For
Ti Jean Kerouac On The 50th Anniversary Of His Death And The
“Assistant King Of The Beats” Allan Ginsberg-Hard Rain’s A Going To Fall With
Kudos To Bob Dylan “King Of The Folkies"
By
Lance Lawrence
[In
the interest of today’s endless pursue of transparency which in many cases
covers up the real deal with a few fake pieces of fluff I admit that I knew
Jack Kerouac’s daughter, Janet always called me and those I knew Jan now late
daughter (she died in 1996) whom he
never really recognized as his despite the absolute likeness and later testing for
whatever cramped reason and which took its toll on her with like her father an early
death, met out in Todo el Mundo south of Big Sur off the famous Pacific Coast
Highway. We, a group of us from the Boston area who had been told by some guys
from North Adamsville, about forty miles south of Boston who we met through
Pete Markin* who I went to Boston University with before he dropped out in the
Summer of Love, 1967 about Todo and how it was a cooler place down the road
from Big Sur which had become inundated with holy goofs and tourists and a rip
off. That s is still true today although the rip-off part is submerged since it
in no longer a hippie Garden of Eden except among those who were so stoned that
couldn’t find their ways out of the hills above the ocean and have wound up
staying there as models for what the 1960s were all about (and what I remember
hearing a few parents tell their children to avoid at all costs-oh, to be very
young-then)
We
had been staying at a cabin owned by the writer Steven Levin (mostly novels and
essays for publications like City Lights and Blue Dial Press and regional
literary journals) when one Saturday night we held a party and in walked Jan
then maybe seventeen or eighteen, nice and who wanted to be a writer like her
dad. The hook for me to meet her was the Boston-Lowell connection (one of the
few times being from Boston did me any good). We became friendly the few days
she stayed at the cabin (at my request) and I saw her a few times later. I was
having my own troubles just then and as the world knows now she had a basketful
from that crass rejection by her father and frustrations at not being taken
seriously as a writer always following in her father’s two-million-word shadows.
Funny it did not take any DNA testing for me to see that she was pure Kerouac
in features and frankly from what I read of his style that too.
I
also knew Allan Ginsburg in his om-ish days when we fired up more than one
blunt (marijuana cigarette for those who are clueless or use another term for
the stick) to see what we could see out in the National Mall where he would do
his sleek Buddha Zen mad monk thing and later Greenwich Village night where he
did serious readings to the Village literary set. I was just a little too young
to have appreciated his Howl which
along with the elegant Kaddish (for
his troubled late mother) fully since the former in particular was something
like the Beat anthem to Kerouac’s On The
Road bible. He had kind of moved on from beat and was moving on from hippie
a bit as well and it would not be until later when the dust settled that he
would go back to the later 1940s and early 1950s to explain to a candid
audience including me over grass and some wine what it was all about, what
drove the startlingly images and weird noises of that former poem. (Which I
have read and re-read several times as well as through the beauty of YouTube
has him reading forming background while I am working on the computer.
This
piece first appeared in Poetry Today shortly after Allan
Ginsburg’s Father Death death without accordion and caused a
great deal of confusion among the readers, a younger group according to the
demographics provided to me by the advertising department when I was trying to
figure out where the thing got lost in the fog, why these younger folk missed
some terms I took for granted with which every reader was at least vaguely
familiar. Some readers thought because I mentioned the word “cat” I was paying
homage to T.S. Eliot generally recognized in pre-Beat times as the ultimate
modernist poet. Meaning for Eliot aficionados the stuff that Broadway used to
make a hit musical out of although it would have been better if they, either
the confused young or the Broadway producers had counted their lives in coffee
spoons. That cat reference of mine actually referred to “hep cats” as in a
slang expression from the 1940s and 1950s before Beat went into high gear not a
cat, the family pet.
Some
readers, and I really was scratching my head over this one since this was
published in a poetry magazine for aficionados and not for some dinky survey
freshman college English class, that because I mentioned the word “homosexual”
and some jargon associated with that sexual orientation when everybody was “in
the closet” except maybe Allan Ginsburg and his Peter although they were in
friendlier Frisco mainly thought I was referring W.H. Auden. There had been
some coded words for the sexual acts associated with homosexually then, and
maybe in some older sets still in use Jesus,
Auden, a great poet no question if not a brave one slinking off to America when
things got too hot in his beloved England in September 1939 and a
self-confessed homosexual in the days when that was dangerous to declare in
late Victorian public morality England especially after what happened to Oscar
Wilde when they pulled down the hammer was hardly the only homosexual
possibility. That despite his game of claiming every good-looking guy for what
he called the “Homintern.” Frankly I didn’t personally think anybody even read Auden
anymore once the Beats be-bopped.
There
were a few others who were presented as candidates as the person I was
championing. James Lawson because some of his exploits were similar to the ones
I described but those events were hardly rare in the burned over 1950s down in
the mud of society. Jack Weir because of some West Coast references. Jeffery
Stein, the poet of the new age shtetl because of the dope. All wrong. That poet
had a name an honored name Allan Ginsburg who howled in the night at the
oddness and injustice of the world after saying Kaddish to his mother’s memory
and not be confused with this bag of bones rough crowd who refused to learn
from the silly bastard. This piece was, is for ALLAN GINSBURG who wrote for
Carl Solomon in his hours of sorrow just before he went under the knife in some
stone- cold crazy asylum and I now for him when he went under the ground. Lance
Lawrence]
*(We
have, those of us who knew Markin back in the 1960s when he hung around the
Cambridge coffeehouses with his cheap date girlfriends (he was a scholarship
boy who had no money, came from some slack family house so coffeehouses, the
ones with no admission charges and cheap coffee to maintain a seat), have often
wondered whether Markin and Kerouac would have gotten along if they had been of
the same generation. That generation born in the 1920s, his parents’ generation
if not lifestyle. From Markin’s end would Jack have been the searched for
father he had never known. From Jack’s end whether the two-million question
Markin would have clashed or meshed with the two-million- word Kerouac. I know
as early as in the 1980s when I was dating an English Literature graduate
student from Cornell that Jack was in bad odor as a literary figure to emulate
and subsequently anybody who wanted to be “school of Kerouac found hard sledding
getting published. This is probably worthy of a separate monogram in this 50th
anniversary year of the passing of Kerouac )
***********
I
have seen the best poet of the generation before mine declare that he had seen
that the best minds of his generation had turned to mush, turned out in the
barren wilderness from which no one returned except for quick stays in safe
haven mental asylums. Saw the same Negro streets he saw around Blue Hill Avenue
and Dudley Street blank and wasted in the sweated fetid humid
Thunderbird-lushed night (and every hobo, vagrant, escapee, drifter and grafter
yelling out in unison “what is the word-Thunderbird-what is the price forty
twice” and ready to jackroll some senior citizen lady for the price-ready to
commit mayhem at Park Street subway stations for their “boy,” to be tamped by
girl but I will be discrete since the Feds might raid the place sometime
looking for the ghost of Trigger Burke who eluded them for a very long time.
Thought that those angel-headed hipsters, those hep cats hanging around Times,
Lafayette, Dupont, Harvard squares crying in pools of blood coming out of the
wolves-stained sewers around the black corner would never stop bleating for
their liquor, stop until they got popular and headed for the sallow lights of
Harvard Square where they hustled young college students, young impressionable
college students whose parents had had their best minds, those hallowed
students, wasted in the turbid streets of south Long Island (not the West Egg
of Gatsby’s dream of conquering everything in sight like any other poor-boy
arriviste with too much money and not enough imagination and not East Egg of
the fervid elites but anytown, Levitttown of those who would escape to Boston
or Wisconsin to face the angel of death up front and say no go, pass, under
luminous moons which light up sparks and say to that candid world which could
have given a fuck hard times please come again no more.
Saw
hipsters cadging wine drinks from sullen co-eds staying out too late in the
Harvard Square night who turned out to be slumming from some plebian colleges
across the river maybe good Irish girls from frail Catholic parishes with
rosaries in their fair-skinned hands and a novena book between their knees who
nevertheless has Protestant lusts in their pallid hearts but unrequited (here’s
how-they would arrive at the Café Lana with ten bucks and their virginity and
leave with both and some guy with dreams of salty sucking blowjobs walking out
the backdoor and doing the whack job behind the dumpster –a waste of precious
fluids and according to Norman Mailer world-historic fucks which would product
the best minds of the next generation all dribbled away). Maybe tasty Jewish
girls from the shtetl in not East or West Egg who flocked to the other side of
the river and gave Irish guys who previously had dribbled their spunk behind
dumpsters after losing out to ten bucks and virginity in tack tickey-tack
Catholic girls who refused to give that head that would have brought some of the
best minds some freaking relief (better not say fucking relief because that
would be oxymoronic). Maybe some sullen fair-skinned and blonded Protestant
girls who spouted something about one god and no trinities, no god and no
trinities and just feel good stuff. All three varieties and yes there were more
but who knew of Quakers, Mennonites, lusty Amish girls run away from home,
Tantic card-wheelers, and fresh- faced red light district sluts who at least
played the game straight-played the cash nexus for pure pleasure and maybe to
even up some scores. All-Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, yeah, Quakers (fakirs,
fakers and Shakers included), the sluts, Mennonites and yes those lusty
red-faced Amish runaways all coming together after midnight far from the negro
streets but not far from the all night hustlers and dime store hipsters with
their cigar store rings and cheap Irish whiskeys bought on the installment plan
who converged around the Hayes-Bickford just a seven league jump from the old
end of the line dead of night Redline subway stop in order to keep the angel of
death at arms’ length. There to listen until dawn to homosexuality- affixed
hungry for the keyhole blast or the running sperm fakir poets and slamming
singsters fresh out of cheapjack coffeehouses where three chords and two- line
rhymes got you all the action you wanted although maybe a little light on the
breadbasket sent around to show that you were appreciated. Yeah, now that I think
about the matter more closely hard times please come again no
more.
Saw
the angel of death make her appearance one night at the Café Lana and then
backstopped the Club Nana to fetch one young thing who warbled like heaven’s
own angel. Some Norman Mailer white hipster turned her on to a little sister
and then some boy and she no longer warbled but did sweet candy cane tricks for
high-end businessmen with homely wives or fruitless ones who had given up that
sort of “thing” after the third junior had been born and who were ready to make
her his mistress if she would just stop singing kumbaya after every fuck like
she was still a freaking warbler, a freaking virgin or something instead of
“used” goods or maybe good for schoolboys whose older brothers took them to her
for their first fling at going around the world, welcome to the brotherhood or
maybe some old fart who just wanted to relive his dreams before the booze, the
three wives and parcel of kids did him in and then the hustler sent her back to
the Club Nana to “score” from the club owner who was connected with Nick the
dream doper man, the Christ who would get him- and her well –on those mean
angel-abandoned death watch streets but who knew that one night at the Hayes
(everybody called it just that after they had been there one night), one after
midnight night where they had that first cup of weak-kneed coffee replenished
to keep a place in the scoreboarded night where hari-kara poets dreamed toke
dreams and some Mister dreamed of fresh-faced singer girls looking for kicks.
So please, please, hard times come again no
more.
I
have seen frosted lemon trees jammed against the ferrous night, the night of
silly foolish childhood dreams and misunderstanding about the world, the world
that that poet spoke of in a teenage dream of indefinite duration about who was
to have who was to have not once those minds were de-melted and made
hip to the tragedies of life, the close call with the mental house
that awaits us all.
In Honor Of The 60th Anniversary Of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"- The Film- A Guest Review
Click on the headline to link to a Boston Sunday Globe article, dated September 26, 2010, concerning a review of Howl, a film adaptation of Allen Ginsberg's famous poem.
http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2010/09/26/howl_marches_to_the_beat_of_ginsbergs_drummer/
Markin comment:
Needless to say this little cinematic effort to put the sense of Allen Ginsberg’s seminal modernist poem, Howl, on the screen is more than welcome in this space. As I have repeatedly emphasized on previous occasions any poem that starts of like this one is going to get my attention and keep it every time:
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn, looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night . . .’’
I have also of late made note of the influence of the “beats” in my own youthful political and social development. A prima facie case can be made by me, and has recently in this space, that Ginsberg’s Howl is his search for the blue-pink great American West night that animated my youth and that I have been ranting on about.
