u/beatdom_journal

>God how right Hemingway was when he said there was no remedy for life—and to think that negative little paper-shuffling prissies should write condescending obituaries about a man who told the truth, nay who drew breath in pain to tell a tale like that!
--Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels, p.347

Kerouac admired Ernest Hemingway as a young man but then grew to dislike his macho persona and sparse prose. However, later in life—and particularly after Hemingway's death—Kerouac regained his respect for the older writer.

Read all about Hemingway and the Beats in this essay: https://beatdom.substack.com/p/hemingway-and-the-beat-generation

Ernest Hemingway died 65 years ago today (July 2, 1961). Although one does not typically think of him as having influenced the Beat writers, there were certainly some connections.

>Hemingway was a very, very great technician, and a good head and a real sharp mind, and basically a very sympathetic person.
--Allen Ginsberg

>The Snows of Kilimanjaro [...] is one of the best stories in the language about death. [...] The end deserves a place among the great passages of English prose, with the end of Joyce’s The Dead and the end of The Great Gatsby.
--William S. Burroughs

>God how right Hemingway was when he said there was no remedy for life.
--Jack Kerouac

>I wish them all good luck.
--Hemingway on the Beat writers

Although the quotes above are mostly positive, their opinions varied and they could be extremely critical, particularly of Hemingway's macho attitude and the dialogue in his novels. You can read all about the links between Hemingway and the Beats in this new essay: https://beatdom.substack.com/p/hemingway-and-the-beat-generation

>How about a real broadside attack on the Beat—to be published by City Lights? Wd you be interested? A short book—or pamphlet?
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti to Kenneth Rexroth, March 14, 1959

By 1959, both Ferlinghetti and Rexroth were sick of the Beat Generation and, in particular, they were tired of being associated with the media’s “beatnik” obsession.

Rexroth did not take Ferlinghetti up on his offer but continued to write vicious (and often quite unfair) attacks that were published elsewhere, and he occasionally gave nasty quotes to tabloid journalists. He loathed Kerouac in particular and sometimes wrote brutal reviews of his books for major newspapers.

Ferlinghetti was eager to distance himself, too, and offered Rexroth the chance to write a full-on “attack on the Beat” that would no doubt have confused visitors to City Lights Bookshop, which was already very much associated with the movement (most notably as the publisher of Howl and Other Poems). In the same letter, he congratulated Ferlinghetti on an earlier “put-down of the mushroom beats.”

Both men spent much of the rest of their lives angrily denying paternity of the Beat Generation but their complaints were mostly ignored and numerous headlines called them each “the father of the Beat Generation.”

For a full account of Rexroth’s difficult relationship with Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, see this essay: https://beatdom.substack.com/p/honest-advice-wanted-allen-ginsberg

>I got the idea for the spontaneous style of On the Road from seeing how good old Neal Cassady wrote his letters to me, all first person, fast, mad, confessional, completely serious, all detailed, with real names in his case, however (being letters).
--Jack Kerouac

This is from Kerouac's Paris Review interview. He goes on to talk about the Joan Anderson letter that Cassady had sent him, calling it "the greatest piece of writing I ever saw, better'n anybody in America, or at least enough to make Melville, Twain, Dreiser, Wolfe, I dunno who, spin in their graves." This letter, which was lost for many decades, was finally published in 2020.

Photo by Carolyn Cassady

Houellebecq mentions Burroughs a few times in his books but only superficially. I suspect there is probably some overlap in fanbase though. Both are brutally critical social commentators and darkly comedic.

Image source: https://howlfarm.substack.com/p/houellebecq-and-burroughs

Ferlinghetti said this in an interview soon after the 1965 reading at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Some reviewers had complained about a poem in which he used the word "fuck" many times. He denied that it was explicit and said he was trying to use the word in a "holy" sense.

>The whole point of the poem was defeated, but a lot of people got it despite the stupid reviewer; many people in the audience got the message.

This quote and photo come from Penthouse magazine.

More info on the Royal Albert Hall reading in this recent essay: https://beatdom.substack.com/p/poets-of-our-time-the-beats-at-the

>I’ve never had a beard in my life. I wear sober, unspectacular suits. I’ve never slept on anyone’s floor and no one has ever slept on mine. My only association with the beat crowd is that I know poets Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. So why call me a beatnik?
--William S. Burroughs

This comes from a short article in The Daily Mirror (August 31, 1965). Burroughs was reported as being “in London to arrange publication of his new book, Subject: Science fiction.”

Asked about his plans for future books, he told the reporter: “I’ve explored the field of drugs and sex as much as I want to. All I want now is to write something which can be enjoyed by 12-year-old children.”

Burroughs was in the news constantly throughout 1965, on both sides of the Atlantic. A Canadian newspaper announced in August that “Reading Burroughs is like eating raw oysters: either you do and you’re crazy about them, or you don’t and the thought of it makes you sick.”

The photo is from a different article, this one from earlier that same year but in his hometown of St. Louis.  

The poetry reading widely known as "The International Poetry Incarnation" took place on June 11, 1965. It featured Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and many other poets in a three-hour event at London's Royal Albert Hall.

In fact, the event was called "Poets of the World/Poets of Our Time." There is much uncertainty about it. There is debate over whose idea it was and who did most of the organising, and it is even unclear how many people were in the audience or on the stage. That is in spite of it being partially filmed for Wholly Communion (1965) and widely reported in the press.

Ginsberg, Corso, and Ferlinghetti were all extremely unhappy with the reading and went to the media in the days following it to complain publicly about the other poets on the line-up. However, in spite of their disappointment with the local poets, the Albert Hall event was a pivotal moment in the British counterculture.

All of this is discussed in this new essay: https://beatdom.substack.com/p/poets-of-our-time-the-beats-at-the

Photo by John "Hoppy" Hopkins.

>When the question is therefore asked, "Are writers made or born?" one should first ask, "Do you mean writers with talent or writers with originality?" Because anybody can write, but not everybody invents new forms of writing.
—Jack Kerouac

This is from a short essay called “Are Writers Made or Born?” and collected in Ann Charters’ Portable Kerouac. He goes on to explain:

>Gertrude Stein invented a new form of writing and her imitators are just "talents." Hemingway later invented his own form also. The criterion for judging talent or genius is ephemeral, speaking rationally in this world of graphs, but one gets the feeling definitely when a writer of genius amazes him by strokes of force never seen before and yet hauntingly familiar (Wilson's famous "shock of recognition"). I got that feeling from Swann's Way, as well as from Sons and Lovers. I do not get it from Colette, but I do get it from Dickinson. I get it from Celine, but I do not get it from Camus. I get it from Hemingway, but not from Raymond Chandler, except when he's dead serious. I get it from the Balzac of Cousin Bette, but not from Pierre Loti. And so on.

He then makes this fascinating statement:

>The main thing to remember is that talent imitates genius because there's nothing else to imitate. Since talent can't originate it has to imitate, or interpret.

Photograph by Fred DeWitt.

For more on Kerouac’s views on writing (as well as those of other Beat writers), see this short Substack article: https://beatdom.substack.com/p/writing-advice-from-the-beats

>When you notice yourself thinking, take a friendly attitude toward it. Don’t invite it in for tea, don’t invite the thought in for tea, don’t push it away either, just let it be there and notice it or acknowledge it.
--Allen Ginsberg

This advice on meditation comes from a 1990 interview that Ginsberg did with Christian Loidl. It was unpublished until a few days ago, when it appeared in Beatdom 26.

From the mid-sixties onwards, Ginsberg frequently used his interviews and poetry readings to educate people about meditation techniques.

Photo by Michael Tighe.

Jan Kerouac, daughter of Jack Kerouac, died 30 years ago today.

She was born in 1952 to Joan Haverty, the second of Jack’s three wives, but Jack denied paternity. Whether or not he truly believed she was not his child is unclear but he probably knew. He selfishly did not want to be forced into taking a job that would distract him from focusing on his writing. Joan pursued him via legal channels for many years but Kerouac would not provide financial assistance until forced by a court to pay the minimum of $52 per month when Jan was 10 years old.

Jan lived a tragic life of poverty, drug abuse, and prostitution and, like her father, died at a young age. (She was 44 when she passed away; her father had died at 47.) Like her father, she became a writer, publishing two books during her life, with another published posthumously.

Gerald Nicosia, who wrote the excellent Memory Babe (a biography of Jack Kerouac) and befriended Jan, said:

>I think that she couldn’t find her father in the outside world, and then he was gone and dead, so the only place she could find him was inside herself. I think in many ways she tried to become him, with the rambling and the travelling with no money, the alcohol and the drugs and the sexual wildness. I think in some ways she was trying to find her father by becoming her father.

Photo by D. Alexander Stuart.

Further reading

Those interested in Jan Kerouac can try to find copies of her books Baby Driver and Trainsong. Nicosia’s Memory Babe also has useful information about her but for much more information see his 2009 book, Jan Kerouac: A Life in Memory. This article from the 25th anniversary of her death is also worth reading: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jun/07/jan-kerouac-forgotten-child-of-jack-kerouac

On June 5, 1963, the New York Times reported that Allen Ginsberg had been mistaken for a spy whilst visiting Vietnam.

Although Ginsberg later denied it and certain books about the Beats have speculated that it was a bored journalist playing a joke, there is in fact evidence in his archives to show that it was at least partially true. There are multiple witnesses for the Buddhist press conference and Ginsberg's own letters show that he was upset by the coverage but did not deny the reality behind the story.

The journalist David Halberstam wrote to him:

>as a celebrity arriving in this city and going to the heart of a major political dispute, you again put yourself in the public domain. If you had wanted (as a celebrity) to stay out of the papers then you had to stay out of the pagodas. Given the situation the buddhist story and your arrival in the midst of it failure to send on a short piece would have been a sort of dereliction of duty; the fact that we liked you very much and found you a sympathetic friend does not excuse us from our jobs.

It seems fairly clear from this and other comments in his letter that Ginsberg had indeed gotten in an awkward situation with the South Vietnamese Buddhists and that the NYT article was not just bored journalists goofing around.

You can read the full story in this long essay about Ginsberg's time in Southeast Asia: https://beatdom.substack.com/p/allen-ginsberg-in-southeast-asia The part about Vietnam and the spy accusation come about halfway down the page.

The collage above appears in Beatdom 26: The Allen Ginsberg Special, which is released today to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the great Beat poet. Ginsberg wrote in response to chaotic, confusion, doom-filled times, making him as relevant now as ever.

Jack Kerouac’s brother Gerard died 100 years ago, on June 2, 1926. Gerard was 9 when he died; Jack was 4.

Kerouac had worshipped his older brother. Gerard had been the centre of his world, as he recounted years later: 

>For the first four years of my life, while he lived, I was not Ti Jean Duluoz, I was Gerard, the world was his face, the flower of his face, the pale stooped disposition, the heartbreakingness and the holiness and his teachings of tenderness to me, and my mother constantly reminding me to pay attention to his goodness and advice. (Visions of Gerard, p.7-8)

Following Gerard’s death, Jack’s mother and father took out their pain on him, making his own suffering worse. Everyone around him seemed to have viewed Gerard as saint-like and so Jack spent the rest of his life trying and failing to live up to that impossible image.

Kerouac also spent the rest of his life looking for a new older brother. He found one in Neal Cassady, whom he sometimes compared to Gerard. In 1955, he wrote Cassady to say:

>I’m not too sure that maybe you arent my brother Gerard reborn, because he died in the summer of 1926 and you were born. . . when? in 1927. (Selected Letters 1940-56, p.472)

Cassady had actually been born a few months before Gerard’s death. Oddly—and Kerouac does not seem to have realised this—Allen Ginsberg was born the following day (June 3).

Kerouac wrote Visions of Gerard (which he called his “best most serious sad and true book yet”) in December 1955 and January 1956. In that book, he said he became writer because of his brother:

>The whole reason why I ever wrote at all and drew breath to bite in vain with pen of ink, great gad with indefensible Usable pencil, because of Gerard, the idealism, Gerard the religious hero--'Write in honour of his death!' (Écrivez pour l’amour de son mort) (Visions of Gerard, p.132)

Kerouac was proud of the book and perhaps more attached to it than other novels because of its subject, Gerard. It hurt that publishers were initially not interested but it hurt far more when it was released in 1963 and savaged by critics. Kerouac wrote:

>everybody’s become so mean, so sinister, so hypocritical I can’t believe it.  So I turn to drink like a lost maniac… They make me feel like never writing another word again (Selected Letters 1957-69, p.370)

Visions of Gerard was written soon after the death of Natalie Jackson, an event that deeply impacted Kerouac. It is possible her death inspired the writing of this book. Here’s a detailed essay about her from 2024: https://beatdom.substack.com/p/beat-and-damned-the-death-of-natalie

Timothy Leary died 30 years ago today. He spoke with William S. Burroughs a few hours before he died. Burroughs (who died a year later) was interviewed soon after Leary’s death. He said:

>I knew him for years. And I think he accomplished a great deal, really. I talked to him the day he died. His son called me and said that he was slipping in and out of the coma. But I talked to him. He said, uh, "Is it true?" I didn't know exactly what he meant. Well, I guess it's true. [Chuckle] It's true, Tim. And then he just said, "Well I, I love you, Bill," and I said, "I love you, Tim." He died about four hours later. That was all there was to it. (Conversations with William S. Burroughs, 224)

Asked what Leary’s accomplishments were, Burroughs explained:

>He had a worldwide impact on young people, leading men to question what they had taken for granted, and to experiment. And to increase awareness. But it's obvious, I think, that the old, the old gods have fallen, the old beliefs are gone. Gone, crumbling before our eyes, of their own inertia. And when that happens, you look for something new.

Burroughs first met Leary in Tangiers in 1961, then visited him at Harvard. He was not initially impressed, quipping “I’m leery of Leary.” Ginsberg said in 1987 that Burroughs had once called Leary “a horse’s ass.” Indeed, he hoped Leary was a scientific man but found at Harvard he was “just sort of fooling around” on psilocybin. However, the two men later became good friends.

It was Allen Ginsberg whom Leary first met of the Beat writers. That meeting occurred in 1960, when Leary visited him. In January 1961, Leary and Ginsberg gave Kerouac some psilocybin, which resulted in him saying, “Walking on water wasn’t made in a day,” a statement that Ginsberg often quoted. Later that year, Leary went to Tangiers, where he spent more time with Ginsberg, met Corso, and had his first meeting with Burroughs. Ginsberg spoke very highly of Leary during and following his legal problems. He called him a “philosopher savant” and said:

>He’s the only man I know that no country in the world will have. So that means he couldn’t be wrong. (Allen Verbatim, p.8)

Others in the counterculture were markedly less impressed, including Hunter S. Thompson, who repeatedly criticised Leary. In one interview, he said:

>Every time I think about Tim Leary I get angry. He was a liar and a quack and a worse human being than Richard Nixon. (Ancient Gonzo Wisdom, p.264)

Further reading: There is some great information about their meeting and collaboration on the Human Be-in in Jane Kramer’s Allen Ginsberg in America (1969). It’s also worth looking up “The Houseboat Summit: Changes” in Conversations with Gary Snyder (ed by David Calonne, 2017). Ginsberg has some writings on Leary in Deliberate Prose (ed by Bill Morgan, 2000) and mentions him positively in many interviews.

Photo by Philip Heying, 1987.

>I guess I wouldn't have made a soldier, my theory is to give all the soldiers belts with bottles of whiskey hanging from them. That way they'd win the battle. Makes you sentimental. Everybody would look out for his buddy.
--Jack Kerouac

This quote is from a 1968 interview in the Boston Globe. The reporter explains that Kerouac was "in a rocking chair, red slippers, white socks, pajama pants, open plaid flannel chest, not having shaved or eaten for four days [...] averaging 12 to 15 shots of whiskey and gulps of beer an hour, seven feet from his own television set, staring at the midday pap, his mind as sensitive as a frog's opened heart, talking."

Later in the article, he calls himself a "harmless drunk." He takes the reporter on a tour of the local bars, reciting Emily Dickinson and falling asleep in each one.

The photo is from the newspaper article. No photographer listed.

Just two years before his death, Ernest Hemingway was visited by a young journalist, who asked him about the Beat Generation. He replied:

>I wish them all good luck. They seem to be doing okay. They have their own publicity organization already.

It seems to be the only time Hemingway ever mentioned the Beats but of course they often referred to him in their journals and letters, especially Kerouac when he was young.

An essay on Hemingway and the Beats will be posted to the Beatdom Substack next month. Subscribe to receive it as an email: https://beatdom.substack.com/

On May 23, 1971, the poet Lew Welch left a suicide note in his car and wandered into the wilderness with his gun. His body was never found.

Welch had been a Reed College student alongside Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen, and later befriended various Beat poets, including Jack Kerouac. He dated Lenore Kandel in 1960 and almost married her.

Unlike most of the Beat poets, Welch actually tried to live a conventional life through most of the 1950s. After becoming a bohemian poet in the late 1940s, he lived a straight corporate existence between 1950 and 1957, before realising that wasn’t the life for him. In 1959, he began publishing his poetry and, incredibly, was included in Don Allen’s landmark The New American Poetry 1945–1960.

Like Kerouac, Welch drank himself to death. Periods spent hiking and camping in the wilds of the West brought temporary respite but he destroyed himself through booze and bad diet and various other habits. His mind and body deteriorated rapidly and his depression worsened. As early as 1962, he predicted that he would end his own life. In a letter to Robert Duncan, he wrote:

>The poet can never sink, and while sunk, be Poet. His diving is always a dive, even if to do it he must sniff the vapors of his oracular cave—or otherwise drastically wrench himself open that the whole river flow through…
And so I have not sunk. And the sickness I’ve been through had nothing to do with the bottom of any river. It was a worse thing: the deliberate closing of myself.
And I found that whatever it is that chooses to flow through me is so powerful it will destroy me if I resist it in any way. That I must open to it or die. And the death will be suicide.

The following day, he wrote, “I saw myself a ring of bone in a clear stream, and vowed, never, ever, to close myself again.” This would of course become the seed of his great poem, the posthumously published “Ring of Bone,” but the lesson was one Welch proved unable to embrace. He was on a course towards total self-destruction.

His friends tried to save him but nothing could be done. He had been given a parcel of land by Allen Ginsberg and had obtained permission to build from Gary Snyder, who lived nearby. He had found people to help him build his cabin and life looked good. But then one day he just walked into the woods, leaving behind this note:

>I never could make anything work out right and now I'm betraying my friends. I can't make anything out of it--never could. I had great visions but never could bring them together with reality. I used it all up. It's all gone.

A few years ago, a biography of Welch was published. It’s called He, Leo: The Life and Poetry of Lew Welch by Ewan Clark. It’s a fantastic book. Grab a copy if you can find it.

>Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now.
--Jack Kerouac

Kerouac wrote this in a letter to Edie Parker in January 1957. He continues:

>That’s the story. That’s the message. Nobody understands it, nobody listens, they’re all running around like chickens [...] I will try to teach it but it will be in vain, s’why I’ll end up in a shack praying and being cool and singing by my woodstove making pancakes.

This appears in Selected Letters, Vol 2, edited by Ann Charters. It’s on pages 7-8.

Kerouac was indeed a gentle soul who practised kindness in pursuit of heaven on Earth but found a cold and unkind world that pushed him further into alcoholism rather than the more idealised isolation he mentions in this letter. The pressures of fame and the cruelty of a sensationalist media also severely impacted him following the release of "On the Road" in late 1957.

The photo is of Kerouac and a cat. I am unsure of the photographer but it seems to come from the Orange County Regional History Center. It seems to be taken outside his Orlando home, which is now on the National Register of Historic Places.