Coal

Down the Beaten Spiral (1 of 2)

Nov 6, 18:55 Literature

I was going to talk about William S. Burroughs, who said “I’m forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for [his wife] Joan’s death…”

Burroughs was a pot-growing opium-smoking swinger who had planned to be exactly that from a young age. He travelled the world and explored the criminal underground. He ran from the law, he partied, he impressed, he thought, he tried, and eventually, he wrote. He killed his own wife.

The story is that he was running from the law, which was after him for growing dope, among other infractions. He, his wife Joan Vollmer, and their child ended up in Mexico city. At a party one night he proposed to show off his sharpshooting skills with a William Tell act. Joan placed a glass on her head, Burroughs aimed, and shot her dead on the spot.

I was going to talk about Lucien Carr, who introduced Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Neal Cassady to each other. After a while he began to pull away from the beats and their mad antics, but not soon enough to escape disaster. Carr was apparently attractive – especially to other men, and there were plenty of swingers about at the time. Among them was a man named David Kammerer, with whom Carr wanted only friendship. One day when Kammerer’s advances were refused, he attacked Carr. Carr stabbed him to death with a pocketknight in self-defense, filled his pockets with rocks, and rolled him into the river (where the entire scene took place). A short while later he turned himself in to police and served a two year sentence.

I could go on in this vein. There is a dark side to the beat generation and their escapades that I sometimes forget about while reading literature from their glory days. But Ginsberg wasn’t joking around when he wrote Howl.

Nevertheless, Lucian Carr and William S. Burroughs aren’t what I want to talk about. What interests me is the beatific vision. What interests me are the broadest currents of beat culture, the art it produced, and the ecstatic depraved glory of holy fools, mad saints, and ‘angelheaded hipsters’.