“The Beatnik Goes On,” by David Susman

Mar 20th, 2009 | By | Category: Prose

The road was life. We were young and bored and disillusioned with everything, so we’d get a car from somewhere and pile in-me and Kerouac and Ginsberg and others-and just go. It may sound tame by today’s standards, but back then, young people didn’t know much about rebellion. For example, we were the first young people to slouch. Before us, it just wasn’t done, and the only way you could make a statement was to tuck your feet behind your head and walk around like a crab, which didn’t intimidate anybody and eventually made your thighs numb.

I knew Ginsberg when he was still a student at Columbia. He was an activist and a rabble-rouser, but I could tell that he was a sensitive soul, because he wrote heartfelt poetry, and because he played with dolls. He introduced me to his friend Jack, an aspiring novelist who was experimenting with a spontaneous, rambling prose based on drug-induced visions. Already he had achieved some exciting results on nasal spray. We hit it off immediately, and the three of us talked all night about art and philosophy. Jack was convinced that traditional syntax was dead, and he showed us a story he had written that consisted of nothing but commas, which we thought was promising but choppy. Allen announced that he wanted to be the next Walt Whitman, by which he meant that he wanted to grow a beard. Jack suggested that Whitman was also a fine poet, and this gave Allen much to think about.

These were exciting times for us, and we were mad and exuberant and desirous of everything at once. We sought out radical new forms of music-jazz, of course, but also blues and bebop and the evocative polka tunes that came to symbolize our generation. Others scoffed, but to us, music was poetry. Poetry, in turn, was architecture. Architecture became modern dance. Modern dance became a cream-based sauce for chicken dishes.

This was around the time that Allen began his quest for enlightenment, a spiritual journey that led him through Zen Buddhism, Kabbalah, Sufism, and, finally, pantomime. He pantomimed for two years before realizing that it wasn’t the sort of thing that brought enlightenment, and that jugglers made better tips. I admired Allen, not only for his intellect but for his willingness to be openly homosexual in an age of neo-Puritanism. Not yet thirty, he had already come to terms with his sexuality. By forty, he would come to terms with Adlai Stevenson’s sexuality.

Our group expanded when we met Burroughs, who became a source of fascination for us. Tall and gaunt, wasted from heroin, he still had a certain austere dignity, making it a point never to be seen without a three-piece suit, which he never actually wore but carried around with him and used as a napkin. Burroughs was a brilliant man. He could quote at length from Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, and held forth on literature and history and economic theory, or sometimes wore socks on his hands and put on little puppet shows. Â

It was at Burroughs’s apartment that we held our wildest events, all-night rap sessions with wine and poetry and music and drugs and lavish indulgences of every sort. Nothing was off-limits, and we reached levels of debauchery that could only be compared to the ancient Romans or the Republican Party. Burroughs gave us open access to his medicine cabinet, which held a staggering array of chemicals, including a compound which would later be called lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD. Eventually, the contents of Burroughs’s medicine cabinet would find their way to such interested parties as drug researcher Timothy Leary, activist Abbie Hoffman, and McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc.

But above all, there were the travels. Jack got the idea that we should all go out west and visit Neal Cassidy, since Neal had just telephoned and was in the middle of a particularly interesting sentence, and it was likely that we could get out there before he finished. Neal was a true hipster, a street kid who started stealing cars at age fourteen and had been arrested many times, so he seemed like a natural inclusion in a burgeoning literary movement. When we got out there, Neal immediately started talking about Jean-Paul Sartre, whom he called an excellent and profound thinker and said that Being and Nothingness had opened his eyes and changed him deeply, though he tended to confuse Sartre’s concept of existential nausea with certain passages from The House at Pooh Corner. With Neal, we traveled up and down the country, coming to know the land, celebrating its breadth, learning its lessons, and siphoning gasoline from its cars. Neal was the perfect tour guide because he had traveled all his life, and every sight triggered a memory for him. At any given locale, he could recall learning to ride a horse, or stealing a kiss from a girl, or pistol-whipping a clerk, so there were moments of rich beauty for all of us.

The trip solidified something for Jack. He returned to his writing and tried to capture it all. He wrote constantly, furiously, not in paragraphs but in huge, extravagant chunks of prose. Mere sheets of paper couldn’t contain it, and he began writing on large rolls of butcher paper, then on the butcher himself, who tended to squirm, so he went back to butcher paper. Jack was convinced that he had a masterpiece on his hands, saying he could feel the spirit of America coursing through his veins. Four months later he would need corrective surgery.

Allen, meanwhile, had found his voice as a poet. This came as a great relief to everybody, since Allen had been borrowing Truman Capote’s voice, which we all found nasal and annoying. But at last Allen had refined his style, and the poetic vision which had once seemed bleak and apocalyptic now rang a note of healthy pessimistic doom. In his seminal work “Howl,” he wrote of madmen and junkies and squalid Brooklyn streets and unspoken sexual longings, celebrating the dark world of the soul. Almost immediately after it was published in the Ladies’ Home Journal, it became a sensation.

And with that, the Beat Generation was on the map. Jack and Allen had paved the way for a literary and cultural revolution, and none of us could have foreseen its power. Inspired by our writings, young people everywhere were striking out against the conventions of the past-taking to the road, listening to new and exotic music, seeking sexual adventures, and recklessly dangling modifiers (this would prove to be a precursor to the wild comma splices of the 1960s which nearly tore a nation apart). We had changed the face of literature, and suddenly we were celebrities. Aspiring young writers came from far away to meet the new keepers of the flame, and Allen, like a holy man, would bestow blessings on them or, if they had an especially profound question, give them animal-shaped balloons.

We were still rebellious, but we were no longer carefree, for now we knew the pressure of fame. We visited Burroughs in Tangier, where he was putting the final touches on Naked Lunch, applying thin coats of polyurethane to the cover. Jack called the manuscript “a good effort,” and after that you could tell there was tension because Burroughs tried to throw battery acid in Jack’s face. Burroughs admitted that he was on edge because he was trying, as he so often did, to get off drugs, which he said was not so difficult except that his hands shook and he was occasionally prompted to eat small appliances. He and Jack reconciled, and Jack gave him an inscribed copy of On The Road, which Burroughs thanked him for and later tried to smoke.

That night at dinner was like old times. We talked about literature and philosophy and society and life, and the conversation went on into the night. Jack was struck by inspiration and began writing his next novel on my veal chop.. Burroughs, in a rage over some undercooked carrots, tried to stab the waiter with a cocktail fork. (We didn’t let Burroughs imbibe anything other than chocolate milk that night, but he still managed to get drunk from it.) Allen, making a point about religious transcendence, went outside and sat in the lotus position in the middle of the road and was hit by a cement mixer. It was a beautiful evening.

————

David Susman lives in southern Maine. His humorous pieces have appeared in The Door, Slick Times, and other magazines. He has tried writing serious stuff, but it all comes out funny. Really, it’s a problem.

Tags: , , ,

Comments are closed.