Esquire asked Kerouac to write about entertainment in New York, but it was too difficult and too boring. Then Jack said, “Wouldn’t it be fun if we just wrote about hanging around on the streets and going to Times Square, because the articles usually are about going to the Pavillion33 for supper or the Playboy Club, or something elegant?” So we decided we would write about an authentic evening on Times Square.
Take, for example, this typical evening you can have: —
Emerging from the Seventh Avenue subway on 42nd Street, you pass the john, which is the beatest john in New York—
This Esquire article is to open with a big description of the subway john as one of the major sights of New York, which it was if you wanted to get in touch with what was going on under the skin.
you never can tell if it’s open or not, usually there’s a big chain in front of it saying it’s out of order, or else it’s got some white-haired decaying monster slinking outside, a john which all seven million people in New York City have at one time passed, and taken strange notice of—past the new charcoal-fried-hamburger stand, Bible booths, operatic jukeboxes, and a seedy underground used-magazine store next to a peanut-brittle store smelling of subway arcades—here and there a used copy of that old bard Plotinus sneaked in with the remainders of collections of German highschool textbooks—where they sell long ratty-looking hotdogs (no, actually they’re quite beautiful, particularly if you havent got 15 cents and are looking for someone in Bickford’s Cafeteria who can lay some smash on you) (lend you some change).—
Coming up that stairway, people stand there for hours and hours drooling in the rain, with soaking wet umbrellas—lots of boys in dungarees scared to go into the Army standing halfway up the stairway on the iron steps waiting for God Who knows what, certainly among them some romantic heroes just in from Oklahoma with ambitions to end up yearning in the arms of some unpredictable sexy young blonde in a penthouse on the Empire State Building—some of them probably stand there dreaming of owning the Empire State Building by virtue of a magic spell which they’ve dreamed up by a creek in the backwoods of a ratty old house on the outskirts of Texarkana.—Ashamed of being seen going into the dirty movie (what’s its name?) across the street from the New York Times—The lion and the tiger passing, as Tom Wolfe used to say about certain types passing that corner.—
Leaning against that cigar store with a lot of telephone booths on the corner of 42nd and Seventh where you make beautiful telephone calls looking out into the street and it gets real cozy in there when it’s raining outside and you like to prolong the conversation, who do you find? Basketball teams? Basketball coaches? All those guys from the rollerskating rink go there? Cats from the Bronx again, looking for some action, really looking for romance? Strange duos of girls coming out of dirty movies? Did you ever see them? Or bemused drunken businessmen with their hats tipped awry on their graying heads staring catatonically upward at the signs floating by on the Times Building, huge sentences about Khrushchev reeling by, the populations of Asia enumerated in flashing lightbulbs, always five hundred periods after each sentence.—Suddenly a psychopathically worried policeman appears on the corner and tells everybody to go away.—This is the center of the greatest city the world has ever known and this is what beatniks do here.—“Standing on the street corner waiting for no one is Power,” sayeth poet Gregory Corso.
Instead of going to night clubs—if you’re in a position to make the nightclub scene (most beatniks rattle empty pockets passing Birdland)—34
He’s using “beatniks” here consciously because I think the Esquire editors said, “Well, now, give us a beatnik New York,” because there was a good deal of media publicity about beatniks of such garish nature that Jack thought that it would be charming to write an essay on beatniks’ appreciation of the shades of subway paint.
The word “beatnik” was coined by Herb Caen, a gossip columnist in the San Francisco Chronicle, at the time of Sputnik, because the Beat poets were supposed to be so far out of this world, like the Sputnik. Immediately a whole race of beatniks arose. Somewhat of a Frankenstein image, beatniks, the idea of Big Daddy and kill your mother in the bathtub, unwashed hair, bearded, crab lice, angry at the government and angry at their parents, living in filth, not making their beds, stealing, ax murderers, that whole genre up unto the elegant horror of Mansonism. The beatnik wave bugged Kerouac because people would come up to him and say that they could drive faster than Neal Cassady and get him in their car and try to kill him. There’s a generation of people who thought that “beatnik” meant angry at the world rather than weeping at the world.
This was written in 1960 and described wandering around New York in the late 1950s with some flashbacks to the 1940s. It has all grown old now. At this point, Kerouac’s just writing with a certain sardonic nostalgia, almost making fun of it. His original impression of Times Square was of a big room, which is a concept we shared. “It was some kind of appreciation of space itself that was our earliest intimation of Dharma Kia.” The world hanging in space, the skyscrapers hanging in space. The key was the vision of the enormous roof of sky above the cornices of the buildings. If you became conscious of standing in that great room and looked about you, you’d see this handiwork of intelligence in every direction. And you’d realize you were not standing in New York City but you were standing in the middle of the universe, the vast open sky. It’s that awareness of himself in space that characterizes Kerouac’s work, mine somewhat, and the whole Beat period of the forties. It was the first discovery of a crack in consciousness, that we were made of the same suchness, that we were ghosts.
The climax of On the Road for me is when they’re coming back from Mexico, and there’s this sudden vision of the Shrouded Stranger on the road, saying “Ooo.” It is the key and most visionary moment in On the Road, because it’s a poetic apparition in the midst of all that romantic naturalism. All of a sudden there’s a little Faustian figure, Doctor Sax walking on the road. It’s the hint of time and death and egolessness and woe, the first noble truth [of Buddhism]. The phantom says, “Go moan for man,” the truth of suffering. We knew that something great was happening and all I could say was “wow.” “Wow” finally becomes the mantra for the whole book. There’s this early hint in On the Road of mind which is already Buddhist-oriented. Appreciating the phantom nature of beings, of ourselves, an awareness of the mortal, “Go moan for man.”
CHAPTER 8
Carr, Ginsberg, and Kerouac at Columbia
I was living in the Union Theological Seminary at 122nd Street and Broadway in the second half of my freshman year at Columbia. I had been housed at the seminary with a few roommates because the college [dorms] were filled with V-12 sailors.35 I was in my room after having been there several weeks and heard Brahms’s Trio No. 1, which I never heard before, coming from a room across the hall. It’s a classical Brahms piece with a kind of romantic haunting melody. So I went out to find the source of the music, knocked, and the door was opened by the most angelic-looking kid I ever saw, blond hair, pale, “Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind and took a mess of shadows for its meat.”36 He was Lucien Carr, a St. Louis friend of Burroughs, and he had become a close friend of Kerouac. Lucien had been kicked out of a lot of private schools and finally landed at Columbia [where he] hung around the West End bar. He drank a lot of beer and knew a funny girl named Edie [Parker], who was living with Kerouac at the time in an apartment near the Columbia campus. Edie introduced Lucien to Kerouac who had just come back from a trip in the Merchant Marine where he’d been up past Greenland and saw submarines and watched ships torpedoed. He had written his first novel, called The Sea Is My Brother, a mystical, heady-prose work. He had been reading a lot of Thomas Mann and Thomas Wolfe and so it had heavy Germanic symbolic prose. There wasn’t much naturalistic plot, but a lot of prose poetry about the surface of the ocean, the stars at night, the bow of the ship lifting and falling, the romance of being a sailor, hidde
n mysterious angels under the waves, and great whales moaning in the north. Or at least something like that, something Gnostic and pretty.
Lucien had already met Jack and told me to go see him. I went up to the apartment one day and knocked on his door. I should explain I can’t remember very clearly and specifically a lot of actual situations. I also found that things that Kerouac wrote about are not quite reliable either. He was a novelist, he invented little details, or condensed seasons, so that his account isn’t quite accurate either, and in many instances I’m so recollective of his account that I think it’s what actually happened when it’s just his version of a story. I can’t propose what I’m saying as authentic fact, but only as my recollections, [and] they have to be checked against other people’s versions.
I went to see Jack at Lucien’s suggestion, because I had a crush on Lucien and would go anywhere he suggested I go. He said there was this great, dark-haired, romantic seaman, who looked like Jack London, who wrote books about the sea, which sounded sensitive and great. So I went to see him with some trepidation because I had heard he was a big tough football player and I was a sensitive fairy from New Jersey with all sorts of romantic notions and a very soft vulnerable heart. I was capable of falling in love with anybody at a glance, but I hadn’t told anybody that I was queer. I hadn’t said anything about my love life to anybody because I was afraid I’d be rejected, afraid I’d be put down, just too timid, afraid of being ashamed. It seemed so delicate and personal and eccentric that if I did tell people what my love was like it might be like turning over a stone and seeing the worms underneath. Or if I did expose myself it might turn out that the reason for my being in love with men was something so shameful and horrible that it would be even worse than being in love with men.
Naturally I couldn’t say what was on my mind at all. I might be swooning with delight inside but at the same time sitting there with a stiff back trying to maintain a conversation about politics and [act] smart. I walked into Kerouac’s apartment where he was sitting eating his breakfast and said I was a friend of Lucien’s. I don’t remember what the conversation was, but he said something straightforward, like “Do you want a drink?” And I said, “No, no, discretion is the better part of valor,” which is some little tagline I heard when I was twelve and when I didn’t know what to say that’s what I’d say.
Kerouac was a very mellow, shrewd, observant, tolerant person, so there was mutual curiosity. He saw my shallowness and I saw some of his gruffness. I was in love with Lucien [and] I also fell in love with Kerouac. I found that I could be in love with a lot of people at the same time, partly because it was never consummated, I didn’t sleep with anybody, and I didn’t even tell ’em. My romantic feeling for Lucien was so great and strong at the time that I thought it was some Goethean Sorrows of Werther, or final drama of life. I felt that same nostalgia for Kerouac. I mean they were very beautiful people, Kerouac was physically very beautiful as you can see from early photos, but psychologically, mentally, spiritually, and heartwise he was extraordinarily sensitive, very intelligent, very shrewd, and very compassionate. Compassionate toward the awkward kid.
Actually Vanity of Duluoz is Kerouac’s last long book, but it [tells the story of] that period. It’s one period that Jack never wrote about, partly out of respect for Lucien. He didn’t want to invade Lucien’s life with a biographical novel and it was only after decades and decades that everybody mellowed, matured, and calmed down. It is much different than what he would have written ten or twenty years earlier. Earlier [it] would have been a huge, romantic Dostoyevskean novel, Vanity of Duluoz, in which everybody’s beauty was a vanity, everybody’s tolerance was egotism. It’s a late disillusioned version and a very precious one for that reason, because it’s a view of youth seen from the advantage of illness and age and total realism, no longer clinging to the images and archetypes and loves of youth. Rather than being disadvantaged, that’s really an advantage, because you can see from the other side of the grave then.
[Kerouac and I] walked to the Union Theological Seminary together. I was flattered that he would walk with me, was interested. On the way we got into a long conversation about the nature of phantoms and ghosts and our own melancholy about the ghost presence. I told him a story about when I was twelve or so, in Paterson, walking home at night from the movies. I would pass by the hedges of the church across the street from my house and my heart would ache thinking how mysterious the universe was, how lonely I was in it.
It was the first time that I ever went back and began appreciating the archetypal romance of child mind thought. Truly the first time I began talking from my own mind instead of saying “discretion is the better part of valor.” So here I was actually talking out of my native mind, out of experience that was my own rather than of something I had read in a book, or thought I was supposed to say. It was nice, and he let me and was interested and curious. And he said, “Gee, I had thoughts like that all the time when I was in Lowell.” He went on to say that he used to stand in the backyards at night when everybody was eating supper and realized that everybody was a ghost eating ghost food. Or that he was a ghost watching the living people.
At the Union Theological Seminary I pointed out that that was the door that I’d met Lucien at, and the music was Brahms’s Trio. We had some kind of mutual understanding about it, that here was where I’d encountered some kind of beauty. As I turned from the dormitory suite, I bowed to it and made a gesture of farewell, saying “good-bye door.”
We had a long excited conversation about other people who had that same awareness and [wondered if] everybody was like that. Of course everybody’s like that, that’s what everybody’s heart is to the extent that they’re conscious and sensitive. Everybody has the same soul, everybody is the same, really. So that was the basis of our understanding. It was a question of the melancholy that we felt, a sadness or pain at being lonesome and dying in the universe. Aware already of the suffering of it, aware of the transitoriness of it, the ghostly, phantom-like nature of it. New York City standing in eternity and then gone.
The teachers at that time around Columbia were Lionel Trilling, Mark Van Doren, Meyer Schapiro, and best of all Raymond Weaver. Trilling was a learned, elegant literary critic, who in a sense tried to revive the humanistic solidity and good manners of mid-nineteenth-century England. Trilling loved Lucien [Carr], and liked Kerouac and liked me a great deal, we were in his class. He was completely baffled by us. He probably thought I was crazy, because I was going downtown and hanging around with Huncke and Burroughs on Times Square. He liked me, but he worried that I was getting into some awful terrible problem with myself. Which I did. I wound up getting busted and going to jail and he had to help get me out.
Trilling didn’t want to hear about Burroughs. It was probably my fault, I gave him such a romantically exaggerated version of hanging around Times Square, smoking marijuana with the hustlers and thieves, and Bill Burroughs as a Harvard graduate who’s got the long needle in his arm like Dr. Mabuse.37 So that probably scared Trilling off.
The other teachers around were Mark Van Doren, who wrote rhymed verse, much like Robert Frost, actually a good poet and a very good man. Later when I freaked out and got busted and was talking about having visionary experiences with [William] Blake and seeing light, Van Doren was able to understand and said, “Ah, well, can you describe the light?” He’d had some experience of his own and didn’t freak out, but was curious and inquisitive about the nature of my experience. Whether hallucinatory or real, at least he was open to listen.
Van Doren’s office mate at Columbia was a very rare character, hardly known to anybody nowadays, Raymond Weaver, author of the first biography of Herman Melville, Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic. He discovered the manuscript of Billy Budd in a trunk. Weaver was a real scholar and had intelligence enough to pick up on Melville before Melville was known. To read Pierre, or, The Ambiguities, and the Confidence-Man, and all of Melville’
s great novels, and then search out manuscripts, like a good scholar should. Weaver was probably, in the terms of academic professorhood, the super professor of all professors in America. Kerouac took his early novel The Sea Is My Brother to Weaver who read it very sympathetically. Weaver had been in Japan and had used a Zen style [of] questioning in his class as part of his teaching technique, so Jack came away from Weaver with a list of books to read. That was the first introduction of mystical, Gnostic, zap-mind, Zen-style literature that we encountered.
There were a couple fairies on the faculty that were interesting, but mostly the tone was anti-Whitmanic. Whitman wasn’t seriously taught. Much more attention then was being paid to John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, and what are now known as academic poets. There was a definite put-down, a snob put-down, of Whitman. In the 1940s, William Carlos Williams was considered some kind of big provincial jerk, raw and crude. Nobody understood Ezra Pound’s quantitative prosody and nobody understood what Williams was doing with his measure of American speech. He had the reputation within the avant-garde with Duchamp and the surrealists, but not within the academy. They were still stuck with “The Waste Land” and early Ezra Pound, probably as universities are now stuck with myself and [Charles] Olson.
I’m describing the fourth floor of Columbia College [which was the English Department], because the literary breakthrough that took place with Burroughs, myself, and Kerouac had to do with the literary old-fashionedness or conservatism of the English Department there. We were picking up on Genet, Céline, Shakespeare, Thomas Wyatt, Marvell, Milton, and Blake. I was having visions of Blake. We were reading Christopher Smart, Gregory [Corso] was reading Shelley and Keats, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson (a crank in her room with funny squiggles), Melville’s Billy Budd, and Melville as poet. None of the English majors ever heard of Melville as a poet. Thomas Wolfe, whom Thomas Mann thought was the greatest prose writer in America because of the symphonic power of his prose sentences, influenced Kerouac. At Columbia, Wolfe was considered to be some kind of loudmouth, just as many academics now consider Kerouac some kind of a nature boy dope. Rimbaud who Lucien was reading was introduced to the scene. Dostoyevsky who I had read and Kerouac had read, particularly his image of Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, [was important].