Beatdom #20

Dear Reader, In most issues of Beatdom, we focus on the three most famous Beats, as well as those other figures surrounding them during the early days of the Beat Generation – the hipsters of Times Square and Columbia – or out in San Francisco as the Beats morphed into the hippies.

This time around, we have chosen to look at those who came later, including the “Second Generation Beats,” post-Beats, and other countercultural figures whose lives and work grew out of the Beat Generation.

There are essays, interviews, and reviews about Hunter S. Thompson, Diane di Prima, Timothy Leary, Denise Levertov, and Bob Kaufman. The aim is not to expand the definition of the Beat Generation, but rather to track its influence into the wider counterculture and related areas of literature. Also, these are fascinating people whose lives and work deserve more attention and it has been an honour to read and edit the fantastic contributions we received for this issue.

As always, Beatdom embraces divergent ideas and writing styles. Although it can be jarring to follow one essay with another that is utterly different, we think it is better to keep the original contributor’s voice and perspective.

Finally, it is with great sadness that we report the passing of Michael McClure, an important Beat poet, who passed away on May 4, 2020. Michael was kind enough to talk with me for the first ever issue of Beatdom in 2007 and I had the great fortune of listening to him reading Kerouac’s poems on a later trip to San Francisco. He was a wonderful man and will be sorely missed.

David S. Wills Editor

Beatdom Founded 2007

Edited by David S. Wills Cover by Waylon Bacon Published by Beatdom Books www.books.beatdom.com

Contents

“Hunter S. Thompson and the Beat Generation”

by David S. Wills................................................1 “Pregnancy always makes me want to fuck more: Sexual and Maternal Desire Entanglements in Diane di Prima”

by Ambar Geerts Zapién.............................27 Two Poems

by Eliot Katz…………................................…..42

“The Encounter Robinsonian: Weldon Kees and Denise Levertov, April–October 1955”

by James Reidel.............................................47 “Review of Kerouac: The Last Quarter Century”

by Robert Niemi…………….....................…..65 “Interview with John Sampas”

by David Daniel……………………..………….70 “William S. Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Drugs, and Control: When the Beats Split into the Hippies

and the Punks”

by Westley Heine.............................................77 “Chasing Hunter’s Literary Persona Through the Pages: A conversation with Hunter S. Thompson scholar, Dr. Rory Patrick Feehan”

by Noel Dávila…………………….......………..98 “The Beaten Generation: Burroughs, Ginsberg, Thompson… and the Battle of Chicago”

by Leon Horton.............................................129 “A Shoe that Fits the Mind: A Review of Ginsberg’s South American Journals”

by David S. Wills.......................................…..175 “The Deconstruction and Resurrection of Bob Kaufman”

by Ryan Mathews..........................................181 “Fear and Loathing in Utero”

by Leon Horton………..................................227

Contributors David S. Wills is the founder and editor of Beatdom and the author of Scientologist! William S. Burroughs and the ‘Weird Cult’ and World Citizen: Allen Ginsberg as Traveller. He is currently working on a book about Hunter S. Thompson.

Ambar Geerts Zapién is a Mexican scholar and translator.

She is currently a PhD candidate at the National University of Mexico (UNAM), and holds BA and MA degrees from the Free University of Brussels (ULB), where she wrote a dissertation on mystical experience and entheogens in the writings of Carlos Castañeda and Timothy Leary. For the last four years, she has been extensively studying Diane di Prima’s archives, poetry, and autobiography. The results of this research will be presented in a doctoral thesis about self-representation and corporality in the poet’s early work (before 1970).

David Daniel is the author of more than a dozen books, including White Rabbit, a novel set in San Francisco in the Summer of Love, and four entries in the prize-winning Alex Rasmussen mystery series. His most recent book is Inflections & Innuendos, a collection of flash fiction. He lives north of Boston and is on the adjunct faculty at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

Leon Horton is a cultural journalist and humourist. After gaining his masters from the University of Salford, he lost the will to live working as a court reporter (wouldn’t you?), drank himself into a corner writing upbeat “isn’t everything marvellous” crap for local magazines, and enjoyed a failed stint as the editor of Old Trafford News. His writing has been described as “not quite what we’re looking for” and

is published by Beat Scene, International Times, Beatdom, Literary Heist, Empty Mirror and Erotic Review. When he’s not barking at the moon or up the wrong trouser leg, Leon can be found blogging Under the Counterculture at leonhorton. wordpress.com Noel Dávila is a staff writer for Money Magazine and The FourOneOne. His editorial interests include investigative reporting, music creation, and politics. Blue Light Whispers, his debut novel, is set to be published in the near future with a short story collection to follow soon after. Noel is based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. This is his second contribution to Beatdom. Twitter: @noeldavila Web: noeldavila.net James Reidel has published in many journals, including The New Yorker, Paris Review, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review. He is the author of two collections of verse, Jim’s Book (2014) and My Window Seat for Arlena Twigg (2006).

His most recent work has appeared in Poetry, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Hawai’i Review, Outsider, Fiction Southwest, The Flexible Persona, The Wax Paper, and elsewhere—including The Best Small Fictions 2016. He is the author of Vanished Act: The Life and Work of Weldon Kees (2003) and a translator whose latest work is Waiting on the Opposite Stage: The Collected Poems of Heiner Müller (forthcoming 2020).

Westley Heine is a writer and multimedia artist. He is the video editor of Biologic Film, which utilizes the cut-up method and the audio recordings of William S. Burroughs. Heine is known for his documentaries Poetry in Action and The Trail of Quetzalcoatl, which the latter has a companion book of poetry and interviews. Publications of his work have been in The Chicago Reader, The Wellington Street Review, Bleached Butterfly, and CC&D Magazine. He grew up in Wisconsin, was educated in Chicago, and bummed from New York to Mexico to California. He now resides with his wife in Los Angeles.

Robert Niemi is a Professor of English and American Studies at St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont. He is the author of several previous nonfiction and reference

works including History in the Media: Film & Television and a biography of Russell Banks. He lives in Vermont.

Ryan Mathews is a writer, artist, futurist, and academically trained philosopher. He is the coauthor of The Myth of Excellence, The Deviant’s Advantage, and What’s Your Story?.

He occasionally read poetry with Edie Kerouac-Parker, Jack Kerouac’s first wife and his earlier work on the Beats has appeared in Beat Scene.

Eliot Katz is the author of seven books of poetry— including Love, War, Fire, Wind, and Unlocking the Exits.

His most recent book, The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg, was published by Beatdom Books in 2016. Called “another classic New Jersey bard” by Ginsberg, Katz has been a longtime activist for a wide range of peace and social-justice causes. His website is at www.eliotkatzpoetry. com.

Hunter S. Thompson

and the Beats

by

David S. Wills

Hunter S. Thompson was never part of the Beat Generation, no matter how hard people try to make him one. He was an outsider and changed literature with his experimental prose, but that is not enough to make him Beat. For one thing, he was much younger than the Beats. For another, he moved in different circles. He also shied away from such categorization and ultimately made his own one-man genre, Gonzo, which was stylistically quite different from anything published by any of the Beat writers.

Yet there is no denying that these people rubbed shoulders in the hallways of American literature and there is good reason for bookshelves around the world containing Thompson’s books alongside those of Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg, or the likes of Charles Bukowski, who decried any attempt to lump him in with the Beats, whom he loathed.

Perhaps it is understandable that readers would attempt to categorize them together: These writers were renegades and, to some extent, poetic, heroic losers. They shared many ideals and a few elements of style, and they held some of the same sorts of

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attitudes. Yet many have tried and failed to tie Thompson with the Beats, including myself in an old essay for Beatdom.1 I tried to trace his interests and influences and run-ins with the men and women of the Beat Generation and found that there just wasn’t a huge amount to go on.

Some said that Thompson was inspired by Kerouac and Burroughs (and he did meet the latter when both were getting to be old men), and that Thompson was somehow a friend of Allen Ginsberg, though neither wrote much about the other. So what is there to write about except that they were popular counterculture figures?

In researching a forthcoming book, I stumbled upon some more information that shed light on Thompson’s views about the Beats. It made me realize that not enough had been written and that what had been written before may have been inaccurate as well as insubstantial. As such, I have tried to bring together those disparate sources to bring you the following.

Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Kerouac, and the Wider Beat/Beatnik Movements Hunter S. Thompson was about a decade younger than most of the Beat writers and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, far from the Beat crowds (though not that far from William S. Burroughs, who had grown up in St. Louis). When the Beats were in New York, exploring Times Square and being kicked out of Columbia University, Thompson was still in elementary school.

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“Hunter S. Thompson & the Beats” in Beatdom #4 (2009)

Despite being only ten years old when Neal Cassady burst onto the scene and took Kerouac off on the road, Thompson was not vastly different in attitude.

He was a young hell-raiser, constantly in trouble with teachers, his parents, the police, and the community at large. Like Kerouac, he was a well-read rebel and like Neal Cassady he was a charmer but an abuser, someone to whom others gravitated.

While most of the main Beat figures joined the Merchant Marine in the forties, Thompson took off for the Air Force in the fifties, and it was there that he got into writing. After blagging his way into the role of sports editor on the base newspaper, he continued his fledgling career as a journalist, hopping from newspaper to newspaper in search of the respect he felt he deserved. Alas, his short-temper, pranks, and alcoholism caused him to be fired nearly everywhere he went, and often evicted from the places he rented.

His propensity for rebellion made him, in his own words, “utterly unemployable.”2 After bouncing around the US in search of smalltown newspapers willing to believe his largely falsified résumé, Thompson landed in New York City in 1957, the year that Kerouac’s magnus opus, On the Road, was published. Had he been born a little earlier, he might have crossed paths with Ginsberg and Kerouac at Columbia, where Thompson attended literature classes two and a half days each week.

Unable to sit still (another Neal Cassady-like trait), he didn’t last long and thus ended his spotty academic career. Like the Beats before him, Thompson, too, was a Subterranean, inhabiting a virtual dungeon in 2 Proud Highway, p.xxxii

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Greenwich Village, where he had the walls painted jetblack. He also frequented some of the same bars that the Beats had a decade earlier, like the White Horse Tavern.

According to Thompson’s friend, Paul Semonin, it was in early 1958 that Thompson began reading Kerouac.3 At this point, Kerouac’s only published books were On the Road (1957), The Subterraneans (1958), and the much earlier The Town and the City (1950), and it is not clear whether he had read the latter. He was introduced to Kerouac’s work by Semonin’s girlfriend, who also turned him on to marijuana, jazz, and – another Beat-related curiosity – orgone accumulators.

Although Thompson played it cool, one of his friends remarked that, “I am pretty sure [these things] were new to Hunter.”4 Over the following year or two, Thompson lived out his version of the Beat life. Although he was powerfully averse to any sort of clique or movement, and openly scoffed at the beatniks with their berets and bongos, his life in New York was, according to Semonin, quite heavily influenced by the real Beats. Thompson and his buddies tried to “drink like the Beats” and he began an autobiographical novel, Prince Jellyfish, that was supposedly inspired by Kerouac.5 Although it has never been published, part of this work was printed in his 1990 collection, Songs of the Doomed. The prose is weak and highly derivative of Fitzgerald, and one would hardly guess it was written by the man who later invented Gonzo journalism. Yet Thompson did admit in one letter that it was at least partly inspired 3 Gonzo, p.32 4 When the Going Gets Weird, p.94 5 Fear and Loathing, p.39

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by Kerouac. He told a friend that it was “something of a cross between Gatsby and On the Road.” 6 The first pages alone are littered with references to “Columbia” and “girls,” and revolve around a party in a hip apartment on Morningside Drive, one of Kerouac’s haunts. Like Kerouac, Thompson wrote about himself and his friends (although he was always more interested in participating than observing) with just a thin veil of fiction obscuring the absolute reality.

There is little in those pages to suggest that Kerouac was particularly influential on Thompson’s developing literary style, and few have ever tried to make that claim. Douglas Brinkley, his literary executor, commented that “Kerouac’s confessional prose made quite an impact on Thompson’s philosophy for living, if not on his writing style,”7 and elsewhere explained that Thompson thought On the Road was “sloppy and romantic and oversentimental.”8 Perhaps Thompson’s kindest words for Kerouac attest to this. In the second edition of his Aspen Wallposter series, when he recounted seeing Kerouac on TV in a New York bar, he said, “I decided to quit my job and go into fulltime craziness.”9 Given the importance of “craziness” to Thompson’s life and work, that is surprisingly high praise.

But looking deeper, there is some evidence that Kerouac did helped shape Thompson’s writing, at least in terms of content. While Thompson was more interested in Hemingway and Fitzgerald, as well as J.P. Donleavy and George Orwell, and his writing largely 6 Proud Highway, p.166 7 Proud Highway, p.110 8 Gonzo, p.11 9 Freak Power, p.46

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aped theirs during the years when he was finding his own voice, he told the Paris Review: Jack Kerouac influenced me quite a bit as a writer . . . in the Arab sense that the enemy of my enemy was my friend.

Kerouac taught me that you could get away with writing about drugs and get published […] I wasn’t trying to write like him, but I could see that I could get published like him and make the breakthrough, break through the Eastern establishment ice.10 In his letters, there are also fleeting positive comments.

In early 1958, he wrote that Kerouac “is more of a ‘spokesman’ than most people think… and he speaks for more than thieves, hopheads, and whores.”11 In 1971, after achieving some measure of fame for his Gonzo fusion of fictional and non-fictional writing, Thompson explained to his publisher the debt he owed to Kerouac: There was simply no room, no way to make a living, in that twilight of the Eisenhower Era, for anybody who might want to bring a writer’s fine eye & perspective to the mundane “realities” of journalism.

Probably the first big breakthrough on this front was Jack Kerouac’s On the Road—a long rambling piece of personal journalism that the publisher (Viking) 10 Ancient Gonzo Wisdom, p.265 11 Proud Highway, p.110

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called “fiction” because if they’d said it was “journalism” no Literary Critic would touch it.12 It is important to note the odd phrase, “personal journalism,” in that last quote. This is precisely what Thompson considered his own writing style at that time. In the late sixties and early seventies, whilst developing his own inimitable style of prose, he was attempting to incorporate literary techniques into journalism… and by journalism, he often meant rambling accounts of his own adventures. It is highly likely that this is what initially drew him to On the Road, and what he borrowed from it for his own emergent style.

Back in New York in the late fifties, Thompson asked his friend, Gene McGarr, a fellow copyboy at Time magazine, “Do you remember Gregory Corso, the fucking guy who wrote ‘Boom’? Well, he’s reading tonight at the Living Theater. Let’s go.”13 The performers were Corso and Frank O’Hara, but Kerouac was sitting in the front row, and at the end of the night, he got up to read from Doctor Sax. The two men heckled Corso, whose reading disappointed them, and they kicked a beer can up and down the center aisle, trying to annoy him. It worked and he walked off, deeply insulted, shouting, “You’re all a bunch of baaaystuds!”

He then pointed at Thompson and said, “And you are a cweep!”14 They thought Kerouac’s reading was poor, too, but they respected him enough to stay quiet for

12 Fear and Loathing in America, n/a (Kindle) 13 Hunter, p.75 14 ibid

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the duration.15 When it was time for Thompson to leave New York City, he was inspired by On the Road to take a crosscountry road trip with Semonin. They drove all the way to Seattle, and from there Thompson hitchhiked alone to San Francisco. “This makes Kerouac look like a piker,”16 he boasted. Despite his apparent distaste for Corso’s poetry and the wider beatnik fad, Thompson headed straight for City Lights Bookstore, where he would hang out and listen to poetry.17 Years later, he told an interviewer, “Lawrence Ferlinghetti influenced me—both his wonderful poetry and the earnestness of his City Lights bookstore in North Beach.”18 From San Francisco, Thompson made his way south to Big Sur. Kerouac had stayed at Ferlinghetti’s cabin in Bixby Creek Canyon during August and September of 1960 but Thompson arrived a few months later, just missing him. Although he may have had Kerouac on his mind, he was primarily interested in two local authors – Dennis Murphy and Henry Miller (although Miller had departed in April and they never met, either). From Big Sur, Thompson occasionally ventured back into San Francisco to, according to one of his biographers, “drink wine with Richard Brautigan, Jack Thibeau, and Gary Snyder.”19 Thompson evidently stayed in touch with the latter two poets, interviewing them for an article on hippies in 1964.20

15 Fear and Loathing, p.43 16 Proud Highway, p.244 17 Fear and Loathing, p.57 18 Ancient Gonzo Wisdom, p.266 19 When the Going Gets Weird, p.136 20 The article is called “The ‘Hashbury’ is the Capital of the Hippies,” from The Great Shark Hunt.

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It may seem as though I have been pushing the Kerouac connection a little further than necessary until now. After all, Thompson disparaged the beatnik fad and wrote a very different sort of prose to Kerouac. He acknowledged Kerouac at times for his breakthroughs with On the Road, and occasionally seemed to admit to being part of the wider Beat movement, once or twice using “we” to talk about the beatnik hangerson in New York in the late fifties, but he often seemed keen to distance himself from Kerouac and the Beats.

In one interview, he reluctantly acknowledges this connection: Legere: Were you reading Kerouac?

HST: I was.

Legere: Were you into the Beat thing?

Ginsberg?

HST: Yes.21 Those short answers suggest an unwillingness to get into the topic any further than necessary. Indeed, by the mid-sixties, Kerouac had moved on from his interest in Kerouac: …in a symbolic way I expected Kerouac to turn up in Haight Ashbury for the cause. Ginsberg was there, so it was kind of natural to expect that Kerouac would show up too. But no. That’s when Kerouac went back to his mother and voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964. That’s when my break with him happened.22 21 Ancient Gonzo Wisdom, p.249 22 Kingdom of Fear, p.51

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Perhaps Thompson did move away from Kerouac’s influence in the mid-sixties, but it is likely that it had begun long before then. Even by the end of 1958, Thompson’s interest in Kerouac and Beat literature was waning. Although he had appeared enthralled early in the year, in November he wrote: I’ve read The Subterraneans: all of his crap for that matter. The man is an ass, a mystic boob with intellectual myopia. The Dharma thing was not quite as bad as The Subterraneans and they’re both withered appendages to On the Road – which isn’t even a novel in the first place.23 He goes on to suggest that Kerouac’s readers were “lemmings” and suggested that they should be killed for the betterment of his generation. In 1962, he wrote that, “I have tonight begun reading a stupid, shitty book by Kerouac called Big Sur…” and explained that he would like to open fire on a “herd of grazing beatniks.”24 Clearly, the honeymoon period was over.

While Kerouac turned away from the countercultural movement of the sixties, Thompson ventured further into it. Although neither particularly liked the hippies, Thompson certainly mingled with them, supporting their anti-War efforts, enjoying the acid culture and its associated musical movement, and befriending Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, whom Kerouac outright rejected. By the time Kerouac was washed up and drinking himself to death beside his mother, it was Thompson who was hanging out with and writing 23 Proud Highway, p.140 24 Proud Highway, p.387

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about Neal Cassady.

In one of his better articles of the mid-sixties, when he was finding his voice for the first time and beginning to be widely published outside of local sports news, Thompson wrote: Today's activist student or nonstudent talks about Kerouac as the hipsters of the '50s talked about Hemingway. He was a quitter, they say; he had good instincts and a good ear for the sadness of his time, but his talent soured instead of growing.25 Given Thompson’s habit for taking his own ideas and putting them into the mouths of his “sources,” it is quite possible that this was his view in 1965. However, it pleasing to note that by 1998, Thompson looked back fondly and even wrote a poem about Kerouac.

He said that Kerouac “remains one of my heroes,” and acknowledged that “he was a great influence on me […] Jack was an artist in every way.”26 In his final years, Thompson wrote a short column for ESPN, and in one of his articles he talked to Jim Irsay, who owns Kerouac’s On the Road scroll. Thompson proudly declared, “He was a football star, in his youth, just like me,”27 which grossly overstates Thompson’s athletic abilities but highlights how eager he was to be 25 The Great Shark Hunt, p.401 26 This is taken from an apparent home video of Thompson, uploaded to YouTube here: https://youtu. be/9Jl4J8vrt4Q 27 “Jack Kerouac and the Football Hall of Fame,” uploaded to ESPN’s Page 2 blog here: https://proxy.espn.com/espn/page2/ story?id=1209358

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seen as a peer. They had never met despite treading the same grounds, but it is not hard to see them as brothers in literature.

Thompson & Ginsberg: An Unlikely Alliance Although his interest in Kerouac waned, Thompson befriended another Beat writer in the sixties – Allen Ginsberg. There could hardly be a more unlikely pair, and yet they remained friends on and off for nearly four decades. Thompson had a tremendous respect for the poet, referring to him often as both a close friend and “one of my heroes.”28 Fittingly, Ginsberg and Thompson first met at the apartment of their mutual drug dealer. Thompson recalled: I met Allen in San Francisco when I went to see a marijuana dealer who sold by the lid. I remember it was ten dollars when I started going to that apartment and then it was up to fifteen. I ended up going there pretty often, and Ginsberg— this was in Haight Ashbury—was always there looking for weed too. I went over and introduced myself and we ended up talking a lot. I told him about the book I was writing and asked if he would help with it. He helped me with it for several months; that’s how he got to know the Hell’s Angels.29 28 Ancient Gonzo Wisdom, p.217 29 Ancient Gonzo Wisdom, p.361

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Indeed, the relationship between Thompson and Ginsberg is largely known due to his book on the Hell’s Angels (which includes Ginsberg’s poem on the biker gang) and the events that transpired. Thompson had been working on his book for some time and, when he met the author Ken Kesey, he agreed to introduce them. Kesey and the Angels got along well, and so Thompson then introduced them to Ginsberg. They all ended up at a huge party at Kesey’s house, with acid handed out and Bob Dylan songs playing from speakers in the trees. Neal Cassady was running around naked, while his ex-wife was having sex with dozens of bikers.30 Outside the compound, the police were arresting people indiscriminately when they tried to enter or leave. Ginsberg was appalled and insisted that they go and confront the cops.31 Thompson agreed, and 30 Thompson makes this claim in Hell’s Angels but Zane Kesey believes it was an ex-girlfriend rather than ex-wife. Kevin T. McEneaney erroneously claims, in Hunter S. Thompson: Fear, Loathing, and the Birth of Gonzo, that it was Carolyn Cassady, but Zane says: “Mountain Girl says this was Cassady’s girlfriend.

She was jealous that Ginsburg (sic) was there and was hooking up with Neal. Yes, this was revenge on Neal. She kept saying look, look what you make me do. Neal watched and started sucking a tailpipe of a motorcycle, saying do you want me to suck this?

Ask MG, ask the Pranksters…it was VERY voluntary!” This is online here: https://electrickoolaidblogtest.wordpress.com/2013/07/07/ hells-angels-merry-pranksters-party-at-ken-keseys-1965/ 31 As with almost any story about Hunter Thompson, this one changes a lot depending on the source. Sometimes he said they went to confront the cops; other times they just tried to leave. Occasionally, he claimed that they were arrested together and in a letter dated a few days after, he tells someone that he was cited for a cracked tail-light. In any case, they ended up speaking with a cop and Ginsberg “Om’d” through the whole experience. It left quite an impression on the journalist. Although Thompson never once mentioned his wife being in the car, she later claimed to be there and that they were going to pick up more drink. She recalls Ginsberg repeated “I’m a poet… I’m a poet…” which everyone thought was hysterical. Thompson

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the two of them drove out in Thompson’s car, with infant son in the back seat: Allen at the very sight of the cops went into his hum, his om, trying to hum them off. I was talking to them like a journalist would: “What’s going on here, Officer?”

Allen’s humming was supposed to be a Buddhist barrier against the bad vibes the cops were producing and he was doing it very loudly, refusing to speak to them, just “Om! Om! Om!” I had to explain to the cops who he was and why he was doing this. The cops looked into the backseat and said, “What is that back there? A child?” And I said, “Oh yeah, yeah. That’s my son.” With Allen still going, “Om,” we were let go. He was a reasonable cop, I guess, checking out a poet, a journalist, and a child. Never did figure Ginsberg out, though. It was like the humming of a bee. It was one of the weirdest scenes I’ve ever been through, but almost every scene with Allen was weird in some way or another.32 Thompson recounted this story in Hell’s Angels and elsewhere, once remarking: “Ginsberg was so enraged by the harassment that he might want to write an ode about it.”33 In fact, Ginsberg appears often in his never mentioned this and claimed Ginsberg’s only word was a repeated “Om.” 32 Ancient Gonzo Wisdom, p.264-5 33 Proud Highway, p.536

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writing. He is mentioned twice in Thompson’s most famous book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and also in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972.

These are just fleeting references, though, to the poet’s signature “Om” and famous lines of his poetry. He appears often in Thompson’s articles throughout the sixties, again just flash images that show Ginsberg’s role as a cultural touchstone more than they illuminate the relationship between the writers. In one of the author’s most important articles, “The Temptations of Jean-Claude Killy,” Thompson mentions a rumor that Ginsberg was going to sign up as a spokesman for General Motors. It is a textbook example of the sort of weird humor Thompson used throughout his writing.

He would insert these blatantly false statements into his work because, to him, they seemed ridiculous and impossible to believe, therefore hilarious. Yet, of course, a few decades later Ginsberg was advertising for GAP… A few weeks later, Thompson and Ginsberg met again to attempt to resolve a problem between the Hell’s Angels and the anti-war movement. The Angels planned to crash a peaceful process and so there was a gathering of minds to avert it. The leader of the biker gang, Sonny Barger, hosted Hunter Thompson, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and Ken Kesey and they all dropped acid, smoked pot, and listened to Bob Dylan records. Thompson quoted one of the Angels as saying, “That goddamned Ginsberg is gonna fuck us all up. For a guy that ain’t straight at all, he’s about the straightest son of a bitch I ever met.”34 Thompson was not entirely happy with Ginsberg’s 34 Hell’s Angels, p.246

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plan to bring peace: Allen is a good-hearted fucker, but here is Ginsberg setting up all these rendezvous with the Angels, and I was the organizer, the point man. For Allen it was a weird time, and people asked me to do all kinds of weird things. But Allen had a good time because Barger was in a good mood and he humoured Ginsberg with his ‘We’re all in this together.’ Barger never believed a fucking word! That is what I tried to tell Ginsberg. They are mean fuckers!35 In the seventies, Ginsberg visited Aspen but, according to people who were there, Thompson attempted to avoid him.36 It appears that Ginsberg had wanted to spend some time together and, for reasons that remain unclear, the Aspen native was eager to ditch his poet friend. In 1994, however, when Thompson was on a panel of a Beat Generation event in New York, he was keen to get back in touch with his old friend. Thompson claimed that Ginsberg had been avoiding him for several decades after getting embarrassingly drunk: “It’s a little-known fact […] that Ginsberg was a horrible drunkard,” he said. The pair managed to meet up and had dinner that night.37 In Better than Sex, Thompson’s dismal 1994 collection of political writing, the author briefly reflected upon a drunken evening with Ginsberg, during which Thompson jokingly confessed to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He claims that they 35 When the Going Gets Weird, p.160 36 Gonzo, p.116-7 37 Gonzo, p.316-7

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stayed up all night and “both slid into the abyss of whiskey madness and full-bore substance abuse,” and this appears to be a reference to their post-Beat Generation event dinner.38 When Ginsberg died in 1997, Thompson wrote a bizarre epitaph, which he gave to Johnny Depp to read at the memorial service. Written like a news report, the unconventional eulogy refers to Ginsberg as “a dangerous bull-fruit with the brain of an open sore and the conscience of a virus.”39 He goes on: He was a monster. He was crazy and queer and small. He was born wrong and he knew it. He was smart but utterly unemployable. The first time I met him in New York he told me that even people who loved him believed he should commit suicide because things would never get better for him. And his poetry professor at Columbia was advising him to get a pre-frontal lobotomy because his brain was getting in his way. “Don't worry,” I said, “so is mine. I'm getting the same advice. Maybe we should join forces. Hell, if we're this crazy and dangerous, I think we might have some fun . . .” I spoke to Allen two days before he died. He was gracious as ever. He said he'd welcome the Grim Reaper because he knew he could get into his pants.40

38 Better than Sex, p.4 39 Conversations with Hunter, p.157 40 ibid

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Coming from Hunter S. Thompson, these otherwise harsh words meant love and respect, particularly as they were tempered by a few very rare words of kindness: He could talk with the voice of an angel and dance in your eyes like a fawn. I knew him for thirty years and every time I saw him it was like hearing the music again.41 Those familiar with Thompson’s work know that such generous praise is extraordinarily rare. Even harsh words were used as a sort of bizarre kindness, but sentimental ones like this are few and far between in his writing, so it is evident just how fond he was of his Beat friend. It is also interesting to note the use of “utterly unemployable” in the first long quote. This was a phrase that Thompson applied to himself as a young man, particularly referring to his brief period of Beat infatuation.

The apparent friendship of Allen Ginsberg and Hunter S. Thompson seems entirely improbable. It was an odd relationship, and there is not much to indicate that they stayed in close contact throughout the years.

42 Although they were iconic figures of their era, the two men were completely different in character and literary style. Yet it is clear that Thompson respected Ginsberg, which is quite rare, given his attitude towards most of his fellow writers. Thompson could also be quite homophobic, too, which makes this all 41 ibid 42 They both attended the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, along with William Burroughs. You can read about this in Leon Horton’s essay.

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the more surprising. The fact that he often referred to Ginsberg as a friend and hero is high praise indeed.

Literary Outlaws: Thompson and Burroughs Although Thompson was somewhat influenced by Jack Kerouac’s writing, thought Neal Cassady was a pretty amazing character, and was friends with Allen Ginsberg over a period of several decades, it was perhaps William S. Burroughs that is the most obvious of the Beat-Gonzo links. Thompson didn’t talk about him much, but it’s not hard to see the influence of Naked Lunch on his own hilarious, violent, and grotesque writing, and whenever he did mention Burroughs, he spoke with admiration. In Kingdom of Fear, he wrote: William was the Man […] William didn’t fuck around. He was serious about everything. When the Deal went down William was There, with a gun. Whacko!

BOOM. Stand back. I am the Law. He was my hero a long time before I ever heard of him […] Yessir, that was my boy. Between Mitchum and Burroughs & Marlon Brando & James Dean & Jack Kerouac, I got myself a serious running start before I was 20 years old, and there was no turning back. Buy the ticket, take the ride.43

43 Kingdom of Fear, p.341; Thompson turned twenty in 1957,

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Elsewhere, he even compared himself to el hombre invisible: Obviously, my drug use is exaggerated or I would be long since dead. I’ve already outlived the most brutal abuser of our time—Neal Cassady. Me and William Burroughs are the only other ones left.

We’re the last unrepentant public dope fiends, and he’s seventy years old and claiming to be clean. But he hasn’t turned on drugs, like that lying, treacherous, sold-out punk Timothy Leary.44 As with Allen Ginsberg, there are a quite a few references to Burroughs throughout Thompson’s writing, but these show little more than an awareness of Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine. Still, it seems that Burroughs’ 1959 novel had quite an impact on Thompson. Having read it soon after it was published, Thompson began to incorporate Burroughs’ disturbing imagery and jump cuts into his own writing. In his book, Gonzo Republic, Neal Stephenson notes how Burroughs “had strikingly conflated politics, sex and drug addiction,” something that Thompson used to great effect a little over a decade later in his Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.45 He goes further, claiming that “Thompson’s Gonzo writing has much the same political impact as William S. Burroughs’s so it’s unlikely that these people were his heroes at that point.

He may well have read Burroughs before then but, given that he only got into Beat literature in 1958, that is somewhat unlikely.

44 Kingdom of Fear, p. 187; Thompson later reconciled with Leary and wrote a touching eulogy for him.

45 Gonzo Republic, n/a (Kindle)

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cut-ups.”46 Stephenson believes that Thompson’s violent prose, savagely taking apart political figures, mixed with bizarre, grotesque flights of fantasy, owes a debt of gratitude to Burroughs.47 Thompson’s work was filled with these weird tangents, which Stephenson rightly likens to Burroughs’ “routines.”

Thompson’s friend and neighbor, Jay Cowan, also believed that Burroughs also had a hand in shaping Thompson’s perverse prose. Regarding his short story, “Screwjack,” in which Thompson vividly describes having sex with a cat, Cowan says, “The influences for such a piece are many, ranging from the ever-pressing need to be original and build to his on-going fascination with the life and work of William S. Burroughs.”48 One hopes that he meant Burroughs’ bizarre fantasies rather than his real-life interest in cats.

In the 1990s, when William Burroughs was an old man living in Lawrence, Kansas, a phone call came in from Hunter Thompson, asking if he could visit. There are not many details available for this particular trip, but a long, rambling essay by Jim McCrary recounts the events in manic detail and, in 1997, after Burroughs’ death, Thompson wrote a very short account of his visit as a sort of obituary. Apparently, Thompson decided to drive from Colorado to Kansas because he had too many guns (and, obviously, drugs) to fly with.

He got blind drunk and nearly did not make it, but eventually reached Lawrence and visited Burroughs’ home. En route, Thompson was his usual self – angry, 46 ibid 47 Stephenson also claims that On the Road was a “template” for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which is a harder idea to accept.

48 Hunter S. Thompson, p.37

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wild, obnoxious, difficult. However, when he got to Burroughs’ house, “something amazing happened,” McCrary wrote.

Dr. Thompson switched gears. The minute he walked into the house his demeanor, his energy, his self became as quiet and attentive as a student before the master.49 They chatted amiably and Burroughs retired for an early bed – something the nocturnal Thompson would never do. The next day, they met at Burroughs’ house again for a spot of shooting. Thompson had brought a gift – a .454 Casull Magnum, “the most powerful handgun in the world,” according to Thompson.50 After someone went out to buy the right kind of bullets (which Thompson had forgotten or lost), they took turns firing the beastly weapon. Burroughs loved it, even though it kicked back enough to make him bleed. McCrary reckons that the recoil sent him five feet back and Thompson reckons it lifted him several inches off the ground, but they both acknowledged that he was a great shot with it.

McCrary is unsure of whether or not Burroughs and Thompson met anywhere else, but it seems highly unlikely. It appears that the meeting in Lawrence was their first, and although McCrary cannot remember the year it occurred, it was in the mid-90s, meaning that Burroughs died not too long after that. In September, 1997, Thompson wrote “The Shootist: A Short Tale of 49 “When Hunter S Thompson visited William S Burroughs” uploaded here: http://www.williamsburroughs.org/features/ category/kansas 50 Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone, p.550

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Extreme Precision and No Fear,” a sort of obituary for Burroughs that echoed the one he’d written for Ginsberg a few months earlier. Just as he had mixed dark humor with a rare warmth for Ginsberg, so he did for Burroughs, twice joking about the death of Joan Vollmer: “William had a fine taste for handguns, and later in life he became very good with them,” he quipped.51 It finishes: William was a Shootist. He shot like he wrote—with extreme precision and no fear. He would have fired an M-60 from the hip that day if I’d brought one with me. He would shoot anything, and he feared nothing.52 Several years later, he wrote in his ESPN blog that Burroughs was his friend and that they had “swapped gruesome tales over whiskey,” no doubt referring to that Lawrence visit.53 It is fitting that they shared those gruesome tales as it was probably Burroughs’ disturbing and hilarious anecdotes that amused and inspired Thompson. There can be little doubt of the respect Thompson had for Burroughs, and this should be no great surprise to the legions of fans who admire both of these great twentieth century authors.

Hunter S. Thompson was not a part of the Beat Generation and it is not particularly useful to apply the word “Beat” to his writing, even if one takes a liberal 51 ibid 52 Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone, p.551 53 “XFL, RIP” on ESPN’s Page 2 blog, uploaded here: https:// proxy.espn.com/espn/page2/story?id=1996511

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view of the meaning of the word. Yet it is possible to view Thompson as a descendent of the Beats, a beneficiary of their literary breakthroughs and their fight against censorship. As we have seen, Thompson took Kerouac’s idea of “personal journalism” and made it his own by fusing it with the shock humor and conflation of politics and sex as advanced by William S. Burroughs in Naked Lunch, among other works. From the Beats, Thompson learned that one can break the rules, push the boundaries, and write for a subsection of the population that is receptive to ground-breaking, controversial literature whose surface may at times appear adolescent, yet hides a subtext of social critique and literary allusion.

Indeed, as we have seen, Thompson held all three of these Beat giants in high regard. He may have said a few derogatory things about Kerouac as a hot-headed young man, but he acknowledged a major debt to him. Later in life, it seems, Thompson was willing to admit that all of these writers had done something for him. They were all, at one point or another, mentioned as his heroes and he clearly wished to be viewed as their peer.

As such, although we can still say for sure that Thompson was not a Beat, he was certainly post-Beat in the sense that he inherited much from them and did, in at least a few instances, socialize with them.

It is, then, very understandable why so many people find themselves huge fans of both Gonzo and Beat literature and eager to seek connections. They are there, but you have to search hard to find them.

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Works Cited Carroll, E. Jean, Hunter: The Strange and Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson (Dutton: New York, 1993) Cowan, Jay, Hunter S. Thompson: An Insider’s View of Deranged, Depraved, Drugged Out Brilliance (The Lyon’s Press: Connecticut, 2009) McKeen, William, Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson (W.W. Norton: New York, 2008) Perry, Paul, Fear and Loathing: The Strange and Terrible Saga of Hunter S. Thompson (Plexus: London, 2009) Stephenson, William, Gonzo Republic: Hunter S. Thompson's America (Continuum Books: New York, 2012) Thompson, Anita (ed), Ancient Gonzo Wisdom: Interviews with Hunter S. Thompson (Da Capo Press: Boston, 2009) Thompson, Hunter S., Better than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie (Ballantine: New York, 1995) - - - - - - - Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist (Bloomsbury: New York, 2014) - - - - - - - Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (Ballantine: New York, 1996) - - - - - - - Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child In the Final Days of the American Century (Simon & Schuster: New York, 2003) - - - - - - - The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (Simon & Schuster: New York, 2003)

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- - - - - - - The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman (Ballantine: New York, 1998) Torrey, Beef and Smithson (eds), Keven, Conversations with Hunter S. Thompson (The University Press of Mississippi: 2008) Watkins, DJ, Freak Power: Hunter S. Thompson's Campaign for Sheriff (Meat Possum Press: Aspen, 2015) Wenner, Jann S. (ed), Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (Simon & Schuster: New York, 2011) Wenner, Jann and Seymour (eds), Corey, Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson (Little, Brown & Co.: New York, 2007) Whitmer, Peter O., When the Going Gets Weird: The Twister Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson (Hyperion: New York, 1993)

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“Pregnancy always makes me want to fuck more.”

Sexual and Maternal Desire

Entanglements in Diane di Prima.

by Ambar Geerts Zapién

Perhaps because maternity is attached to domesticity, which appears hopelessly bourgeois, cultural studies do not usually take the politics of motherhood and family seriously. Accordingly, to talk about Diane di Prima in the frame of her maternal desire may seem at first sentimental for, in the context of bohemia, countercultural poetry, and peyote trips, what could be more uncool than motherhood? Seeing her as a mother or as desiring to be a mother may appear to undermine her radicalness, as readers generally seem to go for the detached, cool Beat chick portrayed in her Memoirs of a Beatnik. Yet if we go back to the last pages of the book, we might remember it closes with the beginning of a new life: hers and her baby-to-be, turning the traditional trope of eroticism and death upside down. After pages and pages of orgies, sodomy, rape, and incest, the uneasiness caused by this conventionally “square” decision

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reveals the distance we have created, as allegedly modern and secular Western societies, between sex and conception, in parallel with the distance between sexual and maternal desire.

Of course, the idea is not new: whether in the field of procreation or sexuality, the control over female bodies is a pillar of patriarchy. For decades, feminist authors have claimed that maternity, as practiced in our patriarchal system, is a point of contention on which hugely important political battles are waged for the maintenance or deflection of the status quo. Accordingly, this appropriation mirrors and goes hand-in-hand with the appropriation of female sexual desire, or rather with its colonization by masculine sexual and/or religious prerogatives.

There is, not surprisingly, a general belief —and maybe a coercive self-fulfilling prophecy— that the voluntarily self-sacrificing and masochistic demands of maternity cancel sensuality and aggressiveness in women. Apparently, pregnant women and mothers have crossed the invisible but real barrier of sexiness and acquire some kind of sacred halo that channels a strong and pervasive social taboo. The MILF-paradigm is further proof of this, for it posits that sexually attractive mothers are some kind of transgressive exception.

In the history of literary countercultures, Diane di Prima has often been portrayed as exceptional, albeit for reasons other than her sex-appeal. Although I eschew the idea because it makes other women less worthy and kind of includes her in Ginsberg’s infamous “boy gang,” her biography certainly makes the distinction tempting. One of the difficulties I found while working on her poetry and biography is to avoid

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the anecdotic trap, trying to shift the scope from her nonetheless significant break with and reversal of traditional feminine stereotypes towards the work itself and its powerful visionary quality. By this I mean also going beyond the now established knowledge that, yes, Beat women have been undervalued, understudied, underrated. What follows? Di Prima herself does not seem to bother, which does not mean it does not concern her. What we do have is a huge amount of material, which makes its urgent to read, think, and write about her as about other great women.

However, going back to the anecdotic issue, the deep entanglement of Beat life with Beat texts makes the “purity” posited by looking at her writing as selfcontained not only impossible but a bit strained. So I do not claim to avoid it altogether, even supposing such thing would be theoretically possible (it has been attempted and the results are by no means the most fascinating endeavor in the history of literary criticism), but I believe it is important to look beyond the mere refusal of the Beat chick stereotype into the poems, into the realm of her visionary, mystical imagination.

This essay briefly introduces Diane di Prima’s very subjective, enlightening articulation of embodied sexual and maternal desire. When I read di Prima’s erotic memoirs and her autobiography, I sense not only that her worldview admits the possibility of pleasure being a reliable guide, of desire being able to teach us something about higher human experience; more significantly, the preservation of her subjectivity does not imply, as often happens in the masculine universe, and more often than not in

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the world of the Beat poets, a negation of her interest in maternity. On the contrary, the maternal is part of her quest, and one of her paths to access other, more complex knowledge. What I find compelling in this stance is that it calls for the rescue of both sexual and maternal desire and for the resistance to its caricaturization as false sentimental conscience or as basically an essential part of female nature.

On another level, the question is historically interesting, as di Prima came to age in the era of sexual liberation and the commercialization of the pill.

To say that she is not an advocate of contraceptive methods and institution-orchestrated parental planning is hardly an overstatement: “…when you want to fuck, you just fuck. Nothing gooey, nothing tensionmaking. If you get knocked up, the discomfort of early pregnancy tends to last only two or three months— whereas with the pill it lasts forever. Pregnancy always makes me want to fuck more, too, and I enjoy it more…As for childbirth, having a baby is a matter of lying down and having it.”1 Even if this reads a bit like a caricature, it is significant that five children later, in the 1988 edition of her erotic memoir (first published in 1969), she does not retract from her pro-maternalism.

She does, however, add a note concerning safe sex in the age of the global HIV epidemic: “Flirting with pregnancy is one thing: having a kid can be a great celebration of life; flirting with AIDS is something else: is simply courting a quick and ugly death”. For the young di Prima, at a time when no one had yet heard about HIV, the practice of attempting to limit the risk involved in sexual encounters is counterproductive to 1

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Diane di Prima, Memoirs of a Beatnik, p.76.

the sexual contract and damaging to the erotic bond developed between two parties. The concept of “risk” expressed as constitutive to the erotic experience is very important, and would no doubt have had Bataille’s approval, as we will see in a moment.

Discussing the relationship between the maternal and the erotic, Julia Kristeva beautifully and brilliantly defines the maternal as characteristically erotic. She speaks of “reliance” in the sense of its Latin and Old French etymology, meaning “to link” or “unite,” when she talks of “maternal reliance” within a “heretics of reliance.” Kristeva posits maternal eroticism as a specific economy of drives that makes these problematic and available, “and places them together in the service of the living as an ‘open structure,’ related [reliée] to others and to the environment.”2 I find thinking of the maternal as erotic particularly evocative in the sense that it supposes a permeable way of being and inhabiting one’s body, in which the senses do not cut off maternal feeling from sensitive and bodily pleasure. “Always inside and outside, self and other, neither self nor other, an intervening space, maternal eroticism separates and rejoins [relie]: hiatus and junction.”3 What does this mean in a societal context where common sense opposes maternal desire, designating desire as being about sex, and maternity as being about anything but sex?4 What does this signify in a context where societies tend to reduce the complexity of sexuality and desire to two polarized forces, one situating eroticism as 2 3 4 p.668

Julia Kristeva, “Reliance, or Maternal Eroticism”, p. 71 Ibid., p.76 Daphne de Marneffe, “The Problem of Maternal Desire”,

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a dangerous, subversive, potentially disruptive and antisocial drive, and another, which defines eroticism as benign, vital, and liberating?5 With Kristeva and others, I contend that there is a symbiotic relationship to be found between sexual and maternal desires. At its most obvious, both are centered in and spring from the body, as the body is central to desire and to the transformation required in its birth and consumption. More deeply located is the sense that the overwhelming changes brought about by gestation and maternity, and even before that, by the desire to be a mother, are imprints in the very core of our sensuality, fluctuations that touch the most sensitive strings of our erotic capacity.

Di Prima, beside embracing and exploring the deep and articulate connection between sex and fertility, believes in an embodied female essential role. This is clearly expressed in her description of her body and her will as two ultimately reliable entities: “The first four or five years on my own I never used birth control. I felt I could ‘feel’ it if I was going to become pregnant. And that I could will the child away if I had to, any child.” It is the kind of superpower all fertile women would have dreamed of. Giving birth however, like death, implies real danger, experiences of the flesh: It was a tricky edge, because at the same time I felt that when I went to bed with anyone it should be someone whose child I wouldn’t mind bearing. And in my world, where doctors, together with 5

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Joel Gwynne, Erotic Memoirs and Postfeminism, p.2.

cops and psychiatrists, were people you almost never called on, bearing a child, I was acutely aware, might mean losing my life.6 This resonates with the entanglements of sexual and maternal desire, and additionally implies the towering, powerful presence of death in liminal experiences. The presence of these three cornerstones represents a triad of fundamental turning points in the life of a woman. Sarah LaChance Adams deplores Bataille’s failure to account for female experience: “Pregnancy, childbirth and mothering are, in truth, the most dynamically erotic experiences of which a human being is capable.” Indeed, although the French intellectual brilliantly described how the erotic remains entangled with the experience of death, creating a cyclical movement with the different thresholds of human experience, he totally dismissed the experience of childbirth. Yet, as brightly articulated

by LaChance: What experience could more closely embody the idea of “assenting to life up to the point of death”? In lending her body to give life, the pregnant woman risks various possible deaths: death of the maiden identity, abortion, miscarriage, the life threatening illnesses of pregnancy, the very real risk of death in childbirth, the temptation of filicide, and bringing another into existence who 6 p.153.

Diane di Prima, Recollections of My Life as a Woman,

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will inevitably die.7 Note how di Prima states her total acknowledgment of this: “So every chance sexual encounter was weighed: was it worth, ultimately, dying for, if it came to that? And the answer was usually yes. Partly because my Will—and my close connection to my body—its reproductive part at any rate—loaded the dice in my favor.”8 She keeps repeating the words “feel” and “will” as verbs that are entangled, logical consequences of each other, giving “will” at least three meanings. There is, first of all, a corporeal, almost biological will. Similarly, her desire and her will are one and the same, be it for sex or for having or not having a baby, in another meaning of “will”: “to will the child away.” Thirdly, there is the Will with a capital letter, the reliable guide of destiny as it were.

In her experience, the distance between desire, sex, and procreation is practically non-existent, resulting in a fluid, natural, essential contiguity.

On the other hand, her dismissal of biological or affective paternity is overly ambiguous, since in any case she admits she would have to “accept” the product of a pregnancy and thereby the link that would unite this baby with its genitor: “someone whose child I wouldn’t mind bearing.” Interestingly, when she says paternity, she also implies institutions, expressing a similar resistance to those powerful and dangerous males, agents of a lethal system. “It was not that I held my life so cheap, but held experience, the savoring of life so dear.” Her marginality is clearly 7 Sarah LaChance Adams, “Erotic Intersubjectivity. Sex, Death and Maternity in Bataille” pp. 91-101.

8 Diane di Prima, ibid. p. 154.

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stated as voluntary, sublimated into a desire for experience. She hereby establishes a relationship between sex and death as a catalyzer of desire: “Experience itself was good, the ultimate good.” This blend of sexuality, desire, and her own very close relationship with her body is reiterated in numerous passages and poems. “I get my period, September 1964” claims her disappointment and frustration for not having conceived: How can I forgive you this blood?

Which was not to flow again, but to cling joyously to my womb To grow, and become a son?

When I turn to you in the night, you sigh and turn over When I turn to you in the afternoon, on our bed, when you lie reading, you put me off, saying only It is hot, you are tired.

You picket, you talk of violence, you draw blood But only from me, unseeded & hungry blood which meant to be something else9 The poem deplores a disturbed order, the interruption of her maternal and sexual desires. In Body/Politics, Mary Jacobus describes this disordering figure: “the gap between feminine desire and 9

Diane di Prima, Selected Poems, p.136

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conception, and between conception and maternal desire…disorders our sense of a unified, coherent subject; it confronts us instead with the irreducibility of a body that is only metonymically linked to desire”.10 This is exactly what di Prima expresses here: what should have become but did not because there was no seed, no sex, no mutual erotic and procreative desire. The blood remained “hungry” and flowed out of her body, in a discontinuity or interruption of the essential corporal functions. “Dim Mama” exposes a similar frustration, this time related to abortion: to oppose one’s will to the will of the cosmos

and call it a gamble a touch of hauteur in this. blue denim bedspreads

bloody from abortion. to at last be broken come up against it at last: to do what will not work in living like in poems

my hair is loose my body wont go on much longer the arc it spans

the lights on this bridge and not the satisfaction of saying

I did it for love11

10 Mary Jacobus, Body/Politics. Immaculate Conceptions and Feminine Desire, p.11 11 Diane di Prima, Selected Poems, p.65.

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This poem is moving in its depiction of sorrow and fracture, acknowledging the consequences of failing to follow the poet’s subjective authenticity.

The depth of this sadness might allow us to infer a confessional gesture here. Again, she uses “will” with different connotations: the will of the cosmos/one’s will, this time in opposition. Although one could see the “will of the cosmos” as poetic proof of her playing the essentializing game, her de-patriarchization of maternity gives the lie to this. In this sense, her queer desire to be a mother focuses on finding a donator, displaying a matricentric counter-narrative: Not that I for one minute thought of including a man in my life, in my home.

That was out of the question. I had seen enough in Brooklyn in my growing years to rule out the possibility of living with a man. Someone probably stupider than oneself who wanted control. Who thought he knew how things should be done, how money should be spent, even worse, how children should be raised. As far as I could see, all they were was trouble.12 Thus, her sexual desire comes intrinsic with maternal desire, establishing the goal and culminating with conception. Meanwhile, she sets out to find someone who can fertilize her, eschewing the ideal of the couple, the home, the traditional nuclear family (remember this was 1957!): 12 p.157.

Diane di Prima, Recollections of My Life as a Woman,

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There was no way around it. From the morning I woke with the desire for a baby, till the point when I knew for certain I wanted no more children, I was at the mercy of this thing. This way of seeing.

I was no longer simply with a man for himself, but for what kind of children he might make. And whether he’d leave me alone to raise them as I wished…It was only when I was past the need for having more children and therefore free of this “fishing for genes”, that I found my own choices and wishes were very different…

In the interim I’d learned something of how to love. And I’d left my Cool behind me along the way.13 Her fertile years are impregnated, so to speak, with her intent on having children, but with a maternalism that is by no means familialism, she reverses and reappropriates in her own terms the most traditional of all feminine roles. Additionally, her mordant declarations clearly show she has no qualms about infantilizing men. Her logical underwriting the relative uselessness of the masculine beyond fertilization expresses the location of her desire in her body and its processes, in which men are seen as merely instrumental. Of course, there’s always the question as to what extent the author actually practices the condescendence, the security, and the assertiveness declared in such passages. As Joel Gwynne asks when discussing “post-feminist” erotic memoirs: 13

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Ibid., p.161.

“Are the politics of the bedroom as egalitarian as their…sensibilities seem to imply?” Actually, di Prima gingerly followed her desire for experience, and in more or less difficult material circumstances brought five children to this world.

I want to conclude this brief reflection with one last important aspect of di Prima’s complex essentialization and self-representation, located in her negotiation of maternity and coolness. It is no secret that the Beats considered the literary production of the men far superior to that of the women. In fact, the most celebrated and discussed texts, both in academia and mainstream criticism invariably remain “Howl” and On the Road. It has been commented elsewhere that feminine representations in both texts, but more specifically in Kerouac’s, are far from flattering. In fact, less famous texts by male Beats are equally riddled with stereotyped and/or negative representations of women. If we inquire a little further into this, we find, related to this unashamed misogyny, a clear strand of anti-maternalism, which partly stems from the existentialist aspects of the Beat ethos.14 Di Prima, however, at least during the first two decades of her poetic career, flaunts the inherent uncoolness of maternity, and, as Mary Paniccia Carden pointed out, “she portraits motherhood, like poetry, as a product of her truth to herself,” and even manages “to make 14 Significantly this only applies to potential spouses and partners. In the case of Kerouac, for instance, the poet seems to have a particular loyalty towards his mother, which is apparently not extendible to his partners, the mother of his daughter, or his daughter herself, for that matter. For further analysis on antimaternalism in bohemia, academia, and counterculture, see the very interesting book by Susan Fraiman, Cool Men and the Second Sex.

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motherhood countercultural.�15 This capacity to reopen the flowing dynamics between existential aspects that have been severed, distanced, and divorced from each other is what makes di Prima’s reappropriation of motherhood and sexual desire so significant: it derides the lost human capacity to provide authentic outlets for visionary callings and self-transcending modes of experiencing the liminal states of the body and the mind.

15 43-56

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Mary Paniccia Carden, Women Writers of the Beat Era, pp.

Works cited de Marneffe, Daphne. “The Problem of Maternal Desire,” in Andrea O’Reilly, Maternal Theory, Demeter Press, 2007, pp. 668-682. di Prima, Diane. Pieces of a Song. City Lights, 1990.

—- Recollections of My Life as a Woman. The New York Years, Viking, 2001.

—- Memoirs of a Beatnik. Olympia, 1969. Last Gasp, 1988.

Fraiman, Susan. Cool Men and the Second Sex, Columbia UP, 2003.

Gwynne, Joel. Erotic Memoirs and Postfeminism. The Politics of Pleasure, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Jacobus, Mary “In Parenthesis: Immaculate Conception and Feminine Desire” in Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller and Sally Shuttleworth, (eds.) Body/Politics.

Women and the Discourses of Science, Routledge, 1990, pp.11-28.

Kristeva, Julia. “Reliance, or Maternal Eroticism”. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, vol. 62, no.

1, February 2014, pp. 69-86.

LaChance Adams, Sarah. “Erotic Intersubjectivity: Sex, Death, and Maternity in Bataille”, in Jonna Bornemark and Nicholas Smith (eds.), Phenomenology of Pregnancy, Södertörn University, 2016. pp. 91-102.

Paniccia Carden, Mary. Women Writers of the Beat Era. Autobiography and Intertextuality. U of Virginia P, 2018.

Young, Iris Marion. “Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation” in Throwing like a Girl and other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory, Indiana UP, 1990, pp. 160-176.

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Would Trump’s Wall Perform

Magic Tricks?

by Eliot Katz Trump says a wall of concrete or steel slats has to be built along the U.S.-Mexico border for national security,

so I am wondering what magic tricks it would perform: Could the wall tell that I have picked a jack of clubs out of my deck of blue-striped playing cards?

Would the wall rain newborn rabbits down from a hat on its highest point?

Could the wall read Trump’s sociopathic mind and

stop his pathological lying?

Would the wall prevent Zeta Reticulis from piloting

flying saucers across national boundaries?

If the wall could really protect our security, would

it draw down CO2 and methane to reverse

climate change?

Will it find thousands of lost children kidnapped by

Homeland Security from Central American parents?

Could it do something to make Trump’s skin look

more human?

Would it safely melt the world’s nuclear missiles

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and power plants and drink up radioactive

plutonium shakes?

Could it ferment tofu into tempeh? Find missing

prophetic notebooks of William Blake?

Would concrete or steel slats improve global free-

speech protection?

Could a wall provide medical treatments for sick kids

whose parents cannot afford a doctor?

Will it stop another meteor from destroying Earth’s

large-sized life again?

Can it bring back even one recently extinct species?

Could it prevent the monthly flooding and power

outages in my home town of Hoboken?

Would it create a new Israeli/Palestinian peace plan

without having to wait for Jared Kushner to

finish his schooling?

Could the wall compete against the best magicians

on America’s Got Talent?

Will it prevent the healthiest apple polyphenol dust

from leaving our country?

Can it send more young progressives like Alexandria

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Ocasio-Cortez into Congress?

Could it fix the broken zipper on my winter jacket?

Filter out the lead in too many U.S. water

supplies? Find a cure for chronic Lyme disease?

Would the wall offer a good resting pillow for the

necks of zebras?

Could it patch potholes? Stabilize bridges? Fix

electric grids? Prevent ransom computer

viruses from spreading across the web?

Would the wall prevent Trump from ripping up any

more peace treaties?

Okay, I just picked a new card. Wall, can you tell me

what it is?

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Trump Releases a Paper with

His Ukrainian Crimes

by Eliot Katz Thinking he would be exonerating himself, Trump

released a summary of a phone conversation he called “perfect” with the

Ukrainian president in which Trump illegally requests foreign help to dig

up dirt on the son of one of his potential 2020 electoral opponents.

The summary is classic mob boss-speak: we’ve been good to your people and now I am

asking you a favor if you want more help—find me dirt on Bidens!

Even if you have to make it up!

Is Trump losing his nerve or his mind?

Does he always resort to mob-speak in a panic, finding himself losing badly in the polls? A panic

noticed so clearly

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by key aides that his extortion conversation was

quickly locked up in a top-secret server in a buried concrete vault.

Having committed a large wrestling ring’s worth of constitutional and

human rights crimes, does Trump harbor an unconscious desire to get

impeached and convicted— able to rationalize a return to his lazier landlord

overseer life? And why the hell is New York’s former mayor, Giuliani, undertaking

Ukraine shakedowns for Trump? What old secret NYC campaign favors

does the mayor owe?

Days later, Trump demands the right to meet his

accuser despite whistleblower protection laws, and promises Big

Consequences!--as well the crazier threat of an actual civil war. It is he who released the evidence-filled phone call summary to the press!

Look in the mirror, Mr. President! Your accuser is there, staring into a

pair of sociopathic eyes.

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The Encounter Robinsonian

Weldon Kees and Denise Levertov

April–October 1955

by James Reidel

Biographers commit all kinds of sins. I remember reading Janet Malcolm’s book about Sylvia Plath and being struck by Malcolm’s assertion that biography was a transgressive art. The biographer enters the inner sanctum of the subject and feels a little like a thief as he or she gathers the interviews, the correspondence, the facts and the rumors and attempts to write a book from which the biographer establishes a reputation and, in some cases, monetizes the life and work of the subject and profits in the real sense of the word.

Like a thief, too, or a cat burglar, the biographer must be selective in the “valuables” taken from, say, a white-gloved special collection like the Howard Gotlieb at Boston University, whose founder suspected researchers of being just as transgressive as rare book and manuscript librarians can be in their peculiar way.

I remember Franz Wright asking me about whether he should sell his papers to the Gotlieb or the special collection of the University of Texas–Austin. I found

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working with the latter more pleasant and efficient when it came to handling its treasures. (The Gotlieb Room requires white cotton gloves and a pencil stub to take notes. No copies are permitted since the bright of light a copy machine will fade ink and photographs.)

There is, too, another kind of sin that goes—I cannot resist—hand in glove with transgression: the sin of omission. That is, what to leave in the biography and what to leave out. For the hagiographer, certain intimate details about the “saint” must be elided or given lip service. For the author of the exposé, the good qualities must not outweigh the bad. The sins of omission take many other forms and they are not really that sinful per se. Some biographers must work under a deadline and do not have the luxury of time to “turn over every stone.” Some biographers must simply cut all the details, the lengthy block quotes, the many “wonderful” photographs, the “what ifs” (those haunting speculations that are de rigueur for the biographies of suicides and young genius), and the like for the publisher’s economies of scale (where other sins of omission occur and where the limited space here must, well, omit). Then, lastly, there are those omissions that occur because the biographer could not find them in time. He or she just couldn’t make the connection. This is simply the sin of the biographer’s own omission, of writing so after the fact, of having been omitted by being born too late and the like.

If you open to the index of Vanished Act: The Life and Work of Weldon Kees (2003), you will find no mention of the poet Denise Levertov. The faintest of dots between the two existed in her preface to a collection of her early poems published in 1980, the year I began to work on Kees. Back then, before

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there were search engines, you did your foot- and spadework in libraries, in people’s homes, in the changed and sometimes empty places where Kees had been. In his case, his papers and possessions had been scattered all over the country. Some of this had to do with his friend Michael Grieg, who appropriated Kees’s personal library, manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, films, and many of his paintings and collages. He began to sell off Kees’s legacy within weeks of it falling into his possession and against the wishes of Kees’s aged father. The sales were initially piecemeal and began in earnest with the deaths of Kees’s parents in 1964. Undoubtedly, this resulted in a diaspora of Keesiana scattered in library special collections, stored off-site in some vast labyrinth (see Rincon Annex below) of stacks with timers on the light switches. (To know where to look requires the proverbial lightbulb in one’s head to stay lit.) Some of this Keesiana ended up in private collections, where the typescript of a poem, for example, becomes the useful and moral equivalent of a Kees rooky card.

Such penetralia can remain blind spots for decades.

(And there is always the danger of it being put out on the curb.)

Grieg is the source of the Kees-in-Mexico story.

But if he had no qualms about selling Kees’s stuff, that in itself suggests that he knew Kees was dead, that his being alive somewhere was purely speculation, a legend of convenience. I had to work around this more troubling line of conjecture—yet another kind of omission—to gain access to what is left of the “Grieg lot,” as I called it, after his death. But there are other reasons for why Kees can never be a cold case. Every now and then, I get a request for my help or there

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is some new flourish of curiosity or interest in Kees in me and others. It has become a habit for me, the way some people text, to conduct casual-to-robust searches for manuscripts and letters related to Kees, perhaps even to Grieg’s money trail. A growing list of keywords to triangulate with “Weldon Kees” often turns up what I missed, what I have to pause over now, what makes me feel regret, helpless, even a little sick that a lost fact (even if just a factoid), a missing person, or incident is not in Vanished Act. The saddest omission thus far is the poet Denise Levertov’s and her personable but impersonal encounter with Kees in the conception of her first American book, Here and Now. Usually, it takes a third dot to connect two in biographical research. The third dot for Kees and Levertov was Kenneth Rexroth, an estimable third dot for his vast contacts in the poetry world for much of the twentieth century. He had been corresponding with Levertov—it is almost a love story—since 1946.

Rexroth had known Kees personally since 1939 and visited Kees when he lived in Brooklyn Heights. At that time, Rexroth was well into his correspondence with Levertov in England and Paris. But it was not until April 1955 that Kees became aware of Levertov’s poetry and her new American voice, from her mentorship with William Carlos Williams and the Black Mountain poets, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley—through Rexroth.

Kees listened to a taped reading by Levertov aired on Rexroth’s book review program on San Francisco’s KPFA-FM. Kees was particularly interested in such performances—he had once had his own poetry hour on KPFA—and had taken advantage of affordable and portable reel-to-reel tape recorders. He also

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understood their limitations and despite the poor quality of the recording Levertov had made, Kees apparently hung on every word. He asked Rexroth for Levertov’s address.

In April 1955, Weldon Kees was a man with many “irons in the fire.” He had been busy for months with his Poets Follies, a kind of literary vaudeville and burlesque show that relied not only on the talents of Bay Area poets, actors, musicians, and other artists and their friends, but a real striptease artist who recited Sara Teasdale rather than remove her clothes.

Kees, too, had been writing songs and collaborating with the torch singer Ketty Lester (she of the single “Love Letters”). Although Kees’s film company and school had failed to take off, he was still working on the footage he and the photographer William Heick had made of the Golden Gate Bridge, which they hoped to set to Kees reading Hart Crane’s poem “The Bridge.” Kees had also started writing a play for women—for the aspiring actresses he had met during Poets Follies—and renting out and remodeling an old building he hoped to transform into the “Showplace,” a permanent venue for the many talented people he had met in San Francisco since his arrival in 1950—and especially since his painful divorce from his wife Ann in 1954.

Kees’s many ventures filled a vacuum. For the most part, he had set aside his own poetry following the publication of what would be his last book, Poems 1947–1954. Adrian Wilson had designed and printed the sumptuous letterpress volume. For Kees, however, the early manuscript of the book had been rejected by trade publishers and, despite the fine party his friends had given him, Poems 1947–1955 amounted

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to a consolation prize, evidence that tastes in poetry were changing—to either side of him. On the one hand, what poetry was published by Knopf and the like was academic and formal—and Kees had chosen to remain outside the fold (and safety net) of the emerging creative writing departments. To the other side, the younger side, tastes were changing and Kees found himself out of place among the younger poets who gathered at Rexroth’s house on Nob Hill, the poets who embraced the new improvisational jazz music that Kees had no ear for, and the freer free verse that became Beat poetry, Howl.

But Kees did have an ear for Denise Levertov— he heard himself in her work. He had learned from Rexroth that she had a manuscript of poems that represented her new style and her experience of having lived in New York City. This, too, Kees heard and it surely validated what he had been doing all along, even as he had not really written much poetry at all throughout the anno miserabilis of separation, divorce, living with friends, and a love affair in which there was no rebound. The new year, 1955, however, seemed to offer more possibilities in which he hoped to turn around his life. Kees had turned forty-one and still had his flexible day job as a filmmaker and photographer at Langley Porter Institute, a teaching hospital treating mentally disturbed and challenged patients. There were already many new ventures that raised his spirits and bridged the lows of his frequent depression—that is, when he was closest to the world and voice in his poetry. He had an ear, too, for a new possibility, a new venture, perhaps as the editor— or, at least, midwife—of an unknown poet, a young woman who lived on West 15th Street in Chelsea, a

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neighborhood he knew well—where readers of his poetry last “see” Kees’s liminal alter ego: Somewhere in Chelsea, early summer; And, walking in the twilight toward the docks, I thought I made out Robinson ahead of me. (“Relating to Robinson”) Not long after Kees had discussed Levertov with Rexroth, he dashed off a letter to her on his typewriter, on the stationery that Adrian Wilson had printed for him, the letterhead with a Rincon Annex post office box, which had become something like a permanent address given that Kees saw himself as likely on the move again: April 21st 1955 Dear Mrs Levertov, I wanted you to know how much I liked the poems of yours that you read on a tape that was broadcast over KPFA. The quality of the tape was fearful, but the poems deeply moving. I can’t really get at them very objectively, though: they brought back New York like a strong blast—and some of the ways I used to feel, sometimes even in the part of town where you now live.

Kenneth Rexroth gave me your address.

If there is anything I can do to get the manuscript of yours he told me about printed, I’d like to. At least I can try, if you’d like me to. I would like to have Adrian

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Wilson, who published my last book, read the poems. And I’d like to read them myself, very much.

Sincerely, Weldon Kees1 There is still no “set list” of the poems that Levertov read.2 The poems, however, produced a “strong blast” of nostalgia for her scenes of Hudson Street, her Chelsea neighborhood, what she called “an endless/ city of refuse.” In all likelihood, Kees had heard poems such as “An Innocent,” “15th Street,” “The Gypsy’s Window,” “The Flight,” “Something to Wear,” “Xmas Trees on the Bank’s Façade,” “Central Park, Winter, after Sunset,” “Poem from Manhattan,” and others that sounded familiar and in some verses like himself.

Perhaps, if she wrote him back, she might admit to having read his work, confirming some suspicion and feeding a little vanity on his part and this other kind of anxiety of influence. “Done forget the crablike/ hands, slithering/among the keys,” the lines that begin Levertov’s “The Hands,” surely had the sound and feel of a Kees poem. Levertov admits to being derivative, too, in her Rilkean poem, the most Keesian of them all, “People at Night.” Robinson—Kees’s New Yorker persona—whose urban alienation and selfestrangement—could have been the “brother” to this sisterly voice:

1 Weldon Kees to Denise Levertov, April 21, 1955. Denise Levertov papers (M0601), Stanford University. Libraries. Dept. of Special Collections and University Archives.

2 The tape recording is lost.

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A night that cuts between you and you and you and you and you and me : jostles us apart, a man elbowing through a crowd. We won’t look for each other, eitherwander off, each alone, not looking in the slow crowd. Among sideshows under movie signs, pictures made of a million lights, giants that move and again move again, above a cloud of thick smells, franks, roasted nutmeats— Or going up to some apartment, yours or yours, finding someone sitting in the dark: who is it really? So you switch the light on to see: you know the name but who is it?

But you won’t see. [. . .] (“People at Night”) Levertov could have asked the same questions after she picked up her mail a few days later and read Kees’s letter: Who is he really? I know the name but who is this? But Rexroth had already apprised her of Kees’s interest in her work and already knew how she might respond to his offer.

Married to the writer Mitchell Goodman, whose career took priority, and the mother of a six-year-old son, Levertov was still virtually unknown outside of a small but influential coterie, which included Rexroth,

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William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley. This she admitted as much to Kees in her letter of April 24. “Kenneth told me to expect a letter from you but I didn’t expect it to be quite such a nice one,” she began. “Most of the people who do like my poems are personal friends […] and it is a great & quite different satisfaction to know someone who is a stranger but liked them—one can be sure then it’s not just an access [i.e., outburst] of personal affection.”3 Levertov continued, almost thinking aloud to herself about her prior commitments—of not hurting Creeley’s feelings, for he had offered to publish her under his new Divers Press imprint—to ensure Kees that she was very agreeable to being published by Adrian Wilson.

The only snag was getting the manuscript typed. “I’m giving all the fair copies I have to Virginia Admiral to get them typed,” Levertov wrote, mentioning a name Kees certainly recognized as one of Hans Hofmann’s students and the ex-wife of the painter Robert De Niro—that is, the parents of the eleven-year-old who already showed a precocious interest in acting.

In closing, Levertov asked Kees if he knew Robert Duncan, a native Californian, who had returned to Berkeley and San Francisco in 1945 (not long after his love affair with Robert De Niro Sr., whose coming out ended the De Niro marriage) and a poet whose opinion of Kees and his offer she would have trusted.4 She was also fascinated by Kees’s return address. “I wondered what Rincon Annex cd. be, […] It sounded 3 Denise Levertov to Weldon Kees, April 24, 1955. Denise Levertov Papers (MSS070), Department of Special Collections, Washington University Libraries.

4 Duncan was living in Majorca during this time and although he was undoubtedly aware of Kees—both poets lived in Berkeley and shared Rexroth and others as a friend—they

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mysterious. I visualized the large building, the still larger one to which it was annexed, the grounds, shrubberies—but what on earth went on inside?”

Levertov ended with the hope that, “if nothing comes of the publishing idea,” she was nevertheless happy to know Kees had liked her poems. She admitted that she only had a dim recollection of “older poems” she had read in magazines and promised to buy a copy of his new book.

Levertov’s promise, however, would have been hard to keep for money was tight, so much so that she could not send her fair copies to Virginia Admiral because she still owed her five dollars and could not, in good conscience, ask her friend to type up to forty poems. She wrote Kees a short letter on May 14 about the delay in getting him a finished manuscript. She also sent three new poems and her assurance that she wanted to publish with Kees—whom she could only assume was editing the volume—and now had Creeley’s blessing as well.5 The next day she wrote Duncan and told him about how Kees had heard her tape and how her new-found connection might soon result in a book. “[A] beautiful book indeed,” returned Duncan from Banyalbufar, if it were printed by Adrian Wilson, whose work was considered exquisite and already collectible by bibliophiles. “Send me notice likely had little truck with each other. Kees tended to be wary of befriending other poets for two primary reasons, either he did not like their work or they were openly homosexual. Kees made few exceptions. In Vanished Act, however, I suggest that Kees could have been homo- or bisexual or repressed. His poem “Aspects of Robinson” has that one clue, of following Robinson toward the West Side piers, where gay men have long “cruised” for anonymous sex with strangers.

5 Denise Levertov to Weldon Kees, May 14, 1955. Denise Levertov Papers (MSS070), Department of Special Collections, Washington University Libraries.

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as soon as any decision is made and I will subscribe immediately.”

By the end of May, Levertov mailed her manuscript and waited for Kees’s quick reply. She had no idea that had had fully immersed himself in another project which consumed him both creatively, emotionally, and financially throughout May and the first week of June.

On the same day that Kees wrote Levertov his fan letter, April 21, he had informed a friend that he had long missed writing for the theatre. Not long afterward, he began writing The Waiting Room, an existentialist play in the style of Sartre and Beckett, with strong roles for three women. In Vanished Act there are newspaper photographs of Kees and his friends preparing the Showplace and seemingly rehearsing for an evening of four one-act plays titled 4 Times 1, including The Waiting Room, Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes, and The Gallant Cassian by Arthur Schnitzler and The Tenor by Frank Wedekind. Then, a few days before the opening, the San Francisco Fire Marshal ordered the Showplace closed due to code violations. “The fire department’s final dicta involved sheetrocking The Showplace practically down to the faucets in the lavatory,” Kees wrote one of his actors in early June, “the towel, clutched compulsively for so long has now been thrown in.” It may have been just as well. As one of his leads wrote, the “rehearsals were undisciplined, chaotic”—and she felt uncomfortable but nobody “picked up on the deep despair that was driving” Kees at this time.

At the same time—and like an echo of the actresses in Kees’s play, waiting out their lives and frustrations with men in a bus station—Denise Levertov was still waiting for Kees to acknowledge receipt of

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her manuscript. She had no idea if he had read her poems yet and certainly no idea of a string of defeats that Kees endured over the next four weeks. He had certainly been attracted to one of the actresses in The Waiting Room, Nina Boas. In the spring of 1955, however, Kees had started dating Virginia Patterson, a clinical psychologist ten years his junior. It was a workplace romance at Langley Porter Institute, located on the campus of the University of California– San Francisco in Parnassus Heights, which had to be a rather bittersweet irony for Kees, a poet who had not been given his due and had now undertaken to help another poet reach her own.

Although Kees had stretched himself thin with his theatre venture and love affair to read Levertov’s manuscript or even to write her back in a timely fashion, all three involvements reveal how much Kees thought about women. He seemed fascinated about what fulfilled and disappointed them—this in the wake of his divorce year. Kees seemed to have returned to that part understanding, part solace, and part appropriation found in the closure of his poem “A Pastiche for Eve” from the late 1940s (“Their pain, their blood, are ours.”). Then Levertov would not have seen Kees as a near-feminist. What she had read by him— as she almost apologetically admitted in her April letter—were two poems in the Tiger’s Eye, an opulent magazine in which the contributions were not signed and could only be looked up the table of contents in the middle of each issue. These were the bleak and abstract “Rites for Winter”—and “The Furies,” with Kees’s horrific avatars that almost anticipate the things that haunted him in the summer of 1955: “a hunchbacked dwarf” with “a smile like a grapefruit

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rind,” a “brain […] empty and tired,” a “clown,” “a man with a mouth of cotton/Trapped in a dentist’s chair,” “a face gone rotten,” a “monster strung with guts,” a “coward covered with hair” . . .

Kees had taken Virginia Patterson on a camping trip, perhaps along the Russian River, in June and soon after they parted. On July 3, Kees finally wrote Levertov, answering her letters of April and May as well as the receipt of her poems. He assured her that the manuscript was in play—which he could see by the top sheet having been given the optimistic title of Continuing. He made no comment and simply said that he would give the book to Adrian Wilson as soon as he returned from his summer vacation. But Kees did betray things less than optimistic and of a personal nature. “[T]hese things,” Kees wrote, “always seem to take a heartbreaking amount of time. […] I’d write more, but have been ill and am otherwise feeling a bit sunk and uncommunicative.”

Levertov certainly understood the vicissitudes of the creative life given her own experiences—her abortion in Paris, having to work to support her husband and their young son. She had, in her May letter to Kees, told him that her father had died and that she was caring for her sick mother, who had come from England to live with her in her small apartment.

Kees’s aged parents lived in Santa Barbara and it was a matter of time before they might need his help after years of helping him with their own generosity. Kees had visited his parents in June and he may have, for the first time, been refused a “loan” he desperately needed. In any event, Levertov did not suspect the worst from Kees and waited to hear from him or Adrian Wilson.

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Almost three months later, Levertov received a letter from another stranger in California, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, proprietor of the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. “Adrian Wilson lent me your mss of poems entitled ‘Continuing’, Ferlinghetti said, “and I am writing to ask you if you would be agreeable to having a collection your poems published in the City Lights Bookshop’s POCKET POETS SERIES. […] Rexroth has told me that he considers you The Most, and in reading your poems I have come to somewhat the same conclusion.”6 Ferlinghetti included a copy of the first book in the series, The Coney Island of the Mind, some of which he had read for Kees’s Poets Follies.

He did not mention Kees’s fate, but Levertov already knew or was now prompted find out what happened four weeks earlier on July 18, that Weldon Kees had disappeared or had more likely leaped to his death off the Golden Gate Bridge.

Two years later Here and Now was printed and its content much changed from the manuscript that Kees had. Levertov had told him that she would send him new poems as the “book idea” between them developed further. Had he known, Kees would have been surprised to see a poem of the sea wind, green palmettos, and steep jungles set in Tomatlán—in Mexico, that destination he had mentioned in his last weeks, where he could be for those who still held out hope for him. How strange that Levertov almost came to live there in 1956. I have not yet found any evidence that she knew of the rumor that Kees might be there as well, to keep an eye out for a man she had yet to 6 Lawrence Ferlinghetti to Denise Levertov, September 26, 1955. Denise Levertov papers (M0601), Stanford University.

Libraries. Dept. of Special Collections and University Archives.

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meet. He had simply come and gone in her letterbox, almost a phantom, a troubling episode to forget until his name came back to mind.

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Manuscript Sources

Levertov Papers (M0601), Stanford University.

Libraries, Department of Special Collections and University Archives.

Levertov Papers (MSS070), Washington University Libraries, Department of Special Collections.

Secondary Sources Duncan, Robert, and Levertov, Denise. The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov. Edited

by Robert Edward Duncan, Robert J. Bertholf, Albert Gelpi. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.

Green, Dana. Denise Levertov: A Poet’s Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012.

Hollenberg, Donna. A Poet’s Revolution: The Life of Denise Levertov. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.

Kees, Weldon. The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees, 3rd ed. Edited by Donald Justice. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.

Levertov, Denise. Collected Earlier Poems, 1940-1960.

New York: New Directions, 1979.

Reidel, James. Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.

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Kerouac Estate Battle The saga of the Kerouac Estate Battle is an old one, and not one that we are eager to delve back into. However, for this issue, we were approached with two interesting but very different pieces of writing. As they acted as counterpoints in the same argument, it felt fair and reasonable to include them.

What follows is a review of Gerald Nicosia’s latest book and also an interview with John Sampas of the Jack Kerouac Estate. The background details are in the text, but this note shall suffice to say that it is a vast, complicated topic with many people on either side who passionately disagree with each other.

These two pieces have been included to present a balanced perspective on a divisive issue. Enjoy.

- the Editors

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Kerouac:

The Last Quarter Century

a Review

by Robert Niemi When Jack Kerouac died of a massive esophageal hemorrhage in October of 1969, he was virtually penniless, as he had been most of his life. His premature death from alcoholism – he was only 47 – was tragic in itself, but the timing also proved to be something of a disaster for his literary legacy. The day before he died, Kerouac sent his nephew, Paul Blake, Jr., a letter stating his intention to divorce and disinherit his third wife, Stella (Sampas) Kerouac, and to leave everything to his mother, Gabrielle (aka, “mémère”), while making Paul the alternate beneficiary. If he had lived long enough to carry out his wishes, Stella and her relatives would have had no legal claim to his estate, which has since come to be valued somewhere between $10 and $20 million today.

But it was not to be. When Kerouac’s estate was probated in 1972, two-thirds went to his mother and one-third went to Stella (under Florida’s Dower Right’s law). When Kerouac’s mother died in 1973, her putative

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will bequeathed everything to Stella. When Stella died in 1990, Kerouac’s literary estate devolved to Stella’s brothers and sisters. The next year, the Sampas family appointed the youngest brother, John Sampas (19342017), as literary executor of the Kerouac estate.

Though he had no training in literary studies, John Sampas presided over the publication of a slew of books gleaned from Kerouac’s papers between 1991 and 2017: boom years for renewed interest in Kerouac and the Beats but, as Gerald Nicosia argues in Kerouac: The Last Quarter Century, John Sampas’s stewardship seemed mostly driven by proprietary interests and mercenary motives. For example, Nicosia notes that Sampas’ primary criteria for choosing book editors was loyalty to the Sampas family rather than scholarly competence. Nicosia points out numerous editorial errors in these posthumous collections due to sloppy scholarship. Furthermore, to burnish the Kerouac brand for maximum sales potential, Sampas also insisted that his editors expunge any references Kerouac made in his letters to drug use, homosexuality, anti-Semitism, etc. – bowdlerization that presents a sanitized and therefore diminished portrait of the artist. Nicosia also delineates a substantial sell-off of Kerouac’s literary legacy aimed more at profit maximization for the Sampas family than legacy preservation. The New York Public Library bought a sizeable portion of Kerouac papers in 2001 but much of the estate was sold piecemeal to rare book dealers or anonymous collectors at exorbitant prices: a scattering and privatization of Kerouac’s oeuvre that stymies scholarly research. Sampas’s most famous sales coup was his auctioning off of the so-called “scroll” edition of On the Road to Jim Irsay (owner of

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the Indianapolis Colts football team) for $2.43 million in May, 2001.

Kerouac: The Last Quarter Century is not just an exposé of John Sampas’s dubious handling of Jack Kerouac’s literary legacy. Intertwined with that saga are other related stories that cast further shade upon the Sampas clan. Gerald Nicosia recounts his longterm friendship with Kerouac’s two surviving blood relatives: Jack’s nephew, Paul, and Jack’s daughter from his brief marriage to Joan Haverty, Jan Kerouac.

Inadvertently disinherited because Kerouac died intestate, Paul Blake, Jr. (1949-2018) struggled with destitution, alcoholism, and homelessness. Rejected by her father, who refused to acknowledge her as his daughter or pay child support until ordered to do so by a court – even though she was his spitting image – Jan Kerouac lived a troubled life on the margins, a life marred by poverty, drugs, prostitution, and alcoholism. She died in 1996 (at the age of 44) from complications related to kidney failure. Nonetheless, she inherited her father’s gift for words and managed to write three fine quasi-autobiographical novels: Baby Driver (1981), Trainsong (1988), and Parrot Fever (which was supposed to have been published in 2000

by Thunder's Mouth Press, but which was blocked from publication by Jan’s heirs). Nicosia met Jan Kerouac in 1978 and became a close friend and ally. In December, 1993, Canadian bookseller Rod Anstee sent Nicosia a copy of Gabrielle Kerouac’s will that left everything to Stella Sampas. It was soon determined that Gabrielle’s signature was a crude forgery, making the will invalid.

Nicosia connected Jan Kerouac with a lawyer to challenge her grandmother’s estate (Paul Blake, Jr. was added to the lawsuit later on). The legal machinations

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that ensued over the next 15 years are too complex to recite here but, long story short, in 2009 a judge ruled that the will had indeed been forged and reopened the probate of Gabrielle’s estate. Unfortunately, the Sampas family was protected from having to turn over their ill-gotten gains from the Kerouac estate by virtue of a 1989 Florida non-claim statute – so the legal ruling that Kerouac’s estate had been stolen from his rightful heirs was a moral victory that had no practical consequences.

Because Gerald Nicosia had written an authoritative and meticulously detailed warts-andall biography of Kerouac (Memory Babe, Grove Press, 1983) and had aided Jan Kerouac and Paul Blake, Jr. in their legal battles against the Sampas family, John Sampas deemed him a mortal enemy. To retaliate against Nicosia, Sampas pressured Viking Penguin to take the 1988 paperback reprint edition of Memory Babe out of print in 1993 (fortunately it was republished

by UCal Press in ’94). Sampas also did everything in his power to exclude Nicosia from Kerouac publications, bibliographies, and celebrations in Jack’s hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. Sampas even had Nicosia and Jan Kerouac forcibly ejected from a 1995 conference on the Beat generation at NYU. Yet, for all the bitter conflict that Nicosia relates in Kerouac: The Last Quarter Century, the tone of the book is remarkably calm and forthright. It tells a story of monstrous theft and injustice but without rancor or special pleading, which makes it all the more powerful. Any fair-minded reader will be struck by the tragedy of it all. The only thing missing from Nicosia’s sad but fascinating book is a justly deserved indictment of Jack Kerouac himself. Had he loved himself sufficiently to choose

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a responsible and sober life over escapism and selfdestruction, Kerouac’s daughter and nephew would likely have had a far better time of it and his formidable literary legacy would probably be preserved intact in a single archive – a gold mine for scholars interested in one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, albeit a deeply flawed and troubled human being.

Kerouac: The Last Quarter Century. By Gerald Nicosia.

Illustrated. 188 pp. Corte Madera, CA: Noodlebrain Press. $24.95.

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An

Interview

with by

John Sampas

David Daniel

I first met John Sampas in 2003, when I was appointed as the Jack Kerouac Visiting Writer in Residence at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. The final step for approval for the residency was to have dinner with Mr. Sampas. I went with some misgiving owing to things I’d read about his selling off parts of the Kerouac estate (the trench coat to Johnny Depp story) and making scholarly access to the writer’s work difficult. By evening’s end, however, I was won over by Sampas’s transparent enthusiasm for Kerouac’s artistic achievements and his devotion to keeping Jack’s legacy alive. A decade later, I sat down with Mr. Sampas to talk about his role as Kerouac’s literary executor. The interview was conducted in his home in Lowell, on February 18, 2014.

Snow is beginning to fall as I park in front of #2 Stevens Street, a tall rust-brown Victorian, not far from the University of Massachusetts Lowell campus. The house is the one where Sampas, the youngest child of a large Greek immigrant family, was raised. He had

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six brothers and one sister. I am greeted by John, who offers a handshake, and by his dog, an aged Black Lab/Great Dane mix. “That’s Henry,” Sampas says.

“Adopted from the pound. Jack would’ve liked him, but cats were his favorites.”

The house’s interior is warm, not fancy. The rooms I see are crowded with shelves, which hold a vast collection of Beat books, including foreign language editions of Kerouac’s works, art books, and volumes on jazz. Old paintings adorn the walls. I notice filing cabinets: three in the foyer as I come in, another couple in a side room, three more in the room where we will talk. Sampas has a round table set up and a soft green leather chair for me. He offers tea. Classical music plays softly from a radio—99.5 WCRB in Boston.

Sampas sits opposite and we start. He is a softspoken man of about 80, with a twinkle in his eyes when he talks. As the conversation proceeds, I realize that he, as Kerouac was, is loath to say a bad word about anyone. Many names come up: Kerouac’s boyhood buddies, later friends and acquaintances, literary folk. Wanting to give some focus to the discussion I say, “You’re the keeper of the Kerouac flame. What is the role and function of a literary executor?”

“It’s decision-making, power of estate. This involves copyright and intellectual property rights— people requesting permissions to quote from work.

Film, translation. Analyzing royalty statements, contracts...” He rattles it off; it’s a question he’s been asked a lot. “There are fees to agents, lawyers. There’s a lot of interest in Jack, as you know. One of the big tasks was determining where Jack’s papers should be housed and curated. Jack was compulsive about saving things. There was an archive in Lowell, a

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locked room in a house on Wilder Street which had his materials.”

He explains that Andrew Wiley was after him for years hoping to represent Jack’s work, but Sampas stayed with the Sterling Lord Literistic, though with a younger assistant rather than Lord himself (who was Kerouac’s agent), “only because I felt Lord hadn’t done enough to maximize earnings for Jack.” Sampas mentions, for instance, that Lord was approached about a film of On the Road many years before and the filmmaker was willing to pay $125K, “but Lord told Jack to hold out for more, and the offer went away.”

[Note: After Sampas died, his nephew Jim Sampas and adopted son John Shen-Sampas moved the Kerouac account from Lord’s firm to Wiley's.]

According to Sampas, when Kerouac died in 1969, his mother Gabrielle and wife Stella were living “mostly on Social Security and some royalties—about thirty thousand a year, from On the Road. Gabrielle and Jan Kerouac were his co-heirs.”

At the time of Kerouac’s death, OTR had been translated into half a dozen languages. Fortyfive years later, by Sampas’s count, the number of languages was close to fifty.

Kerouac left his estate—at the time, worth very little—to his mother Gabrielle. When she died (1973 at 78), her will directed that the estate go to Kerouac’s widow, Stella. Upon her death (1990 at 71), rights went to her siblings. John took over as executor in 1991, chosen by his siblings to represent the estate.

“I began the task of going through what was there,” he says. “There’s a lot. I started with the notebooks. There were more than seventy notebooks, journals, diaries. I’d take one to bed with me each

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night. Curling up with Jack, so to speak. Remember, I was much younger than Jack. He was friends with my older brothers. Sebastian and Jack were best friends.

I didn’t know him all that well when I was growing up.

So, after Stella died I began reading the notebooks to learn more about the man who’d been my older brother’s friend and my sister’s husband.”

Sampas took the assignment seriously. He undertook going through the archive to see what was there. He had the contents of the locked room on Wilder St. transferred to a vault at a downtown bank. “I was also collecting everything of Kerouac’s that I could, wherever it was, gathering up materials relating to Jack. I got the correspondence between Viking Press and Jack. I got original manuscript copies of many of Jack’s books that Sterling Lord had in various drawers in his office in New York. Stella and Jan [Kerouac, Jack’s daughter] hadn’t renewed rights on certain things and Lord didn’t either, so some of the stuff ended up in public domain.”

Sampas’ next major concern was finding a permanent home for the archives. He had also begun to sell manuscripts to the New York Public Library, and that seemed a likely place for everything.

“UCal Berkeley and the University of Texas were also interested, but,” Sampas laughs, “New York is the center of the world. They showed up at the bank with a truck and took it away. I was amused that the bankers never realized what had been stored in their vault.

Now they take pride in it.”

Sampas hired Paul Marion to do the initial cataloguing of Jack's papers. Marion remembers Sampas taking him around one day to several banks to show him manuscripts in safe deposit boxes. He

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describes being “totally blown away seeing scroll manuscripts and bound typescripts in the metal bank boxes.” He told me recently, “In 1991, when I was brought on board to catalogue and generally assist John with Estate matters, I told someone that seeing the manuscripts in the bank safe-deposit boxes was like opening up the top of Kerouac's skull and looking inside to see all the writing in there.”

Around 2000, New York Public Library became the home for the bulk of the Kerouac Archives.

“The editor for Jack’s stuff at Viking was David Stanford, from about 1991-98. Then Paul Slovak became the editor and got some more stuff published. Atop an Underwood [1999, edited and intro by Paul Marion] was with Viking.

“After a point, however, Viking didn’t want to do any more, so I went somewhere else. Actually, City Lights was the first to publish a posthumous book [Pomes All Sizes, in 1992]. Most recently it’s Da Capo— The Sea is My Brother [2011; intro by Dawn Ward] and next up is The Haunted Life [which appeared later in 2014, ed. by Todd Tietchen]. The Library of America published Collected Poems [Ed. By Marilene PhippsKettlewell, 2012] and there’s a short manuscript titled ‘I Wish I Were You’ which may come out. It’s Jack’s solo version of the Lucien Carr/ David Kammerer case, which he and Burroughs had dealt with in The Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks.”

At the time of Kerouac’s death he had published eighteen books. Since then, beginning in 1971, thirty or more additional works have been published, most of which Sampas shepherded through the editorial process. He also got poems by his brother Sebastian, who died during World War II, published.

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Sampas says that he has regular, amiable dealings with James Grauerholz, William Burroughs’s executor, and Peter Hale and Bob Rosenthal, who oversee Allen Ginsberg’s estate.

In October, 1993, I had spent several hours talking with Kerouac biographers Gerald Nicosia and Brad Parker so I was aware of the conflicting claims about the Kerouac estate, but I knew that a 2004 Florida court ruling had affirmed the rights belonged to the Sampas family. When I mention this in passing, Sampas firmly shakes his head, obviously still galled by all of that, but he doesn’t get over reactive. “I’ve avoided legal squabbles. I get sued sometimes, but I don’t sue. I try to resolve things equably.”

Sampas has meticulous records and files, duplications of what is in the formal archives in New York. This explains the numerous filing cabinets visible from where we sit. He says the system of organization owes in large part to Kerouac’s own almost obsessive record-keeping, list-making, filling of notebooks and journals, and using carbon paper whenever he typed a letter. “And his correspondence was voluminous!”

In the course of our conversation, Sampas is able to access materials he wants to show me. With something like the glee of a child demonstrating mastery of a mechanical toy, he makes mention of an obscure New York literary magazine from the early 1950s containing work by Kerouac and LeRoi Jones (before he became Amiri Baraka) and, voila!, opens a file drawer and produces it. He does this several times, presenting materials to document a point. He shows me a copy of the Lowell police arrest log dated August 12, 1968, with Kerouac’s name and the offense “drunk”; under “occupation” the booking officer had written “writer.”

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Sampas says that when Kerouac was in Lowell in 1967 and ’68, living on Sanders Avenue in the Highlands, he hung out with Tony Sampas, who had an apartment upstairs above brother Nick’s tavern. Jack would sometimes stay there if he’d had too much to drink. The next year, Kerouac moved to St. Petersburg.

“Tony got a phone call from Jack the night before he died,” Sampas says ruefully. “He was drunk, as usual, and wanted to talk. Tony was in bed with his girlfriend and had to cut the call short.” I remind Sampas of something John Clellon Holmes said in one of the Kerouac documentaries: that even when drunk, Jack’s talk was always brilliant, but that he had become a monologist, no longer interested in conversation.

The “formal” part of our interview has given way to relaxed conversation. Sampas recounts a story of how one of Kerouac’s notebooks ended up in the University of Texas collection. “I knew from Jack’s own journals that it was one that had been stolen.

He complained that his friends were taking his stuff. I traced it and found that the dealer who sold it to Texas had purchased it from Gregory Corso.” We share a laugh: bad boy Gregory.

Outside that the snow is continuing to pile up. I put on my coat and say goodbye. Sampas wishes me careful driving. Henry, who has been lying quietly on the floor the whole time, perks up for a head rub.

“One of the things I didn’t mention,” Sampas says as if it has waited ‘til now to occur to him, “is looking after Jack’s grave. You’ve been out to see it?”

“Many times,” I assure him.

Later that year, the estate oversaw a new headstone at Edson Cemetery.

John Sampas died in 2017; he was 84.

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William S. Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Drugs, and Control:

When the Beats Split into the Hippies

and the Punks

by Westley Heine

It’s well known that both William S. Burroughs and Timothy Leary used drugs for inspiration. More revealing is the difference between the two thinkers.

Leary went on a crusade to advocate the wonders of psychedelics, whereas Burroughs warned that drugs could be used as agents of control, primarily heroin but also psychedelics. These two countercultural figures provide very different approaches to the question of drugs in society and are prototypes for the splintering of the counterculture into the mystic hippies and the skeptic punks. These two men perceived the use of drugs differently, and their attitudes are reflected in their work and in the subcultures they inspired.

Burroughs and Leary first met through Allen Ginsberg while Leary was experimenting with psilocybin mushrooms outside of Cambridge, Massachusetts. According to Leary’s book, High

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Priest, Ginsberg told the then Harvard Professor in 1960: “You’ve got to write a big, enthusiastic letter to Burroughs and get him interested in taking mushrooms.

He knows more about drugs than anyone alive. What a report he’ll write you!” Ginsberg had just returned from the headwaters of the Amazon, where he traced Burroughs’ steps to find – and sample – the powerful hallucinogen, ayahuasca.

By January 1961, Ginsberg had sent Leary’s address to Burroughs. In a letter preserved in Rub Out The Words, Burroughs wrote to Leary: I know that my work and understanding has gained measurable from the use of hallucinogens and I think the wider use of these drugs would lead to better conditions on all levels. Perhaps whole areas of neurosis could be mapped and eradicated in mass therapy. I enclose copy of Minutes to Go which I hope will interest you. Actually I have achieved pure cut up highs without the use of any chemical agent.

The following summer, Leary visited Burroughs in Tangiers and brought with him the mushrooms in question. Despite Burroughs experiencing the onset of a bad trip and dosing himself with apomorhine to stave off the effects, he wrote Brion Gysin in early August 1961 about his first meeting with Leary: “I found him very aware confident and I think well intentioned…

He is paying my expenses to and from and during two months at Cambridge where they have equipment etc.”

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The equipment Burroughs is referring to never materialized. His tone had changed in less than a month in a letter to Gysin from Massachusetts: “I am more leery of Leary… I can’t tell you how bad this mushroom thing looks.” Again he wrote to Gysin in late September 1961: “Leary has gone berserk. He is giving mushrooms to hat check girls, cab drivers, waiters, in fact anybody who will stand for it.” And in a letter to Paul Bowles, Burroughs wrote: I don’t know when I’ve seen anything so nasty. Staying in Leary’s house. Enough food to feed a regiment left out to spoil in the huge kitchen by Leary’s over-fed, undisciplined children. Unused TV sets, cameras, typewriters, toys, books… stacked to the ceiling. A nightmare of stupid surfeit. The place is sick sick sick…

Nothing will ever get another psilocybin pill down this throat.

Burroughs expected a laboratory setting furnished

by Harvard to synthesize new drugs, map untapped psychic areas, cure neurosis, and ultimately inspire new writing. What he found was that his host was on a religious mission to spread hallucinogens with Leary as the prophet.

In 2007, I interviewed Daniel Pinchbeck, writer and son of Beat writer Joyce Johnson. At the time, he was frustrated about being compared to Timothy Leary in Rolling Stone. In our discussion, quoted from my book The Trail of Quetzalcoatl, Pinchbeck commented:

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Leary was an unfortunate catastrophe in the 60s. It’s sort of the karma of the situation that a figure like him emerged.

He clearly had a kind of egomania, and incredible desire for attention. With the whole ‘Turn on, Tune in, Drop out’ I think the dropping out part is a terrible concept. There was this unsubtle fervor.

I am writing an introduction to this book called The Psychedelic Experience, which was their manual from the 60s on how to use psychedelics. There’s this endless insistence on how you have to smash the ego then you’re gonna reach enlightenment. It was kind of too fast. I think it was 1961, and Leary was forty years old when he first took a psychedelic. Then within two or three years he was ready to make these incredible proclamations, act like he knew what was going on, that he had attained enlightenment, and so on.

What we’ve learned in hindsight is that whatever enlightenment is you don’t get there from just taking LSD or any drug.

You have to correlate your life pattern to whatever illumination or ideas that you have. It’s a much more difficult task. I think psychedelics can give you glimpses into other forms of consciousness, but then you have to do a huge amount of work when you’re not involved in psychedelics in order to integrate those experiences with your life path.

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Enlightenment was never the goal for William Burroughs. Ginsberg and his other friends had tried to get him interested in Buddhism and meditation, but without success. In The Retreat Diaries, Burroughs wrote: I am more concerned with writing than I am with any sort of enlightenment, which is often an ever-retreating mirage like the fully analyzed or fully liberated person. I use meditation to get material for writing.

I am not concerned with some abstract nirvana. It is exactly the visions and fireworks that are useful for me, exactly what the masters tell us we should pay as little attention to as possible. Telepathy, journeys out of the body—these manifestations, according to Trungpa, are mere distractions. Exactly. Distraction: fun, like hang-gliding or surf-boarding or skin-diving. So why not have fun? I sense an underlying dogma here, which I am not willing to submit. The purposes of a Bodhisattva and an artist are different and perhaps not reconcilable.

The goal of the mystic and the artist definitely overlap for Alex Grey. In 2006, I asked Grey about his painting St. Albert because it featured Burroughs in the peripheral as Albert Hoffman discovers LSD. The renowned psychedelic painter commented that William Burroughs was included because it showed various thinkers who were influenced by the drug, but that Burroughs was: “basically paranoid till the end.”

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In a letter to Brion Gysin on September 28, 1961, Burroughs’ tone is fearful: Situation here worse than I can tell you—Ovens now on mescaline. DO NOT TAKE ANY HALLUCIGEN UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES… Made it out of Cambridge just under the wire—Leary had ordered mescaline and had me all set up—Would no doubt have snatched my apomorphine stash—Claire Booth Luce money and power behind this …

Apomorphine only hope of averting total disaster—Anyone who (as Leary does) deliberately comes out against apomorphine marked total enemy…

It is sometimes hard to tell when Uncle Bill is being serious or satirical. Sometimes it’s as if he is playing the intergalactic secret agent with his co-conspirator Brion Gysin. His letters show that he changes his address every few months for the better part of two decades acting as a kind of whistleblower running from what he sees as one bad scene to another. One could make the case that he encouraged paranoia in himself intentionally to inspire his nightmare realms much as Salvador Dali famously suggested an artist should do in his paranoiac-critical method. Could invoking fear in oneself create hyper-awareness and then inspiration?

Burroughs, who also coined the phrase heavy metal, had been pushing himself to the limits for years and long before the culture at mass. The darkness clouding him at this point would not be in the collective

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consciousness until the mid-seventies, after the flower children had been replaced by the punks. His concept of “the ovens” is shorthand for a bad trip, seemingly mixing holocaust imagery with the sweaty physical rejection of a hallucinogen. Bizarrely, at the same time as Burroughs was using this metaphor, the CIA and the KGB were using LSD and other psychedelics as truth serums during interrogations, and experimenting with them as a form of mind control. Burroughs may have been right to be a little paranoid.

Today, the CIA programs such as MK-Ultra are public knowledge. What is more surprising is the alleged involvement of Leary and other counterculture figures acting as CIA agents to popularize psychedelics in the mainstream. This is the thesis of Drugs as a Weapon Against Us, a book and a documentary by John L. Potash. The film draws on common conclusions about the War on Drugs, including that during the Vietnam War the US imported massive amounts of heroin from Southeast Asia. Later, the US imported more heroin from Afghanistan during the War on Terror. Also included is the CIA flooding black neighborhoods with hard drugs even inventing crack to cripple the Black Panthers and other revolutionary groups. What this film does differently is show that counterculture figures collaborated, sometimes unknowingly, with the CIA to popularize drugs in the culture, including various rock stars and Timothy Leary.

The film alleges that the CIA set-up the Human Ecology Fund through Cornell, which funded programs to study hallucinogens, including the one spearheaded by Leary. The film includes an audio clip of Leary in 1967, in which he states, “The CIA funded and supported and encouraged hundreds of young

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psychiatrists to experiment with this drug.” In an interview from 1975 in Freedom Magazine conducted

by Walter Bowart, Leary states: Eighty percent of my movements, eighty percent of the decisions I made were suggested to me by CIA people… I like the CIA! The game they’re playing is better than the FBI… They’re a thousand times better than the KGB. So it comes down to: who are you going to work for? The Yankees or the Dodgers?... I knew I was being used by the intelligence agents of this country… Yes I was a witting agent of the CIA, but I’m not a willing agent of Nixon! I did everything in my power to throw out Nixon!

In Acid Dreams: The CIA & LSD by Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain, William Burroughs is credited as: “being one of the first to suspect that the acid craze of the 60s was a manipulated phenomenon.” In the book, Burroughs is quoted: “LSD makes people less competent. You can see their motivation for turning people on. Very often it’s not necessary to give it more than just a little push. Make it available and the news media takes it up, and there it is.”

According to John L. Potash’s thesis, the CIA lured students away from the Freedom Riders and other Civil Rights concerns and towards dropping out with drugs.

Also, the record labels began to sign folk musicians who were less political as LSD became popular. Drugs as Weapons Against US, though often lacking direct evidence, shows a distinct pattern for fallen left-wing

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icons. JKF was killed shortly after he changed his mind about Vietnam, tried to end the CIA’s MK-Ultra program, and went after the mafia for trafficking drugs. RFK, MLK, and Malcolm X all died shortly after publicly opposing Vietnam. Numerous Black Panther Party members were assassinated or became addicted to drugs due to efforts of CIA infiltrators.

When Ken Kesey ended the Acid Tests, suggesting that people “graduate from acid,” he was immediately arrested. Janis Joplin died from a bad batch of heroin shortly after agreeing to do two benefits for peace candidates in the upcoming election. Jimi Hendrix died shortly after quitting acid and supporting the Black Panthers. John Lennon was killed after his music became more political and less trippy. Kurt Cobain died under suspect circumstances after his stomach ailment ceased, was getting off heroin, and therefore was no longer in a position to make heroin popular.

Tupac, whose parents were Black Panther Party members, was killed after trying to unite and politicize gangs and steer them away from the drug trade that was turning them against each other.

Do the powers that be want the public to “drop out” and burn out? If this is the case, with hallucinogens it largely backfired. If psychedelics were purposefully popularized to control thought, ironically the effect for most people was that these drugs set the mind free. Yet again, this is not always the case as the many acid cults in the 60s and 70s demonstrate, famously symbolized by Charles Manson manipulating his followers with acid. Psychedelics were a doubleedged sword: one side joyous and mystic, which Leary embodies despite his affiliations, and the other negative, which Burroughs warns against. Perhaps

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because the effects of LSD and other hallucinogens are so unpredictable, the CIA stopped funding them and switched to popularizing hard drugs.

When Burroughs and Leary first met, before all the conspiracy theories began, Burroughs was ahead of his time whether you categorize it as skepticism or paranoia. In 1959, two reporters from Life magazine interviewed him and Brion Gysin at the Beat Hotel. The Luce family, mentioned as Leary’s benefactor in Burroughs’ letter above, ran what we would now call a mass media conglomerate, which included Life. The reporters, Dean and Snell, playfully compared themselves to Hauser and O’Brian, the two interrogating cops from Naked Lunch, even offering Burroughs an Old Gold cigarette. Perhaps this dark humor was the duo’s way of suggesting that the article may blur the line between promoting their Beat art and exploiting them for the publishers’ agenda. Whether it was rumor or not, in 1961, when Burroughs learned that Leary’s mushroom project was not funded by Harvard as much as the Luce family, it was too much for him to stomach and he fled back over the Atlantic.

Burroughs wrote to Ginsberg in October 1961:

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I have severed all connections with Leary and his project which seems to me completely ill intentioned. I soon found out that they have the vaguest connection with Harvard University, that the money comes from Madame Luce and other dubious quarters, that they have no interest in any serious scientific work, no equipment… that I was supposed to sell the beatniks on mushrooms. When I

flatly refused to push the mushrooms but volunteer instead to work on flicker and other non-chemical methods, the money and return ticket they had promised me was immediately withdrawn… I hope to never set eyes on that horse’s ass again.

A real wrong number… One thing for sure, Leary isn’t getting any short count.

Twenty thousand a year plus expenses.

For doing exactly what? Pushing those pestiferous mushrooms.

Shortly after, Burroughs published an open letter accusing Leary’s project as being a “Monopoly of Dreams.” In High Priest, Leary retorts by subtly suggesting that Burroughs’ sexuality was partly to blame for him not mixing with Leary’s tribe: Each of us has built into his genetic code, into the very cellular essence of our being, tribal commitments. Tribal style. Tribal Mores. Tribal taboos. Tribal sexual rituals… Of these, geographical (racial) and sexual factors are the most important in formation and perpetuation of the tribal commune. Over the millennia these two factors—geography and sexual style—have operated through natural selection. Today, in the period of collapsing empire, we are faced with the problem of reforming tribes. Look to your ancestors and listen to your sexual messages as you select your tribemembers… Awareness of, and delicate

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sensitivity to, their ancient styles facilitate harmonious tribal living and rewarding inter-tribal contact. Ignorance of racial and sexual tendencies breeds chaos…

Bill Burroughs came to visit, a dignified, sage, complex genius-shaman-poetguide from a different, but sympathetic tribe. Our obtuse game playing paid disrespect to his clan.

Perhaps Burroughs’ words of warning about psychedelics, and Leary’s enthusiastic crusade to spread them, are hinged on the same mistake: both men assumed that people would have the same reaction to psychedelics that they themselves had.

It is always surprising how different people react to the exact same substance, and what is revealed is not the drug itself, but whatever is deep inside the individual before the chemical catalyst. Whatever their differences were, Leary and Burroughs went their separate directions after that failed collaboration in 1961.

Yet a few years later, Burroughs donated to Leary’s defense fund when Leary was busted for marijuana. At that point, Leary was a famous LSD guru, and given thirty years for two joints. Perhaps the CIA knew the whole story, but according to some strands of the US government, Leary was one of the leaders of the youth culture or hippies. Several years after that, William Burroughs returned to New York to live in the US for the first time in over twenty years and found that he also had followers in the form of a youth movement: the punk rockers. The imagery of William S. Burroughs is not flowers and sunshine. Suddenly, in

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punk, his mix of urban decay, de-constructivism, and pairing gritty noir with oozing surreal fantasy and cautionary tales had a musical style to match and a fashion that was visible on the streets of New York and London. After leaving CBGB, some of the rockand-roll youths straight out of a Burroughs’ novel went down to “The Bunker” to shoot up with the re-addicted elder. Darkness and downers were in style again. Was this boom largely due to the CIA importing massive amounts of heroin from Vietnam?

If Leary was an active agent of the CIA, or powerful media moguls, whatever privileges he had were suddenly reneged. He was sent to prison. His escape and fleeing to Algeria and Afghanistan are so exciting it is surprising the story hasn’t been adapted into a Hollywood movie. In contrast to Burroughs’ skepticism, Leary’s positivity and optimism can be infectious. Perhaps Leary was flaky compared to the hardboiled, occasionally pessimistic poets of the Beat Generation, but he never romanticized the past. In Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger 1, the author recalls visiting Leary in Vacaville Prison in the 70s, where Leary remained positive despite his years of solitary confinement and interrogation. In the interview, Wilson reports that a “prominent counterculture hero” was mentioned before Leary goes on to say: “He hates me now, because I’m not suffering. If I were in misery, he’d love me. He suffers every time he drags himself out of bed, I’m sure. But glorification of suffering is one of the larval reflexes we must lose. I’m free, you see, and those people can’t stand that.” Was Leary referring to Burroughs?

Perhaps Leary was referring to Hunter S. Thompson whose Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas had just come

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out. Within it, Thompson perfectly captured how America’s drug of choice at any given moment reflects the mood of the country, which by the seventies was darkening: We are wired into a survival trip now. No more the speed that fueled the sixties.

Uppers are going out of style. This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip. He crashed around America selling consciousness expansion without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all those people who took him too seriously… All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit… What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole lifestyle that he helped to create… a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody—or at least some force—is tending the Light as the end of the tunnel.

Being a mystic or a skeptic with a drug of choice to match is one thing. Criminalization of drug use as a moral issue rather than a medical problem is a far more serious issue. In my interview with Daniel Pinchbeck, I framed the differences between the two figures with the question of legalizing psychedelics.

On the one hand, Leary thought that everyone should try it, that it should be used in college classrooms,

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and that it should be prescribed by doctors. On the other hand, Burroughs didn’t want the government or the mainstream to get involved. He felt that it should be found intuitively and stay in the underground.

Pinchbeck commented: I think ultimately if we would reach a kind of mature place as a society that we would find the right place to integrate the entheogenic experience into the culture. It’s probably not all bad that they’ve been illegal in that it’s actually forced those people who really want to have this experience to seek it out, and sort of strengthen their own character. It would be great if we could reach a place as a society where people could make these explorations without fear of legal reprisal.

When the US government recaptured Leary, he allegedly named names to the FBI. There are many versions of his collaboration with his interrogators.

The conspiracy theorists figure that Leary’s CIA connection was given to the FBI and he was able to make a deal because ultimately he was set free.

Sympathizers with Leary contend that he only named people in the counterculture whom the feds already knew about and for whom the statute of limitations had run out.

By the 1980s, Burroughs and Leary found themselves speaking on the same panel at The Nova Convention and crossing paths on the reading circuit. If Leary had broken the old code laid out in

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Burroughs’ first book, Junkie, that you never rat, Burroughs didn’t seem to care. Being a stool pigeon was the lowest of the low. Yet, for whatever reason, the two aging thinkers were amicable. A picture of the two smiling, arm-in-arm, from Burroughs’ porch in Lawrence, Kansas, shows that peace had been made.

Did this have anything to do with the fact that Leary had de-emphasized his drug agenda and begun a crusade advocating computers and futurism instead?

In lieu of “Turn on, Tune in, Drop out,” Leary began his SMILE (Space Migration + Intelligence Increase + Life Extension) campaign, which is more along the lines of Burroughs’ ideas of evolution under weightless conditions in space. Or perhaps Burroughs was forgiving of Leary’s CIA involvement out of jealousy.

In the film Burroughs, he expresses his regret in not going into espionage because in his youth, during one such job interview, the recruiter turned out to be someone who “absolutely hated me.” But, if given the chance, would Burroughs been able to follow the CIA’s MK-Ultra agenda?

In a 1989 interview in Pataphysics, Leary commented on Burroughs’ impressions of the Harvard research on

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psychedelics back in 1961: He thought we were a bunch of dumb bozos running around and trying to save the world with these drugs and he was very uh, rightfully cynical about what we were doing. He’s a very scientific person.

The only psychedelic he likes is marijuana.

He never really liked other psychedelic drugs. Burroughs has forgotten more about drugs in his life than I’ve learned…

But Burroughs, he’s not the guy that goes around with a grin on his face saying peace and love. He’s a very crusty, introverted guy with a very deep sense of humor…

Burroughs’ later opinion of the Harvard research could be found in the foreword he wrote for Leary’s autobiography, Flashbacks, in 1989: Looking back now, though, with the perspective of almost three decades, I recognize that they must have been on to something—otherwise, why should their endeavor have provoked such a panicky and cruel persecution by the secret authorities of the time?

Clearly, many of the social freedoms of the present-day Western world were facilitated by the introduction and widespread dissemination of these ancient mind-altering chemicals and the twentieth-century counterparts,

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such as LSD… before that time they were generally reserved to a self-selected psychedelic elite who warned newcomers of the grave dangers attendant upon sharing the “secret knowledge” with the uninitiated… Despite my own initial disgruntled reaction to “Dr. Tim” and his save-the-world antics… I have come to regard Timothy as a true pioneer of human evolution. Never stinting to dare all in pursuit of his idealistic dream of universal psychedelic enlightenment, he has suffered enormously in its service: doggedly pursued and harassed by the authorizes, sacked from Harvard, harshly imprisoned for a minor marijuana infraction (at least that was their excuse), hectored by his Black Panther “saviors” for political correctness, and unfairly accused in the Counter-Culture of being a stool pigeon when he finally gained his freedom in 1975.

Clearly Burroughs did not consider Leary to be an informant.

As for Leary’s CIA connection, Burroughs was vague if not surprisingly forgiving. Burroughs stated in his foreword to Flashbacks:

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…the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was there first, or at least as the same time—and without their pervasive, secret support of psychedelic research during the 1950s and 1960s, the ground would

not have been nearly as fertile for the general introduction of psychedelics into society… But the CIA was looking for a “truth drug,” or at least an incapacitating chemical warfare agent, and in retrospect they got more than they bargained for: Dr. Leary and his legions of young acid-trippers popped out of the CIA’s Pandora’s Box in short order, and in that great American tradition, the 2secret knowledge” was soon widely shared, inevitably distorted and harmful at times, but so deeply influential upon our era that its impact can hardly be overstated.

This summary seemed to paint Leary as a kind of double agent who may have accepted the secret assignment from the CIA, but then exploded with a chaotic public campaign for psychedelics. If this is what the CIA wanted Leary to do, then perhaps Leary was the “fall guy” when dosing America became bad Public Relations. Or if the CIA did not instruct Leary to be so indiscriminate with spreading the psychedelic seed, then perhaps he was imprisoned and punished for going rogue.

Famously the two thinkers spoke on the phone the night Leary died. Burroughs reported that Leary said to him: “Why not?” Even in death, Leary was optimistic. The predominant theme of Burroughs’ writing is less trusting, but a constant fight against all forms of control, be it government, media censorship, drug hysteria, psychic possession, or even his drug of choice: junk. Nothing was innocent of manipulating the individual, even Burroughs’ own choice of expression:

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writing. He went so far to say that the word acts as a virus. Burroughs’ lens of scrutiny was so fearless that it turned in on himself, warning of the Ugly Spirit, and the Man Within. From the onset, Burroughs was leery.

A lot can be learned from these two thinkers, from Burroughs mining the subconscious to Leary’s intentional projection of his consciousness to try and create a better world. Now that cannabis is becoming decriminalized and legalized, Burning Man is entering its third decade, and tourists go on retreats to the Amazon to try ayahuasca, heads can experiment with less paranoia.

Legalization will not bring instant world peace, but it will keep people from having their lives ruined by the for-profit prison system. Drugs are finally being seen as a personal choice rather than a moralistic problem.

Most people have finally come to realize that the War on Drugs has made society worse. Now, the opiate of the masses is technology, which like LSD promises universal connection but just as easily creates a sense of isolation.

In my mind, two types of heads emerge from the haze-filled rooms of my youth: the skeptic and the mystic. Everyone knows the guy who will go on and on that if people would just get high then the world would be a better place. World peace would ignite if only everyone just lit up. The other, who also uses drugs, does not see things as being so simple, and knows that there is a thin line between freeing your mind and just being under a different spell. In the diverse array of thinkers at the vanguard of the drug culture, none personify this dichotomy more than Timothy Leary and William Burroughs.

I’d like to think that these two men became friends

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later in life because they realized that letting the counterculture splinter into endless categories only keeps us fighting each other rather than fighting those seeking to control us all. As Burroughs stated in his foreword to Flashbacks, “Old friends and seasoned vieux combatants, we still have out differences—of personality, outlook, appetite for politics—but on this we are firmly in solidarity. This is the Space Age, and we are Here to Go.”

Sources Brookner, Howard. Burroughs 1983 Documentary Bowart, Walter. Freedom Magazine 1975 interview with Timothy Leary Burroughs, William S. The Retreat Diary from The Burroughs File Edelstein, Leo, and Elliston, Judith. Pataphysics 1989 interview with Timothy Leary Heine, Westley. The Trail of Quetzalcoatl 2007 interview with Daniel Pinchbeck. Alex Grey quote previously unpublished outtake from 2006 interview for the same project.

Leary, Timothy. Flashbacks Leary, Timothy. High Priest Lee, Martin, and Shlain, Bruce. Acid Dreams: The CIA & LSD Morgan, Bill. Rub Out The Words The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1959-1974 Potash, John L. Drugs as a Weapon Against Us Wilson, Robert Anton. Cosmic Trigger 1

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Chasing Hunter’s Literary Persona

Through the Pages

a conversation

with Hunter S. Thompson scholar,

Dr. Rory Patrick Feehan

by Noel Dávila

A lot has been written about Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, his excess, and his unique mastery of the written word.

Through the prism of his own literary persona, Hunter — sometimes as Raoul Duke — pushed journalism to the edge, showed us Nixon’s America, and warned us of a war on terror that was merely getting started when he turned a gun on himself.

For over ten years, Rory Feehan has presided over TotallyGonzo.com, an online community for depraved minds and Gonzo enthusiasts. For his Ph.D., Feehan took it upon himself to write a thesis about the literary persona found throughout the writings of Hunter S. Thompson.

I talked to Dr. Feehan for over an hour, but I can confidently report that we could’ve spoken for days.

Such is the crazed, incurable passion that Hunter S. Thompson inspires. We discussed how he came to

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discover Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter’s connection to the Beat Generation, and the literary persona that permeates all that is Gonzo and beyond.

Some questions and answers have been edited for brevity and clarity. *** What was the catalyst for writing a Ph.D. thesis about Hunter S. Thompson?

That's the question everybody asks. How the hell does a guy in Ireland end up doing a Ph.D. about Hunter?

You'd be surprised how many times I’ve been asked that. Well, you know, I was always interested in the ‘60s, the music, the literature, the movies… from a very early age. I suppose I picked that up from my father, who was interested in that whole era as well.

But funnily enough, it wasn't until I was in college, actually, that I came across Hunter. So I was late discovering him, if you like, despite my familiarity with that whole era. It was actually a friend of mine in college, who one day just said to me, “Have you ever read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas?” I said I hadn't and he gave me his copy and said, “Here, check it out. I think you’ll like it.” And I always remember this.

I took a look at the book and I was kind of flipping through it and the first thing I noticed obviously was the illustrations by Ralph Steadman. And I thought this is kind of weird and I started reading. It was early in the morning and I ended up skipping all of my college lectures that day. I just stayed at the student lounge and read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas cover to cover. I was just hysterical laughing at the book; I just

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thought it was absolutely brilliant. And that kind of kick-started — that was around 2002 — and then I just read everything I could get my hands on, everything

by Hunter, everything on Hunter. And that was the start of it, really.

Then, in 2004 I had an opportunity to study abroad as part of my BA program. And we could go anywhere in Europe, anywhere in America. I just asked what colleges were available in America that I could go to. And they gave me a map and I literally looked to see which was the closest place to where Hunter was, and it was Regis University in Denver, Colorado.

And I just said, “I'm out there.” That was my chance to see if I could perhaps run into Hunter and get to meet him.

So, I went to Regis University for the college year 2004-2005. And when I got there, I got talking to my English professor about Hunter and he said to me, “You know, he's living up at Woody Creek. You should try to meet him.” And he encouraged me to actually write my final year dissertation for my BA course on Hunter, so he said I should see if I could interview him.

In October 2004, I tried to get to Woody Creek with a few friends of mine. It was around Halloween and we started to drive up to Woody Creek and it was an absolute disaster. We got about halfway up, halfway between Denver and Aspen. A big blizzard just flew in out of nowhere and trapped us overnight.

We had altitude sickness… it was nasty. And the next morning we just decided, you know what, this is crazy.

We’ll come back in the springtime when the weather is a bit better. And we drove back to Denver. That was, say October 2004. Of course, the following February Hunter took his life.

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What really made me resolve to do the Ph.D. was that I saw all of the coverage of his death firsthand, in Denver all the local newspapers, as well as all the media in the States. And I was struck by how they covered his death. There was very little about how he was such a really great journalist and writer. And that early work was glossed over. A lot of the focus was about the larger than life persona, that kind of celebrity gossip. I just felt that the coverage itself was a bit disrespectful and it didn’t really acknowledge him as the writer that he was. So that kind of made me determined to write about that guy, about the writer. I did my final year dissertation for my BA when I returned to Ireland, and then based on that, I was asked would I like to do a Masters. It was a research Masters and I started writing about Hunter as well for that. And when I turned in the first chapter of the thesis, my supervisor said to me, “This is actually Ph.D. quality. Do you want to do a Ph.D.?'' So I said of course.

I felt like I had jinxed him in a way because, believe it or not, the night before Hunter died I was at a bar in Denver. We were discussing the recent reelection of George W. Bush and the mood was not good, to say the least. And Hunter’s name came up in conversation and somebody said, “Well, I wonder how Hunter is dealing with this?” And I started talking about his ESPN column, which they weren't familiar with. And I started telling him about how he had been writing about George W. Bush and how pissed off he was, basically, at the state of the country and how he’d been writing about it for a good four years. And somebody made a remark saying, “I'm surprised he hasn’t shot himself.”

And then the next morning we woke up to the news that Hunter had done that. I was walking across the

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college campus and I spotted my English professor.

And he looked at me and he was like, “You jinxed him by daring to write about him. Now, you're going to have to write about him.” So that was kind of weird how that happened.

That's a fascinating story. I also heard that you're planning on publishing your thesis. Can you tell me a bit about the ongoing process?

Yeah, it's pretty much done actually. I'm looking for the right publisher at the moment. One of the things that I [noticed] very early on when I was writing my Ph.D. thesis [is that] academic writing can be very kind of stale if you like, very detached.

And there is a tendency where people think the more complicated it is to read, the more intelligent or profound it is. And that's actually not generally the case.

You know, it's actually sometimes an awful lot more difficult to Dr. Feehan’s thesis. say something in a simple way. And one of the things I decided early on was that I really didn't want to go with that kind of academic writing style in writing about Hunter. Which is kind of hard, because Hunter is such a lively writer, that his writing really

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would jar with the kind of more traditional academic style. So what I wanted to do with writing my thesis was to make it very accessible and readable. Very early on, I started writing it as if it was a book and not necessarily a thesis. What happens with a lot of Ph.Ds is that when they're finished, then they start to think about publishing it as a book. What they actually find is that it involves an awful lot of rewriting, because they have to basically rewrite their thesis as a book, whereas mine was already book-ready.

So, my main concern at the moment is just finding the right publisher. There are some Irish academic presses that I'm looking at. One of them, UCD Press, they've recently signed a deal with University of Chicago Press to distribute their titles across America.

I’m thinking of something along that route because it's the American market that I really want to actually get the work to. Hopefully, I'll have news on that front sometime soon.

For some of our readers who might not be as well versed in Hunter's writings, could you, in the simplest of terms, tell me what is Gonzo journalism?

Oh, the multi-million-dollar question. (Laughs) It's actually one of the things I addressed in my thesis as well because you have to address the whole idea of Gonzo journalism and what it is. But one of the things that I was very conscious of from early on was this idea that Hunter and Gonzo are so intrinsically linked that you can't really talk about him without talking about Gonzo — that tends to be the focus. People tend to look at Hunter like that was his big achievement:

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this intensely subjective, first-person journalism style. I suppose the simplest way of describing it will be almost like working like an embedded journalist, the way we talk about war journalists now being embedded on the frontlines. Hunter did the same thing. He took it from the likes of George Orwell and his book Down and Out in Paris and London. When he was writing about the Hells Angels, he decided, “I can't be detached from this. I have to be in the middle of it, in order to write about it in an authentic way.” So he got directly involved.

I suppose the clearest example of how another journalist might cover the same subject would be if you were to compare Hunter’s writing about the Hells Angels with Tom Wolfe’s in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Tom Wolfe was quite detached from his subjects, whereas Hunter was right in the middle of it. He was at the parties, at Ken Kesey's compound, the acid tests with Ginsberg and the Hell Angels. Hunter took acid there with them, whereas Tom Wolfe was afraid to do any of that.

But there is something I wanted to make quite clear early on in my writing about Hunter. And it's something that Douglas Brinkley actually identified as well with Hunter. He said that Gonzo journalism isn't really Hunter’s big achievement. There isn't really one single work that he would say is his greatest achievement. Douglas Brinkley said that Hunter’s greatest achievement was actually the legendary persona that he created, spanning all of his work. I thought that was a very interesting point of view. And it starts to make a lot more sense when you delve deeply into Hunter’s work. One of the things people tend to ask is who's writing Gonzo journalism today?

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The reality is that there's really only one person that does or did Gonzo journalism and that was Hunter S. Thompson. The problem is when somebody else tries to do Gonzo journalism, it inevitably sounds or comes across as a kind of cheap imitation of Hunter and it reads terribly. That's because at the center of Gonzo journalism, what actually makes it Gonzo and makes it work is the literary persona that Hunter created.

When you take that out of the story, you don't have Gonzo journalism.

Are you referring to Raoul Duke?

Raoul Duke would be, I suppose, the most famous incarnation of that literary persona. But it does change across his writing from the early years to later years. I think the earliest example of Hunter referring to himself as a literary character in his work is 1959 or 1960. There's a letter that he sent to one of his girlfriends, where he was describing his situation in life and what he was going to do next. And he said, ‘What next for the Hunterfigure?’ So, that actual term is Hunter’s own term. Even before he published anything, he was already looking at himself as a character to be written about. So that's actually what I use as the title of my Ph.D. dissertation: The Genesis of the Hunter Figure, A Study of the Dialectic Between the Biographical and the Aesthetic in the Early Writings of Hunter S. Thompson. Quite a mouthful.

Yes, but it’s beautiful, regardless.

It’s a study, basically, of how Hunter created this literary persona and how it evolved in his writing from

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the very beginning right up to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. But you're right; Raoul Duke would be the most famous incarnation of that persona. But even when he's already writing Prince Jellyfish, which was his first attempt at writing a novel, it was essentially Hunter writing about himself, a very thinly disguised incarnation of himself. And that's what his early discussions with his friends about the value of writing, it was all about how he felt that words could bring order out of chaos. If you use the right words, you can even put your own life in order. So, that kind of explains his whole approach to writing. In writing about his own life, he felt like he could exert a kind of control, if you like, right the wrongs that had actually occurred in his own life. So that was kind of his attraction to literature, to writing.

Is this persona, as you call it, one of the reasons why so many of us regard Hunter S. Thompson as a great American writer?

Yeah, it's the thing that grabs you, it is that persona.

As Douglas Brinkley said, it is his greatest literary creation. The other part of it is that it's such an entertaining character, such a funny character. Very early on, in his early childhood, Hunter was attracted to all these figures like Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and these kinds of myths of the Wild West. And the thing that they all have in common is that they were all kind of outlaw figures. So, he identified with that kind of persona, even as a kid. Even before he started writing, when he was getting into trouble in Louisville as a teenager, he saw himself as the Billy the Kid of Louisville. So he was already kind of fashioning his

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own persona, even outside of literature, as a rebel, as an outsider, as an outlaw. So, that was a very natural thing that crept into his writing very early on. And there's a key book, actually, in all of this, that explains how he developed that persona. It also explains, I suppose, the popularity of the persona, because it’s a popular kind of character across literature; across the arts, actually.

There's a book by Colin Wilson, called The Outsider, it was published in the ‘50s. And it was a study of the outsider persona, the different types across literature, philosophy, and religion. It examined the relationship between the outsider and society, and the attraction of that persona to people that are creative types, if you like. Hunter read that book very early on; he was only about 19 or 20. He actually sent a letter to his mother after he had finished the book and he said to her that if she wanted to understand what was ahead for her wayward son that she should read Colin Wilson's The Outsider.

That really was the key influence when he was that age, because it allowed him to kind of see how this persona, this type of figure, this type of character, kind of transcended all popular forms of creative expression. It's a part of our mythology and it resonated with Hunter and he saw ‘Well, maybe there's a way into literature here where I can actually write about myself or even create myself in that mold.’

And I think that essentially also explains our attraction to his writing, because everybody loves a rebel, the charismatic outsider who not necessarily breaks the law but doesn't necessarily feel like he's obliged to adhere to it, either. He speaks of this in Kingdom of Fear, where he talks about how across

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all different cultures and society, all traditional storytelling and mythology there was always that character in every culture: the charismatic outsider.

So, it's quite clear he had studied it very closely. And I think that that's what actually explains the popularity of his character. It's the classical rebel outsider.

We can all relate to that character.

And you can live vicariously through the character.

You know, Hunter did the things we might like to do ourselves, whatever we're afraid to do.

We touched upon humor, which I think is such an essential part of his writing. And not just because of its entertaining value, but the way it captivates us. What are your thoughts on his approach using humor throughout his writing?

It is an essential part of his writing, and indeed, the persona itself. One of the things I found was kind of a comment because I picked it up from the Beat poet, Ron Whitehead. It was in his tribute to Hunter after he passed away. And I picked up on it and I thought this guy gets it. He said Hunter was kind of similar to Jewish mystics and the figure of the crazy fool. It's the idea that humor could kind of serve as a way of delivering the truth in a more acceptable manner. But if it makes us feel uncomfortable, we can also similarly dismiss it in an easier fashion by saying, ‘Oh, he’s crazy.’

But again, this figure goes back to mythology and storytelling. That idea of the crazy fool that actually turns out to be the wisest in the end — that's a longstanding trope in literature and Hunter kind of picked

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up on that, about how humor can be used to say things that otherwise you wouldn't necessarily get away with saying. So, it's a kind of an insurance policy almost for delivering the truth in an acceptable fashion.

That's a great point of view and I would have never thought of it that way.

It's like an acceptable way of stating things that would otherwise be dismissed. It's a very clever thing.

I wonder, did your perspective on his life but mainly his work, did it evolve throughout your research?

Yes, certainly I was learning about Hunter throughout the whole thing. I suppose it's all about our perception of Hunter, but what originally drove me to do a thesis in the first place is that there's a lot of misconceptions about him as a writer, but also as a person.

I think one of the things I picked up on early on that surprised me was that he was such a sensitive character and a lot of that bravado of the persona kind of masked that. But if you read his letters, when he was struggling to make it as a journalist, to make it as a writer, I think what struck me early on was how deeply affected he was by what was going on in America, what was taking place in society. It really affected him deeply. I didn't expect that, to be honest, because we look upon Hunter as a kind of resilient, strong character. But I think that was masking a lot of suffering that he went through, both in terms of how he was reacting to the events that were taking place, like the assassination of Kennedy and just the general

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turmoil taking place in America during the ‘60s, but also in his own personal life, how he struggled to make it as a writer. He went through really tough times, dealing with no income; essentially it was poverty. And that really kind of struck me because nobody talks about that, nobody talks about how he suffered for his art.

And I think that goes a long way toward explaining the indulgences later on in his life. The alcohol, the drugs… there was a lot of suffering there and I think that did surprise me.

You mentioned the letters and Douglas Brinkley, who had a lot to do with the process of publishing the first two books. And we're waiting for the third, obviously.

Oh, God, yeah. I hope that makes an appearance soon.

So, I understand that the letters played a role in your thesis. Why do you think they're so important?

Well, first of all, if you were to ask me what’s my favorite Hunter S. Thompson work… You know, everyone massively gravitates towards Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas but I actually think his letters collection is just outstanding. I don't think it has quite yet got the credit or the recognition that it deserves, I think. And I hope that when the third volume’s published, I think it will stand up there as his greatest work, actually.

In terms of understanding Hunter, he used his letters as his way of practicing his writing. So, if you look at his correspondence and how it evolved, you can see all the elements of his style as they first start

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to show their signs in his letter writing, like that's where he used to experiment with different styles. So they really show us how he evolved as a writer, but it also shows the incredible output that he had. These letters are an incredible collection and it serves almost like an alternative history of the United States from 1958 up until, well 2005 if we get the third collection. I think it shows how much more of a serious writer he was and how deep a thinker he was. That doesn't necessarily translate to some of his work as well. Just his sheer output and his political insights, it's incredible.

I often encourage people to read his letters collection. It's absolutely brilliant. And I think, and I hope as well, that the third volume will kind of explain a lot of what was going on in his later life as well because his later work tends to be disparaged somewhat. I suspect that people will perhaps look at it in a different light when we understand the context, which hopefully the third volume of letters will provide.

I've been waiting on that one for a while now.

I've heard rumblings that we might be getting it sooner rather than later. We have been waiting for about 15 years now. I was talking about this recently with somebody that it has been 15 years since Hunter’s death and we haven’t really seen any major official release from his estate and I think it's time we got something. There are a lot of anniversaries coming up. This year is the 50th anniversary of the Kentucky Derby piece, his campaign for Sheriff, next year Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas... So I hope there's going to be some releases. There's definitely stuff to be released. Even some anniversary re-issues of his

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books with new introductory essays would be very welcome.

Let’s switch gears and talk a bit about the Beats.

A lot has been said about Hunter’s connection with the Beats and he had a relationship with Allen Ginsberg. But speaking of Hunter Thompson the writer, how do you think he fits into the Beat Generation’s literary canon if he does at all?

It’s an interesting one. One of the difficult things about Hunter, if you were to talk about his influences, for example, the writers that he admired, the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, J.P. Donleavy, they're the writers that Hunter kind of looked to. It was strange in terms of his relationship with the Beats. You would think they’d be kind of a natural fit for Hunter. I don't know whether it was a kind of jealousy there in some aspect, but he was very, very faint with his praise at times for the Beats. And I'm not sure why exactly, particularly with Kerouac. There are letters in his collection where he dismisses Kerouac. But then if you look at Hunter later on in his life, he's full of praise for them and said that he kind of felt a kinship with them.

Not necessarily maybe in terms of the writing but more from the political point of view. But Hunter wasn't somebody that would tend to just gush with praise for anybody.

The impression I get is that Ginsberg is the one that he was most impressed by. Ginsberg first met Hunter in San Francisco because they shared the same weed dealer. Allen Ginsberg was one of the first people to help Hunter with the manuscript for Hells Angels. He helped proofread it and look it over with him. Hunter

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had a lot of respect for him.

But with Kerouac, it was a bit more complicated.

I'm not sure what Hunter’s issue really was with Kerouac early on. But certainly later in life, he seemed to have more respect for him. There was a term he used in Kingdom of Fear where he said, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” That's kind of how he looked at the Beats. And I think he respected the fact that they fought against censorship, and they managed to publish things, certainly writing about drugs and so on, that he felt that they broke down some barriers in that respect and that he felt they paved the way for his writing. And he said he thought the way Kerouac was writing about things, and Ginsberg and Burroughs, he thought, “Well, if they could do it, so can I.” But it was kind of a complicated relationship that he had with them.

But in terms of where he fits… Because I've heard the term Post-Beat.

I'd be inclined to agree with that. You see, Hunter very early on actually addressed that idea of where he fit as a writer and he actually said that he didn't see himself as a Beat writer, or a member of the “Angry Young Men.” And he compared his writing to a bright white golf ball on a fairway of windblown daisies. He didn’t like to be grouped in with anyone. He wanted to stand out from everybody. And I think he does. And he doesn't fit naturally with any group, really. He tends to get grouped with the New Journalism, but if you look at Hells Angels, certainly the first part of that book would fit with the New Journalism movement, but the second half is already moving into Gonzo journalism

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and kind of breaking away from that movement in a sense. So he never fit clearly with any one group, but I think Post-Beat would be certainly accurate.

You mentioned Hunter’s political point of view. As we know, he used Richard Nixon as a sort of archnemesis and that brought forth amazing writing.

With the political climate as it exists today, with what's going on in Washington DC, Brexit, and all these sociopolitical movements dominating the news… Have you been exposed to any writers who are fueled by the times, much in the way that Hunter was in his day?

That's a good question. A lot of people ask what would Hunter make of today's climate and how would he write about it. I suppose, there’s one writer and journalist who stands out to me who's really engaging with what's going on and writing about it in a very insightful way. And that's Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone magazine. But it's more straight journalism as opposed to literature. He's the one that jumps out to me just in terms of how he's engaging with this Russiagate thing, Trump's presidency, but also about how the media is actually dealing with these issues and how they're addressing it.

His latest work is called Hate Inc. It's a brilliant analysis of how the media has devolved, if you like, into the current form that we see today. In terms of how ratings are affecting their coverage of events, and how news platforms have actually followed the Fox News model. If you go back to the 2004 presidential election, Fox News was kind of the running joke amongst everybody. You know their slogan “Fair

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and Balanced�? That was like a punch line for people who just didn't respect what they were doing. And rightly so, because it was all fueled by getting the most ratings and feeding the outrage. Facts took kind of a backseat. But the ironic thing is that the other news networks looked at that and saw how much of a success it was for ratings, and they followed it.

That's why we're now in this current climate of just, I suppose the outrage media you could call it. The 24hour news cycle is about getting as many hits and clicks and fueling outrage. And it's affecting the whole political discourse. There's no time for any measured analysis of what's happening or any political developments. It's just quick knee jerk reactions to everything. And I think if Hunter were alive today, I think he would have been absolutely disgusted with how the media has covered Trump's presidency, for example. I don't think he'd be happy with that at all.

I think the media have played a huge role in actually elevating him and making him successful. And it goes back to that whole Internet thing about how do you deal with the troll? You ignore them. And Trump is like the ultimate troll, but rather than ignoring, they’re actually feeding him and giving him a platform and he's manipulating them and he knows that exactly. And I think Hunter would have picked up on that very, very early. Matt Taibbi is the one who's been doing that and he's been vilified for saying that, which is interesting.

It's like he's lifted the lid on what's actually taking place behind the scenes and he's being attacked. He's been accused of being a Russian agent and all kinds of nonsense.

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I think it's par for the course considering what's happening and Rolling Stone’s long history of being a left-leaning publication. And with Taibbi, I’m not surprised at all at the way he’s being received. But changing the subject to more happy matters... I know you participated in GonzoFest last year. Could you tell me a bit about your experience there?

Yeah, it was amazing. I had appeared as part of GonzoFest in 2017, but it was by video link so I didn't really get to experience it as such. But when they asked me to go there for last year's GonzoFest, I just jumped at the chance. It really was a unique experience, certainly because I'd written about Hunter for so long and about his childhood and growing up in Louisville. I had to see it; I had to go see the place. It's one thing about doing the research and reading about a place but it's another thing to actually go there and experience the place for yourself.

Dr. Feehan at Gonzofest.

And what really struck me when I was flying into Louisville was how similar it actually looked to Ireland from the air. The difference, of course, is the heat. (Laughs) I have to give enormous credit to Ron Whitehead;

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he was incredibly generous with his time. He took me up to see Hunter’s childhood home in Ransdell Avenue.

He brought me all around the neighborhoods where Hunter grew up and it fulfilled a long-time goal of mine to see those places. I went to the museum exhibits and just to see all of Hunter’s life, if you like, on show in his hometown. It was moving to see all of this for Hunter. I got to meet people that I'd actually written about in my Ph.D., some of Hunter’s childhood friends that were part of the Castlewood Athletic Club and the Athenaeum Literary Association. I'd written about how Hunter used to kind of haze the new members of these clubs, and he'd get them to fake epileptic fits in places just to cause kind of consternation. And one of those people that I had written about, I got to meet him, which was a kind of a weird experience. And he couldn't believe that I had written about those events in my Ph.D., either. And then to give the talk at the Speed Art Museum, that was truly something else. It was a real honor and the turnout was beyond expectation.

The Speed Art Museum itself was a hugely impressive museum and they were expecting about 800 people to show up to the exhibit. It was called Gonzo: The Illustrated Guide to Hunter S. Thompson. And they had all the Ralph Steadman pieces on display, photos of Hunter by Annie Liebovitz, they had all the first editions of his books, just a load of different pieces of memorabilia. And the night in question, when the crowds turned up, they actually got over 1,500 people.

And when I was giving my talk, security actually had to stop people coming into the gallery because they couldn’t fit in; there was a fire hazard. So for me, coming all the way from Ireland, to be standing in a museum in Louisville talking about Hunter's life and

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work and in front of me I had Ron Whitehead, William McKeen, Margaret Harrell, Hunter’s son Juan, Hunter’s childhood friends and relatives.

I was blown away by it all, to be honest, and I was delighted to meet Hunter’s son as well. He’s an absolute gentleman and such a calm and collected guy. His book is a great read. It's a powerful book, it’s really quite moving, actually. And I think he's going to be taking over the running of GonzoFest.

But the turnout was amazing, the interest was just phenomenal. So it seems like every year it's been getting bigger and bigger. I think it's nice to see how Louisville has embraced Hunter because obviously they didn’t necessarily have the best relationship over the years. It's like the return of the prodigal son in a weird way.

I'd highly recommend it to anyone interested in Hunter. If they could make it to GonzoFest some year, then go because it's growing every year. The talks in 2019 were fantastic. William McKeen gave a great lecture all about how Hunter developed as a writer.

Matt Taibbi showed up and gave the keynote speech which was really funny, I might add. He was a really nice guy, met everybody afterward, stayed and talked to everybody. I liked how he opened his talk. He said, “Hello, my name is Matt Taibbi. I inherited Hunter's job and his hairline.” I also learned that his mother is Irish and is from my hometown of Limerick City! That was a weird coincidence.

It’s great to see them acknowledging Hunter and embracing his writing. I think and I hope that the next step is that they're going to unveil a statue of Hunter in his hometown, maybe even hopefully name a street after him. If you’re walking around downtown,

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there's a lot of statues and there's a whole boulevard named after Muhammad Ali and I think it'd be a great idea if they were to name one of the connecting streets Hunter S. Thompson Avenue. Seeing as Hunter interviewed Muhammad Ali and they liked each other and respected each other, I think that would be a cool touch.

You could have the corner of Ali and Thompson.

That would be something else.

Yeah.

You mentioned some key people like Ron Whitehead, Juan Thompson, obviously William McKeen. Who do you think are the people who are making substantial contributions to Hunter’s legacy?

Well, there's one person I didn't mention, and I should.

And that's D.J. Watkins, the author of the Freak Power book on Hunter’s campaign for Sheriff. I think that's been one of the best contributions to the field. In terms of our knowledge of Hunter, in recent years, it's a huge, impressive book. D.J. is the curator of the Gonzo gallery. His first book was about Thomas W. Benton, who collaborated with Hunter on the Aspen wall posters. That kind of gave us a hint of what was to come because that book was also a real gem. That was the first time that the Aspen Wall Posters were published in an accessible form, they folded out of the book. And that was a huge thing for me to get my hands on because they're so rare now that the text on the back by Hunter, you can't find it anywhere prior to

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that book being published unless you owned one of the original posters. So for D.J. to publish that book, that was the first time since the campaign for Sheriff that that text was made publicly available again.

That was a huge, huge thing. And to publish his Freak Power book, it's just a wealth of material on Hunter’s campaign. I don't think D.J. gets enough credit for that book. So, that's why I'm mentioning him.

In terms of academia, William McKeen, he does a fantastic job. His lecture at GonzoFest was just a master class on how to give a lecture on Hunter S. Thompson. Obviously, Douglas Brinkley is the literary executor, and as the editor of the letters collection, he’s made some really important contributions as well. And I hope to hear more from Douglas Brinkley.

Margaret Harrell, of course, Hunter’s copy editor for Hells Angels, she's got another book in the pipeline and I'm hoping that it's going to come out soon as well.

But just from the point of view of my own inroads into academia, when I started doing my Ph.D. on Hunter, there was very little academic interest or writing about him. The only published academic book at that point was William McKeen’s book from 1991.

But since I've started, the academic interest in Hunter has exploded. I think there's gonna be a lot more to come in the years ahead, but a lot of that will depend on whether Hunter’s archive is made available for scholars to study. That is going to be the crucial thing. Johnny Depp owns the archive. He said in an interview not too long ago that he would like to take it on the road to make it available to people to see, kind of similar how Kerouac’s scroll for On The Road was toured around the world in different museums.

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He wanted to do something similar with Hunter’s archive, but it's really imperative that the archive is made available to scholars to study because there's a lot of detail about Hunter’s life that we've yet to fill in, particularly his later life, and also the unpublished manuscripts. Scholars need to see that work so that we can understand how his writing fully evolved. But at the moment, it's under lock and key. And it's a real shame that it's not yet available. I think Johnny Depp will definitely do the right thing, and I hope that he makes it available to either a university or a museum.

The sooner the better because there's a lot of writing to be done about Hunter yet. And of course, my own book is going to come out as well! (Laughs) I'm looking forward to that one, of course.

You mentioned McKeen, and he wrote Outlaw Journalist, a fantastic book. How would you describe his role in your thesis?

Well, something that they often say to people when you're writing a Ph.D. thesis is to keep a book in front of you that inspires you. Because it's a hard slog doing a Ph.D. It's a very isolating experience. And motivation and determination are 95% of the work. But it can be hard to stay motivated. William McKeen’s book, his early academic text and Outlaw Journalist, they were the benchmark, that was what I needed. That was the mark I needed to hit. He really inspired me because I really respect his work. It is the best biography out there of Hunter. When I finished my dissertation, then I had to actually pick an external examiner for the thesis defense. For me, there was really only one person and that was William McKeen.

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He flew over from Boston to Ireland and it was funny, they arranged the thesis defense for February 21, 2018.

And that was one day after Hunter’s anniversary, that was a coincidence. But McKeen came over and he was absolutely brilliant. I can't speak highly enough of him, really. I hope we haven't heard the last from him in terms of Hunter. I hope he's got more to say.

I know some of his other books address Hunter as well. Mile Marker Zero is another one of his books, and it talks about Hunter down in Key West, Florida.

And that's a really great book as well. I think some people might have overlooked that one. But there's a lot about Hunter in that as well. You know, McKeen was the trailblazer when it comes to academia and when it came to writing about Hunter, the real writer behind the persona. McKeen was the first one to do that, so you have to give credit for that He's been very kind to me over the years answering my emails and I think the first time you and I corresponded, I was actually asking you what's the best HST biography out there. And you mentioned Outlaw Journalist and I read it immediately. It's fantastic.

There were several Hunter books published in the ‘90s.

Oh, God. Yeah. Go on.

Let me just mention some of the titles. There was Fear and Loathing: The Strange and Terrible Saga of Hunter S. Thompson by Paul Perry, When the Going Gets Weird: The Twisted Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson by Paul Whitmer, Hunter: The

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Strange and Savage… I mean, they all sound the same. That last one was E. Jean Carroll.

How would you rate these books? And were they a part of your research?

I read everything about Hunter that was published, so I had to include them. Certainly, they were published in 1991 or mid-’90s, they’re out of date now, technically.

We know a lot more about Hunter now than when those books were published. But that's not to disparage them from that point of view. Certainly, Paul Perry's book, there are some inaccuracies in there, they're not major ones but it does have its good points as well.

There are some interesting quotes in there. It's okay.

Obviously, time hasn’t been good to these books because they were only able to work with what they had at the time. And now there’s just so much more.

Certainly, Hunter’s letters hadn’t been published when those books were released. Whitmer’s book is really good as covering his early life in Louisville. He did a lot of research into that.

And then you have E. Jean Carroll's book; that's the one book that I have a big issue with, to be honest with you. I’m not a fan of it, at all, for several reasons. So, I would never say to anybody not to read Whitmer’s or Paul Perry's book. But E. Jean Carroll's book, I once said to somebody, take scissors to every second chapter and just cut it out. Because every second chapter is her attempt at Gonzo journalism.

She creates an alter ego called Laetitia Snap and it's all about going to visit Hunter at Owl Farm and, frankly, it is absolutely terrible. There's a reason why people should not try to write Gonzo journalism, and that's because you're not Hunter S. Thompson and any

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attempt to do so just comes across as terrible. And it's supposed to be a biography but frankly, that's not really what I would consider biography, that's fiction or an attempt at Gonzo whatever. And it’s awful and I don't recommend people pay any attention to it. The other chapters in that book are more conventional biography, there are interviews with friends of his and family, and so on. And that's a bit better, certainly.

I’ll give you one example of why the book should not be taken seriously. Everybody knows about Hunter's daily routine, it has become a thing on the Internet. Well, that comes from E. Jean Carroll's book.

And it's… well, it's bullshit. I look upon that as a Gonzo take on Hunter’s routine. So it should be taken with a very large pinch of salt. Frankly, that was not his daily routine. Certainly, there are parts of that that might be accurate in terms of the time he’d get up and working through the night. And yeah, drugs were a feature of his daily life, but not anything to the extent that's made up by that daily routine. I mean, frankly, that would kill you if you tried it, certainly if you tried it on a daily basis. I don't doubt that Hunter might have been able to do that once or twice. But to think that he did that on a daily basis is just ridiculous. And I've talked to people who have worked with Hunter, and they all said the same thing, that it's rubbish. We all know what his vices were, they were part of his life, but that's just a completely exaggerated thing. But people have taken it as fact because it's entertaining.

I certainly say that it's entertaining. It's kind of funny, but it doesn't belong in a biography. And for the record, Hunter absolutely hated all three of these books. The only one he admired was William McKeen’s first academic study of his writing. He kept a copy of it

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beside his writing desk in the kitchen at Owl Farm and would show it to people. It got the stamp of approval and for good reason.

So, what's next for you after you publish your thesis?

Well, actually I see it as a three-parter. So, my first book will cover up to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

And then hopefully the plan is that I'm going to have a second book after that will be addressing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas up until probably The Curse of Lono. It’s Hunter at his peak and how he deals with fame from that peak and how it affects his writing.

Then, the third volume that I want to write is about Generation of Swine through to his death. And I think, funnily enough, that that book is actually going to be the most important one. Because I think that the greatest misunderstanding of Hunter is that period in his life. I'm sure you've seen it yourself. People tend to dismiss his writing after Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. And it’s just quite disparaging of his later work. There certainly were issues, but I think it’s way overboard the criticism because when you think about it, Hunter peaked quite early as a writer. That time period, say with Hells Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the Kentucky Derby piece, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, you're talking ‘67 roughly to ’72. And to produce three classics and also a classic journalism article… I mean, the vast majority of writers don't get to come near that kind of achievement. You know, Matt Taibbi said recently that most writers would kill to have one of those pieces in their arsenal, let alone all of them.

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And I think to expect Hunter to then beat that level of output for the rest of his life is just completely unrealistic. We don't expect it from other writers. So, it's almost like he's held to a different standard in that regard. If you look at the other creative artists, even musicians, they all have their peak gold period. And that's it; their output after that is fixed. And I think Hunter gets really unfairly treated in that regard. And if you look at his later writing, certainly the pieces are shorter. The output isn’t as long or as focused but if you look at, for example, his 9/11 column for ESPN, which was written the day after. That piece is amazing now if you go back and read it, because while mainstream journalists were trying to explain to people who Osama bin Laden was, Hunter pretty much nailed America's foreign policy for the next 20 years in that article. He outlined the war on terror and what was going to happen and we've lived it now. It's just an amazing piece of writing.

He absolutely nailed where we are today in that one little column. You know, he still had it when he was motivated to do it. And I think that to expect him, at his age with his health problems, to be as motivated as he was when he was 35 is crazy. It's just not realistic.

It is true to say that he was a victim of his own success as well. That certainly is true. Fame did affect

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him as a writer and so did his lifestyle. But I think the criticism that he gets and the way that certain people tend to dismiss his later output, it's crazy. But certainly, if you look at his last two books, Kingdom of Fear and Hey Rube, they are now prophetic when you look at what has taken place since they were published. They predicted exactly where we are today. And I think if you go back and reread those books now, I think people will have a greater appreciation for what he was writing about in 2001, 2002.

It's crazy. Under-appreciated gems, those last two.

Yeah, he saw where we were going. I think if he were alive today, I don't think he would be surprised at all at the state of the world as we speak. I don't think he would have been surprised by Trump's presidency — he predicted it. So I think what would actually animate Hunter today, as a writer, would be the current state of journalism and the media. I think he would be disgusted. He was always very critical of the media and journalism. Back in the early ‘60s when the first televised debates went up between Kennedy and Nixon, Hunter was critical of the way the press covered it and [how they] were not asking the hard questions of the candidates. So you could imagine if he wasn't happy then, what would he be thinking about today?

Well, I guess we'll never know. But we can imagine.

We can certainly speculate. You can make an informed decision. But when people ask me what would Hunter think of Trump's presidency, I always say Hunter was

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unpredictable. He always had a unique take on things.

Certainly, you could say that he would be unhappy with how Trump has behaved in terms of the protocols that are normally adhered to by the President. The pageantry, if you like, of the Office of the President, and how you conduct yourself in office. I think Hunter would be unhappy with how Trump has kind of bulldozed over those formalities if you like. But other than that, I would hesitate to actually say what Hunter would say about Trump because we don't know for sure. But he wouldn't be happy. He might certainly get a kick out of the chaos but only perhaps as a source of material to work with.

Well, I'm not happy, so…

I think it's another thing that people forget, as well… If you look at Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, everybody knows Hunter hated Nixon, but people tend to forget that some of Hunter’s most vicious criticism was about the Democrats. That tends to get glossed over, people tend to forget that. And I think if Hunter were alive today, I don't think he'd be any different. I think he’d be firing off critiques in every direction.

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The Beaten Generation:

Burroughs,

Ginsberg,

Thompson…

and the Battle of Chicago

by Leon Horton

It was meant to be an anti-war protest. It was meant to show the Establishment that the People had turned against the Vietnam War. It was meant to tell the world what can be achieved when disparate groups come together through the chant of peaceful resistance: “The whole world is watching. The whole world is watching…” It became a bloodbath.

What happened during the August 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago – the protest marches, Mayor Richard Daley’s roughshod military-style mismanagement, the subsequent rioting and police brutality – broadcast live on the mass medium of television, reverberating across the world via satellite – remains one of the worst stains on America’s social and political conscience. Just as well, then, that three of the most radical writers of the prevailing counterculture were positioned at the front to report back on the battle: William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Hunter S. Thompson.

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I went to the Democratic convention as a journalist and returned a raving beast. It permanently altered my brain chemistry.

There was no possibility for any personal truce, for me, in a nation that could hatch and be proud of a malignant monster like Chicago.

– Hunter S. Thompson I think everybody who watched television during the convention experienced a widening of consciousness because… outright police brutality was shown so clearly that even TV and radio commentators were saying, “This is a police state.”

– Allen Ginsberg The youth rebellion is a worldwide phenomenon that has not been seen before in history. I do not believe they will calm down and be ad execs at thirty as the Establishment would like us to believe. Millions of young people all over the world are fed up with shallow unworthy authority running on a platform of bullshit.

– William S. Burroughs 1968 was a revolutionary year: global in its political activism, social protest, and civil insurrection; mostly, but not exclusively, against the Vietnam War. In January, as the United Nations proclaimed 1968 the “International Year of Human Rights,” the hands

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of the atomic clock on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (designed to show how close the world was to mutual nuclear destruction) were reset from twelve to seven minutes to midnight. That same month, North Vietnam, in what would soon be known as the Tet Offensive, broke a ceasefire and launched their biggest attack yet on the south.

In his expansive account, 1968: The Year that Rocked the World, award-winning journalist Mark Kurlansky called 1968 a “year with no middle ground” and identified four merging factors that created the dominant mood: “the example of the civil rights movement, which at the time was so new and original; a generation that felt so different and so alienated that it rejected all forms of authority; a war that was hated so universally around the world that it provided a cause for all the rebels seeking one; and all this occurring at the moment that television was coming of age but was still new enough not to have become controlled, distilled, and packaged the way it is today.”

The whole world was watching.

The world watched as the war in Vietnam continued to enrage; they watched as the Prague Spring uprising in Czechoslovakia took on the brutality of the Soviet Union; as disgruntled students and striking workers in Paris united against the state and all but brought down de Gaulle’s government; as a million people were massacred or starved to death during the civil war in Biafra, thanks in no small part to the foreign policies of the US and the United Kingdom; as Israel confiscated land from Jordan, Syria, and Egypt, exacerbating a conflict that exists to this day; as dissenters across the globe – from China to Mexico to Haiti – were beaten and murdered by their own governments. And

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thanks to television, to what the media guru Marshall McLuhan termed the “Global Village,” they could see it all happening simultaneously on their doorsteps.

In America – from white picket fenced suburbs to inner-city ghettos, from crumbling tenements to the house on Pennsylvania Avenue – 78 million antennae turned on and tuned in to see a spontaneous combustion of napalm, psychedelic rock, hippy love-ins, the civil rights movement, “Hell, no, we won’t go” draft dodgers, gay liberation, race riots, atrocities in Vietnam, feminist protests, university students marching on the Pentagon… Despite Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in, The Dean Martin Show, or The Beverley Hillbillies, the average viewing Joe couldn’t help but smell the stench of dissent.

Allen Ginsberg was no stranger to social dissent or to political activism. As a Jewish homosexual poet, stalwart of the Beat Generation, radical free-thinker, and drug-user, he had spent much of his life, his writing, and his not inconsiderable influence, in the fight against oppression wherever he saw it, both at home and abroad. The FBI kept a file on him. He was a counter-cultural legend, living embodiment of the Hippies’ link to the Beats.

In February, political and social activist Abbie Hoffman visited Ginsberg in New York and told him that he and Jerry Rubin – previously one of the organizers of the VDC (Vietnam Day Committee) – were planning a “Festival of Life” in Chicago, to coincide with the Democrat convention. Their intention, Hoffman said, was to show, with the unwitting aide of the assembled media, that there was an alternative voice to the one espoused by politicians. They had already launched the Yippies (later to be named the Youth International

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Party) and would run their own candidate for president: a pig named Pigasus. To that end, they had issued a manifesto through the underground press: Join us in Chicago in August for an international festival of youth music and theater….Come all you rebels, youth spirits, rock minstrels, truth seekers, peacock freaks, poets, barricade jumpers, dancers, lovers and artists. It is summer. It is the last week in August and the NATIONAL DEATH PARTY meets to bless Johnson. We are there! There are 500,000 of us dancing in the streets, throbbing with amplifiers and harmony.

We are making love in the parks…

Hoffman wanted Ginsberg on board, and asked him to use his influence to invite the Beatles and Bob Dylan. Ginsberg was intrigued, but his punishing schedule meant he was unable to commit to an active role. He did, however, endorse the project and on March 7, he took part in a televised press conference with Hoffman and Rubin, where he outlined the intention of the festival as “a desire for the preservation of the planet.”

Although it had been claimed as a victory by the generals, the Tet Offensive turned the tide of feeling against the Vietnam War (which would continue for another seven years) and the policies of President Lyndon B. Johnson. So much so that on March 31 he announced he would not be standing for re-election.

His decision, gasoline on the fire, sealed the race for the leadership nomination, with Senator Robert

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Kennedy seen by many as the best, not to say only, real hope for the beleaguered Democrat Party.

Johnson’s withdrawal had an unwitting effect on journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who had a deal in place with publishers Ballantine to write The Johnson File, a savage attack on the president. With the surprise announcement the deal was now off. “My nerves are shot and my temper is raw,” Thompson wrote to his younger brother Jim, “and last Sunday night Johnson’s cop-out cost me $10,000. That was what I was going to get for a book on the bastard. I really hated to see him quit; he deserved to be destroyed on his feet.”

The race to the Whitehouse, already seen by most political pundits as an easy walk for the Republicans, suddenly took a back seat on April 4, when James Earl Ray, an escaped white convict, walked up to the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, and shot and killed civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King.

Alongside the outpouring of national grief, came national anger, with race riots igniting in more than forty cities across the country. Where there was looting and damage to property, many of these cities called in the National Guard. Property is everything in America, and politicians live or die by it.

In Chicago, Mayor Daley – “Mayor of the most ethnic city in the country and of the country’s most racially segregated city” according to David Farber in Chicago ’68 – issued orders to “shoot to kill” arsonists and “shoot to maim” looters. Daley, a thickset bull of a man, had built his career on patronage and favour (machine politics, critics called it) and since 1955 he had controlled the city like a fiefdom. On his home turf, through kickbacks, payoffs, and political machinations, Daley was the Democrat Party.

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The intransigent mayor had fought hard to bring the upcoming convention to his city, and he was not about to let a bunch of long-haired freaks and radicals call the shots. When word came through from the FBI that over one hundred protest groups – an estimated 200,000 people – were expected to descend upon Chicago in August, Daley acted fast: he denied the Yippies a permit to hold their “Festival of Life,” instigated an 11 p.m. curfew on the parks, effectively denying the demonstrators a place to sleep, placed 11,500 armed police officers on standby, mobilized 5,500 Illinois National Guardsmen, and had a further 7,500 Texas soldiers ready to be air-lifted in should they be needed. He couldn’t stop the protestors coming, but he sure as hell would be ready for them.

With his proposed book on President Johnson dead in the water, Thompson turned his attention to an idea he’d been nurturing for some time: an autopsy on the death of the American Dream. He’d been struggling to nail a spine to it, fearing he’d gotten into something far too “vast and weighty,” but with his unerring nose for trouble, he now felt Chicago looked set to provide the answer. “A presidential campaign would be a good place, I thought, to look for the Death of the American Dream,” he wrote in his memoir Songs of the Doomed.

“When Chicago came round, my head had gotten into politics and I thought, well, if we’re going to have a real bastard up there I may as well go.”

Thompson had pitched his American Dream book to publishers Random House, and on May 10 he wrote to his editor Jim Silberman requesting Random secure him the required press credentials for the convention: “I could go to Chicago and spend all my time lost in mob scenes unless I have a ticket to the inner circle… If

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Esquire can get Bill Burroughs accredited, RH shouldn’t have any problem with me. Right? And if you have any doubts as to the wisdom of my attending the convention, for Christ’s sake let me know. I see it as one of the major power struggles of the era, and I want to understand it.”

But Thompson’s yearning to understand the grasping for power took a nasty slug to the gut on June 5, when, having won the California primary, Robert Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Was this the Death of the American Dream he’d been looking for?

Thompson was watching Kennedy’s short-lived victory on TV, but he was out of the room when the screaming started. Kennedy’s last (public) words before he was gunned down were: “And now on to Chicago…”

On Saturday, August 24, two days before the convention, a plane from London hit the tarmac at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. Among the jet-lagged passengers spewing from the bird’s belly walked a bespectacled ghost: thin, hollow-faced, wearing a brown suit, black shoes, and a snap-brim fedora. “First visit in 26 years,” he would write later in ‘The Coming of the Purple Better One’ – “Last in Chicago during the war where I exercised the trade of exterminator.

‘Exterminator. Got any bugs lady?’” The writer/ exterminator carried a Norelco – “‘The tools of your trade’ said the customs officer touching my cassette recorder” – and proffered his passport: William Seward Burroughs.

Esquire had indeed commissioned the decidedly apolitical Burroughs to cover the convention – an unusual choice, made all the more unreal by their decision to send him with the French author,

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playwright, and erstwhile gay prostitute Jean Genet, and Terry Southern, screenwriter of Stanley Kubrick’s blistering anti-war satire Doctor Strangelove. It was an invitation Burroughs didn’t want to refuse. He was living in London, which he hated for just about every reason – the damp climate, the damp food, the ridiculous licensing laws – and the prospect of a $1,500 writing fee plus all expenses trip to America, the chance to see old friends, and make some new allies, proved irresistible.

Burroughs checked in to the Sheraton-Chicago, and met with Genet and Southern, John Berendt from Esquire, and Richard Seaver from Grove Press – publishers of both Genet and himself. He was delighted to meet Genet, one of his writing heroes, who, as a convicted criminal, had been denied an entry permit to the US and had to be smuggled into the country from Canada. They were refused service in the hotel’s offensively named Golliwog Room, and after a few drinks in the downstairs lounge, with Genet expressing a desire to see Les Yippies, jet-lagged Burroughs left them to it.

Allen Ginsberg flew into Chicago the same day as Burroughs and made his way to the Yippie headquarters on the edge of Lincoln Park. So much had happened since his original meeting with Hoffman back in February – not least the assassinations of King and Kennedy – that he felt duty-bound to take a proactive part in proceedings, if only to reaffirm his commitment to nonviolent protest. He was worried he was alone in his desire for peaceful demonstrations, that the Yippies had the wrong leadership in Hoffman and Rubin, that threatening to pollute the city’s water supply with LSD, for example, was a deliberate attempt

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to provoke the authorities into violence.

He was right to be concerned. The Yippies had been busy over the previous months, organizing theatrical protest events such as a “Yip-In” at New York’s Grand Central Station – which attracted a great deal of media coverage and descended into violent confrontation with the police – and attending planning conferences with groups such as the Mobe (the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam) to coordinate their tactics.

But the Mobe was a serious leftwing political movement, and had little time for the goofing attitude of the Yippies. Their chairman David Dellinger was repulsed by what he saw as the Yippies irresponsible hedonism, announcing after one meeting: “Like the society they criticize they are too often victims of their own rhetoric and their own failure to think through the consequences to other people of the things they say or do.”

Rubin and Hoffman just didn’t seem to care.

Despite not having a permit for their ‘Festival of Life’ in Lincoln Park, they decided to go ahead regardless, realizing that if they cancelled thousands of people would still come. To publicize their commitment to the cause, on Friday 23, they staged a happening at the Chicago Civic Centre plaza, and introduced their nomination for president: “a real big, ugly pig”. As Rubin tried to address the bemused spectators, the police shoved their way through the crowd, shouting “Get Rubin! Make sure you get Rubin!” Rubin was arrested but later released.

Ginsberg was not happy at this state of affairs, and he made his position clear. He agreed that a certain amount of political theatre was necessary

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but, sensing the air of confrontation, he refused to cooperate with anything that might lead to violence or bloodshed.

They discussed what to do about the curfew.

Hoffman and Rubin wanted to hold the park, declaring that if the police persisted, there’d be gangs of protestors “going out from the park to loot and pillage.” Ed Sanders, Yippie organiser and member of rock band The Fugs, was highly critical: “I’m sick and tired of hearing people talk like this,” he exclaimed.

“You’re urging people to get out and get killed for nothing. Man, that’s like murdering people.” Ginsberg put it more succinctly: “The park isn’t worth dying for.”

Despite public statements from the major protest groups that they would not offer resistance to the curfew, Ginsberg was deeply troubled when he later witnessed Mobe marshals in Lincoln Park, led by an enthusiastic Abbie Hoffman, conducting karate training sessions and practicing crowd protection techniques, while a police helicopter hovered overhead. That night, around 10:30, Ginsberg and Ed Sanders were still walking in the park, when, as Barry Miles in Allen Ginsberg: Beat Poet put it: There was a sudden burst of lights, and a wave of police moved in fast to clear the park. Allen was surprised and said to Ed, ‘They are not supposed to be here until eleven!’ He began to chant ‘Om!’ He and Ed slowly walked out of the park, gathering a group of people, until fifteen or twenty of them were uttering a solid deep vibrational chant as they walked towards the Lincoln Park Hotel. It took

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about twenty minutes to reach the road dividing the park from the hotel, by which time he had attracted about a hundred people, all calm and unharmed by the police.

The police announced that the park was closed, and twenty or so officers cleared the few remaining stragglers. After that, the evening went without much trouble, and the demonstrators – many of them chanting “Peace Now!” – melted into the night without incident.

The following morning, Burroughs, Genet ,and Southern went out to Midway Airport to see the arrival of Senator Eugene McCarthy. Following Robert Kennedy’s untimely assassination, McCarthy was now officially the anti-war candidate, gathering support from many of the protesters. Alerted to the potential violence, Senator McCarthy had encouraged his supporters to stay away; but in their youthful enthusiasm, they came anyway.

Standing on the flat-bed trailer reserved for the press, Burroughs was surprised, not to say moved, by the gratifying reception McCarthy received: “An estimated fifteen thousand supporters there to welcome him mostly young people. Surprisingly few police. Whole scene touching and ineffectual particularly in retrospect of subsequent events.” Genet, however, felt that he detected a certain “whorishness” in McCarthy’s face.

Burroughs and Genet both wore McCarthy pins, and with the enthusiastic response of McCarthy’s people to their Esquire credentials, they waited over an hour to speak to the man. McCarthy, an erudite

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scholar, was proud of his liberal, cultured views, and understood and valued his popularity with certain quarters of the leftfield press. Genet wanted to ask him if he was “intellectually and psychological suited” to be president. But no meeting occurred, McCarthy was swept along to his campaign headquarters at the Hilton Hotel, and Genet’s question would later be answered at the convention.

Ginsberg returned to Lincoln Park, where the “Festival of Life” had officially started at 4 p.m. About two thousand people were in attendance, far fewer than the 500,000 Hoffman and Rubin had predicted, but despite the ominous police presence in the background, the mood was celebratory: the sun was shining, balloons hung from the trees, people drank and danced, and drugs were freely available – just another hippy love-in.

But there was a problem. In denying the festival a permit, the authorities refused to allow the Yippies to bring in the flatbed truck they intended to use as a stage, which meant that bands such as the MC5 – “Kick Out the Jams, Motherfucker” – one of the few groups not to cancel, had to perform with a makeshift PA system right there on the grass, which meant that most of the crowd couldn’t see them, which meant a lot of tension.

Ginsberg asked for the microphone and spent fifteen minutes chanting Hare Krishna to the overexcited crowd, then sang William Blake’s “The Grey Monk” to try and calm the mood. The burgeoning crowd were more interested in rock music, however, and as MC5 resumed playing, Ginsberg – crazy-cootChrist – moved on with his growing band of followers.

As more people, mostly locals, entered the park

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attracted by the music, Hoffman and another Yippie called Super Joel tried to drive the truck in. But the police stopped them, the crowd started screaming obscenities, and Super Joel, along with several others, was arrested. A few people started throwing stones, so Hoffman declared the festival over, by order of the police, further antagonizing the crowd. Several officers started to menace people with their clubs, some of them shouting: “Get the fuck out of town!”

At 9 p.m., the police began forcibly clearing people from the park, two hours earlier than expected. Most of the crowd splintered into smaller groups, a deliberate Mobe tactic to disseminate the police threat. Some argued that they should stay and fight. As the police helicopter hovered over the trees, people chanted, “Hell, no, we won’t go!” and “Fuck you!” The police, forming skirmish lines, pushed forward, billy clubs at the ready. Mark Kurlansky in 1968: The Year That Rocked the World described the scene:

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The Yippies built a barricade of trash baskets and picnic tables. The police squared off with the demonstrators and ordered them and the media to leave the park. In a long line three men deep, the police looked ready to attack, so the television crews turned on their camera lights, making the flimsy barricade look more substantial by giving it deep black shadows. The newsmen had started wearing helmets. There were flags, the Viet Cong flag, the red flag of revolution, and the black flag of anarchy. The police were beginning to appear. The Yippies,

though visibly afraid, held their ground.

Suddenly a strange humming sound was heard, and Allen Ginsberg once again appeared leading a group in “Om.” This time, however, the atmosphere was so febrile that Ginsberg’s calming mantra had little effect. As the crowd shouted “Pigs eat shit!” the police began swinging their billy clubs, and were heard to shout: “Kill, kill, kill, the motherfuckers!” People started throwing bottles and rocks. The police stood there and took it for a moment… then suddenly, without warning, they charged, clubbing everyone they reached, smashing heads – And Ginsberg, sitting on the ground, calm Buddha in the maelstrom, chanted “Om” as people ran, screaming, and the police kicked and battered and clubbed everyone in sight.

Alerted to the fighting, TV crews and pressmen swarmed into the park, and met the indiscriminate arm of the law – “Get the bastard with the camera” – as tear gas and mace hit them head-on. Mobe medics, dressed in white, were beaten as they gave first aid.

As Ginsberg chanted “Om”, a police officer raised his club to him, but Ginsberg sent him away, saying “Go in peace, brother”. The demonstrators fought back with tree branches and a police captain shouted orders – “Don’t leave the line… Get back” – and lost control as the skirmish lines dissolved into a feeding frenzy of blood and broken bones.

Police reinforcements arrived continuously – more beatings, more blood, more tear gas, pushing the protestors and the fighting beyond the confines of the park and out into the Chicago streets, into the

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traffic and the passersby, attacking anyone without prejudice.

Ginsberg chanted “Om” as the fighting raged through the night in clouds of gas and smashing glass. Jerry Rubin watched from a safe distance and remarked to a friend, “This is fantastic and it’s only Sunday…. They might declare martial law in this town.”

It was two o’clock in the morning before the fighting was over. The battle of Chicago had begun.

On the first day of the convention, delegates packed into the nine-thousand-capacity International Ampitheater, four miles from the troubles, among the beef stockyards and the lingering stench of the slaughterhouses – Chicago’s legacy. Mayor Daley, (who opened the convention by saying “As long as I am mayor of this city, there is going to be law and order in Chicago”) had the building cocooned in barbed wire and swamped with security. The mood in the Ampitheater was as rank as the air outside, with many – mostly the supporters of Eugene McCarthy – complaining they were being shunted like cattle; while the best seats in the house were retained for Daley’s favourites, out in front where they could be heard over the din of dissonance – Daley the Kingmaker.

Burroughs and the Esquire contingent, meanwhile, joined Ginsberg at a Yippie press conference in Lincoln Park. Ginsberg took an instant shine to Genet, later trying to bed him. Burroughs busied himself with his tape recorder – recording, intercutting, and playing back random sounds. To the policemen on duty, he looked like any other news reporter. In his Esquire article ‘The Coming of the Purple Better One’, he would write:

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We spend Monday morning in Lincoln Park talking to the Yippies. Jean Genet expresses himself succinctly on the subject of America and Chicago. “I can’t wait for this city to rot. I can’t wait to see weeds growing through empty streets.”

May not have to wait long. Police in blue helmets many of them wearing one-way dark glasses stand around heavy and sullen. One of them sidles up to me while I am recording and says: “You’re wasting film.”… Another sidles up right in my ear.

“They’re talking about brutality. They haven’t seen anything yet.” The cops know they are the heavies in this show and they are going to play it to the Hilton.

As Burroughs recorded, Genet spoke – with Ginsberg translating – denouncing the police and the previous night’s events. Militant groups such as the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) spoke of their delight at the fighting: “Great surging feeling. Fantastic when we took Michigan Avenue, so surprised.” Tom Hayden, SDS stalwart and now Mobe activist, called the confrontation a “100% victory in propaganda.”

The Yippies, revelling in this sanctification of their struggles, announced they would join the march to the Ampitheater on Wednesday: “We support our brothers and sisters in the MOB(E)…. We all fight in different ways; we all have respect for each other’s decisions.”

Mayor Daley’s tactics had only succeeded in unifying the protestors into a coherent force.

That evening, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Genet, and

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Southern attended the Democratic convention.

Ginsberg had been given the required press credentials

by Esquire, but even so, with his long hair, beard, and hippy attire, they had trouble getting in. Terry Southern, in his freewheeling article “Grooving in Chi,” described it as: “exactly like approaching a military installation – barbed-wire, checkpoints, the whole bit; Genet was absolutely appalled, I was afraid he was going to be physically sick; Burroughs, of course, was ecstatic; it was all so grotesque that at one point he actually did a little dance of glee.”

It is doubtful that Burroughs did any kind of dance, gleeful or otherwise, and what he saw inside the Ampitheatrer didn’t impress. Mayor Daley had opened proceedings earlier by saying Chicago welcomed protestors but not people “who seek to destroy instead of build… who would make a mockery of our institutions and values.” Genet denounced the convention as gaudy and meaningless. In his superlative biography Genet, Edmund White wrote: “Ginsberg stood, raised both arms and bellowed ‘Hare Krishna!’ He and Genet held sticks of burning incense.” The protest had little impact, however, and after half an hour, the Esquire gang (with the exception of Burroughs, who went for a drink at the Oxford Club Bar on Clark Street) headed back to Lincoln Park.

The park had been the scene of intermittent troubles throughout the day, with more and more people turning up to catch the Zeitgeist. By 9 p.m., three thousand people had gathered – not just out-of-town Yippies, but locals, Westside teenagers, blacks from the South Side … all bearing their respective grudges against the authorities. As the impending curfew approached, the mood of the burgeoning crowd grew

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nasty, the mood of the police even nastier, not helped by the fact that Daley had them pulling twelve-hour shifts.

The police delivered a warning: “We have information that there are weapons in the hands of persons in the park to be used against the police officers. We intend to take every step to see that police officers are not injured. This is your final warning!

Move out of the park!”

Hunter S. Thompson, newly arrived, witnessed the whole thing. “On Monday night I saw 3000 lined up behind a barricade of park benches and garbage cans,” he wrote to his Random House editor Jim Silberman – “beating on the cans with clubs and shouting: ‘Pigs Eat Shit!’ at a mass of 400 cops, about 100 yards away, chanting ‘Kill, kill, kill….’”

Ginsberg, Genet, and Southern locked arms and moved towards the barricades. The crowd yelled obscenities and chanted “Hell, no, we won’t go”, as others banged their metal trash cans. Barry Miles in Allen Ginsberg: Beat Poet described what happened next: It seemed to Allen that they were looking for a confrontation with the police, since it was 11p.m. He began chanting “Om!’ and was joined by more and more people until almost everybody at the barricades was doing it. After about fifteen minutes, a police car came rolling down the hill behind them and crashed into the barricade, with a tremendous sound of breaking glass. People scattered.

Allen retained his composure and, still

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chanting, removed himself from the scene.

As they fled the park, they were amazed to witness police officers burst through the trees in pursuit not of protestors but of press photographers. Many of the officers had removed their name plates and badges, and now the media were fair targets. By the end of the night, seventeen reporters – from the Washington Post, Newsweek, Life, ABC, CBS, and NBC – had been hospitalized. A press pass was no protection in the city of Chicago.

Like the previous night, demonstrators fought back – hurling rocks, bottles, and bags of urine at their attackers. Police officers lobbed gas canisters and smoke grenades, smashed through barricades, clubbed people as they tried to escape. Gagging and choking, people once again fled into the streets, into more ferocious fighting. Patrol cars were surrounded, their windows smashed. Enraged, the police responded with animal brutality. David Farber in his explosive analysis Chicago ’68 described the mayhem:

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A seventeen-year-old hippie girl was ordered to move by a middle-aged police officer. She replied that she had a right to be on the sidewalk. He screamed, “You hippies are all alike. All you want is free love.” He knocked her to the ground with his club and then pinned her to the ground with his club and said, “Free love, free love. I can give you some free love.”

A group of eight policemen surrounded three teenage girls and screamed and

screamed at them, “Pig! Pig! Pig! Bitch!

Bitch!” A black reporter was knocked to the ground by a police officer. On the ground, he waved his press credentials.

The officer said, “That don’t mean anything to me nigger’” and beat the reporter several more times with his club.

Hundreds of panicked people, protesters and pressmen alike, spilled from the park on to Clark Street.

The police punched and kicked and fell on people, cracking skulls and clubbing them in the kidneys.

Burroughs, who was smoking a joint in the back of a truck with some fans, stumbled bleary-eyed from the vehicle to witness the police beating on innocent bystanders. “What are they doing here in the first place?” he would wonder in ‘The Coming of the Purple Better One’. “The worst sin of man is to be born.”

Tuesday morning, when the smoke and tear gas had cleared, the Mobe sponsored a press conference to tell the American people they would not be terrorized. Close to one hundred reporters were present, while a dozen television cameras recorded Rennie Davis, Mobe spokesman, announcing “the whole world was watching” what Daley and his police force and his Democrat Party were trying to do to the anti-war movement.

The reporters, some of them victims themselves, didn’t need convincing. Early that morning, editors and executives of nearly all the major news outlets had complained about the treatment meted out to their staff by the police. Daley was forced to hold an impromptu press conference: “We ask the men of the news media to follow the instruction of the police

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as other citizens should… and that they not join the running and rushing which is part of these disorders.”

In a U-turn that would come to typify the final analysis of the media to the rioting, the Chicago Tribune – the city’s most conservative newspaper – backed the Mayor. Ordinary Chicagoans, sitting down to breakfast, could read: “some of the newsmen looked like hippies and perhaps they refused to obey police orders to move. If so, police perhaps were justified in using force.”

Ordinary Chicagoans, sitting down to eat their cornflakes, couldn’t have been further removed from the special guest who arrived in Lincoln Park to deliver a speech that evening. Bobby Seale, leader of the Black Panthers, was no Yippie, no peace-loving hippy, or nonviolent Mobe member. His was a message of violent revolution, fought on the streets with bullets, and the crowd of young people, galvanized by three days of police brutality, felt a strong wave of brotherhood as they cheered Seale’s call to arms: If a pig comes up to us and starts swinging a billy club and you check around and you got your piece – you gotta down that pig in defense of yourself. Pick up a gun, and pull that spike out of the wall.

Because if you pull it out and you shoot it well, all I’m gonna do is pat you on the back and say, “keep shooting.”

That night, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Genet, and Southern attended the “un-birthday” party for President Lyndon B. Johnson at the Chicago Coliseum.

Speakers railed against Johnson and the Vietnam War.

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People burned their draft cards and chanted “Fuck you, LBJ.” Protest singer Phil Ochs sang “Call it peace or call it treason / Call it honor or call it reason / But I ain’t marching anymore.” Mobe leader David Dellinger told the crowd they would march on the Ampitheater the following day, permit or no permit. Burroughs took the stage to deliver a damning statement in his distinctive St. Louis drawl: Regarding conduct of the police in clearing Lincoln Park of young people assembled there for the purpose of sleeping in violation of municipal ordinance. The police acted like vicious guard dogs attacking everyone in sight.

I do not “protest.” I am not surprised.

The police acted in the manner of their species. The point is, why were they not controlled by their handlers? Is there not a municipal ordinance requesting that vicious dogs be muzzled and controlled?

After the party, they all returned to Lincoln Park, where a ten-foot wooden cross had been erected by a group of local clergy. “We Shall Overcome”, they sang, in a show of solidarity with the Yippies and the Mobe – “Onward Christian Soldiers” against the curfew.

While SDS organizers argued it would in fact be better to take to the streets, others that they should hold the park, Steve Lerner, writing in the Village Voice, captured a brief tableau: Sitting in a cluster near the main circle, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Genet, William

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Burroughs and Terry Southern were taking in the scene. Ginsberg was in his element. As during all moments of tension during the week, he was chanting OM in a hoarse whisper, occasionally punctuating the ritual with a tinkle from his finger cymbals. Burroughs, wearing a felt hat, stared vacantly at the cross, his thin lips twitching in a half-smile. Genet, small, stocky, bald-headed, with the mug of a saintly convict, rubbed his nose on the sleeve of his leather jacket. I asked him if he was afraid. “No, I know what this is,” he replied. “But doesn’t knowing make you more afraid?” I asked. He shook his head and started to speak when the sky fell on us.

The sky fell in at 12:30, as once again the police fired gas grenades into the crowd. “The presence of the cross, after the tear gas came rolling in, slowly engulfing it, lent the spectacle an unreal and cinematic quality,” wrote Terry Southern. But there was worse to come. The police had a new weapon up their sleeve.

Lumbering through the yellow fog, came metal beasts – “I look up to see what looks like a battalion of World War I tanks converging on the youthful demonstrators,” wrote Burroughs – beasts in the shape of garbage trucks. Only, these garbage trucks had been fitted with special mechanisms, courtesy of the army, which sprayed powerful CN gas at the crowds.

The police, wearing gas masks, loomed through the fog and the orange headlights. People ran, screaming, tearing through the trees. Task Force officers pursued

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them, clubbing, beating, kicking at the fallen. One of the clergy was knocked unconscious. Once again, the violence spilled into the streets. Once again, police cars were pelted with stones, bricks, bottles, bags of urine. The police used so much tear gas that it drifted into oncoming traffic, into residential areas, into apartments – burning eyes, throats, lungs…

Beating a sensible retreat, Burroughs recorded it all as dirty realism, black & white, hardboiled: I take off across Lincoln Park tear-gas canisters raining all around me. From a safe distance I turn around to observe the scene and see it as a 1917 gas attack from the archives. I make the lobby of the Lincoln Hotel where the medics are treating gas victims. The Life-Time [sic] photographer is laid out on a bench, medics washing his eyes out. Soon he recovers and begins taking pictures of everything in sight. Outside the cops prowl about like aroused tomcats.

According to Barry Miles, they all took refuge in the Lincoln Hotel, where Ginsberg was staying, which “was filled with people coughing, tears streaming from their eyes.” This might well have been when Ginsberg invited Genet to his room and into his bed.

“You were my only sunshine, my only light in America,” Genet would later tell Ginsberg; but, whichever night it occurred, at the sight of the poet’s flaccid penis, Genet remained true to his reputation – he got up and left the room. Ginsberg was philosophical: “Of course I was no spring chicken. I was forty and had a thick

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black beard.”

By Wednesday, the city of Chicago was effectively under martial law – just as Jerry Rubin had predicted.

On the day the Democrat Party would vote in their candidate for the presidency, the day the Mobe intended marching on the Ampitheater, Mayor Daley ordered in the National Guard. They came in jeeps festooned with barbed wire and machine guns, in full battle gear. On the corner of Michigan Avenue and Balboa, at the Conrad Hilton, they leapt from army transports, un-shouldering carbines fixed with bayonets, M-1rifles and shotguns. It was a scene more reminiscent of the Soviet tanks rolling into Prague only the week before – “Chicagoslovakia,” Abbie Hoffman called it.

Shortly after 8 a.m. Hoffman was arrested as he was eating breakfast in a Lincoln Park restaurant, ostensibly for having the word FUCK etched on his forehead. He was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, but really the police just wanted him out of the way of the Grant Park rally. For the next thirteen hours, he was shunted from precinct jail to precinct jail, where he was worked over by police, out of sight. “I laughed hysterically through the beatings,” Hoffman recalled in his autobiography Revolution for the Hell of It, “I was so winged-out from not sleeping and all the tension.”

Grant Park, a series of green belts running parallel between Michigan Avenue and Lake Michigan, seemed an ideal location for the Mobe to make their headquarters. It was near the hotels where many of the delegates were staying, which meant the only television news crews outside of the Ampitheater were there – a good place for an effective demonstration.

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Over the last few days, protestors in Grant Park, as in Lincoln Park, had felt the thud of the night stick and fled the throat-burning tear gas. Despite the Mobe’s nonviolent philosophy, every night had ended in bloodshed and every day, despite David Dellinger’s pleas for peaceful protest, more militant voices like Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis seemed to be winning the argument for direct confrontation.

Hunter S. Thompson, after spending the morning at the Ampitheater, where he saw the debate and defeat of the antiwar platform, was trying to get to Grant Park for the rally when he ran into a cordon of police at the Balboa Street bridge. As he flashed his credentials, an officer snarled “That’s not a press pass” and struck him violently in the gut with his truncheon, knocking him to the ground. Thompson got to his feet and beat a winded retreat to the Sheraton-Blackstone Hotel, where he was staying. Getting his breath back, he changed into running shoes and grabbed his motorcycle helmet…

By 3 p.m. fifteen thousand people had gathered for the rally at the park’s band shell. They were a different crowd to that of Lincoln Park: embittered McCarthy supporters and older, more conservative members of the antiwar movements, in town only for the rally and hoped-for march, now joined their fellow demonstrators. Many of the “seasoned” protesters (some wearing helmets and carrying home-made weapons: bottles, pieces of concrete, balloons filled with urine) resented the virgin newcomers. Before the speeches had even started, the legal rally and “illegal” march appeared to be fracturing.

As Mobe leaders struggled to control the demonstrators, police surrounded the band shell

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on three sides, issuing leaflets warning protestors that they would be arrested if they tried to march; while a few hundred yards away, the National Guard ominously looked on from the roof of the Field Museum – with many more stationed in a nearby parking lot.

At 3:30, as ex-SDS president Carl Oglesby tried to speak to the crowd, a young man climbed a nearby flagpole and began to take down Old Glory. Thinking he was about to desecrate the flag, officers rushed forward and yanked the youth from the pole. As they dragged him away, another group (undercover agent provocateurs, some said) tore down the flag and replaced it with a red T-shirt. More officers moved in, hurling tear gas, but angry demonstrators simply threw the canisters back and, choking on their own gas, the police fell back. Then they marshalled… surged forward in greater numbers…

Furious, Rennie Davis dashed to the flagpole and tried to set up a line between the police and the crowd.

In response, five officers beat him to the ground – and kept on clubbing him as he tried to crawl away. He was knocked unconscious and rushed to hospital.

As Dellinger tried to maintain order, Tom Hayden (who had been adopting a variety of ever more bizarre disguises to avoid arrest during the last few days) grabbed the microphone:

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This city and the military machinery it has aimed at us won’t permit us to protest…. Therefore we must move out of this park in groups throughout the city and turn this excited, overheated military machine against itself. Let us make sure that if blood is going to flow let it flow all

over this city. If gas is going to be used, let that gas come down all over Chicago and not just all over us in the park. That if the police are going to run wild, let them run wild all over this city and not over us. If we are going to be disrupted and violated, let this whole stinking city be disrupted and violated…. Don’t get trapped in some kind of large organized march which can be surrounded. Begin to find your way out of here. I’ll see you in the streets.

Some, not many, followed Hayden, but most remained at the band shell. The author Norman Mailer, in town to cover the convention for Harper’s Magazine, watched as Ginsberg addressed the remaining crowd.

As he recalled in “Miami and the Siege of Chicago”: The police looking through the plexiglass face shields they had flipped down from their helmets were then obliged to watch the poet with his bald head, soft eyes magnified by horn-rimmed eyeglasses, and massive dark beard, utter his words in a croaking speech. He had been gassed Monday night and Tuesday night, and had gone to the beach at dawn to read Hindu Tantras to some of the Yippies, the combination of the chants and the gassings had all but burned out his voice, his beautiful speaking voice, one of the most powerful and hypnotic instruments of the Western world was down to the

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scrapings of the throat now, raw as flesh after a curettage.”

“The best strategy,” Ginsberg said, hoarsely, “in cases of hysteria, overexcitement or fear, is still to chant ‘Om’ together. Join me now as I try to lead you.”

After everything he had seen, all the brutality and blood, Ginsberg remained serene with his Buddhist principles of nonviolent civil disobedience – with what Ghandi and his followers knew as satyagraha.

As pockets of violence continued throughout the park, Dellinger tried to organize the march into lines, and convinced Burroughs, Ginsberg, Genet, and Southern to lead from the front. Burroughs the cool, cynical observer became Burroughs the political activist: I find myself in the second row of the nonviolent march feeling rather out of place since nonviolence is not exactly my program. We shuffle slowly forward the marshals giving orders over the loudspeaker.

“Link arms… Keep five feet between rows… You back there watch what you’re smoking… Keep your cool… This is a nonviolent march… You can obtain tear gas rags from the medics…”

The National Guard, meanwhile, moved into the area in force. Warned by police that demonstrators were breaking up benches to use as weapons, they were tasked with guarding the series of bridges that linked Grant Park to Michigan Avenue, while the police

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formed skirmish lines west and southwest of the band shell – the direction in which the march was moving.

As several thousand protestors reached the edge of the park, they found their way blocked by barbed wire and guardsmen with machine guns. Burroughs: We come to a solid line of cops and there is a conflab between the cops and the marshals. For one horrible moment I think they will let us march five bloody miles and me with blisters already from walking around in the taxi strike. No. They won’t let us march. And being a nonviolent march and five beefy cops for every marcher and not being equipped with bulldozers it is an impasse. I walk around the park recording and playing back, a beauteous evening calm and clear vapour trails over the lake youths washing tear gas out of their eyes in the fountain.

As Dellinger tried to negotiate, more police officers arrived (bringing a bus for holding prisoners) and proceeded to bisect the marchers. Reporters and demonstrators alike were warned that they were now in an arrest situation. Barry Miles in Allen Ginsberg: Beat Poet: Dellinger asked Allen to calm the crowd and the troops by chanting. “There was this long line behind us, there was this great mass of armed people in front of us. It was a tricky, scary moment,” Allen

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said later. He took the microphone, and with the tattered remains of his voice, he began chanting “Om Sri Maitreya”.

People sat down, expecting a long wait, and quite a few began to chant along with him. When Allen’s voice finally gave out everybody just sat quietly.

Dellinger’s pleas fell on deaf ears, and it was becoming clear to both sides that no one – neither police nor protestor – was in charge. As the march began to break up, people tried to leave the park by the other bridges, but repeatedly found their way blocked. On one bridge, a huge mob was forced back by bayonets and rifle butts as reinforcements arrived, charging the trapped crowd, deploying heavy doses of tear gas.

Frantically, the crowd headed for the Jackson Street bridge, which was unguarded, and made it to Michigan Avenue – where they ran headlong into the Poor People’s Campaign march, replete with mules and wagons, as it headed for the Ampitheater.

The march, sponsored by the Southern Christian Leadership Council, was one of the few to hold a permit, and with the enthusiastic encouragement of the wagon drivers, many protestors joined the slowmoving train. As the march proceeded to the corner of Michigan and Jackson, near the Hilton, the police had no choice but to allow them through… and within minutes the entire area was swarming with thousands of angry people.

Ginsberg and Burroughs, meanwhile, escaped across another unguarded bridge to the north of the park, while Jean Genet was pursued by police as he

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tried to get to his car. In an apocryphal tale, often told

by Burroughs, Genet ran into an apartment building in terrified flight and knocked on the nearest door, which was answered by a male student who, remarkably, was writing a thesis on him. But it doesn’t seem to be true. According to Edmund White in Genet, the person who answered the door was described by Genet as “a young and very beautiful black woman.” No mention was made of any thesis.

By 7:30, there were several thousand people trapped at the intersection outside the Conrad Hilton, directly in front of the television cameras. They chanted “Hell, no, we won’t go,” “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh,” and “Sieg Heil” – taunting police, as reinforcements arrived. With the sun setting behind the Chicago skyline, the order was given to clear the streets. Dozens of enraged officers charged the crowd from all directions – Only this time many of the demonstrators met them headon, and now it was the turn of the police to suffer indiscriminate beatings, as the crowd feigned retreat then surged forward again. Officers were punched, kicked, knocked to the ground, and trampled over. But for every injured comrade, a dozen more Task Force officers charged into the mêlée.

Thompson, who had left his hotel, was standing outside the Hilton with a group of fellow journalists when all hell broke out. As he recalled in his memoir Kingdom of Fear: I stood against the wall, trying to put my helmet on, while people ran past me like a cattle stampede. The ones who weren’t screaming were bleeding, and some were being dragged. I have never been

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in an earthquake, but I’m sure the feeling would be just about the same. Total panic and disbelief – with no escape. The first wave of cops came down Balboa at a trot and hit the crowd in the form of a flying wedge, scattering people in all directions like fire on an anthill… but no matter which way they ran, there were more cops. The second wave came across Grant Park like a big threshing machine, a wave of long black truncheons meeting people fleeing hysterically from the big bash at the intersection.

Thompson pulled on his motorcycle helmet just as a billy club came down hard on his head. With his brain rattling around his skull, the violence continued all around him. Police officers on three-wheeled motorcycles ran people down. Another group of officers looked on and cheered as a soldier (a deserter, it turned out) attacked a Mobe medic. Innocent bystanders were sprayed with Mace and dragged off to the holding buses; as more police officers, skirmish lines splintering, charged again and again.

Senator George McGovern looked down from his fourth-floor rooms in the Sheraton-Blackstone and exclaimed to his aides, “Do you see what those sons of bitches are doing to those kids down there?” Across the way, at the Hilton, Senator McCarthy also witnessed the battle, and immediately gave permission for his suite to be used as an emergency clinic for the injured.

Above him, on the top floor, Vice President Hubert Humphrey was busy writing his acceptance speech, when a faint whiff of tear gas from the air conditioning

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curled under his nose. Glancing out of the window, he decided to take a shower.

Down on the street, just a few feet from Thompson, a phalanx of policemen charged protestors, forcing them against the plate glass window of the Hilton’s Haymarket Inn with such ferocity that, with a sickening crash, the window shattered and the people tumbled backwards through jagged glass teeth and fell, bleeding, into the restaurant. Officers pursued them inside, running amok, beating the wounded, diners included, as they tried to crawl – hands, knees, and severed arteries – across a carpet of glass shards.

Thompson, spotting a gap between the raised truncheons and the fallen protestors, made a dash for his hotel – about sixty feet away – where he ran into club-wielding officers trying to hold back the crowd. “I live here, goddamnit!” Thompson screamed, holding his key aloft, as he was slammed against a wall. “I’m paying fifty dollars a day!”

Once in his room, he locked and chained the door and tried to compose himself. He was in shock. He couldn’t make sense of the state-sanctioned terror. He was, as he recalled in Kingdom of Fear: Trembling, unable to make any notes, staring at the TV set while my head kept whirling out of focus from the things I’d seen happen all around me… and I could watch it all happening again, on TV; see myself running in stark terror across Michigan Drive, on camera, always two steps ahead of the nearest club-swinging cop and knowing that at any instant my lungs would be shredded by some bullet

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that would hit me before I could even hear the shot fired.

Neither a lifetime of clashes with authority nor a journalist’s instinct for “getting the story” could have prepared Thompson for what he’d just witnessed.

“These bastards knew my position, and they wanted to beat me anyway.” He still had his press pass around his neck, more a target than protection out there on the streets, but he could use it elsewhere…

Although the police managed to clear the intersection in a little over twenty minutes, the violence – captured live, and on a seventeen minute news reel that would pass into history as “The Battle of Michigan Avenue” – continued for hours, with cameras picking out the crowd chanting “The whole world is watching!

The whole world is watching!” as they were mercilessly beaten by a police force that had long lost any semblance of control.

Officer J. Shaeffer was not only present that night, but had the dubious distinction of being a serving policeman and a National Guardsman. In Vietnam: The Definitive Oral History, Told from All Sides by Christian G. Appy, Officer Shaeffer recounted his experience:

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I always remember this one incident. The police shot tear gas in there after things really started to heat up. But I’ll tell you the truth. It was like a Vietnam thing really because you never know who was who.

I mean they could have been throwing tear gas. Who knows who started some of this stuff?

So everybody starts running. When I say

everybody I mean the police as well as the – I’m not going to call them rioters – the dissidents. I wind up running from the tear gas for about half a block, choking and gagging. I run around the corner and go into a doorway. I can’t even see, my eyes are burning so bad. When I am finally able to see, I’m in this doorway with two of these hippies. (Laughs.) Here we are. We’re taking shelter together. I mean can you imagine what a picture this would have been? And believe me when I tell you, I did not have the slightest thought to arrest them or do anything.

So we’re just standing there saying, you know, “Son of a bitch,” swearing and choking. You feel like you can’t breathe.

So I just walked away, thinking, what the hell is this insanity? In fact, you know what? I think we are all victims together in this whole business, in this whole thing.

Thompson, meanwhile, had made his way to the press gallery at the Ampitheater. In Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson’s Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism, Timothy Denevi described Thompson as “wild-eyed and stinking – the tear gas still in his skin” as he watched the proceedings on the floor.

When football coach Bear Bryant was nominated, somewhat ingenuously, for president, Thompson could no longer contain himself. He started screaming, “Martin Bormann!” at the delegates below – much to the bemusement of his press colleagues. “Martin

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Bormann! Martin Bormann!”

As news of the chaos on the streets filtered through to the delegates, their aides and congressional leaders – many of whom were hearing about it for the first time – loud calls were made to adjourn and reconvene the convention in another city. But Daley was having none of it. According to Mark Kurlansky in 1968: The Year that Rocked the World: A priest then rose to lead the convention in prayer, and it seemed to Allen Ginsberg, who was in the convention hall, that the priest was blessing the proceedings and the system it represented. He jumped to his feet and, though no one had heard more than a raspy whisper from his tired voice that day, he blasted out an “omm” so loud that it drowned out the priest, and he continued without stopping for five minutes. According to Ginsberg, he did this to drive out hypocrisy.

Thompson looked on from the press gallery, as Senator Abraham Ribicoff took the podium to nominate George McGovern as an anti-war candidate. “As I look to the confusion in this hall,” he said over the hubbub, “and watch on television the turmoil and violence that is competing with this great convention for the attention of the American people, there is something else in my heart tonight… And with George McGovern as president of the United States we wouldn’t have Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago!”

The crowd went wild. All eyes turned to Mayor

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Daley. In the full glare of the television cameras, Daley turned purple and shouted, “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch! You lousy motherfucker! Go home!” Ribicoff just shook his head sadly: “How hard it is to accept the truth.”

Thompson couldn’t believe what he was witnessing.

He would later write to Ribicoff: “In retrospect your performance stands out as the highpoint, for me, of that whole nightmarish scene… There was an awesome dignity in your handling of Daley and his thugs, and for a moment that whole evil scene was redeemed – but only for a moment.”

The balloting began at 11:20, and Vice President Hubert Humphrey breezed into the nomination with an easy majority. The Democrat Party was now officially a pro-war party. When Humphrey rushed up to a television camera and kissed it, Jean Genet, also in the press gallery, was revolted and stood up to leave.

“I’m very happy,” said Ginsberg, sitting next to him.

“It’s so hideous that all that will have to disappear in a few minutes.”

On Thursday, while the Esquire contingent rested, Thompson – insult to injury – was thrown out of the Ampitheater by security agents and, unable to sleep, spent the day wandering the bloodied streets; thinking, drinking, making notes, trying to understand what could not be understood.

“This administration and the people of Chicago,” Mayor Daley announced after the battle for Michigan Avenue, “will never permit a lawless, violent group of terrorists to menace the lives of millions of people, destroy the purpose of a national political Convention and take over the streets.” In Daley’s eyes, he was simply standing up for the ordinary Chicagoan, and

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he accused the media of promulgating a “distorted and twisted picture.”

There were more speeches in Grant Park throughout the day. While hundreds and then thousands of outof-town protestors began to leave Chicago, others stayed to listen to the antiwar delegates, celebrities, and local dissidents. David Dellinger called it a “tragic victory.” and proclaimed “Millions have been educated and horrified by this experience.” Rennie Davis told the crowd: “Don’t vote… join us in the streets of America…

Build a National Liberation Front for America.” Keeping a low profile, Tom Hayden warned reporters “What we have gained here is the bringing into fruition of a vanguard of people who are experienced in fighting for their survival under military conditions.”

At the Ampitheater, Mayor Daley had the press and spectator galleries packed with his own supporters – with banners reading “We Love Mayor Daley” – for Humphrey’s acceptance speech. Humphrey quoted St. Francis of Assisi: “Where there is hatred let me sow love.

Where there is injury, pardon.” Before leaving Chicago, he gave an interview to CBS: “I think we ought to quit pretending that Mayor Daley did anything wrong. He didn’t.”

There were several more attempts to march on the Ampitheater, but each met with tear gas and dozens of arrests. There was worse to come that night at the Hilton, where police, accompanied by the National Guard, stormed the suite of the McCarthy campaign and beat up the staff and volunteers. When McCarthy himself confronted them, they melted back into the streets. “Just what I thought,” McCarthy shouted.

“Nobody’s in charge.” The police would later claim that objects had been hurled at them from the fifteenth-

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floor windows, windows that had been locked for hours.

Thompson was returning from a Ramparts magazine party, when he ran into Blair Clark, McCarthy’s campaign manager: I got back to the Hilton around dawn, just in time for the wild aftermath of the cop raid on McCarthy’s HQ. People running and screaming in the lobby – bleeding, falling, [veteran CBS correspondent] Blair Clark darting wild-eyed from one scene to another… it was the ultimate horror, the final groin-shot that only a beast like Daley would stoop to deliver. It was an LBJ-style trick: no rest for the losers, keep them on the run and if they fall, kick the shit out of them.

On Friday, as the Democrat convention wound up, Burroughs, Genet and Southern flew to New York and checked in to the Delmonico Hotel to write their respective articles. Esquire arranged a mock-up photo shoot, of the three apparently standing over the dead body of a fallen protestor, but Genet demanded more money for what he rightly saw as a “faux mort.” Editor Harold Hayes called him a thief, to which the author of The Thief’s Journal replied, “Naturellement. Je suis un voleur.” He got his money.

Burroughs, in his inimitable style, turned in a piece of writing that would kick-start his next book, The Wild Boys:

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I have described the Chicago police as left over from 1910 and in a sense this is true. Daley and his night-stick authority date back to turn-of-the-century ward politics. They are anachronisms and they know it. This I think accounts for the shocking ferocity of their behavior.

Jean Genet, who has considerable police experience, says he never saw such expressions before on allegedly human faces. And what is the phantom fuzz screaming from Chicago to Berlin, from Mexico City to Paris? “We are REAL REAL REAL! REAL as this NIGHTSTICK!” As they feel, in their dim animal way, that reality is slipping away from them.

Thompson stayed in Chicago a while longer, picking over the rotting carcass of the Democrat convention:

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So I stayed around all day Friday, mainly sleeping – but for the record I sort of wandered around and viewed the remains, checking the empty suites for echoes, picking up the handbills, talking to the wounded, thinking… and on Friday night I really went out of my head. I wound up racing around Chicago on a bike, drunk and drugged, burning a week’s accumulation of adrenaline. No sleep, a dirty argument with a gaggle of cops at the Hilton coffee shop on Saturday morning… and then the plane, four more

hours of whiskey in the Denver airport, and finally home around dusk.

Chicago ’68 was won or lost, depending on your point of view, in the full glare of the assembled media.

For the Yippies, for Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, Chicago was a success, because as Rubin himself said: “We wanted to show that America wasn’t a democracy, that the convention wasn’t politics. The message of the week was of an America ruled by force. That was a big victory.” Hoffman went further: “There’s a civil war going on in America – right now!”

For Mobe David Dellinger: “It was a clear-cut victory because the police acted abominably and our people showed courage, aggressiveness and a proper sense of values.” They felt they had held a mirror up to the beast.

Mayor Daley would fight a propaganda war with demonstration leaders following the convention.

In a televised press conference he would make an unfortunate Freudian slip: “Gentlemen, a policeman isn’t there to create disorder. A policeman is there to preserve disorder.” Daley claimed that he had received 135,000 letters in support of his actions, and opinion polls backed him up. Only 10% of white people thought the police had used too much force, as opposed to 63% of black people; whereas 25% of all respondents felt that the police hadn’t gone far enough. Even those opposed to the Vietnam War recorded hostility towards the demonstrators – 23% with extreme hostility.

Allen Ginsberg saw Chicago as proof of his conviction that the US was becoming a police state.

“Before Chicago, that would have been considered

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an impropriety, even though many already felt it was true, secretly,” he told Playboy in an interview in April 1969. “To make it official like that turns things over in people’s minds; suddenly they wake up in a different country from where they thought they were. But it was there all along.”

Despite his official condemnation of the authorities, he was equally scathing in his damning of fellow protesters, as Bill Morgan in I Celebrate Myself revealed: “Allen was shocked by the violence and regretted that he had taken part and encouraged others to get involved. The demonstrations were poorly organized and the message that was sent across the country was not an affirmation of life, as the Yippies had promised.”

Years later, shocking many of his fellow protestors, Ginsberg would talk further on the failings of the antiwar movement: “More and more by hindsight, I think all of our activity in the late sixties may have prolonged the Vietnam War. As Jerry Rubin remarked about ’68, he was so gleeful he had torpedoed the Democrats…

So that might be the karma of the Left, because of their anger, their excessive hatred of their fathers and the liberals, their pride, their vanity… our vanity, our pride, our excessive hatred.”

Burroughs saw Chicago as proof of his belief that the only way to regain control from “occupying powers” is through direct action and, where necessary, violence. As Ted Morgan in Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William Burroughs wrote: “He felt the seeds that he and Allen and Jack [Kerouac] planted years ago were bearing magnificent fruit. These young people challenging the political establishment and battling the Chicago police were in a sense the

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spiritual offspring of On the Road, Howl, and Naked Lunch.”

On September 9, Burroughs wrote an enthusiastic letter to his friend Brion Gysin in Tangier: “Dear Brion…

You were right when you said I might not want to leave America. The place has changed unrecognisably since we were last here. There is real resistance among black and whites on a scale and organization I have not seen anywhere else. In Chicago I was addressing rallies and taking part in marches and its fun.”

Oddly enough, of the three, the usually fearless Hunter S. Thompson was the most traumatised. “That week at the Convention changed everything I’d taken for granted about this country and my place in it,” he wrote in his memoir Kingdom of Fear. “I went from a state of Cold Shock on Monday, to Fear on Tuesday, then Rage, and finally Hysteria – which lasted nearly a month. Every time I tried to tell somebody what happened in Chicago I began crying, and it took me years to understand why.”

In a letter to his friend, the CBS News correspondent Hughes Rudd, he said: “It took me two weeks to calm down. I kept bursting into tears at unexpected moments… and now I’m trying to write some of it down, but it’s hard. Nobody really believes me when I say how terrifying it was, nothing I read compares to what I saw – so I feel like I’m working in a nightmare vacuum, with nothing but my notes to assure me that it really happened.”

Thompson would never write the ‘Death of the American Dream’ book he promised, but in Chicago – in what he claimed was “worse than anything I ever saw the Hell’s Angels do” – in Chicago lay the roots of what would become, only three years later, his most

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famous polemic against the evils of authoritarianism: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Assessing the aftermath of the Democratic convention, even the more conservative quarters of the media could not deny a terrible reckoning in their country’s political history. Washington Evening Star political commentator Haynes Johnson summed it up: “In its psychic impact, and its long-term political consequences, it eclipsed any other such convention in American history. Destroying faith in politicians, in the political system, in the country and in its institutions.

No one who was there, or who watched it on television, could escape the memory of what took place before their eyes.�

And yet, there were many, even within the antiwar movements themselves, who felt the true legacy of Chicago was this: the demonstrations had simply handed control to the enemy. 1968, lest we forget, was the year Richard Milhous Nixon came to power.

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Shoe Fits Mind

A that the Ginsberg’s South American Journals

by David S. Wills

In 1960, Allen Ginsberg accepted an invitation to attend a poetry conference in Chile. The conference was to last only about a week, but the inveterate traveller was keen to venture on through more of the vast continent. Altogether, he spent around six months in South America, visiting Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, and Peru.

His time in South America was important on a personal and poetic level. Now famous for “Howl,” he was feeling old and confused about the meaning of life, the universe, and his place therein. The new collection of Ginsberg’s journals, South American Journals: January-July 1960, edited by Michael Schumacher, offers invaluable insight into the poet’s mind as he wandered up and down the western edge of South America, searching for answers.

Ginsberg’s South American journey began in Santiago, where he wrote several times about an anteater he had seen at the zoo. Although he was several years away from his important Indian journey, he displays in his poems and journals an awareness

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of Buddhist (and sometimes Hindu) concepts. He argues that the anteater was doomed by karma to eat ants for all its days, and was very much “a joke on the cosmos.” This leads him to proclaim: I understood not merely Charles Darwin & the theory of Evolution I understand the history of All sentient beings and their Poor Trapped Souls These journals document not only a poet on the move through his physical surroundings but, of course, his internal dialogue. During this period, Ginsberg was grappling with the nature of life and death, vast and changing ideas about consciousness, and the notion of God. Throughout the book, the reader is taken through a confusing array of perspectives and dialogues as Ginsberg tries to argue with himself over these issues. Sometimes he puts forth a confident proclamation, but mostly he is uncertain.

Perhaps the most constant thread throughout this collection is Ginsberg’s discussion with himself over what the universe is and whether or not there is only one universe. (He believes there isn’t.) His position on the nature of the universe and of reality changes often, but at one time states:

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The instant in which the Universe appears as a mirror of some inward thought of mine is the purpose for which the universe was created.

Elsewhere, remarking on the idea of a god, he says: God is so beautiful that it doesn’t make a difference whether he exists or not This is not a statement of belief in one single god, however. Although he sometimes talks about a single god and addresses some parts of this book as a onesided conversation with such a being, Ginsberg thinks that “Monotheism is madness” because there are 20 million universes.

Death is another constant. During this period, Ginsberg turned 34 and he was convinced that he was halfway through his life. Many of the poems in this book are concerned with death and he thinks often of what will happen after his own passing, which he believed would come from a tumour he felt was growing in his ass. “When my time comes it’ll be too fast,” he says, and wonders what will become of his partner, Peter Orlovsky. When Ginsberg sees bones, he struggles to imagine how these could once have belonged to a living, conscious being like himself, and asks, “How many bones in the ground[?]”

There are countless records of dreams throughout the book, some of which are short notes and others long narratives with many characters from his past – Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, Joan Vollmer, and William Burroughs included, as well as Marlon Brando, whom he did not know. Many of these involve death, too, and some show a sadness over the loss of closeness with his old Beat friends. Throughout his time in South

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America, he met many people but remained largely alone and totally celibate.

As with most of Ginsberg’s journals, letters, and interviews, this collection often includes his ideas on the meaning and significance of poetry. It is “a shoe that fits the mind,” he says. However, he is torn on its true importance and questions whether a “transcendent Idea” could ever end suffering. Throughout his time in South America, Ginsberg witnessed poverty and hardship, and he had a moment of doubt about whether an earlier vow to be a labour lawyer would have been a better use of his life: My poetry is all a half-celestial con, worth nothing to the bloodshot eyes of Physical sufferers in the mines & factories & fields.

Perhaps the most important part of the book is the large section in which Ginsberg is experimenting with ayahuasca, a powerful drug used for religious reasons by various people in that part of the world.

There are copious notes on his experiences, which were largely ones of terror and doubt, but honestly one gets a better understanding of this from his letters than his journals. Still, the evolution of his views on consciousness and visions is evident throughout this collection, and therefore important.

In all, this book is a useful addition to Beat scholarship and will be an essential source for people writing papers on Ginsberg in the future. It will also be interesting to those with a strong interest in the poet’s life and work, although at times it seems like a prerequisite for appreciating it is an already substantial knowledge about him. Ginsberg’s journals

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were complex and confusing and it would have been helpful to have had them dated with a little more explanation about where he was when he wrote them. There are useful footnotes that point out who the people mentioned were, but little to say where Ginsberg himself was except his own words, and these descriptions are often unclear. At one point, he crosses the border into Argentina for a very brief visit and a page title changes to reflect this. However, it continues to claim he is in Argentina for a further 20 pages, when in fact he is back in Chile only a few pages later.

The flaws with this book are largely to do with design, such as the aforementioned error in page headings. There is also the questionable choice of a cutesy heart symbol to divide sections and some rather ugly fonts used throughout that very much detract from the tone of the book. The cover, too, is quite unattractive but we shouldn’t judge a book by that measure. Despite all that, the use of photographs and photocopies to illustrate his journals and journeys is a nice touch.

In any case, where it matters this is a wonderful book. Schumacher has once again done an excellent job of collecting Ginsberg’s work. After his work gathering Allen’s Iron Curtain journals and collected interviews, this is another valuable addition that should have a place in any good Beat collection.

Allen

Ginsberg:

South

American

Journals

January–July 1960 Edited by Michael Schumacher. University of Minnesota, 2019. ISBN 978-0-8166-9961-2

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The Deconstruction

and Resurrection

of Bob Kaufman

by Ryan Mathews “America, I forgive you … I forgive you Nailing black Jesus to an imported cross …”

-- Bob Kaufman, Benediction1

“Bob was a sacrificial victim in the sense that there was no compromise with him. He couldn’t live any other way but the way he lived.”

-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti2

Bob Kaufman doesn’t dance down the streets of North Beach at night but his ghosts still do. Thirty-three years after his death, and with the Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman finally available, Kaufman – the unique poetic and cultural agent provocateur, once called 1 Kaufman, Bob. “Benedictions”. Appears in New Direction 17. James Laughlin (Ed). Norfolk, CT. New Directions Books. 1961.

Page 230.

2 Nicosia, Gerald, Editor. Cranial Guitar: Selected Poems of Bob Kaufman. Minneapolis. Coffee House Press. 1996. Page 26.

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“Perhaps the best of the beat poets of the 1950s”

by The National Observer, continues to elude simple definition and defy easy categorization.

He may indeed have been the greatest poet of his generation, but his work never appeared in Donald Allen’s monumental – and career making – 1960 release, The New American Poetry 1945 – 1960, that showcased many Beat contemporaries including Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Brother Antoninus (William Everson), Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Lew Welch, Philip Lamantia, Kirby Doyle, Phillip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Stuart Perkoff, Michael McClure, Ray Bremser, LeRoi Jones, and David Meltzer.3 Hailed by many today as one of the most significant Black poets of the 20th century, Kaufman is conspicuous by his absence in Langston Hughes’ landmark New Negro Poets U.S.A. collection that includes the work of Beat fellow travelers Ted Joans, Audre Lorde, and LeRoi Jones.4 Though never having the fame – yearned for in the case of Ginsberg and perhaps unwanted in the end by Kerouac – associated with the other demigods of the original Beat pantheon, Kaufman came to define the movement in the popular, “square” imagination by inspiring San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen to coin the work, “beatnik.”

In a telephone interview with the Los Angeles Times following the poet’s death, Caen told Times staff writer Burt A. Folkart that he was thinking about Kaufman when he coined the term that tried to cram an entire 3 Allen, Donald M. The New American Poetry. New York.

Grove Press, Inc., 1960 4 Hughes, Langston. New Negro Poets U.S.A. Bloomington.

Indiana University Press. 1964

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countercultural generation into one neat linguistic pigeonhole. “It was a combination of the beat poets like him and Sputnik (the first Soviet satellite) that typified the era and gave me the word,” Caen explained.5 Through decades of acceptance and neglect, Kaufman, Caen’s primal, “beatnik” poet, has managed to remain the Beat Generation’s archetypical liminal man; a meta-Trickster ironically condemned to be trapped forever between dueling mythic origin stories, other people’s perceptions, political expectations, and academic and critical reinterpretation.

Stare at a photograph of him, watch film footage, or just read his work, and it’s all too easy to see what you want to see – the tortured artist or the perpetual Zen master/student; the committed political radical or the madman; the poet or the clown; the addict or the martyr; the lost or the found.

All these elements are clearly there, but Bob Kaufman, the human being, somehow remains a perpetually blurred image of a shadow in the picture, but tantalizingly just slightly out of frame.

Unlike most countercultural figures who go on to be legends, Bob Kaufman never sought fame, going out of his way to escape it. “I keep trying to die, but you won’t let me,” Kaufman told his second wife Eileen as he rose to take the stage at a 1981 reading at the Old Spaghetti Factory, a long gone North Beach landmark.

On another occasion he told Raymond Foye, first an admirer, then a neighbor and friend, and later his 5 Folkart, Burt. “Bob Kaufman, One of Original S.F. Beatnik Poets, Dies.” Los Angeles Times. January 14, 1986. Retrieved (3/22/19) at https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-0114-me-27966-story.html

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editor and anthologist, “I want to be anonymous . . . my ambition is to be completely forgotten.”

He did succeed in dying – far too early in fact, at age 60 – but he has been far less successful in his ambition to be completely forgotten.

In death, Bob Kaufman, the man, is still largely unknown outside of the memories of his friends, some of whom you’ll hear from soon. Bob Kaufman the poet, while continuously building an audience, is still criminally under-appreciated.

But he was right about one thing – people won’t let Bob Kaufman, the myth, die.

And so the ghosts of Bob Kaufman still haunt the Beat memory of Columbus and Grant Avenues, screaming Lorca and Eliot into the wind, scorning the hipsters and Beat tourists who flock to Vesuvio to sip “The Jack Kerouac” or a “Bohemian Coffee,” before, or after, crossing an alley named for the Great Rememberer to trudge up the well-worn backstairs of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers to visit the, “Poetry Room” – a plain-shelved shrine to Beat Literature – without realizing it was once the apartment of Vesuvio’s founder Henri Lenoir, one of the last of the original North Beach bohemians.

What would the real Bob Kaufman make of the streets where he ran, if not free, at least beyond restraint? What would he make of how a scene that never quite knew what to make of him has evolved?

What would he tell us if he could come back for one last time to climb on a table and proclaim his truth?

Provocative questions with answers. The search for Kaufman’s “real” identity is difficult and full of apparent paradoxes. He might not have even known the answers himself. His description of the search for

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Truth from “A BUDDHIST EXPERIENCE” offers tantalizing hints that may or may not serve as a metaphor for his own life: “CANNOT GIVE IT A NAME OR SHAPE, MIGHT SEEK TO FIND A CONTEXT TO UNDERSTAND THE LANGUAGE BEING USED, HISTORICAL, YES, ALSO SOMETHING ELSE, HOW PEOPLE EMERGE FROM THE GROUP. COMPLETE, INDIVIDUAL, EACH RESPONDING TO SOME HIGHER STONE OF ORDER UNCHALLENGED IN THE SEARCH FOR MEANING …”6 The poem itself addresses the Zen state, but it ends on what may be an autobiographical note:

“PEOPLE SEEM TO HAVE PERSONAL REASONS

FOR WHATEVER THEY DO

I MUST FIND MY MOTIVES.”7

Origin myths – pick your poison

Sometimes stories are told to glorify the storyteller, not the subject.

While some Kaufman origin myths were clearly of his own invention, they have been altered, embellished, and repurposed in ways even he could not have possibly anticipated. No surprise when both 6 Kaufman, Bob, Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman.

Cherkovski, Neeli; Foye, Raymond; and Swindell, Tate (Eds.), San Francisco, CA. City Lights Books. 2020. Page 195 7 Ibid. Page 196.

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truth and fantasy are rooted in the birth of an AfricanAmerican Catholic poet with Jewish roots – and just a hint of voodoo thrown in as a lagniappe – who sought salvation as a Buddhist.

Perhaps no one has better captured what Maria Damon, chair of the Humanities and Media Studies Department at Pratt Institute, called Kaufman’s, “genealogical indeterminacy,” better than longtime North Beach resident, poet, playwright, memoirist, and printer Kay McDonough.

In her poem, Bob Kaufman Reading At Vesuvio’s Bar, McDonough wrote: “Jew not Jew Black not Black Outlaw outcast an open sore in your own son’s gut you are the poet of lost heavens and dammed gods”8 Indeed he was, at least, that and much, much more.

Thanks to its editors, Kaufman’s Collected Works contains a biography at once mercifully concise and fairly comprehensive. We recommend it as good a starting place as any (and better than most), for anyone interested in the “facts” of the poet’s life.

Of course, in the world of Bob Kaufman “facts” are fairly fungible.

For example, legend has it that he shipped off in the merchant marine at the age of 13 – amazing, but probably not true given that he graduated from 8 McDonough, Kaye. Bob Kaufman Reading at Vesuvio’s Bar, City Lights Anthology. San Francisco. City Lights Books. 1974.

Page 96

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McDonough #35 High School in New Orleans in the late Spring of 1942.

And, to this day his “official” biography on the website of New Directions – his publisher for two of his poetry collections, The Ancient Rain and Solitudes Crowded With Loneliness – states that his father was an Orthodox Jew; that he was the thirteenth of fourteen children; that he shipped off on a freighter at 13 where a kindly old sailor took him under his wing and exposed him to great literature; and that he met Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and Allen Ginsberg while employed as a steward at the Los Angeles Hilton, all also arguable.9 Even some of his closest friends argue that Kaufman only had one child – his son Parker, named after jazz great Charlie “Yardbird” Parker – born October 13, 1959, also not true. On October 26, 1944, he married Ida Inez Berrocal, a militant lifetime trade unionist and organizer. Together they had one daughter, Antoinette Victoria Marie (Nagle), born the following year, who died in 2008.

The most agreed on set of “facts” are that Robert Gernel Kaufman, the seventh of 13 children was born in New Orleans to Joseph Emmet and Lillian Rose Kaufman on April 18, 1925 and baptized into the Roman Catholic Church three days later. His house was full of books and music, so he had an early exposure to, and appreciation for, literature and poetry, encouraged by his mother’s habit of constantly buying books. He was even a Boy Scout.

9

https://www.ndbooks.com/author/bob-kaufman/#/

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At sail on radical seas

Bob Kaufman’s road to poetic glory began on June 18, 1942 when he received his messman’s papers and shipped out on the Winfield Scott.

There isn’t room here to begin discussing the impact the nine years between that first trip and his experiences as a sailor, member of the National Maritime Union (NMU), labor organizer and his subsequent expulsion from the NMU for “degeneracy” – admitting using drugs – and the U.S. Coast Guard’s 1951 refusal to renew his mariner’s card which permanently ended his career at sea. These were critical days that included a marriage, a divorce, and the honing of his radical political consciousness.

That’s a tale for another day as is a detailed account of the lost years of arrests, institutionalization, electroshock, and addiction. There is just too much to tell.

Bicoastal “highs” and lows

It would be difficult to capture the near decade of Kaufman’s adventures at sea and on land between 1942 and 1951.

And it would be impossible to begin cataloging his many encounters with the police, arrests, decline into addiction and mental illness, wandering between San Francisco and New York, the effect of electroshock treatments at New York’s Bellevue Hospital, the poverty and the homelessness, and the general madness that began in 1959 and continued until his death in 1986. The events of those are legendary – sometimes literally

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– and, in respect to Kaufman’s memory, we won’t try to do readers the disservice of skimming over these seminal years.

We are after the “real Bob Kaufman,” after all, and the events of those years are inseparable from that story but – for now at least – we are going to focus on the poetry in hopes of finding the poet.

The work speaks for itself

Despite the fact that ultimately the search for an artist’s identity begins and ends with his or her work, we don’t have the luxury here for the kind of rigorous presentation and analysis his work deserves. For now, all we can do is encourage Beatdom readers to seek out Kaufman’s remarkable poetry and draw your own conclusions.

Kaufman’s brother Donald accompanied him to San Francisco in 1953, recalling the poet leaping up on a table at Café Vesuvio to recite poetry. Bob returned to San Francisco in 1957. The next year he gave a formal public reading at the Coffee Gallery. One night at 3:00 a.m. Kaufman wandered into a friend’s North Beach apartment where he met Eileen Singer, his second wife, the mother of his son Parker, and one of his most tireless promoters.

In 1959 Kaufman, John Kelley, and William J. “Bill” Margolis, cofounded a co-published Beatitude – a magazine that embodied the essence of Beat philosophy and “ … was designed to extol beauty and promote the beatific life among the various mendicants, neo-existentialists, christs, poets, painters, musicians and other inhabitants and

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observers of North Beach.” Initially printed on a mimeo machine at Pierre Delattre’s Bread and Wine Mission, Beatitude published, among others, early work by Allen Ginsberg, Lenore Kandel, ruth weiss, Philip Lamantia, Gregory Corso, Richard Brautigan, and, of course, the editors. Its first incarnation lasted for 34 issues, but it was revised on an ad hoc basis for years after.

What follows here is an introduction to Kaufman’s published, “stand alone” works, presented in chronological order, beginning with his first, and perhaps best-known, work – the broadside he titled Abomunist Manifesto, which appeared in serial form in Beatitude and was published, with an addendum, in September1959 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books in San Francisco.

The Manifesto, released under the name BOMKAUF, with its obvious titular nod to the Communist Manifesto, captures the essence of Kaufman in a single poem. It is political, radical, defiant; insightful and serious; funny, containing imagery at once equal parts slapstick, irony, satire, and sarcasm; idealistic and utopian; and influenced by the spirits of jazz, Dada, and surrealism.

City Lights published a second broadside, Second April, in October, 1959.

Second April was first mentioned in the colophon of the Manifesto as a “black illumination,” an “abominable combustion,” and an “autobiographical journey springing out of the blind conjunction of such events as Christ’s April crucifixion, death and resurrection by A-bomb, and the author’s own birth.” Kaufman was well read, and his ability to spontaneously recite large portions of the works of other poets like Lorca and Eliot – sometimes as written and sometimes “revised”

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by the addition of his own words – is well documented.

Was Kaufman trying to tell us something by attaching the title of the well-known Second April by Edna St. Vincent Millay to his second broadside?

Was the 34 year-old Kaufman offering up a Beat homage to Millay’s poem that begins: “To what purpose, April, do you return again?

Beauty is not enough.

You can no longer quiet me with the redness Of little leaves opening stickily.

I know what I know.”

We’ll never know in the same way we will never know what happened to Kaufman’s planned novel, hinted at in his third broadside, Does the Secret Mind Whisper? which City Lights Books released in April, 1960. It was billed as “… the opening section of a ‘novelin-progress,’ providing ‘the atmosphere in which the ‘characters’ are to appear — and disappear’.”

Secret Mind offers more clues into how saw Kaufman saw the world. Its “begot” section is what we must assume is an intentional nod to the “begat” section of the Old Testament’s Book of Genesis, and offers us insights into the kind of thinkers Kaufman saw as important: curly forests of nodding heads strewing bits of shattered images in pointed faces of crepe paper kites flying wildly over petrified idols kneeling on fat walls of glowing flesh in the black rain dripping silently in and out of empty stars drooling over nude bodies of dancing

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planets celebrating hot birthdays of the sun bannister sliding on twisted bars of light slanting down marble corpse of twice dead socrates who begot gandhi who begot krishna who begot buddha who begot christ who begot einstein who begot michael who begot melvilie who begot dostoievski who begot lincoln who begot bessie smith who begot picasso who begot charlie parker who begot morpheus who begot farnsworth who begot starkweather who begat geronimo who begat whitman who begot hymened women with moist tongues following chinese funerals escorted by black aeroplanes smokewriting against patent leather skie …

In 1965, New Directions published Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness, a collection of poems including, in the publisher’s description, “ …odes to Charles Mingus, Hart Crane, Ray Charles, and Albert Camus as well as love lyrics, political rants, “Prison Poems, and the prose meditation ‘Second April.’”

Many of the poems in Solitudes have references to jazz and jazz greats and one is written for Allen Ginsberg. In others, Kaufman seems to be offering readers unambiguous insights into who he is and how he sees the world. In “I Have Folded My Sorrows,” for example, he tells us:

“And yes, I have refought those unfinished encounters.

Still, they remain unfinished.

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And yes, I have at times wished myself something different.”

“Afterwards, They Shall Dance” tells us, “In order to exist I hide behind stacks of red and blue poems.”

“Unholy Missions” contains the line, “I want to prove once and for all that I am not crazy.” And “I, Too, Know What I Am Not” ends, “No, I am not anything that is anything I am not.”

1967’s Golden Sardine marked Kaufman’s return to City Lights Books. Its release came roughly halfway through the poet’s so-called, “Silent Period.” While there is substantial disagreement as to exactly how “silent” he was, Kaufman seems to have not written much – or, perhaps better said, didn’t write much that survived.

Mary Beach, an artist working at City Lights and a relative of Sylvia Beach, the proprietor of the famous Paris bookstore, Shakespeare & Company, discovered the manuscript for Golden Sardine and, together with her second husband, Claude Pélieu, published a French edition of the book before convincing Lawrence Ferlinghetti to publish it as part of City Lights’ Pocket Poets series. Ironically, given the close association between City Lights and Kaufman in the contemporary imagination, Golden Sardine is the only Kaufman book Ferlinghetti published during the poet’s short lifetime.

An entire essay could be written on Kaufman’s poetic treatment of the story Carl [actual spelling Caryl] Chessman in Golden Sardine. Caryl Whittier Chessman was a career criminal who, in 1948, was sentenced to death in California for a string of crimes.

Chessman, who wrote four books in prison, became

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the poster boy for anti-capital punishment and prison reform activists. He was executed on May 2, 1960, 25 days short of his 39th birthday.

We have Kaufman’s second wife Eileen and his friends – three of whom he will hear from in a minute for the rest of the Kaufman oeuvre. In his Editor’s Notes to The Ancient Rain, Poems 1956-1978 published by New Directions in 1981, Raymond Foye recalled when Kaufman appeared one day and led him to a bar in San Francisco’s Chinatown. “I don’t know how you get involved with uninvolvement,” he said. “My ambition is to be completely forgotten.”10 “So absolute was Kaufman’s dedication to the oral and automatic sources of poetry,” Foye added, “It was only at the insistence of his wife Eileen, that he began to write down his work.” As Foye noted, with a single exception, all the poems in The Ancient Rain were written after the couple’s first meeting in 1957.

In 1996, Minneapolis’ Coffee House Press released Cranial Guitar: Selected Poems by Bob Kaufman, edited

by Gerald Nicosia. The book borrows from earlier published work as well as containing previously unpublished material.

Gerry Nicosia told Beatdom how the book evolved.

“Eileen Kaufman and I were close friends for many years,” he said. “She respected my work, and I think she also sensed I was not one of the poets who were out to ride Bob’s coattails. She disliked a lot of these poets who ‘claimed’ to be Bob’s direct heir. So it was natural that, as Bob and his work began to recede from public view, that Eileen and I would talk about the possibility of finding a new publisher for the out10 Kaufman, Bob. Foye, Raymond (Editor). The Ancient Rain.

New York. New Directions. 1981. Page ix.

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of-print GOLDEN SARDINE and other of Bob’s poems that had not been collected.”

“City Lights at that time did not want to republish Kaufman,” he continued. “I am a little fuzzy on the years, but I think it was in late 1993 that Alan Kornblum, founder of Coffee House Press [in Minneapolis], was in the Bay Area, and Eileen and I met with him in Marin County. Alan was extremely excited about publishing a new book of Bob’s work, and wanted me to collect as much of Bob’s unknown and uncollected poetry as I could find. I spent many months buttonholing people in North Beach, talking to and writing to Bob’s friends, even one guy in Germany, the poet Rod Iverson, who ended up having several of Bob’s unpublished poems.”

In his introduction, David Henderson wrote, “Bob Kaufman’s life as a poet is unique to American literature. He kept no dairy, or journal, published no literary essays, wrote no reviews, and maintained no correspondences.”11 “Up until his death in from emphysema in January of 1986,” Henderson added, “Kaufman was known as a mostly silent, wiry Black man who walked the streets of San Francisco’s North Beach district day and night often appearing as a mendicant, madman or panhandler”12 Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman, the most comprehensive collection of Kaufman’s work, was a labor of love for its editors, Neeli Cherkovski, Raymond Foye, and Tate Swindell that closes the publishing loop 11 Henderson, David. Introduction to Cranial Guitar: Selected {Poems of Bob Kaufman. Nicosia, Gerald (editor).

Minneapolis. 1995. Coffee House Press; Uncorrected Proof edition.

Page 7 12 Ibid

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by returning Kaufman back to City Lights.13 It is a single, comprehensive source for Kaufman’s work containing everything previously published and a number of other unpublished works along with work culled from generally ephemeral and obscure magazines.

The supreme street poet:

A.D. Winans remembers his friend

At 84, Allan Davis Winans – known as Al to his friends and A.D. to the world at large – still plies the poet’s trade in his native San Francisco. An award-winning poet, writer, and editor, Winans is the author of over 65 books of poetry and prose including two recent bilingual books of poetry from Germany and Turkey. He edited and published the acclaimed Second Coming Press from 1972-1989 and was friends with Kaufman, Jack Micheline, David Meltzer, Charles Bukowski, and others associated with the Beat Generation. He is the recipient of a San Francisco Arts and Letters Foundation Award, a PEN National Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature, a PEN Oakland Lifetime Achievement Award, and a Kathy Acker Award in Poetry and publishing.

We asked him to explain how he met Kaufman and what his first impressions of him were. “I was in Panama serving in the military during the early years of the Beat Generation,” he told us. “I was discharged and returned to San Francisco in early 1958.”

“I discovered the West Coast North Beach Beat scene in March 1958,” Winans told Beatdom. “It 13 Kaufman, Bob. Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman.

[Editors]: Cherkovski, Neeli; Foye, Raymond; Swindell, Tate. San Francisco. City Lights Books. 2019

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was like discovering a new world. I was born in San Francisco but this was a San Francisco I had not seen before. The Co-existence Bagel Shop located on the corner of Grant and Green Street and The Coffee Gallery directly across the street were two of the most populated places that featured poetry readings.

“I first saw Bob read at the Co-existence Bagel Shop where he held court, jumping up on tables and reading his poetry that was a mixture of political, jazz, and surrealism. I was literally awe struck by him. He was a handsome man and quite intelligent but far from an elitist. He often read his poems on street corners as well as at the bars. I didn’t get to really know him well as a friend until the sixties. My first impression of him was that he was a genius. This is a word too often misused, but applicable to him in every way.”

Kaufman has been called many things from the “Black American Rimbaud” to a Be-Bop Poet, a Black poet, an oral Poet, a Beat poet, a street Poet, a surrealist poet, and a jazz poet. To Winans, Kaufman was all of these things and more. “Bob was all of those,” he said. “Beat was just a word to him.

He was, in my opinion, the best jazz poet of his era.

While Ginsberg and others were out seeking fame, he made his home in North Beach. He had no desire for fame. He was a people’s poet; a true poet of the common man and woman. In reality, you can’t pigeonhole him. He was in a category all his own.”

In fact, Winans believes many of the Beats hurt, rather than helped, Kaufman. “I don’t think the upper-tier Beat poets gave Bob the respect he deserved,” he explained. “Ferlinghetti did publish an early book of

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his, but Bob didn’t hang out in any inner circle.14 When Bob died, Ginsberg was quoted as saying, ‘I should have done more for him’. The truth is that he did nothing for him. Allen got his lover and friends of his NEA grants, and could have gotten Bob one, and no one needed the money for than Bob. “Later I got to know Len Randolph, who at the time was the Director of the NEA Literature Program, and was instrumental in helping Bob obtain a grant.

Others took credit for this, but that’s not important.

The thing is that Bob deserved the fellowship, no matter what the circumstances surrounding the award. Bob was above the label of being called a Beat or part of the Beat movement. He was a true poet in every sense of the word and labels were not important to him.”

Some observers – like the San Francisco Police Department of his day – insisted on seeing Kaufman as a derelict, a drunk, a drug addict, or a mental case. Asked how he thought Kaufman’s various issues impacted his work, Winans said, “What is the definition of ‘sane’? Maybe the insane are the real sane ones, and we are the insane ones. Who is to say? Bob was destined, in my opinion, to be a poet, on drugs or stone sober. The drugs did have an effect on him in later life, as they do with most poets and musicians.

But it was the forced shock treatments at Bellevue Hospital that reduced him to a shell of the person he once was, forced to walk the streets twitching and mumbling to himself.

“But he had his moments when he would snap out 14 In fact Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights books published Kaufman’s most important broadsides – Abomunist Manifesto (1959); Does the Secret Mind Whisper? (1959); and Second April (1959) – as well as Golden Sardine (1967), and most recently, Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman (2020).

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of it and become the old Bob Kaufman. They weren’t lengthy returns to reality but they were memorable ones. I remember in the late seventies I organized a Night of Street Poetry featuring Kaufman, Micheline and myself. Kaufman was not in the best shape and I had to literally babysit him to make sure he appeared for the reading. When he got up on stage and began reading, it was like the old Bob Kaufman. Eileen Kaufman and I were amazed to see at one point that he was literally revising a poem right there on the stage. I don’t know of any other poet who is capable of doing this.”

Winans was more than familiar with Kaufman’s ambivalence to the traditional poet’s route to glory – frequent readings and publishing almost anywhere.

Bob was not overly interested in being published,” he said. “If I asked him if I could publish a poem of his, he always said yes. Readings were a bit more tricky.

After the shock treatments, he could not totally be relied on to show up for a scheduled reading. I, or a friend of his, would need to take on the responsibility of seeing that he made it to the reading. When he was living with Eileen, it was of course her responsibility.”

Much of Kaufman’s work was never written down, still more was scribbled on little pieces of paper, some captured by his wife Eileen or preserved by friends and admirers like Raymond Foye. Without this collective group effort of his friends our window into his work would be significantly narrowed. As it is almost everyone agrees that – as in the case of Beat poet Marty Matz – what got saved is just a fraction of the total work.

Asked why he thought Kaufman seemed to have an apparent opposition to permanence, an almost

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proto-Punk view of art as ephemera, Winans said, “This would be speculation on my part. Eileen didn’t write down his poetry. She preserved it and in some instances recorded it. Bob was in the tradition of Buddhists who took a vow of poverty. Much of his work was lost and in one instance Eileen is said to have lost a suitcase of his work at a train station. Bob never wore the label of a “poet” or how others see themselves as poets. He was like a Shaman, maybe the last of the Shaman poets.”

“Bob was never a part of any movement,” Winans said, returning to the theme of finding a label for Kaufman and his work. “He was a rebel and a true individualist. I’ll leave critical analysis to the Academics.

What I will say is he was deeply influenced by jazz and in particular by Charlie Parker and because of this was labeled by many as the original bebop poet.

He merged surrealism and Dadaism and imagery as no poet before or after him. It is because of this that some critics have referred to him as the Black American Rimbaud.”

Asked to share a previously unshared story about Kaufman, Winans reflected and said, “Most of my insights have been published before in articles and a memoir I wrote about Bob that was part of a book of mine published by Punk Hostage Press [Dead Lions]. I do recall one incident at a Chinatown Bar – he was [prohibited from entering] North Beach Bars – that shows how deeply jazz was infused in his soul,” he continued. “It was during the time of his supposed vow of silence that he wandered into the bar and I bought him a drink. He sat, silent for maybe ten or fifteen minutes before turning to me, and saying, ‘Do you have a radio?’ I responded in the affirmative. He

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looked me in the eyes and said, ‘You can listen to jazz’, and then returned to his previous state of silence.”

Winans’ thinking about Kaufman hasn’t changed in the 33 years since the poet’s death. “I consider him the Best of all the Beat Poets,” he said, “better than Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti or the others who rose to fame. I was in North Beach celebrating my 50th birthday when Shig Murao [a writer and former manager of City Lights] stopped me on the street and informed me that Kaufman had died. So yes, that was 33 years ago. I think of him today as I thought of him back in 1958, the closest to a genius that one will ever have the privilege of knowing.”

Finally, we asked Kaufman what he would ask his old friend if he would suddenly materialize before him. “I’d ask him if they played Jazz in Heaven and if he was part of the choir,” he answered. “And then I’d sadly tell him that nothing has changed since he left; that the ‘poetry politicians’ still abound, and that only the names have changed. Then maybe I’d join him in singing the lines from a Jack Micheline poem, ‘It’s the Dead, It’s the Dead, It’s the God Damn Dead that rule this world.’”

Strumming the broken strings

on the Cranial Guitar

For fellow poet, anthologist, biographer, editor, and Beat scholar Gerald Nicosia, who edited the 1996 Cranial Guitar: Selected Poems By Bob Kaufman, the hardest initial part of his relationship with poet was finding him.

“I had heard of the legendary ‘BomKauf’ through

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my friendship with poet Jimmy Ryan Morris, who was then living in the mountains above Boulder, maybe Golden,” Nicosia explained. “I stayed with Jimmy a couple of times while working on my biography of Kerouac [Memory Babe], when I needed to interview many people at the Naropa Institute. Everyone was there in those days: Corso, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Robert Duncan, McClure, on and on.

“Jimmy had been part of the North Beach scene, then had gone to L.A. to form the nucleus of the Beat group down there, which included Stuart Perkoff and Tony Scibella [Venice West], then Jimmy had retired to the mountains above Boulder, ‘to cultivate a habit’, in Burroughs’ words.

“Morris, like most of the L.A. Beat group, was a hardcore heroin junkie. He had shot dope with Lamantia many times, possibly also in New York.

Anyway, Morris told me what a key role Kaufman had played in the North Beach scene. He was the purest Beat of them all, living only for his poetry and joys and kicks, both fleshly and intellectual. He was kind of like a mascot to the poetry scene there, i.e., he was not a careerist poet whatsoever, and they respected that greatly.”

“They also respected his enormous poetic gift,” Nicosia continued. “People cared for him because they sensed his vulnerability and fragility. Physically, Bob seemed almost delicate. He was about 5’7” but not muscular at all, slim and wiry at best. He would dress in colorful clothing and sandals and loved to wear buttons, whether political, artistic, or humorous.

He had a soft, throaty, merry voice, and his wit was legendary.

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“The problem for me, in 1977, was finding him. He had no known address. People said to look for him on the streets. Ferlinghetti told me to look for a lightskinned black man in a poncho and slouch hat crossing Broadway and Columbus. One day I spotted just such a character crossing the street. I yelled out, ‘Are you Bob Kaufman?’ and he answered, ‘Yes!’ I asked if he’d let me interview him, and he said yes, if I gave him five dollars, which he needed for food and various things.

He said, ‘I’ll get it back to you!’ and my recollection is that a week later, he did just that.”

Nicosia gave him the five and promptly entered the world of Bob Kaufman. “We walked together up Grant Avenue to the Savoy-Tivoli,” he told Beatdom, “sat down together, and I bought him a drink and set out my tape recorder. We ended up talking for two hours. It was brilliant stuff, great-remembered history, funny, witty. At times he would even recite bits of poems, his own, T.S. Eliot’s, Lorca’s. The only bad thing was that he had virtually no teeth at that point, so his enunciation was terrible, but I still got most of what he said.

“Midway through our interview, a short, happy-golucky guy about 50 goes sauntering past the terrace, where we sat, and Kaufman calls out, ‘Philip! Come up here! I’m talking to a biographer, and I want you to meet him!’ I’d been writing Lamantia for months with no answer, but he quickly came and sat with us.

‘Normally I don’t talk to biographers’, Lamantia said, ‘but I love the surrealist synchronicity of this meeting!’

So Lamantia joined our session, and also gave me a fabulous interview about Kerouac. Watching him and Kaufman riff off each other was one of the poetic highlights of my time on Kerouac’s trail, and probably

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one of my all-time poetic highlights.”

For Nicosia, like Herb Caen before him, Kaufman was sort of the Ur-Beat. “Bob came to prominence as one of the archetypal beatniks in North Beach,” he explained. “He led the charge at Blabbermouth Night many a night at the Place. Beats or beatniks were rebels, and Bob fulfilled that all the way, marrying a white woman, challenging the cops by putting up poems in the windows of The Place referring to the police as Nazis, and so forth. He lived on virtually no money; got high as often as he could, was antinuclear and anti-war, and fulfilled all the other Beat requirements. On top of which he dug jazz and could dance to it more gracefully than anyone else in North Beach. That was his early image.”

“The later Bob, whom I knew, was somebody who had had electroshock treatments, had no teeth, shook and stumbled when he walked and slurred when he talked, and had to beg for his meals—someone who had paid the full price for that rebellion,” Nicosia continued. “Yet I still saw him as a pure American original, a kind of Grant Avenue Thoreau walking to his own drummer, doing his own thing before the hippies popularized it—and as a writer, also an American original, heavily jazz influenced, but synthesizing so many different influences, from surrealism to black humor – black in every sense – that you couldn’t possibly pigeonhole his writing style.”

The world of Beat scholarship is surprisingly more contentious than one might first guess, and Nicosia’s wars with some members of what he sees as the Beat Establishment – particularly around his outstanding Jack Kerouac biography Memory Babe and his subsequent work with Jan Kerouac and its negative

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impact on Memory Babe – have cost him a good deal.

But even his most ferocious detractors have to admit he isn’t shy about his opinions, and it’s his opinion that much of the “myth” of Bob Kaufman has been created by lesser writers trying to cement their reputations to his.

“A lot of literary careers have been built off Kaufman—I won’t name them all because to do so would lose me even more friends than I’ve lost already, “he told Beatdom. “But the flat-out truth is that if you’re going to build a literary career off someone, it behooves you to mythologize and exaggerate them as much as possible.

“Bob’s vow of silence was sheer nonsense,” he continued. “I did not know him then but knew others like photographer Mark Green who did know him in that period, and he certainly talked when he needed food, drugs, or companionship. It was a fairly dark and bitter period in his life, so doubtless he might have been uncommunicative a lot, just because he had become such a loner (there also were hardly any Blacks in North Beach, so he was isolated on that score too)—but vow of silence, not a real thing.”

The “Buddhist Vow of Silence” – allegedly taken in response to the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles and continuing to the end of the war in Vietnam in 1973 – is one of the most famous Kaufman myths. Winans recalls Kaufman talking during the period and former San Francisco Poet Laureate Jack Hirschman also doesn’t remember the “silent” Bob Kaufman so often referred to by later commentators who never met him. “He wasn’t silent,” Hirschman said.

“I think that was a lot of bullshit, you know.”

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“Do you know how many poets, especially North Beach poets, made their reputation by writing a poem about Kaufman?” Nicosia asked. “More than I can count on the fingers of one hand, for sure. As for the confusion of personal facts, Bob liked to talk, but did not like to talk about personal matters. He would talk about himself as poet—which I heard many times—but I never heard him speak about his actual background, facts about his childhood and youth, etc. Thus it doesn’t surprise me that there are many different versions.”

“Success for Bob was living fully, digging life, loving and being loved. He was a people person, but couldn’t handle being controlled—thus his relationships, including marriage, were fragmentary. But, that said, Bob certainly had some ambivalence about wanting to be recognized as a poet, and even about fame itself,” Nicosia continued. “I remember once I was standing with him and a group of poets in Tosca, a club on Broadway, and I had used up all the film in my camera, so I wasn’t taking any more pictures. Bob saw my camera, and he egged me on, ‘C’mon, take my picture!’ I just looked at him, but he wouldn’t let it go.

‘C’mon! Take my picture! C’mon! Take my picture!’

Finally I lifted the camera and snapped the shutter several times—of course there was no film inside to record it on, but he didn’t know that—and this big, satisfied smile came across his face.”

“Now that I look back on it, the photos would have probably done me a lot more good than him—they’d probably be worth quite a bit of money today!” he joked. “But I tell this anecdote just to make plain that Bob wasn’t always oblivious to recognition or fame— there was a part of him, I think, that wanted it as much

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as anyone but I think he basically had given up, most of the time, figuring it wasn’t going to happen, and so it was more important to him just to live his life.”

“Bob was the quintessential beat. His ‘career’ was living in the now,” Nicosia continued. “Compared to him, with his borrowed clothes, mooched meals, and the couches in other people’s apartments he slept on, Ginsberg and Kerouac look like Grade-A careerists beside him. There’s Ginsberg endlessly writing to editors and reviewers to promote himself; there’s Kerouac keeping meticulous files of his work and correspondence, so that posterity will know how great he was. And there’s Bob, with a twinkle in his eye, reciting spontaneous poems on the spot in bars and cafes, not even bothering to write them down, just trusting that he’ll be taken care of in all the things that matter.

“And for most of his life he was, though people let him down at the end—he died penniless on the street, with emphysema and uncared-for. The 80s were a decade for careerists—certainly not for Beats. When someone once asked Bob what he believed in, he said something like, “We hate war, we hate politicians, we love Kerouac!” Interesting that he used the “we,” not the “I”—that group consciousness, community consciousness, was also part of the Beat ethic.”

Asked why he thought his friend wasn’t more celebrated, Nicosia said, “I would think the answer to this is obvious. In the words of Jack Micheline, ‘I didn’t play the game … I can’t play the game’. Same applies to Kaufman.”

“Commercial success is rarely an accident,” he added. “It normally requires a lot of work, selfpromotion, letter writing, schmoozing, and so forth.

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To become famous, you pretty much have to want to become famous. I’ve read a lot of biographies of famous writers and artists, and you can see how hard most of them worked to become well known. There are a few rare exceptions, like Samuel Beckett. But Beckett, as I recall, had some woman who worked tirelessly in his behalf, to get his work known.”

“Eileen always played that role for Bob,” he continued. “Without her, who knows if we would now know his work at all—as other than a minor footnote, a few early broadsides published, and so forth. Late in his life, and after his death, a few local writers took up his cause. Neeli [Cherkovski] is among the writers that helped Bob’s work reach a wider audience.”

Asked for his “unshared” Kaufman story, Nicosia said, “I’m not sure if you ever heard the story of Bob Kaufman’s birthday party. Every April 18 (which was also Earthquake Day in San Francisco), one of the North Beach post-Beat poets, usually Paul Landry, would host a birthday party for Bob Kaufman in his apartment. It was an annual tradition, a strange sort of celebration in that it honored Bob, but it was also sort of an honoring of the sacred street-poetry tradition of San Francisco, a re-dedication to the cause, so to speak. In his later years, Bob was often too worn out to do much partying and would sometimes spend most of his birthday party in a bed in the back bedroom, where people would take turns coming in to talk to, praise, and encourage him. He’d always get up for the blowing out of the candles and the cutting of the cake, however.”

“One of the things that struck me, at least in the later years, was that the party seemed to mean more to the other poets than to Bob himself,” Nicosia

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added. “It was as if people got some strength to carry on with their own work just by being close to Bob. He had that kind of power. I’ve heard people talk about the strength and magnetism of Neal Cassady in a similar way, though obviously they were very different people, and Bob’s strength was not so much physical, like Neal’s, but rather almost shamanistic.”

Asked about why Kaufman’s work has endured despite his seeming aversion to self-promotion and neglect by the critical establishment, Nicosia said, “Well, his work has held up for me more than that of some other writers. I find Lamantia’s work less interesting now—his fantastic imagery is not leavened with humor and sharp wit as Kaufman’s was. Also, I think Bob’s work came from a purer place than that of a lot of his contemporaries, who in retrospect seem to have been showing off their rebel chops. Bob was never showing off—he loved poetry, loved language, loved other people, and loved the kind of human understanding that only poetry can provide.

“I suppose now that I’m older, with my own health issues, as well as having suffered a lot of hits to my own reputation (a lot of that of course having come from my support of Jan Kerouac and opposition to the Sampas family), and faced a lot of deepening struggles to support myself as a writer and to continue to do my work, that I have come to appreciate more and more Bob’s courage and tenacity in continuing to hold up the torch of poet, to do his work no matter what—despite racism, literary rivalries, poverty, emphysema, and all sorts of roadblocks that would have stopped another writer.

His courage and strength, and his dedication to his craft, now move me more than ever before.”

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If he had a chance to ask his friend a question, Nicosia said, “I would ask him if he would he have done anything differently – in view of the incredibly hard life he led. But I already know the answer. I would also tell him that love for his work keeps growing at an incredible pace worldwide—but he probably foresaw that too.”

Tales of the singing revolutionaries

As L.A. Rebellion filmmaker Bill Woodbury travelled the Bob Kaufman Trail, scouring the landscape for clues as he made his film, And When I Die, I Won’t Stay Dead - Bob Kaufman, Poet, he rightly focused a good deal on his subject’s relationship with former San Francisco Poet Laureate, activist, and fellow radical Jack Hirschman.

Like Hirschman, Woodbury sees Kaufman as a political being who never lost his early leftist faith. “He might have changed his position and attitude towards certain things and places and political phenomena,” Woodberry told a reviewer, “but he never really lost it.

It’s just that he found another way and another place to pursue his ideals and ideas.”15 For Hirschman, there’s no mystery about who Bob Kaufman was or what he represented. Contacted by phone just a few days before the 34th anniversary of Kaufman’s death, the 86-year old activist poet recalled his fallen friend and comrade with deepest affection.

Hirschman’s voice is simultaneously commanding 15 Pattison, Michael. “Unknown If Not Forgotten: Billy Woodbury on Bob Kaufman.” Accessed at: http://www.idfilm. net/2018/01/billy-woodberry-bob-kaufman-and-when-i-die-iwont-stay-dead-interview.html. May 15, 2020.

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and warmly inviting, the perfect poet’s tool, honed over a lifetime of intimate readings and massive public protests. You don’t have to listen too hard to hear the now almost melodic overtones of his native Bronx in his voice, not quite tamed, even after a halfcentury spent in California.

He remains unapologetic about both his art and his politics – activities he sees as inseparable in his life and the life of his friend whom he still calls, “Bobby.”

That same link – Kaufman’s art to politics – is a piece of the story Hirschman remains incredulous, but not surprised, is rarely told.

Hirschman came to San Francisco in 1972.16 He had just been fired from his teaching position at UCLA [where, as seemingly every Hirschman chronicler feels compelled to note, he taught, among others, Door’s vocalist Jim Morrison] after openly and frequently urging his students to resist the draft and protest the war in Vietnam.

“I knew Beatitude a bit,” he recalled. “But I didn’t really read Bobby until late 1972,” he told Beatdom.

Hirschman said the two poets immediately hit it off.

“In actual fact, Bobby thought we were peers,” he continued. “He had been a Communist and I was a Communist – still am a Communist.”

“He taught me the Soviet National Anthem in Russian at Spec’s Bar17,” Hirschman said. “We used to sing it together until the bartenders would eventually 16 Conversation with the poet, January 2, 2020. Some sources date his arrival in San Francisco as 1973.

17 Officially, Spec’s Twelve Adler Museum (Café), located on what’s now know as 12 William Saroyan Place, really more of an alley off of Columbus Avenue in San Francisco’s North Beach area. Former Café Vesuvio bartender Richard “Specs” Simmons opened Spec’s in 1968.

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throw ice at us.”18 For Hirschman, politics – as much or more than poetics – is the key to untangling the myth of Bob Kaufman that has grown up over the years. “Look what Bobby went through,” he said. “He was an organizer. Imagine being a Black Jew in the South in 1948 campaigning for Wallace – Henry Wallace, of course, not George. Remember, the Second World War had only been over for three years.”

Wallace, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president, who was kicked off the ticket in favor of Harry Truman, was the 1948 presidential nominee of the United States Progressive Party, a leftist third party that advocated, among other things, desegregation, national health care insurance, an expansion of welfare programs for the poor, the nationalization of the energy industry, and reconciliation with Stalin and the Soviet Union.

Hirschman believes that it was those experiences in the South, along with Kaufman’s drug dependency, and the electroshock treatments he later received at New York’s Bellevue [now officially NYC Health/ Bellevue] that led to the instability of his later years.

“He was always vibrating,” he said. But at the height of his personal and poetic powers, Hirschman said Kaufman never veered too far from his early days as an organizer and activist. “Look at The Abomunist Manifesto,” he said. “It obviously refers to The Communist Manifesto. It’s really The Communist 18 No doubt it was the 1944 version of the anthem that appealed to Hirschman, a devoted Stalinist to this day, particularly the stanza: “Through tempests the shadows of freedom have cheered us, Along the new path where great Lenin did lead, Be true to the people, thus Stalin has reared us, Inspired us to labor and Valorous Deed!”

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Manifesto for the Age of Absurdity, because he was, at bottom, a Communist.”

“We became good friends on the street,” he recalled. “I had a place, but it was all a street thing.

We had a great time. We always sang.”

Much of their time together was spent in a variety of now iconic North Beach poet’s hangouts like the Café Trieste, Vesuvio Café, Spec’s, The Co-Existence Bagel Shop, which Kaufman immortalized in his Bagel Shop Jazz, calling its patrons, “Nightfall creatures, eating each other / Over a noisy cup of coffee,” and Keystone Corner, (formerly Dino & Carlo’s Bar,) a jazz club where Hirschman’s girlfriend at the time worked.

“We had a great time,” Hirschman said. “I miss him still. We knew that, while we were not real brothers, we were real comrades.”

Hirschman was part of The Bob Kaufman Collective, a San Francisco-based group of poets, artists, and intellectuals who came together after the poet’s death. Among other titles they produced, WOULD YOU WEAR MY EYES: A tribute to Bob Kaufman, which Hirschman edited.19 In his introduction to that volume, Hirschman called Kaufman, “a genuine poet,” adding, “We leave to biographers, historians, and students the task of ‘specializing’ Bob (was he a communist? a buddhist? a surrealist? a beatnik? a bopster? a kabbalist? an anarchist?).”

The book starts with three of Kaufman’s poems followed by tribute poems by dozens of his friends and admirers including, among a lost list, Jack Micheline, 19 Hirschman, Jack (Ed). WOULD YOU WEAR MY EYES? A tribute to Bob Kaufman. San Francisco. The Bob Kaufman Collective. 1989

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Ted Joans, John Montgomery, William J. Margolis, ruth Weiss, George Tsongas, Mel Clay, Martin Matz, Al Winans, Gerry Nicosia, Neeli Cherkovski, and – of course – Hirschman himself.

Neeli Cherkovski: 40 years of keeping the faith

In 1975, Hirschman introduced Kaufman to a 30-yearold poet who had just settled in San Francisco. That poet was Neeli Cherkovski and, from that day to this, Bob Kaufman joined Charles Bukowski as one of the central influences on his life.

“It was in front of the Café Trieste in North Beach a few minutes’ walk from the City Lights Bookstore,” Cherkovski told Beatdom. “Kaufman looked positively ecstatic wearing a serape and some strange kind of hat. He began reciting The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and then a few lines from Wallace Stevens. He said he had known my uncle Herman Cherry in New York – that’d been in the late 40s. We went in for a cappuccino after that with the jukebox playing Verdi.”

Cherkovski told Beatdom, “You have to understand I was always fascinated by his poetry. I knew how much work he had put into each of the poems. So my perception of him grew out of my interest in, and love for, the written word. I was not as concerned about the mystique. I feel that way about all poets. When he lived with me I realize how devoted he was to poetry.

He would sit in the kitchen tapping his hand on the table and asked me to read poems. When I finished one he told me to read another.”

Kaufman’s outer image was a bit of a front, Cherkovski said. “That image – the ‘dangerous poet’

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the ‘wild man’ that wasn’t really Bob,” he explained.

“He was always very concerned about how we were doing. There was a bit of aristocratic presence there, an apparent hidden arrogance about Bob. But I don’t think you can be a great poet without at least a little arrogance.”

Like Winans, Cherkovski said he doesn’t have a “Best Bob Kaufman Story.”

“Not really,” he explained, “except to say I considered him the Saint of Contemporary Poetry. He didn’t have much to say because it at all been said in the poems. He had one-liners like ‘there is no third world, there is only one world’ and ‘don’t feel like you’re not loved remember you have poetry’.”

Asked about his experience with Beatitude, Cherkovski said, “We had a collective going among the younger poets in North Beach basically led by Jack Hirschman. We printed in mimeo as had been done before by the beach and handed the magazine out. The activity of collectively working on this journal installed or instilled a sense of community among us, something I dearly miss. Raymond Foye and I edited a special issue of Beatitude [Beatitude 29]. It had a great cover a photograph of our man Kaufman. Later I did the 50th anniversary edition with a poet Latif Harris who put up the money for the project.”

Raymond Foye echoed Cherkovski’s opinion.

“Lawrence Ferlinghetti used to call Beatitude a ‘floating crap game,’” he said. “Sometimes it was there and sometimes it wasn’t. We just worshipped Bob. We were the first generation that tried to do a reconstruction of the Beat image. When we decided to edit an issue, we decided we were going to feature Bob. He was around but not well known, and I know he was pleased. I think

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it encouraged him to keep writing.”

We asked if his private persona differed significantly from his public image and, if so, how. “He was meditative or so I like to think as he sat there in the kitchen or at the side of his bed,” Cherkovski said.

He never would thank me for the space, but he would smile often.”

“Tragically I have no recognition for a last time with Bob,” his friend continued. “His girlfriend [Lynne Wildey] called me one morning and said, ‘The poet Bob Kaufman is dead’. You can imagine that those words were so difficult to accept, but I had no choice in the matter. For years after his death I would hallucinate his presence among us. This was good in a sense but also rather bothersome.”

Like Hirschman, Winans, and others close to Kaufman, Cherkovski bridles at the notion of forcing the poet into a box like “jazz poet” or “surrealist.”

“Screw those boxes,” he told Beatdom. “Bob Kaufman ‘the poet’ is at the top of the list.”

Asked what he would tell someone who has never read Bob before about why they should pick up Collected Poems, Cherkovski said, “Because it is the sanest poetry in town.”

Raymond Foye, Cherkovski’s longtime friend and writing partner, has suggested that he would like to believe that at the end of his life Kaufman had found some peace in his Buddhist practice, pointing out that Buddhism plays a role in his final poems.

“I believe all poets are spiritual beings,” Cherkovski said. “He did settle himself in Buddhist practice. That meant he was trying to resolve some of the things in his mind. He was writing less [at the end] but Raymond is right, he was writing these Buddha poems. He was

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a much calmer person when he was there, but Bob – like Bukowski and a lot of those guys – weren’t that meditative by nature.”

In 1972, a 14-year-old Raymond Foye had his first encounter with the spirit of Bob Kaufman in the form of a picture on a well-used paperback copy of Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness in a used bookstore in Jack Kerouac’s hometown of Lowell, MA. It’s an experience he has described as what Hindus call darshan, the transformation felt when you stare into the face of a Master. Kaufman’s face, Foye has written, is, “… the face of a holy man on Earth as a hero and a martyr, in the guise of a hipster and flâneur.”20 A few years later, on January 1, 1977, then 19-yearold Foye arrived in San Francisco looking for adventure and searching for poets. He took a room above the Caffe Trieste. One day as he was walking down the stairs to the street, he ran into Kaufman. Shocked, the young Foye asked, “Are you Bob Kaufman?” Without ever stopping or acknowledging his presence, the then 51-year-old poet replied, “Sometimes.”21 Over the years, the two writers became close.

It was Foye who rushed to the Dante Hotel where Kaufman had been staying after learning the building had caught fire. Sensing that Kaufman might have left some poems lying around, Foye waited for the fire crews to leave and snuck past the police lines, rescuing a thick Moroccan binder soaked by water from the firefighters’ hoses. He took the soggy book to City Lights where he was working, carefully laying out the 20 Kaufman, Bob. Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman.

[Editors]: Cherkovski, Neeli; Foye, Raymond; Swindell, Tate. San Francisco. City Lights Books. 2019. Page 216.

21 Ibid

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pages to dry and then typing up the contents, which he collected with other poems to form the contents of The Ancient Rain. After considerable persuasion, Foye got Kaufman to reluctantly agree to sign the contract to get the book published. He was also instrumental in getting Kaufman grant money, which the poet would never applied for himself.

“I’ve never known anyone whose presence was so defined by absence,” Foye told Beatdom. “In a way with Bob it’s very hard to separate the person from the myth. Myth, in many ways, is a truer truth. He had so many rivers flowing through him. He identified as a Black Jew which is relevant because he combined all these different streams that are the American experience.”

Foye believes some of the myths grew up because “He [Kaufman] was not forthcoming about his biography. I never heard him talk about New Orleans.

You only got the information he was willing to give you.”

Like Hirschman, Foye also sees Kaufman’s years as a labor organizer to be a critical period in his life. “The period where he’s writing poetry is really quite small. He got back to San Francisco late in 1959 and by about 1963 he [publicly] stops writing.”

So what was he doing? “He’s just out there living his life in different ways,” Foye said. “He also seems to have been quite consciously living a secret agent theme.

The whole ‘secret’ thing runs through everything he does – kind of a double agent in life in terms of how he’s out there and manifesting himself.”

Kaufman wore many masks and many personas, he continued, citing the poet’s tendency to use lots of Biblical references, as well as illusions to slavery,

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Native Americans, and Jim Crow laws. Kaufman, he added, had an unusual relationship Hollywood, television imagery, or advertising. “He’s very pop in that respect,” he said. “Very McCluhanesque.”

The mix of his radical politics and poetic sensibility Foye said was, “All brought together in his opposition to capital punishment. He knew this country is based on murder.”

Privacy was critically important to Kaufman.

“Privacy is something we really don’t have anymore,” Foye said. “But privacy was his way of protecting who he was as an artist and his source of inspiration. The act of writing poetry and being a poet is a very private thing, a most private thing, an intensely private thing.”

Foye said, “All poetry was one for him. He’d pull a line here and a line there. That’s why he didn’t like people writing stuff down. He was always quoting a lot of people and he didn’t want to be accused of plagiarism. It’s a jazz thing. He’s improvising. He’s just riffing. It’s another example of Bob recreating poetry in the moment.”

That approach is one of the things that endeared Kaufman to Jack Kerouac. “Kerouac was crazy about Bob,” Foye said. “He just thought the world of him.”

Asked why he thought Kaufman is still not as famous as his contemporaries – even some of his less talented contemporaries, Foye said, “I think he’s very accessible. Frankly, he’s too good. Maybe it’s the fact that he wasn’t out there hustling, making the scene, doing readings all the time. Maybe it’s just because he was naturally reclusive. Maybe some people felt, ‘This guy is just too good’. Is that because of jealousy?

Remember, in the old days there was real [racial] tokenism. For the life of me, I just don’t get it. But

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frankly, the smaller the audience that understands you.”

“But I think it’s all coming around. If you read Jail Poem and that look at the themes of Black Lives Matter you see the same theme – institutional of violence against people of color.”

“Gregory Corso used to ask why the greatest Black poet in America doesn’t write about being Black.

That’s the challenge – to read the work constantly reevaluating the work. The reputation and archetypal qualities always get in the way of the work. That’s what we should always be trying to do in the end – look at something with fresh eyes.”

As to what the poetry tells us about the poet Foye said, “He partly shows us Bob Kaufman, but for him that was also partly a construction, a persona. I think it shows us a certain distance. Like he’s saying, ‘Yeah, that’s one of the people I am’. That creation, that invention, is a persona he sometimes occupied.”

Foye believes that Kaufman died, if not totally happy, at least more at peace. “He seemed to get happier and happier as time went on,” he said. “I think he went out on a very high note, aside from the fact that he never had any money and was homeless much of the time. He finally accepted who he was. I know he really liked being with Lynn Wildey. You could always judge how he was feeling by how he dressed. It was always a good sign of where his self-esteem was.”

We asked Foye what he thought Kaufman would say if he came back and discovered his newfound celebrity. “I think he’d love it,” he said. “He wouldn’t revel in it in an egotistical way. I think Bob would really dig that. In a funny way he wasn’t that comfortable in the spotlight, even though he could easily command

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the spotlight.”

Foye said there was a good reason why Collected Poems ended up at City Lights. “New Directions passed on it,” he explained. “Things go in and out of style. Sometimes I wish we could get rid of the ‘Beat’ appellation altogether. I just think it gets in the way.

The variety is tremendous. Eric Walker is kind of the last Beat poet. That’s what it’s all about – how to live.”

Goodbye don’t mean I’m gone

Bob Kaufman died of pulmonary emphysema in San Francisco on January 12, 1986. The stories from that day could easily fill another article. Lynne Wildey had been at his side for last five years of his life.

On Friday, January 17, over 250 poets and friends gathered at San Francisco’s Sacred Heart Church, near Fillmore District to pay their last respects. Some, but not all, of his Beat-era and beyond peers were there – including Hirschman, Cherkovski, and many, many others.

Michael McClure read a poem. Jack Micheline read a poem, Ferlinghetti read a poem from Ginsberg, who was not there. After the mass, the poets regrouped at the Mirage Bar at 22nd and Guerrero Streets, for a party that had begun sometime in 1956 and continues on to this day.

Kaufman’s ashes were scattered at sea on Thursday, January 23, 1986, according to his wishes.

Earlier, a jazz procession made their way up Grant Avenue, stopping to play music at each of the bars Kaufman once drank at. Hirschman and many, many others were there.

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The celebration, Neeli Cherkovski told us was “a great testament to Bob and his impact. We had music, spontaneous poetry, and it all ended with a group of us taking a boat … and spreading his ashes. What more could one ask for? Do you know he was the quintessential beatnik, a righteous prophet?”

As the ashes dissolved in the cold water, a huge rainbow appeared across San Francisco. Maybe it was the Trickster’s latest shape shifting exercise. Maybe it was his spirit smiling down on his friends. Maybe it was just a rainbow.

Bob Kaufman, always elusive, left us with far more questions than answers.

Coda WHEN THE POET PROTESTS THE DEATH HE SEES AROUND HIM, THE DEAD WANT HIM SILENCED. HE DIES LIKE LORCA DID, YET LORCA SURVIVES IN HIS POEM …”

-- Bob Kaufman, “The Poet” “Given the way things work in American culture, some people come to exemplify particular cultural forms. In some ways it’s not their choosing, but what happens sometimes is that others get obscured by that,” observed Billy Woodbury who wrote, directed and edited And When I Die, I Won’t Stay Dead - Bob Kaufman, Poet, an award winning documentary that

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premiered at the 2015 International Film Festival in Rotterdam. “Kaufman is one of those people — it’s not so difficult in the United States to explain why he’s not as well known as the others.”22 Trying to make sense of those cultural forms is often an exercise in futility. Maybe one of the best summations comes from Maria Damon, chair of the Humanities and Media Studies Department at Pratt Institute, who has written a series of insightful commentaries on the poet and his work over the almost 40 years she has studied him.

“I was attracted to Kaufman initially in the summer of 1981, when I pulled out a long-loved anthology of modern US poetry by Hayden Carruth, The Voice That is Great Within Us,23 which had been important to me since the early 1970s when I was a high school student just discovering Robert Creeley, etc.,” Damon explained. “I was headed to graduate school in the Bay Area and had been somewhat ‘politicized’ by my college studies. I noticed that Bob Kaufman, who had a few poems in the anthology, was half-Black and half-Jewish, or so the bio ran. I loved his work and the bio, which spoke to many of my concerns.”

Wanting more, she found a copy of The Ancient Rain, which had just been published, at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, MA. “I bought it, devoured it and the myths it came enwrapt in, and headed out to California,” Damon told Beatdom.

“As soon as I got there I saw that Kaufman would 22 Pattison, Michael. Unknown If Not Forgotten: Billy Woodberry On Bob Kaufman. Sourced at: http://www.idfilm. net/2018/01/billy-woodberry-bob-kaufman-and-when-i-die-iwont-stay-dead-interview.html. May 20, 2020 23 Carruth, Hayden. The Voice That Is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century. New York.Bantam.1978

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be reading in late September at the San Francisco Institute of Art along with Phil Lamantia.

“So I went to that now-historic reading. Three years later, I decided to write a seminar paper on Kaufman for Sandra Drake’s class on African American literature and did so. A year or so after that, I was revising the paper into a chapter for my dissertation when Kaufman died (1986) so I went up for the funeral parade, etc.”

“I never met Kaufman,” she continued, “but he became, and continues to be, a central poet for me.” Over time Damon has dealt with several Bob Kaufmans. “I have shifted in my thinking about him as more has been revealed of his past,” she explained.

“He was able to reinvent himself as a Beat poet after his labor organizing ‘career’ collapsed and he was blacklisted from the AFL-CIO. I’ve come to see him less as a mystical mendicant seer and more as a victim of American racism.”

Asked how she would describe the “real Bob Kaufman,” Damon said, “I think he’s endlessly interesting in that – like Dylan, (and of course Whitman) – he ‘contains multitudes’ – and was able to fit himself to the needs and exigencies of his times. A resourceful survivor, (as well as a victim).”

And what does she make of the multiple myths that seem to surround Kaufman, from whether he was Jewish, or Catholic, or Buddhist to whether or not he really never spoke during his “Buddhist Silent Period?”

“I think people need myth,” Damon answered. “I’d hesitate to make a call on the ‘real’ Kaufman when so much remains to be pieced together, whether through historical research or critical intuition. Billy

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Woodberry24 has come closest, I think, to offering a comprehensive portrait.

“I guess I could just say, ‘Read the work,’ but the life is so interesting as well. Read the life, read the work, hold them side-by-side, but don’t draw any glib or hasty conclusions.”

24 Woodbury wrote, directed and edited And When I Die, I Won’t Stay Dead - Bob Kaufman, Poet, an award-winning documentary that premiered at the 2015 International Film Festival in Rotterdam.

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Hunter S. Fear Thompson: and Loathing in utero

Words by Leon Horton

Artwork by Mark Fisher

This article is respectfully dedicated to my friend Paul Clements (1964-2017), another good Doctor sorely missed.

Owl Farm, Colorado, February 20, 2005 – 5:42 p.m.

Hunter S. Thompson, hell-raiser and author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, takes a phone call from his wife Anita at the Aspen Club and apologises for almost accidently shooting her the previous day. He asks her to come home, sets the receiver to one side, and puts a .45 calibre pistol in his mouth...

In the next room, daughter-in-law Jennifer and grandson Will hear a shot ring out, but this being the home of Hunter, where guns are as commonplace as cutlery, they ignore it.

Moments later, Hunter’s son Juan finds the body, calls the sheriff’s department, then goes outside with a shotgun and fires three blasts into the air to mark

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his father’s passing.

Age sixty-seven, the prolific Gonzo journalist and “wild man of American writing” has filed his last story.

Never hesitate to use force. It settles issues, influences people. Most people are not accustomed to solving situations by immediate and seemingly random applications of force. And the very fact that you are willing to do it – or might be – is a very powerful reasoning tool.

Most people are not prepared to do that.

You can establish the right reputation in this regard – you might, right in the middle of a conversation, just swat some motherfucker across the room. Make his blood shoot out in big spurts.

Ancient Gonzo Wisdom Hunter S. Thompson was an enigma. A riddle wrapped in a mystery waving a loaded gun in your face. It is almost impossible to say anything about Thompson that hasn’t been said before, mostly by the good Doctor himself. It is equally difficult to know where the reality ends and the mythology begins.

But that’s what Thompson was all about – muddying the waters of factual reporting, placing himself at the centre of the story, and sacrificing any notion of journalistic objectivity to the absolute conviction he was a serious writer of fiction, in the same vein as Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Thompson had many lives: He was the fearless young journalist who beat his way through the countercultural hippie scene in San Francisco, spent a

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year riding with the Hell’s Angels, took a nasty beating, and survived to tell the tale in his first book. He was “Raoul Duke,” who staggered out of the crashing wave of 1960s optimism in 1971 armed with an arsenal of drugs, giving us Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Gonzo journalism. Perhaps most importantly of all, he was the leftfield political commentator who got to share a car with President Nixon and talk about football (“The only time I ever saw the bastard tell the truth”), run for office himself as Sheriff of Aspen, Colorado (“I proved what I set out to prove. That the American Dream really is fucked.”), and was the first to see through would-be-president Clinton’s primary colours (“The morals of a lizard”).

By turns exhilarated and disgusted by politics, in 2000 Thompson returned to his first love, contributing a weekly sports column (“Hey Rube”) to ESPN’s Page 2 blog. But thanks to a braying crowd of fans, many of whom had only read Fear and Loathing or watched the 1998 Johnny Depp movie of the same name, he was rarely allowed to escape his past, or the monstrous creations of his often regretted self-mythologizing.

I’m too old to adopt conceits or airs.

I have nothing left to prove. It’s kind of fun to look at it – instead of a personal challenge to the enemy out there, just enjoy the evidence. I can finally look at it objectively. Not “Who is this freak over here?” but “Who am I?” I’ve gotten to that point where it’s take it or leave it. Whatever way I’ve developed seems okay to me on the evidence. So what if the score is against me? I’ve been on the

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battlefield for a long time. I suppose I always will be – just my nature.

Ancient Gonzo Wisdom Thompson’s defiant act of suicide did little to persuade fans and critics alike that he was much more than the drug-fuelled outlaw journalist portrayed in the media. He was a difficult man, most certainly - demanding but fiercely loyal, with a deep-seated abandonment complex that tested the best of his friendships. To love him was to engage in combat with him. And to get to that version of the man, we need to look back into his childhood, past the outlaw antics of Hells Angels or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Hunter Stockton Thompson was born on July 18, 1937 in Louisville, Kentucky, a city built on its chief exports of tobacco and liquor. Steeped in southern traditions and sporting many athletic clubs and literary societies, for some Louisville represented that most arresting of ideals: the American Dream and conspicuous wealth. On the other side of the street, however, it was a deadbeat town of drinking, gambling, and crime.

It is little wonder that Louisville would produce a prodigal son like Thompson. It would become his playground, his alma mater, his vision of the world in minutiae, but some must have thought it was God’s own work when six months before Thompson was born this city founded on vice met with almost biblical retribution when the banks of the Ohio River burst and plunged 70 percent of Louisville underwater. To those who came to know Hunter during his chequered childhood, it might well have seemed a portent.

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In his comprehensive 2008 biography, Outlaw Journalist: the Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson, William McKeen wrote of his long-time friend and colleague: “Hunter was a difficult child. He was also charming, extraordinarily handsome, and selfassured.” Interviewed in 2004 on the Biography Channel for Biography: Hunter S Thompson, Sandra Conklin, Hunter’s first wife, said of her former husband: “Hunter came out of the womb different and somewhat angry. From talking to his mother, he was always different. He always had that charisma.”

Virginia Thompson, née Ray, was twenty-eight when Hunter was born. The daughter of a Louisville businessman, she came from a relatively comfortable background (the family manufactured carriages before her father moved into insurance) and enjoyed the usual trappings of Louisville society. She was intelligent, and her father did well enough to send her to university. With the onset of the Great Depression, however, the family could no longer afford to support her through graduation, and by the time she met Jack Thompson in 1934, any dreams of a genteel southern lifestyle had all but evaporated.

Jack Thompson had been chasing the American Dream most of his adult life – never quite making it, never quite not – but he was no Willy Loman. All he wanted for his family was a nice home in a good neighbourhood, something he achieved in 1943 when he was able to put a down payment on a two-storey bungalow in Louisville’s first suburb, the Highlands. He was fifteen years older than Virginia, more worldly, and like her father, worked in insurance – which might account for her attraction to him. He arrived in Louisville after the death of his first wife, having left

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his first-born with relatives.

Being older, and no stranger to parenthood, Jack often took a back seat where his second son was concerned, but Virginia doted on Hunter. She was more lenient than most mothers, and from an early age it was Hunter not Jack who entertained visitors.

“Even as a child, he worked a room,” McKeen observed in Outlaw Journalist. “When Hunter was around, the chemistry changed; you felt his presence before you saw him. In that seen-and-not-heard generation, Hunter struck even grown-ups mute with his powerful personality.”

With the arrival of baby brother Davison in 1939, the Thompsons might have looked like the perfect allAmerican pre-nuclear family – if such a thing existed – but the times they were a-changing. The war in Europe was looming ever closer, and Jack Thompson took to drinking whiskey and listening to bad news on the radio; looking on from his chair on the porch as younger, more athletic fathers played sports with their children.

For the most part, the family would give Jack a wide berth when he listened to war bulletins and muttered darkly about the Japanese, but Hunter remembered those evenings with childlike reverence.

“I soon became addicted to those moments,” he wrote in his memoir Kingdom of Fear. “There was a certain wildness to it, a queer adrenaline rush of guilt and mystery and vaguely secret joy that I still can’t explain, but even at the curious age of four I knew it was a special taste that I shared only with my father.”

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Choosing the right friends is a life-ordeath matter. But you really see it only

in retrospect. I’ve always considered that possibly my highest talent – recognizing and keeping good friends. And you better pay attention to it, because any failure in that regard can be fatal. You need friends who come through. You should always be looking for good friends because they really dress up your life later on.

Ancient Gonzo Wisdom The same year America entered the war after the bombing of Pearl Harbour, Hunter entered first grade at I. N. Bloom Elementary School, and quickly established his credentials. He was mischievous and funny, which failed to impress his teachers, but made him a focus of fun to his classmates. He had issues with authority, sure, but he was also a natural born leader, and he soon had his own gang of reprobates trailing behind him.

Cherubic wasn’t in it. Even at the age of five, Hunter had the ability to frighten and captivate children and adults alike. He would bark questions at his teachers – voice prematurely deep, sounding angry when he wasn’t – and snarl menacingly at his classmates.

When he was elected to head the school safety patrol, no doubt after a vigorous campaign, the principal protested, calling him “Little Hitler.” “I wasn’t sure what that meant,” Thompson recalled in Kingdom of Fear, “but I think it meant I had a natural sway over many students. And that I should probably be lobotomized for the good of society.”

Out of school, Hunter’s gang would emulate real-life events playing war games in the woods in Cherokee Park, often with real-life consequences and

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injuries, with Hunter as usual taking the lead. When parents saw their children come home with bloodied heads and covered in bruises, they began to see the Thompson kid as a dangerous influence and warned their sons to stay clear of him. “Hunter was a sweat to be around,” friend Neville Blakemore told William McKeen. “I got increasingly uneasy with being around him because I knew he would eventually think of something to do to me.”

Hunter was Coyote, the trickster deity of North American mythology. Coyote was a mischievous, cunning, and destructive force at work within creation.

Mysterious and monstrous were his antics, as was the pleasure he derived from causing troubles and upsets on a daily basis. When the creator god Wonomi yielded power to Coyote, it was not, he said, because Coyote was stronger, but because man had chosen to follow him and not their creator. Legend has it Coyote killed himself and roamed the world as a spirit.

As much as he sought out mischief and trouble, Hunter was a seeker of knowledge, and so the gang’s joyrides across town on their bicycles often led to sojourns in the local library. “There’d be a lot of camaraderie and loud talk until we’d get to the steps of the library, gang member Gerald Tyrell told McKeen. “Then we’d get quiet, go in, and get a book, and sit down and read. We’d leave in about two hours and get noisy again. It wasn’t until much later that I realized it wasn’t the normal stuff for a gang of boys to do.”

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My parents were decent people, and I was raised, like my friends, to believe that Police were our friends and protectors –

the badge was a symbol of extremely high authority, perhaps the highest of all. Nobody ever asked why. It was one of those unnatural questions that are better left alone. If you had to ask that, you were sure as hell Guilty of something and probably should have been put behind bars a long time ago. It was a no-win situation.

Kingdom of Fear It was on the cards. It was bound to happen. A boy like Hunter was always going to run into the Law sooner or later, but his parents must have been shocked when two FBI agents came to their door and accused their nine-year-old son of destroying a federal mailbox.

His friends, they said, had already confessed and put Hunter squarely in the frame for a crime that came with a five-year prison term. Hunter was guilty, of course – he and his gang had contrived, using ropes, to pull the heavy metal mailbox into the path of an oncoming bus, with devastating results – but realising his friends would never rat him out, he held his nerve, and with remarkable assurance for a nine-year-old boy guilty-as-sin, he turned the tables on his accusers and asked: “Who? What witnesses?”

Jack Thompson reiterated his son’s question, and the federal agents eventually left without their man, but it was a pivotal moment in Hunter’s development: “I learned a powerful lesson. Never believe the first thing an FBI agent tells you about anything – especially not if he seems to believe you are guilty of a crime. Maybe he has no evidence. Maybe he’s bluffing. Maybe you are innocent. Maybe. The Law can be hazy on these

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things…. But it is definitely worth a roll.” The mailbox incident was a confidence-builder, he would say later in life, but confidence was never Hunter’s problem.

In the days before Ritalin, sport was the answer.

Sport, experts said, was the best medicine for taming the restless energy of wayward children. Louisville was mad for baseball, despite not having their own Major League team and, like his father, Hunter was passionate about the nation’s favourite game. He played in a church-sponsored league, as did many of his friends, and was considered an extremely good batsman.

At Bloom Elementary, Hunter led the campaign to form an extra-curricular athletics club, the Hawks, organised competitions with other neighbourhood teams, and won the interest of Louisville’s prestigious Castlewood Athletics Club. If the wind had blown in a different direction, the name Hunter S. Thompson might be remembered very differently.

But it was not to be. The spirit of Coyote chewed on his own tail. As Hunter grew, a physical disability – one leg shorter than the other – left unbloomed any flowers of romance that he might one day become a professional sportsman. It was painful to watch his friends surpass him on the playing fields, but the anomaly gave him his distinctive loping walk – a walk that would serve him so memorably in a lifetime of noteworthy “here-I-am-make-of-it-what-you-willcouldn’t-give-a-shit” arrivals and departures.

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To get by you had to find the one thing you can do better than anybody else… at least this was so in my case. I figured that out early. It was writing. It was the

rock in my sock. Easier than algebra. It was always work, but it was worthwhile work. I was fascinated early on by seeing my by-line in print. It was a rush. Still is.

Kingdom of Fear As the gang’s creative mischief continued unabated – taunting other kids with a BB gun down at the creek, pretending to bullwhip each other in public, feigning epileptic seizures as a prelude to shoplifting – so too did their forays into the literary world. When gang member Walter Kaegi acquired a mimeograph, they began publishing their own neighbourhood newspaper, the Southern Star. Kaegi was editor, but Hunter wrote much of the copy. It was juvenile stuff (the lead story in the first issue was about a fight Hunter provoked with new neighbours), but their efforts caught the attention of Louisville’s Courier Journal.

Hunter earned his first writing credit age eleven.

After his first taste of the publishing world, Hunter was hungry for more. He set his sights on joining Louisville’s prestigious Athenaeum Literary Association – but there was a problem. Firstly, he was too young. You had to be thirteen to join the hallowed ranks of the Athenaeum. Secondly, he was at the wrong school. The Athenaeum had started at Male High, a feeder school for the Ivy League, whereas Hunter had started at the less distinguished Atherton High School.

He needed a plan. He needed a way out.

And then something truly serendipitous happened.

After criticising their performance, Hunter was beaten up by the school football team with such alarming ferocity that it was deemed prudent by his concerned parents and teachers that he should transfer to Male

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Above: the January 11th, 1948 Courier-Journal article about Hunter and his friends. Below: The first edition of The Southern Star.

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High forthwith. With a salutary lesson on the redeeming effects of violence, Hunter got where he wanted to be.

As for the Athenaeum, he would just have to bide his time.

Male High meant new friends – many seeking friendship as an alternative to being the butt of Hunter’s pranks – and wider scope for rebellion.

Jack and Virginia fretted over Hunter’s increasing waywardness, but after Virginia gave birth to their third son James in 1949, they had little time or energy to do much about it: Virginia was forty-one, Jack fiftythree, and the burden of another child on Jack’s salary was stressful enough. Besides which, a much darker cloud was looming on the family Thompson horizon.

When I think of him now I think of fast horses and cruel Japs and lying FBI agents. “There is no such thing as Paranoia,” he told me once. “Even your Worst fears will come true if you chase them long enough. Beware, son. There is Trouble lurking out there in the darkness, sure as hell. Wild beasts and cruel people, and some of them will pounce on your neck and try to tear your head off.”

Kingdom of Fear When Jack Thompson was admitted to Louisville Veterans Hospital in 1952, he had been suffering for months. He was exhausted, his muscles ached, his vision was getting worse by the day, and he could barely eat. The doctors diagnosed a chronic condition that attacks the immune system: myasthenia gravis.

Three months later, he was dead.

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“His dad was a nice and quiet man who kept him on the straight and narrow as best he could,” Hunter’s friend Duke Rice told unofficial biographer Paul Perry, author of Fear and Loathing: The Strange and Terrible Saga of Hunter S. Thompson. “When he died, there was no one to do that. His life got turned upside down from that point on.”

Jack’s death sent the entire Thompson family into freefall. Virginia, with three young boys to feed, was forced to take a job at the public library – leaving the day-to-day care of her children to their widowed grandmother Lucille. Although the boys loved their Grandma (Mee-mo), she was no substitute in a time of grief. Hunter, suffering complex emotions of loss and abandonment by his father, deeply resented the daily absence of his mother. To make matters worse, Virginia started drinking heavily after work.

“Your mother’s sick again,” Lucille would tell the boys, as she helped her daughter to bed, but fourteenyear-old Hunter knew better. If he resented Virginia going to work, he positively hated her drinking, and the two would often have screaming matches. “Hunter had a real short fuse with all this stuff,” his brother Jim told E. Jean Carroll in her much-loathed pseudoGonzo biography Hunter: The Strange and Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson. “He was intolerant and mean.”

Feeling abandoned by both parents, Hunter’s antics and wild behaviour increased exponentially.

At Male High, he found new partners in crime (chiefly Sam Stallings and Ralston Steenrod - both older), started dating girls, and learned how to get hold of alcohol. Underage drinking, partying all night, and stealing, gave the teenagers the idea they were somehow untouchable: emulating Marlon Brando’s

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gang in The Wild One (one of Hunter’s favourite films), they roamed the neighbourhood looking for trouble.

And they found it – time and again. Whether threatening terrified store owners to sell them liquor, trashing pool halls, or robbing the collection box from a local church, it was clear which of the gang had adopted the Brando role. After they vandalised a gas station, the police came to Male High and arrested Hunter alone, taking him away in handcuffs. “I learned about jails a lot earlier than most people,” Hunter told High Times in 1971. “I was in and out of jails continually… for buying booze under age or for throwing fifty-five gallon oil drums through filling station windows.” And so it went on.

Still, at least he had the Athenaeum Literary Association. The Athenaeum – whose grand history stretched back to 1824…The Athenaeum – whose fifty or so members came from the upper echelons of Louisville society… At least there, Hunter could show off his prodigious writing talent and keep his delinquent behaviour in check. At least there, the spirit of Coyote could rest awhile. At least, that was how it looked to the outside world.

In reality, the Athenaeum (ostensibly a melting pot of cultural interests and social status) was like the Hellfire Club of 18th century Britain, with all its initiation rites and secret ceremonies. Members, drawn from three years of Male High – sophomore, junior, and senior – had to be voted in, and were expected to prove their mettle in underage drinking and partying.

They would meet every Saturday night, suited and booted, and were required to produce something of literary merit to be critiqued by their peers.

“It was a rather extraordinary thing,” Hunter’s

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friend Porter Bibb told William McKeen, “for forty-five testosterone-packed teenagers to sit there for three hours or more every Saturday night, reading the poems, the short stories, and the essays that they had written.”

Hunter, of course, was a natural, and much of his writing made the final cut into the Athenaeum’s yearbook, the Spectator. Age seventeen, in an essay titled “Security”, he wrote: Turn back the pages of history and see the men who have shaped the destiny of the world. Security was never theirs, but they lived rather than existed… It is from the bystanders (who are in the vast majority) that we receive the propaganda that life is not worth living, that life is drudgery, that the ambitions of youth must be laid aside for a life which is but a painful wait for death… These are the insignificant and forgotten men who preach conformity because it is all they know. These are the men who dream at night of what could have been, but who wake at dawn to take their places at the now-familiar rut and to merely exist through another day…

So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: Who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived, or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?

Reprinted in The Proud Highway

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Despite, or maybe because of, his association with the Athenaeum, Hunter’s contempt for the middleclass mores of polite society saw Coyote raise his game in evermore defiant acts of gratuity. He staged a mock kidnapping in front of the queue outside a cinema (revelling in the fact it made the papers), spent nights in jail for drink-driving, and infuriated his friends’ parents when he got their sons arrested for trying to buy alcohol.

The career of a juvenile delinquent is finite by definition, and time and the patience of law enforcers, not to mention that of the local populace, were running out for the neighbourhood terror that was Hunter S. Thompson. The final straw came one night in Cherokee Park, June 1955, when he, Steenrod, and Stallings, driving around with nowhere to go, decided they needed cigarettes. With teenage logic, no doubt fuelled by alcohol, instead of driving to the nearest store, they pulled up alongside a parked car.

The boys approached the car, where two young couples were enjoying a passionate evening. Stallings asked them for cigarettes, but the startled lovers refused. What happened next has long been a matter of dispute, but according to Hunter, Stallings threatened them. “‘All right, Motherfucker! You give me some cigarettes or I’m going to grab you out of there!’” he recalled. “Then he reached into the car and said, ‘I’m going to jerk you out of here and beat the shit out of you and rape those girls back here.’”

The driver of the car, Joseph Monin, later stated that Stallings threatened him with a gun, giving some credence to Hunter’s version of events, but according to McKeen in Outlaw Journalist, it was Hunter not Stallings who threatened the rape. Whatever the

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truth, the terrified victims handed over cigarettes and money, totalling eight dollars, and the three robbers stole off into the night – but not before Monin got their licence plate.

Hunter sobbed in the dock and Steenrod and Stallings (both sons of attorneys) got off lightly with probation and a fifty-dollar fine respectively. Virginia Thompson pleaded for her son but Judge Joseph Jull’s gavel went down – and Hunter got sixty days in jail. Even one of the victims protested at this, but Jull was unmoved. “What do you want me to do? Give him a medal?” Because of his lack of connections, the alleged threat of rape and his previous petty offences, Hunter Stockton Thompson met the full force of the Law. Prison gives an artist credentials; for everyone else it takes them away. Incarcerated in Jefferson County Jail, seventeen-year-old Hunter had time to reflect on where his life was going. He would be in prison when his friends graduated from high school, he would be voted out of the Athenaeum Literary Association, he would never go to college…

On the day he should have graduated from Male High, Hunter gazed out from his prison cell and wrote: I could see the moon hung high in the sky and the mocking grin on his face.

I know he was looking straight at me, perched high in my lonely place.

His voice floated down through the crisp night air and I thought I heard him say, “It’s too bad my boy, It’s an awful shame,

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that you have to go this way.”

“The Night-Watch”/The Proud Highway In the event, thanks to his 18th birthday, Hunter made bail and served only half of his sentence – but by the time he came out his world was a changed place. Most of his friends had deserted him, and with the ominous warning “We’ll be watching you,” from Judge Jull ringing in his ears, under the steely-eyed gaze of his hated probation officer, Mr. Dotson, he took a driving job delivering parts for a local Chevrolet dealer.

Or, if you prefer William McKeen’s version of events, he took a job driving a truck for a furniture store.

Whichever one it was, it didn’t last. With his love for speed, Hunter behind the wheel was always a risky prospect – something bad was bound to happen.

According to McKeen, he backed the truck through a showroom window. According to Hunter, in numerous interviews and in his memoirs, he tried to take the truck down a narrow back alley: “I took it down an alley – a downtown alley at about 60 miles an hour and just – I mean, one inch off, just opened up the side like a can opener,” he told CNBC in 2003.

The prospect of going back to jail was too much, and so, with barely any hesitation, Hunter simply walked across the street to an Air Force recruiting office and promptly enlisted. “I took the pilot training test and scored like 97 percent. I didn’t really mean to go in there, but I told them I wanted to drive jet planes, and they said I could with that test. So I said, ‘When can I … when can I leave?’ And the recruiting officer said, ‘Well. Normally it takes a few days to check out, but you go Monday morning.’” This was Saturday.

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“Louisville is a good place to grow up and a good place to get away from,” Hunter said about leaving the womb of his hometown. It had prepared him for the outside world, armed him against oncoming storms, but now there was no reason to stay. He would take with him complex feelings of loss and abandonment, the anger and after-effects that would impact on his future life and friendships. For much of his writing in years to come, he would search for the death of the American Dream, perhaps never quite realizing that it was right in front of him all along, deep in his psyche, back there in his childhood.

“I look back on my youth with great fondness,” Hunter wrote in Kingdom of Fear, “but I would not recommend it as a working model for others. I was lucky to survive it at all.”

For anyone who knew Hunter at that time – his family, his friends, teachers, judges and, yes, Mr. Dotson, his “officious creep” of a probation officer – if they thought the Air Force would be the making of Hunter Stockton Thompson, they were in for a rude awakening.

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Recently from Beatdom Books.

World Citizen, by David S. Wills “Scottish Book of the Week�

Travel influenced the poetry, politics, and personality of Allen Ginsberg like no other poet. Read about his adventures in sixty-six countries around the globe in this fascinating travel biography.

World Citizen: Allen Ginsberg as Traveller is, like Ginsberg himself, unique and just as fascinating.

- The Courier It stands alone as an excellent biography, but it is much more than that.

- Ambush Magazine

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