973 L?6h
Lipton
The holy barbarians
73-?306
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;; JAN 30*35 -7'
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JUN 2 6 19TB
UG85 1978
The Holy Barbarians
by LAWRENCE UPTON
Novels
BROTHER, THE LAUGH IS BITTER
IN SECRET BATTLE
Poetry
RAINBOW AT MIDNIGHT
A Book Club for Poetry Selection
PACIFICA: Inferno Records
JAZZ CANTO; Volume One. World Pacific Records
THE HOLY
BARBARIANS
by Lawrence Upton
Julian Messner, Inc. New York
Published by Julian Messner, Inc.
8 West 40th Street, New York 18
Published simultaneously in Canada
by The Copp Clark Publishing Co., Limited
Copyright 1959 by Lawrence Lipton
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Catalog Card No.: 59-7135
V&ntce West Picture Essay by Austin Anton, with additional photo*
graphs by William Claxton, Harry R$dl and Robert F, Skeetz,
Pictured on the jacket are <paint$rs John Altoon (l&ft) and Tony
with coffeehouse waitress Maggie Ryan at ths Altoon studio in Los
For Nettie
i-(6, 6
KANSAS CITY (MO.) PUBLIC LIBRARY
PREFACE
When the barbarians appear on the frontiers of a civilization it is a
sign of a crisis in that civilization. If the barbarians come, not with
weapons of war but with the songs and ikons of peace, it is a sign that
the crisis is one of a spiritual nature. In either case the crisis is never
welcomed by the entrenched beneficiaries of the status quo. In the
case of the holy barbarians it is not an enemy invasion threatening the
gates, it is "a change felt in the rhythm of events" that signals one of
those "cyclic turns" which the poet Robinson Jeffers has written about.
To the ancient Greeks the barbarian was the bearded foreigner who
spoke an unintelligible gibberish. Our barbarians come bearded and
sandaled, and they speak and write in a language that is not the
"Geneva language" of conventional usage. That their advent is not
just another bohemianism is evident from the fact that their ranks
are not confined to the young. Moreover, the not-so-young among the
holy barbarians are not "settling down," as the nonconformists of the
past have done, Some of them are already bringing up families and
they are still "beat." This is not, as it was at the turn of the century,
the expatriates in flight from New England gentility and bluenose cen
sorship. It is not the anti-Babbitt caper of the twenties. Nor the polit
ically oriented alienation of the thirties. The present generation has
taken note of all these and passed on beyond them to a total rejection
of the whole society, and that, in present-day America, means the bus
iness civilization. The alienation of the hipsters from the squares is
now complete.
Presenting the picture in this way, as a kind of evolutionary, histor
ical process, I must caution the reader at this point that it is merely a
preliminary formulation of the picture, a simplification. When I met
Kenneth Rexroth for the first time in Chicago back in the late twenties
he was as beat as any of today's beat generation. So was I. So were
most of my friends at the time. If some of us remained beat through
the years and on into the fifties it was because we felt that it was not
we but the times that were out of joint. We have had to wait for the
world to catch up with us, to reach a turn, a crisis. What that crisis is
and why the present generation is reacting to it the way it does is the
theme of this book.
I have chosen Venice, California, as the scene, the laboratory as it
were, because I live here and have seen it grow up around me, Newer
than the North Beach, San Francisco, scene or the Greenwich Village
scene, it has afforded me an opportunity to watch the formation of a
community of disaffiliates from its inception. Seeing it take form I had
a feeling of "this is where I came in/' that I had seen it all happening
before. But studying it closely, from the inside, and with a sympathy
born of a kindred experience, I have come to the conclusion that this
is not just another alienation. It is a deep-going change, a revolution
under the ribs. These people are picking up where we left off? no,
where we began, Began and lived it and wrote about it and waited for
the world to catch up with us. I am telling their story here because it
is our story, too. My story.
LAWBENCE LIPTON
Venice West, February 9, 1959
CONTENTS
PART I
1. Slum by the Sea 15
2. Biography of Three Beats 44
3. Venice West: Life and Love Among the Ruins 70
4. The Loveways of the Beat Generation 90
5. The Electronic Ear: Some Oral Documents 109
6. Venice West: And All Points North, South and East 124
PART II
7. Down With the Race Race: The New Poverty 147
8. Cats Possessed: Ritual and the Beat 156
9. "God's Medicine': The Euphoric Fix 171
PART III
10. The New Apocalypse 193
11. Jazz, the Music of the Holy Barbarians 207
12. Poetry and Jazz: Love Match or Shotgun Wedding? 216
13. The Barbarian is at the Gates 226
PART IV
14. Lost Generation, Flaming Youth, Bohemian Leftist,
Beat Generation Is There a Difference? 263
15. The Social Lie 293
Notes 311
Glossary 315
Footnotes for Picture Essay 320
Venice West Picture Essay Follows 320
The Holy Barbarians
PART I
1
Slum by the Sea
IT is SUNDAY IN VENICE. NOT THE VENICE OF THE PIAZZA SAN MARCO
and memories of the Doges. Venice, California, the Venice of St.
Mark's Hotel where the arched colonnades are of plaster, scaling off
now and cracked by only a few decades of time, earthquake and decay.
This is Venice by the Pacific, dreamed up by a man named Kinney at
the turn of the century, a nineteenth-century Man of Vision, a vision
as trite as a penny postal card. He went broke in heart and pocket try
ing to carry his Cook's Tour memories of the historic city on the Adri
atic into the twentieth century.
The oil derricks came in and fouled up his canals, the Japanese
moved in and set up gambling wheels and fan-tan games on the ocean
front, and the imitation palaces of the Doges became flop joints. The
Venice Pier Opera House, where Kinney dreamed of Nellie Melbas
warbling arias and Italian tenors singing Neapolitan boat songs, went
into history instead as the ballroom where Kid Ory first brought New
Orleans jazz to the West Coast. And the night air was filled, not with
the songs of gondoliers, but with air-splitting screams from the roller
coasters of the Venice Amusement Pier.
All that remains of Kinney's Folly are a few green-scum-covered
canals, some yellowing photographs in the shop windows of old store
keepers who "remember when," and the PWA mural that decorates
the Venice Post Office, in which the oil derricks are superimposed on
15
16 THE HOLY BABBABIA.NS
the colonnades in a montage that is meant to be at once ironical and
nostalgic. As for the Doges, the Doges of Venice are a gang whose
teen-age members sometimes scribble the name on fences, smear it on
shopwindows and even carve it into walls and bus seats, defacing pri
vate property and earning themselves the epithet of juvenile delinquents.
The sea-rotted Venice Amusement Park Pier has long ago been torn
down, leaving a land's end, waterfront slum where there was once a
fashionable resort, then a wide-open gambling town, then a wartime
furlough spot for the sailors of the Pacific fleet and, till a few years
ago, a bonanza for bingo operators.
Civic virtue, domiciled far away in hotel suites and suburban ranch
houses, closed the bingo games. The luxury hotels along the beach
front promenade, too costly to tear down at present-day wrecking
prices and not profitable enough to warrant proper upkeep and repair,
stand like old derelicts, their plush and finery faded and patched. In
their dim lobbies sit the pensioned-aged playing cards and waiting for
the mailman to bring the next little brown envelope. Pension Row.
Slum by the sea. Two, even three, one-story houses on a narrow lot,
airless and lightless in a paradise of air and light. Night-blooming jas
mine amidst the garbage cans.
To this area of Los Angeles, as to similar areas of other large cities,
have come the rebellious, the nonconformist, the bohemian, the deviant
among the youth. An unrentable store, with its show windows curtained
or painted opaque, becomes a studio. A loft behind a lunchroom or
over a liquor store becomes an ideal "pad" where you can keep your
hi-fi going full volume at all hours of the night with no neighbors to
complain. If you're a UCLA student shacking up with a girl friend,
for love or just to save on the rent, you can find here a ramshackle
three- or four-room cottage "in the back," preferably administered by
a bank for some estate or by an agent for some absentee owner. As
long as you are prompt with your rent payments no questions will be
asked. As likely as not your neighbors will be Mexican-Americans who
will not complain about your bongo drums as long as you do not
complain about their three-families-in-a-four-room shack, seven-
children-two-dog noise fests and their Saturday night all-night open-
house drunk parties. If you can't sleep you're welcome to join them,
but the chances are you won't because you'll be noising it up in your
own pad, with your Chamber Jazz Quartet record offering poor decible
SLUM BY THE SEA 17
competition to their television Hit Parade. Nobody is going to call the
cops because they'll only drink up your liquor and make a pass at your
women, and besides, they're too busy rounding up winos to clean up
the drunk tank and the jail cells on Monday morning, taking the strain
off the paid labor and saving the taxpayers* money.
The aged and the young. And the misfits. All the misfits of the world
the too fat and the too lean, the too tall and the too short, the jerk,
the drip, the half-wit and the spastic, the harelip and the gimp. All the
broken, the doomed, the drunk and the disillusioned herding to
gether for a little human warmth, where a one-room kitchenette is an
apartment and the naked electric bulb hangs suspended from the
ceiling like an exposed nerve.
Here, working couples with children find the run-down apartments
and tumble-down shacks that the realtor has to offer. To them, too, it
is Land's End. After being turned away in other parts of town with
"No children, no pets," they stagger finally into Ocean Park and
Venice, foot-sore or with an empty gas tank, ready to rent anything
with four walls and a roof, even if the walls are paper-thin and the
roof leaks and the toilet is stuffed up. "Wait till you see how 111 fix it
up," says the wife with a tired little smile, and Dad has visions of
puttering around Sunday morning with a paint brush and turning this
time-rotted ruin into the American Dream Home of the magazine
color pages.
The young who come here have no such dreams. The aged, living
in the sealed-in loneliness of their television sets, will leave them
alone. The working couples, fatigued after a night on the graveyard
shift at nearby Douglas Aircraft, will nod over their beer and listen to
the jukebox in the waterfront taverns. If books, painting or music, or
all-night gab fests are more important to the young than the mop and
dishrag, nobody will read them any lectures on neatness in a neighbor
hood where it is no crime to leave the beds unmade and two days'
dishes in the sink. Nobody will turn to stare at beards and sandals or
dirty Levi's on the beach where a stained sweat shirt or a leather
jacket is practically formal dress.
Venice, U.S.A. Venice West, a horizontal, jerry-built slum by the
sea, warm under a semitropical Pacific sun on a Sunday afternoon.
The doorbell rings. The regular week-end invasion has begun: all
the impatient young-men-in-a-hurry, the lost, the seekers, the beat, the
18 THE HOLY BABBARIANS
disaffiliated, the educated, diseducated, re-educated, in quest of a new
vision; visitors from all over America passing through and stopping
off to dig the Venice scene or come to hole in for a while in a Venice
pad; young girls in flight from unendurable homes in other, fancier,
parts of town, hiding their fears behind a mask of defiance, or trying
to look "cool" or act "beat"; Hollywood writers dropping in to refresh
their souls, hoping, perhaps, that some of the creative energy of ded
icated artists will somehow rub off a little on them, maybe to do a
little brain-picking, too, something they can turn into The Big Money;
squares from Beverly Hills and San Fernando Valley ranch type houses
looking for the shock of nonconformism, which is their own kind of
"kick," or on the make for girls; newsmen and radio people on the
prowl for "experience/* or just plain hungry for a taste of intellectual
honesty and artistic integrity, a kind of go-to-church-Sunday soul bath;
ex-Communists with every kind of ideological hang-over coming to
argue themselves out of something or into something or back to some
thing; politicals, apoliticals, pacificts; interviewers coming to interview
and interviewees coming to be interviewed; silent ones who come to sit
and listen, to "dig" the talk and the jazz and stay to eat, and listen
some more and sit, just sit, till everybody else has gone and they can
explode in a torrent of pent-up talk about themselves, their lives, their
loves, their despairs, or make a quick touch; and always the parade of
weekday office and factory workers, Sunday refugees from the rat race,
panting for a little music and poetry in their lives, hoping to meet "the
one" who will lift them out of the quiet desperation in which they
move. And the poets . . . and the painters , . . and the camp followers
of the Muse freeloading and tailchasing on the lower slopes of Parnas
sus, , . . The clowns, the make-believers, the self -deceivers and the
mad, The talented mad. Like "Itchy" Gelden who was gentle and
innocent mad. Or Chuck Bennison who was make-believe mad. Or
"Angel" Dan Davies who was ecstatic, self-righteous mad, . . .
"AH raging and sniffy and crazy-wayecP 9
Angel Davies was the first to drop in that Sunday, He stood there
swaying for a moment when I opened the door, head thrust forward,
with that sideways weaving motion of his like a wrestler sparring for
holds. He wore his shy, angelic smile. This was evidently his day to
SLUM BY THE SEA 19
come on like a raging angel, demanding to be loved or be damned to
you. With a nod for his only greeting, he hunched in, laid a binderf ul
of poems on the floor and sat down with his arms hung loose like a
relaxed chimpanzee. Weaving and waiting.
I put a Charley Bird Parker record on and let it spin for a while,
opening a three-way circuit of communication. It was a ritual. I lay
down and waited for the magic circle to form, closing the circuit. This
time Bird made it for us. Sometimes it was necessary to make two or
three tries Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, once I even had to go all
the way back to Bessie Smith for the magic spark. Angel leaned back,
closed his eyes with a postcoital sigh and began to talk.
"The body finds the foods it needs, Larry, and so does the soul. Cole
ridge needed opium and Wordsworth needed Nature. Nature would
not have written Kubla Kahn for Coleridge and opium would not have
written the Intimations of Immortality for Wordsworth. They found
what they needed. Now, what made them need these things and at
what point in their development it could have been changed that I
don't know. But there came a point where it couldn't be changed.
There came a point where you couldn't say about Bird, "Too bad he's
on horse, too bad he's got satyriasis, too bad he's a lush, too bad he's
trying to kill himself/ There came a point where you couldn't even
say, 'Too bad he's dead.' Because that's what he needed. He sought
it and found it. And the same thing with Dylan Thomas."
"Would you settle for their final end if you could perform what they
performed would you make such a bargain?"
"I'm willing to settle for any end, for myself, if I can make it that
way, like, you know, that's just part of the bargain. There is no choice.
The choice, at some indefinable point, was made to attempt the per
formance. Whatever end is implicit in the attempt is chosen at that
time, I have a recurring image of my end, and I have always been
obsessed; I have seen myself, my horror image of my end, and I don't
think it is something that is going to happen, but if you say to me,
'What's the worst way you could end up?' then I see myself as Maxwell
Bodenheim, And before I even knew he existed I saw myself on Skid
Row, I mean the end was . . . this is ... and ... if this is true, if that
horror image is true of me, like if that's where I'm going to end up the
way I'm going, well that's where I'm going to end up. It's horrifying, it
really gives me ickies, but if it's part of it, if it really is, there's no
20 THE HOLY BABBARIANS
choice. And that's similar, I guess, to the way Bird ended, I mean it's
equivalently ickie. So I guess, yes, I would accept it but not to do
what they did, because I don't want to write poetry like Dylan
Thomas', but he wanted to so he accepted it. The end is implicit in
the beginning, Larry, that's all."
I remembered Kenneth Rexroth telling about the last time he saw
Bird Parker. It was at some pretentious jazz concert, "He was so gone
so blind to the world that he literally sat down on me before he
realized I was there. 'What happened, man?' I said. 'Evil, man, evil,' he
said, and that's all he said for the rest of the night. About dawn he got
up to blow. The rowdy crowd chilled into stillness and the fluent
melody spiraled through it." The way it was spiraling through us at
this moment from the record of "Slim's Jam." And I remembered Allen
Ginsberg telling me about the time Gregory Corso sneaked into the
hospital at midnight and sat by Dylan Thomas' bed watching him
die, till the nice, efficient, antiseptic nurses caught him at it and shooed
him out.
And I thought of my own answer to the same loaded question, "Why
did they do it, did it do anybody any good?" meaning, "Wouldn't
they have done better to join a party or sign protests and petitions
against the Bomb?" My answer: "When the Bomb drops it will find us
writing poems, painting pictures and making music." By which I
meant, I suppose, pretty much the same thing that Rexroth meant
when he wrote, apropos of Bird and Dylan, "Against the ruin of the
world, there is only one defense the creative act."
Tanya had come in by the back door and now she came out of the
kitchen where she was helping my wife prepare some food. Tanya
Bromberger, pink pants and silver toenails, a chick with free-wheeling
hips and no cover charge I must have been thinking of Tanya when
I wrote those lines from my poem on Bird Parker. Tanya had over
heard our conversation about the Bird. She had never known the Bird
but she knew nearly everybody who ever worked with Bird. Not that
sex was all she had to offer jazz musicians. She had told me once: "The
only chance for a woman to establish a genuinely good relationship
with these guys is to genuinely share their enthusiasm for the music.
Just on her sex she can't do it. You can't make it that way." Tanya
knew her music. But it was pot we were talking about now pod,
SLUM BY THE SEA 21
you want to be fancy about it, but every user I know calls it pot. Pot
and horse. Every conversation about Bird inevitably leads to a dis
cussion of heroin and booze and sex. Tanya knew a lot about all of
these tilings. And on sex she was Einstein and Colette rolled into one,
if Einstein doesn't mind. Maybe neither of them minds now.
"Most junkies have very little sex drive/' Tanya said flatly. "As
Negroes and musicians say, It takes your nature away/ that's what they
say. It takes away the sex drive and it renders them impotent, so that
a lot of diem go in for deviations, what people might call, quote, per
version, unquote, like oral copulation. So much of their life is spent
just trying to get the drug, or trying to get the money to get the drug,
that what little is left usually goes to music and very little to sex or
anything else."
Angel got up and wandered off into the kitchen to put on his little-
boy-hungry act with Nettie, which was always good for an outsize
sandwich at least, with all the trimmings. Tanya slid off the chair onto
the floor, working her way over to the divan where I lay, talking all the
way and balancing a beer and a cigarette with one hand.
"Like Tex you remember Tex when he was here with the Ray
Cullen band he was no good when he was all tore up, like when he'd
just fixed or something, but between fixes, coming down, he was good,
one of the best sex partners I ever had. I met him through a musician
friend of mine who was at the time a heroin addict and one of my very
best friends, a wonderful person, I mean we were just like this" with
the thumb of one hand in the fist of the other and that throaty laugh
of hers that always went with the gesture "and they were going to
make a joint purchase you can buy the stuff cheaper in quantity
and Tex had my friend's car and so he was stranded at Tex's motel in
Hollywood, And he asked me would I drive over and pick him up. And
by the time I got there Tex had brought the car back and my friend
had left so I was alone with Tex who I had met a coupla nights pre
viously, you know, just how do you do, when I was out with a gambler
and pimp friend of mine who's also a jazz fan and he likes to smoke
pot and opium when he can get it. So I reminded him that I had
met him the other night and we got to talking and he asked me if I
had a car and I said, yeah, and he asked me would I drive him down
to the club in about an hour/'
22 THE HOLY BABBABIANS
Tanya paused just long enough to take a drag on the cigarette and
a gulp of beer out of the can, all with the trick five-finger manipula
tion that she brought off so well.
"I said yes and so the way it started out his treatment was a little
condescending chicks, you know, they have a tendency to be a little
condescending especially with women, like there are a lot of white
women who have a musician craze on, you know, without any real
feeling or understanding of the music, and so I felt a little of that
condescension but it didn't bother me. I was just relaxed and we
talked and I drove him down to the club and always I make an attempt
to be very truthful and be very much myself with these people. Bullshit
they see through and they're not interested in it, And so I just would
say what I thought about most anything and usually it takes them
aback and they're a little surprised at the unconventionality of it or
something and yet they feel drawn to you, too. I don't remember what
we talked about but whatever it was it evoked some interest in him
so when we got there he said, 'Hey, come on in and have a coupla
drinks/"
Angel was back with a Poor Boy sandwich crammed in his mouth,
dropping crumbs all over the place and still playing his small-boy-
hungry act. He sprawled out full length on the floor and started
sketching Tanya and me on a big drawing pad of mine that he'd
picked up off the end table. Angel took all the arts for his province,
except the art of dance and maybe ceramics, though you couldn't ever
be sure about Angel; he'd try anything if only for kicks, and besides,
what was it about any art except to just cut in and blow, man, just
blow. If a little mayonnaise dripped onto the paper you just rubbed it
into the drawing with a deft thumb crazy, man, crazy.
Tanya was too wound up in her story to notice anything. "So I went
in and wound up staying till two o'clock in the morning. And during
the course of the evening someone came up to him and asked for some
dolophenes which are kick pills to alleviate the discomfort of being
without heroin when you're sick, And I said, *Oh, you got some dolo
phenes, let me have one,* and he said, 'Do you need it?' and I said,
*No, I don't, I just like to take them for kicks now and then, I get a
crazy high off of them/ and in the meantime he'd seen me go into my
purse a couple of times after bennies and I'd given him some bennies
and he gave me a dolophene and as the evening wore on we were just
SLUM BY THE SEA 23
sort of closer and closer and more friendly in our conversation. And
at two o'clock he asked me to drive him back to his motel and I did
and then three or four musicians came by and there was some heroin
there and they proceeded to fix up in the bathroom to get straightened
and we were just talking mostly about music and musicians and the
ideas I expressed agreed almost completely with their own feelings.
And these people are very partisan. There's a terrific resentment among
them against the commercial jazz musicians. They feel their music is
the right music, the good music, and I happen to agree with them so
we got along real well. Pretty soon everybody left and it was about
four o'clock in the morning."
I looked over to where Angel was scrawling and smearing like
crazy on the drawing pad, his head and shoulders weaving back and
forth to appraise the effects. He was sitting up yogi fashion now and
sort of jabbing at the paper and slashing at it; the half -eaten sandwich
was on the floor beside him and he was picking at it with smudged
fingers and sucking the mayonnaise off of them in an ecstacy of art,
lox and salami, grunting and groaning as he worked away at it. Tanya,
feeling that my attention was wandering, moved up closer to the divan,
laid her head on the covers and tugged gently at my leg as she talked.
"There were twin beds there, so I asked Tex if he'd mind if I stayed
over instead of making the long trip home and went to work from
there, and he said 'Not at all/ and so he got out a pair of pajamas. I
put them on in the bathroom and came strolling out and this guy like
he had just fixed, you understand, and by all logic he should be
knocked out, cooling he was pacing around the room like a caged
animal, tense. And he said, 1 don't know how to figure you out. You're
a weird girl/ This is what everybody tells me, you're a weird girl. And
I said, 'There's nothing to figure out,' and then he starts asking me,
"Let me get in that bed and eat you up,' and I said, 'Ah, some other
time, I'm tired, it's late,' and I was really tired, like I just wasn't in the
mood right at that moment. But I liked him, I liked him real well. So
finally after much fidgeting and tossing and turning he settled down
and we both went to sleep in our respective beds."
"Make with a halo around her head," I said in Angel's direction, but
I was only kidding and she knew I was kidding. Angel paid no atten
tion to my remark nor to Tanya's bite of mock punishment on my bare
leg. (It was a hot afternoon and I was in my shorts.) Angel's lack of
24 THE HOLY BARBABIANS
humor is as complete as that of a newly canonized martyr in an early
Christian painting. The nearest he ever gets to it is a smile, and that's
usually a smile of pity or condescension or the small-boy-hungry smile
of utter helplessness. He saves his rare laugh for the exultant, bellig-
erant Mr. Hyde side of him, and then it's startingly out of proportion
to its source, like a mouse laboring and bringing forth a mountain.
"I wasn't playing hard to get," Tanya went on, in a purely rhetorical
disclaimer, "and, like I'm not modest, either, dig? and in the morning
when I changed from his pajamas I dressed right in front of him and
all that, which doesn't stem from just a lack of modesty but also I
think I was trying to titillate or stimulate him, too, I'm honest enough
to admit that. And we started running around together after all, he
didn't have a car and I started driving him to his connections to pick
up heroin. I had sex with him the second night. On the way down.
Also it turned out that his connection was somebody I knew, an old
friend of mine who had been in jail about five years, and when it
turned out I knew this guy, well, it sort of heightened my prestige
with him, that I was no square by any means. About the second day I
was with him he offered me a fix did I want to do up? and I said
no. He never approached me about it again. One time at my apart
ment he took an overjolt and passed out. I was a little concerned about
him after a while, so I went into the bathroom and there he was
slumped over on the floor with his head against the tub, knocked out,
bloody syringe on the floor, dirty spoon in the sink and all that, so I
cleaned everything up and got it all stashed away and got him over
onto the bed, and he was so grateful the next day, he was just gassed,
no recriminations, no criticisms."
Nettie came in with glasses of cold lemonade and some sandwiches,
so it was catch-as-catch-can on the floor, end tables and divan, while
Angel labored over the drawing pad, now enriched with the drippings
of lemonade, and Tanya went on with her story, with Nettie now for
an added listener. Was Tex married? Nettie wanted to know.
"He's got a couple of wives back east and some children and a law
suit with some minor girl," Tanya explained between mouthfuls of
tomato and avocado sandwich, "but he wanted to run away from it all
and stay in California and live with me. But it sort of petered out by
the end of the two weeks he was here and he went up to San Fran
cisco he wanted me to go up to Frisco with him but I said no. He
SLUM BY THE SEA 25
was embroiled in other things and I was reluctant to keep up that
tight of an association because he was pushing heroin to other musi
cians and there was this constant traffic and I felt it was just too close
and that I would eventually get busted. So we parted real good friends
and I've never seen him since."
Beat, Beard and Sandals
Angel Dan Davies had a problem. When his unemployment insur
ance payments had ended some weeks before and he had to start
looking for a new gig, he tried to make it with the beard, instead of
shaving it off as he had always been obliged to do before. After a few
turndowns "and the ad kept running in the papers, so I knew it must
be the beard, like, what else could it be, man?" he tried trimming it
a little, then, as the turndowns continued, a little more, till he finally
shaved it all off and landed a job as a shipping clerk. Now that three
weeks had elapsed and the boss showed no sign of firing him for
goofing on the job or showing up late for work or any of the other
infractions that go with poetry writing, jazz and pot into the early
morning hours, he was letting the beard grow again, and the boss was
beginning to notice and look at him "with that look, dig?" and a
new crisis was in the making.
"Like, it isn't just the beard, Larry, it's the pressure of conformity,
it's Who says I carit have a beard if I want it? or sandals if I want to
wear them on the gig like who would? you could get your toes
chopped off if one of those boxes ever fell on them it's a matter of
utility, shoes, but a beard . . . who the hell cares if I tote boxes and
shipping crates with a beard? Is it as if the customers might ask ques
tions, me stuck back there in that black hole of a shipping room off the
alley and never seeing anybody except truck drivers, so what's the
big crime, what the hell difference should it make to that square? So
I'm thinking is it worth it, the gig, I mean? Or do I start trimming
again, or settle for just the mustache like I did on that godawful car-
selling gig, that I lost anyway when I didn't shuck the customers
enough to please the crook who was running the car lot. I mean when
does it end ?"
"I don t know," I said. "How did it begin?"
"Begin? You mean my beard?"
26 THE HOLY BABBABIANS
"Yes, your beard. How, when did you first happen w
"Oh, that, sure, 111 tell you when. Very simple. The first beard I
started was for the Seder, the first Seder away from home, in my own
home, like I was very religious at the time and it was a kind of ritual,
you might say, and then I had to go out and look for a gig and I found
I had to shave it."
"You were conforming with an ancient Jewish religious custom, isn't
that right? So it wasn't nonconformism but conformism that started
you on your first beard."
"Right. So it isn't conformism or nonconformism the squares are
worried about so what is it? Don't tell me let me think. It's what
they associate it with at the time. Right now beards are being worn by
young people who reject the rewards of the goddamn dog-eat-dog
society, who hole up in pads in the slums and listen to jazz music all
night and get high on pot and violate all their sexual taboos and show
up late for work in the morning or stay home all day if they've got a
poem eating away at them to get itself written or a picture to be
painted. It's putting all these other things first manl That's what
scares the shit out of them "
The doorbell rang again, and it was Itchy Gelden standing at the
door, peering in, fidgeting and scratching his crotch. "Like I don't want
to bug you man, if you're busy. ... I could come back later " He
caught sight of Angel and Tanya. "Hi, what's cookin'? Are we gonna
blow some poetry, maybe?"
He knew it was Sunday, open house. This was just his way of play
ing shy, humble, the half -welcome guest. He shambled in, mumbling
his little high-pitched murmurs, half-words, more for sound than
meaning, and sat down quietly in a cool corner. Itchy scratched be
cause he had no skin; he was open to the world as a turtle without a
shell, sensitive to all the world's hurt and all the world's love. Naked
to the world, winter and summer, in the briefest of shorts and splayed
sandals, scrubbed clean by wind, water and sand, he was forever
scratching away at himself like a louse-eaten crumbum. Dylan Thomas
is said to have clawed away at himself that way. A fellow poet writing
shortly after Dylan's death, and perhaps prone to oversentimentalize
it a bit, explains his constant scratching as a gesture of protest against
the limitations of the flesh; he pictures Dylan trying to get under his
SLUM BY THE SEA 27
own skin to the soul, the Self, a Hamlet gesture. What it might signify
in Itchy Gelden I was to learn only gradually.
All snap judgments about Itchy were misleading. Who would have
guessed, for instance, as he sat there limp and droopy, that he would
suddenly come up with:
"It's like this, man, we need more awareness of the I. It's like be
fore I light up I'm drug with the ten thousand things. Instead of hav
ing this fractured awareness of it, like I'm here but I'm somewhere
else too, wherever this one wants me or that one wants me. When
you're looking at the present it's got to go into the past in order to get
meaning, into the memory, into the network. So there's an alternation
of being here and being there. If the alternation, if the pulsation is
fractured, it begins to get static in it that's what I mean you can't
concentrate, because concentration merely means that you follow the
song of yourself. You're listening and you're hearing the song and
you're swinging along with it, whether it's e-m-c-squared of the Bird
trying to make the magic circle." He was making a reference to some
lines of mine about Bird Parker
I think he saw in four discrete dots
The corners of a square and tried to find
A central fifth round which to swing
The magic circle. . . .
For music was Dave Gelden's bread and meat, as pot was the breath
of life to him. "Like that's the scene, man. I'm a network. I'm a moving
network of nerve endings. And jazz music gives forms to my mind,
forms in sound, and I feel it's better than any psychoanalyst, because
art is a healer, that's a part of its function, it's a connected universe,
just like the words we formed out of the grunts and hollers, it organizes
my universe for me that's healing, integrating, communicating. And
pot is like, well, it makes you aware, aware of the present, you come
alive, you got eyes for the scene, man, and ears to hear with like
most of the time we're listening but we're not hearing, man "
I said, "The mystics talk about going into another plane of existence."
"But I'd want to be able to come back, every time. Back to this life,
with all its insoluable problems" this from Angel Dan Davies, who
28 THE HOLY BARBABIANS
had laid aside the sketch pad now and was rummaging through my
record racks for something to listen to. "Like I want to take peyote,
which, if it does what it is said to do, you go to a plane of existence
where you leave these problems behind you, and I want to take peyote
and I want to see what it's like there, but I want to come back "
"Back to the insoluable problems?"
"That's right. I get my kicks behind those problems, Larry, I enjoy
them. It doesn't horrify me that there's no answer to these problems."
"What happens when you take one of these problems and put it into
a poem, with all your perplexities, do you feel that when you've written
it out for yourself in a poem what does it do for you?"
"It takes me to a plane of existence where these problems no longer
exist or maybe I should say, where these problems no longer matter.
That's where I am after I finish a poem. I'm postorgasmic/'
I remembered Dylan Thomas' answer to much the same question
"My poetry is, or should be, useful to me for one reason: it is the
record of my individual struggle from darkness towards some measure
of light," and "Whatever is hidden should be made naked To be
stripped of darkness is to be clean," and his statement that the poem is
that moment of peace when the inner struggle is resolved, but momen
tarily only.
Angel Davies was insisting that he was not merely willing to return
to the struggle, but would have it no other way. Perhaps Dylan would
have given the same answer if he'd been pressed. For he did return to
the struggle again and again, till he couldn't make the creative scene
any more and, like a pregnant woman long past her time and in un
availing labor no one has ever devised a Caesarean for poets he
died of it.
Some say it was the booze that finished him; some say it was women,
"the old ram rod, dying of bitches," as he says in his poem Lament.
The old easy answers. But whatever it is that finally finishes a poet,
most poets are agreed that what triggers a poem may be any one or a
combination of these things booze, narcotics, women. Edgar Lee
Masters, in his poem Tomorrow i$ My Birthday, "quotes" Shakespeare
as saying just before he died that if he had a virgin in her teens instead
of old Anne at home keeling her pots, he coxild go on to write plays
that would eclipse everything he had already done, plays that would
SLUM BY THE SEA 29
be the wonder of the world. I mentioned the poem and Angel's com
ment was:
"Oh, yeah, I know just what he meant. If he had a swinging piece
of ass to lay he could really write."
"He'd really swing. Would it make you swing?"
"Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't." He paused, sat down
to think it over for a minute, then said slowly, thoughtfully: "I've been
in a kind of quiet period now, the past few weeks I've written not
very much, just a few things, and Margot and I have been making the
wildest sexual scene of our marriage."
"You don't think the other chick Rhonda entered into that
equation, do you?"
"No, because I was writing behind that scene, with her. That was
stimulating me to writing. I wrote a lot,"
"Do you connect the two, possibly that you sought the one in order
to achieve the other? That has a bearing on the problem that Edgar
Lee Masters raised about Shakespeare."
"I sought the one Rhonda because I sought a kind of love that
I knew I needed, and not just to write."
Tanya smelled moral censure and leapt to his defense. The poet
wasn't like other men. He was entitled to a change of venue whenever
he felt he needed it which I punned into a change of Venus, or
venery and there was a laugh all around, except for Angel to whom
nothing is a laughing matter, least of all where he is concerned.
"No," he insisted, "the poet is no more entitled to a change of sex
partners than anybody else. It's a question of the value of monogamy.
And that's a question I just can't answer again. All the important
questions are unanswerable at least I can't answer them. I say yes,
by all means, nothing is better than a monogamy that's functioning.
Maybe what Masters meant Shakespeare's no longer worked. And
I know this feeling. When this is true then the drive is always outside
the relationship, because every human being seeks love, the poet maybe
more so than others, yes, he's more conscious of his need for love."
"Does that mean that he's more justified?"
"He may be more driven, but I don't think that he's more justified, or
unjustified. Like it's a problem I can't give a solution to, but it happens.
I always say one thing about this it happens, face it, don't lie about
30 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
it. Try to make it with one woman, monogamously, but when the drive
takes you out of it, go, but don't lie, and don't hide it from yourself or
from your partner. Whatever happens has to be accepted. It's not a
solution, it's like a neurosis, it's a crutch that breaks. It's that kind of
a solution, it's a sick solution."
Angel had his halo on, his martyr's halo, and lay back, eyes closed,
arms outspread to receive the nails in his palms. It was Tanya's cue to
enter the scene as Mary Magdalen before the conversion.
"Like I love sex, and I don't see why anybody has to feel justified or
unjustified about it, and, like the poet is only doing what anybody
should do if he or she feels like it if it's the honest, inner, felt thing
to do. Anything else is dishonest, I think. Most often it's the mono
gamous relationship that's dishonest if all the love has gone out of
it, and all the sex satisfaction. What's so holy about it then? I mean
like they say Tioly wedlock.' Isn't that what we're all trying to get away
from, like you always say, the Social Lie? And when it happens, like
Dan says, it should be open. When I started having my first extramar
ital affair I did it openly, right in front of my husband that was
Richard, my second husband with a friend of his, a white fellow that
he knew. Long before that I had a feeling that we ought to split up. I
was getting that urge to be free and independent and alone again. I
discovered I was pregnant. I worked up until two weeks before the
baby was born, we were so awfully poor. Richard had all these books
in the house, every wall from floor to ceiling, every room he was
supposed to be in this book business, but he just couldn't bring himself
to actually sell any of them I found that out, like he loved books and
he just couldn't sell them. And so we fought over that, and anyway,
things were getting more and more hostile every day, the pressures
were mounting. I wanted to get out of there and I didn't know what I
could do. By that time Kathy was a year old and I felt that terrible
trapped feeling that there was no way out. I felt that if I leave and I
leave this baby I'll be miserable all my life, so there'll be no happiness
for me. If I stay I'm miserable. So I tried to kill myself and the baby.
I was going to turn the gas on. And Richard came home. I had made a
panicky phone call to him where I thought he might be and left a
message before that, as a lot of suicides do, because they don't really
want to die. And so he came home and he said, If you're that disturbed
I think you should go to a mental hospital, and I agreed. He admits
SLUM BY THE SEA 31
now it was a bluff with Mm, that he felt they would tell me I was just
overemotional and feeling sorry for myself, laugh at me and send me
home. Actually, they encouraged me to sign myself in. So I spent three
months in the County Hospital, in the experimental ward where they
keep only twenty patients at a time they're hand-picked and I
never went back to Richard after I came out of the hospital."
She looked over to where Nettie had settled down to her knitting
expecting, probably hoping, to encounter some expression or at least
a lifted eyebrow hint of reproof from that quarter Nettie was, for
Tanya, a symbol of placid wifely domesticity which she envied, pitied
and despised by turns. All she saw was patient attentiveness, even
sympathy. Itchy Gelden had been taking it all in but he just sat there
nodding, whether in agreement or to some inner voice, who could tell,
now or ever? Angel was still nailed to the cross. It was up to me, so I
asked Tanya if the psychiatrists at the County Hospital had tried read
ing her any moral lectures.
"No," she said. "Not to go back to my husband and baby, or any
thing. Not a word about sex or pot or even heroin, which I'd toyed
with one time I mean I tried it but didn't become addicted. This
wasn't the first time I'd had psychiatry, but this one was the first that I
established any rapport with. I'd had one in Chicago, and three out
here. The first time was when I was fourteen, my family took me to a
clinic to try and find out the cause of my violent migraine headaches,
and the doctors came to the conclusion they were psychogenic in origin."
Nettie spoke up to ask if the headaches had stopped and when.
"After I went to the hospital this last time," Tanya said. "I haven't
had any in two years. I found out what it was. Anger. That I was afraid
to vent. I was venting it on myself, actually. And then the second time
I went to the psychiatrist was when the Community Chest forced me
to, when I asked them for help. That was when I first came out here
I was so poor and it was before Korea and there weren't any jobs. And
they found out I was going around with a Negro motorcycle rider and
figured I must be crazy. And one of the terms of getting assistance was
that I submit myself to their psychiatric clinic. I got into a couple of
violent arguments with the psychiatrist and stopped going. I horrified
him and he couldn't conceal it. He wanted to straighten me out. And
then, the third time, I went to a private psychiatrist shortly before I
went to the hospital. I knew I was sick and needed help so I went to
32 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
this guy in Beverly Hills that the obstetrician recommended. I couldn't
afford to pay him. And I got angry at him because of the money. I felt,
you know, You bastard, you don't really care about me or why else
would you want fifteen dollars an hour? and so I couldn't go on with it.
But here in the county I finally found a man who accepted me com
pletely as I was, made no attempts to reform me or anything like that,
made me get over my guilt feelings about my child and my husband
and things like that."
"This psychiatrist, did he have any understanding of your point of
view, of your political ideas, for instance?"
"His are similar. I think this is essential. I couldn't make it with a
bourgeois psychiatrist. That's why this one was able to help me I was
able to really talk about things, things I'd never talked about before.
He even helped me get over my resentment at being a woman. And
that's why I don't really agree with Dan about monogamy, I mean
for me. I mean, dig, I agree with Dan about being a poet and the need
a poet has, his special need, and about being honest about it if it
happens, and you need a change. But about monogamy, the whole
idea in general, I find it stifling. Definitely. It dulls my sexual appetites.
I told the psychiatrist once that sex in marriage becomes a regular
routine, like having milk delivered at your door every morning, and he
nearly fell out of his chair laughing. To me, every prolonged sex rela
tionship becomes monotonous, routine."
It was at this point that Angel came down off his cross and went
into his rabbinical role, about sex being holy and especially married
sex, about the Shekinah presiding over the marriage bed every Sab
bath eve, reminding me what I had said so many times about the
community of lovers, about the primitive hierogamy growing hotter,
more accusing, by the minute. It began to dawn on me that he saw
himself as the sole defender of a faith that I had proclaimed but had
now deserted, walking away from the challenge and, like Angel
was always able to do, believing it, as he was able to believe almost
anything if he got himself worked up to it enough. He was working
around to where he suddenly remembered that he'd always known
about it, about holiness and the hierogamy and community, how it all
began for him, really, when he was just a kid and his parents sent him
off to a Jewish summer camp
" . , . and when I arrived there I found that I was already a camp
SLUM BY THE SEA 33
legend, and we talked out under a big full moon that summer night in the
midst of woods on an open playing field like, and it was a scene of
much warmth because at that camp I got whatever concepts I now
have of holy community because religion was important there and
it was very beautiful, Larry, and there was community, you know, real
community. It was a kind of unreal situation because we were all away
from our parents, of course that's what enabled us to feel so free. . . ."
His voice trailed off into a kind of self-communion with his mem
ories, or perhaps he was suddenly conscious of motives behind this
sudden uprush of memories, motives that he was sorting out privately
and trying to justify to himself, the saint in him interrogating the devil.
Anyway, when he finally spoke again it was to announce, defiantly and
in my direction, that he had decided to shave off the beard after all.
"Everybody is wearing a beard now Tony, Chuck, Dave here,
even you are starting a beard or is it just that you haven't shaved for
a few days?" He smiled his small-boy smile, sly and also shamefaced,
and lapsed into silence again, to be alone with his secret triumph.
The Joint is Jumpin
By the time Chuck Bennison arrived, red-eyed after an all night
session at bassist Phil Trattman's pad exploring "other realities" with
the help of pot and jazz rhythms, a poetry reading was under way.
Angel Dan Davies was holding forth with his latest jazz-inspired "open
line," free form pieces, Nettie was in the kitchen again preparing a
buffet supper, and the chairs, divans, floor every square inch of
sitting, lounging, squatting and sprawling space in the house were
full up. Beer cans, lemonade glasses, wine glasses, ash trays, sketch
pads and notebooks made for precarious footing. The doorbell kept
sounding every few minutes as the party got really swinging, for it had
gotten around that Les Morgan, the popular Negro trumpet man, might
fall in sometime during the evening and maybe bring along a couple
of men from his quintet for a jam session of poetry and jazz. I had
talked to Lester early in the week and he had eyes to make the scene,
but you never could tell about Les and his boys; they didn't know
quite what to make of this poetry and jazz thing and besides, they
might get hung up at somebody's pad and not show up till around
midnight, if at all. Phil Trattman was due to drop in early in the eve-
34 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
ning with his bass, and a couple of the boys had brought bongo drums
in the hope of sitting in with Les.
Chuck Bennison took me aside to tell me he had managed to get a
few fugitive lines down on paper from a vision he'd had the night
before; it had come to him in a trancelike state when he was far out
on pot. "I don't know what it means, exactly, maybe it's something
like, who can tell? but I'd like to try it out with Les and his boys,
and maybe it'll come to me," he said, with that nervous cackle of a
laugh that sounded like self-mockery but was just Chuck's way of
being modest and offhand when he wasn't the least bit modest and
couldn't be more serious.
Angel was punching out the lines of a poem; it was on the theme of
love, universal love, and community, but the words rang like body
blows as he boomed them out with his bass voice. No small-boy-
hungry this bass voice of his, more like a bull elephant on the make
love, or else! like verbal rape, and as male animal as a soaking sweat
shirt after a tough scrimmage. Angel liked to make his poems strong;
that's the way he liked to hear them described strong, except on the
rare occasions when he deigned to temper justice with mercy, and
then he was barely audible. Nothing between a bellow and a whisper,
that was Angel Dan Davies.
He finished with a bobbing of the head and shoulders that was more
like take-it-or-leave-it than a bow to the applause, much as (I think)
he imagined Bird Parker doing after blowing a wild far-out chorus that
left his sidemen panting for the beat. Then he staggered over to where
his wife Margot was sitting and, sinking to the floor, threw his head
back in her lap and closed his eyes.
I decided to wait a decent interval before calling on anybody else
to read, knowing they would all pay Angel the tribute of showing
reluctance to follow him, a tribute that each expected for himself in
turn and something, I had learned, that never failed to impress the
listeners, reminding them, perhaps, of "the perfect tribute" of silence
that followed the "Gettysburg Address." I piped a tape recording into
the hi-fi, some lines that Carl Forsberg had blown the week before,
improvised to bass and bongo rhythms, and wandered into the dining
room where Chris Nelson was reminiscing about Carl Solomon, a little
knot of people gathered around him.
"Carl Solomon, like he was already a legend when I was still living
SLUM BY THE SEA 35
in Brooklyn and I would drop in five six times a week at this lunch
room in Brooklyn and all you'd hear about was Carl Solomon. The
different lunchrooms, like, they'd have their heroes. They had their
tables, like Trotsky's table, and they had the poets' table and this and
that table, and there were all these other tables where they had noth
ing and anybody could sit there. The legend got started there. I'd
heard about him for a year before he was at Psychiatric Institute
where they had all these geniuses, one hundred and thirty-five IQ and
over, twenty males and twenty females. That's when Carl Solomon met
Allen Ginsberg and he said, 'My name is Kirilov,' and Ginsberg said,
'My name is Mishkin.' That's how they met. It was in this loony house,
and they gave them window shades to paint on. There were a lot of
fabulous painters there, like, a lot of New York people, like those
Black Mountain people."
Was he working then on some kind of a gig, somebody wanted to
know, and what, if anything, was he writing?
"It wasn't so much what he was writing, it was the things he said,
man, like crazy, and everybody would repeat it. Yeh, he published.
Under a different name, like Carl Goy was one of his pseudonyms, I
remember, mostly for liberation and anarchist type magazines. Very
exciting. Yeh, he had a job, he ghosted a Broadway column for a while
and he lost the job when he copied too much whole passages out of
Joseph Conrad, when he would get bored with the job, so he got fired.
And he wrote for a publishing house. Man, that was a hard gig to
make. He never explained his relation to the publishing house and like
he found an in there. He was a superadaptable type cat in a way, one
way, and in another way he wasn't. Like you see the way my nose is
bent over to one side, for instance? He broke that, Carl Solomon did.
It was in some chick's place, and I was wild for the chick, and I had
to show off for the chick, and he was there and she told me to get rid
of him. It was a party, like the going home bit, and Solomon says, 'No,
I'm staying here, what are you doing?' and all I did I started shoving
him out and we started fighting over this chick, digl and he bent
my nose. Once at a New Year's Eve party in Solomon's pad he showed
me a clipping of himself as a kid. He was a child prodigy. He could
remember every baseball score and every baseball player since the
beginning of the game. He flipped four or five times, I don't remember
how many times. Every time he was in I was out, every time I was
36 THE HOLY BAKBABIANS
out he was in. The way I met him, at one time there was a very excit
ing group of teachers at the New School "
Somebody interrupted to ask, "What's happened to Carl Solomon?"
"I asked Ginsberg what happened to him and he said he'd had a
letter from Carl saying he couldn't write at die time but in the near
future he would. Ginsberg didn't know him too well, in fact. A couple
of times I went down in the Village on Saturday nights when I'd make
the rounds and I'd see them together and they'd be talking loudly
together. He was homosexual, you know. And Ginsberg, too, but in
a weird, intellectual type way. Because I know Helen Parker said she
was going to make him. In fact, in The Trembling of the Veil he says,
'Thank you, H.P., you took my cherry at 23,' or something like that.
Their homosexuality, I don't know, I feel it's weird, sort of what I
mean, it isn't real, really, IVe seen these guys from the sticks make it
in New York who don't know how to be homosexuals and they learn
from other fags how to be homosexuals. These guys are like this
intellectual type homosexual. They are well read and they know all
the things that the famous homosexuals have written in literature. But
these same guys, they still make it with chicks. Like Solomon with this
chick I was going to make, like he wouldn't leave her pad and like I
knew he was going to make her and so I tried to beat up on him. And
the funniest thing, he was like insane. Carl's a big cat, about six feet
or so, and this guy who was with me I asked him to help me, just
to pick up Carl and help me carry him out, like they do in night clubs,
you know, but this guy was scared, so I had to fight Carl myself. But
Carl isn't strong, he doesn't know how to use his body, but IVe always
fought, so I could beat him up easy, you know. It's the funniest thing,
there was a moment there when everything snapped in Carl and he
just cooled down and said, 'Oh, well, you're just showing off, I should
have realized, I should never have caused a scene where you'd have to
show off to your girl.' This sounds logical, but only on his basis, be
cause he was thinking of something else, like this insane chess player,
playing one game in his mind and another on the board."
It was getting a little hard to hear, with the bass and bongos going
in another room, the tape I'd left on, where Carl Forsberg was going
full up on his poem Lines on a Tijuana John.
SLUM BY THE SEA 37
In the beginning was the weapon
a Chinese character
started the chain reaction
a thousand years passed
a thousand mercenaries met
in burnished war gear
in a wheat field
to settle the divine right
of muscling in
on the other mob's territory.
We live at ground zero
cowards join the army for protection.
Come closer, friends,
Just a few happy hints
for survival.
You've got to learn
new facts
you've got to move
towards simplicity
you've got to have humor.
Now ? this handy dandy jewel
I have in my hand
I will give away absolutely free.
It will resolve
the national debt
it is the perfect answer
to our slum clearance problem.
Now listen to this
a do-it-yourself laparectomy set
the hydrogen strophe
the best fallout possible.
Think of the funny embryonic mutations
generous, genial, genocide.
It's democratic too
it'll take fragmented man
everyone will move upward
in the free world
equally
in that final illumination.
38 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
Fun for the entire family
if not entirely satisfied
return the empty carton.
And here is a junior kit
consisting of pencils and paper
simple Dadaist images
exploding
can be assembled on the kitchen table
in Johns, in gigs,
on mats
in padded cells ....
And the bass and bongos going under it with a steady beat, with
only occasional short breaks, all with a hum in it that my hi-fi was
picking up and amplifying. Not that anybody cared; by this time there
were a dozen conversations going with little knots of listeners around
this one and that one.
One group was discussing different ways of making it without work
ing. A man in his thirties Chillie, they called him, I don't remember
his last name who was down from North Beach in San Francisco for
the week end, was telling about some real cool cats he'd known:
"Like Shag some of you may remember old Shag, he was around
here a good deal of the time a few years ago Shag walked into this
department store one day ? went up to the sixth floor where the sporting
goods section is, hoisted a 24-foot aluminum canoe on his shoulder and
went down the escalator and walked out. Another time he went into
the same store and picked up a tape recorder and went over to the
salesman and asked where the radio repair department was. The sales
man said, 'We have no radio repair department here/ and Shag came
out with, 'What? Why you Ve got to, I've got a guarantee on this box
I bought it here two weeks ago and it's broken already. I got a one-
year guarantee on it and I want it fixed.' And the guy told him to leave
it there and they'd ship it back to the factory and repair it there. Shag
asks how long it takes and the guy says about two weeks and Shag
says, X)h, no, I need this for my work, I need this in three days
can't you get it fixed for me in three days?' And the guy says it's impos
sible and Shag says, 'Oh, well, 111 take it to a local repair shop and get
it fixed at my own expense/ like real indignant yet! Dig? and he
walks out with the tape recorder, a $250 tape recorder."
SLUM BY THE SEA 39
Chuck Bennison had insisted on going out and getting in more beer,
and now I could hear him at the back door. I hedgehopped over legs,
glasses and beer cans to get to the kitchen and give him a hand with
it. Chuck wasn't having any himself; he was off it beer, whisky or
any alcohol whatever. He was just proving to himself and to those of
us who knew what a lush he had been that he could offer it to others
and let it alone himself. Also he still had enough of the square in him
to want to show that he could throw a few bucks in the kitty for the
party and not be a freeloader like these other cats. He was to lose this
innocence as soon as the few dollars he had left from his last monthly
paycheck at the downtown advertising agency he had walked out of
three weeks earlier melted away.
On his first visit to Venice West he had arrived lushed and had a
fit of the d.t's in the back bedroom, with Nettie and one or two of the
girls trying to nurse him out of it nobody else would have anything
to do with him, they hate alcoholics. He met Delia on that inauspicious
first visit, and she took him home to her pad and straightened him out
and got him off the bottle and turned him on to marijuana, to salvage
what was left of his liver and administer artificial respiration to the
poet's soul in him.
Since then, Chuck had been trying to get hip to the ways of this
new world and pursuing its rules and rituals with the breast-beating
devotion of a new convert and what sometimes looked, to me at least,
like the seriocomic assiduity of a college freshman aping his older
fraternity brothers except that these initiates were Chuck's juniors
by five years or more, which is a lot in times like these when the life
cycle of a "generation" is just barely a decade. His beard, a surprising
pink in contrast to his straw-blond head hair, was already substantial
but untrimmed. I guess he thought he was going the sandal boys one
better by traveling barefoot; he looked more like one of those beach
comber Nature Boy health freaks than a real hipster, but his pale eyes,
thanks to pot and Delia's nocturnal tutelage, already had that red-
hued, heavy-lidded sleepless look that is to the pothead what the little
sooty pop marks on the arm are to the heroin tyro.
In short, he had passed his entrance exams but he wasn't really in
yet; he wasn't quite with it. For one thing, he couldn't listen to jazz
without the novice's overdemonstrative emotionalism; he wasn't cool
yet. Angel Dan Davies just barely tolerated him in his pad and even
40 THE HOLY BAKBAHIANS
treated him with deliberate and pointed coldness, a kind of hazing
that Angel wasn't above administering to newcomers, for all his poems
and protestations of universal love. Itchy Gelden was still giving
Chuck the "just listen and try to dig it, man" treatment, and "like
there's a reason for everything, man, and you can't expect to fall in
from outside like a tourist and expect to make the scene right off you
got to pay your dues, man, like everybody else/'
Like Yew Just Blow
Chuck was shaking like a leaf by the time he sat down at the read
ing stand, watching Angel and Itchy out of the corner of his eye, his
voice tremulous with anxiety. But the poem was a proclamatory one,
a defiant personal statement, and the very words themselves seemed to
give him confidence as he went along. Les Morgan arrived in the
middle of it, with his drummer and tenor man, and swung into the
scene even before the drummer had gotten set xip, which gave Chuck
quite a lift, just to have a little music going behind him. There wasn't
the slightest co-ordination between the poem and the music, either in
mood or in rhythm this was in the first days of poetry and jazz when
any sound behind poetry was a novelty, exciting, a gas. Something
was happening on the poetry scene in Venice West. We had talked
about it for months and experimented with forms of poetry and music,
but nobody knew, as yet, how to integrate the two art forms into some
thing like a modern idiom that would lend itself to improvisation, at
least on the musical level. There were those who insisted that even the
poetry should be improvised. These were the fanatical jazz buffs who
thought that the wordman had everything to learn from the jazzman
and the jazzman could do no wrong. We were open for anything, ready
to try anything.
During these brave beginnings Stuart Z. Perkoff came up with a
long poem, an oratorio for the speaking voice, calling for several
voices, a speaking choir of Hipsters, a Dealer, a Poet and a Chick. It
was dedicated to the great jazz pianist-composer Thelonious Monk
and called Round About Midnite: A poem -for Sounding. Others named
in the dedication were two fellow poets and painters of Venice West
Charles Newman and Tony Scibella. Now we were all set to try it
out with music, with Tony as the Dealer, Charley and Chuck Bennison
SLUM BY THE SEA 41
in the Hipster roles and a talented Negro girl singer that one of the
musicians had brought along speaking the Chick's lines. Stuart was to
speak the Poet's lines. The musicians were given a very brief rundown
on the poem and we were off.
HIPSTERS
dig
this poet
sits at a piano
clanging fingers against each other
bonkdblonk bonkbonk
listens for an answer
clanggalingblonk
& listens
DEALER
is he hip?
does he swing?
I've got dreams for his fingers
HIPSTERS
he's been around before
at sessions up & down the street
always listening
always trying to dig
POET
dreams I've got
who'll lay some fingers
on my hand
HIPSTERS
the sound is the thing, man
POET
if my left hand is dead
& my right hand is withered
& my arms are rigid
& my shoulders brittle
& my eyes are goofed
& my jaw hung up
tell me about the sound
like I listen
& hear what I can
42 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
The bass had laid down the beat and now the bongos took it up, a
funky beat with Phil Trattman adding a few modern subtleties, I
looked over at Les. He was moved, visibly moved and excited. The
words of the poem had touched off something in him. He was trying
to find the right kind of a riff to come in with.
HIPSTERS
who'd he blow with before?
who does he dig?
what's his story?
who is he?
does he swing?
POET
I've always blown
alone
in rooms & at the edge of everything
always alone in a circle of light
the words banging themselves out
into some sort of sound
& me, hanging on, trying to keep the beat
coming in once in a while
making it, not making it
me & the words alone in rooms
& at the edge
HIPSTERS
dig, man
he wants to come in
what does he blow?
what does he blow?
DEALEB
down the street
not too far out
there's a chick
she digs wordmen, man
why don't you try to make it over there
& see if she can cool you
SLUM BY THE SEA 43
Les began to blow, a yearning, haunting theme, in perfect mood
with the words. This was it. This was what we had been working
toward for months. The way Les handled his horn reminded me once
more that jazz began as a vocal art, that the technique of those early
musicians was a vocal technique; they aimed to make the horn talk
It was to be months, however, before any of us had a real grasp of
the problems involved in this revival of poetry and music. Months of
experiment and public performance. And that, too, is a part of the
story of Venice West, A part of the whole picture of a disaffiliated
generation trying to find a way of life that it could believe in, to find
it and express it in music, in poetry, in prose, in painting and dance,
as men have always groped their way to new values and to a new way
of life through the arts.
Biography of Three Beats
The Embarrassed Man
NOTHING is so EMBARRASSING AS BEING HAILED ON THE STREET WITH
hearty familiarity only to prove unknown on closer inspection to the
greeter. A case of mistaken identity as embarrassing for the accosted
as for the accoster.
This is the story of Chuck Bennison's whole life an embarrassing
case of mistaken identity. Others were always mistaking him for some
one he wasn't. He even mistook himself for somebody else: in boy
hood for the All American Boy; in young adulthood for the Man Most
Likely to Succeed; in marriage for the Model of Domesticity. And he
was wrong every time. "Not till I came to Venice West was I able to
know and be what I am, and be recognized for what I am."
After two years of close acquaintance with Chuck Bennison and a
playback of our tape-recorded conversations, I am not at all surprised
that people have continually mistaken him for what he isn't. Because
Chuck is not a person. He is a do-it-yourself kit of bits and pieces of
a personality in the process of becoming a person.
To playmates, schoolmates, college friends and, later, business asso
ciates and social acquaintances., Chuck seems to have presented the
appearance of stereotyped conformity. As a boy he joined the Sea
Scouts, dutifully attended the Christian Science Sunday school and
44
BIOGRAPHY OF THBEE BEATS 45
participated in the usual sports. As a young man he dated the right
girls and made the right friends. He was an exceptionally bright stu
dent who went to Colgate on a scholarship and then on to graduate
work at Harvard and at Boston University. Chuck had no difficulty
going into a career in advertising, finding the right jobs and being liked
by employers and associates. The casual observer would have spotted
him as the classical example of an up-and-coming young American on
the make for a place among the power elite.
But here is where Chuck's resemblance to the classical example ends
and proof of mistaken identity begins. He says he received "an exces
sive amount of love" from his mother and did not like his father that
is, until the last few years of the man's life (he died when Chuck was
twenty-five). Now thirty-five, he has been married twice (both church
weddings), divorced once, and is presently separated from his second
wife. He has made periodic breaks from his jobs, disappearances that
must have seemed inexplicable to everyone who knew him, with
drawals and returns that make sense only when he fills in the missing
pieces
"I would just up and go, that's all. Walk out and not come back.
When I got fed up with it I'd go away somewhere. I'd go away where
nobody knew me and just goof for a while. Or try to write. And when
my money ran out I'd drift back again, with some plausible-sounding
story, or, more often, I'd go to some place new and start again, well,
where I'd left off more or less. I mean, I'd get the same kind of a job
again once I tried going into business for myself and it was success
ful for a while but there would always come that time, you know,
when I'd get fed up again with the whole thing, or they'd get wise to
me, because you can't live that kind of a lie, keep up pretenses false
pretenses, really for very long that way. Sooner or later they'd get
hip to the fact that I'm an oddball."
"That could mean so many things," I remarked. "Even reading
books or going to concerts, and certainly reading poetry aloud any of
these things are enough to mark a man as an oddball in some circles."
"Oh, no, many people that I've known do such things without no,
I figure that I'm subversive basically."
"Subversive? On what values? You mean political, moral - ?"
"All kinds. All kinds of phony values. In any civilization, at any
time, I think most values are phony, and I think my attitude toward the
46 THE HOLY BABBABIANS
values, the symbols of the state, marriage, sex, have always been sub
versive. IVe been able to conceal these attitudes of mine with more or
less success, but only, like I say, just so long* IVe felt that all these
social values, including religion and patriotism, are tawdry and phony
things and have no moral value and I guess my contempt for them
showed through sooner or later. And then there would be a crack-up.
It was just a question of who would crack first, me or the people
around me, Not that I didn't try. Religion, for instance. When I was
in college I had a lot of conflicting ideas about it I went to the Epis
copal church services, to Catholic church, I even looked in for a while
at a Jewish synagogue."
"What were you looking for? 1 '
"I thought of the value of ritual, of devotion an objective kind of
devotion, perhaps I don't know what I was looking for, Any way, I
didn't find It*
*Do you tend to make your own private rituals? Do you find yourself
ceremonializing anything ?*
*No, unless you could call my drinking a kind of ritual* Alcohol is
used in some religious rituals IVe read about* He laughed. He was
joking, of course, and ha knew I knew it
It wasn't till about four years ago that I was finally w0Ung to face
it- that I was an alcoholic. Yd read books about it* I adopted a diet
that would permit drinking of a pint to a fifth of whisky a day, To me,
alcohol had been roughly equivalent to oxygen. At first I took it at
times when I felt I couldn't cope with things. That was during the
period when I'd take, say t three drinks a day up to the period where
I'd take, say, eight or nine, and then your aim sort of shifts to where
you're after oblivion, blotting out yoiar oomdousnms. I needed to be
dropped down real hard before I could do anything about it, With the
help of Alcoholics A&cmymous I was able to stop (Making f or extended
periods of time. Sometimes when I fell off the wagon it was with
frustration at my not being able to write - sometimes it was my sexual
Hfe, the extreme ambivalence that I feel toward women, and I suppose
men, too, for that matter, the inability to face the pains of the world,
especially the pains of my own conflicts,'*
Chuck had tried psychoanalysis, sporadically, when he had enough
money to pay for it and sometimes even gotag toto debt for it, but to
JK> avail so far as his excessive drinking was concerned, although he
BIOGRAPHY OF THREE BEATS 47
does claim that it helped him to understand some of his problems
where mother, father, and family conflicts were concerned. For all her
lavish affections, his mother never approved of any of the women in
his life, neither the girl friends of his youth nor the two women he
married. "She tried to, I guess, but she just couldn't." As for his father,
"Before I was ten I looked up to him as a model and an idol, but I
fought with him bitterly and I wanted to be defeated by him. This was
one of the patterns I carried into my adult life/*
His mother had made a considerable amount of money on real estate
receiverships during the Depression. '1 asked her for money at times,
but the advice that went with it I didn't want her advice. I didn't
think there was any advice she could give me that would help me any.
For one thing, there was so little she knew about me by that time, I
mean about the things that mattered most to me. She has certain
neuroses like putting people under obligation not only me but
everybody, I don't think she was consciously aware of this, but that's
the way it always ended up, so IVe tried to maintain my own inde
pendence, It isn't easy to reject affection and money even if it is
sometimes reluctantly given, and you need it badly enough and,
well, at such times I guess I just played along with appearances, like
I did with everybody and everything till the inevitable crack-up.
What is it Jean-Paul Sartre says in No Exit? 'Hell is other people/"
Hell is other people. This from a man whose search has been for a
sense of belonging, a sense of community, a man who spent years of
his life trying to adjust himself to the values of middle-class society.
His physical appearance should make It easy for him to belong.
Blond, above average height, muscular, good looking, he might easily
be picked by any fashion photographer as the model of a young bus
iness executive. As a boy, he must have looked like any normal teen
ager. Yet he regarded himself as a subversive in every way and his
story, as it unfolded to me in successive interviews over a period of a
year or more, bore out the self -characterization.
Even th fact that he showed up on his first visit to my house looking
a bit shaky after a big Saturday night did not blur the picture for me
on first meeting. It is Standard Operating Procedure, if not de figueur,
for advertising men, newspaper, radio, TV and other communications
people to have a hang-over on Sunday morning. Or at least to affect
a reasonable facsimile of one. His conversational manner had just th&
48 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
right blend of New Yorker sophistication and upper-class bohemianism,
the Madison Avenue exurbanite gone slumming among the disaffiliates.
Only a shaving scratch left by a shaky morning-after hand marred the
good grooming of his face and hair. The rest was all gray flannel, only
slightly rumpled, complete with slightly off-beat tie and casual but
expensive shoes.
Today Chuck Bennison is bearded and barefoot; he has shaken oft
John Barleycorn and taken on Mary Juana and burned all liis gray
flannel britches behind him. He still puts more body English into his
jazz-listening than the cool cats approve of, but he is learning. He is
searching for the Self and finding God. Til never forget the time Dan
Davies came to my pad and wrote on the mirror: This is the face of
God you see."
With this sense of holiness goes, of course, a feeling of separateness,
It is not the folie & deux of embattled lovers; it is not the one against
the world attitude of the solitary hermit; it is we against they. We
against the Others. No attempt is made to define we or they. No defini
tion is necessary. We is what this generation is all about, whether you
call it beat or disafBliated or anything else. We is what its books arc
about, the name of all the characters in those books and what those
characters do and say. Everything that happens to them happens to us.
"They are the Others, the Squares. They don't dig jazz. . . , They're
not with it. ... They're putting on the heat again. . . . They killed the
story because it might lose them an advertiser. . . . They rejected my
book because it was controversial."
Looking back on his past as business executive and advertising copy
writer, Chuck Bennison says: "It all looked so logical at first, slipping
into place from campus to copy desk, from EC 3 or Business Ad to
junior exec, or from Psych 4 to Personnel like stepping from military
academy into West Point. Or from Eton and Oxford into the diplo
matic service - playing fields of Eton and all that sort of rot. And
believe me, I fitted in. That's my curse. I fitted in to everything, Noth
ing is so frustrating as to discover that you can do better than other
people at the things you have the most contempt for. And look the
part. When all the time I hated everything I was doing and everybody
connected with it. It was always a tossup whether I would one day
split a gut laughing or blow a gasket from sheer anger and frustration.
BIOGRAPHY OF THREE BEATS 49
One day everything would look silly to me, like grownups playing at
kid games, and the next day I hated myself and felt like a heel writing
the stuff lies . . . not just harmless lies, like this soap will make you
beautiful or this hair oil will make you a Gregory Peck . . . but straight
out-and-out lies that well, you'd wonder that anybody could believe
stuff like that . . . and yet the damn stuff sold merchandise. So that I
never knew whom I had the most contempt for, myself for writing it
or the people who believed it. Maybe that's one reason IVe never been
interested in politics I've only voted once in my life and that was just
to please my mother somebody she knew was running for the school
board or something I figured if people, grown-up people, could be
lieve the stuff I was dishing up to them in the ads I was writing, what
sense did it make to let them vote on things they probably didn't have
the slightest knowledge about not that they ever really get a chance
to vote on anything that really matters, and maybe it's just as well."
This nonvoting attitude is not to be confused with the self-disenfran-
chisement of the large part of America's eligible voting population that
regularly fails to go to the polls. Chuck's attitude is more like a No
Confidence vote. He is contemptuous of all politicians, and his feel
ing about the people who go to die polls to express a preference be
tween one man or one party and another is a mixture of pity and con
tempt. Like everything else about Chuck Bennison, his political and
social attitudes are in flux, constantly changing and shifting, far from
fixed.
Political solutions? "What are they but election tactics, lies, decep
tions, trickery, mass manipulation? All parties use the same tricks, so
what choice is there between them?" Democracy? "It's just a big shuck,
the biggest shuck of all. The only equality there can be is equality
between equals," which calls to mind the cynical remark, "All men are
equal, but some are more equal than others/' Economic exploitation?
"What holds the exploited to the exploiters? The same thing that holds
the whore to the pimp. It isn't parasitism so much as it is a symbiotic
relationship. They need each other, in the strongest way that anybody
can need anybody in this world neurotically. It's a sick relationship,
sure, but there aren't any political solutions for it, any more than laws
and prisons can cure prostitution." Revolution?' "What revolves in
revolutions is the dramatis personae of the play; the roles remain the
50 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
same and the relationships remain the same. Sometimes the names for
things change, but the things remain the same. The prisoner believes
in his bars,"
Hung between alternatives precariously hung, and in a perpetual
state of imbalance Chuck Bennison sometimes tries to make a virtue
of indecision, a philosophy of polar opposites. Often this takes the
form of wry, cynical humor. "Creditors? It's good to have creditors.
You can always be sure someone will miss you when you're gone. . , .
I think only good people go to hell. It's their x*eward for being good.
Just as bad people always go to heaven. It's their punishment for being
bad. The official truth is always a lie. That's why I'm always on the
side of the underdogma."
One thing, however, remains constant with Chuck Bennison: Hell
is other people. In Chuck's case this includes a mother who clings to him,
resentful of the intrusion of all other women in his life; his first wife
who gave him love, loyalty, community status and a gracious domes
ticity that enveloped him in an atmosphere of success and well-being,
and stifled his every impulse to artistic creativity; a second wife who
promised greater understanding of his needs, encouraged creativity
in his spare time filled the house with upper-class bohemians, drank
with him, promoted his business career, and ended up by filling his
life so completely that there was no escape except desperate flight. "It
got so I was never done! To write anything of value a man has to be
alone with himself once in a while."
Always Other People, including bosses who praised and promoted
him and office associates who partied and plotted with him for bus
iness advantages everybody always paying him the embarrassing
compliment of mistaking him for somebody he was not and never
wanted to be. Till he found himself one day, quite by accident, in
Venice West, shacked up with a girl in a store-front pad and pound
ing away on a typewriter set up on a packing case, The beard, he will
tell you, just grew naturally out of not shaving for a few weeks. "Just
too busy balling and writing." Pressed on the subject or is it that
time has given him perspective? he will tell you that the beard is
really significant: "It's my letter of resignation from the rat race/' What
he means is, it has made him unemployable in a world he has left
behind and is determined never to return to.
BIOGRAPHY OF THREE BEATS 51
Dead End Quiz Kid
Some, perhaps, have nothing to go back to. The pad of beat genera
tion living offers them the only congenial environment they have ever
found anywhere. They have never known the hazards of Success.
Chris Nelson is one of these.
"I quit school in the ,eighth grade. I went straight from eighth grade
into reform school."
That is how Chris Nelson begins the story of his education. How did
he happen to graduate to reform school? "My mother was one of those
progressive types, progressive education and all that. She sent me to
the summer school for kids that the University of Chicago was running.
I used to sleep in the same bed with her when I was thirteen, fourteen
years old. I got to the point where I was irritated by it and, well, I beat
her up. Started slapping her around and she called the cops, and the
cops put me away and she signed me away for reform school. I was
there nine months. That was the one fight we had, and ever since then
I've never been too friendly with her. I was aware that she was promis
cuous, but not with women, just with men. She left my father when I
was a couple of years old, I guess. According to his story she was
unfaithful to him. You hear a story like that and you got to believe
something. He's a real weak monster, my father. He could lie easily.
Later I found out my mother was homosexual/'
The rest of Chris's education is a story of public libraries, bookstore
browsing and people.
"In Chicago I was going to the Blackstone Avenue branch of the
public library all the time. I'd go in like, I wanted to read all the
books, starting with A, you know, and just go straight through. But I
gave that up after a while. Decided it might take too long. I read all
of Herbert Best, all of Ernest Thomson Seaton. What happened was,
all these authors were always referring to all these other authors and
so it blossomed out, so I'd read other guys. And now I can't stand
those kid books. And that's what started me off and I got interested in
drawing and I went to the Art Institute of Chicago and that started me
off on drawing really seriously. I went there about a year. I went to
the downtown library a lot, too. I'd take the El and go down and spend
the day. I'll tell you how tremendous the influence of the library was.
52 THE HOLY BABBAKIANS
I read Leatherstocking Tales, by Cooper? and I thought I was going
to become the forest primeval all by myself. I set pins, in the bowling
alleys, you know? and I made enough loot to get up to Ely, Minnesota
Ely being the last town on the border between Minnesota and
Canada and I stole a canoe and took off for Canada. About three
weeks later they found me, black fly marks all over me and in the last
stages of starvation. They nursed me back to health and sent me back
to Chicago and that's when I started slapping my mother around.
After I got out of reform school I took off for Denver and spent a year
there and then I joined the Army, thinking I could get the GI bill. In
Denver I went to the Skid Row there and got me a bed for fifty cents
a night. I set pins there, too. The cop who arrested me was an ordinary
cop who was taking courses at Colorado State University in criminal
psychology or something. He asked me if I was living with a fag or
anything, or was I a dope addict. I was real sensitive at fifteen or six
teen because I knew this guy was trying to figure me out as a case
history, since I'd read some of the books he had. He advised me to go
in the Army because I could get the GI bill, and the advice was very
good. I joined on my sixteenth birthday. That was in 1946."
At fifteen or sixteen Chris Nelson had read some of the books that an
adult student of criminology reads an indication of the type of
education this Dead End quiz kid was getting. Spotty, precocious,
advanced in some subjects, weak in the most elementary ones; this is
the chaotic sort of self-education frequently found among bohemians
and rootless hoboes in the jungles of on-the-go America, and among
beat generation youngsters who can discuss the most erudite sub
jects knowingly in the language of juvenile delinquents.
Of his service record, Chris says: "I never did get to see any action.
I went down to Kentucky for Basic and then I was shipped to Japan
for Occupation. Oh, as soon as I saw that Tokyol I went AWOL for a
month. They didn't get me at all. When I got back they sent me out
like they was going to punish me. They sent me to Saipan, which was
even more of a ball. . . . But that Tokyo! It was so absolutely foreign
I couldn't put my finger on any response at all, I couldn't figure it
out. It just intrigued me, everything about it. Everything exotic about
it appealed to me, like a prostitute giving me a flower. I had all these
flower allusions from books I've read. You should have seen this pros
titute. She was going with this spade cat I knew, this Negro, I was
BIOGRAPHY OF THREE BEATS 53
cutting in on him, in a way, but that was all right. Both of us had a
very weak sense of possessionship. He didn't mind it very much. She
gave me a flower when I was leaving. You wouldn't expect a thing
like that to happen in the States a prostitute giving you a flower.
Like when I was down in Little Rock. I was trying to find nude models.
So I thought the best thing to do was to make all the hustlers down
in North Little Rock. I went down there and I sounded out about a
dozen of them and all of them were indignant. One of them sent her
boy friend out to have me busted. I almost had it, too, like this guy
was big and I was little and far away from home. But you know how
I got a model? I went to the wealthiest girl in town and got her. The
biggest specialist in Arkansas, his own chick. She not only said,
'Oh, can I model?' but she offered other suggestions, too. Like sex, well,
you know, she like to intimated so. But at the time I was going with
my wife. I learned a very important thing. When you want to try
something experimental, different, and shocking, do not go to a poor
girl, because she won't stand for any nonsense. Go to a wealthy girl
because she's so secure that she wants something that'll jar her up,
you know. And she'll try the most fantastic things. Just think of what
you can do!"
Chris Nelson was filled with awe over the possibilities, but he didn't
explore or take advantage of them as others have. He married the girl
he was going with, is still married to her, and they have three children,
but he is still as beat as he ever was, despite family life and a regular
job at a defense plant. His position in the Venice West community is
ambiguous but secure on the whole. He throws parties at his house
which comes as close to being a pad as family life with children will
permit and he makes the marijuana scene on week ends. He might
show up at work a little woozy on Monday mornings and miss a day
occasionally, but he manages to hold onto his job.
A rich girl with a yen for "the life" is the fond dream of many a
beatnik in San Francisco's North Beach or New York's Greenwich Vil
lage, but in Venice West the dedicated poverty of the artist is very
serious. Not that some in Venice West wouldn't welcome such a wind
fall on their own terms, of course but they are pretty sure, I think,
that there is no Poor Little Rich Girl in their future. Rich girls come
to listen, and some stay for a while, but none to my knowledge has
adopted "the life," or made any permanent union within it, legal or
54 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
illicit. But that it has a kind of fascination for them there is no doubt
at all. Chris has an explanation for it.
"It's because of their security. Everyone has to outlive their environ
ment. The way to outgrow it is to do the opposite of what you always
have. Secure people want to shake themselves up. Like a lot of people
who have rigid personalities often do dangerous tilings."
Evidently it doesn't work the other way round, however. I reminded
him about this that the opposite of his own upbringing and environ
ment would be to marry a rich girl and settle down on a big estate, or
make a fortune himself and settle down as a solid citizen. His answer:
"I'm not that careful a thinker, I guess. You gotta think for these
things. I don't plan much. I'm sort of a friendly opportunist/'
The question of poverty and wealth came up often in interviews.
Most often it was confined to speculations on the best way to make out
with a minimum of income, rather than with dreams of personal finan
cial success or marrying wealth. The ideal aim is a viable, voluntary,
independent poverty, preferably with a marriage or shack-up partner
who is willing to work for a living, at least part time. Chris Nelson,
who holds a full-time job and supports his wife and children and does
his poetry writing and painting evenings and week ends, is the excep
tion. Usually it is a working sweetheart or wife who is the chief pro
vider, Where both write or paint, it is the wife who is the Sunday
painter or writer. Separations when they occur are not due as a rule to
dissatisfaction with this financial arrangement but to other causes.
Dedicated poverty is taken for granted, so much so that it is seldom a
subject for discussion. What is frequently discussed are ways of "mak
ing it." Tricks of the trade, you might say the "trade" of getting by
with as little commercial work as possible, or, ideally, with no com
mercial work at all. Very few have learned to make an art of poverty,
Or to reason out its advantages. Kenneth Rexroth, the poet, is the
exception. He remarked to me when I was visiting with him in San
Francisco:
"Once you reject the lures of society you discover that living in
poverty you live much better than other people, I have friends who
are advertising men and publishers and what not on Madison Avenue
and I eat better than they do and drink better than they do and live
in a better house, and my car is just as efficient, and costs a great deal
less to fix and I fix it myself. I live, essentially, a richer life than any-
BIOGRAPHY OF THREE BEATS 55
body I know who is actually rich and I am, in income, the poorest
person I know. I don't know anybody that makes as little money as my
wife and I make and have two children. And yet, I go better places
and see and do better things, I read better books. All they know to do
with their money is what they're told, and so they buy commodities
which are all made of soy beans and read books which are all made
of soy beans and go to plays which are all made of soy beans.
"The whole morality of poverty has been exhaustively analyzed by
Christian theologians, Catholic theologians, that is hardly by Protes
tantsand especially since the Franciscans. Poverty, of course, is
obedience to the Commandments which forbid covetousness. Now it
so happens that the patrons of the Third Order of St. Francis, which
is the Order that lives in the world and marries, etc., are St. Elizabeth
of Hungary and St. Louis of France who were respectively queen and
king, so that the circumstances of one's own personal wealth, into
which one happens to be born or thrust, are of little importance. I
mean, the thing that is important is the detachment from one's own
possessions and the lack of covetousness of the possessions of others.
This is something that nowadays people simply don't understand at all.
When you tell people that wealth or riches are an evil in themselves
and that a rich man is ipso -facto a bad man, they look at you as though
you were crazy. And my wife once said that the universal sin of modern
society is covetousness and it is so universal and pervasive that when
modern people read the word covet in the Ten Commandments they're
under the impression that it is some kind of ritual sin of the ancient
Jews, like eating trafe. They don't even know what it is. A person must
be completely detached from all the lures of society, so that it doesn't
make a damn bit of difference to him whether he has a Cadillac or not.
By and large the lures of society are unsatisfactory. There is no reason
except empty prestige why you should drive two hundred and fifty
horses to work."
Analysis like this would never occur to Chris Nelson or his wife.
They drive a beat-up jalopy of uncertain age that looks as if they
picked it up in one of those dumps where people illegally abandon
junky old cars. Like Rexroth, Chris fixed up the car and keeps it in
repair himself. Lately he has acquired an old motorcycle. So tenuous
or atrophied? is his sense of possessionship, to use his own word
for it, that when the cycle he pronounces it to rhyme with chickle in
56 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
the manner of most motorcycle addicts was stolen he simply neglected
to report the theft to the police, and it was only by the rarest of ac
cidents that it found its way back to him a few weeks later by a route
that I have not been able to disentangle from his account of the matter.
He told me about getting it back in the same smiling, detached way
with which he had announced its loss. As for his car, I have known
him to forget where he parked it and hitch a ride home with somebody
and simply do without it till a friend found it and told him where he
could pick it up. This is certainly a measure a full measure of the
sort of detachment Rexroth was talking about, but it would never
occur to Chris Nelson to analyze it or even to regard it as anything
different or special.
Chris evidently took his army experience with the same blend of
innocent nai*vet6 and matter-of-factness.
"It was the first time I saw primitive people. A couple of weeks after
I got to Saipan I went out in the boondocks and met some natives and
they invited me home and I became very friendly with them. The
natives were selling liquor fermented coconut milk to the soldiers.
I don't know if it was all right or not for soldiers to visit natives in
their homes, but I spent most of my time out of camp. I made roll call,
though. I'd go out by myself or with a couple of flip artists. Filipinos,
you know. A couple of them were artists. Almost all of them were high
school graduates. The Army took the educated ones and put them in
uniforms. They were a crack troop. I figured when they sent those
guys back to the Philippines they were going to make doggone good
Hukbalahaps. I knew when they got back they were going to have
discipline; they were going to take orders and give orders. The Army
made a few mistakes and this was one of them. They educated them
a little too much," and he laughed. Chris has the only laugh in Venice
West that is completely devoid of cynicism or bitterness. It is unin
hibited, clear, almost ticklish. The laughter of a child.
Chris Nelson's story of army service is not the story of the Sad
Sack. He got all the breaks that usually go only to the cagey ones who
know how to play the old army game and the canny ones who know
how to stay out of trouble. Yet he is neither cagey nor canny. He is the
Innocent, in the classical meaning of the term, the wide-eyed simple
one whom nobody tries to con for anything because he doesn't look as
if he had anything, and whom nobody tries to draw into any deals
BIOGRAPHY OF THREE BEATS 57
because he gives the impression of being entirely without guile. It
appears that he escaped punishment and disciplining by his officers
for things that would have meant the guardhouse, even court-martial,
for anybody else. He got the breaks that usually go to children and
fools. Yet Chris is far from being either a child or a fool. Here is his
account of what he did with his GI bill.
"I went to the New School for Social Research in New York and used
my GI bill up. About a year there, and that was a ball. When Rudolph
Anaheim gave a lecture there was sometimes fist fights and after the
bell rang people would stand around and argue with each other instead
of going to the next class. He lectured on art, esthetics. He was very
exciting. In fact, those fist fights were about art principles. Not many,
but enough to stick in my mind that that class was pretty exciting.
There was one class I used to sneak into where these sociologists or
something used to get some guys from Greenwich Village, old Italians
who could play the goatskin bagpipe and another guy with the flute or
something and one guy with the drum . . . anyway, they wouldn't play
because nobody had any wine. So they sent a guy out to get wine, and
all these guys with white shirts and ties and chicks with their expensive
clothes and modern earrings . . . they all had to drink a white Dixie
cup full of wine, and they were making faces and all. And then they'd
play. That was the whole atmosphere of the New School. The music
was repetitive, not exciting. I liked the atmosphere, it was tremendous.
Bob Gwathney was an art teacher there, Dowinsky was teaching psy
chology . . . and Feran in music. It was a living ball. There was Arn-
heim, he was teaching GestaJt psychology. He set me onto the psy
chology of perception, like little boxes and squares and each thing
having a balance. Gestaltists don't believe that these things operate in
space. That's an artist's idea. The idea, a two-dimensional idea, that
two things can balance and still have a violent opposition, was excit
ing to me. When I went on to Hoffman it came in pretty good. It like
opened up new things. While I was going to the New School I was
also going to the Art Students League.
"This art interest of mine, it really got going in the Army. Those
Philippine flips were sign painters for the Army and on the side they
were doing these paintings with, you know, sign-painting paints, and
I started doing that, too. Earlier, when I was a kid I was doing char
coal drawings only ... of models. These flips were always drawing
58 THE HOLY BABBAKJANS
their home town, see? coconut trees and everything like that. I
started doing that too, I copied their work. That was when I was in
Saipan. When I was in Tokyo I had copies of the woodcuts of fifty
views of Mount Fuji, and a very good copy of 'The Courtier/ by I
forget who. But it wasn't till I got to the New School that I found out
what a ball art could be."
From art, psychology and the New School for Social Research to
the studios and cafes of Greenwich Village was only a step, and Chris
Nelson took it in stride. Greenwich Village in the late forties.
"One thing about the Village, it had a tremendous tradition, and
that was the first thing that hit you. There were people who knew the
tradition and they were the important people. They hung around in
groups and coteries. People made up hipster jokes about them. People
playing recorders, playing Baroque music, playing Bach and Vivaldi.
There was a folk music group, mostly Stalinists. There was the Tree
of Life that was by the Circle at Washington Square where all the
junkies hung out and all the hustlers. And the Waldorf Cafeteria was
the Paris sidewalk restaurant thing of the time. And all the old
anarchists . . . there was an anarchist hall on Broadway. There was
the Spanish anarchists, there was the Catholic anarchists who had a
soup kitchen down near the Bowery on Christy Street. Like I made
that Bowery scene just before I flipped. I flipped four or five times, I
don't remember how many times. The Bowery was the only place in
town where you could go any time of the day or night and get a piece
of bread and some soup. A lot of young people were there. The anar
chist group was the most powerful group at that time. It was the intel
lectual force of the Village and it fell apart suddenly. A lot of people
went into dianetics and Reichian things.
"Once by mistake I went to that anarchist hall too early, before the
party started, and I saw those old people left over from the Spanish
Civil War, an old lady and a whole mess of old men and I had a girl
with me and one guy gets up and snaps out, 'What do you want?'
and this old lady gets up and says, 'Don't frighten these young people
away. Why do you always have to frighten them away?' It was sur
prising to actually see someone who fought there in Spain. I met a
couple of guys in the Village who made the Spanish War. They were
waiters. One was del Rio, he had a steel plate in his skull and told
stories about the Catalonian fighting and stuff. The Village has actually
BIOGRAPHY OF THREE BEATS 59
moved east. Even when I was there. The Village is too expensive.
Toward the East Side there's a lot of people who live in poverty and
won t ever get out of it. That's more like the right kind of an atmos
phere, I think."
A neighborhood where the poor live, the poor who are resigned to
their poverty, the best environment in which to live "the life." This is
a cardinal principle which the beat share with the bohemians of the
past. Among the beat generation young the problem of making a
living is personal; each meets it in his own way, but among the older
bohemians of Greenwich Village in the late forties, at least among the
anarchists, some attempt seems to have been made to organize it along
co-operative lines. Chris tells about it.
"There was a place called Co-operative Messenger Service up in
Chelsea and a bunch of wild men ran it. They didn't make very much
money but they undersold the commercial messenger services. They
had a printing press up there and they printed poems and stuff. There
was a guy, Dick McCoy, who was very important back there. He was a
constant writer, like Tuli Kupferberg was a constant writer. Dick, for
instance, could show you a poem 'Sonnet No. 317.' Dick and a friend
hitchhiked down to Washington once to see Ezra Pound. When they
came back they had been busted somewhere in Jersey. I understand
that Pound wouldn't see anybody except some Fascist anti-Semite and
Negro baiter. Dick was making it with Teena Robinson, a very beau
tiful Village girl. Teena was that chick who started the boy-style
modeling. She was built like a boy, a very beautiful boy thing. This
was in the forties it's died out now, now everything is big tits. Teena
was the first of the boy-girl group. This Teena, she was a weird chick.
She'd sit for hours by the window and she'd say, like 1 just saw my
Death walk by' and sit for hours like that looking out at people, and
she wasn't high at the time either. Teena had the most beautiful body
I've ever seen on anybody. There was one girl who had a prettier
face, very active in the anarchist group. She had an ugly body but
what a face! My girl was a model, too. I met her at the New School.
Lived with her for four years. Modeling was a good way to make a
living, for males, too. I modeled a little myself. A photographer would
pay fifteen bucks an hour, an artist three. If it was a friend, an artist
friend, we'd model for each other free."
Chris Nelson is not an actively productive poet and he paints very
60 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
rarely, though he draws, sketching on a tablet with pencil or charcoal
frequently at parties. He has notebooks filled with such sketches, con
stituting practically a pictorial history of beat generation people and
places. Such notebooks are characteristic among the beat, notebooks
filled with poetry and prose as well as drawings. The notebooks go
with them everywhere and always, even when furniture, clothing and
even books and records are left behind or sacrificed at sale to friends
or dealers for the price of gas or bus fare to the next port of call; they
are the most cherished personal possessions.
When the beat make the westward trek, it is usually the last port of
call. Very few go back to the Middle West or the east coast except for
brief visits. Asked if he thinks he will ever go back east, Chris Nelson
replied, "What's there to go back to?" For most of them, as for Chris,
there is nothing to go back to, no memories of former financial or
social successes. To paraphrase Billy Graham's well-known slogan, they
made the decision for the Muse long ago. Some of them would not
even think it necessary to paraphrase it. For them it is a decision for
God, but in a way that Billy Graham, judging from his pronouncements
on the beat generation, finds sinful and un-Christian. Their disaflBlia-
tion is a rejection of the values of all organized religions. It is anti
clerical. Even when they embrace Catholicism, as a few of them have
done, it is a Catholicism that no church council has ever proclaimed
as dogma or belief, a Catholicism that would shock their confessors
if they ever discussed it with them, which they never do. It is a rejec
tion of the moral and social values of even the most liberal and radical.
The Venice West people sometimes define it as "the revolution under
the ribs."
Second-Generation Radical
Chris Nelson is a second-generation, progressive school product.
Tanya Bromberger is a second-generation radical. So much of the
literature of radicalism in the United States is still written by and about
men and women born around the turn of the century that one is apt
to forget that their offspring have now come of age and are living their
own lives. Tanya was born in 1929, the year of the great stock market
crash, and brought up in a Communist household during the Depres
sion years. Her story is significant for comparison and contrast, throw-
BIOGRAPHY OF THBEE BEATS 61
ing into sharp focus the difference between the Marxist thirties and the
new alienation of the fifties.
Tanya's first sixteen years were spent in Chicago. Her parents were
Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. There were two other chil
dren, both boys. Her father, a secondhand furniture dealer, was self-
educated, but very well read, and the house was full of books. "I
attribute all my interest in books to that/' Tanya says. "He had hun
dreds of books. As a younger man he had been politically active, read
Jack London, knew a lot of the 'muckraker' writers, like Upton Sinclair
and Lincoln Steffens, some of them personally. He got my mother into
the Movement. Then, while I was growing up, he retrogressed com
pletely to a bourgeois businessman. When I was thirteen I joined the
YCL, the Communist youth group. He tried to bully me into quitting
it. That was the first breach between us."
The intensity with which radical parents strive to indoctrinate their
children can be compared only to the "home training" of orthodox
religious faiths. When, as in Tanya's case, the parent loses his faith,
he tries to reverse the process. When he finds that he has done his work
too well, his wrath is just as great, if not greater, that the wrath of
the parent who remains true to the faith and finds his children straying
from it.
By 1945, when Tanya was sixteen, the "united front" honeymoon of
the New Deal and the radical Left was over, Winston Churchill's "Iron
Curtain" speech at Fulton, Missouri, was only a year away and the
rumblings of the Cold War were already being heard by those with an
ear for political thunder. It was the year when Franklin Delano Roose
velt died and the long wake began, a wake that for many Left Wing
and liberal New Dealers is not over even now. They have reluctantly
left the graveside and given up hope of a Rising, but their faith in a
Second Coming remains unshaken. Tanya's father was not one of these.
By 1945 he had already joined the ranks of the "tired radicals." Accord
ing to Tanya, "he had not only lost faith in radical political solutions,
he had lost faith in his fellow man. He felt that the way to a better
society had been put before the people and they had refused to accept
it. They were unworthy of his efforts, his sacrifices. People were only
getting what they deserved. They hadn't listened to him and now they
deserved whatever they got."
Political attitudes, however, are easier to change than social con-
62 THE HOLY BAKBARIANS
nections. If Tanya joined the Young Communist League her reasons
for doing so were probably as much from the pressure of propinquity
as the results of parental indoctrination. The Young Communists were
probably the only young people she knew well enough to feel at home
with. Now her father objected to her joining the one circle where she
had any sense of belonging. "He was horrible about it," Tanya says,
but he had no objection to her marrying a young man whose family
"were ver y active Communist people." He himself had made no new
friends outside Communist circles, despite his defection from the par
ty, preferring to stay and argue interminably with his former comrades,
as so many ex-Communists do, rather than exile himself among the
heathen. Ex-Communists are rarely ex-Marxists; they are people who
have simply lost faith in party strategy or tactics and moved to the
Left rather than to the Right of party policy. As Tanya says, her father
felt no one had listened to his wise counsel and he had withdrawn to
his tent in a sulk. But he had not withdrawn from the argument nor
from his circle of Communist friends and acquaintances. Where else
could he hope to find people who even understood what he was sulk
ing about?
Tanya met Ben at a YCL meeting. "He was just a nebichle? a Yid
dish word for any pathetically ineffectual person, a "poor thing." "Ben
was not an active Communist like the others in his family. He was
lacking in any definite personality. He was good natured, but he was
not an activist or an enthusiast about anything, a very lukewarm sort
of a guy. At the time I married him I felt I was his intellectual superior
and this intensified over the next two or three years and eventually I
had nothing to say to the man. He never read a book in all the time I
knew him, he worked as a mechanic which I have no snobbery
against people who work with their hands, you understand but it
was more in our recreation, the fact that we couldn't enjoy anything
together. We quarreled mostly over my friends, my so-called bohemian
associates. It threatened our marriage."
This was Tanya's first reference to bohemian associates. What she
probably meant was the bohemian fringe of the Communist movement,
not the beat generation young people she knows today.
"He felt that their way of life was so unconventional that it threat
ened our relationship and he tried to forbid me from seeing them,
which was just a repetition of the family pattern, another father
BIOGRAPHY OF THREE BEATS 63
authority. My marriage to him had been just a device to free myself
from parental authority! In fact, I would have preferred to just go off
and live with him some place, but I was sixteen and my parents would
have sent the police after me and brought me home if I attempted
anything like that. Besides, I was too unsure of myself and my rebel
lion against them at that time. I wanted to have sexual relations with
Ben before our marriage and he was the one who refused, saying that,
well, you know, we should have something to look forward to when
we got married. He was ten years older than me, about twenty-six, and
had been through four harrowing years in the war. I was sorry for him;
he was the first fellow I ever went out with and I talked him into get
ting married because I wanted to get out of the house. I think even
then I realized that I was probably just selling myself into another
kind of bondage. In fact, I wasn't too enthusiastic about the marriage
myself. I broke the relationship off shortly before we got married and
it was only at my family's urgings that I finally agreed to the marriage.
Anyway, we got married and moved to New York. My family was
glad to get rid of me. I was not only a psychological and a political prob
lem to them, I was an economic problem. They were foreign born,
trying to make something out of a little business, and what little money
they had they wanted to use for educating their two sons rather than
me. Of course I'd been supporting myself since I was thirteen. My
father got me my first job in a factory. I got fired for talking too
much. It was piece work and they wanted quiet, and you know how I
like to talk. After that I worked in groceries and supermarkets, as a
cashier. So I was really self-supporting, but just the same I felt they
were glad to get me out of the house. My father got a certain amount
of compliance from the boys, but I was a rebellious child, and it be
came a battle of wits between him and me."
The boys, it seems, were given greater freedom than Tanya was.
Freedom is a word that comes easily to the lips of anyone who has
grown up in a radical household. In Tanya's case it meant sexual free
dom. "It was a kind of double standard," Tanya says. "The boys could
stay out later at night and do all sorts of things I couldn't do. As far as
sex was concerned, my father began to look at me suspiciously when I
was twelve years old. I admit that the intent was there, but I wasn't
able to do anything about it. Anyway, the idea originated with him,
not with me. He was unfaithful to my mother and I think maybe he
64 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
saw in me a great many of his own personality traits, so he was sus
picious of me and we clashed, as far back as I can remember. He told
me the whole blame for misconduct in sex always is on the woman -
it's always her fault and that no man ever marries any woman he has
possessed." She laughed. "I think that was his way with women, so he
generalized it into a law of nature. My mother never talked to me
about sex. I'm sure she was faithful to my father. But he talked to me
about sex many times, and not very delicately, if you know what I
mean. He's actually a foulmouthed man. You see, he had lost faith not
only in men but in women. He felt women were usurping man's place
in life, taking over men's jobs, that they were more reactionary, more
complacent, more easily exploited by the bosses. He said that since
women had gotten the vote things had deteriorated more rapidly. He
also had violent race prejudices. I haven't spoken to him in five or
six years."
Such strong antipathies between parents and children often have
sexual undertones. Tanya admits that she has had incestuous dreams
and fantasies about her father. "When I was a child he used to fondle
me a lot and sometimes he would bite my arms till they bled and my
mother would get mad and snatch me away from him. I don't think
she understood what was going on. I don't think he knew either. He'd
heard of Freud but he'd never read him. Maybe he thought it was
just fatherly love, He used to beat me up a lot, too, for my own good,
of course, but looking back on it I suspect he got more pleasure out
of it than he let on."
An incident that occurred three years after her marriage, when she
tried to leave Ben, throws light on this aspect of the father-daughter
relationship.
"Ben went straight to my family and told them I was going to leave
him. They sent my big brother to bring me over to the house and my
father took me outside to the car to talk to me alone and proceeded to
beat me up ... and he became hysterical and started to cry, telling me
he was having an extramarital affair and that the woman was an intel
ligent, passionate woman and that my mother was a nothing and
devoid of sexual feeling and that if I would cast off my restraints and
leave my husband he was going to do the same and leave my mother.
I think he had some idea I might go and live with them him and
the other woman, or something. He went on about how he had sacri-
BIOGRAPHY OF THREE BEATS 65
ficed his life for his three children, that he always wanted to be a
writer and he'd given up his ambitions to work for three kids and a
wife. I said, 'Well I don't have any children and all I want is to be free
from Ben and go my own way.* My mother had a very serious heart
condition at the time. If I left Ben my father might leave my mother
and I was afraid that might kill her. I was sure that if he left my mother
for another woman she would die, and I believed he really meant to
do it. It was a kind of blackmail. So I went back with my husband,
telling him on the way home that it was just coercion that made me do
it, saying, If I ever despised you I despise you all the more now/ And
so I stayed with him two more months and I kept thinking about it and
I realized I was only nineteen years old and it was now or never,
and that I was going to try and find myself some happiness. That's
how I came to feel. So I just took off and left. I left two automobiles
and a houseful of furniture and everything else. I packed a bag and
got a bus to California."
She was never unfaithful to Ben, Tanya says, but sexually the mar
riage was unsuccessful from the start. "We were very incompatible
sexually. I think that the last year and a half we lived together we
didn't have any sexual relations at all." Looking back on it she thinks
her faithfulness to Ben was more from fear, inexperience or just plain
lack of opportunity than any sense of virtue. "What a person is will
show itself in their sexual behavior," and Ben was a "poor thing" in
this as in everything else.
Litigation over money or property rights played no part in Tanya's
divorce. From her point of view, the less the state, police or the courts
are brought into things, the better. Everything in the house had been
bought with their joint earnings, yet she made no claim to any of it.
"I didn't want anything of his," she explains. "I wanted to be very
ethical about it and just take what was mine and go, so that he could
never say I had taken anything that wasn't mine. I left and my dad
never left my mother. Now he claims it was a joke." Since she had no
money of her own, she borrowed money from a friend, "a political
friend," to make the cross-country trip.
About money, Tanya says, "I've never even gone out with anybody
that had money in my whole life. I guess I just don't like in men what
brings success in this society, financial success. I've always had an
antipathy toward financially successful men. I think the reason is that
66 THE HOLY BABBARIANS
I smell a certain conformity in them that I can't stomach. They're so
full of cliches and platitudes. They may not even know they're mouth
ing platitudes, or they may know better but they're afraid, because to
act upon what they know would make them poor and outcast; so they
say, well, you know, it's too bad, but we have to go along with things
as they are/'
Personality, good looks, social graces - it is not, Tanya insists, that
she is unaffected by such attractions, but that all of them are out
weighed by the factor of conformism. A Leftist is more acceptable
than a Rightist, even when all other things are against him. Neverthe
less, nonconformism by itself is not enough. "There are a lot of non
conformists that I don't feel drawn to sexually."
Music, particularly jazz music, plays a large role in her emotional
response to men.
Td say that through the years it has come to this, that if I really
like a person and they are uneducated in jazz I usually attempt to turn
them on to it, as the expression goes. So much of my own recreation
comes from music that if they are going to spend much time with me
it's a necessity. I have friends who are not interested in jazz, but I
don't see much of them."
The circle of jazz music tends to become a closed circle. Note that
Tanya speaks of "turning on" people to jazz. This term, used by mari
juana and heroin addicts, seems to Tanya quite appropriate when ap
plied to jazz, as if jazz, too, were a kind of drug addiction. In many cases
the jazz and drug circles intersect. This was so in Tanya's experience.
In her case, too, there was the added factor of still another closed
circle, the circle of Negro and white intermarriage. It was Richard
who turned her on to marijuana as well as jazz. Richard was every
thing that Ben was not. Richard was strong, handsome, well versed in
books and jazz music, and sexually exciting.
"Richard is not the first Negro fellow I went with. I had Negro
friends in Chicago. I had dated Negro fellows but I had never gone
to bed with them or any other man except Ben till I came out
here. I didn't feel free back there I think it was the distance, really,
that made the difference, two thousand miles or so from home. It gave
me a feeling of really breaking home ties for the first time, a feeling
of release from the family.
"I came to Venice to stay with a cousin who was living here and
BIOGRAPHY OF THREE BEATS 67
going to UCLA. I started going out places with her and meeting
people, and began going with a Negro fellow who was completely non-
political and nonconformist in his own way. He rode a motorcycle and
I was riding with him on this motorcycle and wearing boots and Levi's
and entering into a life I had known nothing about and which held
some kind of a fascination for me. It was very thrilling the speed,
the feeling of independence it gives you. There is a feeling of detach
ment from the whole environment when you get on a motorcycle, when
you go fast, and also because these people were outlaws to a certain
extent and they were always having trouble with the police. Well,
anyway, I had been close friends with a friend of his who was married
to a white girl who was living in the same apartment building I was
living in. They were split up and this Negro guy became good friends
with me, trying to get me to approach his wife for him, to effect a
reconciliation. And that's how I met Richard; he was a friend of
Richard's. He told me a little about Richard, all uncomplimentary.
And then I met Richard at this beach party of the IPP (the Independ
ent Progressive party, headed by Henry Wallace). I didn't see him
again for a while till I ran into him in a junk shop one day. He was
looking around for secondhand books, we both were, and I bought him
some coffee and we got to talking. It wasn't books, though, that
brought us together at first. It was politics. We got into a political
argument the first day we met because I was at that time what you'd
call a Left Wing deviationist, and he had been expelled from the party
shortly before we met. I think it was on account of marijuana. They
told him they could not afford at this time to be linked in any way with
vice or narcotics. That he was jeopardizing the party, and he agreed
with them and accepted his expulsion.
"He was still a rigid party liner when I met him and he kept looking
for a label he could pin on me. He called me a Menshevik and a Trots-
kyite and all those things, which I wasn't really. He was still going to
a lot of party affairs, although he wasn't a member any more, but the
party people didn't like me or the ideas that I put down the devia
tionist sounds I was making.
"It was Richard who turned me on to jazz and also on to pot. Of
course I'd played the piano and the cello, too, for years and studied
classical music and harmony and theory, and I found that pot en
hanced my listening to any kind of music, classical or jazz. I wasn't
68 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
for or against jazz. But then I began to hear jazz frequently, constantly.
Night and day. On recordings mostly, at first. Richard brought a
phonograph and he sort of moved into my place without my permis
sionand first he brought over a pair of house slippers and this
phonograph and some records. I was working at the time for the Bank
of America, but I was living in Venice so it was possible for him to
move in like that without any trouble with the neighbors. Oh, yes,
there would have been trouble, perhaps, but I and my landlady, I had
her sort of under my domination. Actually she was an elderly Jewish
woman and I bullied her. Also Richard made himself useful around
the place, did a little plumbing for her and a few other things and
endeared himself to her. She was happy to see me settle down on one
guy instead of the streams of men in and out of my apartment. So she
didn't really object to his staying there."
While the Negro, if he has intellectual tastes and is acceptable in
hipster and beat generation circles, may visit freely in the Venice West
pads, he meets with the same treatment from Venice landlords and
landladies as he would in any other comparable urban area. It is
easier for him to find quarters in a slum than elsewhere streets
peopled mostly by Mexicans and low-income whites with large fam
ilies who are barred from other areas of the city by no-children restric
tions or prohibitively high rentals.
Any existing tolerance on the part of landlords, however, does not
extend to mixed Negro and white sexuality, even in holy wedlock.
Tanya's Jewish landlady was a rare exception. Perhaps she was won
over by Richard's gentleness and charm, but I suspect that his oc
casional free-of-charge odd jobs around the house had something to
do with it, too. If neighboring landladies asked any questions she could
always tell them he was the janitor or handy man.
Tanya lived in a free union with Richard for about a year and then
decided to marry him. "After I left my first husband I said I would
never again marry anyone until I'd lived with him for quite a while.
We were married by the Reverend Fritchman in the Unitarian church.
Richard doesn't have any religion and I never had any. My father is a
militant atheist or agnostic. I guess I would probably call myself an
agnostic. But Richard and I used to go to the Unitarian church because
we both liked Stephen Fritchman's sermons. They have arts festivals
there every year, poetry readings and plays and things like that. Be-
BIOGRAPHY OF THBEE BEATS 69
cause of his progressive ideas Fritchman can't even leave the country,
you know. He's had his passport lifted and everything else like that. So
when we decided to get married this was the only place I could think
of, so I went and talked to Fritchman and he said he would marry us.
Christmas morning we went to his church and were married."
Six months later they moved into a big apartment hotel in another
part of Los Angeles, a run-down place in a mixed neighborhood
tenanted by prostitutes, musicians, dope dealers "and the vice
squad," Tanya adds, with a wry smile. "Two vice squad guys had taken
an apartment there, sub rosa, to spy on everybody. The musicians
spotted them right off, but some of the others didn't. One prostitute
got busted. I liked the atmosphere, everybody visiting freely back and
forth. It was something like a social life and I got along well with
everybody, better with the men than with the women, as I always
have, and best of all with the musicians. Some of these people were
heroin addicts, some were marijuana smokers, but I got along with all
of them. Everybody was pushing as well as using more or less. Well,
they weren't really dealers, the building was too hot for that, but
they'd get together and make a joint purchase. Richard dealt in pot
while we were there. So did I. I worked all the time on a job, but
Richard wasn't working and I really didn't earn enough on the job to
buy groceries and everything and go to the movies and buy books and
records, and keep ourselves supplied with pot and all our friends that
kept dropping in. The first time I smoked pot and the first chance I got
at heroin I took to them like a duck to water. I had found my element."
Venice West:
Life and Love Among the Ruins
ITCHY GELDEN WAS GETTING MARRIED. THE GIRL, GELDA LEWIS, WAS A
new chick in die sense that she had only recently made the inner circle
of the "community," although she had been living in Venice for two
years or more and dropping in at the more open, public type parties.
Poetry readings and such. She and Itchy had been making it for several
months in a store-front pad and she thought it would be nice if they
got married. Angel Dan Davies had volunteered to write the marriage
service, a hymeneal ritual poem, and the wedding ceremony was to
take place on Venice Beach, at night.
It wasn't anybody's idea in particular, a poetry wedding service by
the ocean at night; everybody had heard about such unofficial cere
monies. Tanya Bromberger told of a couple she knew that got married
on top of a mountain somewhere in Idaho "alone, just the two of
them, a million miles from nowhere, man, was that a gas!" Chris Nel
son said he'd always thought it would be great to get married in the
Fun House on the Ocean Park Amusement Pier, but his wife wouldn't
go for it. Gilda herself had suggested a Buddhist temple wedding at
first; she knew somebody who had gotten married in the Buddhist
temple in Los Angeles the man was brought up a Catholic and the
girl was Jewish, and they didn't want a priest or a rabbi, so they settled
for a Buddhist ceremony. But Itchy wanted something closer to the
kind of primitive ritual we had been discussing so much lately and
70
VENICE WEST: LIFE AND LOVE AMONG THE RUINS 71
everybody agreed that in Venice it had to be the ocean, what else?
Hadn't the Doges of Venice married the sea every year with a ring?
Crazy!
We were walking along the seashore, Itchy Gelden and I, on our
way to Angel's pad. The Venice ocean front land's end for the old
people who came to it, and the promise of a fresh beginning for the
young who could accept the challenge of sea as Itchy and Gilda were
promising themselves to do. Not in the sun but at midnight, for the
night seemed more in keeping with the pagan, lunar thing they wanted
their love-union to be. Morning weddings, noon weddings, that was
for squares. For the hip, for the cats, nothing but midnight would do.
They were the night people.
Itchy looked out across the sandy beach and blinked at the bright
sunlight over the ocean. The light of day or any bright house-lighting
hurt his eyes a common complaint among pot heads and other
narcotics users yet despite the example of many jazz musicians, he
was not wearing sunglasses. He was in one of his barefoot, barebreast
Nature Boy moods, and any kind of glasses seemed unnatural.
"You know what?" he said. "It's gonna be like going back home to
mama to ask for her blessing. I mean the real mama, the ocean, the
mama of the whole race of man, And this bit of me marrying the ocean
with a ring. You know what this is, man? It's the old Oedipus bit,
ain't it? Incest! But, hey, man, I just happen to think what is it gonna
be for Gilda?" He puzzled over that for a minute. "Yeh, I know, she's
marrying her old man, the old man of the sea. Crazy!" He walked along
silently after that, and I could see that he was pondering the solemnity
of the idea and the godlike feeling it gave him to think he was cast for
such a role. He had come out of his usual slouch and was walking
ramrod erect. He must have felt ten feet tall, and he wasn't potted up,
either.
When we got there, Angel was just putting the last touches to the
epithalamium that was to conclude the marriage service. Itchy wanted
to see the whole thing but Angel had mislaid some of the pages he
had been tossing them over his shoulder onto the floor as they came
from his typewriter and they had gotten buried somewhere under a
debris of soiled sweat shirts, old magazines, books, scrap paper,
scribbled notes, half -nibbled sandwiches and the children's toys -but
he was sure they would turn up in time. Margot was going to straighten
72 THE HOLY BABBARIANS
up the whole pad as soon as he could get her up out of bed. He was
afraid she was flipping, sleeping twelve, fourteen hours a day, and
saying and doing the craziest things, "you know, far out but, like,
man you got to come back," and Margot wasn't coining back enough.
More and more she was losing contact with reality and it scared him.
When Itchy started to poke around in the mess on the floor in an
effort to find the missing pages, Angel flew into one o the screaming
rages he liked to affect.
"Don't touch a thing! I know just where everything is, damn it!"
He did know, too, for he was there on the beach at the appointed
time with his manuscript intact. Margot was with him, looking fresh
and rested and no more disturbed mentally than anybody else in the
party.
I later learned that Gilda had made a last-minute attempt to interest
a young "liberal" rabbi in reading the marriage service Angel had
written and the rabbi agreed, but when he asked about the marriage
license and was told there wasn't going to be any, he declined. Gilda
and Dave agreed that her three legal marriages and his two were
enough of a compromise with conventional mores and the unnatural
self-assumed powers of the State.
The marriage rites were impressive, very moving at times, and Angel
read the service in a voice that fitted the moon-and-sea mood of the
occasion and sometimes matched the decible-count of the surf.
Here was an atmosphere that no State would ever think to provide.
Churches have their dramaturgy, their stage settings for such occasions,
and poetry of a sort, but it is always a room-confined, set-piece kind
of thing. Here it was no rule book routine. We were observing Ezra
Pound's advice to poets: Make it NEW! It was a full moon, but a moon
that had never been full before, not like this. Taken as a totality it
was a scene that had never been enacted before and would never
happen again. It had the uniqueness of presence. Stars. Moon shadows.
A unique moment in time. Far off on the southern headlands the lights
of moving traffic marched in slow processional, and to the north, the
highway lamps of the coast road to Malibu were strung like tiny
pearls, clear out to the Point.
Angel's lines were like the liquid arms of the sea herself, embracing
the land, advancing, wavering, withdrawing. His voice intoned the
lines and the sea answered him. The original idea had been that the
VENICE WEST: LIFE AND LOVE AMONG THE KXJINS 73
bride and groom would be naked for the occasion and that was the
way it stayed in the script, but it was a cold night so they settled for
bathing suits with wraps over them for added warmth during most of
the ceremony. The "rebirth baptism of love" in the sea that the service
called for was a shuddering few seconds of foot-splashing in the surf.
But it was all there in the poem and everybody was satisfied that the
word the magic word of the ritual was all that really counted.
Only the ring ceremony was carried out with literal observance of the
text. The ring, as Angel had prescribed in his poem, was a wreath of
flowers. The inshore sea wind blew it back onto the sand on the first
two tries but Gilda picked it up on the third try and managed to fling
it far enough out into the sea to satisfy the requirements of the symbol,
although there was a good deal of discussion afterward about whether
there was any significance to the fact that it was Gilda and not Dave
who had finally consummated the sea-marriage, and what that signified
psychologically, and what it portended for their future.
The closing epithalamium was a little too long and by the time it
was over the fog was rolling in and everybody was dripping wet by
the time we got back to Angel's pad, where the wedding party was to
be celebrated. At the last minute it was discovered that somebody had
goofed and forgotten to go after the can of marijuana that was waiting
to be picked up from the connection in East Los Angeles. After frantic
telephoning from the corner drugstore telephone booth Angel's tel
ephone had been disconnected for nonpayment of his bill Tanya
and Richard were located and promised to pick up the pot, ending
what had threatened to become a major crisis. They didn't show up,
though, until around two o'clock.
A minor crisis earlier in the party was getting Gilda's aunt and uncle
and a couple of teen-age cousins to go home before the party got going.
Gilda had impulsively invited them to attend' the beach ceremony,
perhaps in a belated effort to give some look of legitimacy to the
proceedings after all, Gilda was still more of a candidate than an
initiate and had conventional hang-overs from the past. We were all
surprised when they showed up; nobody was aware that Gilda had any
relatives on the West Coast. They were no trouble at all at the service,
except that Auntie cried too much and at all the wrong times, but after
all, they were squares and it was hoped they would get in their car
and go home after the ceremony. Instead they tagged along to Angel's
74 THE HOLY BABBAKIANS
pad. Auntie made herself useful right away, picking up the children's
toys off the floor where they were a peril to life and limb and tidying
up the place a little. It took the combined strategy of all the hipsters
present to deal with the situation before Gilda's relatives were finally
chivvied out of the pad without hurting their feelings too much or
spoiling the party for the bride.
Now the phonograph was turned full up Auntie had been turning
it down every time she got near it, certain that nobody could want
music on that loud. The occasion seemed to call for funky music.
Usually, it was Thelonious Monk, Chico Hamilton, Miles Davis and
the Modern Jazz Quartet at Angel's pad. That night it was Louis Arm
strong, Coleman Hawkins, Stuff Smith. Richard had promised on the
phone to bring along some old Bessie Smith seventy-eights and other
old-time blues greats.
I picked up Angel's marriage poem and started to read it. It read
pretty well on paper, even without the emotions of the scene, the moon
and the sea, and the sound of the waves. Itchy had squatted down on
the floor beside me and was picking up the pages as I laid them aside,
reading them, too.
He shook his head admiringly. "The good God sure enough laid his
voice on that cat," he commented. "It swings, like a good piece of ass.
He must have been loaded for sure when he wrote this passage" and
he read aloud the verses that had accompanied the ring ceremony. In
Itchy's high, almost falsetto voice, the poetry lacked the force Angel
had put into it.
"Does pot help you to write?" I asked him.
"Yeh." He smiled. "Mary Juana is my muse."
"But you've written without pot, too."
"Yeh, man, like IVe got piles of the stuff. Like I've written in the
Johns in the airplane plant. I used to sit in the Johns writing poetry on
toilet paper."
"When I was around your age," I said, "we used to work for a while,
at anything, and save all we could buying time, we called it. You
didn't think it was wrong, stealing time, writing on the boss' time?"
"It wasn't stealing. I was just getting my own. I was born in theft.
In the congregation of thieves. The arch thieves are the ones who put
down the most bullshit. Now I make it any way I can and the hell with it."
The conversation turned to the events of the evening and, as usual,
VENICE WEST: LIFE AND LOVE AMONG THE RUINS 75
to religion. There had been no religious training in Itchy s home.
Neither his mother nor his father went to synagogue. The first time his
mother spoke to him about religion was only recently and then she
came up with some stuff about Jesus and the saving blood o Christ
that she had picked up from one of those "Mission to the Jews" street
corner preachers. The missionary had used some badly garbled He
brew words and said he was once a Jew and now he was saved. She
not only believed him but she knew so little about the Jewish religion
that "she got an idea like this cat was a rabbi! and this was the reli
gion of the real ancient Jews of the Jerusalem temple that she'd some
how missed out on. Like I guess she feels she's getting real close to
death, and it shook her. But she always was superstitious, like Tolstoy's
peasants, you know. Like she says, 1 had a dream last night' or 1 had a
dream last week.' She believes that because she dreams something and
it comes true she has seen a vision. The vision of a seer or something.
She feels like because she had three children and none of them have
become great in her value system she has to reinforce her ego and
say like Tm a seer' or Tm in the know/ like Tm somebody. 9 "
"And your father "
"Well, my father was like a sort of a hype, in a way. The kind of a
cat who thinks like the animals the family man goes out and hunts
and he brings back the meat for the family, like the food and the cloth
ing and the loot to go for vacations in the country, and shit like that.
He didn't make any loot in the synagogue, so what's the percentage in
going to the synagogue?"
His parents' value judgments, he went on to tell me, were strictly
money. "... like, she has the viewpoint like you can't be straight unless
you got loot. Like if you haven't got loot you are going to be hassled
" he paused, turning the thing over in his mind. "Like it's true, it's
real. You are hassled if you haven't got loot. But what do I have to do
to get loot? I got to hustle."
Hustle is a word Itchy always uses for work, any kind of paid-for
work. Notice that it is a word borrowed from whores and pimps
who, in turn, borrowed it from pedlars and door-to-door canvassers.
( During the boom twenties it lost its derogatory connotations and was
being used quite honorably for all selling.) To Dave Gelden it ap
parently meant what it has always meant to the hoboes something
not necessarily evil in itself, something that might be all right for other
76 THE HOLY BABBAKLANS
people, if they liked working, but for him a necessary evil to be en
dured only if there was no way out of it. Working was something you
did to make living possible, and if you did too much of it too often you
had no time for living, so what was the sense of it? Then it was like
rehearsing for a play that would never be played; there was never any
real worthwhile pay-off, only promises that would never be met, "a
real shuck.'*
"My mother wants me to change, everyone wants me to change,
everyone wants to make the world in their own image. Like if you
don't pick up on their kick well they try to hip you."
I asked, "Do you think Gilda is going to try and change you, make
you hold down a steady job and have children?"
He shook his head to stop me, to let me know I was saying the
wrong thing in the wrong place; then he got up and motioned to me
to follow him. The sound of music and talk was deafening more and
more people had been dropping in for the party but when he opened
the bedroom door where the two Davies children were sleeping, they
didn't even stir in their sleep. They had been conditioned from birth to
sleep through anything, once you got them to sleep, which wasn't al
ways easy. What Itchy had to tell me was something of a secret. He
shut the door behind us and his voice was almost a whisper as he went on.
"You see, the first chick I ever fell in love with, like that was her
scene. Her mother first sounded me on it, like, 'Why don't you try
writing? Look at all the money there is in it.' Like if I made it with the
big magazines or a book maybe I'd be a good provider for her daugh
ter. She'd been reading those success stories, I guess, about rich,
famous authors. Even poetry - why not, didn't Edgar Guest make it?
Like she'd seen pictures of this palatial pad the cat had in a swanky
Detroit suburb, right in there with the automobile magnates. I was
twenty-two then and this chick she was seventeen or eighteen. She
wanted me to be a writer, too, but like she wanted a family, too. So I
got this state job and the first crack out of the box hah! box, get it?
she's pregnant. So I just walked out of that hassle. I was real broke
up behind that scene though. I felt very drug, like I thought of killing
myself. I hated myself. Like I felt here was a chick that really dug me
and I couldn't make it with her. So the next time I got married "
"How soon after was that?"
"It was about two and a half years ago and the scene was Hke the
VENICE WEST: LIFE AND LOVE AMONG THE RUINS 77
first chick she got a quiet divorce and kept the kid and all and this
new chick she was a doll. I could do anything I want, go to school on
the GI bill I still had it coming to me if I wanted to pick up on it
or work or not work she had a good job, so crazy! Only one thing
she didn't want any children. She was very possessive, see, and may
be she didn't want any competition. Anyway, I really dug this chick
and I didn't want to lose her. So I went to a doctor and had myself
sterilized."
A burst of Bessie Smith blues through the closed door told us that
Tanya and Richard had arrived with the can of pot. Dave leaped up
and I followed him into the living room. Everybody was already busy
rolling the brown-paper cigarettes. Tanya was showing somebody how
to roll a cigarette with one hand, a trick she said she had picked up
from a cat in Phoenix who had it from a cowboy hobo who still rolled
his own from a Bull Durham sack.
It was a ritual, like the Indian tobacco pipe, and everybody was
expected to take at least a ceremonial suck on the weed, but I was
exempted from it by a kind of special dispensation. I was the shaman
of the tribe this was the title Angel had bestowed on me and that
made it official. I had once shown Angel an illustration in Jane Har
rison's Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. It pictured Diony
sus "as the Athenians cared to know him," said Miss Harrison, and she
went on to describe the picture. "The strange mad Satyrs are twisted
and contorted to make exquisite patterns, they clash their frenzied
crotala and wave great vine branches. But in the midst of the revel
the god himself stands erect. He holds no kantharos, only a great lyre,
his head is thrown back in ecstacy; he is drunken, but with music, not
with wine." No castanets or sacred baskets for Dionysus, no wine. He
could get drunk on poetry and music. Then and there Angel decided
that the shaman was a member in good standing of the fraternity of
pot even if he never turned on with the gang.
Along with others I hung around with in the twenties, I had in
dulged in marijuana, but in those days it was a Saturday night party
kick. It was legal and you could buy it anywhere. Muggles we called
the marijuana cigarettes, and tea, and most of the boys who used it on
weekdays as well were painters. They said it heightened their color
sense. I sampled opium, too, in those days, and liked it, but I knew
what hazards it held and was satisfied to let it go at that. I have always
78 THE HOLY BABBAKIANS
been able to get high on poetry, music or sex stimulation just good
conversation is often enough to make it for me so that I have been
able to fit right in with alcoholics and narcotics addicts of any kind
without having to take the stuff myself.
Soon the air was filled with the sweet narcotic smell of pot and
everybody was swinging. None of the boozy sentimentalizing that
makes the parties of lushes such a bore, nor the brooding or belligerence
that afflicts heavy drinkers. Sitting around cross-legged on the floor
rolling their sticks of "tea," they looked like a ring of kindergarteners
playing with finger paints.
You would never think anything so innocent looking as this could
be illegal, but consciousness of the heat breathing down their necks
was never wholly absent. The heat, the fuzz, at any moment there
might be a rap at the door. If the stuff was found in your house you
were responsible under the law, even if you were not a user yourself
and only indulging your guests. The penalties were always being made
more severe and judges were meting out stiffer sentences. If the cops
happened to find a roach on some juvenile delinquent who had staged
a holdup or committed some stupid act of violence, the whole thing
was promptly blamed on marijuana and the police cracked down all
over town. You might be sitting around with friends enjoying the hi-fi
or listening to somebody read his poems and the next thing you know
the cops could arrive and hustle you off to jail as a criminal. There had
been such incidents recently, so the air was charged with a sense of
danger that night. You could sense it under the gaiety, though unusual
precautions were taken. The doors were kept locked, the window
shades drawn. When enough cigarettes had been rolled, Angel carried
the rest of the can of pot outside and concealed it behind some loose
boards under the house. That way, he figured, it couldn't legally be
said to constitute evidence of possession or "on the premises."
Everybody had a different notion of the legal technicalities involved,
and about what to do in case the heat showed up. How to dispose of
a roach some said you could swallow it without any serious harm to
your insides. Some were for tossing the evidence of "holding" out the
window, the way some users were reputed to have foiled the fuzz by
tossing marijuana cigarettes out of cars when they were stopped by
traffic cops. You were clean, they said, as long as they didn't find it
on you, as long as you weren't "holding."
VENICE WEST : LIFE AND LOVE AMONG THE KUINS 79
Everybody present had heard all these theories before. It was old
stuff but it gave them a sense of readiness to talk about it. Verbalizing
the possibilities seemed to act like a kind of homeopathic magic against
anything happening. Once it had been talked about they dismissed it
from their minds. All except the bride who had herself a crying jag
in the kitchen "What if we should get busted tonight and we had to
spend our wedding night in jail!" Chuck Bennison made a funny crack
about the Law robbing poor Itchy of jus primae noctis, the right of
the first night, with his virgin bride, and that sent her into an uncon
trollable laughing jag. All very uncool. Just what you'd expect of some
one only beginning to make the scene and not hip yet to what being
cool means.
That was Tanya's verdict. "If you want to belong you've got to ex
pect to pay your dues. It's very unhip to bawl and carry on about it,
even before it happens. The squares and their cops are always out
there, laying for us. The squares are afraid of pot. They've got it tied
up in their minds with the breaking down of inhibitions and taboos.
They're afraid of poetry, which they connect up in their fears with
free love. They're afraid of jazz. To them it means like Bessie Smith
was singing in that blues song you just heard, Empty Bed Blues it
means the kind of sex that 'almost takes my breath away' and 'makes
me wring my hands and cry' and that ain't nothin' like the square way
of loving man. It isn't their dimity curtain, candlewick bedspread kind
of love. Like my hip doctor told me yesterday, "What are the three
most overrated things in the world? Home cooking, home fucking and
Mayo surgery/ I don't know about Mayo surgery, but man he sure hit
it right on the other two shucks."
Holiness? Crazy, man! But you can flip your wig on it.
For months Angel Dan Davies had been turning himself inside out
in a search for the "original meaning" of communal love and the con
cept of holiness. With the driving intensity that marked all his spiritual
and esthetic adventures, he had been re-examining all his basic assump
tions, his relations with everybody he knew "Is it really love or am
I just shucking myself?" and delving into his own past in a kind of
autoanalysis. And drawing everybody around him into it with him.
The solitary labors of the soul were not for Angel. He had to have
80 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
others suffering with him, taking the same risks and sharing with him
his moments of vision. He thrived on it, but his wife Margot was
beginning to crack up. The long, sleepless night hours of orgiastic sex
and spiritual self-examination were too much for her. More and more
every day lately she showed signs of losing touch with reality. At first,
Angel had been reporting to me that Margot was at last beginning to
see eye to eye with him inner eye, that is and this was saving his
marriage, which was always on the verge of breaking up. That she
was beginning to understand him at last and to share his quest of the
numinous, his search for love and holiness. But now it had gotten out
of hand. She was saying and doing things that scared him. For one
thing, she was turning elsewhere for the answers, away from him to
others, and this was a bad sign.
I knew what he meant. Margot was waiting at my door one morning
when I returned from picking up my mail at the Venice Post Office.
She looked like the wrath of Medusa, flushed and manic, her flaming
red hair in a tangle, her eyes bloodshot with a wild look in them. Her
voice when she spoke was strangely, frighteningly calm, childlike, a
little-lost-girl voice "Can I come in, please? You won't mind? I had
to see you "
I let her in and she threw herself on the living room divan at once
and curled up in an embryonic posture. The light hurt her eyes, she
said. I lowered the window shades. All she wanted to do was rest, she
whispered. Just rest and sleep, "just to be here/' I suggested a sedative
but she shook her head and smiled dreamily, as if she were just on
the point of dropping off to sleep.
I breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn't going to be such a mess, after
all. I went into my study to read my morning mail and answer a few
letters perhaps. When I tiptoed back into the living room half an hour
later for a look at Margot before settling down to work, she was sitting
propped up against the cushions. Blouse, slip, bra and panties were
scattered far and wide over the floor where she had flung them, in
what must have been a piece-by-piece stripping act of solitary abandon.
The only thing she had on was a short skirt and that was hiked up
over her knees. She gave me a sideways glance and her face had the
little-lost-girl look again, but her voice was tremulous now, desperate.
"You can help me, Larry. I know you can help me. Like you've been
helping Dan. We've been making a swinging scene every night. Far
VENICE WEST: LIFE AND LOVE AMONG THE RUINS 81
out! But I can't seem to come back. Like I do things ... I don't know
why I do them. And I just can't stop! You've got to help me come
down . . . come out of it."
I picked her things up off the floor and laid them beside her on the
divan, hoping she would take the hint, I was pretty sure Angel was
running around all over Venice looking for her. These disappearances
of hers had become frequent of late. Angel had told me about it, how
he would come home and find she had gone off without leaving a note
or anything, or how he would stir out of sleep in the early morning
hours, after a night of pot, sex, Benzedrine and mystical self-searchings
with Margot, to find she had gotten up without waking him and disap
peared. Sometimes friends would call him up to tell him where they
had seen her, or he would trace her to the home of someone they had
both met only the night before perhaps. In a couple of cases it was
Lesbians she had run off to.
Now I was getting the story from Margot. It poured out of her
breathlessly. Sex was the creative principle of the universe . . . what
were the vestal virgins but mystical brides of the gods . . . Bacchus . . .
Priapus . . . Dionysus . . . the Shechina, the feminine emanation of
Jehovah, hovering over the marriage bed on the Sabbath night . . . the
agape, the early Christian love feast what was it but communal love
in its pure orgastic form . . . faked up by the Church into Christian
fellowship with Sunday chicken and dumplings . . . the vaginal chalice
and the phallic cross sublimated into empty ceremonials . . . and isn't
it a fact that the gods were conceived of in their pure primitive form
as androgynous . . . hermaphroditic? . . . and isn't it just a taboo, this
prejudice against homosexuals and Lesbians? . . . and wasn't Henry
Miller right when he wrote and Andre Gide and Pierre Gordon in
his book Sex and Religion which I had loaned Dan to read and which
they had dipped into together and talked about . . . how else was one
to experience the numinous enlightenment . . . nirvana . . , satori . . .
except by going far out? . . . the irrational . . . wasn't that the whole
idea? . . . and how could you know in these other ways of knowing
unless you explored your unconscious . . . disassociated . . . broke up,
and through, and beyond ... far out . . . through pain . . . through
sex . . . through pot . . . Benezedrine . . . anything . . . everything? . . .
since the whole idea was to experience holiness . . . the beatific vision
. . . orgastic release . . . the crucifixion of the flesh . . . "but how do I
82 THE HOLY BABBARIANS
get back now? What do I do to slow up, to stop, to sleep? ..."
It all had a familiar ring, but distorted. My own words coming back
to me like an echo, but twisted, like sound under water might be
imagined in the mind's ear. The early Christian agape, the love feast,
transmogrified into a community gang-shag. The hierogamy, torn out
of its tribal, communal context and narrowed to the bedroom proportions
of a folie d deux. The asexuality of the gods distorted into multi-
sexuality. And the omnisexuality of the primitive animistic religions
divorced from all communal functions or utility and established as the
rationale of a private ritual, a neurosis that could become dangerously
psychopathic.
I tried explaining this to Margot but it was soon clear to me that
she was already too withdrawn for any logical reasoning, although it
was probably not too late for psychoanalytical therapy; but I was cer
tainly not going to be the one to tamper with parlor analysis. Not in
this case, anyway.
I gave her a book to read while I slipped out the back door and
hurried over to Angel's pad. He had been everywhere looking for her
and was frantic with anxiety. I told him what had happened and together
we returned to my place. The divan was tidied up, smoothed down,
the cushions shaken out and propped up innocently, almost primly,
against the wall. There wasn't a sign of feminine clothing around, not
so much as a bobby pin. And Margot was gone.
"But Tied been there, man, and he blew, and he flew,
man, like high"
It was the mad season in Venice West. Things were happening and
if you were really with it you couldn't show it any better than by flip
ping your wig. Or at least pretending to. Flips and more flips. And
rumors of flips. "Did you know So-and-So was wigging?" "I was with
So-and-So last night and, Oh, man, is he flipping!" It began to take on
the aspects of an epidemic. If you were flipping you became the center
of attention for a few days. Some couldn't resist the temptation to
simulate the symptoms. It was no disgrace to be flipping. It was
definitely the hip thing to do. Hadn't Carl Solomon flipped his wig?
Wasn't Bird Parker a Camarillo case for a while? Hadn't Allen Gins
berg been to the laughing academy?
The square never flipped; he became withdrawn, a case of mental
VENICE WEST: LIFE AND LOVE AMONG THE RUINS 83
depression born of boredom and frustration. Something lie feared and
couldn't face. What was there about the square's rat race or his tepid
love affairs that was worth a stretch at Camarillo or Bellevue?
When the hipster went off the deep end it was a death-defying no,
a death-wooing dive off the high board. It was poetry in action.
Stuart Z. Perkoff catches the "far out" flip in his poem Bird:
frenetic dancer
weaving out of the darkness between
the buildings
blowing high & screaming in. ...
they relaxed him at Camarillo
sent him out
but he did not cool . . .
what about that horror, man?
what about that pain?
what about that cat, like all the time
trying to do himself in, lushing,
hyping, insane fucking, no sleep
no eat just blow blow blow
farther and farther out tearing finger from hand,
eye
from skull, sound from throat, leaving bleeding
chunks of Bird caught in the teeth of many
sessions,
what about that? . . .
but he'd been there, man
& he blew
& he flew, man
like
high
The far-out flip is a gamble for high stakes. It is the descent into Hell.
Orpheus in Hades. The cool cat may flip if he goes too far out, but he
is expected to pull out of it, to come down from his high, to come back,
just as the jazz musician always comes back to the theme on which he
is improvising. The idea is the traditional one of the hero and his
journey perilous.
Chuck Bennison was on a make-believe flip. Perhaps he felt that as
84 THE HOLY BARBAKLANS
a newcomer to the scene it was incumbent upon him to exhibit the
symptoms of contagion. It might hasten his complete acceptance into
the inner circle of the initiated. Despite his abandonment of alcohol
in favor of pot, he still felt that he was being treated in some pads like
a novice, if not an outsider.
Like most converts, his zeal led him to overdo it a little. He would
sit on the floor swaying back and forth to the beat of a jazz record, eyes
closed, face contorted with agony-ecstacy. Then suddenly he would
utter a cry, fall back on the floor, roll over on his face and stay there
in a pretty good imitation of a catatonic seizure. When he came out
of it he had stories of strange visions, "other levels of reality."
I was riding with Chuck one day, in a car he had borrowed from his
mother, when he was suddenly smitten with the gift of tongues. At
least that is what it might have sounded like to any true believer of
the lunatic fringe religions, but I was able to make enough sense out of
it to suspect that he was putting on a show for my benefit. What he
was doing was improvising by free association, or rather free dissocia
tion. He was blowing a riff on a tune that was familiar to me, the
Jungian archetypes. His hand on the wheel was steady, although the
one he gestured with shook violently. When I had had enough of it I
said, "Okay, cut out the crap, Chuck. Snap out of it," and he did, turn
ing to me with a sheepish smile. I said no more about it, but he re
turned to the subject later, explaining that my demand that he snap
out of it had "broken the magic circle." Chuck always had an explana
tion for everything. When he fell into contradictions he could explain
that, too. "Different levels of reality . . . like, everything is true and
everything is untrue, depending on the level of reality on which you
happen to be at the moment." Some of our Venetians expressed concern
over "poor Chuck" and there were times when I, too, thought he
might be stepping over the line, but Nettie assured me he was all
right. "As long as he continues to show up around dinnertime there's
nothing to worry about," she said. "As the psychiatrists say, he is still
oriented as to time and place."
The only time during the flip epidemic that Chuck Bennison failed
to drop in around dinnertime not that he wasn't always welcome
was when I asked him to distribute some posters advertising a poetry
and jazz concert. That time he vanished for a week. When I got wor
ried about him and the posters I started out to find him. It took
VENICE WEST: LIFE AND LOVE AMONG THE RUINS 85
some shrewd detective work. When I did locate him the posters were
still stashed away in the trunk of the car and he was contrite about his
failure to come through on his little errand, but as usual he had an
explanation. This time it was the Muse that had waylaid him, He had
the poem to show for it, too, an opus thirty pages long and as dis
sociated and far out as anyone could wish. It was, like so much of
Chuck's work, "only a preliminary outline." The completed work was
to run to something like a thousand pages, divided into twelve major
books corresponding to the signs of the zodiac, and these, in turn,
divided into three hundred and sixty-five cantos, one for each day in
the year with an extra canto for leap years, the whole to be illustrated
with colored drawings on which he had been working like mad for
days. That the divine frenzy should have taken possession of him so
irresistibly just when he had some posters to distribute he ex
plained very convincingly. He had now reached that stage in his en
lightenment where any material or commercial demands on him set
up a protective defense reaction that drove him even farther out in the
quest for other realities. That night he showed up in time for dinner
without any serious setback, apparently, in his quest of other realities.
When Itchy Gelden flipped, it was gently, innocently, like a child
lost in fairy tale land. Normally his conversation was spiced with
occasional moments of prophetic doom, condemnations of social in
justice and political skulduggery. Now everything was holy. Everybody
was a lost child with him in a wild and wonderful wilderness where
there was neither good nor evil. He had passed beyond good and evil.
He spoke little and slept much. He tiptoed around sniffing at flowers,
gazing at the sea and sky, picking up driftwood and brooding over it
like Hamlet over poor Yorick's skull, but more gently. He sought out
all those to whom he had ever spoken a word in anger and asked their
forgiveness, as if the world were coming to an end and he wanted to
be right with God at the final judgment.
Both he and Chuck had been conducting seances of a sort with Phil
Trattman at Phil's pad. Phil was having wife trouble. He hadn't
touched his ax in months. (Any jazz instrument is an "ax" in Phil's
case, the bass.) He was stoned out of his mind with pot night and
day, often forgetting to eat or dress himself or go out of the house to
shop for groceries. The only thing he seemed able to put his mind to
was bits of wire, string and metal. He was making mobiles. He wel-
86 THE HOLY BABBABIANS
corned the company of Chuck and Itchy, however. Unlike Itchy, who
could sleep eighteen hours a day during a flip, Phil suffered from
insomnia. Suffered is the wrong word for it. He reveled in insomnia.
Chuck, too, was nocturnal. And the three of them were joined fre
quently by poet-painter Don Berney.
Picture the scene. If you fell into the pad after six o'clock in the
evening you had to come in by way of a basement door in the rear,
because the street entrance led through a plaster of Paris shop whose
owner was so afraid somebody might sneak into her "studio" that she
locked it up front and back when she went home at night. You had to
go down a short flight of stairs in the rear and through a cellar to
another flight of stairs that led up to Phil's pad in back of the shop.
Aside from this and the fact that there was only one window, the pad
was ideal. The rent was only twenty a month. Phil's arrangement with
the weirdie who ran the shop was that he would help her mix batches
of plaster which were too heavy for her to handle and act as night
watchman. How he was expected to get into the shop at night if he
ever heard a prowler or, for that matter, what there was for anybody
to steal, outside of a few plaster Kewpie dolls that you could buy in
any souvenir joint for a dollar, was never quite clear to anybody, least
of all to Phil, who didn't care; and the proprietress was too lost in
plaster and biblical numerology to give it any thought, I suppose. It
was the biblical numerology that had brought them together in the
first place. She offered Phil the back room at a low rental she had
no use for it anyway as a kind of love offering to a kindred soul on
the astral plane.
Phil had hung the peeling plaster walls with driftwood and old
fish nets. There were two mattresses on the floor, sans springs, and a
couple of small hassocks, He had never gotten around to providing
bookshelves for his books, mostly paperbacks and thin quarterlies, so
they were stacked up on the floor or set up against the wall with any
thing of proper weight and size for book ends. A three-burner gas plate
set up on the soapstone top of an old commode was cookstove and
heating unit combined, and the washbowl in the corner served as the
sink, The cupboard where the chamber pot was once stored doubled
as pantry and a place to stash away his few dishes and cooking utensils.
The old-fashioned icebox rarely had any ice in it; Phil used it mainly
VENICE WEST: LIFE AND LOVE AMONG THE RUINS 87
for his mobile materials, tools, paints and miscellaneous items. Not
much for comfort, but the odds justified the ends, according to Phil's
view, and the ends he had in view were not so much material as
spiritual. The pad had no bath or shower but it had the only toilet in
the place. Presumably the proprietress, who never used it, had risen
above such material needs on her astral plane.
One of Phil's seances started on a cold, wet night with the whole
ocean front fogged in, one of those impenetrable white fogs as thick
as cotton batting. The open burners of the gas plate, all three of them
full up and flaming like torches, made the big room as warm as a steam
bath but short on oxygen. They also provided the only light there was,
an eerie effect of flickering grotesques and tortured shadows. What
the air lacked in oxygen it made up in marijuana fumes.
I missed most of the session it ran on into the next two days and
nights but the Venice West poet Charles Foster, who was present
and stayed on to the end, gave me a precis of the proceedings in the
form of a poem outline "on the general theme: Knowledge and love
are one, and the measure is suffering."
"Three a.m. Friday morning. Phil, working on mobiles, explains why
he is afraid to flip out. Chuck says: If you're going to flip, man, flip.
Make it!'
"The biblical Job. The Artist. Murder. The Androgynous Creator."
Most of the talk on the first night, I gather from the precis was on
these topics. Only it isn't called talk in hip circles. It is "communica
tion" and "relating." From what I heard of it before leaving, it must
have been on a high level of awareness, as it usually is on such occasions.
"Hamlet. The Businessman. Psychosis. The Father Sex in thought
and action. . . . Alcoholism as a way of life to adjust to life to ???.
Oedipus. The Lover. Money. The Mother."
Some of this, Foster explained, was only in his own thoughts as the
session went on, and in the form of notes to be worked into his pro
jected poem.
"Thelonious Monk. Don attempting to accompany on drums. , . .
00 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
Three persons: the man divided within is thereby divided from others,
& out o contact with the music.
"Huddy Leadbelly. Bongo drums. Modern Man.
"Saturday. Marijuana. Description of the sickness.
"Blow: what paranoid schizophrenia feels like: utter isolation from
others & fear & suspicion of them . . . fear of self's actions ... the
walls ... too many levels, too many thoughts, too many worlds &
strange dimensions, too much reality & it all shifts and changes too
fast . . . the crushing weight of the reality of metaphor & the over
powering multiphastic simultaneous life of metaphor or symbol on
all the levels . . . the fear; there is no place to find firm ground even
for a second; no frame of reference ... the physical sensations . . .
suicide & murder . . . loss of any feeling of insight into the self . . . dis
torted memory of events right after they happen . . . impossibility of
communication,
"Is this sanity or insanity; a distortion of the dynamics operating
intra- & inter-personally or a true understanding of them, for the
first time? Even though George (Foster's name for the hero in the
precis ) is quite aware that he is in a state called psychotic, he is also
convinced that his perceptions of the nature of normal reality are true.
This is more painful to him than the acceptance of his perceptions as
delusory would be. . . .
"Saturday night. Description of another dimension of aloneness
physical isolation. After some time, George goes to the stove to make
coffee. Bread knife brings up ideas of suicide, self -mutilation & murder.
"George is able to get across to them the state he is in. They supply
him with three things to help him hang on. (1) honesty, knowledge,
love; they tell him frankly they don't know how he'll get back, if he
ever will but they know that the things he sees are real & they'll help
in any way they can(2) they suggest he use the sharp weapon at his
command his talent with words to tear down the fences in his
path, and (3) they put Mozart on the box.
"Blow: Concerto for orchestra and solo typewriter. How the music
puts together all the levels of metaphor into the symbols of art how,
by jesus, words can do the same: in the strange land of reality, the
poem is the password.
VENICE WEST: LIFE AND LOVE AMONG THE RUINS 89
"Blow: one or two of the 'nerves upon a screen' pieces, tied in with
ideas about relationship of art & schizophrenia."
The precis goes on to other themes suggestive of the flipping expe
rience and the "therapies" used to help one another during the expe
rience. There is more about jazz, psychology, anthropology, science,
the personal unconscious, the collective unconscious, the nature of
reality and God.
The flip epidemic went on for months, but the only one who had to
resort to formal psychiatric therapy was Margot. She had herself com
mitted to the County Hospital and spent a few weeks afterward in
Camarillo State Hospital. Released for a week end to her husband and
home, she "went over the hill," as the Camarillo inmates call it, and
never went back. When investigators came around she hid out with
friends, like a criminal on the lam. After a not-too-energetic search the
state gave up and, I suppose, "released" her formally, on the books, as
cured. There has been no repetition of her symptoms.
The last one to come out of it was Phil Trattman. Months later he
was still "training a fly" he had befriended and was "communicating
with." How he was able to distinguish this particular fly from the
swarms that buzzed around his pad all the time (the single window had
no screen), I was never able to make out. Finally one day he came
bearing sad news. The fly had died.
After a decent interval of mourning Phil "came back." He returned
to his bass fiddle and started making night club gigs again.
4
The Lovew/ays of the Beat Generation
To THE TOURIST TRADE THAT PATRONIZES THE ESPRESSO COFFEEHOUSES
of Hollywood or San Francisco's North Beach, or similar areas in New
York, Chicago and other cities, the beat generation seems to consist
chiefly of teen-agers in search of thrills. In actual fact, the typical beat
generation young person is more apt to be well past his or her teens.
Teen-agers loom large to the outsider's view because they are still in
school, most of them, and have the leisure to frequent the coffeehouses.
When they get a little older and begin to shack up in places like Venice
West, they are more likely to remain within the closed circle of their
own group and are seen infrequently in public places.
In the loveways of the beat, age is not as important in the twenty-to-
thirty bracket as it is in the middle-class marrying circles. If you have
learned what it means to act cool and share the attitudes of the group,
particularly the negative attitudes, that is, toward squares and the
values of squaredom, you are in, you are with it. If you are a girl and
your shack-up mate is five or ten years older or younger than you are,
the chances are that no one will know or care. Most of the time no one
is even likely to ask. This is especially true of the girls, who seem to
hover in a kind of indeterminate twilight age between eighteen and
twenty-eight. I know veterans of thirty and over who could pass for
eighteen or twenty in square circles. This is partly due to dress and a
90
THE LOVEWAYS OF THE BEAT GENERATION 91
prescribed youthfulness in behavior, which is de rigueur in all "new"
generations.
What are they like, these women of the beat generation pads? Where
do they come from, how do they get here? And why?
Gilda Lewis: The Gypsy Syndrome
A common feature of many early nineteenth-century English ro
mances was the heroine who at an early age ran away from home and
joined a gypsy band, or was snatched by gypsies, or lured away from
family or husband by a gypsy lover. In French romances it was the
traveling carnival that provided the lure, or, in upper class romance,
the theater. In the United States it was the gambling man, the river
boat, or the circus. An essential part of the role was the willingness of
the heroine to suffer for her man, to put up with violent fluctuations of
fortune, to shield him from the Law, at the risk of her life, and, if need
be, her honor.
Gilda Lewis' story reads for all the world like one of these romances,
except that in her case the gypsy band is the beat generation and the
hero is gambling with fame more than with fortune. At twenty-seven,
Gilda has run through three husbands and several lovers, all of them
heroes in the tradition of the gypsy romance, but a kind of gypsy that
the novelists of the nineteenth century never dreamed of. "When I met
my first husband," Gilda says, "I was attracted to him because he car
ried a book under his arm." The next thing about him that attracted
Gilda was that he spoke to her before she spoke to him, without wait
ing to be introduced, and that he swept her off her feet. In Gilda's
life the gypsy lover has always come carrying a book or a musical
instrument or paint and canvas but he was no timid intellectual,
palely loitering at the door. He stormed in and took over.
But Gilda is no early nineteenth-century heroine to be swept up and
carried off in a swoon. The nuptial flight is always "a wild swinging
scene." But then the suffering begins. This is part of the gypsy pattern,
of course. She knows it and accepts it. Yet it always seems to take her
by surprise. It is always somehow more sordid, more petty, than she
had pictured it. When the affair breaks up, Gilda is devastated till
the next one comes along.
"I was eleven years old when I met this boy. My feelings were still
92 THE HOLY BAHBARIANS
immature, of course, and my sensations, my physical sensations were
what do they call it? unlocalized. It was one of those young chase,
push and poke things. Under the staircase in the dark and behind the
house and in the garage, any place that was big enough to get under
or crawl into. And breathless! I still remember some of those scenes
better than things that happened a year ago or the day before yester
day. Nothing happened, of course. We were both too young. And yet,
looking back now, everything happened. Everything that was ever
going to happen, only in pattern, like a mock-up, you might say, of
the real thing. To this day I could swear that we had orgasms. I
know I felt that way it was all over, though, and not, like later on,
localized in the genitals. Even today, when I want to tell myself how it
ought to feel like, I think back to those days and, do you know
something? it sometimes helps to bring it on!
"Anyway, we left New York when I was fifteen and came out to
California. I went to high school in Los Angeles, When I was thirteen,
Martha that's my mother, I never called her mother because she was
my stepmother brought up the subject of my menstruation. She asked
me if I was a lady. I said 'What?' and she said, 'You know, are you a
lady yet?' That was her word for it, so you can imagine how much sex
education I got at home.
"Mine wasn't what you'd call a happy childhood. But what is a
happy childhood? I've never known anybody who had a happy child
hood, have you? I wasn't really what you'd call happy till I was grown
up, out of the house and on my own. Did I say happy? Well like the
poet said, *in my fashion.' "
Gilda's mother died "before I could really get to know her well," and
her stepmother was "what I would consider a very reactionary person."
Why did her father, who was "a card-carrying Communist till 1935,"
marry a reactionary woman? "Well, he had two children who he felt
needed a mother, and she had three thousand dollars which he needed."
Martha was thirty-six when she married Gilda's father and, according
to Gilda, a virgin. Gilda is sure of that, althoxigh it was never discussed.
"I knew, that's all. I could tell by the way she acted." Gilda was eight
years old at the time and her sister twelve.
Her real mother "was completely surrounded by mystery. I was
never allowed to see any of my mother's family after she died. My
father had a falling out with her sister at that time. You know how
THE LOVEWAYS OF THE BEAT GENERATION 93
f amilies are, like they blamed him for her dying ... it was his fault
... it should have been him that died, not she/'
Gilda was seventeen the first time she ran away from home. "I was
going with a guy at the time and I thought I might marry him. I was
fifteen and a half before I started menstruating and I thought maybe
something was the matter with me, being so late. I was always very
intense and maybe that well, anyway, he was the type a great
reader, he wrote a little, too. You see, I was coeditor of the school
magazine when I was twelve, and I remember writing stories way be
fore that. Frank, that was his name, was the mental type. I used to
think I couldn't even have an orgasm with any other type person
which is silly, of course, as I later discovered but it's true in a way
even now. I mean, if he doesn't reach me up here first, there's nothing
happening down there. Like I'm on a mental kick. Artistic, too. Anyone
having anything to do with the arts, you might say. But exciting. He
has to be far out. Like he's going somewhere, far out and fast, and
I can swing along with him. A lot of the young men I met were stu
dents and also party men. It was a time when everybody was trying to
find their way into something. So Frank and I ran away together. ..."
Her father found her and pleaded with her to come back home. He
said it was a disgrace to the family. "He was ashamed for his friends
he said he didn't know how to explain a thing like this." She went home
with him. Three months later she was in flight again. This time with a
young painter who had a shack up in the desert somewhere. She
doesn't remember where. She doesn't remember his name any more.
"Ted, something. It didn't matter. It was wonderful while it lasted.
I think he was part Indian, I mean American Indian. I'd met him only
the night before and the next day just like that! I was ready to go
anywhere, where they couldn't find me and drag me back home again.
This time I left home for good and never went back."
The gypsy trail had begun for Gilda. Back to New York, now, and
her first love. Robert was interested in creative writing but he had
gotten a degree in advertising so he was working in an agency. He was
writing on the side, and also painting. He interested her in music. And
he was political, what the party people called "an intellectual." It was
Frank who brought her into party activities. "He wanted to marry and
settle down as a worker, have children and all that, but keep up with
his writing and his painting, too. It didn't work. He wasn't skilled or
94
THE HOLY BARBARIAJSTS
trained for anything else. I became pregnant right after we got married.
We had to live off the charity of his folks for a while. I managed to get
low-paying jobs to help support us and we kept borrowing from his
people. Finally I decided if I'm going to have a baby and freeze I'm
going to have it in California. So we came here. He got a job and I
had the baby, but then he was out of work for long stretches. When
the baby was five months old we took him to New York and left him
with Robert's family. The day I left my baby I decided that if I
couldn't have my child I certainly didn't want this man. We separated."
Gilda consented to let his parents adopt the baby. On the way back
from New York, hitchhiking, she met another man and lived with him
for a while in Cleveland. They got married she isn't sure but she
thinks Robert got a divorce before that; he did afterward, she's sure of
that and she got pregnant again. This child, too, had to be given up
for adoption by her in-laws. She doesn't know if she is still married to
the Cleveland man or whether he got a divorce. By this time "I was
making the party scene, marching in demonstrations, attending meet
ings. Her sister had married and gone the whole route back to the
Right - "tract house, PTA and all that sort of thing."
"It was no longer possible for me to love any man with conventional
ideas or live a conventional way of life."
Marrying Dave Gelden in a ritual poetry wedding was now her idea
of the swinging scene. Party activity is a thing of the past. "If I were to
describe my political position I would say I was an anarchist. My con
flicts come in when I try to put value judgments on things. I've learned
to live for the moment."
Gilda doesn't follow the news very closely, never reads a newspaper
and rarely reads a news magazine. She keeps the door of the pad
unlocked, on principle. If anyone broke in and stole anything "like,
what is there to steal?" she would not report him to the police. She
joined a church briefly when she was sixteen, the Methodist church,
but has had no religious connections since then. The only thing she
liked about it was the hymn singing. She thinks about going back to
college and getting her degree, but it is hard to sit in a class and listen
to lectures and to the silly questions students ask. "I guess I'm long
past all that now. I just read. I read a lot." Looking back now she isn't
sure that even the war against fascism in the forties made sense. "It
THE LOVEWAYS OF THE BEAT GENERATION 95
wasn't against anything, it didn't settle anything. The only ones I'm
sorry for are the Jews Hitler killed." She isn't a pacifist, however. "I
don't know what I'd do in case of war. People ask me, 'What would
you do if a man broke in and tried to rape you?' He wouldn't have to
break in. The door is open. And I'd rather be raped than put the heat
on him. I wouldn't put the heat on anybody. Not from what I know
about it now."
How did she happen to come to Venice West? "I heard about it and
right away I knew that's for me. Those LIGHT HOUSEKEEPING signs you
see everywhere, that's for me. The lighter the better. And better than
that, a good car well, one that doesn't break down too often out on
the open road and going somewhere. Preferably with someone, away.
It doesn't matter much where to as long as it's away' 9
Three months after the "marriage" to Itchy Dave Gelden, Gilda
Lewis was on the road again. East bound on Route 66 with Chuck
Bennison. Back on the gypsy trail again.
Diana Wakefield: Handmaiden of the Muse
There are those who play a sacrificial role in the service of the Muse,
vestal, if not virgin, servants in the temple. Their labor is a labor of
love. They hold a job and come home to shop and cook, to clean house,
launder, knit, wash the dishes and carry out the garbage. All for the
privilege of living in an atmosphere of art, any art, and feel themselves
part of tihe creative act. Living in poverty and disorder, trouble and
insecurity, they see themselves pictured in glowing biographies of the
future, the artist's faithful model, the writer's devoted lover, loyal
through the years of obscurity and want, the "women in the lives of
men of genius.
Diana Wakefield has had such a picture of herself from the time she
was twelve. A painter of mature years she thinks he was forty or
more but at the time everybody over twenty must have seemed middle
aged to her found her peering in wide-eyed at the door of his studio
one day and invited her in. She became his model, first in poses of
childlike innocence and, by degrees, in progressive stages of undress
till she was posing in the nude. By the time she was thirteen she was
mistress as well as model. All this secretly, without arousing the
96 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
slightest suspicion at home. Not even her closest friends in the neigh
borhood or among her schoolmates knew. How this feat of secrecy was
accomplished is something of a story in itself.
"I would take my schoolbooks over to a girl friend's house, tell her
mother I was going to another girl's house, stop there for a minute and
light out for Melvin's studio. If my mother called up this one or that
one I'd always been there and left. If she asked me any questions it was
easy to pretend I'd run into some kids from school and we'd stopped
somewhere for a soda. I used to go over to Melvin's two or three times
a week. I was always careful to pick up my books and get home by
five or so. Mother was very social. She was usually out playing bridge
or shopping. She belonged to some organization, I forget what, and
they had her licking stamps and addressing envelopes at least once a
week. There never were any stories about me running around with
boys, so she wasn't worried about anything. Dad? I don't think he
even knew I was alive most of the time. I did my homework. I didn't
get into any trouble. I was a model child."
The artist model relationship came to an end when the family moved
from Cleveland to San Francisco. Diana was fifteen when she met
George, a high school senior with a precocious talent for art and no
idea what to do about it. "He wanted to paint, he wanted to sculpt, he
wrote beautiful poetry and played the guitar pretty well." Before he
could make up his mind his family made it up for him. His father, a
wealthy contractor, decided to make an architect out of George, and
when the boy graduated from high school he told him it was all ar
ranged for him to put in a few years at a school in France. George
rebelled against the parental will and broke with his family. That gave
Diana her first chance to play handmaiden to the Muse. George set
himself up in a studio in North Beach and Diana started seeing him
there after school hours, as she had done with Melvin in Cleveland,
posing and, for the first time, keeping house for an artist, Again it was
a clandestine affair, but it was made easier now by the fact that her
parents went back to Cleveland, leaving Diana with the landlady of
the apartment house where they had been living, a sweet, motherly
lady they felt they could trust. It was going to be only for a few months
but it became a permanent arrangement when her father and mother
separated. Her mother subsequently married somebody else and she
hasn't seen or heard from her since. Her father continues to send her
THE LOVEWAYS OF THE BEAT GENERATION 97
a monthly allowance. She sees him once a year when she goes back to
Cleveland for a few days. "It isn't as if I missed either one of them very
much/' Diana says. "We were never very close, anyway."
The sweet, motherly landlady turned out to be more of a madam
than a mother. The cute young couples in the building that Diana's
folks thought were honeymooners proved to be call girls and their
boy friends. Pimps would probably be the professional name for them.
Mrs. Trendel, the landlady had suggestions for Diana on how she
could improve her financial position, but Diana had other plans. "I
didn't want to antagonize her she really was a sweet soul in a way
and I had to stay on in the place so my parents wouldn't get suspicious.
I was in love with George and I wanted to help him. He wasn't taking
a cent from his folks. He didn't even want them to know where he was.
He kept moving around for a year till they got tired trying to keep
track of him. Besides, it wouldn't be long before he'd have to go into
the Army, anyway. We lived on what Dad was sending me and when
we needed more I'd go out and find some part-time work after school
hours. It got so I hardly ever got back to Mrs. Trendel's, except to
pick up my mail, my monthly check from Dad."
The Greetings from the President of the United States came to
George when Diana was two months pregnant. Diana was left alone
in the studio with a pile of unfinished canvases and a problem on her
hands. She decided to have the baby, come what may.
"I was afraid of an abortion, that's the truth. But it's also true that
I wanted the baby. After all, it was his baby, too, and we had plans to
get married when George came back."
George did not come back. He died of an infection in Korea. The
pregnancy had ended in a miscarriage in the fifth month. "I kept it
from him, about the miscarriage, till the end. I couldn't tell him.
I think they sent his body back from Korea in one of those mass re-
burials. His people never told me. They didn't even know I existed till
they learned from the War Department that he'd been sending me part
of his pay every month. I was saving it for the baby. His people didn't
offer me anything and I wouldn't have taken anything from them if
they did."
It was then that Diana hitched a ride with some friends and made
her way down to Los Angeles and finally to Venice West.
Here the same pattern repeated itself. First it was Don Berney, the
98 THE HOLY BABBARIANS
poet-painter. Don's idea of a painter's mistress turned out to be some
thing between a sainted Magdalen and a gun moll. Or rather, it was
both by turns. One day it would be flowers and orisons at the shrine of
the sainted Magdalen. The next day it would be blows and curses. The
flowers were garden flowers filched from the neighbors, but no matter.
They were presented with love and affection, and Diana accepted
them in the spirit in which they were given. The blows and curses were
harder to take, but they were just as sincere and just as well meant. At
least that is what Don always succeeded in convincing Diana of after
ward. Their reconciliations after such flare-ups were touching to behold.
"He doesn't mean it, really," Diana would explain when she turned
up with a blackened eye. "Don is high strung. When things aren't going
so well with his painting, or he gets a poem back from a magazine, he
broods about it for days. Then all of a sudden he blows up, about
everything, against everybody. And I happen to be around." Diana
happened to be around one night when a gallery man who was there
looking over Don's paintings had gone away without making any
commitment, without so much as a word of encouragement. At three
o'clock in the morning she was at our door knocking wildly and crying
hysterically, "Let me in! He's after me, he's trying to kill me!" We put
her to bed in the spare room and gave her sedatives. The next day she
vowed she would never go back to him, got a friend to sneak into the
pad and bring her some clothes, and went off to hide out with friends
in Santa Barbara. A week later she was back with Don. I learned later
that the real cause of the beating was that she had hinted about giving
up her job for a while because she was exhausted from working all day
and partying and potting all night.
When Don started gaining some success with his painting Diana left
him. "He doesn't need me any more," she said, and moved in with Paul
Mattingly, a poet who lived in a pad on one of the Venice canals, a
solitary soul who was seldom seen at parties. It was a rat's nest of a
place but Diana quickly turned it into one of the most beautiful pads
in town. She even succeeded in bringing Paul out of seclusion, and the
feeling of community began to show in his work, deepening it and
making it more communicative. "Paul is going to be the greatest living
poet in America," Diana boasted, That was like Diana. Whoever the
god of her temple was at the moment was always the greatest, and she
was proud to be in his service. But this god, like others in her life,
THE LOVEWAYS OF THE BEAT GENERATION 99
turned out to be made of clay. And in the worst possible way. There
were long stretches of time when he was completely impotent. Paul
had no objections to her finding satisfaction with others during such
times, and Diana had no scruples about it, but it led to complications.
She fell madly in love with a budding young jazz musician and went
on the road with him when he joined a traveling combo.
Today she is back in Venice West shacking up with Tom Draegen, a
talented writer who was one of the latter-day expatriates of Paris,
Majorca and Rome. Tom has been trying for years to finish a novel on
which he got a publisher's advance. He will do it, if he can kick the
heroin habit. Diana is helping him do so.
"A man can do anything if he's got the right woman to help him/'
Diana says. "Tom is going to be the greatest novelist in America
maybe in the world. The Bible says love is stronger than death. I
think it's even greater than heroin, and we're going to prove it."
Rhonda Tower: Daughter of the Regiment
That isn't her real name. A theatrical agent bestowed it on her and
it stuck. From the apple orchards of Washington State to a private
school for girls to Pasadena Playhouse to Broadway to the Champs
lyses to Rome, Vienna, Berlin and Venice, Italy, is a long, round
about way to Venice West, but that is the way Rhonda Tower made
it. First as a dramatic student with money from home, then as a
dancer with a theatrical troupe touring Europe, then as a student at
UCLA working for a library degree and finally as a young divorcee
with a monthly alimony check making it cool and groovy in the Venice
scene.
You would never pick out Rhonda Tower as the finishing school
product, which she is, or the typical beat chick, which she isn't. There
is nothing typical at all about Rhonda. In her high heels and black
formal she is the lady who is a tramp. In her toreador pants, bare legs
and sandals she is any prowling newspaper photographer's idea of a
movie starlet on a beach-front beatnik kick. Too beautiful to be
casually approached by any Venice Sunday beach visitor, Rhonda is
easily recognized by the secret stigmata known only to the beat
generation initiate. Once she feels she can "relate" to you she will
speak freely and frankly.
100 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
"I screw every chance I get. That doesn't mean I'm promiscuous.
Like I don't get many chances/'
Those who know Rhonda Tower have no trouble understanding such
apparent contradictions.
Early memories include a doting father, a jealous mother, an Indian
boy. "It's a real vivid scene. Like my mother put it up to my father to
pick between us. You're going to live with her or you're going to live
with me. You better make a choice. Just like that. Like there was a
pairing off." Rhonda is sure she did nothing to provoke such an out
burst on her mother's part. "It was intuitive on her part. You might say
she had an intuition something like this might happen." Anyway, it was
her first experience as the hypotenuse of a triangle, a role she was to
play on one or two occasions in the future, more realistically. Of the
Indian boy incident: "I was about twelve and the boy was the same
age. It was exploratory, like I wanted to show myself to him. It was
a sexual act, you might say, but it was never completed. I kept dream
ing about him for years. After my divorce I went back home and I
looked him up. We saw each other but nothing happened. We didn't
swing out. Like he was scared. By that time I was making the movie
scene. I was under contract to one of the movie companies and I was
running around with a movie crowd. I was making money and like he
didn't have any money. He had become conscious of the difference in
our social status not only money, I mean the racial thing. It made me
want him all the more but it bugged him. He was so hassled about it
that, well, he couldn't make it. I was real drugged about it. I wasn't
making any love scene at the time. I would have made it with him wild
like if we could have gotten started."
It was a dream that brought her back to her Indian boy, and she
remembered it in detail. "It was after I was divorced and I remem
bered how he always came to my bedroom window that was when
I was in high school and he'd call to me, and I'd get up and sneak
out of the house. In the dream we'd be making a swinging scene out
in the back yard and my parents didn't know anything about it. That's
how the dream would go. Well, when I went back home I slept in the
same bedroom and that night I could hear his voice sounding me, just
as clear! 'Madelaine, Madelaine.' He was calling me, just like that. I
got up in my sleep and I sleepwalked outside and I woke up there.
THE LOVEWAYS OF THE BEAT GENERATION 101
That was why I had to find him again. But after I saw him and nothing
happened, I never have had the dream again."
Her marriage had been a good marriage. "He was kind and con
siderate. He made a good living. I was with him in the act. It went
over big here and in Europe. His whole life was the stage and he's
really one of the best. We got along fine only there was one thing. I
wasn't having an orgasm/'
Her mother had had the same problem. "My mother never had an
orgasm till she was about thirty-five years old. She didn't even know a
woman had an orgasm. Like she had something wrong with her foot
once and she went to a doctor and she was talking to him and he said
like, you know, 'How's your sex life?' and so they got to talking and
she realized like that she wasn't making the scene. She went home and
started working on it and she had an orgasm. What a lousy lover my
dad was!"
Her father, Rhonda explained, had a very strict religious upbringing.
He was an only child. Sex had always been a problem with him. "He
had so much guilt feeling about it that sex was always a hassle with
him. Like my mother sounded that he had never come to her bed. She
always had to go to my father's bed. She said, 'How would you like to
live with a man and always have to go to him?' "
Her father is a doctor, and when she found she wasn't having an
orgasm with her husband Rhonda went to him and told him about it,
and said that it was ruining her marriage. "He said, 'Don't worry about
it. It's better that way. You don't need to have it and you're better off
not to have it, so forget it.' That's what he told me. Like that's how
hassled he was about sex."
Psychoanalysis was no help. "Like it cleared up a lot of things for
me, about my past, my childhood, mother and father feelings, things
like that. But I still wasn't having an orgasm. And believe me I tried."
It was an affair with a beat generation poet that finally filled Rhonda's
sail with a fair wind out of the Dry Tortugas.
"Maybe it was the poetry. Like it makes me feel warm, like I'm relat
ing. I'm with something, you know, and it makes me feel warm and
swinging. And music, jazz music. Like it loosens me up and makes me
less inhibited. And with pot man, crazy!"
After a year of psychoanalysis Rhonda says she is still quite inhibited
102 THE HOLY BARBAJEUANS
at first, "Like it's hard for me to take the first step. I stay more or less
outside of it. Poetry helps me to get into it more, and music and pot.
That way it's a wailing scene."
In the Venice West scene, Rhonda Tower is the Colonel's daughter,
the pride of the post, the daughter of the regiment. She is no hand
maiden of the Muse, yearning to wive, mother and nursemaid a genius
to fame. Nor is she panting for a gypsy lover with whom she can hit
the open road in a broken-down jalopy and suffer hunger or abuse.
Rhonda is no pushover for a hard luck story or any emotional cripple
looking for a crutch. "To make it with me a cat has to bring something
to the scene, something that promises, at least, to lead to love." Like a
keenly perceptive jazz musician listening for a sound, the sound, that
he can improvise with uninhibitedly, freely, swingingly, at last Rhonda
is developing the faculty of listening for the sound of love, the respon
sive chord. Some women possess it from the start, as a gift. Rhonda
had to learn it the hard way.
Will she ever return to the stage? "I put that scene down when I got
divorced. I realized that this was only fulfilling my mother's dream for
me for her not for me. I swung over to my father's scene then. My
father was always sort of the intellectual of the family. So I decided to
go to college and get educated. I tried to make that scene and it was a
shuck, too. Now I'm trying to find myself and make my own scene."
Barbara Lane: Refugee from Squareville
Barbara Lane's story is brief and single-pointed.
"It isn't art or intellectualism, it isn't genius that's got me hooked.
It's the life. Do you have any idea what it's like out there? Sure, it
isn't Main Street any more. Sinclair Lewis' Gopher Prairie is a thing
of the past. So is Zenith City, for that matter. Squareville is modern
now. It's got network television and Life magazine culture. You can
tune in the Metropolitan opera on the radio. You can stay out late and
come home drunk once in a while without being hounded out of town.
You can play around a little, if you're discreet about it, without too
much talk. The drugstores carry paperback editions of Plato and
Lin Yutang.
"But the tension! Wages go up three cents and coffee goes up ten. So
they pipe sweet Muzak into the supermarkets and you go around in a
THE LOVEWAYS OF THE BEAT GENERATION 103
daze loading up that cute little chromium-plated cart without looking
at the price tags. And let most of it rot in the refrigerator before you
get to it. Last year's car is out of style before you finish paying for the
tail fins. It's a rat race. Who's got time to laze around in the sand for
an hour, or take a quiet walk by the ocean in the evening, or watch a
sunset?
"Here I can get away from it for a while, at least evenings and week
ends. I can do without things. God! do you know what a relief that
is? Not to have to keep up with anybody. Nobody to show off for. The
people at the office, they don't even know where I live. I tell them I
live in Santa Monica. That's close enough, and it sounds respectable.
It's got the same telephone exchange as Venice, so nobody suspects
anything.
"This is the one place I've ever lived where you can take your skin
off and sit around in your bare bones, if you want to. Only the rich,
surrounded by acres of land and iron fences, can enjoy anything like
that kind of privacy. That's what I mean by being hip. And staying cool."
Barbara Lane is part time square and part time hipster, but her heart
is in Venice West. "In town, at the office, I work. Here I live," she will
tell you. "It's like having one foot on each side of the tracks. But that's
the only way I can make it."
Barbara had everything, as they say. Family background, money,
education, travel. When her family thought it was time for her to
settle down with a good husband and raise a family, she went along
with the idea. The man was her own choice; he was good to her, he
provided well. They had all the right things, went to all the right
places, knew all the right people. When she got pregnant she knew it
was now or never. "I just picked up one morning and ran. I didn't
know where I was going. All I knew was I wanted out. I didn't take a
thing with me. The only place I could think to fly to was Mexico. There
I got a divorce. And an abortion. I learned a lot in Mexico. I didn't
have much money so I lived in a small town on the west coast. It was
like dying and being born again. The only things I've found to like
about America I found first in Mexico, strangely enough. I mean jazz
music, good books, uninhibited sex, relaxed living. Like Jack Kerouac
says in On the Road, Mexico is a whole nation of hipsters!"
Barbara returned to the States when her money ran out. She found
Venice when the gas ran out. "I drove up with friends I'd made in Mex-
104 THE HOLY BARBAKIANS
ico. Visitors from San Francisco. On Windward and Main, in Venice, we
ran out of gas. It was a question of buying gas or staying where we
were. I'd never seen Venice before, although Yd been living in Los
Angeles for years. I liked what I saw. So did my friends. We found a
couple of cheap rooms and moved in together. Slept three in a bed
for weeks till we had enough money to get separate apartments. My
friend, her boy friend and me. No complications. I got a job in a
Beverly Hills lawyer's office and my friends went on to San Francisco.
I stayed on in Venice.
"The only time I saw my ex-husband again he spotted me in
Beverly Hills one day when I was coming home in this beat-up old car
I drive back and forth, and followed me all the way to Venice. I didn't
know till he knocked on the door. Said he was still in love with me and
would I consider coming back to him. When he saw the way I was
living something clicked in him, like he was remembering something
he'd always wanted and missed out on somehow, and do you know
what? He wanted to move in with me! I said Okay, Bill I was just
testing him Okay. But you'll have to leave all that other stuff behind,
the way I did. The fishtail fins and the made-to-order shoes and Coun
tess Mara ties. Those precious gold clubs of yours. Dinner at Mike
Romanoff's. Those slick magazines we never read and used to leave
lying around to be seen by our friends. All those nice opera records.
The hunting prints in your den. And the goddamn phony spinning
wheel lamp
"He said *Yes,' and I thought he meant it. That was a year ago and I
haven't heard from him since."
Sherry McCall: Link Between Two Worlds
For the Venice West beatster, Sherry McCall is the missing link with
the World War II forties. The twenties and thirties he can read about
in books. But the home-front scene of the forties is still, for the most
part, undocumented in print except in a few novels, 1
Sherry McCall is beat from in front, as the bop jive boys of the for
ties would have put it. Sherry has had it. Everything. She was there
when the passbook to a wartime shack-up was a book of ration stamps.
At Sherry's place you can still hear the old 78 Alco record of Earl
Robinson singing the song he wrote to Alfred Hays's Porterhouse Lucy,
the black market steak. 2
THE LOVEWAYS OF THE BEAT GENERATION 105
Temptation Smith is steak mad, and he says:
Steak! Steak! I got to have me red corpuscles.
I dreams of it. I wakes up in the middle of the night
and I talks to myself. And I say to myself,
It's a conspiracy. There must be a cow left over
from the last war, Look at me fingers, no calcium.
That's what I need, calcium. With fried onions!
Now this is my story and the meaning is plain
You can't ride to victory on the gravy train. . . .
Porterhouse Lucy, the black market steak,
Porterhouse Lucy, Lord the trouble she make.
Her kind ought to be feedin' Hitler's army.
You got a date with Mary Four Freedoms this very evening.
Besides, you ain't that hungry
Sherry kept away from Temptation Smith and Porterhouse Lucy.
She skimped on sugar, collected junk iron in the scrap drives, bought
Victory Bonds and Freedom Bonds, rounded up Bundles for Britain,
and dreamed about the world of the Four Freedoms that was to
follow the war to end war, the world that Comrade Stalin and Comrade
Churchill and Comrade Roosevelt had agreed upon at Teheran and
Casablanca. She still had the pamphlets and the clippings to show for
it, and framed copies of Norman Rockwell's "Four Freedoms" drawings
stuck away somewhere in one of the half-dozen trunks that cluttered
up her Venice West bedroom.
In a North American Aviation plant Sherry met Johnny McCall.
Johnny wanted to get a crack at the Nazis and Fascists, and when he
was drafted he went, even though he might have gotten deferment
because he was a defense worker. He was older than Sherry by a dec
ade and had gotten in a few good licks against them in Spain as a
member of one of the international brigades, but this time it was
different. Uncle Sam and Uncle Joe Stalin were on the same side and
the combination was invincible. Sherry and Johnny had been living
together and a week before he left for basic training she married him.
She had never married anybody before but at the time, she explains,
everybody was doing it. It was the patriotic thing to do, the Progres
sive thing to do, and both meant the same thing in those days.
Johnny never got to fire a shot at either Hitler's or Mussolini's
legions. The War Department somehow found out about his Loyalist
106 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
war record and sent him to the Pacific theater instead. There is a little
packet of letters somewhere in that mess of stuff piled up in the bed
room and the last-dated one of them is from a war buddy of Johnny's.
She doesn't remember now what became of the War Department
telegram.
Anyway, all his books are still around, piled up on the floor and in
the closets. An almost complete set of the red-covered books of V. I.
Lenin. An old copy of The Communist Manifesto, heavily underscored
and full of penciled notes in the margins. Volumes of letters and papers
of the Presidents of the United States, which Sherry had given Johnny
during the honeymoon of the United Front when Abraham Lincoln
and Thomas Jefferson were saints in the calendar of the Communist
Political Association and even George Washington squeaked into it on
his Revolutionary War record. Everything Howard Fast had ever writ
ten, and Albert Maltz and Grace Lumpkin and Meridel Le Sueur and
Sean O'Casey. And the Russian novelists and an anthology of prole
tarian poets and old copies of New Masses, The Anvil and Partisan
Review. All mixed in with or buried under piles of old clothes, torn silk
lamp shades, broken umbrellas, half-spilled-out boxes of Christmas tree
ornaments, hatboxes crammed with old shoes, phonograph records,
finger paints and medicine bottles. Children's toys in every state of dis
repair were always scattered over the floors and a hazard underfoot.
Sherry had never married again but she had four kids, none of them
her own. Two had been left with her and never called for, and two
she had borrowed and never returned, as near as I could make out
from her stories. Sherry loved children. Besides, they were the most
effective insurance she had ever discovered against starvation. No
county welfare department would ever let a mother and four children
go hungry or homeless.
When Johnny McCalFs buddy, the one who sent her the letter, came
back crippled from the war, Sherry lived with him for a time on his
GI bill in one of the UCLA housing units for veterans, his wife in name
to make it cool with the VA's office. Since then she had lived with other
veterans in similar arrangements. They were all Johnny to her and she
was still Sherry McCall.
From veterans' housing shack-ups to Venice West was only a short
step for Sherry. It puzzled her why she wasn't being received hos
pitably in the pads. They weren't so different, as far as she could see,
THE LOVEWAYS OF THE BEAT GENERATION 107
from the bohemians of the matchstick and tar paper apartments of
veterans' housing and their informal, freewheeling domestic relations.
Besides they needed her, she figured, to give direction and a social
goal to their youthful revolt.
"A Stalinist. An unreconstructed Stalinist," was Angel Dan Davies*
verdict.
Sherry never lost an opportunity to declare her adherence to the new
Khrushchev party line, but to Angel, Stalinism was an incurable
disease. "I went all through that with my mother and father," Angel
said. "They brought me up to believe that the working class was the
hope of the world and all the time they were falling for the Stalinist
dictatorship. Like IVe worked with the working class," he told Sherry,
"right next to them, at the workbench and in the shipping room, and
IVe walked with them on the picket line and I wouldn't trust the future
of the smog problem to them let alone the hydrogen bomb. Let some
slob of a newspaper publisher start a crusade against beards and
sandals and I wouldn't put it past the people, these world savers of
yours and my parents', to come and bomb us out of here, the way
they're doing to the Negroes in the South right now. No, man, I'm not
the people worshiper I used to be."
"But what are your values, your positive values?" Sherry kept asking
all of them.
"Like I want to love everybody," Itchy Gelden told her quietly.
"Even the haters and the war-makers on both sides of the iron cur
tain. And maybe if I can love enough, and put it into my poems and
into my paintings, maybe it'll spread out like. And if enough of us
make it that way and it helps to transform a few people here and a
few people there, then somebody on this side is going to refuse to
make their fuckin' bombs for them, and somebody on the other side is
going to refuse to fire their missiles for them "
"And if they don't?-"
"Then we'll be the last ones who ever did anything positive about it
and it'll be easier to die when the bomb drops. Like me, I'd rather die
loving than hating, that's all, and I'm not any happier hating one side
than the other side. Like let *em put everybody in the Army, and let
*em occupy each other's countries, like they did after the last war in
Germany and Japan, and in a few years they won't be able to aim a
gun in any direction without hitting their own little bastards on the
108 THE HOLY BABBABIANS
street. Let "em fight their fuckin wars backward, starting with the
occupations, man, and they'll never get to the shooting.
Sherry would throw her hands up in confusion and dismay and go
back to her knitting. She was always knitting something for somebody.
It was something she started during the war, for Johnny and his bud
dies at the front, and she has never been able to stop. That, and the
fact that you could always be sure of a meal at her house "It's on the
county," she would say endeared her to some of the beat, especially
the youngsters who kept dribbling in from here and there, always
broke and in need of a warm sweater in the cold, foggy winters by the
sea or a hot meal now and then. There was always something they
could find to wear or help outfit a pad among the household junk and
wearing apparel Sherry had piled up all over the house the accumu
lation of years of housekeeping with one Johnny or another.
The Electronic Ear:
Some Oral Documents
You make it any way you can
(The Scene: Angel Dan Dames 9 pad. Angel has just been served
with an eviction notice, after six months nonpayment of rent. He
is discussing the situation with Itchy Dave Gelden, Chris Nelson,
Chuck Bennison and Dean Murchison, a visitor from San Fran
cisco who was formerly a Greenwich Villager.)
DAVE: Man, what a drag. I thought the cat was satisfied with you paint
ing the outside of the house for him.
ANGEL: Sure, man, but it's six months now. And I haven't even finished
painting the place. Guess I got kind of hung up. Fact is I had .to use
up most of the paint painting my pictures.
DAVE: That comes first.
ANGEL: Naturally. But what I mean is, what do I do now? What do I
tell the cat?
CHUCK: Tell him anything. Tell him you've sold a picture and you ex
pect to collect for it next month, or something. Tell him your publisher
is in Europe and owes you six months' royalties. He's a businessman,
he'll understand a thing like that. You know, accounts receivable.
DAVE: You could take a thing like that to the bank, man, and get a
loan on it I understand.
109
110 THE HOLY BABBARIANS
ANGEL: Yeh, if youve got something to show for it. No kidding, what
do I do?
DEAN: I wouldn't do anything. Sit tight. Take it cool
ANGEL: But suppose I don't want the heat coming around they
might not like some of the books IVe got here, or smell pot or some
thing.
DAVE: That's right. (He broods silently for a minute.) Did you say you
had a roach stashed away somewhere?
(Angel fishes around back of some books on the shelf and comes up
with the charred half end of a marijuana cigarette. He lights up,
takes a drag on it and passes it around. Dave has been going over a
pile of jazz records. He finds what he 9 s looking for and puts it on the
box. Thelonious Monk's Brilliant Corners.)
DEAN (Stretched out full length on the floor., relaxed and reminiscent):
I lived in Manhattan once on nothing a week.
DAVE: What did you do, man, beg?
DEAN: No.
DAVE: You're an animal, man, you have to eat.
DEAN: Well, I scrounged a place to live. I lived in a different place every
week. I would go to the landlord and say I want this place and I can't
pay you any money till next week. I might have to hit ten or twelve
places before I found a landlord who would let me live in the place
and I would live in it for a week or so and when he came around for
the rent I would be gone. I didn't have anything to move in and noth
ing to move out. I had two pairs of dungarees, two nylon shirts and a
pair of sandals. (Long pause) But I wasn't happy. Didn't get a damn
thing done. No painting, no writing, nothing.
CHRIS: I saw a cat once carrying a big cardboard box, and I said,
"What you got there, man?" And he said, "I'm carrying my bed around
on my back." He used to make it up to Hoffman's at the Red Barn, and
sleep on the stairs. He said you shouldn't think ahead more than a half
hour, you know, live in the present.
CHUCK: Like I say, now is the time. This is the only moment we have,
now. Right at this split second. Past, present and future all in one.
ANGEL: You can talk man, like you've got it made. Your old lady's pad,
you can always go back there. But I've got all this stuff here, and Mar-
got laid up with the flu, and the kids. What'll I tell the landlord? -
THE ELECTRONIC EAR: SOME ORAL DOCUMENTS 111
DAVE: He's a Christian, let him share with his fellow man. Like they
say it's good for the soul.
DEAN: I wouldn't tell him nothin*. I'd move out and to hell with the
joint. YouVe had six months of it. It's time to give some other landlord
a chance. There's plenty of pads with FOR RENT signs hanging out.
ANGEL: Yeh, but you've got to be able to pay at least one month's rent
in advance.
DAVE: IVe got some loot. It's my next month's rent but I'll lay it on
you, if you think that'll do it for you.
ANGEL; I already sounded him on that, but he wants all the back rent,
six months. And besides, he's already served this eviction notice.
DAVE: Hey, I got an idea. Ill move into your pad and you can move
into mine. And when the agent comes around my pad looking for the
rent, tell him I'm working in Detroit, in one of the auto factories ex
pert consulting job, or something fancy like that and I'll be back
with the loot in a couple months, and you're taking care of the place
for me so no one will bust in and damage his fuckin' property. If he
raises a stink you can lay a month's rent on him
ANGEL: But if I do that, what'll you do for rent to pay my landlord.
He'll want at least a month's rent in advance.
DAVE: I'll tell him I'll finish painting the outside of the joint for him.
It looks like hell now, half fresh paint and the other half peeling off
like old wallpaper. He'll be able to rent it this way.
(General approval of the idea all around)
ANGEL: Hey, you know something? It might work!
(NoiE: It did.)
War for Survival
(The Scene: Chuck Bennisons pad. It was once a small liquor
store, later converted into a studio by a maverick architect who
used it as a hideaway workshop for some wild ideas that more
practical builders have since taken over and made fortunes on. He
put a lot of work and materials into making the place livable, left
it all behind him when he moved. Others left kitchen equipment,
furniture and wall decorations, passing the pad on from friend to
friend, but it still lacks bath or shower. It is late Sunday afternoon
and Chuck has just gotten up after an all-night pot party. The
112 THE HOLY BABBABIANS
place is very untidy. From a shelflike mezzanine under the "high
ceiling., which the architect used as a storage place and which has
since been made into sleeping quarters, reached by a ladder, came
soprano snores some chick left over from the party, still asleep
there. Clem Peters, a young man recently out of college and now
making the Venice West scene, has dropped in to discuss a prob
lem. He has just been called up for military service.)
CHUCK: (from behind the kitchen screen, puttering around with the
business of preparing breakfast): So what's the problem, Clem, don't
you want to do your duty to your country? See the world? Prepare for
a future in a trade of your own choosing? What's the matter, don't you
read the army posters?
CLEM (in no mood for banter): I didn't sleep all night. I called up Dad
in St. Paul. I talked with Mom, too. They both think it's all right, since
there isn't any war on. It would kill them if I tried to make CO, you
know, conscientious objector, or anything like that. You were in it,
weren't you, during the war? I know it's something I have to make up
my own mind about but I thought if I could talk to someone. . . .
CHUCK: Just tell me what you've decided to do and I'll tell you all the
good reasons why you should do it. That's what you want, isn't it?
(I can see Clerns haggard face working with exasperation. He
gives me a wry smile.)
CLEM: I've decided to go to Washington and bash in Parson Dulles*
head with a Gideon Bible.
CHUCK: You can't. You're a pacifist.
CLEM: I've got a rich uncle who can get me out of it.
CHUCK: You can't accept it. Remember what you said about means
and ends.
CLEM: I'll take it on the lam. Hide out in Mexico.
CHUCK: Escape from reality? What'll your analyst think?
CLEM: All right. I've decided to kill myself. Know any good ways?
(There is a knock on the door. I go to the door and let in Angel
Dan Davies. He throws himself on the floor mattress in a spread-
eagle posture of complete relaxation. I tell him about Clem's prob
lem.)
ANGEL (to Clem): Don't look at me. I can't give you any advice. Be
sides, I'm a convicted felon.
CLEM (startled): Yeh, what did you do?
THE ELECTRONIC EAR: SOME ORAL DOCUMENTS 113
ANGEL: I refused to register. That was in '48. Then everybody said to
me, "Why make a case out of it? The war's over. You might as well
register/' But I said no, so they threw me in jail. I was in six weeks.
CLEM: What reason did you give them?
ANGEL: I said it was against my principles. To register was to give
assent to war. I said the more you give in to them, the more corrupt
you become. YouVe got to draw the line somewhere, wherever you
can. I still bought cigarettes and paid sales tax. I still rode the munic
ipal subways and some people I knew in New York at that time
didn't even do that. I know a man in New York who lives on twenty-
five dollars a month he earns as a janitor. Fifteen of it he sends home
to his mother. The other ten he keeps only because he has like dentist
expenses. He lives on garbage. On fruits and vegetables the markets
throw out in the alley. He won't eat in anyone's house because he
knows he can't offer food to them, they won't eat it. So he'll never take
anything from you. Unless he is totally exhausted, then he'll accept a
glass of milk.
(Chuck emerges from behind the screen with coffee and toast and
a large platter of scrambled eggs.)
CHUCK (with a malicious grin): Milk, anyone? Garbage?
CLEM: Well, what happened. Six weeks, is that all?
ANGEL: I decided to register and they let me out. They stopped bother
ing me, that's all. They didn't want me. They just wanted me to regis
ter. I was the first case under the second draft law in New York. They
didn't know what to do with me; they hadn't received any instructions
from Washington. CO's were supposed to be handled differently than
under the old wartime law. All they wanted me to do was quietly
register and get out of their hair.
CLEM (eagerly): Do you think I could do you think it might work
that way in my case if I?
ANGEL: Who knows? Like, who can ever tell what the bastards will
do? You've got to take your chances, man. First you got to ask yourself
why.
CHUCK (with a mouthful of eggs): I got a suspicion the sonofabitch is
one of those twenty-years-of-treason Democrats, like Harry Truman.
He doesn't like Ike.
(Bob Rickles drops in, a quiet, soft-spoken young man who had
heard about Venice West from Henry Miller and others up in Big
114 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
Sur and is making the rounds of the pads with an eye to settling
down for a while. He gets the drift of the conversation and joins in.)
BOB: This friend of mine who's building a home in Big Sur told them that
he would only go into the Army under two conditions. Either he would
live by himself in a tent and only show up for exercises, when he had
to, or that he must be sent into battle immediately, because he wanted
to fight. He got out of it right away as a psychotic schizophrenic
with delusions of persecution.
CLEM: How did they figure that?
BOB: He had the hunter instinct in him.
ANGEL: Crazy, man! They wouldn't let him into the Army because he
had the killing instinct! Too much!
BOB: They don't want to deal with people like that.
CHUCK: They try to conceal the killing part of it with all kinds of
euphemisms. You don't shoot people, you accomplish a mission or take
an objective. Even the gun they give you isn't a gun, it's a weapon.
Gun sounds too much like gangsters.
BOB: Yeh, they try to pretty up the picture. This guy was too bald for
them. Too frank. Anyway, it worked.
ANGEL: I understand the bed- wetting bit still works. And the homo
sexual bit still works.
BOB: I know another fellow he had a much more difficult time, be
cause he had to go through four hours of examinations, everything
from Rorschachs to bending down and testing the tension in his rec
tum. But he was a student of psychology. He'd been giving such tests
himself, so he knew what to do.
CLEM: Well, what happened to him?
BOB: He also got off. Schizophrenic with delusions of persecution.
CHUCK: You know, I think abnormal psychology should be a required
course in all universities from now on. Because that enables you to
know how to simulate these symptoms. It's just like the Stanislavski
school of acting you make it real to yourself so you can get it over
to an audience.
BOB: Well, all these things exist within everyone schizophrenia,
delusions of persecution it's only a question of degree and balance.
It's like my friend said, he wasn't lying, he was just exaggerating.
CLEM: I don't think I could get away with it. Or any of these things.
I'm just not a good liar, I guess or exaggerator. I'd give myself away.
THE ELECTRONIC EAR: SOME ORAL DOCUMENTS 115
(Angel gets up, with a wave of the hand says, "Later" and leaves.
Bob follows him.)
CLEM: I know it's really up to me, myself. What I mean, it hit me so
suddenly I haven't had time to think, to ask myself
(The chick has gotten up and is looking down from aloft. What she
has pulled on over herself does not and is probably not calculated
to conceal the fact that she has a very beautiful young body and
isn't the least bit ashamed of it.)
CHUCK: Like it's a war for survival, like they say. You got to make up
your mind which part of yourself you want to survive.
(The chick descends the ladder and nods to us. Chuck makes no
move to introduce her. I get up to go and move toward the door.)
CHUCK: Wait a minute, I'm going with you. (to the chick) Marian, this
is Clem Peters, Clem's got a problem. See what you can do for him.
(Chuck and I exit together, leaving Clem and chick alone in the
pad.)
Would you rather be buried., cremated or eaten by cannibals?
(The Scene: Itchy Dave Gelderis pad. One of those slow-motion,
cool parties is in progress, with low-decible, cool West Coast jazz
on the phonograph, everybody relaxed, saying little and seldom
and low keyed. You can sit for two hours on the -floor, back propped
against the wall, and as long as you keep your eyes closed most of
the time nobody will violate your privacy. I couldn't guess how
many are in the place. It is very dimly lighted by a few forty-watt
bulbs subdued by almost opaque drawing-paper shades painted
with oils in a somber key. It is one of the larger store-front pads,
high ceiling and a closed-in mezzanine that serves as private sleep
ing quarters. Every foot of floor space is sleeping quarters, for that
matter, for anyone who cant or wont go home or comes properly
recommended from the pads of San Francisco or anywhere else in
the country. Certain key pieces of knowledge or information will
serve as credentials. The password is an easy familiarity with jazz
and jive talk.
Richard, Tanya's husband, had a death in the family and the
funeral was this afternoon. Most of the Venice West people knew
the deceased quite well and some of them have received favors
from him, but no one except Itchy Dave Gelden showed up at the
funeral. Tanya is present. Richard is spending the evening with
116 THE HOLY BABBAJEUANS
members of his family, and she is frankly puzzled. Why didn't
they come to the funeral? She turns to Angel Dan Dames.)
TANYA: Like you're always saying ritual, how important it is for a cul
ture that it should have its rituals. Isn't a funeral a ritual, too?
ANGEL: Now don't go getting hung up behind the scene, Tanya. It isn't
as if there was anything personal about it. We all loved Uncle Amos.
But like it wasn't our scene. Dave went (He turns to Itchy who is
lying face down on one of the mattresses, his arms over his head)
what was it like, Dave?
(Dave turns over slowly.)
DAVE: It was like hell, man, don't bug me you know what kind of
a scene it is it was a fuckin' farce. It was a circus.
TANYA: A Baptist funeral. It wasn't nearly as much of a production as
a Jewish funeral I once went to.
DAVE: Jewish funerals are a farce too, a carnival, if you ask me.
TANYA (to Angel): If there had been time you might have written
something for it, Dan, like you did for Dave and Gilda's wedding.
(pause) No, I guess they wouldn't have wanted that.
ANGEL: I couldn't have done it, anyway. You can't write rituals for
other people, only for yourself and your own. Like every culture has its
own rituals and I guess I guess we're a different culture. Maybe
that's it. (slowly, half to himself, with the awe of a new discovery) Yeh,
man, maybe that's it. We're a separate culture.
(Bob Rickles gets the drift of it and moves over to join the con
versation.)
BOB: We were talking about that up in Big Sur just before I left. What
we would do for a funeral service if someone died, and nobody seemed
to know. Everybody pretended not to care, yet everybody was con
cerned about it, as if somebody ought to do something about it. Like
is it better to be buried, cremated or eaten by cannibals?
DAVE: Buried wouldn't be bad if they just threw me in the ground and
I could be fertilizer and being cremated like is just a waste of time
because why should they go to the trouble of burning me and if I'm
eaten by cannibals at least I make food for somebody. Direct food. I
mean, it doesn't have to go through the metabolism of the earth.
(Gilda has been lying beside Dave, seemingly uninterested in the
conversation, Now she turns over on her back.)
THE ELECTRONIC EAB: SOME OBAL DOCUMENTS 117
GILDA (to Dave): But suppose it was somebody you loved.
DAVE: I would give it to a medical school probably.
GILDA: Even if it was somebody you loved?
TANYA: Don't you think you would feel any attachment?
DAVE: I would feel revulsion if anything.
TANYA: But you'd go to the funeral, wouldn't you?
ANGEL (corning to the rescue): I would write a funeral ritual, and we'd
all go to the funeral.
BOB: But what to do with the body, that's the question.
DAVE: What's the difference, man? It's a rock, a stone, or like I say, if
it's if the cat is a cannibal let him eat it like that's his culture.
ANGEL: If a culture has a ritual, a real living ritual, it doesn't matter
what you do with the body. The only thing that matters is what the
living make out of it out of the fact of death and that means the
fact of life, the meaning of life.
BOB: That's the question. That's what we were talking about up in Big
Sur. We all agreed that what we needed was a funeral ritual, but what
would it be like?
ANGEL: I don't know. Marriage is one thing. Mating. Love. I can do
something with that. I can understand it. But dying wow! death
I don't know what Yd. do with it. Like I don't even know what it is,
what its function is supposed to be, for the individual, for society. Sure,
I know all the answers, all the old answers, but I can't accept a single
one of them, really, not mentally, not emotionally. And I don't know
anyone anyone I've ever talked with or read in a book who knows
any more. Unless he's so used to shucking himself that hell accept any
thing, as long as he doesn't have to raise any of the real questions. Like
everything they ever told us about death and the afterlife, about heaven
and hell and all the rest of it, is just one big shuck. And I don't know
even how to start thinking about it so how am I going to make it
new? How am I going to create a new ritual for it?
(In a far corner of the room one of the guests has started a little
light finger tapping on a pair of bongo drums. Somebody else begins
piping a tune on a recorder. The record on the box is allowed to run
itself out and everybody is quiet, listening to the impromptu im
provisations of the bongo and recorder. To me and those in our
little circle it lias the eerie haunting sound of a dirge. Only the words
are missing.)
118 THE HOLY BAKBARIANS
Anybody want to be God?
(The Scene: Same as above, an hour later. A Let's Pretend con
versation game has started. It is a hipster adaptation of the Socratic
dialogue with Talmudic and Scholastic elements in it, and the
inevitable touch of Zen Buddhism. Chuck Bennison has joined the
circle. He seats himself on a hassock with a lamp behind his head,
the lamp shade simulating a halo.)
CHUCK: Dig me, man, I'm God!
TANYA: What have you done with Uncle Amos?
CHUCK: Ah, Amos, mah good and faithful servant. Walked upright be
fore de Lawd. Loved mercy, walked humbly how the hell does it
go? Any of you cats got a Bible?
TANYA: Some God, he doesn't even know his own Holy Word.
ANGEL: Make up your mind, man I mean God. Are you Jehovah,
Adonai, Elohim are you Spinoza's God or Hillel's or Aquinas' or
Billy Graham's or Uncle Tom's?
CHUCK: I resign.
(He yanks the lamp shade off the stand and plops it down on
AngeTs head.)
ANGEL: I don't want to be God.
CHUCK: You're elected. I make you Pope. Peter, Jesus, God. The works.
ANGEL: Then what are you?
CHUCK: I'm Satan, Mephistopheles, the Devil. I'm your alter ego.
Everything is chaos, all the pieces are lying around in the big store
house of Tohu and Bohu Incorporated and you're the Great Producer
ANGEL (shouting): Liar, and Prince of Liars! You know it's all a big
shuck. Like if I'm God now, I'm God of Now. Not yesterday or last
year or the last millennium or fifty millenniums.
(He stands up and spreads his arms in a godlike gesture of com
mand.)
ANGEL: I abolish Time. I abolish Death no, wait, I take that back.
Abolish death? Make everything everybody immortal? No. Like
the idea is horrifying to me.
CHUCK: If you create death then you permit murder. Life feeds on life.
You put the power of life and death in every man's hand, his own life
and everybody else's.
ANGEL: Then I create Justice. Checkmate, Satan! Man is created with
certain inalienable rights how does it go? life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness.
THE ELECTRONIC EAR: SOME ORAL DOCUMENTS 119
DAVE: That's a shuck too, man. He's got life only as long as you, God,
want him to have it, and in the end he always loses it. He's got liberty
if he fights for it, and sometimes he has to give his life for it. Hap
piness? He doesn't even know what it is. Like the cat is drugged be
hind the scene nine times out of ten every time he tries to decide what
he wants, what he really wants, to make him happy. It's a drag, man, a
sad drag. Why don't you put all the goodies in his hand and say: Here,
man, help yourself. You want to live forever? Crazy! And you, you over
there, you want to die? early, late fine! Make it your way. Like
everybody makes it his own way, the best way he knows how. That
would be freedom, man.
(Tanya gets up and does a little marching dance, pretending to
carry a placard like a striking picket and shouting "Freiheit! Frei
heit!" Others take up the cry.)
ANGEL (trying to make himself heard above the din): All right! All
right! You've made it. It's all yours. I abdicate. Anyone who wants the
job can have it.
BOB: Wait a minute. You can't do that.
ANGEL: Why not? I'm God, ain't I?
BOB: All right. Then you've got to have a reason an infallible reason.
ANGEL: I abdicate because I don't believe any more. I'm an atheist. I
don't believe in the existence of man!
CHUCK: Then the world is abolished and we're back again where we
started. Man no longer exists God has become an atheist and no
longer believes in the existence of man. God no longer exists there is
no man to invent him. We're back with old Tohu and Bohu, Inc., again.
Anybody else want to take a crack at the God business?
(As if in miraculous answer to his summons y the door opens and
Ron Daley walks in well, not just like that he opens the door a
crack and peers in, opens it a little wider and looks around, then he
tiptoes in and stands by the door waiting for an invitation. We all
know his habits and beckon to him to come in and join us. It is Rons
little private ritual. He is the Zen philosopher of Venice West. I
explain to him what the game is and tell him the job of God is open.
He sits down y gracefully, in his fairy way not swishy, although he
is homosexual just gracefully in the yogi posture.)
ANGEL: Go on, create a world.
RON: What for? What do you need it for, man? A Zen master once gave
120 THE HOLY BARBABIANS
this sermon to his monks: "You are all like those who, while immersed
in the ocean, extend their hands crying for water."
(He takes a book from his pocket and reads.)
Zen recognizes nothing from which we are saved. We are from the
first already "saved" in all reality, and it is due to our ignorance of the
fact that we talk about being saved or delivered or freed. So with
"escape," etc., Zen knows no traps or complexities from which we are
to escape. The traps or complexities are our own creation. We find
ourselves, and when we realize this, we are what we have been from
the very beginning of things.
(Other conversations in the room break off and everybody moves
over to join our circle. Ron continues reading passages from his book.)
We think Nature is brute fact, entirely governed by the laws of ab
solute necessity; and there is no room for freedom to enter here. But
Zen would say that Nature's necessity and Man's freedom are not such
divergent ideas as we imagine, but that necessity is freedom and free
dom is necessity. . . .
Our inner life is complete when it merges into Nature and becomes
one with it. ...
The whole universe which means Nature ceases to be "hostile" to us as
we had hitherto regarded it from our selfish point of view. Nature, in
deed, is no more something to be conquered and subdued. It is the
bosom whence we come and whither we go. 8
(He puts the book back in his pocket. Dave gets up and puts Art
Peppers Modern Art record on the box. The circle breaks up into
twosomes and threesomes in a low conversational buzz. The bongo
drums pick up on Art Peppers rhythm section with lightly tapped
counterpoint. Everything is cool again.)
The man with the gun
(Scene: Ron Daley's pad. A made-over garage. Ronny has fitted
it out with redwood panel walls and laid straw mats over the
cement floor wall to wall. Two mattresses on the floor are covered
with Japanese fabrics and strewn with cylindrical and three-cor
nered cushions of pastel colors. The bookcases are boards and glass
bricks. Two lamps hang from the ceiling, parchment lantern shades
of modern design derived from the Japanese. The components of
the hi-fi are unenclosed. In one corner* a triangular private shrine
THE ELECTRONIC EAR: SOME ORAL DOCUMENTS 121
holding a single rosebud in an Oriental vase, over it a rice paper
print of the Buddha in contemplation, a Buddha of Zen simplicity.
Partitioned off with bamboo and rice paper screens is a tiny kitchen
ette, all the utensils neatly hung on the wall, copperware, shiny
bright, and the dishes set up on the shelves, a spartan kitchen,
clean, monastically clean.
Ronny is lying on the bed, swathed in bandages. He was bru
tally beaten up by vice squad officers during questioning at the
police station after a raid on the Casbah, a gathering place for
homosexuals, and is out on bail. Gilda Lewis has moved in to do
nursing duty. She is busy in the kitchen making some broth for
Ronny. He is telling me about the incident. His voice, always low
and modulated, is almost a whisper.)
RON: It wasn't like anything I had ever experienced before, Larry. His
eyes were hazel, with little golden flecks in them. I must have been
pretty high at the time and I guess he was, too. But it wasn't the pot
altogether, I'm store of that. It wasn't physical so much as it was spir
itual, something inside us or outside, out there, who knows what it
is, really? drawing us together. And he was talking. Art. Music.
Philosophy. Poetry. I can't recall what he said, exactly. It wasn't what
he was saying. It was a kind of spiritual presence. I felt as if I had
finally found someone who was like that other dark side of me, myself,
and I was looking at myself as in a mirror. And discovering myself in
ways I had never known before. I'm sure it isn't a unique experience.
Others must have known it I remember vaguely having read about
such a meeting once in was it Shelley? Or something in Gide?
(Gilda comes in with a cup of broth. I help to prop him while she
spoon-feeds him, slowly and very gently. His face is badly cut up
under the bandages. The doctor told me as he was leaving that he
might be badly disfigured for life. After the broth he continues with
his story. So far he has said nothing about the police beating, only
about the young man he met at the Casbah that night and what
happened before the raid.)
RON: There was something in his voice that I remember. It seemed to
be coming from somewhere far out. And I was enveloped in it, like a
palpable thing. Like he was an extension of myself . . . the mystical
being. ... the Other . . . Narcissus' reflection in the pool come to life
and assuming an existence of its own. And yet separate and different
in some wonderful, mystical way. . . . Something I had always dreamed
might happen to me. . . ,
122 THE HOLY BABBARIANS
(He goes on like this for some time, his voice trails off into silence.
He may be asleep. About the police beating nothing now or at
any time since then, to me or anyone that I know of. Angel Dan
Davies is at the door with Dave Gelden and Rhonda Tower, the
chick Angel has been making it with lately. They take off their san
dals and leave them at the door before entering, as Ron always does.
Rhonda has bad news. The prominent lawyer she knows has refused
to take Rons case.)
RHONDA: You could have knocked me over with a feather. Like I was
sure he'd take the case. He's taken other cases where there wasn't any
money. Liquor cases and labor cases, things like that. But when I told
him how the vice squad goons beat up Ronny and the homosexual
thing man, he just flipped. What kind of a friend was I, trying to
drag him into a scene like this!
DAVE: Like I told you, you were wasting your time going to a cat like
that. He's a square, man, and you don't catch a square sticking his
neck out.
RHONDA (to me): Do you know any hip lawyers? (7 shake my head and
smile) See, you've got to go to a square in a case like this, whether you
like or not. They've got you over a barrel.
GILDA: Even the doctor was afraid to come when I told him what it
was, and where it was.
ANGEL: It's like money. Did you ever try sounding a square for money?
He'll take you to a fancy restaurant and spend ten bucks but you can't
sound him for money to buy food for your wife and kids. They'll buy
you drinks in a bar but sound them for a buck to buy groceries and
they'll act like they're embarrassed they'll hem and haw and
Christ! you'd think you'd asked them to take their pants off in pub
lic or something.
DAVE: That's what it is, man. Like they can't admit it, even to them
selves, that there's such a thing as real starvation in the world. Or like
this lawyer the cat can't face it, that a couple of cops will beat up on
a cat just because he's a homosexual. They've got to prove it to them
selves and to each other that they're real he-men.
RHONDA: Do you suppose the Civil Liberties Union lawyers might do
something?
ANGEL: The Liberals? The political cats? They're the biggest squares
of all when it comes to sex. Homosexuals yet wow! We got to find
a lawyer who isn't prominent, or political or social. Some shyster who's
THE ELECTRONIC EAB I SOME ORAL DOCUMENTS 123
mixed up in the rackets, maybe. He's the only kind that'll have the guts
to mix it up with the cops in a police-beating case. He's beat, in a way,
so he doesn't have to worry what the country club boys or the PTA is
going to say about him. He doesn't have any illusions about justice or
civil rights or the Constitution.
RHONDA: I know a prostitute that works up on the Strip
DAVE: Now you're talkin , Get ahold of this chick and shell know what
to do, who to go to.
ANGEL: Like when I was on the road and I landed in a town broke, I
learned one thing: never go to the local minister or the rabbi or the
social agencies. All they'll want to know is who you've got back home
that they can ship you back to if somebody back home is willing to
wire them the money. Go to the first whorehouse you can find and talk
to the madam, or to some saloonkeeper in the slum part of town, I
remember a whore in Terre Haute once
DAVE: They're the original hipsters the outlaws, the outcasts. The
square, like he's got all these official lies he's got to believe, the school-
book story and the church story and all that shit
(Ronny stirs a little. Angel lights a stick of tea and holds it to
Ronnys lips to take a drag on. Ronny smiles and tries to nod his
thanks. It hurts.)
DAVE (looks over at me and shakes his head): Like I told you, Larry.
The squares talk about their religion, their laws, their justice, their
charity, but sooner or later it always turns out to be the man with a
gun on his hip*
6
Venice West:
And All Points North, South and East
THINGS WERE HAPPENING EVEKYWHERE NOW. IN SAN FRANCISCO, IN NEW
York, Chicago, New Orleans, Seattle. And people were converging on
Venice West from everywhere to tell about them. One day it would be
somebody down from San Francisco for the week end with a story of
weird and wonderful happenings in a cellar cafe or some hillside pad.
The next day it would be a pair of young visitors from Chicago who
had hitch-hiked across the country leaving an unfinished semester at
the U. of C. to dig the Venice West scene, Or a teacher on a moral
holiday from one of the denominational colleges intent on mastering
the mystique of the metaphysical orgasm. Or a refugee from Harvard
on a beatnik binge, lured by talk of the West Coast Renaissance.
Tom Draegen, for instance, had made it all the way from Paris and
Majorca by way of New York. Tom was a Dubliner who had knocked
about in the London literary scene for a year or two, where with
Dylan Thomas he made the rounds of the pubs and parties, and then
joined the beatster fringe of the international set on the continent.
In New York he had no trouble gaining entry into the circles of the
Upper Bohemians. They were junior executives of the advertising
agencies and other "power elite" professionals of the communications
industries and the young women who held down research jobs and
124
VENICE WEST: AND ALL POINTS NORTH, SOUTH AND EAST 125
fancy secretarial positions. Week-end beatsters "beatnik" didn't fit
them, since there wasn't the slightest tinge of pink in them who had
discovered the Hipster Jazz Apocalypse ten years late and were re
viving the bop talk of the early forties, presumably with the help of
glossaries clipped from old copies of Life and Esquire. Tom told of
their hipster parties, affairs that made Paris look like a Sunday school
picnic. Usually held in a posh apartment, that was some pansy dec
orator's idea of a beat pad, they were more like the orgies in a Cecil B.
DeMille movie, he says, than anything on the beat scene.
Up in San Francisco the big news was poetry and jazz at The Cellar
in North Beach. Kenneth Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti were
reading their poetry there with a jazz band and packing them in.
In Chicago a disk jockey named Ken Nordine was improvising
or so it seemed to his listeners bits of poetic prose and clever nar
rative pieces with jazz music, not in the hipster idiom but in some
thing of the same spirit. He called it Word Jazz and there were rumors
that he would soon be bringing out an LP recording of it. *
Down in New Orleans, R. Cass had been publishing Climax, a crea
tive review in the jazz spirit since 1955. He was running a club which
he called The Climax Jazz, Art & Pleasure Society of Lower Basin
Street, a hangout for poets and musicians, with an art gallery attached
to it, to raise the money to keep the magazine going. He wrote me
once that the police had raided his club because Negroes had been
seen mixing there with whites and ha was having trouble making bail
and lawyers' fees; but issues of Climax continued to appear.
The grapevine brought stories of things happening'everywhere: off-
campus beer parlor sessions in Seattle with English profs from the
University of Washington making the literary beat scene in the tradi
tion of the Wandering Scholars of the University of Paris; campus
cats and beat pads and shack-ups around the University of Chicago
where the Chicago Review was publishing my essays, and Henry Mil
ler's, and other off-beat work that was beginning to attract nation-wide
notice; 4 a maverick crew of scholarly rebels at Harvard bringing out
i.e. The Cambridge Review and shaking die ivy walls. The first stories
were beginning to appear in the newspapers. Nobody knew what to
make of it, whether to treat it like another goldfish-swallowing craze,
juvenile delinquency or a Communist plot.
126 THE HOLY BAJRBARIANS
Squares in Beatville
The squares had discovered beatville and were beginning to sniff
and nibble around the edges.
In New York it was the Madison Avenue exurbanites and the news
paper and magazine editorial and art staffs. Some of them were begin
ning, trimly and discreetly, to sprout beards and go to work in elkskin
shoes, the lap-over Indian moccasin kind that no beatnik could ever
afford to buy. The girls had to save their new beat look for week ends
when they could go the limit with a way-off-the-shoulder, studiedly
careless but conspicuously expensive get-up. It was the old Gilded
Bohemia of F. Scott Fitzgerald all over again on a tax-deductible
expense account. But it was trying to talk beat and act cool.
In Chicago it was, outside of the campus cats, a caf6 society scene
gone beat in Playboy fashion. It was hi-fi and high fashion, with a
touch of Bug House Square and the old Dickie Pickle Club in it. But
brought up to date, modernized, the Holiday magazine look.
In San Francisco the squares had discovered North Beach and were
learning how to look beat without going too far out. Here, too, it was
a week-end kick. Students from Berkeley were driving in on Saturday
nights to sit around in basement jazz spots, a girl here and there going
so far out as to show up with her hair and eyebrows sprinkled with
silver dust and a fairy smoking a long panatela cigar. The old zany
touch in the new "crazy" version. They went for funky jazz Turk
Murphy and Bob Scobey with its flavor of Old New Orleans, Story-
ville as they imagined it, with all the horror and heartbreak left out
of it
In Hollywood it was beginning to be taken up, like everything else
in film circles, as a fad. The press agents were getting into the act,
dressing their starlets for the publicity pix in briefer-than-ever briefs
and in poses copied from the "Playgirl of the Month," reading Sartre's
Existentialism or Camus' The Rebel Everybody was trying to look,
off screen, like James Dean and Marlon Brando. The sale of bongo
drums was booming on Hollywood Boulevard. Staying up all night
with jazz on the hi-fi, pounding the bongo drums and running around
with beat characters was beginning to show up in the courts as grounds
for divorce in filmland, dictated to the lawyers by alert press agents, I
suspect. The Man with the Golden Arm had been made into a movie
VENICE WEST: AND ALL POINTS NORTH, SOUTH AND EAST 127
and there was talk of a dozen beat generation movies being planned, if
the writers could "lick the story/' that is, keep the narcotics angle
within the Code and make Existentialism entertaining.
In Venice West there was as yet no Hollywood invasion. There were
no "spots" to go to; the pads were private and the smell of the Hy-
perian sewer emptying into the Pacific was too much for the Holly
wood crowd when the wind was from the south. But that didn't keep
out the non-Hollywood squares, the Left squares, refugees from witch
hunts and loyalty oaths, or the university squares, lured by reports of
a Renaissance, hoping that some of the creative energy that was loose
in Venice West might rub off on them.
Bloomsbury Boy Among the Beat
The English departments of small colleges and the off-the-main-
campus branches of state universities seem to throw off a mutation that
can be described as the Bloomsbury strain. Like all hothouse variations
it is a product, not of natural selection, but selective breeding.
Painfully thin of face and figure and brittle-looking but deceptively
stout like bone china, Grant Flemming made his first appearance at a
party in Don Berney's pad. In the subdued light only dim forms were
visible, sprawled on the floor-low divans in a tangle of legs, arms and
rumps. Everybody except Chris Nelson, who was sketching away
furiously in his notebook, was digging the poetry that Don was put
ting down, with Tony on pots and pans, Angel on bongos, Chuck on
conga, Ron Daley on recorder and Itchy Dave Gelden at the grand
piano that the former occupant had left in the pad with three overdue
rental payments due on it. It was a free-blowing jam session with
nobody paying any attention to what anybody else was doing, and
Itchy, who had abandoned formal pianistic technique at the age of
seven after three lessons, pounding out palm and fist dissonances and
elbow glissandi while Phil Trattman took it all down on the tape
recorder he had just gotten out of hock.
Nobody paid any attention to the newcomer till Grant tried to start
up a conversation with Chris Nelson. Above the din, Angel's keen ear
detected the accents of the square, and he laid aside his bongos long
enough to get an earful of what the stranger was putting down. He
didn't like it When Don finished blowing his poem, Angel had a word
128 THE HOLY BAHBABIANS
with him in the kitchen and when they came back the whisper was
passed around that if anybody was holding they had better not turn on
till after the square could be gotten out of the pad. He might be a
narcotics agent. Unaware of what was going on, Grant tried to engage
others in conversation only to meet with stony silence. He had
expected to find these cats cool, but not this way. After one last stam
mering, stuttering attempt he got out of there and walked the ocean
front all the rest of the night talking to himself in a paroxysm of chok
ing chagrin that more than once boiled over into tears.
By morning he was down with a bad cold and running a tempera
ture. A girl at the aircraft plant where Grant worked found him three
days later, half out of his mind with fever and scribbling away on a
pad of paper, the bed littered with tin cans and bread crusts.
When I saw Grant Flemming again I had met him only fleetingly
at Don's party he was standing at our door, shifting from one foot
to the other, uncertain of his welcome, and clutching a manuscript in
his hand. Nettie promptly administered her usual first-aid remedy,
coffee and sandwiches. The manuscript he had to show me was plainly
a product of emotional confusion and high fever, but that seems to
have been just what Grant needed to break through the "good writing"
of English Lit to something like the beginnings of immediacy of speech
and the "open" free-swinging style that is prized in beat generation
literature.
"All the time I was writing it I thought I was dying," Grant told me.
He had only the barest inkling of what was happening to him and he
was afraid of it. He understood, vaguely, that what he wanted was a
loosening up, but he was afraid of coming apart in the process. His
fears were not unfounded. More than once in the weeks that followed
he was on the point of cracking up. At such times he would put down
the whole scene as a dangerous madness that led only to disconnected
impressions and unfinished fragments. And unsuccess. He wanted des
perately to see something of his in print besides the one or two school
boy exercises his campus quarterly had published. The academic hang
over was still strong in Grant. He wanted, if possible, to be published
in a university literary quarterly of solid reputation. That would be
success, and where was he if at twenty-two he hadn't even had a short
story in Hudson Review or the Virginia Quarterly? Early success is in
VENICE WEST: AND ALL POINTS NORTH, SOUTH AND EAST 129
the Bloomsbury tradition and Grant saw himself as a latter-day Yellow
Book man. Post-Joycian, of course, and with a touch of nostalgia for
Henry James. But somehow hung up on the notion that Jack Kerouac
had something for him, too, if he could only find out what it was
without flipping his wig. Christopher Isherwood had been his shining
example of a free prose style under proper control while he was at
college. Now he was uncertain and confused. "I feel British," he would
say in moments of confusion. "I feel there's solid ground there. I think
I could pull myself together and get something done and finished if I
suddenly found myself by a miracle set down in the middle of literary
London/' But he was bent on making the beat scene first. After all, it
was his generation. It puzzled him why he was still regarded as a
square by most of Venice West, even though they were convinced by
now that he wasn't the heat. Somehow he had to make it, to cross over
In Sherry McCall, who stood with a foot in both worlds, Grant found
the bridge.
Nothing he ever learned in any history course at the university pre
pared him for the shock of this redheaded delayed-action bomb out of
the wartime forties. What she had for him to read and what she had to
tell him came through to Grant like the discovery of Dead Sea Scrolls
out of an underground past His college years spanned the loyalty oath
period. There had been hints dropped in class about the united front
years preceding the Cold War, but guardedly. Now the missing pieces
were fitting together in his mind. Fascism had become an all but un-
mentioned word in college history courses in the state-supported
universities; and Grant recognized in this fact the clue to much that
had puzzled him in the anti- and apolitical attitudes of the beat genera
tion. It may have been a war against fascism to Sherry and her friends,
to Johnny who died fighting it on some Godforsaken rock in the South
Pacific, but that wasn't General Motors' war, nor the Pentagon's, nor
was it the version that was being dished up in the loyalty-oath-bound
history classes.
The Bloomsbury boy who might have fitted into the Mauvre decade
which somebody described as pink trying to be purple was turn
ing a bright, shocking pink under the tutelage of Sherry McCall, and
when he checked his discoveries against the attitudes and opinions of
the beat, arguments ensued that sometimes lasted all night. It was all
130 THE HOLY BABBARIANS
very upsetting and for a time Grant was ready to settle for "a plague on
both their houses/' But even this proved an unsatisfactory solution for
him.
Grant's conflict was still unresolved when Sherry suddenly an
nounced one day that she was leaving Venice and going back east.
There were rumors that the mother of one of "her" children had turned
up and wanted the child back. Whatever the reason, it called for a
quick departure. There was no room for all Sherry's household goods
in the trunk and on the floor of the getaway car. Would Grant mind
storing it for her in his apartment? It was only a one-room apartment
and hardly big enough to hold a tenth of the stuff, but Grant coveted
the upright piano that went with the deal. He had taken piano lessons
years ago and thought that if he could brush up on his playing a little
he might be able to make the jazz scene with Don, Angel and the other
boys. He went out and found a tiny three-room apartment on one of
the Venice canals. The stuff filled up the two front rooms completely
and most of the kitchen and even spilled over into the back yard, but
he had the piano. By stepping over a few hatboxes and sliding in be
hind a stack of packing crates he could get to the piano and practice
his scales again. The new apartment cost more that he could afford
he had quit his aircraft plant job by this time in accordance with his
new political attitude and there was hardly room in the place for his
typewriter and bed. Weeks passed and there was no word from Sherry,
He was stuck with the stuff. Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin now lay in one
untidy pile with his own copies of James Joyce, Jack Kerouac, Henry
Miller and William James. It was a mess. A perfect picture of his own
dilemma.
Before he could grapple further with the problem, the Army called
him up for military service. He talked it over with everybody in Venice
West and finally decided to accept the President's invitation. It was
one way out.
The Coming of the Hip Square
At the opposite pole of the educational breeding grounds of the state
universities is Black Mountain College. Founded in North Carolina in
1933 as an experimental school combining academic work with student
VENICE WEST: AND ALL POINTS NORTH, SOUTH AND EAST 131
community life on what the encyclopedias describe, discreetly, as a co
educational basis, its alumni have now gravitated mostly to the East
and West coasts. When the college was disbanded in 1956, many of its
current students made the westward trek to San Francisco and Los
Angeles, and two of its teachers, Charles Olson and Robert Creeley,
became controversial but influential figures in the literary circles of the
beat generation. (Jonathan Williams' Jargon Press in Highlands, North
Carolina, has published much of their work, as well as that of other
writers related to them in style and spirit. )
Manual labor and handicrafts were stressed at Black Mountain Col
lege and some of its alumni are now engaged in such occupations as
landscape gardening, weaving, book designing, home building and
similar pursuits. Others follow the beat pattern of working for a while,
then living off unemployment insurance as long as they can and pur
suing one or another of the arts. Politically they could be said to re
semble the Owenites and other community-founding sects, but morally
they would have been tossed out of such communities. It is in their
way of life that they resemble the beat generation and merge with
them, but not without friction. For some of the beat regard them as
squares hip squares. Here is an account of how the Black Mountain
boys came upon the beat scene, as recorded in an interview I had with
Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso on their visit to Venice West in 1956.
GINSBERG: Last year Robert Duncan went to Europe where he met
Robert Creeley in Majorca. He had been in correspondence with Black
Mountain, with Olson, who had been friends with and in correspond
ence with Creeley on Black Mountain Review. Creeley picked up on
Duncan and threw Duncan on Rexroth. Creeley is a hipster and very
cool, like all hipsters, with an elliptical style and very great intel
ligence. He dug Jack Kerouac, so he got some stuff from us for the
next issue of the Black Mountain Review. From Kerouac and me, a
chunk from Gary Snyder, prose from Duncan, a piece of Burroughs'.
Now we're all friends, but not organized as a literary movement. Essen
tially it's just friendships, connecting the West Coast with what has
been happening on a lower type level at Black Mountain, through
academic, disciplinary Olson and Creeley, so there was a connection
between the sensibilities of the West and the East there, for a while.
132 THE HOLY BAKBABIANS
Olson dug Kerouac immediately. Then Black Mountain College closed
about three weeks ago and the last remaining students arrived in San
Francisco with their beards
CORSO: Mental gangsters.
GINSBERG: Well, you know, it's a beautiful thing, basically, a great
thing, but
CORSO: It's a question of enthusiasm. They want to be cool, but intel
lectually cool.
GINSBERG: Diabolical, beautiful love. Actually I think they're hung up
on authority, like Ezra Pound.
CORSO: In other words, they're hip squares.
GINSBERG: But they're very intense and beautiful.
CORSO: Hip squares. Wherever there's awkwardness there is not
coolness.
LEPTON: Are they sexually uninhibited?
GINSBERG: Pretty much so, I think. Like crazy. They're cocksmen. Their
method of teaching is like an attack on the defenses but not like Dos
toevski, not like Alyosha and Mishkin. It's more like Ezra Pound. It's
also suicidal, they're all suicidal. Always getting hit by policemen, get
ting their hands cut by barbed wire, getting lost in deserts in Arizona.
CORSO: I've never liked the way they live. That's why I'm against them.
They stand apart.
GINSBERG: They're cool; having rejected everything they've become
unable to utter anything except in the most roundabout way. Except
Creeley. He doesn't say anything except what he absolutely knows
simple like on a basic, simple level, very short, epigrammatic, ellip
tical, like
I went out
Got a beer.
Ran into a milk truck,
by God.
You won't understand me till you
run into a milk truck.
CORSO: A great lack of enthusiasm. Deliberate lack of enthusiasm.
GINSBERG: Yes, except that they're so open, like Creeley likes Jack be-
VENICE WEST: AND ALL POINTS NORTH, SOUTH AND EAST 133
cause he's so open. He's also invulnerable, because he's so open. That's
why he likes Duncan. And in Jack Kerouac, like he's found a way out
of the impasse. And it comes to a great extent from Olson's influence.
Because Olson is like a great hip intelligence.
CORSO: No. It's aggression. It's terrible. It's an aggression against them
selves and nothing else. It's like the cool musicians, the cool blowing of
bop several years ago.
GINSBERG: Like the most elliptical, hard, personal and, in a sense,
suicidal, but also beautiful. Because like there was no compromise. It
was intensely idealistic. A natural outgrowth of bop. Bop killed itself.
Bop committed suicide. Like Mallarme. And so did poetry.
The Black Mountain hipster touches the beat generation scene only
peripherally, the way the juvenile delinquent touches it, or the profes
sional criminal. I am not speaking here of the literary influence of
Black Mountain Review and the writers who cluster around it. Their
influence on beat generation writers remains strong and, on the whole,
beneficial. I am speaking of the students who have not yet succeeded
in finding any place where they fit in outside of the abandoned Black
Mountain community and are hovering around the fringes of beatland.
They are not numerous enough to be conspicuous anywhere. And
where they have found entry easiest to make is in San Francisco's
North Beach and New York's Greenwich Village. In Venice West we
have seen few of them and those few have soon gravitated to Holly
wood, where the pickings are richer, or back to New York or San
Francisco. As hip squares, their tastes and many of their lifeways are
hipsterish, but their values are bourgeois, or perhaps I should say a
caricature of bourgeois values and, like all caricatures, greatly exag
gerated and distorted.
Hoods, Junkies and the Illegal Sex
Other squares who, for one reason or another, try to make the beat
scene are small-time hoodlums, heroine addicts and homosexuals. None
of these can be actually a square, of course, in the sense in which a
normally adjusted person living a conventional life is a square. They
are square only with relation to the lifeways and values of the beat
generation. If beatville is heaven, it is easier for a hood, a junkie or a
134 THE HOLY BABBAJEIIANS
homosexual to get into it than a banker, a professor or a Cub Scout
den mother.
In Venice West the hoods hang out at the Wind Blue Inn. From the
outside it looks like any other ocean-front saloon. There is nothing
arty about it inside either, to justify the rather poetical name it goes
by. The proprietor is a Lesbian, a strapping bull-dyke who can wield
a barrel bung as lustily as any bartender. Big Fanny runs the joint with
the help of a girl friend who looks like a depraved angel with a halo
of honey-gold hair and eyes that might have been transplanted from
Lucifer's eye bank. Big Fanny has a taste for the higher things of life
and when she discovered the holy barbarians she encouraged them to
drop in for a beer and sit around at the tables she put in for their
benefit. Fanny herself is sustained by Cosmic Vibrations and a daily
quart of Three Star Hennessy. In the holy ones of Venice West, Big
Fanny could feel the vibrations of the Infinite right away. "I knew you
were tuned to the music of the spheres," she told Itchy Dave Gelden.
"I can feel the vibrations/*
Itchy called it horseshit but he liked the atmosphere of the place and
introduced his friends to it. Most of them soon dropped out when
Fanny started proselytizing them, but among those who remained
patrons of the place was Tom Draegen. He had no more use for Big
Fanny's vibrating God than any of the others, but he found the hoods
who frequented the joint an excellent source of wine and heroin.
Tom was still working on The Book. It was Diana Wakefield who
called it that, the capital letters were in her voice when she said it.
Diana had been working to keep Tom going on The Book but late
hours and absenteeism had gotten her fired from one job after another.
Now she was pregnant and having a miserable time of it. The hoods
were keeping them in wine and cigarettes, slipping Tom a few caps
of heroin now and then, and once in a while a fin or a sawbuck when
the pickings were good.
Hot merchandise was also available at the Wind Blue Inn. For their
writer and artist friends it came cheap and sometimes for free. Tom
Draegen and a Black Mountain alumnus who did most of his goofing
at Tom's pad were the only ones who availed themselves of such
favors. An occasional hot typewriter offered the most tempting favor
but the cool cats turned it down. Nothing with serial numbers on it.
Besides, it might turn out to have been heisted from one of their fellow
writers in the neighborhood and would have to be turned back anyway.
VENICE WEST: AND ALL POINTS NORTH, SOUTH AND EAST 135
The hoods loved to hang around the painters' pads, gape at pictures
and watch the artist working for hours on end. It fascinated them.
Poetry readings were more of a chore for them and usually they picked
up a copy of Mad and leafed through the cartoons while the reading
was in progress, waiting for the real part of the party to begin. They
went for pot but left the stronger stuff untouched, although they were
not above using their connections to get a little horse for Tom now and
then.
The Book grew by a page or two from month to month but Tom's
monkey grew by leaps and bounds. Diana was hooked on the stuff,
too, by this time. Office work or any other kind of regular work was
out of the question now. A girl at the Wind Blue Inn told Diana about
a strip job that was open at one of the Reno night clubs. This was how
Tom and Diana finally made it back to New York. Tom and his Black
Mountain alumnus friend, who had to get out of town anyway because
the police were after him for a few dozen traffic tickets he had ignored,
lived off Diana's strip act salary and, for a nest egg to get to New York
on and to finance the habit after they got there, they peddled Diana's
after-the-show hours to Reno tourists at from five to twenty-five dollars
a throw.
For the send-off before they left Venice nobody was around except
Itchy Gelden, who loved everybody and denied no one. AH the rest
had put Tom and Diana out of the pale long ago. The hoods had given
them up, too. They were too hot by this time to be seen around with.
When Itchy left the pad Tom went down to the Wind Blue Inn to see
if he could promote Big Fanny for a bottle of something to take along
on the long trip to Reno.
"I was figuring you might put it on the cuff for a few days," Tom
lied, buttering it up with his most engaging smile.
"Where the Inner Power is at work there is no need and no want/'
Big Fanny told him. "For God knoweth our need even before we ask.
And supplies our every want, if we will only tune in with the vibrations
of the Infinite." Fanny never was a soft touch when it came to business.
"Cut out the crap," Tom said, "all I'm asking is a few cans of beer or
something " Nothing but cash on the counter could break the spell
of the Infinite.
"Okay," Tom said, "you can take the whole damn joint and stick it
up your ass. We're cutting out of this town."
"Just you wait and see. When you get your ass in a sling you'll come
JL36 THE HOLY BARBABIANS
running to God, and what do you think He'll say to you? He'll say go
fuck yourself, that's what He 11 say," Big Fanny called after him. And
returned to her contemplation of the Infinite.
The Illegal Sex
After a narrow escape out of a rear window of the K-9 Club in East
Los Angeles when the joint was raided by the vice squad in a roundup
of homosexuals, Chippy Rosland fled to a shack on the Venice West
canals because it looked like a good hide-out where no squad car would
ever think to come prowling. It was then that Chippy discovered the
beat generation and took up painting. He wrote poetry occasionally,
too, but he kept it to himself, feeling it wasn't good enough to show yet.
Among the beat, Chippy found complete acceptance on a no-questions-
asked basis for the first time in his life. Was he hip? Was he cool? Or
was he just another square trying to make it in Beatville? Chris Nelson
had an answer that echoed the feelings of everybody in Venice West.
"Like nobody can belong to an illegal sex, man, and be a square. He's
the beatest of the beat!"
Even the fact that Chippy worked as a lathe and turret man in one
of the defense plant machine shops was not held against him. As a
member ex-officio of the beat generation he was not bound by all the
rules of the tribe.
Chippy didn't have to be turned on to pot. It was as widely used in
homosexual circles everywhere as it was among the beat. And the jive
wasn't exactly a secret language to Chippy. He was even able to intro
duce a few good additions to the beat vocabulary. All that was neces
sary to turn his place into a beat pad was to persuade him to throw his
Maxfield Parish prints out in the trash and put some drip and smear
abstracts that Angel and Itchy gave him on the walls. Chippy was al
ready an intellectual, a homo intellectual. He kept the radio tuned to
the FM classical music station, went to symphony concerts and owned
an almost complete collection of old 78 Dwight Fisk records, including
Minnie the Wayward Sturgeon and The Colonels Tropical Bird, Before
long he was listening to Dizzie Gillespie, too. And Thelonious Monk.
Prudently keeping a foot in both worlds.
Today Chippy exhibits his water-color abstracts along with the paint-
VENICE WEST: AND ALL POINTS NORTH, SOUTH AND EAST 137
ings, junk sculpture and collages of the beat in the saloons, where it
is too dark anyway to tell a daub from a masterpiece.
LIKE, ART, MAN
is the way the most recent saloon show was advertised, and Chippy had
three water colors in it. In fact, Chippy was the only artist in the exhibit
who got an offer of money for one of his paintings. He was offered a
dollar for it by an art lover who happened to drop in and recognize its
merits. Chippy turned down the money, preferring to give it instead as
a love offering to a handsome young blond boy he met in the place and
now has shacked up with him at his pad on the Venice West canals,
The Juvenile Delinquents
"Everyone has to go to jail some time in his life," remarked a fifteen
year-old girl I met at Angel's pad one afternoon. She was playing hooky
from high school for the day and had just come back from visiting her
boy friend in the County Jail. He had been busted for pot and they
were also trying to hang a car-stealing rap on him. "They" were the
heat and this was the bond that this chick felt with beatland. The
beards puzzled her, and the poetry was so much baby talk to her. She
had enough of that at school. One book was the same as any other to
her. Pot was baby stuff, too, She had been on horse since she was
thirteen.
What drew her to the beatniks was the way they understood her
attitude toward her family and elders in general and the fact that they
didn't think she was a bad girl. The fuss that parents and older people
made about sex seemed silly to her. Virginity? She and her girl friends
at high school had a word for it. "Big issue about a little tissue."
As a juvenile delinquent Myra Flores belonged to the cool cats who
could be seen coining out of Venice High after school hours and piling
into a car integration was no problem here white, Negro, Mexican.
They didn't hang around street corners; they drove fast cars in car pools
that were also clubs of a sort. The Mexican girls were popular with
these boys. Sometimes the blond girls dyed their hair to look like
Mexican chicks. Their cars were not souped-up hot rods, that was for
squares. Their clothes were sharp. Every penny they could beg, borrow
138 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
or steal went into clothes. They drank wine and smoked marijuana.
They didn't talk much. They were physical in their relations, fondled
each other a lot and watched television by the hour. Looking older than
their years was very important to them. It meant that they could pass
for twenty-one without an I.D. card in the taverns.
Rarely can a girl like Myra Flores make the beat scene except as a
place of refuge or a drop-in lay, but a J.D. like Willie Frank can make
it for quite a while on nothing but an ability to say little, listen much
and play it close to his vest, which passes for cool as long as he doesn't
make any false moves. Willie fell into Venice West from a town in New
Jersey where things had gotten too hot for him. He had smoked pot
since he was fourteen, graduated to horse not long afterward, and
served a term in jail back east.
The beat and the juvenile delinquent are only kissin' cousins. They
have the same enemies, which is the slender thread that sometimes
unites them in temporary alliance. Both are outlaws, speak a private
language and put down the squares, but in beat circles the J.D. is re
garded as a square, a hip square in some things, but still a square.
He is a square because his values are the conventional American
values: success, the worship of things, the obsession with speed and
devil-take-the-hindmost attitudes in everything. They are "sharpies"
always looking for angles. They believe everything they read in the
ads. The "kick" they are looking for when they "borrow" a car for a
night is the kick of making "a majestic entrance" in front of a chick's
house. The juvenile delinquent wants a Ford in his future, but he wants
his future right now. He can't buy it so he steals it. "My old man
waited," one of them remarked to me, "and what did it get him? He's
fifty and he's still driving a '49 Chevy."
The names they give their gangs are indicative of their hunger for
social status. In Venice West it's The Doges. Some of them pronounce
it "dogs" but they know it means something like The Man of Distinc
tion. (Wasn't "putting on the dog" once a slang synonym for distinc
tive?) If one gang names itself The Counts, the gang in the next block
goes it one better with The Dukes. Such pretensions are abhorrent to
the beatnik.
Their "social protest," which is a common theme in liberal magazines
trying to "understand" the J.D., is so much double talk in the beatnik's
opinion. They are not victims of the society, they are its fruit and
VENICE WEST: AND ALL POINTS NORTH, SOUTH AND EAST 139
flower. The J.D. in a stolen car, dressed up in his sharp clothes, seated
beside his chick and smoking the cigarette that is the choice o men
who demand the best, is the ironic triumph of the adman's dream. They
are not likely to yield to the lures of communism. In fact, many of the
J.D.'s of past generations are now among the society's most successful
businessmen. Their only protest is that it takes too long.
The vandalism of the juvenile delinquent is directed against symbols
of authority, like the school. If he finds school too confining or oppres
sive, or too boring, the beatnik finds ways of "beating the system." He
cuts classes as often as he can but he keeps his scholastic average high
enough to stay out of trouble. He doesn't go back after school hours and
wreck the classroom or waylay a teacher and slug him for giving him
low marks. Any show of violence among the beat generation, when it
does occur, is rare enough and significant enough to become leg
endary. Such a legend is the one you hear frequently about Carl Solo
mon. "It was at Brooklyn College," says Allen Ginsberg. "Some square
lecturer was giving a lecture on Dadaism, and Carl pelted him with
potato salad." Which is exactly what any Dadaist would have done.
That Carl was expelled for it is only further proof that the lecturer
was a square.
The violence of the delinquent is usually directed against older peo
ple. The beatnik would not commit such acts of violence. He would
write a poem about it.
Only a newspaperman with his feet stuck in a slot at the rewrite
desk could possibly mistake a J.D. for a beatnik. The newspaper stereo
typed vandal is a composite of "teen-ager," "juvenile delinquent" and
"beatnik," a convenient composite since it simplifies headline writing
and makes every youth crime story a rewrite of the familiar dope fiend,
sex fiend, youth-on-the-rampage yarn. All the reporter has to do is
change a few names and places. The J.D. doesn't mind the publicity.
It gives him status. The only thing Willie Frank objected to in the
news stories about him and his gang when they were busted for drugs
was that the papers misspelled his name and even mixed up names
under the pictures. "DOPE RING SMASHED" was a little too grandi
ose a headline, Willie thought, for a twenty-dollar haul of pot, but it
gave him a glow just the same.
Related to the J.D.'s, but two or three cuts above them in education
and family background, are the young sons and daughters of the rich
140 THE HOLY BABBAEIANS
from the "right" side of the tracks. When they arrive in Venice West it
is in their own Jaguars, with a few boxes of avant-garde books and jazz
records, looking for the beatest pad they can find on the beatest street
in town.
The Beautiful and Beat
Judy March was one of them who came to beatland by way of an
Auntie Mame progressive school childhood, a dramatic and dancing
school girlhood and a jazz and espresso coffee shop postgraduate
course. At nineteen she was already two abortions ahead of all her
schoolmates, had made the Lesbian scene for kicks, and was ready to
try pot, poverty and holiness. She had read about Venice West in the
newspapers and heard about it in the coffee shops. At a poetry and
jazz session in Cosmo Alley she met Sally Collins, another beat-struck
chick, and the two of them decided to make a team of it in a Venice
pad. The decor of the pad they set up was a cross between sorority
house modern and New Orleans whorehouse.
Both girls are beautiful, Judy in a delicate, cameo way and Sally in
a dark, sinewy, athletic way. Together they present a toothsome double
threat that would be cause for panic among the women of any other
community, but not among the chicks of beatville. Where beauty has
no scarcity value the competition is greatly diminished. As for sex,
where availability is the rule, not the exception, other talents have a
chance to figure in the courtship of the young. Judy paints and sings
folk songs and is able to accompany herself on the guitar. Sally has a
flair for dressmaking, makes her own clothes and likes to make clothes
for her friends.
Their original plan was to get jobs in or near Venice West, working
part time and pooling their earnings. The rest of the time was to be
spent in study, the arts and partying. Neither girl had any difficulty in
getting jobs. Employers took one look at them and hired them on the
spot, whether a position was open or would have to be created by firing
somebody. But there always seemed to be a catch to it. The boss ex
pected something more than gratitude. Judy promptly quit the first job
she got, a good one, when the boss tried to press money on her she
had left home with only a few dollars and was broke before payday
and made Me miserable for her when she refused his money and the
VENICE WEST: AND ALL POINTS NORTH, SOUTH AND EAST 141
proposition that went with it. Judy wasn't angry about that; she was
sorry for the man. "If only he hadn't been so vulgar about it, standing
there with the money in his hand * Judy was used to seeing money
conspicuously displayed. That was one of the things she was running
away from.
Between dates and parties they boned up on Zen and cool jazz and
talked about Existentialism all night. They read Kenneth Patchen's
poems aloud to each other and passages from Henry Miller's Tropic of
Cancer. Day and night their pad resounded with rhythm and blues and
smelled of Chanel No. 5. They were making the scene but the larder
was chronically empty and there were no dining-out invitations to be
had from the beatniks. The boys would bring a few groceries in a bag
and a few marijuana cigarettes and they'd make an evening of it that
way, but for a substantial meal Judy and Sally still had to accept dinner
invitations from their square boy friends in Hollywood and Westwood.
When Christmas came Judy went back home for the holidays and
did not return to the pad. Sally stayed on in Venice West, shacking up
with a square who had a steady job but wanted to make the scene in
beatville.
The Evidence: Heard and Seen
There is more to the "case history" of a human life than any inter
view can reveal, however skilled the interviewer may be and however
frank and self-searching the interviewee. Without the evidence of
things seen, the evidence of things shared and experienced, the oral
evidence, even in the most confessional interview, is incomplete.
Who would guess, for instance, that Tanya Bromberger, who says
monogamy is a bourgeois shuck, is a perfect madonna of a mother? The
love and care she lavishes on the child of her mixed marriage "What's
mixed about two people getting married?" she would probably ask
matches anything I have ever observed in "respectable" circles. Diana
Wakefield is vocal in her praises of any man who is the genius of the
moment in her life, but her critical judgments where art and literature
are concerned are shrewd and unbiased. She loves her man, not for what
he is, but for what she thinks he can become. To him she can be
unmerciful in her criticism, but let anybody else utter the slightest
criticism and she will take his head off. Angel Dan Davies will repeat
142 THE HOLY BABBABIANS
"I don't know" witih. every show of humility when you ask him ques
tions, but let anybody else pretend to know the answers and he must
prove that person wrong if it's the last thing he does. Christlike in word
and often in deed, Dan is capable of ruthless vilification when he thinks
somebody has not given him his due or failed to live up to the expecta
tions he has built up in his own imagination. And the next week or
month, perhaps, he will swing around to the other extreme of un
questioning faith and affection.
Rhonda Tower, for instance, describes herself as too cool to be
taken in by any would-be artist looking for a meal ticket, yet I have
seen her playing dinner host for days on end to some broken-down
beatnik who isn't capable of reciprocating with a lay, let alone love.
Once it took all the self-discipline she could muster to keep herself
from running off with a visiting poet who had nothing to offer but a
great love, a broken heart and a shared life, equal but separate, with his
wayward common-law wife and the kids he loved and couldn't leave.
Chris Nelson is often voluble in his criticism of beat amorality, espe
cially in matters of personal responsibility, like repayment of loans. Yet
one in need even a stranger whose only credentials are a sheaf of
unpublished poems and an empty pocket can find food and lodging
at his pad.
And gentle Dave Gelden, who vows he loves everybody, even the
squares, will fly into a tantrum when he is ever so mildly reproached
for falling down on a promise or failing to show up on time. For Dave,
the right to goof transcends all other rights. "Like, I goofed, man," is the
unassailable defense in all matters of equity and etiquette.
Yet in many things that most respectable people lie about, the beats
are often pathologically truthful. Even when it means losing an advan
tage or failing to gain a favor. I have known them to lie for each other
in matters where they would never dream of lying for themselves.
To anyone except an insider, the reasons which a beat generation
person will give for anything are far from the real reasons. This has
been true of all alienated generations, but it was never so true as it is
today when the alienation is virtually all-inclusive. It is the code of the
outlaw. Suspicion of the square is normal. He may be a narcotics in
former. Even the most reasonable proposal from a square is likely to
meet with "Okay, it sounds all right. What's the shuck?"
A seasoned disaffiliate can pick a potential beat chick out of a bevy
VENICE WEST: AND ALL POINTS NORTH, SOUTH AND EAST 143
of squarejanes as expertly as a veteran trainer picks racers out of a
stable of fillies. How lie does it is a mystery which it would be blasphe
mous to divulge to the profane. Common lechers from squaredom are
always trying to get the beatnicks to play bird dog for them, but pimp
ing of this sort is discouraged in beat circles. To play talent scout for
a squarejohn is the rankest kind of treason. "Where do you -find them?"
the squarejohn asks in amazement, looking over the strikingly good-
looking chicks in espresso shops. "Could you fix me up?"
He knows that to the square he is only a "character." He has been
portrayed that way in the newspapers and magazines, by the same
pen-prostitutes who make "characters" out of all intellectuals, and
whores out of all women who are beautiful and speak with a foreign
accent. The nearest the square ever comes to members of the beat
generation is in the espresso coffeehouses, the cafe society of the beat.
He sees them sitting quietly over a cup of Italian coffee, listening
with rapt attention to a piece of cool jazz music on the hi-fi, and con
cludes that being cool means a sophisticated pose of indifference and
nothing more. He sees young couples in low-voiced conversation, not
even holding hands, and decides that the younger generation is either
frigid or prematurely satiated with sex. What he sees in these places
doesn't fit in with what he has read in the press, so he is vaguely irri
tated and, at the same time, eaten up with curiosity. Something is being
kept from him, he feels. He would feel better if he were being verbally,
even physically, challenged. What hurts is that he is being pointedly
ignored.
His impression of the situation is substantially correct. To the dis-
affiliate of the beat generation who drops in for a cup of coffee, a game
of chess, conversation or music at the espresso coffeehouse, the square
is a slummer from squareville. He sees him as a dupe or a victim
of the rat race. More likely a victim, or else why would he be hanging
around a beat joint? He is probably someone who is driving a three-
thousand-dollar car to a sixty-five-dollar-a-week job after withholding
and deductions. He is fed up, perhaps, with the middle-class culture bit
and is looking for something more satisfying than quiz programs, radio
opera and South Pacific. Maybe he's a step farther out. He goes in for
bucket chairs and shipping-crate modern architecture. He reads his
Time from back to front, and "The Talk of the Town" in The New
Yorker. He may even be having his first doubts about the neon chrome
144 THE HOLY BAHBABIANS
artyfake Disneyfication of America, but the chances are he still falls
for the shell game swindle of "the highest standard of living in our
history" while he tosses all night in debt-infested dreams. At best he
might be squirming in that circle of hell which is reserved for those
who do violence to their own nature in an effort to conform out of fear
of being different. He is looking for something. He doesn't know what
it is, but he wants it bad. Yet he isn't ready to pay the price for it. You
can see that in the way he looks around him at the pictures on the wall,
at the beards and sandals, at the chicks. He thinks all it takes is the
price of a cup of capuccino and a fast lay in a beat pad.
PART II
Down With the Rat Race:
The New Poverty
THOSE WHO SEE THE AMEKICAN BUSINESSMAN AS THE FOUNT FROM
whence all blessings flow, enterpriser par excellence, organizer of Prog
ress, job-maker, charity-giver, endower of churches and universities
and patron of the arts, who has given us the highest standard of living
in the world, have never been able to understand why the figure of the
businessman has fared so badly at the hands of the intellectuals. As
for the businessmen themselves, the early industrialists were never wor
ried about their reputation with the intellectuals. Many of them were
only semiliterate, and while they were quick to retaliate against sticks
and stones, whether thrown by labor or by their competitors, they were
merely contemptuous of words. But the growth of advertising as a
formidable weapon opened the businessman's eyes to the possibility
that while he was watching out for sticks and stones, words might
break his bones.
It was not until after the Depression, the New Deal and World War
II, though, that the public relations men and the advertising men were
able to arouse the businessmen to active retaliation against the treat
ment he was receiving in novels, plays, radio and films, and even in the
churches and classrooms. During the Depression he had to lick his
wounds in bitter silence while he heard himself called a "malefactor of
great wealth" by that "traitor to his class" Franklin D. Roosevelt. He
had to suffer in silence while detractors were being entertained in the
147
148 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
White House and providing verbal ammunition for a New Deal that
looked to him like nothing more than a "hate business" conspiracy
which his political spokesmen have since rephrased as "twenty years of
treason/' It is little wonder that his pent-up resentments should have
taken the form of a vengeful "house cleaning" after the war, not only of
political officeholders but of the New Deal's intellectual and literary
friends as well.
Hand in hand with the loyalty oaths and investigations has gone a
widespread propaganda campaign on the platform and in the press
against all intellectuals, a campaign in which friendly highbrows are
regarded as only a little less dangerous than unfriendly ones and po
tentially treasonous. The halfhearted and timorous "wooing back" of
the egghead that began with the successful Soviet orbiting of Sputnik I
is confined to scientists and technicians, and is concerned, character
istically, with buying brains rather than encouraging the intellectual to
think straight and speak out plainly.
The word intellectual has never been altogether free from suspicion
in the United States; calling a man a brain has been fightin' words for
a hundred years. Intellectualism is, needless to say, equated with left
ism, a proposition that has at least the merit of being half true, but not
in the way they mean it. It is even equated with modernism in art
unless it can be turned into window displays, high fashion fabrics,
liquor ads and clever television commercials.
But the businessman had a bad conscience long before he ever be
came a target of the intellectual. Profit, which is the basis of business,
has been under a cloud for centuries, certainly since the time of the
prophet Hosea and probably long before him. Among the Church
Fathers there were not a few who echoed the words of the Hebrew
prophets against malefactors of great wealth, well before "That Man"
in the White House blasted them on the radio.
And when Dave Gelden speaks of writing poetry in the lavatory of
the airplane plant on the boss' time and on the boss' toilet paper and
says, "It wasn't stealing, I was just getting my own," he speaks out of
an old and honored tradition. He speaks for the few who can reject the
rewards that a business civilization offers those who are willing to help
it sell its ideology.
Moneytheism is everywhere, in everything we see and read and hear.
The child is indoctrinated with it from birth, not in the schools, which
DOWN WITH THE RAT RACE : THE NEW POVERTY 149
try to counter it with the humanities as much as they dare but in
the large school of experience where most of our education is received.
It is only after a long process of diseducation and re-education that
one sees it clearly and sees it whole the price-wage shell game, the
speed-up treadmill, the Save! -Spend! contradictions dinned into our
ears night and day, the heartbreaking brutalities of class-made law,
lawyer-made law, judge-made law, money-made law, and the unspeak
able vulgarities of hypocritical religion, the nerve-shattering Stop! and
Go! Hurry! and Go Slow! Step Lively! and Relax! warnings flashing
before our eyes and bombarding our ears without letup, making the
soul a squirrel cage whirligig from the first stimulant in the morning till
the last sedative at night. The rat race. A rat race that offers only two
alternatives: to run with the hare or hunt with the hounds.
Disaffiliation: The Way of the Beat Generation
Disaffiliation is a voluntary self-alienation from the family cult, from
Moneytheism and all its works and ways.
The disaffiliate has no blueprint for the future. He joins no political
parties. He is free to make his own inner-directed decisions. If he fails
to vote altogether, that, too, is a form of political action; half the eligi
ble voters of the United States normally fail to do so. In his case it is
a no-confidence vote.
The disafEliate doesn't like the smell of burning human flesh, whe
ther it come from the lynching tree, the witness chair or the electric
chair.
Having read history from the bottom up as well as from the top
down, he knows that culture moves both ways, interactively, and there
are times the present is one of them when the cultural top is at the
economic bottom.
He is not against industrialization. He is not against "things," mate
rial things as opposed to spiritual things.
Why, then, disaffiliation in an era when Time-Life-Fortune pages are
documenting an American Way of Life that is filled with color-matched
stainless steel kitchens, bigger and faster cars, electronic wonders, and
a future of unlimited luxuries like television-telephones and rocket trips
to the moon? Because it is all being corrupted by the cult of Money-
theism. In the eyes of a Nelson Algren it is all a "neon wilderness." In
150 THE HOLY BABBABIANS
the eyes of a Henry Miller it is all an "air-conditioned nightmare." Be
cause, as Kenneth Rexroth has put it, you can't fill the heads of young
lovers with "buy me the new five-hundred-dollar deep-freeze and I'll
love you" advertising propaganda without poisoning the very act of
love itself; you can't hop up your young people with sadism in the
movies and television and train them to commando tactics in the army
camps, to say nothing of brutalizing them in wars, and then expect to
"untense" them with Coca-Cola and Y.M.C.A. hymn sings. Because
underneath Henry Luce's "permanent revolution" the New Capital
ism, the People's Capitalism and Prosperity Unlimited - lies the ugly
fact of an economy geared to war production, a design, not for living,
but for death.
If the disaffiliate is on the side of the accused instead of on the side
of the accusers, it is because the accuser has his spokesmen, a host of
them, well paid, with all the mass media at their command and all the
laws and police on their side.
Where the choice is between two rival tyrannies, however pious their
pretentious, tie disaffiliate says, not a plague but a pity on both
your houses.
The Art of Poverty
The New Poverty is the disaffiliate's answer to the New Prosperity.
It is important to make a living, but it is even more important to
make a life.
Poverty. The very word is taboo in a society where success is equated
with virtue and poverty is a sin. Yet it has an honorable ancestry. St.
Francis of Assisi revered Poverty as his bride, with holy fervor and
pious rapture.
The poverty of the disaffiliate is not to be confused with the poverty
of indigence, intemperence, improvidence or failure. It is simply that
the goods and services he has to offer are not valued at a high price
in our society. As one beat generation writer said to the square who
offered him an advertising job: "I'll scrub your floors and carry out your
slops to make a living, but I will not lie for you, pimp for you, stool
for you, or rat for you."
It is not the poverty of the ill-tempered and embittered, those who
DOWN WITH THE RAT RACE : THE NEW POVERTY 151
wooed the bitch goddess Success with panting breath and came away
rebuffed.
It is an independent, voluntary poverty.
It is an art, and like all arts it has to be learned. It has its techniques,
its tricks and short cuts, its know-how.
What is poverty for one may be extravagance for another. The writer
must have his basic library, the composer his piano, the painter his
canvases and tools, and everyone must have at least a few of the
books he wants, if only in paperback editions, a few good recordings
and some objects of art, if only in prints and cheap imitations.
It all depends on what the disaffiliate values most. Kenneth Rexroth,
for instance, has a scholar's library that may be worth ten thousand
dollars all of it shelved in packing cases set up one above the other
to serve as bookshelves in a fifty-five dollar slum apartment. A com
poser I know has a microfilm library of the world's best music that is
matched only by that of the Library of Congress and perhaps a few
private collections, and stints on food and clothing almost to the point
of beggary. Each must work out the logistics of the problem to fit his
own case.
The writer as disaffiliate has a special problem of his own. He may
not have much control over the size of his income a book may flop or
it may be a runaway best seller but he does have some measure of
control over how much he spends. And how he spends it. And where
he lives. For, as Nelson Algren has expressed it, "Scarcely any way now
remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the
tote-board. From behind the TV commercials and the Hearst headlines,
the car ads and the subtitles, the editorials and the conventions. For it
is only there that the people of Dickens and Dostoevski may be found
any more."
Behind the billboards lie the slums. Here one may hold his standard
of living down to the level of a dedicated independent poverty with
some measure of ease and self-respect. It is a way of life that is obliga
tory only on the truth-telling artist but it is a good way of life for him;
it helps him keep the long, lean view. He will go farther on less if he
learns how to travel light. In the slum he will learn that the health of
a civilization should be judged by the maxim laid down by one of hu
manity's greatest physicians: "Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of
152 THE HOLY BABBARIANS
these least, ye did it not unto me/' He will learn what Diane Lattimer
(in George Mandel's novel, Flee the Angry Strangers) meant when, at
the last, out of the depths of her agony and pain, she said: "Come, sit
in the Cosmopole. You don't need anything in this world; only poverty
is holy/'
The Logistics of Poverty
The dedicated independent poverty is an art, but it is also a science
of survival. It has its strategies and logistics.
Those who choose manual labor soon find out that, so far as the
trades are concerned, breaking into the ranks of labor is neither easy
nor cheap. Joining the proletariat is like trying to join an exclusive club
and often quite as expensive, what with trade union initiation fees and
numerous qualifications and restrictions. For the most part the beat
generation disaffiliate is confined to the fringe jobs in the labor market,
like small house painting jobs if he is an artist trying to find part-time
work to pay for his colors and canvases and keep some canned goods
in the larder. Some painters in the Los Angeles area have occasionally
found cartooning jobs and sculpting on a part-time basis in the studios,
particularly at the Walt Disney Studio. Ceramics has provided some
income for artists, as well as costume jewelry designing, free lance or
in the employ of some small businessman. Frame making can be a
source of income. And some artists do not mind teaching a few hours
a week at some art school or as private tutors.
In Venice West some have made it for a while as typewriter repair
men, postal employees and arts and crafts teachers "occupational
therapy" in mental hospitals, or attendants in the mental wards, or
psychology assistants giving Rorschach tests. In San Francisco they
sometimes ship out with a crew for a few months and come home with
a bank roll, or join a road construction gang in Canada or Alaska. Allen
Ginsberg financed a trip to North Africa and Europe that way. The
lumber camps of the Northwest sometimes serve the same purpose for
a while. Some part-time jobs are to be found as laboratory technicians,
X-ray technicians and the like, if one is willing to spend a few months
preparing himself for the job.
In New York there are jobs that offer an opportunity to work in odd-
hour shifts, much desired by the beat, as art gallery guards, deck hands
DOWN WITH THE RAT RACE : THE NEW POVERTY 153
on ferryboats, and for those who seek solitude and plenty of time to
think, goof or write, the job of barge captain is the answer. Those who
are polylingual or have traveled abroad can find part-of-the-year em
ployment as travel guides, either self-employed if they have a little
organizing ability or in the employ of travel agencies.
In Greenwich Village there are some who make it by doing hauling
in small trucks, and some by delivering packages and messages. New
Yorkers also find good pickings at the many openings and premieres in
art galleries and other places to say nothing of pickups, but for this
racket you have to own at least one good party suit, unless you can
pass for a painter or an interesting "character/' New York is also good
for free-lance manuscript reading jobs for publishers and part-time jobs
reading proof for publishers or printers. Musicians who are making the
beat scene do copy work for composers and music publishers, or com
pile "fake books" containing melodies and chord symbols, with or with
out words, and peddle them to commercial musicians in a kind of un
der-the-counter deal, sometimes on the union hall floor and other hang
outs for musicians in New York and Hollywood.
In Venice West and elsewhere there is always the possibility of an
occasional hitch with the gas and electric company as a meter reader.
There is clerking in bookstores and now there are a few jobs in es
presso coffeehouses. For those who live near a university there is library
work on an hourly basis. Landscape gardening is a year-round possibil
ity for West Coast beatniks. Some of them have made it as counselors
for juvenile delinquents, in the employ of the city or county. The job
of shipping clerk is a popular one. When you have saved all the money
you think you are going to need for a while, you quit and pass the word
around to your friends to go there and apply. In this way a job is "kept
in the family," just as the pads are kept in the family by being passed
on from one tenant to the next, with the landlord often none the wiser
or richer.
Job opportunities are always more numerous for the girls, of course.
They can always find work in dress shops and department stores, with
the telephone company and the telephone answering services. As doc
tors' reception clerks and dental assistants. If they have had some
dancing school they can find part-time jobs as dancing teachers in pri
vate schools and summer jobs in girls' camps. There are any number
of office jobs a girl can fill There is manuscript typing and other free-
154 THE HOLY BABBABIANS
lance typing work. In Los Angeles some find jobs as script girls in the
TV and movie studios. Comparison shopping and the sub rosa job of
starting whispering campaigns in the subways for commercial products
is strictly for the "angle-shooters" among the Village chicks in New
York. Modeling is open to those who have the face and the figure for it.
The job of B-girl in the taverns is very much sought after because it
pays well and the hours are desirable, but rarely do the chicks of beat-
land double as call girls or do a week-end stint in the whorehouses.
That is a monopoly of respectable working girls and housewives in
need of extra money to support their families or expensive tastes in
clothes and cars. It is no part of the beat scene.
The musically inclined among the girls seek jobs in record shops and
with music and record publishers. The artistically talented among the
chicks sometimes make it as dress designers, window dressers and in
terior decorators, but here they run into competition with the beat ho
mosexuals. Homosexual writers and artists are the most hard put to it
to find and hold onto employment of any kind.
If all else fails there are always the foundations, the Huntington
Hartford Foundation near Venice West, where one can find food and
shelter for three months (renewable for three months longer) if he is
judged eligible and comes properly recommended, and, on the East
Coast, Yaddo and the McDowell colony. Some have been the recipients
of Guggenheim fellowships or other grants.
There are windfalls now and then. An industrial firm or a university
will let it be known that it needs guinea pigs for some research test,
like the sleep tests at the U. of C., or some other research problem. One
beatnik I know made it for some months as a sweater. He sweated so
many hours a day for a cosmetics firm testing a new product.
And there are the standard jobs for itinerants and occasional workers
cab driving, dish washing, bus boy work, filling station work, and, for
the girls, jobs as car-hops in drive-in restaurants or waitresses. In
Venice West there are jobs for girls on the Pacific Ocean Park Amuse
ment Pier. Some of the younger chicks who are still going to college
or can keep up a reasonable appearance of doing so get money from
home. If you are older and have children to support and no visible
means of support, the county will come to your aid.
With all that, there are still many problems. Poverty is not easy to
manage. It requires some planning and some conniving. The pressure
DOWN WITH THE RAT RACE: THE NEW POVERTY 155
is toward conformity, with regular working hours and consumer spend
ing in ways and in quantities that will make the American Way of Life
look good in the Labor Department reports and the Department of
Commerce statistics. Buying a secondhand suit for five or ten dollars at
a Windward Avenue uncalled-for clothing store or a three-dollar sec
ondhand dress at an East Side rummage shop does nothing for the
statisticians or the Chamber of Commerce.
Sponging, scrounging, borrowing and angle-shooting are too unde-
pendable as a regular source of income, and street begging takes too
much time, as Henry Miller has shown, with inspired documentation,
in Tropic of Cancer. Pushing pot is too hazardous and peddling heroin
is a one-way ticket to the penitentiary, if not to the grave. Shoplifting
is only a stopgap measure at best. It is an art that takes long practice to
master if one is to make a living at it, and is better left to those who
have a talent for it. One amateur I know found herself confronted one
day with an ideological, if not a moral, problem. The supermarket
where she sometimes shoplifted a quarter of a pound of butter more
as social protest when butter prices took a sudden jump than from any
actual necessity was being picketed by strikers. Out of sympathy
with tie striking union she went across the street to the little inde
pendent grocer and did her shoplifting there till the strike was over.
Inheritances sometimes provide a few valuables to be divided among
the needy in true communal fashion. Somebody who has wigged out
and been committed to a mental institution for a while, or been busted
for pot for the third or fourth time and sent up for a long stretch, will
leave behind a pad with household effects, furniture, clothes, books,
phonograph records, pictures and hi-fi equipment. The accepted prac
tice is that such stuff becomes community property. If a cat moves out
of town he sometimes wills such things to his friends quite informally
rather than try to tote them with him or go to the expense of having
them shipped. When he comes back he will find any pad open to him,
or can divide his guesting between several of his choosing. It is the
traditional hospitality of the poor, one of the few traditions of the
square that the beat honor scrupulously.
"Why don't more of them simply marry rich women?" I heard a
square ask one evening at a party in one of the Venice West pads.
Chuck Bennison took it upon himself to answer.
"It's a full-time job," he said.
8
Cats Possessed:
Ritual and the Beat
THERE ARE MANY THINGS THAT SEPARATE THE CATS FROM THE SQUARES
but the first thing that is noticeable when they meet and not always
the easiest to understand is the beat attitude toward sex.
Sex among the beat is not only a pleasure, it is a mystique. As in all
mystery cults, words are important and significant. "Joint" * s a place,
as it is in squareville, but it can also mean the penis or a stick of mari
juana. "Work" means sexual intercourse. (A job is a gig.) Once you are
out of your teens you don't usually dance. You never dance in any pub-
He place. That's for squares. As long ago as the twenties dancing was
considered "dry fucking" by the cognoscenti who regarded it as some
thing for subteen-agers only. Nothing is cornier, or will date you more
quickly, than talking about "a piece of ass/ 7 That went out with "dumb
bell" and such cute Winchellisms as "heart interest" and "carrying the
torch." In fact, Winchell was never in at all, as far as the young of any
generation was concerned. "Honey" is shunned as corny. "Dear" is out,
even in private talk among beat lovers. Usually only the chick's name
is acceptable, or some inspired and original nickname, but it's got to be
good. "Baby" is taboo, except among the Negro beat and in blues lyrics.
"Hot" is still used for chicks, but only if she is "cool." If she is cool she
is "crazy in the sack." Not in the "hay," that is corny, only in the sack.
"Hot" is one of the few words that the beat share with the square in
the sex department. But the beat use it in a special sense. As in jazz
156
CATS POSSESSED: RITUAL AND THE BEAT 157
music, it means trancelike, the hypnotic "warm all over" feeling that
Rhonda Tower described.
Domesticity has the same effect on sex that it has on animals. It
makes both tame and awkward. The beat prefer to think of themselves
as cats. Cats have never been domesticated sexually. Don Marquis 5
"archy and mehitabel" stories made into a "back alley opera" with
music by George Kleinsinger and Carol Charming in the role of the
wayward mehitable who couldn't make it as a domestic house cat and
found her way back to alley promiscuity is a favorite record among
the beat. 5
Propriety has always been galling to some Americans. Henry Adams
in his letters complains about Boston of the 1870's: "Everything is re
spectable, and nothing amusing. There are no outlaws." Later, in
Japan, he was "a bit aghast when one young woman called my atten
tion to a temple as a remains of phallic worship; but what can one do?
. . . One cannot quite ignore the foundations of society." In Samoa
some native girls, making sure first that lie wasn't a missionary, turned
him on to a fermented coconut drink called Kawa and put on a dance.
"Five girls came into the light, with a dramatic effect that really I never
felt before. Naked to the waist, their rich skins glistened with coconut
oil. Around their heads and necks they wore garlands of green leaves in
strips, like seaweeds, and these too glistened with oil, as though the
girls had come out of the sea. Around their waists, to the knee, they
wore leaf -clothes, or lava-lavas." On another occasion he witnessed the
pai-pai, a Samoan strip tease in which the dancer, "showing more legs
and hips every time, until the siapa hangs on her" finally lets it fall "in
full view, then snatches up the siapa and runs away."
But it is not to Henry Adams that the beat of today look for the
sexual mystique. It is more likely to be Henry Miller. It is a metaphys
ical impersonalism that constitutes "cool" sex among the beat genera
tion today. To the square it may sound cold rather than cool "unfeel
ing" is the way it was described in one article I have seen but there
is little likelihood that the doubting square, as long as he remains a
square, or the writer of the article either, will have any opportunity to
check his opinions against experience. There is no impersonal approach
to the metaphysical impersonalism of the cool fuck.
The generation of the twenties went in for heavy necking. Gifts and
"going out together" played an important part in courtship. Such nice-
158 THE HOLY BARBAHIANS
ties are considered square among today's beat. Their courting is as un
sentimental as a blues ballade. It is an attack in depth. The soul must
be engaged as well as the genitals. Speech plays as much of a role in
the act as it does among the squares, but it is apt to be earthier. The
four-letter words are taboo among the beat. They are taboo not in the
puritan sense of forbidden but in the Samoan sense of sacred. In the
sexual act, the beat are filled with mana, the divine power. This is far
from the vulgar, leering sexuality of the middle-class square in heat.
This is not to say that every beatnik is a hierophant of the metaphysical
fuck and every pad a temple of the hierogamic ritual act. It is the ideal.
The grail at the end of the Quest.
To the indignant or shocked square the initiate of beatland would
say, "Go on, fight it. If you fight anything hard enough you'll end up in
bed with it. Remember Jacob and the angel, and maybe you'll be
blessed."
"I Hold a Beast, an Angel and a Madman in Me! 9
"I hold a beast, an angel and a madman in me/' Dylan Thomas once
wrote of himself, "and my enquiry is as to their working, and my prob
lem is their subjugation and victory, downthrow and upheaval. . . ."
If Angel Dan Davies stays up all night with wine, pot, sex, music or
talk and gets fired from his job the next day, or Chuck Bennison goofs
off and shows up three days late to an appointment, they have some
sort of justification, if they think they need any, in the example of
Dylan Thomas. "After some terrible drunk," says critic John Daven
port, "he (Dylan) would come to, somewhere out in the country. Ut
terly exhausted, nervous, there he would be, suddenly stuttering, diffi
dent, fumbling in his pocket *I don't know if you'd mind of course
you haven't the time' and dragging out a poem for you to read.
There he was, with his dirty, curly hair, probably wearing someone
else's trousers, those nail-bitten fingers as if they were stretched out
for a five-pound note then he produced some beautiful thing like
this."
The point is, he produced "some beautiful thing like this." For this,
nothing was too much to endure, for him or for anybody who happened
to be involved with him. Theoretically, at least, there is always this
beautiful thing to hope for and struggle for, whatever the cost.
CATS POSSESSED: BITUAL AND THE BEAT 159
Beast, angel and madman, "and my enquiry is as to their working,"
said Dylan Thomas, "and my problem is their subjugation and victory,
downthrow and upheaval." Surely he was referring here to something
more than whisky, women and panhandling the price of a meal. D. H.
Lawrence's life was also an "enquiry" into good and evil, ecstacy and
madness, an "enquiry" that led him to the ends of the earth, to primi
tive cultures, to self-searchings, in a pursuit that was also a flight. Of
the Pueblo Indians he wrote:
(To the Pueblos), everything is alive, not supernaturally but nat
urally alive. There are only deeper and deeper streams of live, vi
brations of more and more vast . . . (And) the whole effort of
(the Indian) is to get his life into direct contact with the elemental
life of the cosmos, mountain-life, cloud-life, thunder-life, air-life,
earth-life, sun-life (as in the sacred races). To come into immediate
felt contact, and so derive energy, power, and a dark sort of joy.
This effort into sheer naked contact, without an intermediary or
mediator, is the root-meaning of Pueblo religion. 6
That was in the early twenties. If Lawrence were alive today he
might be seeking his "natural" not supernatural god in Zen Buddhism,
along with the beat generation. To them, too, everything is alive, not
only the natural forces like air, sun and thunder, but the machines that
man himself has made. Here is the transcription of a tape recording of
Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso telling about an experience on their
trip down the coast from San Francisco.
COKSO: It happened in front of the Carmel High School. We were by a
traffic light, waiting to hitch a ride. And these great mechanical mon
sters began to move!
LIPTON: Making magic out of the commonplace?
CORSO: But the commonplace is what we see. This is the fantastic thing.
We finally see it. And some of us, through cowardice, call it visions,
hallucinations. But what we see is really real.
LIPTON: Then the magic is the real?
GINSBERG: Yes, in the sense that it's what we actually think of. We were
standing and looking at the red and green traffic signals. Then we both
suddenly realized Gregory pointed it out, we were both high the
essential monstrousness of the thing. You know how a face looks, a
160 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
head with blue and green lights blinking on and off.
CORSO: That it was capable of moving. And that people had created
it, thinking it was inanimate. See they don't know the monster is
moving.
GINSBERG: The eyes, everything. Monstrous.
A traffic signal moves. It isn't like a human face, it is human, mon
strously human. "What we see is really real'' Corso rejects the notion
that it is an illusion; he says it is cowardice to call it a vision, a halluci
nation. "The commonplace is what we see," it is fantastic and it is really
real. Asked how he pictured the Muse, Ginsberg replied, "I think of
it as numen, the numinous." In the numinous experience the thing seen
is the real; it is the thing itself experienced, seen, known, in its "true"
nature and essence.
It is all part of what Carl Jung has called modern man in search of
a soul. This spiritual search is not confined to the beat generation; it is
in such waters that Monsignor Sheen has been fishing for years. But
it is not peace of mind or positive thinking or reconciliation with tradi
tion or the Church that the beat are seeking. It is something deeper in
the human psyche and farther back in the history of the numinous ex
perience, farther back and farther out, than any church of our time has
to offer. It is not a creation of priests, ministers or rabbis, not as or
ganized religion is now constituted. The anticlerical bias of the Renais
sance in Italy, France or England was a love feast compared with the
loathing with which the nonconformist American, whether of the twen
ties, the thirties, the forties, or the disaffiliated today view the churches,
their priests and ministers and all the workings of organized religion
including the churches of India, China and Japan and Zen Buddhism
itself. Organized church worship and ceremonial of every sort is reli
gion "shorn of its hair and balls," as Chuck Bennison will tell you. It is
not even "the opium of the people," as the Communists insist. It lacks
the properties of a proper narcotic. Everything narcotic or hypnotic has
been squeezed out of it, along with the sex, the poetry, the art, till there
is nothing left in it but watered-down weak tea for wine and the sweep
ings of the chaff for what may once have been the living bread of the
spirit. To their last breath, churches, like empires, have one primary
aim: to preserve and perpetuate themselves. They are not self -liquidat
ing institutions. The first oath every new pope takes is never to give up
CATS POSSESSED: RITUAL AND THE BEAT 161
any o the powers of the papacy, even if it means his death; and one
recalls Winston Churchill's remark that he did not become the king's
first minister to liquidate the British Empire.
The beat see themselves as outlaws from the Church, something like
the first Christians who also lived in pads of a sort, in the slum quarters
of slaves and outcasts, and were hunted down by the officialdom of the
church and the empire and its fly-cops. When they say "ritual" they
are not thinking of the overblown and pompous ceremonials of the
cathedrals, or the unintelligible mumblings of the synagogue, or the
book-reviewing pulpits of the Jewish Reform temples, either. Or evan
gelistic camp meetings, or Billy Graham and his show business theatrics
and publicity stunts. They have read their anthropologists and histo
rians and are trying to cut back to something like primitive root sources
for the meaning and function of true myth and ritual, before it was
taken over by rulers and clerics and organized and institutionalized and
wrung dry of every esthetic pleasure and every orgastic joy.
It is during the Christmas season that the disaffiliates are more con
firmed than ever in their rejection of institutionalized and now com
mercialized religion, and yet they are faced with a moral dilemma.
It is the birthday of the Prince of Peace and they are not opposed to
peace. For once in the year the word love is heard in the streets and
they are not against love. Christmas is a time that tries the souls of the
beat, confronting them with decisions and choices and temptations to
compromise. Whether to go back home for Christmas. Whether to ac
cept the invitation of a family in squareville whose son or daughter had
made their acquaintance in one of the espresso cafes. Whether to give
gifts. Whether to buy Christmas cards and mail them to old friends
back there. Or make their own, with a little artistry and good taste,
leaving out the pious cliches and the corny tinsel. Whether to set up
a Christmas tree, which is, after all a pagan, not a Christian, symbol
as pagan as Priapus or the Muse. Why would it be so uncool to set up
just a small tree, a plain white one maybe, or better yet, to make one
out of driftwood and miniature mobiles and maybe invite a few friends
in just for the hell of it? A little wine for the belly's sake never did
anybody any harm, even if it has lost its mana in the empty ceremonials
of the churches and been further debased in the unspeakable vulgari
ties of office parties. Or would it be cooler just to ignore the whole
thing?
162 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
Venice sculptor Stan Winkler solved the problem by setting up his
Christmas tree in the form of a Holy Rood made of agonizingly gnarled
and knotted driftwood. He and his wife Ella stayed up late on Christ
mas Eve fitting it out with painted clay replicas of Gold Coast figurines,
Ashanti miniatures, early Christian saints, cubistic Philippine statuettes,
Iroquois masks, the dancing figures of Borneo and some Kachina dolls
they had brought back with them from the Hopi pueblos. Stan had sold
something at his recent show and Ella still had her job, so they roasted
a fifteen-pound turkey the next day and invited everybody who was
hungry in for Christmas dinner. The party lasted through the night and
well into the next day, with Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers'
Ritual drum record on the phonograph, the bongos going all over the
place and Stan putting on his own version of a primitive wine dance,
pounding a conga drum under his arm. A corroboree of clowning, pro
test and reverence characteristic of the holy barbarians.
The Gospel According to Anthropology and Prehistory
On the bookshelves of the beat pads you will usually find one or
more of the books of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Ernst Cassirer, Susan
K. Langer and Maud Bodkin, in paperback editions or expensive hard
cover copies that were purchased at the sacrifice of food, perhaps, or
filched from bookstores or borrowed from a public library and never
returned. Some of the beat are familiar, from college courses or library
reading, with Oesterly and Elie Faure, Konrad von Lage, Andrew
Lang, Franz Boas, Paul Radin and Melville Herskovits. They all have
paperback editions of the books of Margaret Mead and Penguin books
like those of Gordon Childe on prehistory and ancient cultures are on
their shelves and Leonhard Adam on primitive art.
Not a few among them have had the experience of going back to the
Church it is usually Catholicism in their search for the numinous,
but they have always come back to the anthropologists, who occupy
among the beat today much the same position that the writings of
Freud did among the Secessionists of the twenties. From their reading
of church history they know that the sacred dance was banished from
the Church, just as Athens imposed similar bans and restrictions on
the goat plays and the mystery religions. Just as the dancing prophetic
bands of Israel were viewed with suspicion and hostility by the priests.
CATS POSSESSED: RITUAL AND THE BEAT 163
Official historians and scribes "glossed" the myths into false history
and turned the sacred dance into temple pageantry. Robert Graves has
made a career of such historical-literary-mythological detective work
and his books are widely read among the younger generation of today,
both here and in England.
The so-called Cambridge School of classical anthropologists were
among the first in our time to give some attention to the role of art
and the artist in relation to myth and ritual. The ethnographer with his
pencil poised to note the symbolism and the psychological implications
of tribal dances, verbal rituals and music also contributed to our knowl
edge of the subject. Bronislaw Malinowski is perhaps the most percep
tive of these chroniclers, although the approach, if not the methods, had
already been employed by H. H. Marett who, more than E. B. Tyler
and J. G. Frazer, deserves credit for the first clear insight into ritual and
myth. H. H. Marett approached "the sacraments of simple folk" as
something to be learned, not something to be dissected and classified
with scientific detachment or, as has too often been the case, with
Protestant Christian bias. To possess what you inherit you must earn it,
Marett said, and some of the investigators in this field have emulated
his humility. Malinowski, reminding us that religious ritual "does some
thing infinitely more than the mere sacrilizing of a crisis of life," that it
transmits to the initiated not only a knowledge of his duties, privileges
and responsibilities but "above all a knowledge of tradition and the
communion of sacred things and beings," goes so far as to add that
anthropology should also be a study of our mentality in the light of
Stone Age mentality. 7
Ritual is the sacramentalizing and socializing of the crises of life:
birth, puberty, marriage, conception, pregnancy, sickness and death.
The community, through the rituals, helped the individual to meet
these crises of life. It helped him to be born, taught him how to live,
love and work, heal his sicknesses and, at the last, gathered at his bed
side and helped him to die. From the first birth through the rebirth of
Initiation to the final Viaticum, ritual gave meaning, beauty and dig
nity to every critical event of life. This was its purpose and their func
tion.
Myth is the god-making process by which the community metaphor-
izes its aspirations, "le dSsir collectif per$onif6" the collective desire per
sonified. 8 Myth gives the individual and the group a sense of origins,
164 THE HOLY BABBAMANS
roots, and a sense of continuity. In the arts, myth is at one and the same
time the conserver of tradition and the material out of which new myth
is forever being created to fill new needs. As the old gods die their
rituals die with them. The historic process of god-making has been
going on from the remotest beginnings to this very day. In between
periods of relative stability there is always a twilight of the gods, bring
ing with it chaos, conflict and Angst We are in the midst of such a
Gotterddmmerung today.
Religious ritual, if it is not to sicken into the private rituals of neu
rosis, must have a mass base, at least within the limits of a socially
integrated group. The lack of such basic rituals in our time is a subject
of intermittent concern in the public prints. The churchmen, of course,
see no lack of ritual. They have it, packaged and priced for mass con
sumption, in spiritual emporiums that come more and more to resemble
department stores where every day is Christmas. In religious surveys
four-fifths of those questioned say they believe the Bible is the "re
vealed word of God." Americans are buying more Bibles than ever be
fore. Nevertheless other surveys show that fifty-three per cent are
unable to name even one of the gospels, and a panel of twenty-eight
prominent Americans, asked to rate the hundred most significant hap
penings in history, ranked Christ's Crucifixion fourth in a tie with the
Wright Brothers' flight and the discovery of X rays. 9 Allowing for the
pious fraud that winks at faking up the figures to the glory of God and
his churches, the membership attendance figures of organized religion
are still impressive. Evidently Bibles are bought and seldom read and
people go to church but come away from sermons and services with
out being transformed. They are still hungry and searching for ritual
cleansing and spiritual illumination, according to most studies emanat
ing from nonclerical (and often enough from clerical) sources. The
tendency, increasingly, is to look elsewhere, outside the churches, for
signs of an American mythos and a mass ritual.
Every so often an inspired cultural anthropologist, usually one of
amateur standing, discovers an American mass ritual that everybody
else has overlooked. It might be baseball, or football, or basketball, if
attendance figures are any criterion. All have their heroes, who might
well pass for gods, or their high priests and apostles who spread their
gospels in the sports pages of the newspapers and on radio and tele-
sion. "What's the score?" might well pass for a "God be with you"
CATS POSSESSED: RITUAL AND THE BEAT 165
greeting among the faithful, and serve as a badge and a ritual bond.
I have even heard it seriously argued that the football cheering sections
and their stylized antics are comparable to the response of the congre
gation, and the agonia on the gridiron, with its marked yardage lines
and goal posts, is the modern counterpart of the stations of the cross
and the Holy Rood.
Whatever the merits of the argument, the beat generation isn't buy
ing. Neither the church ritual nor the sports ritual. Except among the
teen-agers who sometimes admit to occasional church attendance "to
please mother" is the usual explanation I have yet to find one beatnik
who has found, or expects to find, any ritual salvation in the churches,
The beat are not to be found in the baseball stands or tuning in on the
play-by-play on radio or television. They never know who's ahead in
the pennant race. The World's Series, which one of our new theologians
analyzed, in a liberal weekly, as something culturally homologous to
the tribal religious celebrations of the fall equinox, leaves the beat
spiritually unmoved and unregenerate. They are likely to take their
theology in matters of church and sports from Mad magazine rather
than The Christian Century or Sports Illustrated.
The Way of Wit's End
On one occasion when we were having a party at the house, a well-
educated woman of our acquaintance was having an animated discus
sion with a young man of nineteen. I could see by her expression that
she was shocked. Later she came over to me and said, "Do you know
what that young man just said to me? One plus one doesn't make two.
One is one and two is two and three is three, and any connection there
may appear to be between them is illusion, a mere convention of time."
She was not only mystified or indignant - there was something in her
manner that suggested a suspicion that the young man was poking fun
at her for being a square - but she was horrified. "Why, do you realize
what that means?" she went on. "It means that nothing is the cause of
anything else! It means there is no continuity at all to life, or thinking,
or human relations. It means there isn't any such thing as progress -"
and so on, on and on, getting more and more indignant by the minute.
I took Alan W. Watts's The Way of Zen off the shelf and pointed out
this passage for her to read:
166 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see
clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this
instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without
any concrete reality. Until this has become clear, it seems that our
life is all past and future, and that the present is nothing more than
the infinitesimal hairline which divides them. From this comes the
sensation of "having no time," of a world which hurries by so
rapidly that it is gone before we can enjoy it. But through "awaken
ing to the instant" one sees that this is the reverse of the truth: it
is rather the past and the future which are fleeting illusions, and
the present which is eternally real. We discover that the linear suc
cession of time is a convention of our single-track verbal thinking,
of a consciousness which interprets the world by grasping little
pieces of it, calling them things and events. But every such grasp
of the mind excludes the rest of the world, so that this type of
consciousness can get an approximate vision of the whole only
through a series of grasps, one after another. Yet the superficiality
of this consciousness is seen in the fact that it cannot and does not
regulate even the human organism. For if it had to control the
heartbeat, the breath, the operation of the nerves, glands, muscles,
and sense organs, it would be rushing wildly around the body
taking care of one thing after another, with no time to do anything
else. Happily, it is not in charge, and the organism is regulated by
the timeless "original mind," which deals with life in its totality
and so can do ever so many "things" at once. 10
"Why that's Tao!" she exclaimed. It developed that she had read
translations of Tao literature as long as twenty years before and now
she recognized the connection, for Chinese Taoism is indeed one of the
streams of thought that went into the making of Zen Buddhism. Fur
ther conversation revealed that she had read sporadically in Indian
Buddhism and was familiar with Vedanta and Yoga. It simply hadn't
occurred to her, however, that these were anything but subjects of
study for cultivated people to pursue, to make interesting conversation
about, certainly not to take seriously as something to act upon, as a way
of thinking or living. What shocked her, in short, was that this young
man was making it a way of life.
"She's a square," the young man told me afterward. "She knows all
about it up here " tapping his forehead "but she doesn't dig it,
CATS POSSESSED : RITUAL AND THE BEAT 167
man. Like you got to swing with it or you get hung up on the numbers,
man, on the little black dots and all that corn, and you never make it"
"The problem/* says Watts, "is not simply one of mastering different
ideas, differing from our own as, say, the theories of Kant differ from
those of Descartes, or those of Calvinists from those of Catholics. The
problem is to appreciate differences in the basic premises of thought
and in the very methods of thinking, and these are so often overlooked
that our interpretations of Chinese philosophy are apt to be a projec
tion of characteristically Western ideas into Chinese terminology. This
is the inevitable disadvantage of- studying Asian philosophy by the
purely literary methods of Western scholarship, for words can be com
municative only between those who share similar experiences/'
Our educated friend had read the books but she had never done any
of the things the young man had done. He had packed a rucksack and
gone off by himself into the desert and up the coast to the wilds of the
Big Sur country, and given himself over to meditation for days at a
time. He had listened for it in the music of Bach and the music of jazz,
with equal attentiveness and absorption. He had sought for it in sex
and pot. He was young, only in the beginnings of the quest, but he had
a pretty good idea what he was looking for and it wasn't all gathered
from books. There were birds in his experience, and deserts and moun
tains and danger and fatigue. He knew he had a long way to go. After
all, he was only nineteen!
But he was "on the road/' He was already one of those holy bar
barians "who drove cross-country seventy-two hours to find out if I
had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out eternity,**
to quote a line from Allen Ginsberg's Howl il He will tell you that what
he understands by "the beat" is the beat of jazz, the heartbeat, the
beat in the beatific vision anything but the construction of beaten or
defeated that the squares, in their mortal fear of freedom, have put
on the word.
The general tendency of the Western mind (says Watts) is to
feel that we do not really understand what we cannot represent,
what we cannot communicate, by linear signs - by thinking. We
are like the "wallflower" who cannot learn a dance unless someone
draws a diagram of the steps, who cannot "get it by the feel" For
some reason we do not trust and do not fully use the "peripheral
168 THE HOLY BARBABIANS
vision*' of our minds. We learn music, for example, by restricting
the whole range of tone and rhythm to a notation of fixed tonal
and rhythmic intervals a notation which is incapable of repre
senting Oriental music. But the Oriental musician has a rough
notation which he uses only as a reminder of a melody. He learns
music, not by reading notes, but by listening to the performance of
a teacher, getting the "feel" of it, and copying him, and this
enables him to acquire rhythmic and tonal sophistications matched
only by those Western jazz artists who use the same approach. 12
The aim, of course, is wholeness, personal salvation, in a word, holi
ness, and the artist has always been in search of it, one way or another.
The Dada movement which began in Zurich in 1916 and quickly spread
to Paris where it became the basis of surrealism, sought to break up the
habitual linear habits of thought by a deliberate derangement of the
senses, the sensibility and what not, a misguided search that ended in
a blind alley because it remained within the framework of duality, "the
opposites." Thus we find Andre Berg talking about responding "utterly
but successively to the contradictory appeals of the sensitivity/' Tristan
Tzara trying to make it by "unaccustomed caresses, touching the soul
at points where it has not been touched before, shaking it and stirring
it with new griefs and happy hazards," and Jacques Vache wanting "to
shape the personal sensation though the aid of a blazing collusion of
rare words not often, eh what?" he adds, and any of our young
barbarians with even a smattering of Zen could tell him today, "not
ever, man, not ever!"
For the Tao, 13 the Way, is not to be found by dividing the mind into
subject and object, trying to observe itself, any more than the eye,
which sees, can see itself. Watts offers an analogy: "We have two types
of vision central and peripheral, not unlike the spotlight and the
floodlight. Central vision is used for accurate work like reading, in
which our eyes are focused on one small area after another, like spot
lights. Peripheral vision is less conscious, less bright than the intense
ray of the spotlight. We use it for seeing at night, and for taking 'sub
conscious' notice of objects and movements not in the direct line of
central vision. Unlike the spotlight, it can take in very many things at
a time. There is, then, an analogy and perhaps more than mere
analogy between central vision and conscious one-at-a-time thinking,
CATS POSSESSED: RITUAL AND THE BEAT 169
and between peripheral vision and the rather mysterious process which
enables us to regulate the incredible complexity of our bodies without
thinking at all .... We are not suggesting that Westerners simply do
not use the 'peripheral mind.' Being human, we use it all the time, and
every artist, every workman, every athlete calls into play some special
development of its powers. But it is not academically and philosophical
ly respectable. We have hardly begun to realize its possibilities, and it
seldom, if ever, occurs to us that one of its most important uses is for
that ^knowledge of reality' which we try to attain by cumbersome
calculations of theology, metaphysics, and logical inference."
The "other ways of knowing" that we of the West have been seek
ing, then, are not to be found by deranging the senses or playing tricks
with the autonomic nervous system, but by learning how to use the
peripheral vision we already possess. The way to get release from the
rat race of the ten thousand things is to let go, for it is not "they," the
"things," which are bedeviling us, it is we who are clutching them.
"When we have learned to put excessive reliance upon central vision,
upon the sharp spotlight of the eyes and mind, we cannot regain the
powers of peripheral vision unless the sharp and staring kind of sight
is first relaxed. The mental or psychological equivalent of this is the
special kind of stupidity to which Lao-tze and Kung-fu-tse (Confucius)
so often refer. It is not simply calmness of inind, but 'nongraspingness'
of mind." It is the "stupidity" of the Sacred Clown, the Holy Fool.
Much of the behavior of the holy barbarian toward the square, so
often incomprehensible and frightening when it is not revolting is
of this character. For the square is by definition the unreleased, the
rigid, the rectilinear. He is always busy, he is always in a bind. He
never lets himself alone. He never lets himself "go," so that he is never
"gone," in the swinging sense of jazz. In the dance of life he remains
the wallflower. And hates the hipster as only the wallflower can hate the
dancer. Hates hm-i and, secretly, envies him. If you want to see this
mixed hatred and envy in action, read any of the attacks on the beat
generation in newspapers and magazines.
"It is fundamental to every school of Buddhism," says Watts, "that
there is no ego, no enduring entity which is the constant subject of our
changing experiences . . . there is no real Self (atman) at the basis of
our consciousness."
170 THE HOLY BABBABIANS
What, then, is this Self that the holy barbarian is constantly explor
ing? It is a search for the "Original Face." His basic, original nature.
Usually it is only after he has explored every avenue of approach to it,
when he is finally at his wit's end, and knows that he doesn't know,
that he is ready for enlightenment. It is only then that he can begin to
swing with the beat.
9
'God's Medicine": The Euphoric Fix
THE EUPHORIA THAT THE BEAT WHO USE MABTjTUANA ABE SEEKING IS NOT
the wholly passive, sedative, pacifying experience that the users of the
commercial tranquilizers want. On the contrary, they are looking for a
greater sense of aliveness, a heightened sense of awareness. Of all the
euphoric, hypnotic and hallucinogenic drugs, marijuana is the mildest
and also the most conducive to social usage. The joint is passed around
the pad and shared, not for reasons of economy but as a social ritual
Once the group is high, the magic circle is complete. Confidences are
exchanged, personal problems are discussed with a frankness that is
difficult to achieve under normal circumstances music is listened to
with rapt concentration, poetry is read aloud and its images, visual and
acoustical, communicated with maximum effect The Eros is felt in the
magic circle of marijuana with far greater force, as a unifying principle
in human relationships, than at any other time except, perhaps, in the
mutual metaphysical orgasm. The magic circle is, in fact, a symbol of
and a preparation for the metaphysical orgasm. While marijuana does
not give the user the sense of timelessness to the same degree that
peyote does, or lysergic acid or other drugs, it does so sufficiently to im
part a sense of presence, a here-and-nowness that gives the user a
heightened sense of awareness and immediacy.
When the marijuana head (vipers, we called them in the thirties) or
the hype turns on, he has the feeling of setting something in motion
171
172 THE HOLY BAKBABIANS
inside himself. He feels the "jolt" as an automobile "feels" the charge at
the moment of ignition. It lights up, explodes. "Charge" and "explode"
are also terms used by the head and the hype to describe the kick of the
drug at the moment of "turning on." The energy charge is the kick and
the feeling of euphoria that follows is "cool," tranquilizing. When the
smoke comes in contact with the respiratory mucous membrane, in the
case of the marijuana smoker, the absorption is rapid. The effects are
felt immediately and last from one to three hours, depending on the
potency of the drug and the state of mind of the user.
Sometimes it is a heightened sense of self that is sought, rather than
the sensory experience of things outside the self. As Itchy Dave Gelden
expresses it, "It's like this, man, we need more awareness of the I. It's
like, before I light up I'm drug with the ten thousand things . . . you
can't concentrate," but when you light up you can "follow the song of
yourself. You're listening and you're hearing the song and you're swing
ing along with it." At other times it is a heightened sensory receptivity
that is sought, a sharpened esthetic awareness, especially kinesthetic
awareness. Colors appear to be brighter, sounds sharper, more defined,
more easily picked out and followed through the chord changes of the
music. "I never really heard the music till I started listening with pot,"
is something you hear often in beat circles. "It's like switching from an
old-fashioned phonograph to hi-fi."
Some of the holy barbarians, particularly the poets and painters, have
found the cool world of heightened sensory experience in another
drug peyote. Here is how Mike McClure, the San Francisco poet,
describes his sensations in Peyote
Clear the senses bright sitting in the black chair
Rocker the white walls reflecting the color of
clouds moving under the sun. Intimacies! The rooms
not important but like divisions of all space
of all hideousness and beauty. I hear the
music of myself and write it down for no one
to read. I pass fantasies as they
sing to me with Circe Voices. I visit
among the peoples of myself and know all
I need to know.
I KNOW EVERYTHING! I PASS INTO THE ROOM
there is a golden bed radiating all light
"GOD'S MEDICINE": THE EUPHORIC FIX 173
the air is full of silver hangings and sheathes
I smile to myself. I know
all that there is to know. I see all there
is to feel. I am friendly with the ache
in my belly. The answer
to love is my voice. There is no Time!
No answers. The answer to feeling is my feeling
The answer to joy is joy without feeling.
The room is a multicolored cherub,
of air and bright colors. The pain in my stomach
is warm and tender. I am smiling, The pain
is many pointed, without anguish.
Light changes the room from yellows to violet.
The dark brown space behind the door is precious
intimate, silent and still. The birthplace
of Brahms. I know
all that I need to know. There is no hurry.
I read the meanings of scratched walls and cracked ceiling.
I am separate. I close my eyes in divinity and pain.
I blink in solemnity and unsolemn joy.
I smile at myself in my movements. Walking
I step higher in carefulness. I fill
space with myself. I see the secret and distinct
patterns of smoke from my mouth
I am without care part of all. Distinct.
I am separate from gloom and beauty. I see all.
SPACIOUSNESS
And the grim intensity close within myself. No longer
a cloud
but flesh real as rock. Like Herakles
of primordial substance and vitality.
And not even afraid of the thing shorn of glamor
but accepting.
The beautiful things are not ourselves
but I watch them. Among them.
And the indian thing. It is true!
Here in my apartment I think tribal thoughts. )
174 THE HOLY BAKBABIANS
STOMACH!!!
There is no Time. I am visited by a man
who is the god of foxes
there is dirt under the nails of his paw
fresh from his den.
We smile at one another in recognition.
I am free from Time. I accept it without triumph
a fact.
Closing my eyes there are flashes of light
My eyes won't focus but leap. I see that I have three feet.
I see seven places at once!
The floor slants the room slopes
things melt
into each other. Flashes
of light
and meldings. I wait
Seeing the physical thing pass.
I am on a mesa of time and space.
/ STOM - ACHE !
Writing the music of life
in words.
Hearing the round sounds of the guitar
as colors.
Feeling the touch of flesh.
Seeing the loose chaos of words
on the page,
(ultimate grace)
(Sweet Yeats and his ball of hashish.)
My belly and I are two individuals
joined together
in life.
THIS IS THE POWERFUL KNOWLEDGE
we smile with it.
At the window I look out into the blue-gray
glooms of dreariness.
"GOD'S MEDICINE": THE EUPHORIC FIX 175
I am warm. Into the dragon of space.
I stare into the clouds seeing
their misty convolutions.
The whirls of vapor.
I will small clouds out of existence.
They become fish devouring each other.
And change like Dante's spirits
becoming an osprey frozen skyhigh
to challenge me.
Tastes and personality traits apparently determine to a large extent
what is experienced by the user of drugs. When Mel Weisburd, one of
the editors of Coastlines magazine, submitted to an experiment with
lysergic acid by a Los Angeles doctor who was investigating the effects
of several types of hallucinogenic drugs, he saw "gigantic proletarian
murals" and "a pillar of light against a blackened horizon, like an
atomic blast" and at one point talked politics with the doctor.
"You know, Dr. Irving," I said, "capitalism and socialism make
absolutely no difference at all. It's the germ plasm that counts. Don't
let them fool you." "I know," Dr. Irving replied, "you're absolutely
right," as if he had also overturned his soul, as if he had also run
smack into a channel of yearning, dropping his ludicrous role as
experimentor.
But there were also visions of the sublime and the supernatural.
We were on Olympic Boulevard which, like all six-lane boule
vards in Los Angeles, was sick with nervous stop-and-go traffic.
But now Olympic Boulevard was Olympia, a great Sunday-driver
pageant moving in vehicular streams to and from the cities and
beaches of beatification. And suddenly, with the logic of a
heavenly-wise wish, who should appear but a guardian angel
formed in the likeness of an old girl friend, high on a motor
scooter. Her fresh wind-blown face radiated the quintessence of
the power of recognition, the sublimest nostalgia imaginable. In
our matter-of-fact glance, there was not only the recognition of a
friend, but the pure principle of kindredness. I had an overpower
ing warmth for everyone I knew and with everything that lived.
When we arrived at the park, we began walking towards it
"Yup, this is it!" I remarked as if marking the place of my ecstasy.
176 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
The air was unbelievably fresh. "Wonderful," Dr. Irving answered.
"You're supernormal now, supersane." He patted me on the back.
"Just breathe this air. Isn't it wonderful? Here, look at this tree.
What do you think of it?" "Supernatural," I said and savored the
word as if I understood it for the first time. The lawns, the wide side
walk, the rows of leafless, sinewy sycamore trees, all of these under
scored with living emphasis, the word. "Supernatural," no division
in nature, no separation of myself from anything, everything
whole, everything integral. And in this fulfillment of existence,
all desire was lost. Imagination did not exist either, for that was an
instrument of a falsely conditioned mind forced to manipulate
pseudorealities, forced to endure the conflicts and the distortions
of the flesh. Possession was ridiculous, for you possessed nothing.
Vanity and egotism were frivolous for you were not an individual,
but the infinite power of the germ plasm of the race. The body
was a mere pedestal to hold experience. Death, therefore, was
nothing, nothing at all, for life was indestructible. . . .
"It's like an orgasm," Dr. Irving suggested, "like an eternal
orgasm." And yes, yes he was right, by everything that is holy and
sexual. That constant feeling of abandon, of giving oneself up to a
driving force that exuberantly fructifies in every living thing: that
selfless exhilarating releasing flight: that cool, damp breast-milk
feeling of satisfaction in my throat and lungs. 15
Did Weisburd's experience with lysergic acid, in which life suddenly
appeared to him like an eternal orgasm, where everything is "holy and
sexual," work any transformation in his attitudes? A few months after
the experiment he told me that it had changed his attitude toward his
own writing, that he now recognized two ways of seeing and knowing,
instead of one, but that he sees no reason not to continue working at
a job even when it demands of him everything that he detests, because
his lysergic vision has taught him that "everything that is, is necessary."
In short, no transformation in lifeways took place. In this case, at least,
pharmacy under controlled laboratory conditions with physicians and
nurses in attendance ( again, how like the square that is ) has proved to
be no short cut to salvation.
Apparently, the pharmaceutical fix can only trigger the vision, it can
not give it content. That must come from the individual himself, from
his personality patterns and life experiences, just as the manifest con
tent of the dream comes from the "residue" of the dreamers waking
life. What distinguishes the holy barbarian from Sunday-go-to meeting
"GOD'S MEDICTNE" : THE EUPHORIC FIX 177
shimmers in paradise like Mel Weisburd is that the holy barbarian acts
upon his visionary experience. He doesn't just talk about it, or use it as
a justification for continuing to live and work in the thickening center
of the society's corruption. And this determination to act is nowhere
more in evidence than in his use of the euphoric fix, not merely as
Tacks," or a medical experiment, but as a social ritual.
On the level of the juvenile delinquent the use of narcotics in the
magic circle is crude, tentative and entirely unself-conscious. In the case
of a teen-age juvenile delinquent like Willie Frank, pot was a means
of belonging, a matter of childish prestige. "I was about fourteen years
old and still in grammar school and they opened up a little luncheonette
right across the street from where I lived. There was a bunch of guys
hanging out there and they were taking pot. I didn't know anything
about pot or nothing, you know. I just started hanging around with
them and idolizing them because I thought they were really something,
a bunch of real smart guys, you know. I think it was a couple of months
after I started hanging around with them I got accepted and they
turned me on one day/'
On the high school level, pot is a unifying group-force chiefly be
cause it is illegal. It is a matter of guilty knowledge; in this case, not
because it is a sin, but because it is a secret brand mark that holds the
group together as partners in crime. How strong a bond this can be
when it is sealed with sex.
It is only when one comes to consider its use among the holy bar
barians of the beat generation that anthropological data on the use of
narcosis in cult ritual becomes clearly relevant. Hallucinatory visions
are sought in tribal cultures for various purposes, personal and social,
for divination, for healing and other uses. Such visions are induced by
fasting, by pain-producing practices (among Christians it would be
called "mortification of the flesh"), or by hallucinogenic drugs, usually
accompanied by dance, chanting and music. In the case of the drug-
using rites it is the shaman who is the custodian of the tribal drug lore.
The rite is performed under his supervision to keep it always within
certain social controls. An example of such a rite is the peyote fiesta
among the Tarahumare of Mexico.
A peyote shaman and from six to ten men go to gather peyote.
It is a long journey, sometimes covering a full month ... On arriv
ing at the spot, everyone goes out to pick peyote ... In the eve-
178 THE HOLY BARBAJRIANS
ning they erect a small cross and build a large fire around which
they dance . . . For two nights the dance continues, part of the
pickers dancing while the others sleep . . .
The return of the pickers is celebrated by a -fiesta ... At this
fiesta the raw buds are eaten . . . The dutuburi is danced all night,
and the dance of the peyote is performed around a large fire . . .
Peyote is kept hidden in a cave under an olla, well guarded from
the rats and human trespassers. Only the shamans can use it. The
other people do not keep it. From time to time it may be offered
food, drink, and cigarettes, especially just before it is removed
from its container.
Those who have never eaten peyote fear it most. Should they
touch the plant they believe they would go crazy or die. Those
who have once eaten it at a fiesta need have no fear of it, providing
they treat it properly. 16
You can sense the excitement of these Mexican Indians as they go
hunting for the peyote plant, a search not unlike Allen Ginsberg's
"angleheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection,"
but with more self-control, not, like Ginsberg's hipsters, "dragging
themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry
fix." 17 There is, however, a further similarity between them; the hipster
who knows the connection (who the pusher is and where and when to
find him and is trusted by him to make the deal) is respected and
looked up to among drug users in beatland in much the same way
that the peyote shaman who leads the peyote journey is looked up to.
It is the element of shamanistic control that is lacking among users of
marijuana or the hallucinogenic drugs among the holy barbarians.
As for the use of heroin or other habit-forming drugs, these can only
be regarded as a corrupt misuse of drug-induced creativity which, of
course, defeats its own ends, since it results in little or no creativity.
Jazz musicians will be and have been on many occasions the first
to attest to the artistic uselessness to say nothing of the physical and
psychological damage of heroin. Most of them avoid it like the
plague. Marijuana is, however, quite commonly used by jazz musicians.
The demands made on the jazz musician for improvisation, hour after
hour, results in pressures that may drive even the most creative genius
to call on Mary Juana to help out the Muse.
Until quite recently, when a standing committee was set up at a
"GOD'S MEDICINE'*: THE EUPHOBIC FIX 179
seminar on jazz and narcotics at the Newport Jazz Festival to study
"the problem," the tendency among jazz critics and the magazines pub
lished for jazz musicians and their fans has been to ignore or at least
soft-pedal the whole subject. If the name of a musician dropped out of
Downbeat or Metronome for a few months, if no notices of his gigs or
records were being published, you assumed that he had been busted
and sent up for a stretch, or that he was sweating out a cure somewhere,
or had simply dropped out of things for a while to try and pull himself
together. Many jazz buffs liked it that way. Word got around via the
grapevine and if you were in the know you were one up on those who
didn't know. As for the musicians themselves, the users were inclined
to treat it as a kind of trade secret, and the nonusers preferred to keep
mum about it, too, asserting, if you pressed them, that it was a private
matter and really had nothing at all to do with the music.
Treatment of the subject in the newspapers had been sketchy, partly
because until recent years jazz musicians have not been sufficiently
well known by most newspaper readers to rate news space, and partly
because newspaper reporters are inclined to be friendly to alcoholics
and, by courtesy, to other addicts. Besides, the newspaperman (and
woman) is never strictly a square. He is a square with the corners
rubbed off on the rough realities of life and sometimes even a round
cat in a square hole. So the subject of jazz and drugs has remained one
of those best-kept secrets that everyone knows and nobody talks about.
Except the beat generation, especially the youngsters, to whom the
jazz musician is the shaman of the cult Whatever he does and says is
something to be talked about, often and at length. Tex, of the Ray
Cullen band, is such a cult hero. "One of the most intellectual junkies
IVe known," Tanya Bromberger will teU you. "The guy who just
makes the scene and doesn't have the actual power of the intellect to
analyze it (the use of heroin), he will moan and groan every time he
gets sick. This is the last time he's going to fix, he 11 tell you. He s going
to fix once more and then he s going to kick the habit. But Tex never
talked like that No fix was ever the last fix. He knew the real physical
danger. The night his band closed a bunch were over at Tex s hotel
room and did up, and one guy went out -unconscious - and they can
die from that. He'd been drinking heavily, which does not mix but pro
duces a very bad reaction. Junkies have aU kinds of home remedies.
They throw guys in bathtubs, they've half drowned people, but he, Tex,
180 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
knows. He says, It's Ms upper respiratory system that's paralyzed/ He
climbed up on top of him and gave him artificial respiration for twenty-
five minutes, in the meantime asking for kitchen salt and water and a
needle, which they shot into his arms and right away you heard the
lungs, a horrible gasp as the air rushed in. Tex really knew what he
was doing. Other junkies risk their lives two, three times a day, using
the drug without really knowing what it does. He's the heaviest user
I know but he's the most intelligent. Also he has a ferocious loyalty to
his fellow musicians. Like some guys would have rolled him out the
door, let him die. He stood by him and this was the seventh time the
guy had gone out like that, he told me, and every time he's brought
him around."
A story like that will go the rounds of the beat pads and become part
of the Tex legend. Or the story of how Rock, another hero of the jazz
and junk cult, kicked the habit. Here is the way Tanya tells it.
"It was the time Rock and his trumpet player, Mitch, were here and
the heat was on and they were having trouble getting something and
Rock finally got something from some girl and both of them fixed up.
They had a recording date the next morning and they both staggered
in real late feeling real bad. 'Oh, that was strong stuff,' they were say
ing. And that night they did up the third cap and the same thing hap
pened. They fell sound asleep. Then Rock came over and told Mitch it
wasn't heroin they'd been using, it was a strong sleeping sedative. Then
it dawned on them that they'd been going three days without heroin
and they hadn't been particularly sick. They hadn't felt good but there
hadn't been any of those horrible withdrawal symptoms. And Tex said,
'Hell, this is it. 9 Only one of them kicked. Mitch went back on junk six
months later. But Rock got the monkey off his back for good that
way with sleeping pills!"
Everything the shamans of jazz do is legendary material for the
beat: the gargantuan user, the cat who kicked it, the martyr-hero who
died of it. Dead, he becomes, like Charley Bird Parker, a cult hero on
the order of James Dean and Dylan Thomas.
Bix Beiderbecke, the great cornetist of the twenties, made the Val
halla of jazz on alcohol. Buddy Bolden, the first of the jazz greats, made
it posthumously. How he flipped his wig in the middle of a street band
parade in New Orleans, cornet in hand, and never came out of it, is
"GOD'S MEDICINE'*: THE EUPHOKIC FIX 181
another one of those hero legends. Huddy (Leadbelly) Ledbetter made
it on a combination of booze and murder. Of course all of them were
great artists of jazz or the legends would never have grown up around
them in the first place.
The hip cats among the holy barbarians will tell you they have no
desire for the heavy stuff, but their curiosity about it is boundless, and
if you listen to them talking about it you will not fail to notice their
admiration for jazz musicians who are known to use heroin in heroic
doses.
The Little Flowers Report on the Tea-pads
Before 1944, when New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia's Commit
tee on Marihuana made public its exhaustive report, the drug had been
blamed for every crime in the book. In a pamphlet issued by the Inter
national Narcotic Education Association (Los Angeles, 1936), it was
called "a most virile and powerful stimulant" that produces "a peculiar
psychic exaltation and derangement of the central nervous system . . .
sometimes convulsive attacks and acute mania, and decreases of heart
beat and irregularity of pulse. Death may result from the effect upon
the heart."
This pamphlet went on to say:
Prolonged use of marihuana frequently develops a delirious rage
which sometimes leads to high crimes, such as assault and murder.
Hence marihuana has been called the Taller drug." The habitual
use of this narcotic poison always causes a very marked mental
deterioration and sometimes produces insanity. Hence marihuana
is frequently called 'loco weed." (Loco is the Spanish word for
crazy.)
While the marihuana habit leads to physical wreckage and
mental decay, its effects upon character and morality are even more
devastating. The victim frequently undergoes such degeneracy
that he will lie and steal without scruple; he becomes utterly
untrustworthy and often drifts into the underworld where, with
his degenerate companions, he commits high crimes and misde
meanors* Marihuana sometimes gives man the lust to kill un
reasonably and without motive. Many cases of assault, rape, rob
bery and murder are traced to the use of marihuana.
182 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
In a column headed "HEALTH ADVICE," the New York Daily
Worker had this to say about the "reefers."
Smoking of the weed is habit-forming. It destroys the will
power, releases restraints, and promotes insane reactions. Con
tinued use causes the face to become bloated, the eyes bloodshot,
the limbs weak and trembling, and the mind sinks into insanity.
Robberies, thrill murders, sex crimes and other offenses result.
When the habit is first started, the symptoms are milder, yet
powerful enough. The smoker loses all sense of time and space so
that he can't judge distances, he loses his self-control, and his
imagination receives considerable stimulation.
The habit can be cured only by the most severe methods. The
addict must be put into an institution, where the drug is gradually
withdrawn, his general health is built up, and he is kept there
until he has enough will-power to withstand the temptation to
again take to the weed.
The spread of this terrible fad can be stopped only when the
unscrupulous criminals trafficking in the drug are rooted out.
The La Guardia Committee, staffed by a full complement of doctors,
psychiatrists, psychologists and officers of the narcotic squad of the
Police Department, and financed by the Friedsam Foundation, the New
York Foundation and the Commonwealth Fund, began its researches
in 1940 and reported four years later that "marihuana is not a drug of
addiction," that "those who have been smoking marihuana for a period
of years showed no mental or physical deterioration which may be at
tributed to the drug." Increase in the pulse rate and blood pressure was
confirmed but "no changes were found in the circulation rate and vital
capacity."
Smoking marihuana can be stopped abruptly with no resulting
mental or physical distress comparable to that of morphine with
drawal in morphine addicts. . . .
In most instances, the behavior of the smoker is of a friendly,
sociable character. Aggressiveness and belligerency are not com
monly seen, and those showing such traits are not allowed to re
main in "tea-pads."
The marihuana user does not come from the hardened criminal
class and there was found no direct relationship between the com-
"GOD'S MEDICINE': THE EUPHORIC FIX 183
mission of crimes of violence and marihuana. "Tea-pads" have no
direct association with houses of prostitution, and marihuana itself
has no specific stimulant effect in regard to sexual desires.
The marihuana users with whom contact was made in this study
were persons without steady employment. The majority fall in the
age group of 20 to 30 years. Idle and lacking initiative, they suffer
boredom and seek distraction. Smoking is indulged in for the sake
of conviviality and sociability and because it affords a temporary
feeling of adequacy in meeting disturbing situations.
Providing there are no disturbing factors, as is the case in
gatherings of small friendly groups or parties in "tea-pads," the
regulated smoking produces a euphoric state, which accounts for
continued indulgence. . . . The marihuana user acquires a tech
nique or art in smoking "reefers." This involves special preparation
of the cigarette and the regulation of the frequency and depth of
inhalations. In a group of smokers, a cigarette circulates from one
to another, each in turn taking one or more puffs. The performance
is a slow and deliberate one and the cigarette, held in a forked
match stick, is smoked to its end. 18
The La Guardia Committee report is still the classic study of the
subject and commands respect in all informed quarters, but the puni
tive statutes against marijuana are still on the books and are today, if
anything, more savage and vengeful than they were in 1944. What is
the reason for this attitude toward the marijuana smoker?
The animosity between those who do and those who do not whe
ther it be liquor, pot, sex or any number of other things is almost as
strong as the animosity between the Haves and the Have-nots. It may
be that the two confrontations are not entirely unrelated. For one thing,
there are more Do's among the Have-nots than there are among the
Haves, and it is the Haves who make the laws. As Angel Dan Davies
says:
"They can pass a law against anything and over night they've created
millions of new criminals. Maybe it makes them feel good to think there
are so many of us and so few of them."
Exclusivity is certainly highly prized among the Haves and the
feeling of belonging to the small and select company of the virtuous
and the righteous is probably a factor in prohibition and censorship of
all sorts. In the case of marijuana it takes on added force from the
184 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
suspicion of the Do-nots that the Do's are enjoying satisfactions which
they are, for one reason or another, inhibited from enjoying. This
accounts for the wildly exaggerated stories of marijuana and sex and
the fabricated horror tales about mania, insanity, thrill murders, rape
and robbery.
So far as tihe marijuana cats among the beat generation are con
cerned, no proper understanding of their use of pot is possible without
probing the psychological and social roots of its use and misuse.
The Psychological Factors: Pot and the Pleasure Principle
It is a sad commentary on modern society that a word like euphoria,
which in Greek meant well-mindedness, cheerfulness, merriment, gra-
ciousness and glad thoughts, should have come to have pathological
connotations and to mean in common usage something like a fool's
paradise. Happiness pills is a popular name for the euphoric drugs.
The word pleasure, too, has undergone a process of downgrading, in
usage, at one time narrowing down in the puritan mind to sex and sad
ism in such expressions as "to take one's pleasure" of a woman, "houses
of pleasure" for whorehouses and, in law, "at the king's pleasure," a
phrase that referred to the sentencing of a convicted felon and could
well mean anything from torture to life imprisonment.
It was Sigmund Freud who brought the word pleasure back into
good odor again, but not without a sickroom smell clinging to it.
Freud raised pleasure to capital status, with a double P, in The Pleasure
Principle "any given process originates in an unpleasant state of
tension and thereupon determines for itself such a path that its ultimate
issue coincides with a relaxation of this tension" 19 a definition that
the first American young generation to be influenced by Freud, the
generation of the twenties, took very much to heart, even before he
had fully formulated it Most of them, judging from my own observa
tions of the twenties, had discovered it on their own, without ever
having heard of Freud. And subsequent generations of American youth
went right on honoring the definition in the performance as well as in
the breach long after Freud himself went Beyond the Pleasure Princi
ple, 20 qualifying and refining and redefining what he meant by pleasure
and pain and finally winding up with something he admitted even he
couldn't explain.
"GOD'S MEDICINE" : THE EUPHORIC FIX 185
When it comes to unpleasant tensions needing to be relaxed, the beat
generation of today knows things that Freud and ILLS generation never
knew. Poetry, music and the dance have a long and honorable history
as pleasure-givers, detensers and euphorics. They can be taken in vary
ing degrees of concentration and in varying doses, depending on the
education and sensibilities of the "patient." And the same is true of a
euphoric such as marijuana.
On the lowest levels of pleasure enjoyed by almost illiterate young
juveniles like Myra Flores or Willie Frank, it need yield only the
simplest pleasures to produce a relaxation of tensions. Myra's mother
works in a defense plant all day and her father in the kitchen of an
all-night drive-in. She doesn't see much of either one of them, but when
she does it is words and blows all the way she has scars to prove
it an unhappy home situation that fits neatly, I think, into the "un
pleasant state of tension" that Freud defined as a condition in need of
relaxation. She finds relaxation in sex "going steady" is no euphemism
in Myra's set and in drugs. In Myra's case it is heroin when she can
get it, but most of the time she has to make it on pot, although she
looks down on it as "kid stuff/' From her friends I learned that while
Myra's boast that she has been on horse since she was thirteen is
technically true, it is mostly a boast, because the heavy stuff is much
too costly for a kid of her age and she is still in the sniffing and popping
stage. What Myra gets out of pot is simple but satisfactory.
"It makes me feel like they say cool. Mellow like. It makes me for
get my old man and my old lady, for a while. Like they hassle me all
the time and what would you do? what would anybody do? I go out
with the gang and we have a ball. When I'm high and nobody is bug
ging me I'm easy to get along with, but nothing brings me down faster
than to get home and find my old man drunk in bed with some broad
and Mom at the factory and all he can think of to do is bop me
around just to show me what will happen to me if I rat on him as if I
ever would! I'm not that kind. Like all I want is both of them they
should leave me alone. As long as I keep my nose clean and keep
out of trouble "
The case against marijuana is usually clinched, in the opinion of
those who point with alarm, by the argument that it leads to heroin
addiction. It might, but so might a broken romance or a business fail
ure. In Willie Frank's case it was just the other way around. It was an
186 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
OD an overdose of horse that led him back to marijuana.
"So we get this horse and we go up to this guy's house and we jump
in and Muzzy hits up, you know, he's got the worse habit, he hits up.
And he hits up the whole thing and he gets blind and he starts nod
ding, you know, hanging. And this other guy hits up but he only hits
half of it and he gets blind, he's hanging. So I said, Tm going to get
high next.' So Muzzy says, *What you gonna do, use all of it?' and I
says, *No, man, only half of it, it's powerful stuff.' So he wants to do
half of it for me. So I'm sitting at the table and I hit up and like you
usually take a draw back of the blood into the syringe, like they call
jacking it, it doesn't really do nothing. But like this time I just shot it
in there and it hit me right away. And I just went back like and pulled
the spike out and I laid it on the table, like that. Then the cat sitting
across the table from me says, he says, 'How do you feel, man?* and I
said, 'Man, if I get any higher I'll I'm not gonna enjoy it/
"Just then my head started falling and I couldn't hold my head up, so
I had to stand up, and Muzzy's there, he's cleaning the spike, you
know. I said, *Muzzy, I'm gonna fall out.' He's real small and I just fell
on him, I fell out. Muzzy said I turned blue and my heart practically
stopped. And they started shooting me up with salt and water and put
ting ice on me all over, you know, running ice all over me and they
said it was more than a half hour before they could even get me up,
you know. And they were walking me up and down, up and down in
the parlor so I could come out of it. Well, the first thing I can remem
ber is the girl and the guy got me there and were walking me up and
down, up and down, you know. After a while I started walking myself
and I finally sat down and I was so high I couldn't stand it and I
couldn't get up again. I started to just go out again. So they get me up
again and out in the air and I walked around outside. So everybody
leaves and they go down and take us downtown. They leave me and
Muzzy off quite a bit of ways from where we're going and we walked
there. So I had to hold onto Muzzy's shoulder so I wouldn't fall down,
you know, so I could balance myself.
"We get down to Main and Market and there's a bunch of guys hang
ing there and Muzzy starts talking to them. So I go to lean up against
the wall there and I just started to fall down, you know. Then he would
have to come over and stop me and get me going and I'd walk myself,
you know. We were down there about an hour and I kept falling out.
"GOD'S MEDICINE" : THE EUPHORIC FIX 187
It got so that I was falling out walking, you know. So he gets somebody
to drive me home.
"I get up to the house and go in there and my mother's laying on the
bed. Well, you know, I don't want her to see I'm high cause like, well, I
told her I wasn't going to get high any more. She takes one look at me,
you know, and she gets scared to death, she thought I was going to
die. I was just chalk white and my eyes were up in my head somewhere
and I just looked like I was dead, you know. I was high for three days
and like you just can't sleep and before that stuff got out of my system
I was high three days, and that was the last time I shot up,"
Willie found that after the first few days of withdrawal pains the
pot made it for him okay.
"We used to go up there (to New York's Harlem) and this guy Sam
used to get the best pot you ever seen. It was Panamanian pot and I
think that's the best pot there is. They were in great big bombers, man,
like king size. They were a dollar a joint like but they were worth it
We'd get up there, this guy Frenchy and I and we were real comedians,
you know, we were really something. That cat would put on a whole
stack of records that made a story like, you know. Like all different
singers but they just came out and made a story. And this guy, as the
records would be playing, he would answer them, you know, like, the
record would come on and he would talk back to the singer and man,
it was a gas.
"One night these two girls are there and there are about eight of us
in the place and we're all high. Like I'm sitting in this great big chair
and it's like a king's chair, you know, with a great big curve in the
back and everything. I'm sitting there and Frenchy comes over and
says, 'So what do you think, Mr. President?' So we come on like we're
having a council, you know, this guy was minister of the interior and
this one is secretary of state or something, and this went on for hours
and we're passing pot around, and we're sitting on top of the world. I
mean like I was having more fun with pot than I ever was with horse
any day.
"Like one night there was these two lamps in the place, you know,
Chinese figures, and one was male and the other one was a female, you
know. So Frenchy he would walk up to one and he'd say, "What did
you say? 7 and he'd say to us, 'Shh, I'm talking to the lamp.' And then
he'd listen and he'd say, 'Oh, yeah,' and he'd start talking to the other
188 THE HOLY BAEBARIANS
lamp, you know. Then the two lamps would be talking to each other
and he would be like interpreting. One lamp would tell him something
and he'd tell it to the other lamp. We'd be sitting there and listening
and listening, you know, really hung up on what's happening with
these two lamps and what are they saying. He'd say, 'None of that
now* and we had to stop blowing pot at the statues because he said
they got too high and were arguing with each other, you know.
"Oh, yeah, Til never forget my first time getting high on pot with
these guys. These guys were above us more educated like and they
got imagination, you know, and they could make up things and I
wanted to get high with them, me and Ollie and Sneezie. And Sneezie
goes up and buys a pound of pot, you know, and we all go up to
Frenches house. We're in Frenchy's kitchen, rolling pot, and pretty
soon we all go into the parlor and he's got the radio on real low, no
lights on, just a little red light. Nobody could see nobody. We're pass
ing a joint around and all you can hear is puff, puff, puff and all you
can see is the light from the cigarette. So this goes around I don't know
how long and everybody is blind, you know. And then pretty soon you
would hear a kind of snicker, then maybe the guy next to you would
snicker and then the whole place would bust up and we'd all be in
hysterics. We'd sit there and nobody could see nobody and everybody's
laughing and snapping up and nobody's saying nothing. And it was a
ball. But then you can be brought down. Like if Sneezie came in and
turned on the light it would change everything. He just came in and
turned on the light and it just knocked out the whole thing. Like a guy
should come down easy, but some guys are sadists and bring you
down hard."
What Willie had to say about pot and sex bears out the La Guardia
Committee report.
"These two girls I used to get high with are in show business, you
know, I don't know what they do. I never asked them or nothing, like
they just came up to get high. They lived in the same building and
they'd come up and they'd have like a housecoat on with nothing under
it and it would fall open and nobody says nothing. There was a few
times I did get high on pot where there was a situation where I'd think
about sex and I'd just have sex, you see. It's perfectly possible. I mean,
a couple of times I got high with these girls and they want to have sex
and we got high and we had sex with both of them. If you're going to
"GOD'S MEDICINE" : THE EUPHORIC FIX 189
a party with a bunch of guys and girls and everybody gets high and
there is sex, well, you just do whatever is going on, that's all. When I
was messing around with horse the only time I had sex was when I
wasn't high, but when I was on horse it was out. Once I laid up with
a girl when I was high on horse and it went on all night, we were at it
from twelve o'clock till dawn, and it was fun, you know, but nothing
was happening. You can't come to a climax."
Between the simple pleasures of make-believe councils of state, con
tagious laughter and talking lamps of these juvenile delinquents and
the complex, modern, cool jazz, philosophical clowning and the poetry
readings of the more sophisticated of the holy barbarians there is not
so much a difference of kind as of degree. Their orbits intersect at the
point where the conflicting, contradictory demands of everyday living
become unendurable and something is required to relax the tensions.
The square takes a Miltown pill, the pothead takes a puff of marijuana
and the junkie takes a heroin fix. Here again it is a question of degree,
of means more than of ends.
PART III
10
The New Apocalypse
A PROPHET CAME TO TOWN. RUMOR HAD PRECEDED HIM. HE WENT ABOUT
in an aura of wine and marijuana with a retinue of disciples at his
heels, all of them drunk or stoned out of their minds with poetry and
pot. He spoke in esoteric riddles and obscene metaphors. Lord Byron
had introduced the open collar, Walt Whitman the open road, this new
prophet the open fly. Dylan Thomas had come amid Philistine rumors
of "she-bears, witches on the mountain, exploding pit-heads, menstruat
ing babies, hounds with red ears, Welsh revivalists throwing dynamite
and semen in all directions," according to Kenneth Rexroth. 21 This new
poet-prophet had the Philistines spreading breathless tales of bearded
hermaphrodites speaking in secret tongues, jazz Saturnalias, manholes
erupting piss, pus and corruption, and bebop poets careening madly
down the San Francisco streets naked on roller skates.
People I knew in the Bay city reported huge throngs of youngsters
crowding into poetry readings, carrying on like Elvis Presley fans at a
Rock and Roll binge, shouting, stamping, whistling, doing snake dances
in the aisles. A mailed announcement from San Francisco advertising
one of these readings went like this:
CELEBRATED GOOD TIME
POETRY NIGHT
Either you go home bugged or completely enlightened. Allen
Ginsberg blowing hot; Gary Snyder blowing cool; Philip
193
194 THE HOLY BAKBARIANS
Whalen puffing the laconic tuba; Mike McClure his hip hight
notes; Rexroth on the big bass drum.
Small collection for wines and postcards.
Abandon Noise Strange pictures on walls
Oriental music Lurid poetry
Extremely serious
TOWN HALL THEATRE
One and only final appearance of this Apocalypse
Admission free
A visiting poet from the East Coast, Richard Eberhart, had written
an account of these goings-on for the New York Times Book Review.
"Poetry here has become a tangible social force, moving and unifying
its audience, releasing the energies of the audience through spoken,
even shouted verse, in a way at present unique to this region." 22 He
attributed this activity in part to the establishment three years before
of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State College, but from what I
could gather from other sources and from a visit to San Francisco, the
Poetry Center there was not much different from the dry, droning
poetry readings at New York's Poetry Center at the Y.M.H.A. or any
similar place. The only time the San Francisco State College Poetry
Center was really swinging was when the poets of the new Apocalypse
took the stage and their disciples whooped it up. Then it was a real ball.
I was not unprepared for Allen Ginsberg's visit to Los Angeles, since
he had written me from San Francisco, but when he got to town Nettie
and I were so exhausted from all the poetry-reading parties we had
been throwing for visiting poets that I was relieved when the editors of
Coastlines, the L.A. quarterly, offered to sponsor the reading. I knew
they had no use for the sort of thing Ginsberg was writing or what we
were doing in Venice West (in fact, much of their magazine is devoted
to attacking it), but now that it looked like it might be attracting wide
public attention they wanted to get into the act.
The reading was to be held in a big old-fashioned house that was
occupied by two or three of the Coastline editors, living in a kind of
Left Wing bohemian collective household, furnished what there was
of furniture, which wasn't much in atrociously bad taste, nothing like
the imaginative and original decor of the beat generation pad, even the
most poverty-stricken.
THE NEW APOCALYPSE 195
I consented at their request to conduct the reading, "chair the meet
ing," as these people are in the habit of saying. To them everything is
a meeting. In this case they got more than they bargained for. Allen
showed up high mostly on wine, to judge by the olfactory evidence
and, after an introduction by me, in which I tried to spell out something
of the background of this "renaissance," he launched into a vigorous
rendition of Howl, Launched is the word for it. It was stormy, wild
and liquid. In his excitement he tipped over an open bottle of wine
he had brought with him, spilling it over himself, over me and over
his friend Gregory Corso who was with him and was also scheduled
to read.
Allen and Gregory had refused to start till Anais Nin arrived, and now
that she was seated in the audience Allen addressed himself exclusive
ly to her. He had never met Anais before and knew her only from
Henry Miller's books. She had written the preface to Miller's The
Tropic of Cancer in the Paris edition of the book. He was sure that
Anais was one person who would be able to dig what he was putting
down. For him there was no one else in the audience but "beautiful
Anais Nin." That she had long ago come to the parting of the ways
with Henry Miller and was making her own scene now, a very different
scene from the one they had once made together on the Left Bank of
Paris, made no difference to Allen. She was still, to him, the Anais Nin
of the Henry Miller saga, a fabulous figure out of a still brightly shim
mering past. Artistically, he felt, she was his nearest of kin, and Anais
very graciously acted out the role he had cast her in that night.
The audience, except for Anais and the people we had brought with
us from Venice West, was a square audience, the sort of an audience
you would find at any liberal or "progressive" how that word lingers
on even though the song is over fund-raising affair of the faithful
who are still waiting for the Second Coming. Few of them had come
knowing what to expect. They never read anything but the party and
cryptoparty press. The avant-garde quarterlies are so much Greek to
them. Most of them don't even know such magazines exist any more.
They associate that sort of thing with the little magazines of the
twenties which were swallowed up with the advent of the Movement,
the real Movement (capital M), in the thirties and transformed into
weapons in the class struggle. The few who had heard rumors of what
was going on in San Francisco and Venice West were there as slum-
196 THE HOLY BABBARIANS
mers might go to a Negro whorehouse in New Orleans, to be with,
briefly, but not of. But even they were not prepared for Howl, or for
the drunken, ecstatic, tortured, enraptured reading Allen was giving it
that night. A very moving performance, for all his tangle-tongue bob
bles and rambling digressions. He was reading from the book, which
had just came out, but he changed words, improvised freely, and sup
plied verbally the obscenities that the printer had in a few cases de
leted.
As it happened, Allen and Gregory were not the only ones in the
place who had been drinking. There was one other in the audience.
He was someone who had drifted in, having somewhere picked up one
of the pluggers advertising the reading. At first he applauded Allen's
reading at all the wrong places and too loudly. Then he took to
cheering, the kind of cheers that are more like the jeers they are in
tended to be. I watched him and it struck me that he looked and
sounded like a brother Elk on the loose, or an American Legion patriot
on a convention binge. When Allen got to the poem America, the
drunken square was visibly aroused. He began to heckle. Allen ignored
Tiim and, at one point, interrupted the reading to ask the heckler, very
gently, to hear him out and he would be glad to talk to him about it
later and listen to any comments or criticism he cared to make. That,
and disapproving scowls from some members of the audience who,
being squares themselves and sober dislike anyone "making a
scene," stopped him for a few minutes.
Gregory Corso now got up to read or, rather, sat down to read
Gregory, unlike Allen, is the gentle, relaxed persuader rather than the
shouter. At least he was that night. When the drunk started heckling
him, too, he turned the face of an injured angel to him. When that
failed he reversed himself and tried shock therapy
"Listen, creep, I'm trying to get through to you with words, with
magic, see? I'm trying to make you see, and understand "
The square had an answer for that. "Then why don't you write so a
person can understand you, instead of all that highfalutin crap?"
"You will understand," Gregory replied patiently, "if you open your
self up to the images. Try to get with it, man."
Tou think you're smart, don't you?"
Gregory ignored the remark and went on with his reading. Nothing
THE NEW APOCALYPSE 197
could have angered the drunk more. It brought out the righteous citi
zen in him.
"Think you know it all, don't you? I know your kind. It's punks like
you that are to blame for all this -all this " he sputtered, unable
to make up his mind which of the crimes punks like this were to blame
for were equal to the enormity of the occasion. He tried again, gave
up, turned a beet red and, to cover his chagrin, launched into a tirade
of uninspired, stereotyped, barroom profanity, ending with, inevitably,
an invitation to "step outside and settle this thing like a man!"
Gregory grinned. "Yeh, I know, you want to fight. Okay, let's fight.
Right here. Not with fists, you cornbalL That's baby stuff. Let's fight
with a mans weapon with words. Images, metaphors, magic. Open
your mouth, man, and spit out a locomotive, a red locomotive, belching
obscene smoke and black magic. Then I'll say: Anafogasta. Rattle-
boom. Gnu's milk. And you'll say: Fourth of July, Hydrogen bomb!
Gasoline! See? Real obscenities. . . ."
The drunk was indignant. He was outraged. When he heard snick
ering in the audience he started toward the front of the room, menac
ingly, repeating his challenge to step outside and settle this thing
"You're yella, that's what Like all you wise guys. You're yella "
Ginsberg got up and went forward to meet the drunk.
"All right," he said, "all right. You want to do something big, don't
you? Something brave. Well, go on, do something really brave. Take
off your clothes!"
That stopped the drunk dead in his tracks.
Ginsberg moved a step toward him. "Go on, let everybody see how
brave you are. Take your clothes off!"
The drunk was stunned speechless. He fell back a step and Allen
moved toward him, tearing off his own shirt and undershirt and fling
ing them at the heckler's feet. "You're scared, aren't you?" he taunted
him. "You're afraid." He unbuckled his belt, unzipped his fly and
started kicking off his trousers. "Look," he cried. "I'm not afraid. Go
on, take your clothes off. Let's see how brave you are," he challenged
him. He flung his pants down at the champ's feet and then his shorts,
shoes and socks, with a curious little hopping dance as he did so. He
was stark naked now. The drunk had retired to the back of the room.
Nobody laughed. Nobody said a word. The audience just sat
198 THE HOLY BABBARIANS
mute, staring, fascinated, petrified, till Allen danced back to his seat,
looking I couldn't help thinking at the moment with inward amuse
mentlike Marcel Marceau, the great French mime, doing his hopping
little David and Goliath dance. Then the room was suddenly filled with
an explosion of nervous applause, cheers, jeers, noisy argument. Our
hosts, the editors of Coastlines, had been having a huddle on the side
lines. Now one of them, Mel Weisburd, dashed up front and stood
over Allen menacingly.
"All right," he shouted, "put your clothes on and get out! You're
not up in San Francisco now. This is a private house . . . you're in
someone else's living room. . . . You've violated our hospitality. . . .
If this is what you call . . ."
He looked over at me as if to say, "You re chairman here, do some
thing."
I rapped for order like a proper chairman and announced the next
order of business. Gregory Corso would read another group of poems
and then we would hear from Allen Ginsberg once more with his
poems Sunflower Sutra and A Supermarket in California. Corso was
all for leaving at once. "Well go somewhere where we can get good
and drunk and take Anais Nin with us." But Allen shook his head
and quietly put his clothes on, one piece at a time, in slow motion,
smiling to himself with half-closed eyes. A sly, mysterious, inner-
directed Buddha smile.
The reading went on amid general approval and with closer, more
respectful attention than before. The incident had sobered up the
drunk. When the reading was over he approached Allen and said,
loud enough for everybody to hear, that he was sorry he had made
such an ass of himself and where could he buy a copy of Howl?
Through it all Anais Nin, faithful to the role in which the poets had
cast her, sat imperiously still, only slightly disdainful of the hubbub,
like a queen on a throne.
Stuart Perkoff, who was present, later made the incident the theme
of a poem
THE BARBARIAN FROM THE NORTH
for Allen Ginsberg
Blind as roses
we sit in the evenings in rooms of our own choosing
THE NEW APOCALYPSE 199
rooms filled with intricacies of many delicately structured parts
which dazzle, and fascinate, and alter appearances and statements.
Everything with its own clear limits
Everything marked and classified
All aspects known
All new structors viewed with distaste
What are we to say, then of a man
who takes off his clothes in someone else's living room?
Are we to applaud?
What is his nakedness to us?
What do we care about his poems?
Do you realize that he is in the light?
How can I be expected to read!
He makes too much noise!
He says dirty words!
He needs a bath!
He is certainly
drunk!
I hope he soon realizes, that this is, after all, now
and we have many wonderful things to amuse us
when we want to see clowns
we go to the circus.
is he gone yet? can I come out
now?
Transform the Audience
There is nothing wrong with entertaining an audience. The only
trouble with it is that "show business" has loused up the word for
any intelligent or honest-talking use. Likewise there is nothing wrong
with instructing an audience, except that the pedants have loused
up that one. In fact, there is nothing wrong with any of the common-
sense concepts of the relation between the artist as performer and the
audience as listener-spectator. It is the dishonest, meretricious use to
which the artist-performer's function has been debased that makes the
200 THE HOLY BAKBABIANS
truthtelling artist bristle when anyone uses words like entertain or
instruct in connection with "audience appeal/'
The artists who can be said to be identified with the beat generation
in one way or another lay chief stress on another function of the artist
in his relation to society. He holds that it is not enough to entertain
and instruct the audience, he must also transform it. When the San
Francisco poet Robert Duncan visited Venice West I should say at
once that Duncan came not like the barbarian from the north in dirty
dungarees and leather jacket, but more like an esthete, an exquisite
in a long greatcoat with flaring sleeves that he wore over the shoulders
like a cape, Oscar Wildly he had some observations to make on this
subject:
"At first there is no separation between the writing and the concep
tion of the poem and where it is going to be delivered. Still, as it's
written it is always aimed at the audience it is meant for. The poet
must have some urge for a large audience, which is also a social urge.
What that audience is to be is not clear yet to me, at least but
that social urge must certainly be to transform the nature of the audi
ence. Not only to find his audience, but the audience must find him,
and finding his audience he would also find the ritual conditions nec
essary to transforming the audience.
"At the present time when we have poetry readings at a Poetry
Center, rising out of universities, the poet's urge is disruptive, actually,
^>f these institutions."
Duncan was, at the time, codirector, with Ruth Witt-Diamont, of
the Poetry Center at San Francisco State College.
"Poets have not yet learned to distinguish between the intimate
poem and its intimate audience and the public poem . . . Marianne
Moore, for instance, is a personality so we treat her as such, but she's
not in her poetry. We organize a poetry center like you would organ
ize plays today, consumerwise. We insist that the thing we call the
public should support poetry, but it shouldn't, because this thing
called the public now is the thing the poet abhors. He wants people,
the public, to be completely changed. We ask the city to support it
civically, but we don't believe in that city, we believe in the other city
that men have talked about from the beginning. If a meeting of people
hearing poems can be transformed into that city, then the poet has
his moment, otherwise he wanders away from such a reading never
wanting to read in public again."
THE NEW APOCALYPSE 01
Here I wish to tick off a few highlights from my experience with
the problem of trying to transform the audience.
AN OFF-CAMPUS READING IN WESTWOOD, California, before
an audience of students, some of them English majors and young in
structors. A few older women. The place, a studio in a remodeled gar
age, a collegiate version of a beat pad. Navaho Indian nigs on the
floor. Van Gogh's yellow "Sunflowers" on the wall. Unusual winter
weather for California. Outside, cold with coat on. Inside, frigid with
coat off. No heating at all. My hands and feet are stiff, congealed, by
the time I'm half through the manuscript of my ( at that time unpub
lished) Rainbow at Midnight. The room is in darkness except for the
gooseneck lamp by which I am reading. In the twenties it would have
been candlelight, and I would have been cross-eyed with eyestrain
by this time. It's a floor-sitting audience but a stiff, unrelaxed, uncom
fortable one.
Rainbow is not just a collection of poems, it is a book of poems
structured to build up a line of thought from start to finish. Not easy
to follow at first hearing. It wasn't my idea to read it at one sitting.
Three hours! But these are earnest young seekers and word had gotten
around that this was deep stuff, steel-shot caviar for stout intellectual
mastication. I should be flattered but my jaws ache just dishing up the
stuff. I finally reach a good stopping place and call for a seventh in
ning stretch. I come back from the bathroom to find everybody still
squatting there, with only the minimum change of posture to ease
muscle strain. This is a well-educated audience. It has learned that
culture comes high in effort, mental application and physical incon
venience.
The reading is not without its personal rewards. Out of the corner
of my eye I can see the faces and by now I know just which eyes will
light up at this or that passage, which ones will flash a quick sign of
recognition at this or that allusion, which will register shock at a sur
prisingly heretical phrase on the next page, or a far-out metaphor.
I am numb in mind and limb by the time the reading is over. The
audience creaks to its feet but not an honest groan in the crowd.
Lively discussions are started. A nice elderly lady comes up to me, her
eyes moist with tears, and kisses me on the cheek. She tells me the
experience has opened new vistas in life to her. Is this one of my
transformed ones? I listen in on one discussion circle and wander over
202 THE HOLY BARBABIANS
to another. It is English Lit talk. Where does Rainbow fit in? What
category? I hear names dropped. Yates, Pound. T. S. Eliot. Joyce.
Objective correlative. Free association. Vers libre. It reminds one of
this and another of that. That indispensable correlation. Frame of ref
erence. Opinions differ about the poems but everybody agrees it was
a wonderful evening.
Not for me. All I want to do is get home to my warm, unesthetic-
looking gas heater.
Afterthoughts: Wrong poem, wrong people, wrong place. Some
poems require study before hearing and Rainbow is one of them. Al
though there are parts that are clear enough at first hearing, the struc
ture and many of the metaphors and allusions require study before
they yield their full meaning. The voice, the sound, does add a dimen
sion to the meaning, but not until the other dimensions are already
present in the mind of the listener. This is not true of all poems but
it is true of a poem of any length or complexity. The wrong people,
too, because college-trained young people come to a poetry reading
as they would to a classroom. They come to be instructed, not to be
entertained, much less to be transformed. It is like a lecture with reci
tation to be followed by criticism and discussion. The academic daisy
chain: a paper on which you make notes for a paper to be read for
others to make notes on and write a paper. No communication, no
mutuality, no climax. The little old lady with tears in her eyes? I don't
want to sound ungrateful but my guess is she was moved by all the
wrong things and in ways that would have been embarrassing to me
if I had taken the trouble to ask. It's like a heathen being converted
by a typographical error in the Bible. I'd rather have a poem panned
for the right things than praised for the wrong ones. Wrong place, be
cause well, let's put it this way: a bed of nails is no place for a love
scene.
READING IN A TRACT HOUSE in Inglewood, a L.A. suburb, be
fore an audience of teachers, psychiatrists, psychology majors, anthro
pologists and their wives. The interior d6cor of the house is plainly a
protest against the tract house conformity of the exterior, but a polite
protest, a private one: modern furniture modified by considerations of
THE NEW APOCALYPSE 203
comfort, nothing stuffy or overstaffed, but everything well padded.
Lighting subdued but direct, nothing indirect or extreme, no home-
crafted parchment shades or modernistic metal contraptions. Two sets
of bookshelves. One in the living room, for the eyes of casual visitors,
business friends and drop-in neighbors. Another in the bedroom for
the eyebrow-raising kind of belles-lettres and the sexual esoterica of
the professional psychiatrist's library. Everything in its proper place.
Tonight my host is making an exception. He is bringing the bedroom
into the living room for an evening. A live poet is going to read live
poetry, that is, poetry that isn't in the curriculum; some of it isn't even
in the books yet. "Go ahead, shock 'em," he tells me. "I've prepared
them for you and they know what to expect, so" with a sly wink
"don't disappoint them." He had met me once before in what was for
him, and his wife, a delightfully shocking experience and he wanted
to share it with a few chosen friends. He had gone out of his way to
buy a few literary quarterlies containing poems of mine. "Give 'em
End of the Line? he urges me, "and I Was a Poet for the FBI. That
ought to do it!"
I open with Inquest.
Lock the door. Let no one leave the room.
A crime has been committed here. An old man
Stricken on his bed, his face turned to the wall,
A derelict six days dead and stiffening
In a rented room. The headlines in their short
And ugly words of violence report a miracle.
This morning at the Mass the wine turned water
And the bread to stone. Cold April comes.
The fruit is still-born in the seed . . .*
I look around me as I continue no darkroom-spotlight effects here,
no floor-sitting, but I can see that the images are getting through to
this audience. They are used to dealing with word-symbols. I follow
with I Was a Poet for the FBI. The laughs come in all the right places
but it is nervous laughter. I have trapped them into laughing, out of
the repressed, loyalty-oath-bound recesses of their minds, at something
they have been bound, bludgeoned and propagandized into fearing
and respecting.
I continue with a reading of End of the Line. After the first four-
204 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
letter word a schoolteacher gets up and walks out. The wives move up
closer, with rapt attention. I know this is going to make trouble later
but what the hell, I'm not billing myself as a marriage counselor with
a proud record of practical adjustments and sensible reconciliations.
I'm here to make trouble all right, but not that kind of trouble. That's
only a side effect of the good medicine I'm putting out and you've got
to take your chances. Another patient is going over the hill, on a pre
tense of using the bathroom, but I notice that he doesn't come back.
Instead I hear him in a loud argument with the schoolteacher out in
the patio. These tract house walls are paper-thin and their palaver out
there is disturbing the reading. There has been a good deal of drink
ing and the pair in the patio are noisy-drunk by this time.
The reading is over finally, amid a buzz of excitement. The wives
want to know where they can get printed copies of the poems. The
husbands shake my hand approvingly but their hearts aren't in it.
They have reservations. Couldn't it wouldn't it be even more ef
fective with some things hinted at rather than you know, more
subtle? But Oh, yes, they want the poems, too. "I'd like to show them
to my secretary at the office," one confides to me, whispering. "She's
one of those prim kind." Another tells me "I don't know what you'll
think I'm a technician, working on missiles after that poem of
yours, The Ultimate Weapon'' He wants a copy of Rainbow and
will I inscribe it for him and his wife? I do. He repeats the bit about
being a missile-maker and insists on some reaction from me about
that. "What would you say to me?" "I would say to you," I tell him,
"what Walt Whitman said to the prostitute: c Not till the sun denies
you, do I deny you.'" He is satisfied, chagrined, chastened. He has
done his penance and can go back to the shop with some vague feel
ing of absolution. Or maybe it's a special dispensation. Anyway, he
wants to be invited to more readings.
I join the walk-outs in the patio. They both descend on me with
disclaimers of discourtesy. It was just too damn hot in the room. But
and they suddenly remember a radio program I was on, being inter
viewed on the subject of censorship did I mean that there shouldn't
be any censorship laws at all? He is a high school teacher and has re
sponsibilities to impressionable young boys and girls. He can take it,
nothing can corrupt him, but the usual buts. I have heard it all be
fore, but I listen and refer him back to the broadcast, I had answered
THE NEW APOCALYPSE 205
all those questions and he knows it, but he wants to go over the
ground again. It gives him a chance to tell me again what an invulner
able purehearted, pure-minded Galahad he is.
An anthropologist has been in the kitchen lushing up the whisky all
during the reading. As I leave he is politely apologetic about having
missed the reading which he had no trouble hearing through the
kitchen door, of course but he just doesn't believe poetry is intended
to be read aloud. This from a student of oral cultures, some of which
do not even have a written literature, but an extensive oral literature,
much of it poetry.
At the door my host is sweating with excitement and self-congratu
latory bravado. "You killed 'em," he says. "Some of them will never
talk to me again, but the hell with that. Theyll never be the same
again/*
Well, that was the idea.
Afterthoughts: But is it true? Will they really never be the same
again? On the surface everything will appear to be unchanged. They
will go back to their jobs, doing the same things, saying the same
things. But it will be just a little harder for the salesmen of the Social
Lie to sell them the old bill of goods. And when a crisis occurs in their
lives, if the wife picks up and runs away with another man, or the
husband gets tossed off the job for harboring dangerous thoughts, or
when one of those black nerve crises hits them and they're fed up
with the whole dumb-show or tired of the old rat race, a line of In
quest will come back to them, perhaps, or some image from End of
the Line or some other poem or poet my reading will have led them
to by that time, and theyll be ready for a try at the first mile, at least,
of the journey perilous, God help them! I don't wish it on my friends
and it's too good for my enemies, but luckily the decision is not mine
to make. It's more like a contagion; only those who are susceptible in
the first place will catch it anyway, and I am only the carrier, and they
will become carriers in their turn, and in this way the audience is
transformed.
But slowly. None of these people invited me to their homes for
similar readings before their friends. Nobody had been asked to pay
admission. The drinks were on the house. A few bought copies of
Rainbow because I had some copies with me and was willing to auto-
206 THE HOLY BABBABJANS
graph them. I doubt if one of them would have gone to a bookstore to
buy it or mailed a check to the publisher or gone a few blocks out of
his way to a public library to pick up a free copy to read. Why should
they? Poetry, all art, is a labor of love and the person on the receiving
end is like a passive female, not unwilling to be seduced if you catch
her in the right mood, but expecting you to make the first move, and
often the second and third, too.
No, it is enough for the artist to say it, to do it, to live it. Contagion
will take care of the rest. These poetry readings are one way of spread
ing the contagion.
11
Jazz, the Music of the Holy Barbarians
JAZZ MUSICIANS THEMSELVES ARE OFTEN PUZZLED AND SOMETIMES IRRI-
tated by the response of the holy barbarians to their music. This is
especially so among the jazz musicians who have made the university
circuit and the musical supermarket scene of the jazz festivals. Those
who have tasted commercial, financial success. They want to forget the
profane beginnings of their art, for "profane" is by definition "outside
the temple." The temple, to them, is Carnegie Hall, Brandeis Univer
sity and a Victor Records* royalty check in four or five figures. They
are trying hard to persuade themselves it is the temple of the Muse,
not Mammon's, they are headed for.
The holy barbarians, on their part, often fail to discriminate between
the sacred ritual elements in jazz and the show that the "natives'*
sometimes put on for the tourists and the Janqui dolar. The beats
are so hungry that they wolf down everything in sight, or rather in
hearing. The more knowledgeable among them, however, are aware
that jazz is the Dyonysian, not the Apollonian, beat in music. There is
a time and a place for both in the world and sometimes the world
needs one more than it needs the other because there is an imbalance,
a sickness of the human spirit for which the only therapy is a restora
tion of the balance. The beat generation is seeking such a therapy in
jazz. This is not the first time a generation of the American youth has
207
208 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
turned to jazz as a therapeutic. It happened in the twenties, too, and
the squares were scared out of their wits.
One cannot exaggerate the protest with which jazz was met
when, in the 1920's, it had spread to Chicago and New York. Com
posers, critics, ministers of the church, laymen, pundits and ig
noramuses had their fling. The storm was historic. An entire era
was called the Jazz Age, Not only the sins of its flappers and gin-
toting lounge lizards came to be blamed on this ineffably nefarious
music, but also nearly all the woes of the postwar world up to and
including the 1929 crash in Wall Street. Reverberations of the
storm penetrated even to New Orleans, where the Times-Picayune
rose hastily to disavow any connection of jazz with its native city.
Although many knew then that jazz had been played in, among
other places, whorehouses and wine shops, and judged it accord
ingly, none knew that it was a fine art transcending its surround
ings. Nevertheless, many of the people knew that it was their
music, a music created for them by men using lack of formal mus
ical education as the freeing factor in hot and spontaneous crea
tion. The men wanted, needed, to create it; their fellows wanted,
needed to listen, to dance, to respond to, and be freed by it 24
No one among the youth of the twenties that I knew held it against
jazz that it was played in the whorehouses of New Orleans. We listened
to and danced to the jazz bands at the Dreamland, White City or the
Pekin Cafe in Chicago and took what we could. Nor did we feel any
need to apologize to anybody for the flappers or the gin-toting lounge
lizards. Many of these flappers, that Rudi Blesh seems to be trying
to disown, were pretty hip to what King Oliver and his New Orleans
Rhythm Kings were putting down in those days.
It was mostly gangsters and bootleggers and their molls who got to
hear the best jazz of the period, along with a Negro audience and the
bohemian underground among the writers. You were more likely to
run into Kenneth Rexroth at a Chicago skiffle (rent party, shake and
percolator were other names for it) than F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Carl
Sandburg, for all his reported early savvy of jazz. At these rent parties
we heard Chicago jazzmen like Jimmy and Alonzo Yancey, "Cripple"
Clarence Lofton and Albert Ammons, and the barrel house and boogie-
woogie of Pine Top Smith.
JAZZ, THE MUSIC OF THE HOLY BABBABIANS 209
Hello Central, give me Doctor Jazz.
He's got what I need, 111 say he has.
When the world goes wrong
And I got those blues:
He's the one that makes me
Get out both my dancing shoes! 25
And there were plenty of lounge lizards who dug Meade Lux Lewis*
piano plenty before they slid under the table. Most of what is de
scribed by the historians as the Jazz Age was a "blackface" imitation
of jazz. It was not the jazz we knew, the jazz of Lillian Hardin's piano
and Jimmy Noone's clarinet, or Johnny Dodds's, or the Creole Jazz
Band's at Dreamland and the Pekin Cafe.
It was only the wayward and irreverent of the twenties who dug
the real jazz of the period or had any opportunity to hear it at all, for
that matter, in places like Chicago's South Side Negro ghetto, or in
dives like PurcelTs on San Francisco's Barbary Coast, where they
could catch Oliver and his band, or across the bay at the Iroquois Cafe
in Oakland. In Los Angeles it was Jelly Roll Morton at Leek's Lake
Resort; and in New Orleans at Lala's it was a new and promising young
jazzman, Louis Armstrong.
The upper-class bohemians of the period that F. Scott Fitzgerald
was writing about thought jazz was Paul Whiternan at New York's
Palais Royal or any "Paul Whiteman Orchestra" (it was a chain store
operation) on board some ocean liner. They listened to the first "race
records/' too, but only for their sexy content, without trying to learn
something about the musical content of the blues. They dug it only
because it was hot, low-down and dirty, and a public scandal. When
the commercialized imitations of the blues came along, substituting
"suggestive" lines for the earthy directness and unsentimentalized sex
of the anonymous folk blues, it was all the same to them. They
couldn't tell the difference.
Kansas City, St. Louis and Chicago seem to have been the focal
points from which boogie-woogie spread out through the country, al
though regional forms of it have been traced through the South from
Arkansas and Tennessee to Texas and Louisiana. The bohemian Left of
the thirties made much of Pine Top Smith and Meade Lux Lewis as
folk artists, and during the United Front wartime forties Negro musi
cians of any sort in the hot jazz style were much sought after in Holly-
210 THE HOLY BABBABIANS
wood for fund-raising parties in democratic and progressive circles.
Leadbelly (Huddy Ledbetter) and Josh White were always head-
liners at these affairs. And, of course, there were always the folk sing
ers, Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger and others, the composer-singer Earl
Robinson and a host of lesser-known artists* Hot piano or guitar in
the blues changes were about the limit of any real understanding in
Leftist circles as far as jazz went. These fitted their notions of a "col
lective" nonindividualistic folk art which, according to the prevailing
party line, rose up spontaneously from the masses and was therefore
free from the taint of capitalist commercialism. Ritual, healing, or
spiritual catharsis was no part of their esthetic. If the stuff was sexy,
well, that was just part of the earthiixess that made it folksy, like the
Peter Bruegel prints ("Peasant" Bruegel) which they hung on their
walls.
What makes ritual efficacious as a personal or a group therapy is
social consensus, the acceptance of certain symbols and their potency
within the magic circle. All music is sacred and ritual in origin, but in
European music these origins have long been "refined" out of it. In
jazz they are still close to the surface. That anything can be orgiastic
(in the Greek sense of orgia, secret rites practiced only by the initiated,
as in the rites of Bacchus or the worship of Demeter at Eleusis) and
still be sacred in the best sense of the word is a concept that the offi
cial culture cannot tolerate, especially in a predominantly Protestant
society. Dance was always looked upon with suspicion by the priestly
mind and finally banished from the churches. In Europe the drum, the
basic dance instrument, has been used chiefly to "drum up" troops for
military service and keep them marching hypnotically under orders. In
Africa the drum has many and varied uses, including communication
at a distance, but its use in the sacred dance ( and the secular dance as
well) has never been curtailed, except by European colonial authori
ties. In the United States the European attitudes prevail. During the
last century in the South drumming was forbidden by the slaveowners,
but in the woods under cover of night the slaves would meet and beat
their homemade drums under washtubs to muffle the sound, nocturnal
gatherings that recall the witchcraft meetings in Europe. "Despite
this," says Rudi Blesh, "the tradition of percussive polyrhythms has
persisted in the hand-clapping and stomping of the spiritual-singing in
JAZZ, THE MUSIC OF THE HOLY BAEBABIANS 21 1
the churches, in the jazz band, and, in one form or another, in all
Afro-American music." 26
It is from its use with dance that music derives much of its kines
thetic character, the feeling of muscle tension and the sense of move
ment which is part of the esthetic pleasure in all musical experience,
particularly where percussion lays down the beat, as in the rhythm
section of the jazz band. The variety of rhythmical patterns that can
trigger kinesthetic response in the listener is very great, the most
obvious being those which produce a sound effect in nature itself, such
as a dog's trot, a running horse, the ticking of a clock, the heartbeat, a
person walking, ocean waves, thunder. Less obvious but none the less
rhythmical are the seasons, the morning, noon and night tempos of
everyday living, childhood, youth, maturity and aging, and the suc
cessive steps of the sexual experience.
In more abstract music sex can be as cool and complex as the meta
physical orgasm or the hours-long mating of the hero gods and god
desses in Wagner's operas. In jazz, where the very name of the music
is still identified by millions as a synonym for the sexual act itself, the
kinesthetic experience of the listener, to say nothing of the dancer, is
unmistakably sexual. In the blues the lyrics often spell it out in words
of one syllable. Some of the earlier private versions, reserved for the
whorehouse, the saloon and, today, heard only in after-closing-hours
jam sessions, sometimes spell it out in words of four letters, as for ex
ample in such old-timers as "the dirty dozens."
The sexual in music becomes the therapeutic when it has the effect
of liberating the listener from his inhibitions, something that squares
react to in jazz with fear and fascination. For squares are by definition
angular and rigid in sex, awkward and guilt-laden.
Their arms are knives, their fingers all nails.
When they try to make love they hurt each other.
They torture themselves with shame and pride,
With time clocks and unattainable ambitions.
They drag themselves over miles of broken glass
And stone themselves with false confessions. 27
212 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
When it becomes unbearable they run to the psychoanalyst, to
whores, to the Hollywood swamis. Anything except the kinesthetic re
lease of jazz music, because they fear the direct approach to their
problem. They prefer that the cure, if any, should have a scientific,
medical-sounding name, or be followed by the self-punishment of
guilt feelings, or, as in the case of the swamis, come wrapped up in
some phony mystical jargon that sounds, to them, like religion. Jazz
is too pure for them to take straight.
The sexual in music becomes sacred ritual when it raises sex to the
level of the sacre, holy, which in turn means wholeness, integration.
It is a sacrament when it is socially responsible, when it has the force
of an oath between lovers. It becomes sacrilege when it is stolen out
of its hierogamic context and used for profit, violence, rape.
For the holy barbarians jazz music is both a therapeutic and a sacred
ritual, in addition, of course, to its many secular uses. For them it
makes a swinging scene out of the sexual act, before, during and after.
That it is considered profane in contemporary Western society makes
it no less sacred to them. It has its own temples, back-alley temples and
hideaway shrines, not unlike the nocturnal woodland worship which
has always marked the outlawed religions. Knowing the language of
jazz, its musical language, and sharing it with others in a closed com
pany of the initiated, is perfectly in keeping with its secret religious
character. Add to this its special hipster jive and you have something
very much like a mystique of jazz.
To the beat generation it is also a music of protest. Being apolitical
does not preclude protest There are other solutions besides political
solutions. Or, if not solutions, then at least some kind of relief. For
some things, in the view of the disaffiliate, do not permit of any solu
tion, at least not at the present time. It was the sex, not the protest, that
the youth of the twenties looked for in jazz. The youth of the thirties
looked for protest in the Negro jazzmen as a member of an oppressed
and disfranchised minority, rather than in the music itself, except
where it was most obvious, as in the work songs of the plantations and
river docks and in ballads like Stagolee, Mr. Boll Weevil and John
Henry. In the forties, anything in jazz, even if it was only a near
cousin like The T. B. Blues or Careless Love, was hailed as united
front and anti-Fascist by the swimming pool proletariat. To the present
generation of nonconformist youth the simple existence of jazz itself is
JAZZ, THE MUSIC OF THE HOLY BARBARIANS 213
protest enough. They see it pitting its spontaneous, improvised, happy-
sad, angry-loving, ecstatic on-the-spot creativity against the sterile
antiseptic delivery room workmanship of the concert hall that the
squares take for musical culture. And they whisper coolly, quietly
but intensely -"Say it, Batch!" "Tell 'em, Gerry!" "Blow a great big
hole in the walls they have thrown up to keep man from man." They
know that what the Bird is putting down in those one-two punches on
the horn is shock treatment with a love as fierce as anger and better
than insulin or metrazoL They even welcomed Rock 'n Roll, for all its
ballyhoo, as a fresh smell of young sexuality in the square's fetid and
buttoned-up world. For a little while everything was barbarous again.
They listen to Bela Bartok, too, especially to those compositions
where he draws most on Hungarian dance patterns and achieves per
cussive, dynamic effects which convey a strong kinesthetic impact The
more sophisticated among them dig his polytonal harmony, his dis
sonances, just as they dig "the Schonberg bit" and flip over Stravinsky's
Rite of Spring. They honor the old maestro for his early interest in jazz
despite the fact that he probably mistook corny vaudeville pit bands
for the real thing. The same sophisticates also listen to Paul Hindemith
and Darius Milhaud because they know that some of the modern cool
jazz musicians studied with them, but they only smile at Milhaud's
own "jazz ballets" just as they smile at Stravinsky's 1918 Ragtime
movement in Histoire du soldat. Morton Gould's Chorale and Fugue
in Jazz and the John Alden Carpenter ballets Skyscrapers and Krazy
Kat are given more respectful attention, as are Krenek's jazz opera
Jonny spielt auf and Aaron Copland's Concerto for Piano and Orches
tra and Music for the Theatre, but what really sends them is something
like Gruenberg's Daniel Jazz or Shostakovich's Suite for Jazz Orches
tra. They dug Aram Khachaturian's "sword dance" till the disk jockeys
played it to death, hearing in it, probably, more that was phallic rather
than military, but they leave his concertos to the longhairs. The Indian
ragas interest and excite them more, because they are improvised, like
most jazz, on set themes. There is some talk in the pads about Cage,
Varese and Piston, but not much listening. Not enough has been re
corded yet to listen to. George Gershwin is strictly Tin Pan Alley to
them, and that goes for Porgy and Bess as well as Rhapsody in Blue,
burnt cork minstrel stuff. Their reaction to Leonard Bernstein is con
fused, positive and negative by turns. After a few turns of West Side
214 THE HOLY BABBAMANS
Story on the phonograph they may yank it off and put on Marc Blitz-
stein's and Kurt WeilTs Bert Brecht record The Three Penny Opera
instead, and yank that off after the overture, put on Louis Armstrong's
jazz version of Mack the Knife and set the repeat shift on the record
changer. I heard as many as ten successive playings of it in some
pads when it first came out. This, they insisted, was the way Brecht
himself would have liked to hear it sung. I doubt that, but the beat
have a way of making their own reality by repeating things often
enough among themselves.
Opera the beat will not be found dead with, not even Menotti's or
with scores by Christopher Fry or Wynstan Hugh Auden. Opera is for
squares. A record like Carl OrfFs Carmina Burana will be passed
around in beatville for a while, but only because its lyrics ( cleaned up
a bit) are from poems by those on-the-road twelfth-century beatniks,
the goliards, whose story is familiar to them from the paperback edi
tion of Helen WaddelTs The Wandering Scholars. 28
Jazz, however, remains the staple musical diet. Tastes tend to be
regional, sometimes aggressively regional, among the beat as among
other jazz buffs. And even further divided, by groups and circles. A
full set of the original Library of Congress Jelly Roll Morton will win
you entry into one pad and do less than nothing for you in another.
Opinions differ on what is jazz hot and jazz cool, what is in the main
stream of jazz and what is off course, what is a forward, far-out step
and what is imitative of the past or downright reactionary and, finally,
what is holy.
Is the stuff Mahalia Jackson sings holy? Careless Love was what
Mahalia sang but that was before she was saved. "When I was a little
girl ... all you could hear was Bessie (Smith). The houses were thin;
the phonographs were loud. You could hear her for blocks. . . . I'd play
that record over and over again, and Bessie's voice would come out so
full and round. And I'd make my mouth do the same things. And be
fore you know, all the people would stand outside the door and listen.
I didn't know what it was at the time. All I know is it would grip me.
It would give me that same feeling as when I'd hear the men singing
outside as they worked, laying the ties on the railroad." Then she
heard somebody called Blind Frank singing the spirituals. "He used to
come around the churches in New Orleans and play his guitar. Places
where the Holiness folks gathered, the Sanctified people. They sang the
JAZZ, THE MUSIC OF THE HOLY BAKBAMANS 215
way I like it, with free expression. That' s where I think jazz caught its
beat. From the Holiness people. Long before Buddy Bolden and Bunk
Johnson, they were clapping their hands and beating their tambourines
and blowing their horns." Mahalia suffered a critical illness in Chicago
and attributes her recovery to God's amazing grace, and what she
learned from Bessie Smith and Careless Love she carried over into
Swing Low, Sweet Chariot and What a Friend I Have in Jesus. Same
beat, she will tell you. "You know, the Fisk University choir they made
lots of those songs popular. They took out the beat that the Holiness
people gave them and cultivated it. They concertized them, prettied
them up. Not much feeling, but, oh, it sounded so sweet!" 29 No one
puts Mahalia down in beat circles but you won't hear her records in
beat pads for all her holiness. They'd rather get it straight from Bessie
Smith and Ma Rainey. As far as they can see, there isn't any reason why
Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey couldn't have gone straight into any
church without being "saved." They had God's amazing grace, "from
in front." That is what Stan Winkler and his friends would have told
you if you had questioned the holiness of their Crucifixion Christmas
tree with its all-cultures ornaments and their congas and bongos and
Art Blakey's African drum rhythms and the Bird's alto horn and Miles
Davis' trumpet and Louie's and Dizzy's and Count Basie on the key
board and bass man Mingus and tenor man Hawkins and many
among the holy barbarians would add:
Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop apocalypse!
Holy the jazzbands marijuana hipsters peace and
junk and drums! 30
12
Poetry and Jazz:
Love Match or Shotgun Wedding?
FROM THE FIRST, POETRY AND JAZZ HAS HAD SOME OF THE ASPECTS OF A
swinging love affair and a grim-lipped shotgun wedding. It is hard to
say which is the bride and which is the groom. Since the initial pro
posal some would call it a proposition came from the poets, I sup
pose it would "be poetry that was the groom. And, as in many shotgun
weddings, the bride was willing enough but the trouble came from the
in-laws, on both sides. That is to say, from the critics, the school
teachers and the editors.
No new art form in the last fifty years has been subjected to so much
journalistic distortion as poetry and jazz by its friends as well as its
enemies. As far as the newspapers are concerned, anything avant-
garde in the arts is news when it can be presented as a freak or a fad.
Poetry and jazz was a two-headed calf. Better yet, it was a two-headed
calf of which one of the heads was an animal of some other species,
which made the whole thing a carnival side show attraction. A mon
strous miscegenation.
One reason why it looked, in its beginnings, like a miscegenation is
that it was born in a misconception. Ralph J. Gleason, the jazz critic,
writing about the San Francisco phase of it in Downbeat magazine
(May 2, 1957), quoted Kenneth Rexroth as authority for the idea that
poetry and jazz was an attempt to supply jazz music with new and
better lyrics.
216
POETRY AND JAZZ : LOVE MATCH OR SHOTGUN WEDDING? 217
tunes, even in their best form, always have been hung up with
weak lyrics, according to poet Kenneth Rexroth. And he extends this,
saying weak lyrics are found even in the best popular songs, including
those of such writers as Cole Porter." It is not surprising, then, that
what Gleason heard in the first poetry and jazz at The Cellar was "a
fascinating experiment," but, while ''extremely successful commer
cially . . . not completely so artistically /*
For the basic problem is essentially that of the lyricist. The
words must fit the music and the rhythm or else the music is only
an accompaniment in the background in which the poet's voice,
far from being an instrument in the band, is a spotlight or leading
actor behind which the music goes its own way, even though
related emotionally to the poetry.
The problem is that of fitting a preconceived poem to music that
is improvised. Until either the musicians learn to think in poet's
structures of thought and frames of rhythms or poets write poetry
in the format of songs to be recited against 4/4 time at a steady
rhythm there will be difficulties.
Six months later, after hearing more poetry and Jazz with Kenneth
Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti at The Cellar, and Kenneth Patch-
en with the Chamber Jazz Sextet at the Black Hawk, Gleason reported
in the same magazine (November 14, 1957) that it was still "a sort of
freak attraction in San Francisco."
When this whole jazz and poetry hassel began last spring, Ken
neth Rexroth said he was just trying to start a fad, maliciously, and
foresaw the possibility that it might catch on like swallowing
goldfish and become the rage.
There seems a fair danger that he was right.
At this point I fairly expect to see a press release announcing
that Abe Saperstein has signed T. S. Eliot for a coast-to-coast tour
with the Harlem Globe Trotters and that the proceeds of the next
World Series will go toward a fund to free Ezra Pound. . . .
The Black Hawk is doing some business but it is all predicated
on a dishonest premise, to my way of thinking. Mostly the poets
are slumming. Jazz already has an audience and they don't.
They're cashing in on the jazz audience but they won't learn any
thing from jazz or listen to it or try to allow the natural jazz
218 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
rhythms they have to come out. Instead they are blithely wailing
away with the same sort of thing that lost them their audience in
the first place. , . . Not until a poet comes along who learns what
jazz is all about and then writes poetry will there be any merger.
What we have now is a freak, like a two-headed calf. That's all.
In other words, it was not going to be successful until poets wrote
lyrics for jazz. Note, also, that Gleason was giving jazz top billing
jazz and poetry, not poetry and jazz. And accusing the poets of steal
ing the spotlight and exploiting the jazz audience, of slumming for
kicks and "cashing in" on jazz. The poets Gleason was hearing in San
Francisco, by the way, were working for free or at most for five dollars
or so a night, while the musicians were getting union scale. So much
for "cashing in." This was to become, as time went on, the party line
of the commercial jazz magazines which rely for their existence not so
much on their circulation as on the advertising of instrument manufac
turers, phonograph and hi-fi manufacturers and the mass consumption
record companies to whom jazz is just another department of the
music business. When they referred to it at all they called it "jazz-
poetry," with or without the hyphen, and in reviewing the records
they reserved their praise for those in which the poetry was most like
blues lyrics and had the same themes, or was so trivial and brief as not
to "interfere" with the music at all. In short, it was a hatchet job the re
viewers were doing on this new art form.
My own experience with poetry and jazz disproves many of these
allegations. I was approached by Jack Hampton, a theatrical booking
agent with a half -interest in the Los Angeles Jazz Concert Hall, to put
on a series of poetry and jazz concerts for him at the hall.
Jack Hampton, as I learned on meeting him, is a jazz guitarist and
trombonist of the swing era of the thirties whom changing fashions in
jazz had passed by, forcing him, ironically, into booking and promoting
the new style "baroque Bach" he disapproves of. The "new sound" of
West Coast jazz "is actually pretty much of a stereotype," he told me.
"They phrase and they type up, and they've forgotten the basis of
jazz which is the beat. When you lose the beat in jazz you're finished,
because then it's just like taking sex out of sexual intercourse. Let's
face it, that's what they lost. They tried to abstract something out of
it. They abstracted an abstraction and out of that they abstracted
POETRY AND JAZZ : LOVE MATCH OR SHOTGUN WEDDING? 219
another abstraction, to wit: the way the man plays. He improvises on
the original theme and then improvises on what he's improvised and
then he improvises on a third improvisation and he ends up with a
heap of dung. He's pounding the thing like that and thinks he's getting
a new sound. So the whole thing completely loses all identification
with jazz. I'm not talking because I'm against these guys, but that way
a whole culture can become a madhouse instead of helping the individ
ual within it, and I claim that this country is becoming a madhouse.
Then up in Berkeley there's a school that believes there's only one guy
that ever existed and that's a guy by the name of Bach, so these guys
with the ivy league suits, who never played with a jazz band, who
never played the one-nighters and who never had fist fights on the
street about who lost the beat, and got thrown in jail like I did in
Omaha, guys who never played for three bucks a night and jumped
seven hundred miles to make it, these guys sit together in these clois
tered little goddamn houses they live in on those campuses where it's
nice and cool, with their blondes, and they took the seventeenth and
eighteenth century music and they put to it that so-called sound and
that became jazz.
"The result of all this is that jazz is no longer a dance art. The Con
sumers Research says that these kids listen six hours a week to jazz
records and they spend fifty per cent of their income on albums. But
they can't dance to this stuff. Can anybody dance to our friend Shelly
Manne? It's only for listening. So I knew the time was ripe, so there
could be a concert hall, just for listening. And it proved itself. Except
that we didn't get to the audience."
What Hampton hoped for from poetry and jazz was that it might
get to a fresh audience and help him pull his concert hall out of the
red. He felt that the thing was salable and "when you get to art and
culture, boy, you can sell yourself a hell of a deal." He himself had
written poems, back in the thirties, that Langston Hughes once called
"the best blues poems ever written by a white man." He and his part
ner, the famous jazz composer and musician Benny Carter, had sunk
thousands of dollars into the hall and there would be little cash for
production. Would the poets work for free? I told him I had no inten
tion of asking poets to work at all in these first concerts, but if they did
they would have to be paid at least the same basic union scale as
musicians. I had experimented for more than a year on poets reading
220 THE HOLY BAKBABIANS
their work with music and found that they lacked not only the musical
knowledge to know when to come in with their "solos" but even the
rudiments of effective public speech. The best of them possessed either
a monotonous deathbed baritone style or the painful "poeticism" of a
lyric tenor. Radio actors, on the other hand, possessed technique but
lacked warmth and understanding, while stage actors read poetry like
dramatic dialogue, either in the realistic Stanislavski style or hammed-
up Shakespeare. I was to have at the most a month or so to assemble
and train a jazz band in this new art form and find a few voices that
could be coached into something like the kind of vocal rendition I
had in mind.
As it turned out, before Hampton was able to line up the musicians
there was no time for more than a brief conversation with the leader
of the band. As for the voices, I auditioned dozens of voices speech
majors from UCLA, actors from the little theaters, professionals of
experience and reputation in the movies and on the stage, radio voices,
television actors, disk jockeys. I ended up with a movie actor who
reneged at the last minute and had to be replaced with a little theater
actor a disk jockey and three poets, Stuart PerkofE and Saul White of
Venice West and Kenneth Rexroth, whom I brought down from San
Francisco for the occasion.
We had the most impressive array of first-rate jazz talent anyone
could ask for a poetry and jazz concert: Shorty Rogers and his Giants,
including such well-known artists as Bill Holman, tenor sax; Ralph
Pena, bass; Marty Paich, piano; and Larry Bunker, drums; and an
additional band, billed as a special poetry and jazz group, consisting
of such jazz greats as Fred Katz, cello; Bud Shank, alto and flute;
Barney Kessel, guitar; Buddy Collette, clarinet and flute; and Red
Mitchell, bass. But getting jazz musicians to rehearse at all is a thank
less and all but impossible task. Two rehearsals were scheduled. To
only one did enough of them show up to make a rehearsal possible,
and we had only a few hours to put the thing together. No wonder it
took three nights and six performances before the musicians began to
pay any attention at all to the words and attempt "any kind of co
operation between the music and the poetry. But the audiences
capacity crowds applauded wildly and enthusiasm ran high. I was
gratified with the turnout but my satisfaction with the audience re
sponse was tempered by the realization that nobody had anything of
POETRY AND JAZZ: LOVE MATCH OR SHOTGUN WEDDING? 221
the kind to compare it with and therefore no critical standards.
These audiences were not just jazz audiences, as Gleason said they
were. They sensed that something important was happening, some
thing they wanted to see happen because it filled a need they felt,
though few among them had any idea what that need really was or
what they should be listening for and expecting to hear.
They were coming to hear poetry, the sound of poetry, that lost
dimension of the poetic art which went out of poetry with the inven
tion of printing.
Poetry and the Vocal Traditions
Before the invention of printing, poetry was still largely a vocal art.
Ever since its beginnings in the ritual drama when the poet was proph
et, seer, shaman, priest, judge, bard, singly or in varying combinations,
poetry was something to be spoken, chanted or sung with music and,
often as not, with dance. It was the "spell," a form of words which per
formed one of the vital functions of ritual. When the arts of ritual
drama were secularized and individualized, poetry still retained its
oral character.
What we are witnessing today in public poetry readings and in
poetry and jazz is a revival of certain lost elements of oral culture,
sparked by the electronic revolution in communications, by the pho
nograph, radio, tape recorder, and the audio-visual media of motion
pictures and television. Poets have long felt that writing poetry merely
for the printing press was somehow insufficient, that it left the act of
communication incomplete. In 1941, Harry Thornton Moore, writing
in New Directions Annual, expressed the view that "the sound of
poetry is part of its meaning." Many poets had forgotten that poetry
has a sound. When the Library of Congress began its recorded poetry
series, many poets, confronted suddenly with the request that they
read their work aloud, found themselves tongue-tied and self-conscious
to the point of physical distress.
What had lost the poets their audience was not, as Gleason seems to
think, an unwillingness or inability to write the sort of jingles that can
be ticked off, syllable by syllable, to the four-four beat of jazz the
only kind of jazz, and the only kind of poetry, too, perhaps, that Glea
son has any ear for. What lost them their audience was, in the first
222 THE HOLY BAKBAMANS
place, the decline of oral culture with the advent of the printing press
and, as a result, the decline of the poet's skills with voice and music.
In the English language this decline was aggravated by the fact that
English as a literary language was born at almost the same moment as
the printing press. The earlier languages of Britain perished after the
Norman Conquest, and their oral literature failed to become incor
porated into the main stream of English literature. This was not the
case in France, Germany or Italy, where the oral elements of poetry
made an orderly transition from the voice to the printed page. In other
oral cultures, for example Wales and Ireland where the printing press
was later in making its effect felt on poetry, the vocal elements never
completely died out. Dylan Thomas, of course, is the outstanding
example of a poet who, although he was not writing in the traditional
language of his country, was still able to carry over something of the
oral tradition into his poetry. Before the present revival in the United
States, there were two previous and abortive attempts to restore
poetry to the oral tradition. The key figures in these two attempts were
Walt Whitman and Vachel Lindsay, and Lindsay was one of the first
poets whose voice was recorded on records. Dylan Thomas' records
have sold by the tens of thousands, far outselling most jazz records
this by way of a reminder to Gleason, who is worried about the poets
of today trying to cash in on the jazz audience.
What Rexroth and Ferlinghetti were seeking, and the poets of
Venice West as well, was a restoration of poetry to its ancient, tradi
tional role as a socially functional art allied with music in a single, re
integrated art form. We turned to jazz music because jazz is the mu
sical language of America in our time. Modern poetry was born at the
same time as modern jazz was born and both have had a similar his
tory. Both have had the same friends and the same enemies. Both
aimed at freeing their art from the strait jacket of the printing press:
in the case of poetry, from the printed page, in the case of jazz, from
the printed score. They belong together.
The experiments that had been going on in Venice West, with able
jazz musicians like Shelly Manne, Jimmie Giuffre and Buddy Collette,
were serving to reveal the artistic problems involved in reintegrating
poetry and music. We listened to earlier attempts in the same direction
by Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schonberg. In the preface to his
POETRY AND JAZZ I LOVE MATCH OR SHOTGUN WEDDING? 223
Pierrot Lunaire, where he used the voice within something like the
speaking range, Schonberg had written:
The melody indicated for the speaking voice by notes (apart
from a few specially indicated exceptions) is not meant to be
sung. The reciter has the task of transforming the melody, always
with due regard to the prescribed intervals, into a speaking
melody. That is accomplished in the following way:
1. The rhythm must be kept absolutely strict, as if the reciter
were singing; that is to say, with no more freedom than he would
allow himself if he were singing the melody.
2. To emphasize fully the contrast between the sung note and
the spoken note, whereas the sung note preserves the pitch, the
spoken notes gives it at first, but abandons it either by rising or by
falling immediately after. The reciter must take the greatest care
not to fall into a sing-song form of speaking voice; such is ab
solutely not intended. On the contrary, the difference between or
dinary speech and a manner of speech that may be embodied in
musical form, is to be clearly maintained. But, again, it must not
be reminiscent of song. 31
I pondered what had gone wrong with this early attempt of modern
music to integrate poetry with an orchestra and decided that the dif
ficulty stemmed from the composer's effort to retain a harmonic re
lationship between the pitch of the voice and the music and to keep
the rhythm "absolutely strict." This caused it to fall between two stools,
with the result that both music and speech were blurred. Its success
with the critics of the time I could only attribute to the fact that, for
one thing, it was a novel and daring thing to do, and for another, there
were no longer any standards of comparison for spoken poetry used in
connection with music. What Schonberg had attempted to do was, in
fact, pretty much the same sort of thing Ralph Gleason was asking the
poets do with jazz music. Our own experiments were teaching us that
this was a blind alley. It was most certainly not the sort of procedure
that the poets of the past had followed with poetry and music. Nor
what had been done in the early talking blues.
There was no one method, I found, that solved all the problems of
integrating poetry and jazz into an art form. When I came to produc
ing my own recording, Jazz Canto: Volume I, 32 I introduced into it
224 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
several different approaches to the problem, each with its own merits
and demerits.
For example, the poetry of Walt Whitman on this recording has
music written without key and "cued" to the voice only at focal points
where the mood or meaning of the poem changes. It is not music under
the voice, or behind it, or to accompany the voice, or to illustrate the
poem. It is the poem itself, freshly written by the composer in a mu
sical idiom. It runs parallel to the poem and is equal to it in the atten
tion it demands of the listener. Since it is, in a sense, a "translation" of
the poem into music, the instruments Fred Katz, the composer, uses
are in each passage those which are naturally associated with the sound
meaning that long-forgotten dimension of poetry the acoustical
image evoked by the words themselves. Trumpets and percussion, for
instance, to go with the prophetic passages of the poem, clarinets for
the meditative passages, and guitar in the "pleading" passages.
Nevertheless I regard it as only a beginning. Poetry and jazz or
Jazz Canto, as I prefer to call it will not be a viable art form until
it solves its problems and becomes a part of the standard repertoire of
public performance. Nor should it be limited to jazz music. In Jazz
Canto several types of music are employed besides jazz. Whatever
music is suitable to the poem is the right music. When poets learn
more about music and musicians learn more about poetry it will be
easier to make progress with this new idiom. To this end I have been
laying the foundations for a Jazz Canto Workshop where poets will be
required to learn how to read music, play at least one instrument, and
take voice lessons in order to learn how to use the voice box for the
public rendition of their poetry.
The jazz musicians, on their part, will have to learn something about
poetry. The poets among the holy barbarians know much more about
jazz than the jazzmen know about poetry. In the Jazz Canto Workshop
the jazzmen will have an opportunity to work with poets and learn
something about the art and craft of poetry. Even the best-educated
jazzmen I know read so little modern poetry that every line and every
image has to be explained to them before they can improvise or write
music for it.
Only a Jazz Workshop, with serious and dedicated young men and
women working together, can solve the many problems that this new
POETRY AND JAZZ : LOVE MATCH OR SHOTGUN WEDDING? 225
art form presents. Notwithstanding all these pitfalls and drawbacks,
Jazz Canto will thrive and flourish, I think, because it is part of the
growing revival of the oral tradition and, in poetry, a part of the
bardic tradition.
The Barbarian is at the Gates:
The Literature, Art and Music of the
Beat Generation
WHAT is TAKING PLACE IN THE LTTEEATTIRE OF THE HOLY BABBARIANS
is something more profound than the emergence of a new school. It
is a change in the literary use of language itself.
What is better than reading Vergil or memorizing Goethe
(Aalles Vergdngliche ist nur ein Gleichnis, etc.)? Why, eating out
doors under an awning for eight francs at Issy-les-Moulineaux.
Pourtant je suis a Sevres. No matter. I have been thinking lately
of writing a Journal dun Fou which I imagine to have found at
Issy-les-Moulineaux. And since that fou is largely myself I am not
eating at Sevres, but at Issy-les-Moulineaux. And what does the
fou say when the waitress comes with the big canette of beer?
Don't worry about errors when youre writing. The biographers
will explain all errors. I am thinking of my friend Carl who has
spent the last four days getting started on a description of the
woman he's writing about. "I can't do it! I can't do it!" he says.
Very well, says the fou, let me do it for you. Begin! That's the
principal thing. Supposing her nose is not aquiline? Supposing it's
a celestial nose? What difference? When a portrait commences
badly it's because you're not describing the woman you have in
mind; you are thinking more about those who are going to look at
226
THE BAKBABIAN IS AT THE GATES 227
the portrait than about the woman who is sitting for you. Take
Van Norden he's another case. He has been trying for two
months to get started with his novel Each time I meet him he has
a new opening for his book. It never gets beyond the opening.
Yesterday he said: "You see what my problem's like. It isn't just a
question of how to begin: the first line decides the cast of the
whole book. Now here's a start I made the other day: Dante wrote
a poem about a place called H . H-dash, because I don't want
any trouble with censors."
Think of a book opening with H-dash! A little private hell which
mustn't offend the censors! I notice that when Whitman starts a
poem he writes: - "I, Walt, in my 37th year and in perfect health!
. . . I am afoot with my vision ... I dote on myself . , . Walt Whit
man, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, turbulent, fleshy, sensual,
eating, drinking and breeding . . . Unscrew the locks from the
doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs . . . Here or
henceforward it is all the same to me ... I exist as I am, that is
enough ..."
With Walt it is always Saturday afternoon . . .^
Note in how many particulars Henry Miller writing in the mid-
thirties, and Whitman whom he cites, anticipated the beat generation:
the insistence on the spontaneous, the improvised, the importance of
living in the present moment, the sensuality, naturalness, contempt for
censorship, the sense of holiness, the openness even to leaving doors
unlocked, a common practice among the beat. What is more pertinent
at this point, however, is Henry Miller's use of language. And his ap
proach to the problem of the written word. It is not an approach to
the written word at all, in fact. It is the spoken word committed to
writing. It is oral in structure.
"Oral languages/' says Edmund Carpenter, "tended to be polysyn-
thetic, composed of great tight conglomerates, like twisted knots,
within which images were juxtaposed, inseparably fused; written
communications consisted of little words chronologically ordered. Sub
ject became distinct from verb, adjective from noun, separating actor
from action, essence from form. Where preliterate man imposed form
diffidently, temporarily for such transitory forms lived but temporari
ly on the tip of his tongue, in the living situation the printed word
228 THE HOLY BABBAMANS
was inflexible, permanent, in touch with eternity: it embalmed truth
for posterity.
"This embalming process froze language, eliminated the art of am
biguity, made puns 'the lowest form of wit,' destroyed word linkages.
The word became a static symbol, applicable to and separate from
that which it symbolized. It now belonged to the objective world; it
could be seen. . . . Writing didn't record oral language; it was a new
language, which the spoken word came to imitate. . . . Gutenberg
finished the process." 34
The written word, written in speech forms imitative of the written
word, reached its reductio ad absurdum in the Victorian novels. When
Thackeray satirized writers like Disraeli and Bulwer-Lytton he was
satirizing not only the genteelism of the middle class but the bookish-
ness of their Geneva code language, a style that by the 1890's had
begun to burlesque itself, unconsciously. Human speech is oral and
nonlinear as Carpenter and his associate Marshall McLuhan have dem
onstrated in their experiments with communications media at the
University of Toronto. When it is set down in writing it is merely be
ing recorded for playback. Playback may be by eye and, where the
reader is capable of it, by the "audio-imagination," as Eliot calls it,
or "the inner ear," Marianne Moore's name for it, but it does not come
fully alive again until it is played back by the human voice box. A
poem can be mastered, that is, it can be understood on every level of
meaning; it can be "explicated" in the manner of the New Criticism,
all its allusions traced to their sources and identified, its metrics
scanned, its grammar and syntax unscrambled, all of its ambiguities
ferreted out and classified according to William Empson, and the act
of communication will still be incomplete unless the sound is played
back to the listening ear. The inner ear is not enough, no matter how
much audio-imagination the poet has or the listener possesses. The
printed poem is not the poem. It is only the "score" of the poem, just
as in music the score is not the music. It has to be played back.
If it is written in the Geneva code it will sound stilted when it is
read aloud, no matter how well it "reads" on the printed page. It will
sound like the printed page would sound if it could speak: clipped,
precise, evenly spaced, no word lighter or darker than any other word,
in short, a good job of printing. If it is written as oral language it will
play back naturally and convincingly. The same thing is true of prose.
THE BARBARIAN IS AT THE GATES 229
Try reading the following passage from Jack Kerouac's The Subter
raneans silently, then read it aloud and the difference becomes imme
diately apparent.
It's too much. Beginning, as I say with the pushcart incident
the night we drank red wine at Dante's and were in a drinking
mood now both of us so disgusted Yuri came with us, Ross
Wallenstein was in there and maybe to show off to Mardou Yuri
acted like a kid all night and kept hitting Wallenstein on the back
of his head with little finger taps like goofing in a bar but Wallen
stein (who's always being beaten up by hoodlums because of this)
turned around a stiff death's-head gaze with big eyes glaring be
hind glasses, his Christlike blue unshaven cheeks, staring rigidly as
tho the stare itself will floor Yuri, not speaking for a long time,
finally saying, "Man, don't bug me," and turning back to his con
versation with friends and Yuri does it again and Ross turns again
the same pitiless awful subterranean sort of non-violent Indian
Mahatma Ghandi defense of some kind ( which I'd suspected that
first time he talked to me saying, "Are you a fag you talk like a
fag," a remark coming from him so absurd because so inflammable
and me 170 pounds to his 130 or 120 for God's sake 35
J. D. Salinger had already broken that literary ground, of course, in
the middle forties:
I was surrounded by jerks. I'm not kidding. At this other tiny
table, right to my left, practically on top of me, there was this
funny-looking guy and this funny-looking girl. They were around
my age, or maybe just a little older. It was funny. You could see
they were being careful as hell not to drink up the minimum too
fast. I listened to their conversation for a while, because I didn't
have anything else to do. He was telling her about some pro foot
ball game he'd seen that afternoon. He gave her every single god
dam play in the whole game I'm not kidding. He was the most
boring guy I ever listened to. And you could tell his date wasn't
even interested in the goddam game, but she was even funnier-
looking than he was, so I guess she had to listen. Real ugly girls
have it tough. I feel so sorry for them sometimes. Sometimes I
can't even look at them, especially if they're with some dopey guy
that's telling them all about a goddam football game. On my right,
230 THE HOLY BARBARIANS
the conversation was even worse, though. On my right there was
this very Joe Yale-looking guy, in a gray flannel suit and one of
those flitty-looking Tattersall vests. All those Ivy League bastards
look alike. My father wants me to go to Yale, or maybe Princeton,
but I swear, I wouldn't go to one of those Ivy League colleges if
I was dying, for God's sake . . , 36
Catcher in the Rye, the book from which this excerpt is taken, is to
be found everywhere on the bookshelves of the beat. Reading aloud,
both poetry and prose, is a common practice in the pads. It is not
difficult for the beat generation youth to identify itself with the book's
hero, Holden Caulfield. He not only sounds right to them but the
things he says are often the things they say:
If he'd had to shoot anybody, he wouldn't've known which
direction to shoot in. He said the Army was practically as full of
bastards as the Nazis were.
I swear if there's another war, they better stick me in front of a
firing squad. I wouldn't object
The people who applauded the show-offy, tricky stuff of the
night club entertainers were the same morons that laugh like
hyenas in the movies at stuff that isn't funny.
George Mandel is another writer who possesses an oral style and is
popular in beat generation circles for what he says as well as for the
way he says it. Here are some examples from his book Flee the Angry
Strangers:
Those culture perverts from uptown. Anyone from uptown. And
downtown. Everywhere I go. I tell you our society is at the bottom
of its spiral.
The whole commercial scene is animal against animal . . .
everybody's mouth going with words like priests and kings and
congressmen with words and no understanding . . . You can keep
reality. Work is for slaves; I'm free.
The so-called spiritual leaders who are all spirit and no brains,
all sky and no earth . . . the jerks with the electric word of official
dom who do nothing but separate people.
A whole nation of people suspending consciousness in whatever
way they could: in churches and movie houses, before television
THE BARBABIAN IS AT THE GATES 231
sets, in barrooms and in books , . . The whole world (seeking)
hard for its narcosis . . . Dope fiends and philosophers, prostitutes
and poets, artists and hoods, darlings, dreamers, derelicts and
every American variety of displaced persons . . . Whether praying
step by step up tottering towers toward some illusion of heaven,
or playing notch by notch down any available avenue of escape,
from a stupid movie to a charge of heroin the whole world is
hooked. 37
One thing is already evident, that if the holy barbarians have their
way with the national culture the new American literary tradition, now
in the making, is not going to be in the England-via-New England
line of descent. The schools and the reputation-making organs are still
in the hands of teachers, critics and editors in the England-via-New
England tradition, but defections from their own ranks have become
increasingly common in the last few years and newcomers into the
schools, magazines and publishing houses are changing the picture
continually. Where print is still closed to them they either start pub
lishing ventures of their own or take to the oral medium of records. For
it is really the oral elements from foreign cultures in which those
elements have never completely died out that are being transfused by
the holy barbarians into the blood stream of American culture.
The best way to approach the literature of the beat generation is
through its antecedents. If you ask the poets they will name Whitman,
Mallarme, Poe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Yeats, Eliot, Pound;
there will be talk in some quarters of looking into Swinburne again
(didn't he introduce Baudelaire to the English-reading world?); Shelley
will be quoted, Marlowe rather than Shakespeare (though I have heard
The Phoenix and the Turtle, attributed to the Bard, praised as "a far-
out swinging poem"); Blake's philosophical poems are being eyed
speculatively again as they were in the booming twenties when there
was something like a Blake boom, even though it was never listed on
the big board. These new poets will go on to name Robinson Jeffers,
Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth
Patchen, Dylan Thomas, Edward Dahlberg, E. E. Cummings, Kenneth
Fearing and Louis Zukofsky and, judging from the letters I receive
and from the behavior of some of my youngest visitors, I, too, am some
times included as among their literary "ancestors." This is a wide range
232 THE HOLY BABBABIANS
of taste, but if you look closely at the list you may notice that nearly
all of them have one thing in common: they are not patricians of belle-
lettres in the royal roster of the Academy. If they have "made it" with
English Lit at all and some of them have, if they've been dead long
enough (literally or literarily) they made it the hard way, the long
way round.
Most of the same people will be named by the prose writers of the
beat generation, too. The line between poetry and prose is very thinly
drawn in these circles. Many insist there is no line at all. Asked to name
their prose ancestors, however, they will usually come up with James
Joyce, Henry Miller, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway (his
early short stories in particular), Sherwood Anderson, Louis-Ferdinand
Celine, William Faulkner, Andre Gide, Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence
(his poetry as well as his prose), Thomas Wolfe; and some of the older,
more political-minded among the prose writers of the beat generation
would add Theodore Dreiser and John Dos Passos to this list All of
them have heard of B. Traven but, except for The Death Ship, his
work is not widely read in beat circles any more.
Admittedly, neither list is complete, but it is representative, I think.
Conspicuously missing are such titans of the twenties as James Branch
Cabell, Louis Hergesheimer, Carl Van Vechten, and earlier writers
who were widely read by the writers of the twenties (and their readers)
such as Jack London, Guy de Maupassant, Anatole France and Sigrid
Undset. John Steinbeck and Richard Wright lead a kind of twilight
existence in the literary experience of the beat generation writers, but
Nelson Algren is very vivid, very much in the foreground. If I did not
mention him among the "influences" and ancestors it is because he is
regarded as a contemporary, along with Salinger and Mailer and Man-
del. Dostoevski is, as I have noted earlier, an all-pervading influence
that, for this very reason, no one thinks of mentioning. Recently, owing
to new reprints or new translations, Nikolai Gogol and Isaac Babel are
being read. Gorki is still read in some circles but Tolstoy, Andreiev,
Turgenev and Lermontov are known only by name. Chekhov is still
read by the short story writers among the beat with pleasure and profit.
Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust are honored and unread classics.
William Saroyan's early short stories are sought out in yellowing paper
backs, and in some quarters he is listed as an "influence" among beat
writers. Henry James is tough going for them, despite the lively press
THE BARBARIAN IS AT THE GATES 233
agent job that has been done on him in recent years. Sinclair Lewis has
joined Henry James as "schoolbook stuff/' so the younger writers tell
me an uneasy twosome! Mikhail Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the
Don has joined Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front
as "one of those war books" that one must get around to reading one o
these days just to see what all the shootin' was about. Fashions like
reading Stendahl or Trollope may make a stir in English classes and
among the exurbanites, but not in beat writer circles. The same is true
of the occasional succes de scandals, like Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita or
Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhiuago. They are read by beat writers but,
being translations, they can have little effect on style or content in their
own writing. Nabokov's Lolita, for all the praise that many critics
lavished on its style, is still a foreign language to beat writers, and its
shock value is nil, if not actually incomprehensible, in the pads.
The same thing is true of passing fashions in poet-revivals. Some
body writes a critical essay in one of the university quarterlies or in the
Saturday Review about Robert Frost and the English majors go rush
ing to the undergraduate library to snatch everything catalogued under
Frost, R. off the shelves. Or Carl Sandburg is seen on television once
again and the public library has a small run on Sandburg, C. But the
beat poets are unmoved by such flurries of interest in writers they have
read exhaustively at college or in the public library five or ten years
ago and found unrewarding as far as language or the tricks of their
craft are concerned. They can learn more from one page of Charles
Olson or even a good translation of Zen poems.
Polish, in the classroom sense of "good writing," is no more important
to them in a poem or a piece of prose than it is on their shoes. That is
one reason why the university-bred poets of the forties have had vir
tually no influence on the poetry of the beat generation. Of the fifteen
poets anthologized by John Ciardi in his Mid-Century American Poets,
all were college bred and twelve had taught or were teaching in col
leges and universities, but none of them has been able to achieve any
thing like the freedom of style or content that rings a bell with the
beat. It is not their college meal ticket or their learning that is held
against them some of the best-educated men and women in the his
tory of American literature are numbered among them. It is just that
they can't swing with that beat because they are too conscious of every
word they put on paper: you can't dance freely if you have to watch
234 THE HOLY BAKBAJRIANS
your step. The security of the academic life can become as addictive as
heroin and harder to kick. Besides, there are too many eyes looking in
at the mating with the Muse, cramping the creative act. In time the
built-in censorship becomes familial, like a loved, benevolent monster
who provides everything., everything except the freedom to be a clown
or a fool. You can be the court jester on a university payroll but you
can t be the all-out, truthtelling bard and still hold the Chair of Poetry.
You can't even be an honest critic of literature, lest you fall into the
trap of being guilty by association with the truthtelling writer.
For the same plus a few additional reasons, the Robert Penn Warren-
Allen Tate-John Crowe Ransome Axis is "nowhere" as far as the holy
barbarians are concerned, and the feeling seems to be mutual. Like
the Poll Tax Dixiecrats in Congress who hold all the key chairman
ships, this Confederate Bund has bottled up everything that comes out
of the beat writing camp and, in the publications they control, nothing
of the kind is ever reported out of committee.
Yet the holy barbarians respect learning wherever they find it, on
campus or off, but on this point the feeling is not mutual. "They never
read anything," one college English teacher charged during a sym
posium on the beat generation in which I participated. He himself was a
Rhodes scholar, had been "named" by the un-American committee and
"was allowed to resign." Since then he had made the rounds of the
pads in Venice West and San Francisco and seen the bookshelves and
attended the readings and yet, when it came to making a public state
ment about it, he reverted to an intramural position, defending the
academic gates against the barbarians. Besides, as a Leftist in politics,
disaffiliation is defeatism to him, and poverty, voluntary or involuntary,
is a crime against the Cause. Rightists and Leftists stand shoulder to
shoulder at the gates when it comes to required courses, credentials
and degrees.
The position of Poet in Residence, is the university's attempt to meet
the challenge of the times and present something in the way of a
"creative writing course," but it is looked upon by the die-hards of the
faculty as a breach in the walls that may let in the whole horde of
barbarians. They need have little fear, however. The position of Poet
in Residence, like the more ancient Oxford Chair of Poetry, is already
proving to be a potent tamer and refiner of poets. But in the meantime
the protectors of English Lit are watchful and regard even a one-shot
THE BAEBABIAN IS AT THE GATES 235
lecture or reading on campus by any of the holy barbarians of litera
ture as a crisis.
For a time it looked as if the summer "writers' workshop" might
become a kind of halfway house between the creative writer and the
university, but the professors and critics were not long in taking over.
Today there are hundreds of these workshops from coast to coast, but
they are little more than off-campus summer courses for amateurs on
the make for credits or publication. The holy barbarians shun them.
They prefer the informal literary gab f ests of the pads, and as for pub
lic performance, they prefer the saloons and coffeehouse readings and
Jazz Canto jam sessions. These are more in the oral tradition and give
the artists more freedom of discussion and expression.
What is the sound these holy barbarians of literature are putting
down that is so frightening to the guardians of the Required and the
Refined? Let us begin with the poets, since it is the poets who are
today, as they have always been in every literary movement, in the
vanguard.
" Say it, no ideas but in things "
First, the "ancestors" of these poets. In what are almost the first lines
of his long poem Paterson, William Carlos Williams, the oldest living
^poet among these ancestors, lays down the beat and the sound:
Say it, no ideas but in things
nothing but the blank faces of the houses
and cylindrical trees
bent, f oked by preconception and accident
split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained
secret into the body of light! . . .
A man like a city and a woman like a flower
who are in love. Two women. Three women.
Innumberable women, each like a flower.
But
only one man like a city. 38
The object mirrored in the poetic image, that comes first. The poet
comes clean; he tells only what he knows, what his vision has shown
236 THE HOLY BABBAIUANS
him, and he tells it starkly, but with energy, energy from the mysterious
source of all artistic energy, says it and stops. It might be a single
flower, a cloud, a single person or a city. The principle is the same.
"Say it, no idea but in things." Like a Hopper streetscape.
From first to last as in Paterson so in Venice West. Here, for exam
ple, is one of the youngest of the holy barbarians, Stuart Z. Perkoff, in
some lines from his Venice Poems:
the city itself, what it
is, a
city of walking at nite
city of old and ugly houses
city of real pain and real children
city of open sores and open eyes
city of doom and terror
city of ocean and animal lust
city of dying and struggle
city of Venice, my city, city within a city I do not
know or love
what a city is/
a vision, a
holy eye, a
structure
what a city is/
a face, a face of
love, of the place, the real
place
yes, there is a kind of
knowing, it can be called
love 39
If all things are holy it is enough to present the thing, as the poet-
seer of the past made holy the objects of the ritual act by a form of
words spoken or chanted, without himself, as a person, becoming in
volved in the act. It is as if everything that "came" to the poet for
transmission was postmarked Handle with Reverence, that is, handle
THE BAKBAKIAN IS AT THE GATES 237
ritualistically, sacramentally. Even the unloading of a boxcar, as in
this poem by Perkoff :
lifting
a piece
of black steel
and carefully
(conforming to a pattern
previously set down
after extensive
testing)
placing it on a construction
of boards
extending
certain aspects of bodily structure
to the limits of tensions
actions taken
within a situation
once calculated
to destroy all pleasure
now seen to contain
evocations 40
"The trick is never to touch the world anywhere/' as William Carlos
Williams says
Leave yourself at the door, walk in, admire the pictures,
talk a few words with the master of the house, question his wife
a little, rejoin yourself at the door and go off arm in arm listen
ing to last week's symphony played by angel hornsmen from the
benches of a turned cloud. 41
Dr. Williams, as a practicing family doctor, was already half a sha
man from the start. The kind of "nonattachment" that he describes is
traditional with the healer. It is also very close to the Buddhist concept
of nonattachment.
"In Buddhism," says Watts, "the four principal activities of man
walking, standing, sitting, and lying are called the four 'dignities,'
since they are the postures assumed by the Buddha nature in its human
238 THE HOLY BABBARIANS
(nirmanakaya) body. The ritualistic style of conducting one's everyday
activities is therefore a celebration of the fact that 'the ordinary man is
a Buddha/ and is, furthermore, a style that comes almost naturally to
a person who is doing everything with total presence of mind. Thus if
in something so simple and trivial as lighting a cigarette one is fully
aware, seeing the flame, the curling smoke, and the regulation of the
breath as the most important thing in the universe, it will seem to an
observer that the action has a ritualistic style/' 42 The ballet-like move
ments of the western hero of motion pictures come to mind, as he
appears mounted, walking, rolling a cigarette. Certain gang leaders,
even among the juvenile delinquents, cultivate such a style, made
classic on the screen by James Dean, and by Marlon Brando in The
Wild One. Charles Olson celebrates these ritualistic movements in The
Lordly and Isolate Satyrs:
The lordly and isolate Satyrs look at them come in
on the left side of the beach
like a motorcycle club! And the handsomest of them,
the one who has a woman, driving that snazzy
convertible
Wow, did you ever see even in a museum
such a collection of boddisatvahs, the way
they come up to their stop, each of them
as though it was a rudder
the way they have to sit above it
and come to a stop on it, the monumental solidity
of themselves, the Easter Island
they make of the beach, the Red-headed Men
These are the Androgynes,
the Fathers behind the father, the Great Halves . . , 43
Contrast, the significant juxtaposition of opposites, presenting a pic
ture of the world in all its beauty and terror, is found in the poetry of
the holy barbarians in more extreme form than in the more polished
and respectable poets. "I walked on the banks of the tincan banana
dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific loco
motive," writes Allen Ginsberg in the first strophe of his Sunflower
Sutra, "... I rushed up enchanted it was my first sunflower, mem
ories of Blake my visions Harlem/ and Hells of the Eastern rivers,"
THE B ABBABIAN IS AT THE GATES 239
bridges clanking Joes Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby
carriages, black treadless tires forgotten and un-
treaded, the poem of the riverbank, condoms and pots,
steel knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck and
the razor sharp artifacts passing into the past
and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly
bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke
of olden locomotives in its eye. . . .
A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent
lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye to the
new hip moon, woke up alive and excited grasping in the
sunset shadow sunrise golden monthly breeze! 4 *
Kenneth Patchen is a master of such contrasts:
O great blind horses squatting above the world
The reins hang slack in the bitter wind
The shadows of clouds pass like wounded hands
O where can the heart of man be comforted
In the valley the wild flowers
Shake themselves upright again
The red violets 45
Things as they are. "The commonplace is what we see'' says Gregory
Corso. To the Zen Buddhist they are tathata, viewing things as they
are. To the poet they are what he sees, his reality. He is what he feels
himself to be at that particular moment of time, in the making of the
poem. As in Corso's The Last Gangster:
Waiting by the window
my feet enwrapped with the dead bootleggers of Chicago
I am the last gangster, safe at last,
waiting by a bullet-proof window.
I look down the street and know
the two torpedoes from St. Louis.
I've watched them grow old
. . . guns rusting in their arthritic hands. 46
There is still another characteristic that is worthy of notice in these
poets, the sense of the absurd, the role of the clown, the Holy Fool.
240 THE HOLY BARBABIANS
''Constantly risking absurdity"
In the cults that gave rise to early Christianity there must have been
an understanding of the Fool in the poetic imagination and the thera
peutic release of laughter. Not much of it got into the official canon of
the New Testament. This element is the first casualty whenever a
religion becomes an institution. There are a couple of passages in
Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians which are rendered as follows
in the Revised Standard Version:
For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness
of God stronger than men. For consider your call, brethren; not
many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many
were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose
what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is
weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low
and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to
nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the
presence of God.
and:
Let no one deceive himself. If any among you thinks he is wise
in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For
the wisdom of this world is folly with God.
The British painter Cecil Collins made a cycle of paintings and
drawings called "The Holy Fools" and in the preface of a book called
The Vision of the Fool, 47 in which they are reproduced, he has this
to say about Christ the Fool.
The greatest fool in history was Christ. This great fool was
crucified by the commercial pharisees, by the authority of the
respectable, and by the mediocre official culture of the philistines.
And has not the church crucified Christ more deeply and subtly
by its hypocrisy than any pagan? This Divine Fool, whose im
mortal compassion and holy folly placed a light in the dark hands
of the world.
The New Testament Christ is without any question at all a folk hero
figure of ritual drama, and PauTs words may point to one act of the
THE BARBARIAN IS AT THE GATES 241
drama in which the Messiah enacted the role of the Divine Fool in
some sacrificial rite. The analogous role of the truth-possessed artist is
one that poets and painters have recognized for centuries; it is not sur
prising that it is a frequent theme of the holy barbarians.
In one of Lawrence Ferlinghettfs poems the poet appears as the
acrobatic clown, akin to Nietzsche's ropedancer ("Man is a rope
stretched between the animal and the Superman ... a rope over an
abyss. A dangerous crossing" In Zarathustra, 4).
Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
. . . For he is a super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap 48
The poet on the college payroll can risk religious heresy (except in
denominational colleges); he can risk subversion (except in state-sup
ported universities); he can even risk outspoken sexuality (if he doesn't
publish it too conspicuously); but he can never risk absurdity. In de
cent society, even among the best-educated people, it is the cardinal
sin. It is something that only the disaffiliated poet of the slum can per
mit himself. Yet it is traditionally one of the high moments of the
poetic rite.
"In a respectable practical society, where everybody is useful," says
Collins, "the poetic imagination in man is an anachronism, an irritant
which disturbs the chemical sleeping habits of such a society by mak
ing it conscious of the degradation of its mechanization, by the appear-
242 THE HOLY BABBABIANS
ance of extraordinary desires; by overshadowing it with the supra-
reality of poetry, by unsettling it with a thirst and a hunger for eternal
beauty, just at the moment when this society thought that everybody
was satisfied." 49
The Clown as Holy Fool is also a familiar theme of the painters
among the holy barbarians, and so is the Crucifixion theme, which is
always handled in the most unchurchly, unconventional and often
quite unchristian fashion. For the Holy Rood is far older than Chris
tianity, going back to tree worship and the phallic cults.
Zen Buddhism, too, is filled with tales of sainted "lunatics" whose
antics are parables of wisdom. It is the part of Zen that, more than
anything else, commends itself to the beat. Alan W. Watts calls this
beat Zen as distinguished from square Zen, but adds that he has "no
real quarrel with either extreme/'
The extremes of beat Zen need alarm no one since, as Blake
said, "the fool who persists in his folly becomes wise." As for
square Zen, "authoritative" spiritual experiences have always had
a way of wearing thin, and thus of generating the demand for
something genuine and unique which needs no stamp. 50
The poetry and art of the holy barbarians could stand, if anything,
more clowning than it already has. Ferlinghetti's work is often shot
through with social satire, as in Dog/ 1 and in Christ Climbed Down:
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no intrepid Bible salesmen
covered the territory
in two-tone Cadillacs
and where no Sears Roebuck creches
complete with plastic babe in manger
arrived by parcel post
the babe by special delivery
and where no televised Wise Men
praised the Lord Calvert Whiskey 52
THE BARBARIAN IS AT THE GATES 243
More often, as in James Broughton's True and False Unicorn, the
Fool appears in a mood of self -exploration, even self -mockery:
And how shall I conceal my nakedness here?
white, like a maiden's moonlit belly,
white, like an undressed Absolute.
White is the final pure purgation:
sterile gown of the hospital room,
winding sheet, skeleton, the ash.
Animate and inanimate, O ambiguous steed!
In Jabberwock land, or Elysium
where am I truly or falsely at home?
I am the charm sought for a miracle,
I am the harm mocked for a failure.
I am both savior and scapegoat. 53
In my own Fete de Vane For Buridans Ass ( on a theme from Kier
kegaard, 
