />
hand him the cash.<br />
Immediately after his feature reading, I take<br />
Billy home to his apartment as he has scant interest in<br />
the late night world I revel in, and he has no interest<br />
in the poets and poet tasters who attend. And,<br />
granted, my waiter’s hours are not sympatico with his<br />
pain relief schedule. I drive him in my Dodge Tradesman<br />
van a couple of times to Naropa Institute in<br />
Boulder to visit Allen Ginsberg and other visiting<br />
literary luminaries. He seems to enjoy the attention<br />
the Naropa-ites, students and teachers alike, shower<br />
upon him. After all, he is no literary slacker. He’s<br />
already had two novels published and sundry articles<br />
in national magazines including one in Time about the<br />
abusive superintendent of a juvenile facility in Florida.<br />
On subsequent visits to Billy’s apartment, he<br />
reads to me some very poignant and humorous short<br />
stories about his stay in the hospital post-surgery,<br />
about wandering the corridors and deep basements in<br />
the wee hours of hospital late shifts, running once into<br />
a wide-eyed, burned-black crispy corpse on an<br />
elevator gurney, and often into over-medicated<br />
maintenance staff in restricted areas.<br />
48
Billy Burroughs’ Prediction<br />
Despite the humor of his intellect as demonstrated<br />
in his writing, if truth be told, Billy is, for the<br />
most part, a sad sack. He knows the new lease on life<br />
he’s been given is a short-term lease, no matter the<br />
star status of his South African transplant of a transplant<br />
surgeon, Doctor Starzl.<br />
He is so medicated both from<br />
the morphine he injects for<br />
the pain of the arthritis that<br />
came with the transplant and<br />
from the excessive alcohol -<br />
Schmidt’s Malt Liquor, please<br />
- and from the steroids he<br />
takes to ward off organ<br />
rejection (Billy once told me:<br />
If I look at a cold, I catch it) .<br />
. . Billy is so medicated that<br />
he’s mostly a man on the nod.<br />
He spends much of his time in<br />
an overstuffed chair. Alice in<br />
Wonderland is the theme of a<br />
collage he has affixed to the<br />
wall opposite his chair.<br />
On a couple of<br />
occasions I accompany Billy to<br />
a an apartment north of<br />
University Hospital on the<br />
west side of Colorado where<br />
an assemblage of hospital<br />
junkies gathers to swap pills,<br />
drink beer, and generally<br />
banter with each other like<br />
addicts at an NA meeting<br />
telling drug stories, except<br />
these attendees are not on the<br />
wagon, are not taking thirteen<br />
steps towards sobriety and<br />
abstinence. In the middle of<br />
the living room, the lessees -<br />
Ernie and Ray, two Viet Nam<br />
veterans with serious problems<br />
related to the draft, their<br />
military service and exposure<br />
to Agent Orange - have placed<br />
a thirty gallon plastic trash<br />
can. It is filled with empty<br />
alcohol bottles, crushed cigarette packs, and the debris<br />
of fast food existence. Most attendees at the daily<br />
medication exchange rarely rise to pitch their empty<br />
long necks, Coors cans, and hamburger wrappers,<br />
into it, like basketballs into hoops, from their surrounding<br />
lawn chair seats The occasional marijuana<br />
contributed to the get-together is most welcome as<br />
cannabis is not something prescribed across the street<br />
at University Hospital, where the drugs being swapped<br />
originate. Of course, Billy does not offer to barter<br />
with his morphine, only some of the minor barbiturates<br />
he’s been prescribed. Around the circle I note<br />
some curious exchange rates: five Valium for one<br />
Thorazine, a carton of Camels for one Dilaudin.<br />
But there’s more to Billy B than drugs and<br />
despair, more than woe is pitiful me. For Billy B, he is<br />
a gentleman and a scholar. Billy B has died and been<br />
born again, not in a Born Again Christian sort of way,<br />
but rather in a born again beatnik sort of way. He<br />
writes beautiful poems on scarps of Safeway paper<br />
49<br />
Photo of Billy Burroughs in Lyons,<br />
Colorado in 1980 by Marcia Ward
Billy Burroughs’ Prediction<br />
bags, and he seems to possess a special gift, a heightened<br />
intuitive sense, that, as this story will demonstrate,<br />
is downright spooky. His harsh comments<br />
about the state of our great nation are painfully true.<br />
His discontent and disgust, his despair and disrespect,<br />
are based on experience, not politics. Yet hidden<br />
amongst the unkempt and sometimes bitter persona<br />
that Billy B shows the world, there resides a spirit<br />
more angelic than demonic. Perhaps Billy got more<br />
than just a liver from his donor, Virginia, for there are<br />
otherworldly qualities to Billy, as if all the pain and<br />
medication and fear have parted the veil betwixt now<br />
and forever. On occasion Billy sometimes sports a<br />
trickster smile in the shadow of his derby hat that<br />
even seems to enlighten the darkened corners of Ernie<br />
and Ray’s misaligned minds.<br />
Sooooo anyway, I throw a birthday dinner<br />
party for Billy, his thirty-third and last. In attendance<br />
at my house on South Pearl are Billy, his drug swap<br />
buddies, Ernie and Ray, Larry Lake and his new bride<br />
Barbara, entrepreneurial bakers Marie and Melvin<br />
Neumann (who bring beautifully braided rye and<br />
wheat loafs to the celebration), the artist Kelley<br />
Simms, best man at my wedding, Lenny Chernila, the<br />
poet Andy Clausen, myself and my wife Marcia. The<br />
menu is East Coast Italian: antipasto, Caesar salad,<br />
sausage and spaghetti with a scratch Marinara sauce.<br />
The birthday cake is an over the top, incredibly rich,<br />
New York cheesecake, (the secret recipe for which I<br />
received as a wedding present from friends of my first<br />
wife’s parents. In fact, when my first marriage hit the<br />
rocks, I jumped ship with only it, the secret recipe, to<br />
face the future with. I used to sell slices of it for a<br />
buck at street fairs, a price far below its value; and<br />
when satisfied customers, commenting on its superior<br />
qualities, would say that I ought to sell it for more, I’d<br />
make it known the secret recipe was available for ten;<br />
and I’d make a princely profit on the sale of Xerox-ed<br />
recipes.)<br />
Anyway, after Billy blows out the thirty-three<br />
candles that yin-yang atop his birthday cake, there are<br />
good wishes wished and toasts toasted to a future that<br />
proves shorter and bleaker than anyone but Billy<br />
might have guessed. And then, after a pause, Billy,<br />
with stoned eyes a sparkling, makes a prediction,<br />
prognosticating with a question directed at Marcia.<br />
“So when are you going to make your big<br />
announcement?”<br />
Marcia blushes a bit and stares at her<br />
questioner imploringly, as, apparently, she has no idea<br />
what Billy’s talking about, and says so.<br />
“Ah, come on, he continues, tell us about<br />
it.”<br />
“Tell you what? I don’t know what you’re<br />
talking about.”<br />
Billy sighs, smiles, and rephrases his request.<br />
“When are you going to tell us about the baby?”<br />
Somewhat alarmed, yet with a mixture of<br />
naughty delight and hopeful anticipation, while<br />
simultaneously defensive, Marcia soundly refutes the<br />
thrust of Billy’s innuendo.<br />
“I most certainly am not pregnant.”<br />
Billy sighs again, smiles again, and adds, “Ah<br />
yes, so you think, but nonetheless, you are. I would<br />
never kid about something like this. Being pregnant is<br />
not funny. Believe me. You are going to have a baby.”<br />
The next day, bothered yet excited by Billy’s<br />
prediction, Marcia buys an early pregnancy test, and<br />
sure enough: she’s pregnant. I guess we were not as<br />
careful as usual the night of Tommy Larkin’s marriage.<br />
Too much wine and too much passion will do that to<br />
young lovers at an Irish Catholic wedding.<br />
Sadly, the following March, some three weeks<br />
before the birth of my first son, Passion, Billy dies.<br />
The story I hear is that after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration<br />
in January of Nineteen Eighty-one, the new<br />
president’s first Presidential Directive, his first volley<br />
in his War on Drugs, is to forbid the use of morphine<br />
for out-patients, a directive that greatly affects Billy<br />
and his pain relief. Denied his out patient morphine<br />
regimen - one he’s grown totally addicted to - Billy<br />
opts to split Denver and return to Florida where he’d<br />
spent some happy days prior to his liver failure and<br />
transplant. The urban myth is that on the twenty-five<br />
hundred mile bus ride from Denver to Gainesville,<br />
Billy looks at a cold and catches it, a cold that, within<br />
short order, kills him, demonstrative proof that a mix<br />
of steroids and viruses can be lethal.<br />
Doing the backwards math, Marcia and I<br />
figure that she had been a mere thirteen days pregnant<br />
when Billy made his prediction, demonstrative proof<br />
of Billy’s special gift, of his intuitive ability to read<br />
others, their condition, and their future, a trait he<br />
once told me his grandmother had divined in him.<br />
Too bad Billy B never met my son, the proof of his<br />
prediction.<br />
Editor Note...Of possible interest...Cursed From Birth: The<br />
Short Unhappy Life of William S. Burroughs Jr, published by<br />
Soft Skull Press as a paperback in 2006. Still in print I<br />
understand.<br />
50
THE<br />
BEAT<br />
SCENE<br />
REVIEW<br />
SECTION<br />
Dexter Gordon: Dexter Blows Hot and Cool<br />
(Boplicity)<br />
CDB0PM 006<br />
Curtis Counce: Exploring the Future<br />
(Boplicity)<br />
CDB0PM 007<br />
West Coast Jazz. Think of Gerry Mulligan, Chet<br />
Baker, Dave Brubeck, Chico Hamilton. Lightly swinging<br />
sounds. Well, yes, but there was another side to what<br />
was going on in California, though it wasn’t much<br />
publicised at the time because it didn’t tie in with the<br />
“cool” image that record companies liked. And, it needs<br />
to be said, probably because it was mostly played by<br />
black musicians. I’m talking about the hard bop that<br />
came out of Los Angeles in the 1950s.<br />
Tenor-saxophonist Dexter Gordon’s career had<br />
slumped after his active role in the bop revolution of the<br />
1940s. Drug addiction had affected his reliability and he<br />
was in prison for a time. When he recorded for Dootone<br />
in 1955 he was in the process of sorting himself out,<br />
though it would be a few more years before he reestablished<br />
a place in the forefront of jazz. But he<br />
played well and his solos on numbers like “Silver<br />
Plated” and “Rhythm Mad” found him improvising at a<br />
consistently high level. Ballad performances such as<br />
“Cry Me a River” and “Don’t Worry About Me”<br />
showed him to be sensitive without sliding into<br />
sentimentality.<br />
Gordon was lucky to have strong support from<br />
pianist Carl Perkins, bassist Leroy Vinnegar, and<br />
drummer Chuck Thompson, who had recorded with him<br />
in the 1940s. Perkins was a talented bop stylist but<br />
succumbed to heroin addiction and died in 1958. Some<br />
of the tracks also feature Jimmy Robinson, a littleknown<br />
trumpeter. He was competent, but it’s Gordon<br />
and Perkins who really made music of lasting value.<br />
Another fine jazzman who was a victim of heroin was<br />
Elmo Hope, the pianist with bassist Curtis Counce’s<br />
group which recorded for Dootone in 1958. Critic Ted<br />
Through our Beat<br />
filter.....<br />
Robert Creeley,<br />
Jack Kerouac, Jim<br />
Burns, Amiri<br />
Baraka, Ed Dorn,<br />
The Garden of Eros,<br />
Boplicity, The<br />
Beat Generation<br />
boxed<br />
Gioia once claimed that Curtis had “one of the great<br />
neglected jazz bands of the 1950s,” and pointed to the<br />
fact that it never really ventured out of California for its<br />
lack of recognition. Touring on the East Coast, and<br />
especially appearing in clubs in New York, might have<br />
given it greater prominence and got it written about in<br />
leading jazz magazines.<br />
With tenor-saxophonist Harold Land, who had<br />
established a reputation for fine solo work with the<br />
Clifford Brown/Max Roach unit, and trumpeter Rolf<br />
Ericson in the front line, and drummer Frank Butler<br />
joining Hope and Counce in the rhythm section, the<br />
group played straight-ahead hard bop that never failed<br />
to swing. It could also perform in a relaxed way on tunes<br />
like “Angel Eyes” and “Someone to Watch Over Me.”<br />
Ericson was white, a Swedish musician who arrived in<br />
America in the early-1950s and soon found employment<br />
with Woody Herman and other big-bands. He was a<br />
decent soloist and easily fitted in with the general<br />
approach of the Counce band.<br />
It’s significant, I think, that these sessions were<br />
recorded for Dootone, a relatively small West Coast<br />
label that mainly specialised in rhythm’n’blues and<br />
other forms of music likely to appeal to a mainly black<br />
audience. And it’s good that the music, which has stood<br />
the test of time, is now available again.<br />
Boplicity CDs are available from Ace Records, 42-50<br />
Steele Road, London, NW10 7AS.<br />
Jim Burns<br />
51
Damn Fine Letters<br />
The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley<br />
edited by Rod Smith, Peter Baker<br />
aker, , and Kaplan<br />
Harris<br />
(University of California Press)<br />
Robert Creeley. Black Mountain, voluminous<br />
pile of letters, lots published, between him and<br />
mentor figure Charles Olson by John Martin’s Black<br />
Sparrow Press, Creeley’s own publishing venture in<br />
Mallorca, The Divers Press. Running off with Kenneth<br />
Rexroth’s wife Marthe, correspondent of William<br />
Carlos Williams, chicken farmer, sometimes wore a<br />
patch over eye damaged as a very young boy,<br />
connected with the Beats, Kerouac and Ginsberg and<br />
the others in San Francisco in the mid 1950s, not<br />
always a poet, as things like The Gold Diggers attest<br />
to. We know this much maybe, the casual observers<br />
amongst us, to varying degrees.<br />
With The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley<br />
edited by Rod Smith, Peter Baker, and Kaplan Harris<br />
we learn so much more. Creeley was a literary<br />
vagabond, moving around America and South<br />
America, searching for peace of mind, an escape<br />
from poverty as a struggling poet, his family in tow.<br />
The chicken farmer part is true and not something<br />
fanciful. He took it seriously. He also took his poetry<br />
very seriously, one can’t stress how utterly serious he<br />
was about it.<br />
In early letters to people like Charles Olson<br />
and William Carlos Williams and indeed, Ed Dorn,<br />
there are pages of deep thought and critical analysis<br />
of his work and the others. He is a committed<br />
student of poetic theory, dissecting each line<br />
meticulously, looking for weaknesses, seeking to<br />
improve himself. He questions his motivation,<br />
discards much writing which he later regrets. The<br />
back and forth between him and elder poets like<br />
Carlos Williams – a giant to Creeley – is invigorating.<br />
It would be marvellous to see their letters, the triggers<br />
to Creeley’s thought. These deep poetic discussions<br />
can become a little heavy and early on exchanges<br />
between Creeley and Olson evolve into something<br />
akin to Post War jivetalk, a brand of hip speak,<br />
codelike in character that the reader has to tread<br />
carefully and slowly through to decipher. And Creeley<br />
modifies his letter writing style to fit whoever he is<br />
writing to. To Ezra Pound is more formal, stiff even,<br />
recognisable as the kind of letter you or I might<br />
write.<br />
Creeley is a magazine publisher. He enjoys<br />
the organisation, the gathering of material for issues,<br />
the letter writing it entails asking for poems for the<br />
next issue of whatever he is doing. He worked on<br />
issues of Origin, whilst in Mallorca, for Cid Corman.<br />
Of course he is central to the publication of The Black<br />
Mountain Review, a short lived but so essential<br />
publication that played home to him, Charles Olson,<br />
Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac,<br />
Robert Duncan and many many others whose names<br />
you will know. For many the collection will take on a<br />
new meaning with mid 1950s letters to Kerouac and<br />
Ginsberg. Creeley seems totally excited and enervated<br />
by meeting Kerouac, his letters are so open about<br />
this, excited by his encounters with him personally in<br />
San Francisco as the ‘poetry renaissance’ there gathers<br />
pace, the landmark Six Gallery reading, Howl,<br />
Kerouac’s explosion into the public sphere with On<br />
the Road, Creeley seems to take to Kerouac personally<br />
and artistically. He champions Kerouac at every turn,<br />
much as Ginsberg did for all his friends. Creeley<br />
wrote to Kerouac in late January, 1958, not for the<br />
first time, “Dear Jack, I’ve got some start into the<br />
Subterraneans, and yesterday On The Road came – so<br />
that’s it. Your style is pretty incredible, old friend, i.e.,<br />
how you hold a thing, in a haze, then sharpen, then<br />
fade – I like it. To me – and it’s no simpleness – it means<br />
more than the content – or is the content, a disposition<br />
in itself. Or ‘all to be talked about’ a sharp, sliding web<br />
of consideration. So that again is it. Beats is for supper,<br />
otherwise – but you pick and I’ll read it, and feel very<br />
honoured in sd process. You are very damn good. Again,<br />
it’s what you can do, that makes me think about it<br />
all…” (Letter to Jack Kerouac, January 31,1958).<br />
In letters to William Carlos Williams, to<br />
Olson, Creeley is banging the drum, not just for<br />
Kerouac but William Burroughs and Naked Lunch.<br />
I’m taken aback by his positive words on Burroughs<br />
52
Damn Fine Letters<br />
work but he really does admire his way with words.<br />
The subject matter may alarm him at points but the<br />
style, the methodology of Burroughs, impresses him<br />
and he tells his friends just that in letters. Burroughs<br />
and Creeley, an odd couple. And, of course, with<br />
Kerouac in San Francisco, they are embroiled<br />
together, Kerouac needlessly so, over Kenneth<br />
Rexroth’s wife. Creeley and Marthe Rexroth have an<br />
affair, it ends not so long after. So it is a point where<br />
Rexroth, long a champion and rallying point for the<br />
newly emergent Beat Generation,<br />
turns on them. Turns on Kerouac,<br />
who he sees as complicit in the<br />
marriage meddling. So there is<br />
much in Creeley’s letters about all<br />
this. Rexroth wouldn’t let go. It<br />
caused big problems.<br />
There are letters to<br />
England. A fascinating insight into<br />
how things got done in 1961 when<br />
Creeley replies to overtures from<br />
English poet Tom Raworth, then<br />
publishing his Outburst magazine.<br />
Raworth is keen to contact US poets<br />
and Creeley goes the extra mile for<br />
him with names and addresses of pretty well all the<br />
major Beat poets, Ginsberg, McClure, Olson, Robert<br />
Duncan, you name them and they are in his letter.<br />
Letters to Andrew Crozier, Alexander Trocchi. These<br />
tip offs would manifest themselves for years to come<br />
in the Transatlantic exchange of poetry. That results<br />
for Creeley with contact with publisher John Calder<br />
later on in England, with the publication of a number<br />
of books there. Though his relationship with Calder<br />
was to prove irksome for him.<br />
Creeley moves home a lot, New Mexico, San<br />
Francisco, Guatemala, Canada and various other<br />
locations. He and wife Bobbie have four daughters,<br />
one dies tragically aged five in an accident. It hits<br />
him hard. Yet he continues editing this magazine<br />
here, that one there. Small press, independent<br />
publications. Gets his poetry in at places like Yugen,<br />
run by Leroi Jones and Hettie Jones in New York, a<br />
focus for pretty well all the Beat writers. A constant<br />
stream of letters back and forth between him and Ed<br />
Dorn, Louis Zukofsky, Jerome Rothenberg, Kerouac,<br />
Ginsberg, Olson – with news of the death of Olson’s<br />
wife Betty, William Carlos Williams, Robert Duncan,<br />
Alex Trocchi and others. All the time Creeley has a<br />
day job, teaching at universities. He’s very conscious<br />
of supporting his family. Guatemala is a curious place<br />
for him, very colonial, beautiful, generally a poor<br />
country where Creeley has no friends, so the letter is<br />
a big solace for him. New Mexico sees Creeley happy<br />
and sad. His mood swings on his sojourns there,<br />
teaching and bringing up a family, are wild ones. And<br />
Ed Dorn his most regular correspondent along with<br />
Olson, whom he seems to idolise. These are letters of<br />
longing to be with friends, free of the shackles of that<br />
day job, existing as a poet in the USA seems<br />
impossible financially for him.<br />
The letters seem to dwindle<br />
somewhat as the 1970s evolve, he’s<br />
preoccupied with teaching, supporting<br />
his family, and a little spark seems to go<br />
out in him at times. His marriage to<br />
Bobbie Louise Hawkins, they bring up<br />
four daughters, falters. There is much<br />
discussion between them, two, three<br />
years slip by and trial separations. The<br />
separation becomes permanent, but<br />
judging from the tone of the letters it is<br />
amicable. There is a hint at Creeley’s<br />
darker side in a letter to Bobbie, it<br />
seems he could be a Jekyll and Hyde<br />
character when drinking.<br />
Letters go out to Allen Ginsberg, Ed Sanders,<br />
Diane di Prima. Creeley seems to embrace the<br />
changing face of poetry in the 1970s, readings,<br />
performances of poetry. He’s pleased with the money,<br />
but the treadmill of it wears him down. And he’s<br />
forever mobile, moving, moving. In the mid 1970s he<br />
finds himself living above a store in Buffalo, a very<br />
nice apartment by the sounds of his notes. One of his<br />
grownup daughters lives close by. He’s at Buffalo<br />
University teaching, a lively place of course – with a<br />
magnificent library and you think from his tone that<br />
he’s settled. He’s fifty years old, the urge to party like<br />
it was San Francisco 1956, has largely left him – and<br />
yet he’s off again. New Zealand, Singapore, Australia,<br />
Europe, England and more. Never settling.<br />
One curious aspect of the book. Charles<br />
Olson dies in 1970 and save for a few stray lines as<br />
Creeley visits his sick bed, there is nothing. An<br />
almost total absence of correspondence relating to<br />
Olson’s going. What’s happening here? The man who<br />
inspired Creeley so much, surely Creeley spoke of<br />
him in letters to others, Duncan, Dorn? It is a puzzle.<br />
Possibly these letters will surface in another<br />
collection? It is to be hoped for, otherwise there exists<br />
a gaping dark hole. One death that does feature,<br />
though again it is a fleeting moment, is that of Jack<br />
53
Damn Fine Letters<br />
Kerouac. Creeley is at his funeral in Lowell,<br />
Massachusetts, meets John Clellon Holmes, Allen<br />
Ginsberg, Gregory Corso. It is doubtful he had met<br />
Holmes prior to this and he remarks on this fact and<br />
praises the Holmes essay Gone In October as<br />
‘heartfelt.’ And good old England in 1977. He’s in<br />
London, as he writes to Robert Grenier, an old<br />
correspondent. And then to the north where he visits<br />
Basil Bunting, “We had a lovely visit with Basil Bunting<br />
whose wife had broken with him last winter in some<br />
dramatic fashion, took house etc. So he’s at Jonathon<br />
Wms’ (Williams) house in Dentdale, Sedburgh,<br />
Cumbria, extraordinarily lovely country, close to<br />
Briggflats – walking distance. He goes to the Quaker<br />
Meeting house there, est. by Geo. Fox. Anyhow Basil is<br />
what I’d like to be ‘when I grow up’ – so generous,<br />
uncomplaining, filled with explicit memories of people &<br />
places & acts. The conversation ranged over the whole<br />
literal world therefore.”<br />
Creeley likes England. Enjoys the company<br />
of Basil Bunting, Jonathan Williams, and he gets<br />
published and respected here. Why wouldn’t he enjoy<br />
it? Another writer who enjoyed England was Tom<br />
Clark. Resident at Cambridge in the early 1960s,<br />
studying. His Letters Home From Cambridge are a<br />
delight. And then a resident in Essex also, slumming<br />
it with Ed Dorn. Clark enters the Creeley orbit here<br />
in 1985, he’s consulting with Creeley about the<br />
biography of Charles Olson. Clark is gathering<br />
information, memories from Creeley about the big<br />
man and Creeley is rifling his memory banks for the<br />
times, the people, Black Mountain, his first wife Ann,<br />
Fielding Dawson. And this against a background of<br />
two young children Creeley has with third wife<br />
Penelope. It seems a pleasant home life for them all,<br />
despite the constant upheavals of moving. Clark went<br />
on to write a wonderful biography of Olson with the<br />
aid of Creeley’s recollections. In 1985 Creeley Also<br />
alludes to the death of Richard Brautigan in another<br />
letter to Tom Clark, “I’m trying to do some sort of note<br />
on Brautigan’s sad death. That’s so bleak about the ‘uses’<br />
it’s instantly put to. I also couldn’t accept fact that no<br />
one, either Montana or Bolinas, had apparently asked<br />
where he was, i.e., no one to say goodbye, no one<br />
certainly to say hello.” (Letter to Tom Clark, January 9,<br />
1985)<br />
By September Creeley is in touch with poet<br />
Susan Howe from Finland. The journey never ends, it<br />
just goes on and on. He’s making the best of it.<br />
Family in tow, teaching and trying to be enthusiastic.<br />
Telling Howe his children are struggling to adjust. He<br />
likes the Fins but ultimately finds his year teaching<br />
there very mundane. A cloud comes over him with<br />
the news of the deaths of Robert Duncan, poet Joel<br />
Oppenheimer and editor George Butterick, all good<br />
friends of his. But the mood is improved by news he<br />
conveys to Allen Ginsberg in April 1989, Creeley tells<br />
Ginsberg he’s secured a position again at Buffalo<br />
University with a six figure salary, and the job fits in<br />
neatly with all his family obligations. Work drives him<br />
on and he’s heading for future times in Maine,<br />
Buffalo and Providence in Rhode Island.<br />
Back in Buffalo a madcap letter to poet/<br />
editor friend Robert Grenier reveals a jocular side to<br />
Creeley that isn’t always apparent in the preceding<br />
years. Much wordplay, Hey Jude, Tom Clark,<br />
Heidigger, Pepsi, all themes of a buoyant note that<br />
ushers in his new position at Buffalo. That position<br />
seems to involve a degree of poetry politics, with<br />
Creeley advocating a position for friend Susan Howe.<br />
It’s a long way from the barrooms of San Francisco in<br />
1956 with Kerouac and co. Yet the Fax machine<br />
arrives and this is the first Selected Letters I’ve<br />
encountered that includes faxes and emails. Creeley<br />
maintains links with his Fifties past as he<br />
communicates with Allen Ginsberg in this new<br />
fangled cutting edge era. Ginsberg is seeking guidance<br />
on selling his archive. Creeley had recently let his go<br />
to Stanford University. The email age begins for<br />
Creeley – as far as this collection reveals – on<br />
October 12, 1993 with a note to Peter Gizzi. Creeley<br />
mentions his age, the infirmities of it, but with a<br />
humorous grace and twinkle – He writes to Kurt<br />
Vonnegut asking him to drop his daughter Hannah a<br />
line confirming she did really meet Vonnegut in the<br />
Creeley kitchen in Buffalo – with Ginsberg in<br />
attendance. Hannah’s high school friends don’t believe<br />
her. Vonnegut replies in a flash and Creeley’s daughter<br />
has her proof!<br />
Letters about the Vietnam war, references to<br />
liking Bob Dylan, the poetry scene as it emerges into<br />
the 1960s, the insights into his travels and travails,<br />
the domestic of it all. The sheer immersion in poetry,<br />
Creeley is totally submerged in poetry deeps, living<br />
and breathing it. From the 1940s to his death in<br />
2005, his fingers touching the new technological age,<br />
Creeley reveals his life in these ‘Damn Fine letters.’<br />
As he was prone to utter in those early mailings to<br />
Charles Olson, Robert Duncan and William Carlos<br />
Williams. For the history of it all, a fabulous read and<br />
archive of American literary movement.<br />
ISBN 978-0-520-24160-2<br />
hardcover<br />
The University of California Press, 2120 Berkeley Way,<br />
Berkeley, California 94704-1012, USA<br />
www.ucpress.edu<br />
Kevin Ring<br />
54
Jack Kerouac<br />
The Haunted Life and<br />
Other Writings<br />
(De Capo Press)<br />
After years of the Kerouac vaults being locked<br />
we have been treated to a string of freshly published<br />
works, many dating from the younger Kerouac. Some<br />
observers are wary of this release of material, often<br />
billed as ‘lost,’ fearing it will not match the later<br />
period Kerouac, that it will damage his reputation<br />
even. Other critics simply opine that it isn’t up to<br />
scratch and should have been left alone. There are<br />
other camps, trains of thought. The fans, they come<br />
in ever fresh faced waves through the decades, drawn<br />
by his outsider appeal in the main, want to read<br />
everything he ever wrote. They dread the day the well<br />
runs dry.<br />
The Haunted Life and Other Stories was<br />
allegedly ‘lost’ in the back of a taxi cab in the 1940s<br />
in New York City. It makes you smile. The thought<br />
of Jack Kerouac, known for his frugality, catching a<br />
taxi cab makes me wonder. If he could save a few<br />
cents he would. And there was always the subway. Or<br />
maybe Allen Ginsberg or Stanley Gould, or John<br />
Clellon Holmes were picking up the fare? Did he<br />
know Stanley Gould then? But you see what I mean.<br />
Kerouac was like Dickens, he liked to walk. Shanks<br />
pony.<br />
The story goes that the lost manuscript was<br />
rediscovered in a cupboard in a room at Columbia<br />
university. It makes sense of course. Kerouac<br />
famously didn’t graduate from there but hung around<br />
to stop over with Ginsberg from time to time. And he<br />
frequented the bars around the university campus.<br />
The manuscript was eventually sold at auction at<br />
Sotheby’s in New York for in excess of $95,000 some<br />
years ago. Just imagine, ponder on it. What would<br />
that kind of money have meant to a largely down on<br />
his heels forty seven year old Kerouac in 1969? Even<br />
a tenth of that sum. He was basically writing begging<br />
letters to his agent Sterling Lord. The sad irony of it<br />
all.<br />
And so to the book. Me? I’m in the can’t get<br />
enough of Jack Kerouac camp. Never grown out of<br />
that stage. It’s easy to come to the conclusion that his<br />
early work quite naturally doesn’t have that apparent<br />
free flowing style that he so perfected as the 1950s<br />
broke and he listened to Ed White on sketching<br />
theory, that first thought best thought coffee and<br />
Benzedrine rush of writing that he would explode<br />
through and then revise later on. Of course he pushed<br />
the idea that he never revised and for a time we<br />
believed him, some with a raised questioning<br />
eyebrow. Until the academics got to his archives and<br />
made some discoveries. It was still spontaneous prose<br />
but he checked it out later on also.<br />
We’re talking mid 1940s here. Kerouac is what,<br />
twenty two? The Town and the City is years away from<br />
publication in 1950. An epic family saga of a book<br />
that was his first calling card but largely sank without<br />
a trace. Dismissed in the few reviews as heavily in<br />
debt to Kerouac’s hero Thomas Wolfe. It is pleasing<br />
to read in Todd Tietchen’s substantial and thoughtful<br />
introduction that he considers Kerouac’s first novel to<br />
have been unfairly relegated. To be honest my take on<br />
it was I wished he had written more in that vein. It is<br />
a substantial work that sorely needs reassessment.<br />
And mention of Thomas Wolfe, he of the soaring<br />
waves of words, never use ten words when you can<br />
employ a hundred approach, which is his way and has<br />
given us rapturous passages rarely equalled in<br />
American letters – brings in a mention by Tietchen of<br />
William Saroyan – that daring young writer and<br />
indeed playwright and another of Kerouac’s literary<br />
look to guys. Now Saroyan needs no introduction<br />
even today at a time when his books are mostly<br />
absent from bookstore shelves, he’s out of fashion no<br />
mistake – but another left leaning writer that Tietchen<br />
55
The Haunted Life<br />
re-introduces and it made me smile, make that beam,<br />
is Albert Halper. Now Halper possibly does need a<br />
little introduction here. It’s as though he never<br />
existed. Beat Scene, mostly through the efforts of Jim<br />
Burns, has attempted to bring him back from the<br />
dead – though it appears his works remain resolutely<br />
out of print. He was a socialist writer, mentioned in<br />
the same breath as Dos Passos. He wrote of the<br />
workplace, the workers, the downtrodden, he wrote<br />
of trade unions when America really had those<br />
organisations on a par with Communism.<br />
McCarthyism saw to that. He<br />
was out on a limb. And Kerouac<br />
loved his work, he and Sebastian<br />
Sampas, his young Greek friend<br />
in Lowell who was killed in the<br />
Second World War, almost before<br />
he needed to shave. They read<br />
and digested his work as eagerly<br />
as they did Saroyan and Wolfe<br />
and others. Kerouac includes<br />
some initial thoughts on Halper<br />
in his book, “Peter read slowly,<br />
admiring the young Halper’s tragic<br />
sense of youth and lonesomeness.”<br />
Kerouac, through Peter Martin,<br />
imagines Albert Halper in<br />
Manhattan, daydreams of one<br />
day being like him. Discussing<br />
Peter’s room and listing Halper<br />
amongst the Russian novelists<br />
and Sherwood Anderson’s and the<br />
like, his favourite books. So it is gratifying that the<br />
forgotten Halper is remembered and maybe, just<br />
maybe, some enterprising publisher will resurrect him<br />
and bring him to new readers.<br />
The Haunted Life is very much a forerunner to<br />
The Town and the City. Peter Martin is here in<br />
embryonic shape alongside Garabed Tourian and<br />
Dick Sheffield – characters based on Sebastian and<br />
on another Lowell friend Billy Chandler. Sadly<br />
Chandler was another World War Two casualty.<br />
Imagine losing two of your best friends aged twenty<br />
something? And Joe Martin is heavily based on<br />
Kerouac’s father Leo, about whom Jack had mixed<br />
feelings. They clashed, let’s put it like that. Like<br />
Kerouac’s mother, his dad had some questionable<br />
beliefs. In fact the book commences with Joe Martin<br />
bemoaning the state of his America, it is a vicious<br />
Archie Bunker or Alf Garnett tirade that is evidently a<br />
regular feature in the Kerouac household – a what is<br />
the country coming to soliloquy.<br />
Handling his loss of Sebastian and Billy – they<br />
are both dead as Kerouac begins to memorialise them<br />
both - and faced with his father’s racist tirades<br />
Kerouac captures the changing times, Benny<br />
Goodman records over the radio heralding a new<br />
mood, a new deal in Roosevelt’s USA. That sense of a<br />
change is gonna come that Kerouac was so desperate<br />
to capture in his work. The idea that the awesome<br />
swathes of rural America were not immune to the<br />
coming of the new highways, the radio, with<br />
television just around the corner. Nowhere would<br />
remain untouched and<br />
this kid Kerouac is so<br />
aware for his tender<br />
years, in tune, listening<br />
to the pounding drums,<br />
the dustcloud in the<br />
distance as modernity<br />
approaches, he sees it all.<br />
And he’s just this kid.<br />
Can you believe it? And<br />
there’s shades of his<br />
beloved Dostoevsky and<br />
of Proust. It is one of the<br />
more successful early<br />
Kerouac works. Present<br />
are the vital excesses of<br />
his prose, Peter Martin<br />
listening to the sounds of<br />
Galloway through his<br />
open window in the cool<br />
of the evening, “Again<br />
the train…moving north to Montreal…howling long<br />
and hoarse, a mournful night sound…<br />
Silence now for a moment…and the river hush, and the<br />
trembling of tree leaves. Far across the field, over the<br />
tracks and over to the boulevard across the river, where<br />
the cars move endlessly back and forth from the city to<br />
the ice cream road stands, the fried clam restaurants, the<br />
pink-lit roadhouses all crowded with shuffling dancers,<br />
the faint beep of klaxons returns.” (page 42)<br />
He’s already an incurable romantic about the<br />
endless possibilities of America. Even at this tender<br />
age. He can’t possibly see and hear all these things<br />
lying on his bed in his room, can he, but he does. All<br />
the portents are there. The signals that – okay he’s in<br />
the full glare of Thomas Wolfe and overblown,<br />
sometimes like a dazzled rabbit in the headlights, but<br />
he’s on the verge of finding his voice. And you know<br />
the story is a remembrance and tribute to his lost<br />
friends Sebastian and Billy. Kerouac has an almost<br />
camera like movement between Lowell houses as they<br />
Jack Kerouac aged 20<br />
56
The Haunted Life<br />
talk on porches, listen to baseball games on radios,<br />
drink lemonade, talk plans for the future and with<br />
girls. The influence of a writer like Dostoevsky is so<br />
apparent here, families, brothers, awful tragedy. Even<br />
though Kerouac at points stresses his dislike of<br />
‘European decadence.’ And then before you know it<br />
Kerouac’s characters are left in mid thought. It’s<br />
abrupt, no doubt about it. You turn the page hoping<br />
for more. A work in preparation that was to result in<br />
The Town and the City in 1950, where the Martin<br />
family were created in his youthful imagination to<br />
include more brothers and sisters and the coming of<br />
war for America. And there is the portrait of his<br />
father, far from flattering and if the later in life<br />
Kerouac was chided for allegedly bowing to his<br />
mother’s influence, then this father character is no<br />
less a brute force on him. That war involvement<br />
changed the game plan for Kerouac, he got involved<br />
and saw a great big world outside Lowell – how could<br />
it not? Galloway, the sleepy town by the Merrimack,<br />
couldn’t hold him – and he stresses this in additional<br />
essays, questioning even why he is spending time on a<br />
novel about this small town. Maturity would bring<br />
Maggie Cassidy, Dr.Sax, Visions of Gerard, all Jack’s<br />
memories floating through the Lowell streets like<br />
morning fog. Never forgotten, just stored away.<br />
The Haunted Life is augmented with journal<br />
notes, speculative essays of preparation from<br />
Kerouac. He was totally committed to a writer’s life<br />
and passionately organised. These mini essays display<br />
how he was far from spontaneous, the mapping out of<br />
his novel was almost military like in the precision of<br />
it all. Of course his top pocket notebooks became<br />
almost a part of him and thankfully any number of<br />
them have been preserved. In addition there are<br />
letters, observers will be keen to read letters from his<br />
father to Jack and his sister Nin, who died so<br />
prematurely. This is Kerouac finding his way, before<br />
long he would be in New York, involved in seedy<br />
murder scenes, hastily married, involved with drugs,<br />
all the Big Apple could throw at him. He slips into<br />
philosophical mode at points and you wish he might<br />
ditch that and just tell the story Jack. There are<br />
sentimental portraits of his father, Jack seems to love<br />
him despite Leo’s scarily bigoted way. There are<br />
Kerouac diary entries from late summer 1945.<br />
Tellingly there is one entry which reads, “I was<br />
reminded today of a conversation in Greenwich Village<br />
last summer: Mimi West had asked me what I was<br />
looking for, in my writing that is, and I had told her, “A<br />
new method.” At this point, Lucien Carr had put in: “A<br />
new method!...and a new vision.” Well, he was wrong;<br />
the vision I do have, it’s the method I want….Someday<br />
I’ll express it. I’ve no doubt that I will.” (page 186).<br />
It seems a million miles away from the town<br />
of his youth, the all engulfing floods, the stygian<br />
darkness of his Doctor Sax rooftops, the overpowering<br />
Catholicism, but the method was just waiting for him<br />
a few years on. Lucien Carr was halfway through.<br />
Charlie Parker with his innovative progressions in<br />
Bebop, Ed White and his powerful sketching<br />
suggestions, the muse that was Neal Cassady, the ever<br />
unfolding road. All that and more was to come.<br />
Some might question the merits of bringing<br />
this almost juvenile work to the light. Better to leave<br />
it alone and celebrate his master works they may<br />
venture. There is an argument for that. And yet these<br />
unfinished works display a wonderfully observant eye<br />
and a talent for building characters that engage. And<br />
Tietchen, a professor at Massachusetts University in<br />
Lowell itself, how fitting is that. From the days when<br />
it used to be ‘Jack who?’ in Kerouac’s town more<br />
often than not, they now endorse his books and<br />
eulogise him – Tietchen pens a lyrical introduction.<br />
Hindsight is a wonderful thing – but Tietchen places<br />
Kerouac’s work beautifully in context, he has the<br />
luxury of what the years since 1969 have revealed to<br />
us. Of course he has had the advantage of access to<br />
the still largely unknown Kerouac archive. He might<br />
care to think of improved footnotes in subsequent<br />
editions. Any number of references are left<br />
untouched. Who was Mimi West, for instance?<br />
It is frustratingly brief. It is a tidying up of<br />
Jack Kerouac affairs for certain. There are hints at<br />
other, as yet, unpublished essays that may arrive at<br />
some point. ‘Galloway.’ A ‘Philip Tourian novel,’ are<br />
referenced. Kerouac was impressively prodigious in<br />
output and meticulous in archiving all his works<br />
(though he nearly lost this one). Some critics may<br />
sniff and dismiss it but for the thousands of devotees<br />
around the world it will be manna from heaven. And<br />
that’s so right for them, because all along Kerouac<br />
told everyone he was published in heaven anyway.<br />
57
ARTISTS, BEATS & COOL CATS<br />
Jim Burns<br />
(Penniless Press)<br />
It could very well be that Jim Burns has his tongue firmly in his<br />
cheek when speaking of ‘cool cats,’ in his new collection of essays.<br />
This enduring poet and essayist has never seemed in the slightest<br />
concerned with anything as trivial as ‘cool.’ A whole raft of essays<br />
here which, true to the title, span the artistic disciplines. Burns<br />
speaks a precise and simple language and gets to the essence of his<br />
fascinations very quickly. The previous three volumes have revealed<br />
him as a traveller down obscure lanes and roads. So, in this thick<br />
collection there is Jackson Pollock, Maggie Cassidy, Cid Corman’s<br />
Origin magazine, Jack Kerouac, The Village Voice, Black Mountain<br />
College, Edwin Brock, the Objectivists, Dorothy Parker, Bebop,<br />
West Coast jazz and much more besides. Obscure English painters<br />
and writers as well. What Jim Burns seems to do very well is dust off<br />
the years from forgotten figures, the<br />
neglected, the overlooked, even those<br />
who truly never reached any level of<br />
recognition. Burns sees in many of<br />
them qualities that have been missed.<br />
Sometimes a poet’s standing can be<br />
but a good review away from being<br />
restored or enhanced. The slings and<br />
arrows of outrageous fortune, and all<br />
that.<br />
The various essays span the decades.<br />
Some from as far back as 1976 and<br />
are culled from a diverse range of<br />
publications. His own 1970s magazine<br />
Palantir, the journals Iron,<br />
Ambit, the long running magazine<br />
run by Martin Bax and others. One<br />
thing that struck me was that as<br />
Burns edges towards 80 years old, his output shows signs of increasing<br />
and he has embraced the digital age to an extent, some of his<br />
work appearing on line.<br />
While Bebop and the Beats are key interests for him he is by no<br />
means limited in his outlook, with ‘Little magazines’ a particular<br />
favourite of his. He is a mine of information and it might be<br />
advisable to have a notepad handy to jot down some of his references.<br />
And, of course, with essays spanning almost forty years it is clear his<br />
style has evolved, there’s a slightly combative aspect to the Burns of<br />
the 1970s. He seemed on a mission to fight the mainstream, in his<br />
understated, but passionate way. His passions are always going to be<br />
largely obscure and we are better for it. These essays reveal worlds<br />
through doorways slightly ajar, his work beckons you in.<br />
Penniless Press<br />
www.pennilesspress.co.uk<br />
ISBN 978-1-291-85067-3<br />
Larger format paperback<br />
Colin Cooper<br />
THE BEAT GENERATION BOXED<br />
(Enlightenment)<br />
Rebooted for 2014. Five compact discs<br />
billed as the ‘Beat Generation Boxed.’<br />
While it is very entertaining and<br />
impressive, all is not quite what it<br />
seems. What is a real bonus are the<br />
two disc set that includes Jack<br />
Kerouac’s three LPs, the recordings<br />
that he saw released in his lifetime.<br />
Bonus tracks added include a brief<br />
interview Kerouac did with the Italian<br />
journalist Fernanda Pivano in 1966,<br />
whilst on his crazy tour to Europe,<br />
which partly resulted in his<br />
posthumous short novel Pic. There’s<br />
also a fifteen minute interview Kerouac<br />
did with Ben Hecht. Good stuff.<br />
Beat Generation Jazz is a two disc set<br />
billed as ‘The music that inspired a<br />
Revolution.’ Now that’s a big claim –<br />
but if you are including Charlie Parker,<br />
Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, Roy<br />
Eldridge, Lionel Hampton, Fats<br />
Navarro, Miles Davis, George<br />
Shearing (remember that point in On<br />
the Road, when Dean says George<br />
Shearing is God?), Thelonius Monk,<br />
Chet Baker, Bud Powell, Dexter<br />
Gordon, and others. Ken Nordine is a<br />
fascinating inclusion. You get the<br />
picture? And then for good measure<br />
various Kerouac recordings with Steve<br />
Allen, though there is some duplication<br />
going on, with tracks already heard on<br />
the Kerouac discs. But still, all good.<br />
The third separate collection is one a<br />
few of you will have on your shelves<br />
already. Reissued here, ‘Diggin’ the<br />
New Breed. This one originally<br />
appeared some years ago. You’ll hear<br />
the voices of Kerouac, Burroughs,<br />
Ginsberg, Snyder, Huncke, Lucien<br />
Carr, Ferlinghetti, Ed Sanders,<br />
Waldman, McClure. Somehow they<br />
spell Peter Orlovsky’s name incorrectly,<br />
as they do with Ann Charters, and<br />
Michael McClure. Surprising they<br />
didn’t put it right on reissue. Nearly six<br />
hours of listening here. And all for a<br />
mere ridiculous price of under £9. Not<br />
bad at all.<br />
www.chromedreams.co.uk<br />
Sophia Nitrate<br />
58
Amiri Baraka &<br />
Edward Dorn<br />
The Collected Letters<br />
(University of New Mexico Press)<br />
Edited by Claudia Moreno Pisano<br />
Reviewed by Jim Burns<br />
Exchanges of letters between writers can<br />
offer insights into the characters of the people<br />
concerned as well as into their work. And they can<br />
additionally throw light on particular periods of<br />
literary activity. Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn<br />
began to establish themselves as poets and prose<br />
writers at a time when<br />
American literature was<br />
widening its scope and the<br />
“New American Writing,” as it<br />
was often referred to, was<br />
starting to attract attention.<br />
This didn’t necessarily mean<br />
that people like Baraka and<br />
Dorn suddenly found it easy to<br />
break into print, nor did it lead<br />
to their being able to support<br />
themselves from their writing.<br />
But it may be interesting at this<br />
point to say something about<br />
them. Not everyone will<br />
necessarily be familiar with<br />
Baraka’s books, nor with<br />
Dorn’s. Some background<br />
information may be useful.<br />
Amiri Baraka, or Leroi<br />
Jones as he was called prior to<br />
his embracing black nationalism in the 1960s, was<br />
born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1934, and grew up<br />
in what has been described as a stable, working-class<br />
household. He seems to have done well at school and<br />
won a scholarship to Howard University in<br />
Washington. But he soon rebelled against what he saw<br />
as its bourgeois educational ethics and left. He then<br />
joined the Air Force, though he was quickly<br />
discharged because he was suspected of communist<br />
tendencies. This was at a time when McCarthyism<br />
was rampant and any sort of deviant behaviour was<br />
suspect. It would appear that copies of Partisan<br />
Review were found in Jones’s locker. There’s a<br />
humorous side to this, Partisan Review being anticommunist<br />
and even probably supported by the CIA<br />
as part of its cultural<br />
programme. But the fact of it<br />
being an intellectual publication,<br />
and not given to the kind of<br />
populist anti-communism that<br />
Senator McCarthy and his<br />
supporters favoured, would<br />
probably have been enough for<br />
Jones to attract unfavourable<br />
attention. He soon moved to<br />
Greenwich Village and became<br />
involved in the “bohemian<br />
poetry, theatre, and music<br />
scene.” Over the years he<br />
established himself as a poet,<br />
editor, playwright, jazz critic,<br />
and political activist.<br />
Edward Dorn was born<br />
in Illinois in 1929 and so grew<br />
up during the Depression,<br />
something that was reflected in<br />
a poem like “On the Debt My Mother Owed Sears<br />
Roebuck.” Dorn attended Black Mountain College in<br />
the 1950s and got acquainted with Charles Olson,<br />
Robert Creeley, Joel Oppenheimer, John Wieners,<br />
and others who would play a significant part in “The<br />
New American Writing” of the late-1950s and early-<br />
1960s. Dorn wrote prose as well as poetry, but was<br />
never able to earn a living from his writing alone. He<br />
took part-time teaching posts and in 1965 was offered<br />
59<br />
Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka)...photo by Chris Felver.<br />
Included in his book, THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING<br />
(Arena Editions) www.chrisfelver.com
Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn<br />
a position as a Fulbright lecturer at Essex University<br />
where he remained until 1970. When he returned to<br />
the USA he still found it necessary to teach part-time<br />
while trying to develop his poetry. In 1977 he was<br />
offered a teaching position at the University of<br />
Colorado and stayed there until he died in 1999.<br />
The initial contact between Jones (I’ll use the<br />
name he had during the main part of the time they<br />
corresponded) and Dorn was in 1959 when Jones was<br />
editing his little-magazine, Yugen, and wrote to Dorn<br />
to ask him to send some poems. Jones was publishing<br />
a wide selection of the new writers, including Beats<br />
like Kerouac, Corso, and Ginsberg, Black<br />
Mountaineers such as Fielding Dawson and Joel<br />
Oppenheimer, and Frank O’Hara who was linked to<br />
the New York School. Dorn was going<br />
to be in good company. There are<br />
notes about most of the people<br />
mentioned and it’s useful to have them.<br />
Kerouac and Ginsberg don’t need to be<br />
explained, but what about Max<br />
Finstein? Unless you’re a specialist with<br />
an interest in this period of American<br />
poetry it’s unlikely you’ll know anything<br />
about Finstein. His name does crop up<br />
here and there in the letters, not always<br />
in a complimentary way. But he’s not<br />
alone in that and I’ll say something<br />
later about how and why Jones and<br />
Dorn seem to feel it necessary to be<br />
derogatory about many other poets.<br />
And not just poets. Joyce Glassman<br />
(later known as Joyce Johnson) became a particular<br />
hate figure for Jones. Claudia Moreno Pisano says<br />
that Glassman “is the target of some of Jones’s more<br />
vicious misogynist vitriol,” probably because in her<br />
role as an editor at a commercial publisher she didn’t<br />
match up to his expectations of publication of Dorn’s<br />
work.<br />
The exchange of letters became regular once<br />
the initial contact had been established. Both poets<br />
were experiencing financial problems and they often<br />
compare notes on how much, or more likely how<br />
little, they’re likely to be paid for a reading or whether<br />
or not the money can be raised to publish a small<br />
book. Publishing their poems in little magazines<br />
wasn’t ever going to bring in payments of any<br />
consequence, or even any payments at all, most<br />
magazines struggling to stay alive. Jones’s own<br />
magazine, Yugen, had folded after eight issues, and a<br />
mimeographed publication, The Floating Bear, that<br />
he’d started with Diane di Prima, didn’t pay<br />
contributors.<br />
above...Ed Dorn<br />
60<br />
By 1961 Jones was becoming increasingly<br />
politicised and in September he wrote to Dorn to say<br />
that he’d been arrested and charged with “resisting<br />
arrest; inciting to riot; disorderly conduct.” He’d also<br />
attracted the attention of the right-wing Senator<br />
Eastland who described Jones as a “Beatnik poet,<br />
radical leftist racist agitator.” This led to an exchange<br />
of ideas about politics and to what degree poets<br />
should involve themselves in activism. Jones was<br />
obviously an advocate of poets getting involved, but<br />
Dorn had his doubts and tended to take the position<br />
that it was probably better to stay outside politics, at<br />
least in terms of the poet being caught up in direct<br />
action on the streets. He had a deep distrust of the<br />
State (any State, even a revolutionary one) and<br />
thought that they all should be treated with suspicion.<br />
As Jones became even more<br />
active and moved towards<br />
changing his name and<br />
abandoning his white friends<br />
and even his white wife and<br />
their children, they continued<br />
to disagree about political<br />
involvement. Claudia Moreno<br />
Pisano has an interesting<br />
quotation from Howard<br />
Brick’s Age of Contradiction:<br />
American Thought and Culture<br />
in the 1960s: “American<br />
thought and culture grew<br />
turbulent and rife with<br />
contention; the realm of ideas<br />
and arts became more subject<br />
to instability than the foundations of American social<br />
structure itself.”<br />
I mentioned earlier that throughout the<br />
letters there are frequent derogatory references to<br />
other writers. Philip Lamantia is described as “the<br />
fastest longest more boringest talker in the East or<br />
West,” and Michael McClure as “the hugest egotist of<br />
us all.” There’s a reference to “hayseed Kerouac,” and<br />
Robert Creeley as “simple-minded about sociopolitical<br />
matters.” Max Finstein and Marc Schleifer<br />
(connected with the magazine, Kulchur) are attacked,<br />
with Schleifer said to be “the world’s worst poet.”<br />
And women in particular seem to have angered Jones.<br />
Denise Levertov, Diane di Prima, Joyce Glassman,<br />
and Lita Hornick (who financed Kulchur), just to<br />
mention the better-known names, come in for<br />
criticism, often of a nasty kind. Dorn sometimes<br />
joins in, but I had the feeling that his heart may not<br />
have been in it and he was just reacting in a way that<br />
Jones expected. Perhaps I’m wrong? There are other<br />
dismissals, of course, often of established and/or<br />
academic poets. I suppose this was inevitable and it
Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn<br />
happens as any new group of poets starts to fight for a<br />
place in the sun. I’m not sure that it adds anything to<br />
our knowledge of the poets, new or old, though<br />
literary historians may thrive on such material.<br />
Dorn was mostly based in Pocatello, Idaho,<br />
during the years covered by the majority of the letters<br />
(roughly 1959 to 1965), whereas Jones was in New<br />
York and therefore in a position to meet a wide<br />
variety of poets. In a letter from March, 1963, Jones<br />
reports that several “Deep Imagists” had paid him a<br />
visit and names Rochelle Owens, George Economou,<br />
and Armand Schwerner. I can’t imagine that the Deep<br />
Image group will now mean much to many people,<br />
other than students of literary movements, but they<br />
were active for a time in the early 1960s. And as<br />
individuals the various poets carried on writing when<br />
the group label lost its relevance. I have to admit that<br />
I was never sure just what they represented in terms<br />
of their ideas about how to write poems. Jones’s brief<br />
report on their visit gives the impression that he<br />
wasn’t too keen on their work. It also gives him the<br />
opportunity to once again display his crude<br />
comments about one of the women in the group.<br />
Another letter, later in 1963, finds Jones sneering at<br />
Denise Levertov. The misogynistic strain in his<br />
thinking becomes so evident that the reader can’t help<br />
wondering just what his problem was.<br />
Jones was by 1963 beginning to establish a<br />
reputation as a poet, critic, and editor. He edited an<br />
excellent prose anthology, The Moderns, which<br />
featured some of Dorn’s work alongside Kerouac,<br />
Burroughs, Creeley, and others, and his jazz study,<br />
Blues People: Negro Music in White America, was<br />
published to critical acclaim. His early poems,<br />
collected in Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note,<br />
showed him to be an adventurous and entertaining<br />
poet. Dorn, by contrast, was still largely limited to<br />
publishing in little magazines, though his collection,<br />
The Newly Fallen, had appeared in 1962. And that<br />
came about largely due to Jones’s interventions on his<br />
behalf. It wasn’t that Dorn’s work lacked substance or<br />
interest, but the fact of his being away from a major<br />
centre of literary activity like New York or San<br />
Francisco meant that he wasn’t in a position to make<br />
contacts and cultivate editors and publishers. He was<br />
lucky to have Jones as a friend who promoted his<br />
writing.<br />
A letter in 1964 has Jones admitting to “Jewbaiting”<br />
while he was “on some powder and drinking<br />
my head off,” and it perhaps is an indicator of how<br />
he would later write poems in which contained what<br />
Kenneth Rexroth referred to as “vicious anti-Semitic<br />
doggerel.” In 1965 Jones announced that he would in<br />
future be known as Amiri Baraka and he began to<br />
distance himself from his white family and friends.<br />
The letters more or less come to a halt, partly because<br />
of Jones’s new involvements but also because it was in<br />
1965 that Dorn decided to move to England and take<br />
up a position as a lecturer at Essex University. He<br />
remained there until 1970. Claudia Moreno Pisano<br />
mentions that Jones says that he and Dorn<br />
corresponded in the 1990s, but the letters haven’t yet<br />
come to light.<br />
I’ve admittedly moved around the letters and<br />
selected certain areas of them for comment. And it<br />
may be that in doing so I’ve overlooked some of their<br />
more interesting passages. Leaving aside the<br />
tendencies to belittle other poets and to often<br />
denigrate women, they do provide a great deal of<br />
valuable material for literary scholars. Obviously,<br />
much of the information relates to personal matters,<br />
such as families and finances (always a problem), and<br />
to the whereabouts and activities of mutual friends<br />
and fellow-poets. But there are also references to little<br />
magazines and small-press publishers. Jones’s<br />
involvements with Yugen and The Floating Bear, are<br />
discussed, and Dorn’s little magazine, Wild Dog, is<br />
also referred to. Jones recommends Yowl, a magazine<br />
edited by George Montgomery, and suggests that<br />
Dorn send some prose to Second Coming. It seems to<br />
me that information like this is useful to an<br />
understanding of the period concerned. Little<br />
magazines played an essential role in the rise of the<br />
new writing. There is, incidentally, a letter from 1960<br />
in which Dorn tells Jones that he’d sent a poem called<br />
“Pronouncement” to a Dr Gilbert Nieman in Puerto<br />
Rico but had heard nothing further about it. Nieman<br />
edited a magazine called Between Worlds from the<br />
Inter-American University in Puerto Rico and Dorn’s<br />
poem was published in the first issue which is dated<br />
Summer, 1960.<br />
Claudia Moreno Pisano has provided<br />
informative notes about many of the people referred<br />
to by Jones and Dorn and she efficiently fills in the<br />
gaps between letters. There is in, addition, a useful<br />
bibliography. This is an essential book for anyone<br />
with an interest in Jones/Baraka and Dorn or the<br />
wider field of the development of the “New American<br />
Writing” of the 1950s and 1960s.<br />
Hardcover at 248 pages. $59.95.<br />
ISBN 978-0-8263-5391-7<br />
61
THE GARDEN OF EROS<br />
The Stor<br />
tory of the Paris Expatriates and the Post-W<br />
ost-War Literary Scene<br />
John Calder<br />
(Alma)<br />
John Calder. The enduring English<br />
publisher. Who took chances,<br />
Burroughs, Beckett and others.<br />
Morphed into Calder and Boyars<br />
at one point. Apparently that<br />
fusion ended in acrimony. He’s<br />
been around the block a few times,<br />
paid his dues, has stories to tell<br />
and was in on so many events<br />
important in the alternative<br />
English publishing scene post war.<br />
So there are few better equipped<br />
to relate that ‘underground’<br />
publishing story that takes in Paris,<br />
New York, Spain, London, and<br />
involves Grove Press, Maurice<br />
Girodias, the Olympia Press,<br />
Evergreen Review, Henry Miller,<br />
censorship battles, Alexander<br />
Trocchi and so much more<br />
besides.<br />
Nothing happens without a<br />
precedent and Calder outlines the<br />
stories and history that came<br />
before the turbulent 1950s and<br />
1960s. The factions at work in war<br />
torn Paris during the Second<br />
World War, the politics that<br />
divided the literary world, the<br />
resistors and the Nazi<br />
collaborators. The internecine<br />
struggles for cultural ascendancy.<br />
Calder paints a lively, stressful<br />
landscape. And then Paris is<br />
liberated and the city swings back<br />
into its previous life. Hemingway<br />
propping up a bar. Henry Miller<br />
like a deer frozen in the headlights<br />
at a court hearing to determine if<br />
he was an obscene writer or not.<br />
The French were forgiving and<br />
lenient and sometimes persistently<br />
draconian.<br />
George Plimpton and The<br />
Paris Review journal that emerged<br />
from the wreckage of the war and<br />
in influx of Americans into Paris –<br />
this gets the full spotlight from<br />
Calder. Naturally there is a<br />
revolving door of writers, editors,<br />
chancers, lovely young girls who<br />
worked at the Review, writers. Of<br />
course Calder speculates on the<br />
probability of The Paris Review<br />
being financed by the CIA. How<br />
else would it have survived so long?<br />
One figure stands out like a<br />
colossus in Calder’s book, that of<br />
Maurice Girodias. A renegade<br />
publisher if ever there was one.<br />
His Olympia Press a curious<br />
mixture of the avant-garde and the<br />
pornographic. For every Burroughs<br />
or Beckett there was a ‘db’ – a<br />
dirty book. Girodias published<br />
them endlessly and was chased<br />
through the courts incessantly for<br />
his brash nerve and cheek. The<br />
Calder portrait of Girodias, as he<br />
tracks and remembers him<br />
through the decades, is<br />
surprisingly affectionate, when you<br />
consider Girodias was a rogue,<br />
who was a slippery customer when<br />
it came to paying his bills.<br />
If you need to discover Maurice<br />
Girodias, you need look no further<br />
than Calder. Alexander Trocchi,<br />
another ‘character’ who charmed<br />
and conned his way through life<br />
and who ultimately succumbed to<br />
his drug addiction, he too receives<br />
the Calder spotlight.<br />
Grove Press, Barney Rosset,<br />
they went together like hand and<br />
glove. Calder, again, draws a<br />
picture of a shy, yet brash Rosset.<br />
A man who would not entertain<br />
any view other than his own, an<br />
individualist, risk taker. A man<br />
who – as is well documented –<br />
took on the censorship police and<br />
won. Calder does a good job.<br />
John Calder was there, an<br />
insider, consequently his<br />
recollections and thoughts are<br />
invaluable. He has an easy style, a<br />
little ‘old school.’ A rewarding<br />
book.<br />
Paperback by Alma Press<br />
ISBN 978-09574522-1-3<br />
Brian Dalton<br />
NEELI CHERKOVSKI<br />
Falling Light<br />
(Edition Baes)<br />
Back last year Edition Baes, the<br />
publishing house founded by Elias<br />
Schneitter, issued a lovingly presented<br />
hardcover containing the poetry of<br />
Neeli Cherkovski. Now Cherkovski has<br />
been something of an enduring<br />
presence on the San Francisco poetry<br />
landscape for a decade or two. Mostly<br />
published in small editions, firmly<br />
rooted in that old North Beach and<br />
Beat tradition of the 1950s. Sometimes<br />
I feel about him that he was born too<br />
late, instead he should have been part<br />
of that San Francisco poetry renaissance<br />
of the 1950s and mixed with Whalen,<br />
Welch, McClure, Snyder, Rexroth and<br />
all the others who made up that scene.<br />
Instead he has positioned himself in a<br />
place totally his own. He was a close<br />
friend of Charles Bukowski, which<br />
shows he has allegiance to no one, heck,<br />
they even started a short lived magazine<br />
together. Cherkovski also produced the<br />
first biography of Bukowski. Plus<br />
another biography of Lawrence<br />
Ferlinghetti. And he’s responsible for<br />
the excellent Whitman’s Wild Children, I<br />
fear that one is out of print. That’s a<br />
crime.<br />
Here in this new book are contemporary<br />
poems and some older ones. Poetry<br />
recalling Harold Norse, times in East<br />
Hollywood with Bukowski, for Ezra<br />
Pound, Coit Tower, of course an SF<br />
landmark. There is a melancholy that<br />
bathes everything he writes.<br />
Published in English with a German<br />
language text alongside.<br />
ISBN 9-78-3950-355970<br />
Hardcover<br />
Edition Baes www.edition-baes.at<br />
Dawn Swoop<br />
62
Diane di Prima having her long hair<br />
brushed by Shirley Berman at the<br />
Berman home at Crater Lane in 1962.<br />
Also in the picture is Tosh, the son of<br />
Shirley and Wallace Berman. Wallace<br />
Berman took the photo. In 1962 Di<br />
Prima had published her book The<br />
New Handbook of Heaven - issued by<br />
Dave Hasewood’s excellent and<br />
infuential Auerhahn Press in San<br />
Francisco. Di Prima was very much a<br />
believer in the small press way of doing<br />
things, bypassing the mainstream<br />
altogether. Later on she was to found<br />
her own press in New York City. In<br />
that she had much in common with<br />
Wallace and Shirley Berman and their<br />
Semina publications. In hindsight<br />
might this time have planted the seed<br />
of the future in Diane di Prima’s mind?