Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
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