Pour acquérir du vocabulaire il faut être méthodique ! Il ne suffit pas d’apprendre des listes de mots qu’on oubliera 3 jours après. Nous ne sommes pas des ordinateurs !

Mais en tant qu’être humain  nous avons d’autres armes qu’un disque dur pour retenir ce que nous apprenons : nos sens !

Dans notre apprentissage nous avons nos yeux, nos oreilles et notre sens du toucher qui vont nous aider à nous souvenir. D’abord nous lisons, ensuite nous écoutons et enfin nous écrivons.

MEMORY : voici donc un nouveau mot qu’il nous faut retenir.  Alors comment procéder ?

D’abord, on le lit avec les yeux, ensuite on l’entend avec les oreilles en le prononçant, enfin on fait appel au toucher en l’écrivant. C’est la première étape !

Ensuite, il faut l’associer à d’autres mots :

des synonymes ( remembrance, recollection, reminiscence, recall, retention… )

des antonymes( forgetfulness, amnesia, abentmindedness, omission… )

Si c’est possible des homonymes ( Ex. pour : where <> were )

Finalement utiliser le mot dans plusieurs phrases :

I have no memory of this incident.  Let’s take a walk down memory lane.

Comme vous l’avez compris : plus nous faisons d’associations et mieux nous allons retenir !

On commence par apprendre lire.

C'est encore ce qu'il y a de mieux pour apprendre une langue.

On travaille avec : Les citations.

                                Les speeches.

                                Les textes.

                                Beat Generation

 

 

The Beat Generation is a term used to describe a group of American writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, and also the cultural phenomena that they wrote about and inspired (later sometimes called "beatniks"). Central elements of "Beat" culture include a rejection of mainstream American values, experimentation with drugs and alternate forms of sexuality, and an interest in Eastern spirituality.

The major works of Beat writing are Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959) and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957). Both Howl and Naked Lunch were the focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to liberalize what could be published in the United States. On the Road transformed Kerouac's friend Neal Cassady into a youth-culture hero. The members of the Beat Generation quickly developed a reputation as new bohemian hedonists, who celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity.

The original "Beat Generation" writers met in Ohio, LA. Later, the central figures (with the exception of Burroughs) ended up together in San Francisco in the mid-1950s where they met and became friends with figures associated with the San Francisco Renaissance. During the 1960s, the rapidly expanding Beat culture underwent a transformation: the Beat Generation gave way to the Sixties Counterculture, which was accompanied by a shift in public terminology from "beatnik" to "hippie."

 

Writers

The press often used the term "Beat" in reference to a small group of writers and artists, the friends of Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs and sometimes Corso. A slightly wider definition would expand it to include other similar poets from New York, but still regard the San Francisco Renaissance and the Black Mountain poets as separate movements.

Defined more broadly, the "Beat" category would include all of these sub-groups, and many other writers who reached prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s, who shared many of the same themes, ideas, and intentions (dedication to spontaneity, open-form composition, subjectivity, and so on); even though they might have little social connection with the core group, and many might deny that they were ever a part of the "Beat Generation."

The main figures and early writers of the Beats were Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Herbert Huncke, Peter Orlovsky, and John Clellon Holmes. Certain poets the core Beats encountered in San Francisco were associated with the San Francisco Renaissance such as Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Lew Welch, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Harold Norse, Kirby Doyle, Michael McClure. The poets associated with the Black Mountain College were also associated with the Beat Generation, such as Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan (though Duncan was one of the most vocal early critics of the "Beat Generation" label). As well, there were the New York School poets such as Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch; surrealist poets Philip Lamantia and Ted Joans; and, poets who are occasionally called the "second wave" of the Beat Generation such as LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Diane DiPrima, Anne Waldman.

Other people associated with the Beats include Bob Kaufman, Tuli Kupferberg, Ed Sanders, Hubert Selby, Jr., John Wieners, Jack Micheline, A. D. Winans, Ray Bremser and Bonnie Bremser/Brenda Frazer, Ed Dorn, Jack Spicer, David Meltzer, Richard Brautigan, Lenore Kandel. Many previously underappreciated female writers were part of the Beat scene, such as Joanne Kyger, Kaye McDonough, Harriet Sohmers Zwerling, Janine Pommy Vega, Elise Cowen. A few younger writers who were acquaintances of the aforementioned writers (such as Bob Dylan, Ken Kesey, Jim Carroll, Ron Padgett) are occasionally included in this list. Charles Bukowski has a tenuous place on this list since his association is slight. Several older writers were very closely associated with members of the "Beat Generation," though their reputations were solidified so much earlier that it is difficult to call them part of the same "generation." They include Kenneth Rexroth, the principal figure involved in the San Francisco Renaissance, and Charles Olson, the mentor to the Black Mountain poets and author of the highly influential essay "Projective Verse." Also, so many of these writers either studied personally with William Carlos Williams or looked up to Williams as an idol, that Beat writers are often seen as being the children of Williams.

Characteristics

The Beat Generation works highlighted the primacy of such Beat Generation essentials as spontaneity, open emotion, visceral engagement in often gritty worldly experiences; in a seeming paradox, the Beats often emphasized a spiritual yearning, using concepts and imagery from Buddhism, Judaism, Catholicism, and so on. Thus members of the Beat Generation sought a synthesis of the "beaten down" and the "beatific," as Kerouac described it. One of the most well publicized aspects of Beat writing is the continual challenge to the limits of free expression; the Beat writers produced a body of written work controversial both for its advocacy of non-conformity and for its non-conforming style.

The language and topics (drug use, sexuality, aberrant behavior) pushed the boundaries of acceptability in the conformist 1950's. The first "Beat" work to gain nationwide attention was Ginsberg's Howl based partly on its graphic sexual language; an obscenity-trial helped fuel its fame. One of the most enduringly famous "Beat" works, Kerouac's On the Road (written in 1951), which had much of its objectionable material edited out, was not published until 1957, in a sense capitalizing on the fame brought by the Howl obscenity-trial; Kerouac was subsequently accused of encouraging delinquency. Burroughs' magnum opus, Naked Lunch, which was much more graphic than Howl, likewise went to trial for obscenity after its 1962 American publication. These trials helped to establish that, if anything was deemed to have literary value, it was no longer considered obscene.

History

Origin of name

Author Jack Kerouac introduced the phrase "Beat Generation" in 1948, generalizing from his social circle to characterize the underground, anti-conformist youth gathering in New York at that time; the name came up in conversation with the novelist John Clellon Holmes (who published an early novel about the beat generation, titled Go, in 1952, along with a manifesto of sorts in the New York Times Magazine: "This is the beat generation.") The adjective "beat" came to the group through the underworld association with Herbert Huncke where it originally meant "tired" or "beaten down." Kerouac expanded the meaning of the term, over time adding the paradoxical connotations of "upbeat," "beatific," and the musical association of being "on the beat:" the Beat Generation was on the bottom, but they were looking up. Other adjectives discussed by Holmes and Kerouac were "found" and "furtive."

Kerouac's claim that he had identified (and embodied) a new trend analogous to the influential Lost Generation might have seemed grandiose at the time, but in retrospect it's clear that he was correct – though possibly largely because the prophecy was self-fulfilling.

Early meetings in 1940s and early 1950s

The original "Beat Generation" writers met in New York: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, (in 1948) and later (in 1950) Gregory Corso (they are sometimes called the "New York Beats" though only Corso was from New York). Perhaps equally important were the less obviously creative members of the scene, who contributed to the writers' intellectual environment and provided them with subject matter: There was Herbert Huncke, a drug-addict and petty thief who met Burroughs in 1946 and introduced the core members of the New York Beats to the junky life style and junky lingo, including the word "beat:" Lucien Carr, who was key to introducing many of the central figures to one another; and Hal Chase, an anthropology student from Denver, who, in 1947, introduced into the group Neal Cassady, the focus of many beat works (notably Kerouac's On the Road). Also important were the oft-neglected women in the original circle, including Joan Vollmer and Edie Parker. Their apartment on the upper west side of Manhattan often functioned as a salon (or as Ted Morgan puts it, a "pre-sixties commune"), and Joan Vollmer, in particular, was a serious participant in the marathon discussion-sessions.

Later, the central figures (with the exception of Burroughs) ended up together in San Francisco in the mid-1950s where they met and became friends with figures associated with the San Francisco Renaissance such as Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Harold Norse, Lew Welch, and Kirby Doyle. There they met many other poets who had migrated to San Francisco because it had a reputation as an important new center of creativity. This included Bob Kaufman who was, according to legend, the first to actually be called a "beatnik." Also of significance were Philip Lamantia, Tuli Kupferberg, and members of the recently dissolved Black Mountain College looking for a new center of communal creativity, poets such as Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, and Robert Duncan.

Many writers were inspired by the publication of "Howl" and On the Road and decided to join the group. The Beats met most of these writers when they returned to New York: John Wieners, LeRoi Jones, Diane DiPrima, Anne Waldman. The New York School of poets (including Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, and James Schuyler, though Ashbery and Schuyler weren’t quite as closely associated with the Beats), had already been established as a movement in New York; they found much in common with this ever-widening circle and consistently promoted one another's work.

Columbia University

The beginning of the Beat Generation is often traced back to Columbia University to the meeting of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, Hal Chase, and others in the original circle. Although they were later considered anti-academic artists, the seed for the Beat Generation was planted in a highly academic environment. Many of their early ideas were formed during arguments with professors such as Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren. This was the same environment in which some of their classmates, such as Louis Simpson and Donald Hall, became champions of formalism. This is where Carr and Ginsberg discussed the need for a "New Vision" (a term borrowed from Arthur Rimbaud) to move away from Columbia University's conservative notions of literature.

They soon met people outside of Columbia University such as Burroughs, Hunke, and Cassady and the new focus became real life experiences in contrast to the academic environment of Columbia. Perhaps the most important early experience that drove many of the members of the Beat Generation apart was Lucien Carr's stabbing of David Kammerer. The stabbing was an incident that Kerouac tried to capture twice, once in his first novel The Town and the City and then again in one of his last, Vanity of Duluoz.

Burroughs was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1914; making him roughly ten years older than most of the other original beats. While still living in St. Louis, Burroughs met David Kammerer, and thus began an association presumably based on their shared homosexual orientation and intellectual tendencies. As a boys' youth-group-leader in the mid-1930s, David Kammerer had become infatuated with the young Lucien Carr (with what encouragement, if any, it is difficult to say). Kammerer formed a pattern of following Carr around the country as Carr attended (and was expelled from) different colleges. In the fall of 1942, at the University of Chicago, Kammerer introduced 17-year-old Lucien Carr to William S. Burroughs.

Burroughs was a Harvard-graduate who lived off a stipend from his relatively wealthy family. His grandfather had invented the Burroughs Adding Machine, though the amount of wealth in the family is often exaggerated (Kerouac remarked on "the Burroughs Millions," which didn't actually exist^[6]). The three became good friends, whose sprees got Burroughs kicked out of his rooming-house and culminated with Carr confined in a mental ward after an apparent attempted suicide with a gas oven (one version of the story holds that this was a way of avoiding military service). In the spring of 1943, Carr's family moved him to Columbia University in New York, where Kammerer, and then Burroughs shortly followed.

At Columbia, Carr met the freshman Allen Ginsberg, whom he introduced to Burroughs and Kammerer. Edie Parker, another member of the crowd, introduced Carr to her boyfriend Jack Kerouac when he came back from his stint as a merchant marine. In 1944, Carr introduced Kerouac and Burroughs. Kammerer's fixation was obvious to everyone in the circle, and he became jealous as Carr developed a relationship with a young woman (Celine Young). In mid-August, 1944, Lucien Carr killed him with a boy scout knife in what may have been self-defense after an altercation in a park on the Hudson River. Carr disposed of the body in the river. He then sought advice from Burroughs, who recommended that he get a lawyer and turn himself in with a claim of self-defense. Instead, Carr went to Kerouac, who helped him dispose of the weapon. The following morning, Carr turned himself in, and Kerouac and Burroughs were charged as accessories to the crime. Burroughs got the money for bail, but Kerouac's parents refused to post it for him. Edie Parker and her family came through, with the condition that she and Kerouac be married immediately.

The Times Square "underworld"

Burroughs had an interest in experimenting with criminal behavior and gradually made contacts in the criminal underground of New York, becoming involved with dealing in stolen goods and narcotics and developing a decades-long addiction to opiates. Burroughs met Herbert Huncke, a small-time criminal and drug-addict who often hung around the Times Square area. The beats found Huncke a fascinating character. As Ginsberg put it, they were on a quest for "supreme reality", and felt that Huncke, as a member of the underclass, had learned things that were sheltered from them in their middle-class lives.

In 1949 Ginsberg got in trouble with the law because of this association. Ginsberg let Huncke stay with him for a brief time (as referenced in the line from Howl, "who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the showbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steamheat and opium;") Ginsberg's apartment was subsequently packed with stolen goods. He rode with Huncke to transport these stolen goods which led to a car chase with the police. Ginsberg pleaded insanity and was briefly committed to Bellevue Hospital, where he met Carl Solomon. When committed, Carl Solomon was more eccentric than psychotic.

A fan of Antonin Artaud, he indulged in some self-consciously "crazy" behavior, e.g. throwing potato salad at a lecturer on Dadaism. Ted Morgan also mentions an incident when he stole a peanut-butter sandwich in a cafeteria and showed it to a security-guard. If not crazy when he was admitted, Solomon was arguably driven mad by the shock treatments applied at Bellevue, and this is one of the things referred to many times by Ginsberg in "Howl" (which was dedicated to Carl Solomon). After his release, Solomon became the publishing contact who agreed to publish Burroughs' first novel Junky (1953), shortly before another episode resulted in his being committed again.

Neal Cassady

The introduction of Neal Cassady into the scene in 1947 had a number of effects. A number of the beats were enthralled with Cassady — Ginsberg had an affair with him and became his personal writing-tutor; and Kerouac's road-trips with him in the late 40s became a focus of his second novel, On the Road. Cassady is one of the sources of "rapping" - the loose spontaneous babble that later became associated with "beatniks" (see below). Though he did not write much himself, the core writers of the group were impressed with the free-flowing style of some of his letters, and Kerouac cited this as a key influence on his invention of the spontaneous prose style/technique that he used in his key works (the other obvious influence being the improvised solos of jazz music). On the Road is the book where Kerouac began to write in this manner, and it transformed Cassady (under the name "Dean Moriarty") into a cultural icon: a hyper wildman, frequently broke, going from woman to woman, car to car, town to town; largely amoral, but frantically engaged with life.

The delays involved in the publication of Kerouac's On the Road often create confusion: The novel was written in 1951 — shortly after John Clellon Holmes published Go, and the article "This is the Beat Generation" — and it covered events that had taken place earlier, beginning in the late '40s. Since the book was not published until 1957, many people received the impression that it was describing the late '50s era, though it was actually a document of a time ten years earlier.

The legend of how On the Road was written was as influential as the book itself: High on benzedrine, Kerouac typed rapidly on a continuous scroll of telegraph-paper to avoid having to break his chain of thought at the end of each sheet of paper. Kerouac's dictum was that "the first thought is best thought", and insisted that you should never revise a text after it is written — though there remains some question about how carefully Kerouac observed this rule, at least in the case of On the Road which is sometimes regarded as his "transitional" work. Although Kerouac maintained that he wrote this particular book in one three-week burst, it is clear from manuscript evidence that he had previously written several drafts and had been contemplating the novel for years. Also, the text went through many changes between the final "scroll" manuscript and the published version.

Gregory Corso

In 1950 Gregory Corso met Ginsberg, who was impressed by the poetry that Corso had written while incarcerated for burglary. Gregory Corso was the young d'Artagnan (to use Ted Morgan's phrase) added to the original three of the core beat writers, and for decades the four were often spoken of together, though later critical attention for Corso (the least prolific of the four) waned. He gained some notoriety for his tragicomic poetry, such as "Bomb" and "Marriage."

San Francisco

Some time later there was much cross-pollination with San Francisco-area writers (Ginsberg, Corso, Cassady, and Kerouac each moved there for a time). Lawrence Ferlinghetti (one of the partners who ran the City Lights Bookstore and press) became a focus of the scene as well as the older poet Kenneth Rexroth, whose apartment became a Friday night literary salon. Ginsberg was introduced to Rexroth by an introductory letter from his mentor William Carlos Williams, an old friend of Rexroth's. When Ginsberg was asked by Wally Hedrick ^[9] to organize the famous Six Gallery reading in October 1955, Ginsberg had Rexroth serve as master of ceremonies. In a sense, Rexroth was bridging two generations. This reading included the first public performance of Ginsberg's poem Howl and thus it is considered one of the most important events in the history of the Beat Generation. It brought East Coast and West Coast poets together in public performance for the first time, and the reading quickly sparked a legend and led to many more readings around California by the now locally famous Six Gallery poets. Soon after the Six Gallery reading, Ferlinghetti wrote Ginsberg a letter, saying, "I greet you at the beginning of a brilliant career. When do I get the manuscript?" This was an adaptation of Emerson's comment about Whitman's poetry, a prophecy of sorts that Howl would bring as much energy to this new movement as Whitman brought to 19th-century poetry. This is also a marker of the beginning of the Beat movement, since the publication of Howl and the subsequent obscenity-trial brought nationwide attention to many of the other members of this group.

An account of the Six Gallery reading forms the second chapter of Jack Kerouac's 1958 novel The Dharma Bums, a novel whose chief protagonist is a character based on one of the poets who had read at the event, Gary Snyder (called "Japhy Ryder" in Kerouac's roman à clef). Most of the people in the Beat movement had urban backgrounds and they found Snyder to be an almost exotic individual, with his rural and back-country experience, and his education in cultural anthropology and Oriental languages. Lawrence Ferlinghetti has referred to him as "the Thoreau of the Beat Generation". One of the primary subjects of The Dharma Bums is Buddhism, and the different attitudes that Kerouac and Snyder have towards it. The Dharma Bums undoubtedly helped to popularize Buddhism in the West.

Women of the Beat Generation

There is typically very little mention of women in a history of the early Beat Generation, and a strong argument can be made that this omission is largely a reflection of the sexism of the time, rather than a reflection of the actual state of affairs. Joan Vollmer (later, Joan Vollmer Adams Burroughs) was clearly there at the beginning of the Beat Generation, and all accounts describe her as a very intelligent and interesting woman. But she did not herself write and publish, and unlike the case of Neal Cassady, no one chose to write a book about her (though she appears as a minor figure in multiple authors' works.). She has gone down in history as the wife of William S. Burroughs, who was killed by him in a shooting-incident (often called "accidental") that resulted in Burroughs' conviction in Mexico of homicide, but with sentence suspended.

Gregory Corso insisted that there were many female beats. In particular, he claimed that a young woman he met in mid-1955 (Hope Savage, also called "Sura") introduced Kerouac and Ginsberg to subjects such as Li Po and was in fact their original teacher regarding eastern religion (this claim must be an exaggeration, however: a letter from Kerouac to Ginsberg in 1954 recommended a number of works about Buddhism^[16]).

Corso insisted that it was hard for women to get away with a Bohemian existence in that era: they were regarded as crazy, and removed from the scene by force (e.g. by being subjected to electroshock). This is confirmed by Diane DiPrima (in a 1978 interview ):

Potentially great women writers wound up dead or crazy. I think of the women on the Beat-scene with me in the early '50s, where are they now? I know Barbara Moraff is a potter and does some writing in Vermont, and that's about all I know. I know some of them ODed and some of them got nuts, and one woman that I was running around the Village with in '53 was killed by her parents putting her in a shock-treatment-place in Pennsylvania ...

However, a number of female beats have persevered, notably Joyce Johnson (author of Minor Characters); Carolyn Cassady (author of Off the Road); Hettie Jones (author of How I Became Hettie Jones); Joanne Kyger (author of As Ever; Going On; Just Space); Harriet Sohmers Zwerling (author of Notes of a Nude Model & Other Pieces;) the aforementioned Diane DiPrima (author of This Kind of Bird Flies Backward, Memoirs of a Beatnik, Loba, and many others); and ruth weiss (author of DESERT JOURNAL and many other poems and films). Later, other women writers emerged who were strongly influenced by the beats, such as Janine Pommy Vega (published by City Lights) in the 1960s, Patti Smith in the early 1970s, and performance poet Hedwig Gorski in the early 1980s.

Drug usage

The original members of the Beat Generation group — in Allen Ginsberg's phrase, "the libertine circle" — used a number of different drugs. In addition to the alcohol common in American life, they were also interested in marijuana, benzedrine and, in some cases, opiates such as morphine. As time went on, many of them began using psychedelic drugs, such as peyote, yage (also known as Ayahuasca), and LSD. Much of this usage can fairly be termed "experimental," in that they were generally unfamiliar with the effects of these drugs, and there were intellectual aspects to their interest in them as well as a simple pursuit of hedonistic intoxication.

Benzedrine at that time was available in the form of plastic inhalers, containing a piece of folded paper soaked in the drug. They would typically crack open the inhalers and drop the paper in coffee, or just wad it up and swallow it whole. Opiates could be obtained in the form of morphine "syrettes": a squeeze tube with a hypodermic needle tip. As the Beat phenomenon spread (transforming from Beat to "beatnik" to "hippie,") usage of some of these drugs also became more widespread. According to stereotype, the "hippies" commonly used the psychedelic drugs (marijuana, LSD), though the use of other drugs such as amphetamines was also widespread. The actual results of this "experimentation" can be difficult to determine. Claims that some of these drugs can enhance creativity, insight or productivity were quite common, as is the belief that the drugs in use were a key influence on the social events of the time (see recreational drug use).

 

Collaboration

Collaboration and mutual inspiration were an important part of the Beat Generation's literary process. Allen Ginsberg was a promoter of the works of a number of the other members of the Beat Generation. He considered himself a pro bono literary agent for all of his friends and for those with similar ideas. For example, he was instrumental in getting William S. Burroughs's first book, (Junkie,) published. Ginsberg had encouraged Burroughs to write in the first place. He did extensive editing on Naked Lunch, with some help from Kerouac and others. Burroughs and Ginsberg also collaborated on the book The Yage Letters. Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs collaborated early on a parody of hardboiled detective fiction called And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. Gregory Corso, Brion Gysin and William Burroughs collaborated in a book of cut-up poems "Minutes to Go" while living in Paris.

William Burrough's "Naked Lunch" was edited by Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin and Gregory Corso, while they lived in Paris Hotel in 1956. Early in 1956 Jack Kerouac, in Tangiers, had assisted Burroughs in putting his prose "fragments" into novel form. Jack Kerouac incorporates many important Beat figures as characters in his novels. Two of his most important novels, On the Road and The Dharma Bums, feature characters based on Neal Cassady and Gary Snyder, respectively, as their chief protagonists.

The Beats often provided titles for one another's work. The naming of two important works is the subject of Beat legend. Ginsberg gives Kerouac credit for the name "Howl," even though the original manuscript Ginsberg sent to Kerouac had already been given the title "Howl for Carl Solomon." It's uncertain why Ginsberg would give Kerouac credit, but it's not surprising, considering the nature of their relationship. Kerouac also provided Burroughs with the title Naked Lunch, and, according to legend, when Ginsberg asked what it meant, Kerouac said he didn't know but they'd figure it out. Ginsberg gives some suggestions in a later poem: "On Burroughs' Work." He says, "A naked lunch is natural to us,/we eat reality sandwiches." Ginsberg also supposedly coined the term "the subterraneans" (an early attempt at a name for the Beat Generation), which became the title of an early Kerouac novel that was later made into a movie. Ginsberg suggested "Gasoline" to Corso, as the title for his second volume of poetry.

Members of the Beat Generation provided subject-matter for much of Allen Ginsberg's poetry. Neal Cassady in particular was a favorite subject of Ginsberg. Ginsberg dedicates his most famous poem, Howl, to Carl Solomon; Cassady and Solomon are specifically referenced throughout the poem. Other Beat Generation figures referenced in Howl include: Kerouac, Burroughs, Herbert Huncke, Tuli Kupferberg, and many more. He dedicated his first collection of poems, Howl and Other Poems, to Kerouac, Burroughs, Cassady, and originally Lucien Carr, though his name was taken off later at Carr's request. The dedication included all of their accomplishments including then unpublished On the Road, Naked Lunch, and Cassady's The First Third. Carr requested his name be taken off because he didn't want the attention. He dedicated many of his other poetry collections and some individual to poems to other Beat figures, including: Huncke, Cassady, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Frank O'Hara. Many of them were also subjects of specific poems within these collections.

Kerouac used a "roman à clef" style, in which he used thinly disguised Beat characters and described their encounters. Allen Ginsberg appears in five novels as Irwin Garden, and under other names in four more books. William Burroughs is Bull or Will Hubbard, or Old Bull in four books. Corso is Raphael Urso in two books. Corso's letters indicate that Kerouac (as Leo Percepied) originally wrote the ending of The Subterraneans with Percepied killing Yuri Gilgoric (Corso) for sleeping with his African American girlfriend Mardou. Corso warned Kerouac that he would go "down in history as a murderer," and Kerouac rewrote the ending to spare Gilgoric's life by not hitting him with a raised cafe table.

 

Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Cassady collaborated on a poem called "Pull My Daisy." A section from "Pull My Daisy" was one of the first poems Ginsberg published. When Kerouac and Ginsberg later collaborated on a film with photographer Robert Frank based on a script by Kerouac for a play called The Beat Generation, they found that the title had already been copyrighted. They called the film Pull My Daisy instead. The actors included Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Corso, and Larry Rivers (a painter associated with the New York School), and Kerouac did the narration.Gary Snyder dedicated several poems to Lew Welch and has mentioned other Beat figures, such as Kerouac and Philip Whalen, in his poetry.Frank O'Hara in his conversational poems often talks about eating lunch with "LeRoi" (LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka) and often alludes to other Beat writers, such as Ginsberg and John Wieners. LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka occasionally refers to other Beats in his writing (Snyder and Kerouac, for example). For a time in New York, Baraka and Diane DiPrima edited a magazine called Yugen, which published many of the Beat writers.

Cultural context

Significant precursors

Before Jack Kerouac embraced "spontaneous prose," there were other artists pursuing self-expression by abandoning control, notably the improvisational elements in jazz music. The bop form of jazz championed by Charlie Parker and others was one of the biggest influences on many of the Beats; in fact, the horn-rimmed glasses, goatee, and beret sported by the stereotypical beatnik was derived from the fashion of trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. The "cut-up" method most famously employed by William S. Burroughs may have its origins many years earlier in the poetry of Dadaist/Surrealist Tristan Tzara who recommended putting cut up words in a bag and pulling them out randomly to create a poem. "Minutes to Go," a collaboration of Corso, Gysin and Burroughs, was constructed by clipping phrases from newspapers, mixing them in a bowl, picking them out at random, and pasting them in a poet form, pushed the form to Tzara's ad absurdum.

Dadaism and Surrealism had a direct impact on many of the Beats: Dadaism with its attack on the elitism of high culture and its celebration of spontaneity; Surrealism with its transformation of the Dadaist rebellion into positive social intentions and its focus on revelations from the subconscious. Both movements, in a sense, developed as a reaction to World War I, just as the Beat Generation was reacting to the environment of post-World War II America. Carl Solomon introduced the work of Surrealist Antonin Artaud to Ginsberg. Artaud had a strong influence on many of the other Beats. The poetry of André Breton was also a direct influence (see for example Ginsberg's Kaddish.) Since Surrealism was still in many ways a vital movement in the 1950s, the Beats had interactions with many Surrealists and former Dadaists. Beat associates such as Rexroth, Ferlinghetti, and Ron Padgett were responsible for translating a lot of the poetry from French and introducing it to English-speaking audiences.

Several Beat associates, such as Ted Joans, were actual members of the Surrealist group; another example is Philip Lamantia who was close with Breton and was responsible for introducing a lot of Surrealist poetry to the other Beats. The poetry of Gregory Corso and Bob Kaufman show the clearest influence of Surrealist poetry (the dream-like images, the seemingly random juxtaposition of dissociated images, for example), though this influence can also be seen in more subtle ways in other poetry, Ginsberg's in particular. When in France the Beats met many Surrealists and former Dadaists. As the legend goes, when they met Marcel Duchamp, Ginsberg kissed his shoe and Corso cut off his tie. Many other French writers still active in the 1950s had a tremendous impact on the writing of the Beat Generation, writers such as Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Jean Genet. Older French writers rank high on the list of shared Beat influences: Apollinaire, for example. Beats also repeatedly invoke the spirit of Symbolists such as Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire.

Specific Romantic writers had a heavy influence on Beats: Gregory Corso, for example, worshiped Percy Shelley as a hero and was buried at the foot of Shelley's Grave in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. Ginsberg mentions Shelley's Adonais at the beginning of Kaddish, and he cites it as a major influence on the composition of one of his most important poems. Michael McClure compared Ginsberg's Howl to Shelley's breakthrough poem Queen Mab. Ginsberg's most important Romantic influence was Blake, who was the subject of Ginsberg's self-defining auditory hallucination/revelation in 1948, and Ginsberg subsequently spent much of his life studying Blake. Blake was also a major influence on Michael McClure. The first conversation between McClure and Ginsberg was about Blake (McClure saw him as a revolutionary; Ginsberg saw him as a prophet). John Keats was also an influence on many of the Beats.

Of arguably equal importance to the British Romantics was what is often termed American Romanticism. Whether or not this term is accurate, many writers under this umbrella were important to the Beats: Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville and especially Walt Whitman. Edgar Allan Poe is occasionally cited as an influence, as in the line from Howl "who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kaballah..." And, though the comparison might not seem obvious, Ginsberg even claimed Emily Dickinson was an influence on Beat poetry. The novel You Can't Win by Jack Black had a strong influence on Burroughs, as did the short stories of British author Denton Welch.

Though in ways the Beats were reacting against the tendency toward objective distancing and the focus on craft brought on by literary Modernism, (hence why the Beats are sometimes considered Postmodern) many modernist writers were major influences on the Beats: Marcel Proust, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and H.D.. Pound was specifically important to poets such as Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, and Robert Creeley. Pound was instrumental in introducing ideas of haiku and other Japanese and Chinese literary forms into Western literature. The Beats further adapted these ideas in their own work. William Carlos Williams was an influence on most of the Beats with his encouragement to speak with an American voice instead of imitating the European poetic voice and European forms. He specifically influenced Snyder, Whalen, and Welch when he came to lecture at Reed College. More importantly he personally mentored many important Beat figures: Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, among others.

He published several of Ginsberg's letters to him in his epic poem Paterson and wrote an introduction to two of Ginsberg's books. And many of the Beats (Ginsberg specifically) helped promote Williams' poetry and his play Many Loves. Ferlinghetti's City Lights even published a volume of his poetry. Williams is occasionally classified as both an Imagist and an Objectivist. Kenneth Rexroth was also considered a member of the Objectivists. H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), one of the key Imagists, was another important influence on the Beats. Robert Duncan wrote a book-length study of her work. Gertrude Stein, another important modernist and a major influence on many of the Beats, was the subject of a book-length study by Lew Welch. Marcel Proust, specifically in his Remembrance of Things Past, had an influence on Kerouac's Duluoz Legend concept: a single epic/personal story in multiple volumes. Other important Kerouac influences (and by extension Beat influences) include: Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe.

Historical context

The postwar era was a time where the dominant culture was desperate for a reassuring planned order; but there was a strong intellectual undercurrent calling for spontaneity, an end to psychological repression; a romantic desire for a more chaotic, Dionysian existence. The Beats were a manifestation of this undercurrent (and over time, a primary focus for those energies), but they were not the only one. Close analogies to the writings of the Beats can be found in the action paintings of Jackson Pollock and the work of other Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. Many members of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism were friends with many members of the Beat Generation; they were so closely tied with parallel movements such as the New York School of poetry and the Black Mountain school.

Black Mountain was associated with many other artists in the post-war period who embraced a similar disdain for refined control, often with the opposite intent of suppressing the ego, and avoiding self-expression; notably, the works of the composer/writer John Cage and the paintings and "assemblages" of Robert Rauschenberg. The "cut-up" technique that Brion Gysin developed and that William Burroughs adopted after publishing Naked Lunch bears a strong resemblance to Cage's "chance operations" approach. Robert Lowell, who is credited with founding confessional poetry (a school of poetry which later included Lowell's students Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton), was reportedly inspired to become more personal and emotionally vulnerable in his poetry by interactions he had with Beats in San Francisco. This is significant because Lowell was close friends with New Critics such as Allen Tate; Lowell's transition away from the traditional forms championed by the New Critics toward the non-traditional poetry of the Beats framed a significant debate in the poetry world during the Beat Generation.

Open-Form vs. Closed-Form Poetry

One way of understanding why the Beat Generation was considered radical, as well as measuring its impact on later writers, is to compare the literary establishment of the 1950s, especially as it involved poetry, with that of the 1960s to see how it had changed. Poetry in the 1950s was under the heavy influence of T. S. Eliot's often misinterpreted idea of poetry being an escape from self and the Modernist focus on objectivity. Similar to this, and perhaps an even more pervasive influence, were the ideas of the New Critics, including their conception of a poem as a perfectible object. In particular, the poetry of John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren was highly influential at this time. The focus of these poets on the formal aspects of poetry and their celebration of the short, ironic lyric led to a rise in formalist poetry and a preference for the short lyric. When the Beat poets came to prominence during this time, they were decried as sloppy libertines, and the Beat movement was characterized as at best only a passing fad which had been largely fueled by media-attention.

This antagonism between literary camps was framed by two rival anthologies. Three champions of formalist poetry, Louis Simpson, Donald Hall, and Robert Pack, were putting together an anthology of young poets called New Poets of England and America. Allen Ginsberg - who was a relentless promoter of the work of his friends and the work of those he admired - believing at the time that the Beat poets would be accepted by the literary establishment, brought Simpson, his old Columbia classmate, a packet of poetry including works by Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Robert Duncan, Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley, Philip Lamantia, Denise Levertov, Michael McClure, and Charles Olsen in hopes that these poets would be included in this new anthology. Simpson rejected every one of them. The introduction for the anthology was written by formalist hero Robert Frost. The anthology included poetry by Robert Bly, Donald Justice, James Merrill, W. S. Merwin, Howard Nemerov, Adrienne Rich, Richard Wilbur, and James Wright and many others. There is not a strict demarcation here between conservative and avant-garde poetry.

The anthology also included a number of English poets who were associated with a movement that, chronologically at least, ran parallel with the Beat Generation, the "Angry Young Men." These included poets such as Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, and Thom Gunn. However, the anthology did set a trend for who would become poets acceptable to academia and the literary establishment. For example, Robert Lowell and W. D. Snodgrass would be seminal in the creation of what later became known as confessional poetry, which helped finally overturn the strict focus on objectivity (Lowell, according to some accounts, was inspired to write more personal poetry by Ginsberg and the Beats).

Donald Allen of Grove Press accepted many of the manuscripts Ginsberg gave him for his rival anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960. Poets in that anthology included John Ashbery, Paul Blackburn, Ray Bremser, Gregory Corso, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Kirby Doyle, Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones, Jack Kerouac, Kenneth Koch, Philip Lamantia, Denise Levertov, Michael McClure, Frank O'Hara, Charles Olson, Joel Oppenheimer, Peter Orlovsky, James Schuyler, Gary Snyder, Jack Spicer, Lew Welch, Philip Whalen, John Wieners, and Jonathan Williams. Don Allen framed the debate as "Open Form" (his anthology) vs. "Closed Form" (the other anthology). Though seeing it as a rivalry is overly simplistic (for example, many poets in New Poets of England and America were not strict formalists or have since moved away from formalism), the development of U.S. poetry in the later half of the twentieth century is framed in these two anthologies.

Arguably, these poets have had equal impact on literature, and it can be said that Beat literature has changed the establishment so that academia is now more open to more radical forms of literature. For example, of the poets listed in this section, ten from New Poets of England and America and nine from The New American Poetry have been included in the Norton Anthology of American Literature. But Jack Kerouac, despite his impact on American culture and his status as an American icon, has only just been included in the 7th Edition of the Norton. Also, three poets from New Poets of England and America have served as Poets Laureate of the U.S. No Beat poet has ever served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

The "Beatnik" era

The term "Beatnik" was coined by Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle on 2 April 1958, a play on the name of the recent Russian satellite Sputnik. Caen's coining of this term appeared to suggest that beatniks were "far out of the mainstream of society" and  "possibly pro-Communist". His column reads as follows: "...Look magazine, preparing a picture spread on S.F.'s Beat Generation (oh, no, not AGAIN!), hosted a party in a No. Beach house for 50 Beatniks, and by the time word got around the sour grapevine, over 250 bearded cats and kits were on hand, slopping up Mike Cowles' free booze. They're only Beat, y'know, when it comes to work ..." Caen's new term stuck and became the popular label associated with a new stereotype of men with goatees and berets playing bongos while free-spirited women wearing black leotards dance.

An early example of playing up to the "beatnik stereotype" occurred in Vesuvio's (a bar in North Beach) which employed the artist Wally Hedrick to sit in the window dressed in full beard, turtleneck, and sandals and create improvisational drawings and paintings; by 1958 tourists to San Francisco could take bus tours to view the North Beach Beat scene. A variety of other small businesses also sprang up exploiting (and/or satirizing) the new craze. In 1959, Fred McDarrah started a "Rent-a-Beatnik" service in New York, taking out ads in The Village Voice and sending Ted Joans and friends out on calls to read poetry. The image of the beatnik appeared in many cartoons, movies, and TV shows of the time, perhaps the most famous being Bob Denver's character Maynard G. Krebs in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. (1959-1963)

While some of the original Beats embraced the beatniks, or at least found the parodies humorous (Ginsberg, for example, appreciated the parody in Pogo) others criticized the beatniks as inauthentic posers. Kerouac feared that the spiritual aspect of his message had been lost and that many were using the Beat Generation as an excuse to be senselessly wild.

But for many young people, the popular image of the beatnik was their first contact with the subject. As Glenn O'Brien put it, "Maynard was sloppy, lazy, and did not respond to the mainstream of varsity culture. Maynard was post-romantic, a dreaming realist. I didn't know what a bohemian was, but I knew one when I saw one. As a preteen, I sensed that a beatnik was what I wanted to be. Maynard G. Krebs was a satire on beatniks, but that didn't matter because beatness shone through." Thousands of young people on college campuses and high schools came to regard themselves as beats or beatniks in the late 1950s and very early 1960s and many of them were in sympathy with the popular stereotype.

"Hippie" era

Some time during the 1960s, the rapidly expanding Beat culture underwent a transformation: the Beat Generation gave way to The Sixties Counterculture, which was accompanied by a shift in public terminology from "beatnik" to "hippie." This was in many respects a gradual transition. Many of the original Beats remained active participants, notably Allen Ginsberg, who became a fixture of the anti-war movement - though equally notably, Kerouac did not remain active on the scene: he broke with Ginsberg and criticized the 60s protest movements as "new excuses for spitefulness." According to Ed Sanders the change in the public label from beatnik to hippie happened after the 1967 Human Be-In in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park^[35] (where Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure were leading the crowd in chanting "Om"). There were certainly some stylistic differences between beatniks and hippies - somber colors, dark shades, and goatees gave way to colorful psychedelic clothing and long hair. The beats were known for "playing it cool" (keeping a low profile) but the hippies became known for "being cool" (displaying their individuality).

In addition to the stylistic changes, there were some changes in substance: the beats tended to be essentially apolitical, but the hippies became actively engaged with the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement. To quote Gary Snyder in a 1974 interview:

... the next key point was Castro taking over Cuba. The apolitical quality of Beat thought changed with that. It sparked quite a discussion and quite a dialogue; many people had been basic pacifists with considerable disillusion with Marxian revolutionary rhetoric. At the time of Castro's victory, it had to be rethought again. Here was a revolution that had used violence and that was apparently a good thing. Many people abandoned the pacifist position at that time or at least began to give more thought to it. In any case, many people began to look to politics again as having possibilities. From that follows, at least on some levels, the beginning of civil rights activism, which leads through our one whole chain of events: the Movement.

We had little confidence in our power to make any long range or significant changes. That was the 50s, you see. It seemed that bleak. So that our choices seemed entirely personal existential lifetime choices that there was no guarantee that we would have any audience, or anybody would listen to us; but it was a moral decision, a moral poetic decision. Then Castro changed things, then Martin Luther King changed things ...

Connections Between Beats and "Hippies"

The Beats in general were a large influence on members of the new "counterculture", for example, in the case of Bob Dylan who became a close friend of Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg as early as 1960 became close friends with 60's icon Timothy Leary and helped him in distributing LSD to influential people (including Robert Lowell) in order to demystify drug paranoia. In 1963 Ginsberg lived in San Francisco with Neal Cassady and Charles Plymell at 1403 Gough St. Shortly after that Ginsberg connected with Ken Kesey's group who was doing LSD testing at Stanford, and Plymell, which publishing the first issue of R. Crumb's Zap Comix on his printing press a few years later then moved to Ginsberg's commune in Cherry Valley, NY in the early 1970s. (The Plymells never lived at the Farm, just visited there; although they remained in Cherry Valley.)

Cassady was the bus driver for an important early Hippie group, Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, which included several members of the Grateful Dead. A sign of Kerouac's break with this new direction in counterculture occurred when the Merry Pranksters, with Cassady's insistence, attempted to recruit Kerouac. Kerouac angrily rejected their invitation and accused them of attempting to destroy the American culture he celebrated. In addition to the "Human Be-In," Ginsberg was also present at another important event in Hippie culture: the protest at the 1968 Democratic Convention, and was friends with Abbie Hoffman and other members of the "Chicago Seven."

Influences on Western Culture

While many authors claim to be directly influenced by the beats, the Beat Generation phenomenon itself has had a huge influence on Western Culture more broadly. In many ways, the Beats can be taken as the first subculture (here meaning a cultural subdivision on lifestyle/political grounds, rather than on any obvious difference in ethnic or religious backgrounds). During the very conformist post-World War II era they were one of the forces engaged in a questioning of traditional values which produced a break with the mainstream culture that to this day people react to – or against. The Beats produced a great deal of interest in lifestyle experimentation (notably in regards to sex and drugs); and they had a large intellectual effect in encouraging the questioning of authority (a force behind the anti-war movement); and many of them were very active in popularizing interest in Zen Buddhism in the West.

In Allen Ginsberg's A Definition of the Beat Generation: he characterized some of the essential effects of Beat Generation artistic movement as including spiritual liberation, sexual "revolution" or "liberation,"(e.g., gay liberation, somewhat catalyzing women's liberation, black liberation, Gray Panther activism); liberation of the word from censorship, and demystification and/or decriminalization of cannabis and other drugs. Ginsberg claimed that the Beat Generation began to view rock and roll as a high art form, as evidenced by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and other popular musicians influenced in the later fifties and sixties by Beat generation poets' and writers' works. It also included the spread of ecological consciousness, emphasized early on by Gary Snyder and Michael McClure, the notion of a "Fresh Planet" and opposition to the military-industrial machine civilization, as emphasized in writings of Burroughs, Huncke, Ginsberg, and Kerouac. There was increasing respect for land and indigenous peoples and creatures, as proclaimed by Kerouac in his slogan from On the Road: "The Earth is an Indian thing." As well, Beats paid more attention to what Kerouac called (after Spengler) a "second religiousness" developing within an advanced civilization, and there was a return to an appreciation of idiosyncrasy as opposed to state regimentation.

Literary legacy

Many novelists who emerged in the 1960s and 70s, many labeled postmodernists, were closely connected with older Beats and considered latter day Beats themselves, most notably Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) and Terry Southern (Dr. Strangelove.) Other postmodern novelists, Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow)^[39] and Tom Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues) for example, considered the Beats to be major influences though they had no direct connection. William S. Burroughs is considered by some a forefather of postmodern literature; he inspired many later postmodernists and novelists in the cyberpunk genre. Inspired by the Beat Generation's focus on free speech and egalitarianism, Amiri Baraka went on to found the Black Arts movement which focused more specifically on issues in the African American community. Other notable writers associated with this movement include Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou, and Nikki Giovanni.

Since there was such a heavy focus on live performance among the Beats, many Slam poets have been influenced by the Beats. Saul Williams, for example, cites Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, and Bob Kaufman as major influences.

The Postbeat Poets are a direct out-growth of the Beat Generation. Their association with or tutelage under Ginsberg at The Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and later at Brooklyn College not only carried on the activist social justice legacy of the Beats, but also created its own body of experimental and culturally-influencing literature by Anne Waldman, Antler (poet), Andy Clausen, David Cope, Eileen Myles, Eliot Katz, Paul Beatty, Sapphire (author), Lesléa Newman, Jim Cohn, Sharon Mesmer, Randy Roark and others.

Rock and roll connections

The Beats had a large influence on rock and roll including major figures such as the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison.^[41] The image of the rebellious rock star is in many ways analogous to the Beat images such as Dean Moriarty in On the Road. The Beatles spelled their name with an "a" because John Lennon was a fan of Kerouac.^[42] Ginsberg later met and became friends with members of the Beatles. Paul McCartney played guitar on Ginsberg's album Ballad of the Skeletons. Ginsberg was close friends with Bob Dylan and toured with him on the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975. Dylan cites Ginsberg and Kerouac as major influences. Jim Morrison cites Kerouac as one of his biggest influences. He also studied poetry briefly with Jack Hirschman. Michael McClure was also friends with members of The Doors, at one point touring with keyboardist Ray Manzarek. Ginsberg was friends with, and Cassady was a member of, Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, a group that also included members of the Grateful Dead. In the 1970s, Burroughs was friends with Mick Jagger, Lou Reed, and Patti Smith. Singer-songwriter Tom Waits, a Beat fan, wrote "Jack and Neal" about Kerouac and Cassady, and recorded "On the Road" (a song written by Kerouac after finishing the novel) with Primus. He also co-wrote The Black Rider with Burroughs.

Ginsberg has worked with The Clash. Burroughs worked with Sonic Youth, R.E.M., Kurt Cobain, and Ministry, amongst others. Bono of U2 cites Burroughs as a major influence, and Burroughs appeared briefly in a U2 video. Experimental musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson featured Burroughs on her 1984 album Mister Heartbreak and in her 1986 concert film, Home of the Brave. The British progressive rock band Soft Machine is named after Burroughs' The Soft Machine. The Beats are referenced in songs by artists such as: The Beastie Boys, Rage Against the Machine, 10,000 Maniacs, They Might Be Giants, Van Morrison, The Clean, Ani Difranco, Bad Religion, and King Crimson.

Criticism

One prominent critic of the Beats was Norman Podhoretz. He was a student at Columbia who knew Ginsberg and Kerouac (some of his student poetry was published by Allen Ginsberg before their falling-out). Later Podhoretz became editor of the neo-conservative publication Commentary. In 1958, he published an article in the Partisan Review titled "The Know-Nothing Bohemians", which is an attack on "The Beat Generation" largely based on Kerouac's first two published books, On the Road and The Subterraneans, and also, to a lesser extent, on Ginsberg's Howl (Burroughs had not yet been published). More unusually, this essay also works with a reading of an unidentified Norman Mailer article.

The main thrust of his attack is that the Beat embrace of spontaniety is bound up in an anti-intellectual worship of the primitive that's directly opposed to civilization and can easily turn toward mindless violence.

Podhoretz asserted that there was a link between the beats and the delinquents:

I happen to believe that there is a direct connection between the flabbiness of American middle-class life and the spread of juvenile crime in the 1950's, but I also believe that the juvenile crime can be explained partly in terms of the same resentment against normal feeling and the attempt to cope with the world through intelligence that lies behind Kerouac and Ginsberg. Even the relatively mild ethos of Kerouac's books can spill over easily into brutality, for there is a suppressed cry in those books: Kill the intellectuals who can talk coherently, kill the people who can sit still for five minutes at a time, kill those incomprehensible characters who are capable of getting seriously involved with a woman, a job, a cause.

Podhoretz echoes the then-current characterization of delinquents as "rebels without a cause":

The hipsters and hipster lovers of the Beat Generation are rebels, all right, but not against anything so sociological and historical as the middle class or capitalism or even respectability. This is the revolt of the spiritually underprivileged and the crippled of soul -- young men who can't think straight and so hate anyone who can; [...]

The Bohemianism of the 1950s is [...] hostile to civilization; it worships primitivism, instinct, energy, "blood." To the extent that it has intellectual interests at all, they run to mystical doctrines, irrationalist philosophies, an left-wing Reichianism. The only art the new Bohemians have any use for is jazz, mainly of the cool variety. Their predilection for bop language is a way of demonstrating solidarity with the primitive vitality and spontaneity they find in jazz and of expressing contempt for coherent, rational discourse which, being a product of the mind, is in their view a form of death.

According to Podhoretz, Kerouac's anti-intellectualism was shown by his impoverished vocabulary:

Kerouac, however, manages to remain true to the spirit of hipster slang while making forays into enemy territory (i.e., the English language) by his simple inability to express anything in words. The only method he has of describing an object is to summon up the same half-dozen adjectives over and over again: "greatest," "tremendous," "crazy," "mad," "wild," and perhaps one or two others. When it's more than just mad or crazy or wild, it becomes "really mad" or "really crazy" or "really wild." (All quantities in excess of three, incidentally, are subsumed under the rubric "innumerable", a word used innumerable times in _On the Road_ but not so innumerably in _The Subterraneans_.)

Podhoretz also criticizes Kerouac's racial attitudes:

[...] Kerouac's love for Negroes and other dark-skinned groups is tied up with his worship of primitivism, not with any radical social attitudes. Ironically enough, in fact, to see the Negro as more elemental than the white man, as Ned Polsky has acutely remarked, is "an inverted form of keeping the nigger in his place." [...]

Ginsberg responded in a 1958 interview with The Village Voice (collected in Spontaneous Mind), specifically addressing the charge that the Beats destroyed "the distinction between life and literature.":

The novel is not an imaginary situation of imaginary truths — it is an expression of what one feels. Podhoretz doesn't write prose, he doesn't know how to write prose, and he isn't interested in the technical problems of prose or poetry. His criticism of Jack's spontaneous bop prosody shows that he can't tell the difference between words as rhythm and words as in diction ... The bit about anti-intellectualism is a piece of vanity, we had the same education, went to the same school, you know there are 'Intellectuals' and there are intellectuals. Podhoretz is just out of touch with twentieth-century literature, he's writing for the eighteenth-century mind. We have a personal literature now-Proust, Wolfe, Faulkner, Joyce.

Internal Criticism

Gary Snyder in a 1974 interview,^[46] comments on the subject of "casualties" of the Beat Generation:

Kerouac was a casualty too. And there were many other casualties that most people have never heard of, but were genuine casualties. Just as, in the 60s, when Allen and I for a period there were almost publicly recommending people to take acid. When I look back on that now I realize there were many casualties, responsibilities to bear.

Other critics

Bruce Conner stated: "I don’t know any artist that would call himself a beat artist... If somebody did, you’d consider him a fake, a fraud running a scam."

 

Quotes

"The so-called Beat Generation was a whole bunch of people, of all different nationalities, who came to the conclusion that society sucked."

- Amiri Baraka

"John Clellon Holmes... and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent existentialism and I said 'You know John, this is really a beat generation'; and he leapt up and said, 'That's it, that's right!'"

- Jack Kerouac

"But yet, but yet, woe, woe unto those who think that the Beat Generation means crime, delinquency, immorality, amorality ... woe unto those who attack it on the grounds that they simply don’t understand history and the yearning of human souls ... woe in fact unto those who make evil movies about the Beat Generation where innocent housewives are raped by beatniks! ... woe unto those who spit on the Beat Generation, the wind’ll blow it back."

- Jack Kerouac

"Three writers does not a generation make."

- Gregory Corso^[50] (sometimes also attributed to Gary Snyder).

"Nobody knows whether we were catalysts or invented something, or just the froth riding on a wave of its own. We were all three, I suppose."

- Allen Ginsberg^[51]

"Once when Kerouac was high on psychedelics with Timothy Leary, he looked out the window and said, 'Walking on water wasn't built in a day.' Our goal was to save the planet and alter human consciousness. That will take a long time, if it happens at all."

- Allen Ginsberg

 

 

Naked Lunch

Naked Lunch (sometimes referred to as The Naked Lunch) is a novel by William S. Burroughs originally published in 1959.

The book was originally published with the title The Naked Lunch in Paris in 1959 by Olympia Press. An American edition by Grove Press followed soon after in 1962. The American edition was titled Naked Lunch and was substantially different from the Olympia Press edition, because it was based on an earlier 1958 manuscript in Allen Ginsberg's possession.

The article "the" in the title was never intended by the author, but added by the editors of the Olympia Press 1959 edition. Nonetheless The Naked Lunch remained the title used for the 1968 and 1974 Corgi Books editions, and the novel is often known by the alternative name, especially in the UK where these editions circulated.

The novel was included in Time magazine's "100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005".

David Cronenberg released a film of the same title based upon the novel and other Burroughs writings in 1991.

Introduction

The book is structured as a series of loosely-connected vignettes. Burroughs himself stated that the chapters are intended to be read in any order. The reader follows the narration of junkie William Lee, who takes on various aliases, from the US to Mexico, eventually to Tangier and the dreamlike Interzone. The vignettes (which Burroughs called "routines") are drawn from Burroughs' own experience in these places, and his addiction to drugs (heroin, morphine, and while in Tangier, "Majoun"—a strong marijuana confection—as well as a German opioid, brand name Eukodol, of which he wrote frequently).

The manner in which the novel is written might induce the reader to see only part of the picture—as much as he wants to see. It often happens that something mentioned in the book reappears much later producing thus a series of intratextual relationships and echoes. This idea, relating to different perspectives within a larger picture, is itself a theme which runs throughout this book. The novel's mix of taboo fantasies, peculiar creatures (like the predatory Mugwumps, perhaps a reference to the Mugwump political movement although it is not clear), and eccentric personalities all serve to unmask mechanisms and processes of control, and have led to much controversy. By decentralizing the plot Burroughs produces a series of interrelated literal caricatures, satires, and parodies throughout the novel.

 

Explanation of the title

Burroughs states in his introduction that Jack Kerouac suggested the title. "The title means exactly what the words say: naked lunch, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork." In a June 1960 letter Jack Kerouac wrote to Allen Ginsberg saying he was pleased that Burroughs had credited him with the title but had not recently heard from him. He states in his letter that Ginsberg misread 'Naked Lust' from the manuscript, and only he noticed; that section of the manuscript later became Queer, although the phrase does not appear in either of the two final texts of the novel.

 

"Plot" summary

Naked Lunch is a non-linear narrative that is difficult to describe in terms of plot. The following is just a summary of some of the events told in the book that could be considered as "the most relevant".

The book begins with the adventures of William Lee (aka Lee the Agent) who is Burroughs' alter ego in the novel - as well as his pen name for Junky. His journey starts in the US where he is fleeing the police, in search of drugs and his next fix. There are short chapters here describing the different characters he travels with and meets along the way.

Eventually he gets to Mexico where he is assigned to Dr. Benway; for what, he is not told. Benway appears and he tells about his previous doings in Annexia as a "Total Demoralizator". The story then moves to a state called Freeland - a form of limbo- where we learn of Islam Inc. Here, some new characters are introduced; Clem, Carl, Joselito amongst others.

A short section then jumps in space and time to a market place. The Black Meat is sold here and compared to 'Junk', i.e. morphine. The action then moves back to the hospital where Benway is fully revealed as a manipulative, uncaring and corrupt monster.

Time and space again shifts the narrative to a location known as Interzone. Hassan, one of the notable caricatures of the book and "a notorious liquefactionist," is throwing a violent orgy. AJ crashes the party and wreaks havoc, decapitating people and imitating a pirate. Hassan is enraged and tells AJ never to return, calling him a "factualist bitch" - a term which is enlarged much later when the apparently "clashing" political factions within Interzone are described. These include the Liquefactionists, the Senders, the Factualists, the Divisionists, who occupy "a midway position". A short descriptive section tells us of Interzone University, where a professor and his students are ridiculed; the book moves on to an orgy that AJ himself throws.

The book then shifts back to the market place and a description of some form of government. Characters including the County Clerk, Benway, Dr Berger, Clem and Jody are sketched through heavy dialogue and their own sub-stories.

After the description of the four parties of Interzone, we are then told more stories about AJ. After briefly describing Interzone, the novel breaks down into sub-stories and heavily cut-up influenced passages.

In a sudden return to what seems to be Lee's reality, two police officers, Hauser and O'Brien, catch up with Lee, who manages to kill both of them. Lee then goes out to a street phone-booth and calls the Narcotics Squad, saying he wants to speak to O'Brien. A Lieutenant Gonzales on the other end of the line claims there's no one in their records called O'Brien. When Lee asks for Hauser instead, the reply is identical; Lee hangs up, and goes on the run once again.

The book ends 'No glot......C'lom fliday'(which is Chinese Pidgin English 'No got... come back Friday')

 

Literary significance and reception

Naked Lunch is considered Burroughs' seminal work, and one of the landmark publications in the history of American literature. Extremely controversial in both its subject matter and its use of often 'obscene' language (something Burroughs recognized and intended), the book was banned in many regions of the United States, and was one of the most recent American books over which an obscenity trial was held. The book was banned by Boston courts in 1962 due to obscenity (notably child murder and acts of pedophilia), but that decision was reversed in 1966 by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. This was significant, as it was the last major literary censorship battle in the U.S. The Appeals Court found the book did not violate obscenity statutes, as it was found to have some social value. The hearing included testimony in support of the work by Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer.

Sections of the manuscript were published in the spring 1958 edition of the University of Chicago student run publication The Chicago Review. The edition was not well received, and caused the university administration to discuss the future censorship of the Winter 1959 edition of the publication, resulting in the resignation of all but one of the editors. When the editor Paul Carroll published BIG TABLE Magazine (Issue No. 1, Spring 1959) alongside former Chicago Review editor Irving Rosenthal, he was found guilty of sending obscene material through the U.S. mail for including "Ten Episodes from Naked Lunch," a piece of writing the Judicial Officer for the United States Postal Service deemed "undisciplined prose, far more akin to the early work of experimental adolescents than to anything of literary merit" and initially judged it as non-mailable under the provisions of 18 U.S.C. § 1461.

Upon publication, Grove Press added to the book supplementary material regarding the censorship battle as well as an article written by Burroughs on the topic of drug addiction. In 2002, a "restored text" edition of Naked Lunch was published with some new and previously suppressed material added.

 

On a more specific level, Naked Lunch also protests the death penalty. In Burroughs' Deposition: A Testimony Concerning A Sickness, perhaps the most shocking and pornographic section of the book, "The Blue Movies" (appearing in the vignette A.J.'s Annual Party) is deemed "a tract against capital punishment." Within "The Blue Movies," three adolescents take part in hanging one another, wherein Burroughs lewdly mocks by incorporating auto-erotic asphyxiation.

Using believable metaphors representing addiction to such things as, most notably heroin and control, along with medical practice such as Benway resorting to subway abortions after having his license revoked, and even homosexuality and WASP supremacy, Burroughs repudiates America's consumerist post-World War II state, and the overall human condition.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

William Seward Burroughs II (February 5, 1914(1914-02-05) – August 2, 1997 was an American novelist, essayist, social critic, painter and spoken word performer. Much of Burroughs's work is semi-autobiographical, drawn from his experiences as an opiate addict, a condition that marked the last fifty years of his life. A primary member of the Beat Generation, he was an avant-garde author who affected popular culture as well as literature. In 1984, he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

 

Early life and education

Burroughs was born in 1914, the younger of two sons born to Mortimer P. Burroughs (June 16, 1885 – January 5, 1965) and Laura Hammon Lee (August 5, 1888 – October 20, 1970). The Burroughs were a prominent family in St. Louis, Missouri. His grandfather, William Seward Burroughs I, founded the Burroughs Adding Machine company, which evolved into the Burroughs Corporation. Burroughs's mother, Laura Hammon Lee, was the daughter of a minister whose family claimed to be related to Robert E. Lee. His maternal uncle, Ivy Lee, was an advertising pioneer later employed as a publicist for the Rockefellers. His father, Mortimer Perry Burroughs, ran an antique and gift shop, Cobblestone Gardens; first in St. Louis, then in Palm Beach, Florida.

Burroughs attended John Burroughs School in St. Louis where his first published essay, "Personal Magnetism," was printed in the John Burroughs Review in 1929. He then attended The Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, which was stressful for him. The school was a boarding school for the wealthy, "where the spindly sons of the rich could be transformed into manly specimens." Burroughs kept journals documenting an erotic attachment to another boy. According to his own account, he destroyed these later, ashamed of their content. Due to the repressive context where he grew up, and from which he fled, that is, a "family where displays of affection were considered embarrassing," he kept his sexual orientation concealed well into adulthood when, paradoxically, he became a well known homosexual writer after the publication of Naked Lunch in 1959. Some say that he was expelled from Los Alamos after taking chloral hydrate in Santa Fe with a fellow student. Yet, according to his own account, he left voluntarily: "During the Easter vacation of my second year I persuaded my family to let me stay in St. Louis".

 

Harvard University

He finished high school at Taylor School in St. Louis and, in 1932, left home to pursue an arts degree at Harvard University. During the summers, he worked as a cub reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, even covering the police docket. He disliked the work, and refused to cover some events like the death of a drowned child. He lost his virginity in an East St. Louis brothel that summer with a female prostitute he regularly patronized. While at Harvard, Burroughs made trips to New York City and was introduced to the gay subculture there. He visited lesbian dives, piano bars, and the Harlem and Greenwich Village homosexual underground with a wealthy friend from Kansas City, Richard Stern. They would drive from Boston to New York in a reckless fashion. Once, Stern scared Burroughs so much, he asked to be let out of the vehicle.

Burroughs graduated from Harvard University in 1936. According to Ted Morgan's Literary Outlaw,

His parents, upon his graduation, had decided to give him a monthly allowance of $200 out of their earnings from Cobblestone Gardens, a tidy sum in those days. It was enough to keep him going, and indeed it guaranteed his survival for the next twenty-five years, arriving with welcome regularity. The allowance was a ticket to freedom; it allowed him to live where he wanted to and to forgo employment.

Burroughs's parents were not overly wealthy; they had sold the rights to his grandfather's invention and had no share in the Burroughs Corporation. Shortly before the 1929 stock market crash Burroughs's parents sold their stock in the Burroughs Corporation for $200,000.

 

Europe

After leaving Harvard, Burroughs's formal education ended, except for brief flirtations as a graduate student of anthropology at Harvard and as a medical student in Vienna, Austria. He traveled to Europe, which proved a window into Austrian and Hungarian Weimar-Era homosexuality; he picked up boys in steam baths in Vienna, and moved in a circle of exiles, homosexuals, and runaways. There, he met Ilse Klapper, a Jewish woman fleeing the country's Nazi government. The two were never romantically involved, but Burroughs married her, in Croatia, against the wishes of his parents, to allow her to gain a visa to the United States. She made her way to New York City, and eventually divorced Burroughs, although they remained friends for many years. After returning to the U.S., he held a string of uninteresting jobs. In 1939, his emotional health became a concern for his parents, especially after he deliberately severed the last joint of his left little finger, right at the knuckle, to impress a man with whom he was infatuated.^[11] This event made its way into his early fiction as the short story "The Finger".

 

Beginning of the Beats

Burroughs enlisted in the U.S. Army early in 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor brought the U.S. into World War II. But when he was classified as a 1-A Infantry, not an officer, he became dejected. His mother recognized her son's depression and got Burroughs a civilian disability discharge — a release from duty based on the premise he should have not been allowed to enlist due to previous mental instability. After being evaluated by a family friend, who was also a neurologist at a psychiatric treatment center, Burroughs waited five months in limbo at Jefferson Barracks outside St. Louis before being discharged. During that time he met a Chicago soldier also awaiting release, and once Burroughs was free, he moved to Chicago and held a variety of jobs, including one as an exterminator. When two of his friends from St. Louis, Lucien Carr, a University of Chicago student, and David Kammerer, Carr's homosexual admirer, left for New York City, Burroughs followed.

 

Joan Vollmer

In 1944, Burroughs began living with Joan Vollmer Adams in an apartment they shared with Jack Kerouac and Edie Parker, Kerouac's first wife. Vollmer Adams was married to a GI with whom she had a young daughter, Julie Adams. Burroughs and Kerouac got into trouble with the law for failing to report a murder involving Lucien Carr, who had killed David Kammerer in a confrontation over Kammerer's incessant and unwanted advances. This incident inspired Burroughs and Kerouac to collaborate on a novel entitled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. Completed in 1945, the two fledgling authors were unable to get it published, but the manuscript was finally published in November 2008 by Grove Press and Penguin Books.

During this time, Burroughs began using morphine and quickly became addicted. He eventually sold heroin in Greenwich Village to support his habit.

Vollmer also became an addict, but her drug of choice was Benzedrine, an amphetamine sold over the counter at that time. Because of her addiction and social circle, her husband immediately divorced her after returning from the war. Vollmer would become Burroughs’ common law wife. Burroughs was soon arrested for forging a narcotics prescription and was sentenced to return to his parents' care in St. Louis. Vollmer's addiction led to a temporary psychosis, which resulted in her admission to a hospital, and the custody of her child was endangered. Yet after Burroughs completed his "house arrest" in St. Louis, he returned to New York, released Vollmer from the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital, and moved with her and her daughter to Texas. Vollmer soon became pregnant with Burroughs's child. Their son, William S. Burroughs, Jr., was born in 1947. The family moved briefly to New Orleans in 1948.

Burroughs was arrested after police searched his home and found letters between him and Allen Ginsberg referring to a possible delivery of marijuana.

 

Mexico and South America

Burroughs fled to Mexico to escape possible detention in Louisiana's Angola state prison. Vollmer and their children followed him. Burroughs planned to stay in Mexico for at least five years, the length of his charge's statute of limitations. Burroughs also attended classes at Mexico City College in 1950 studying Spanish, "Mexican picture writing" (codices) and the Mayan language.

In 1951, Burroughs shot and killed Vollmer in a drunken game of "William Tell" at a party above the American-owned Bounty Bar in Mexico City. He spent 13 days in jail before his brother came to Mexico City and bribed Mexican lawyers and officials, which allowed Burroughs to be released on bail while he awaited trial for the killing, which was ruled culpable homicide.^[12] Vollmer’s daughter, Julie Adams, went to live with her grandmother, and William S. Burroughs, Jr. went to St. Louis to live with his grandparents. Burroughs reported every Monday morning to the jail in Mexico City while his prominent Mexican attorney worked to resolve the case. According to James Grauerholz two witnesses had agreed to testify that the gun had gone off accidentally while he was checking to see if it was loaded, and the ballistics experts were bribed to support this story. Nevertheless, the trial was continuously delayed and Burroughs began to write what would eventually become the short novel Queer while awaiting his trial. However, when his attorney fled Mexico after his own legal problems involving a car accident and altercation with the son of a government official, Burroughs decided, according to Ted Morgan, to "skip" and return to the United States. He was convicted in absentia of homicide and sentenced to two years, which was suspended. Although Burroughs was writing before the shooting of Joan Vollmer, this event marked him and, biographers argue, his work for the rest of his life.

After leaving Mexico, Burroughs drifted through South America for several months, looking for a drug called Yagé, which promised the user telepathy. A book, composed of letters between Burroughs and Ginsberg, The Yage Letters, was published in 1963 by City Lights Books.

 

Birth of a writer

Burroughs later said that shooting Vollmer was a pivotal event in his life, and one which provoked his writing:

I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a life long struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.

Yet he had begun to write in 1945. Burroughs and Kerouac collaborated on And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a mystery novel loosely based on the Carr/Kammerer situation that was left unpublished. Years later, in the documentary What Happened to Kerouac?, Burroughs described it as "not a very distinguished work." An excerpt of this work, in which Burroughs and Kerouac wrote alternating chapters, was finally published in Word Virus, a compendium of William Burroughs's writing that was published after his death in 1997.

Before Vollmer died, Burroughs had largely completed his first two novels in Mexico, although Queer would not be published until 1985. Junkie was written at the urging of Allen Ginsberg, who was instrumental in getting the work published, even as a cheap mass market paperback. Ace Books published the novel in 1953 as part of an Ace Double under the pen name William Lee, retitling it Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict. (it was later republished as Junkie or Junky). In any case, the fact remains that Burroughs did not become a full time writer until after the shooting.

 

Naked Lunch

For more information, see main article: Naked Lunch

During 1953, Burroughs was at loose ends. Due to legal problems, he was unable to live in the cities towards which he was most inclined. He spent time with his parents in Palm Beach, Florida, and New York City with Allen Ginsberg. When Ginsberg refused his romantic advances, Burroughs went to Rome to meet Alan Ansen on a vacation financed from his parents' continuing support. When he found Rome and Ansen’s company dreary, inspired by Paul Bowles' fiction, he decided to head for Tangier, Morocco. In a home owned by a known procurer of homosexual prostitutes for visiting American and English men, he rented a room and began to write a large body of text that he personally referred to as Interzone.^[20] Burroughs lived in Tangier for several months, before returning to the United States where he suffered several personal indignities - Ginsberg was in California and refused to see him, A. A. Wyn, the publisher of Junkie, was not forthcoming with his royalties and his parents were threatening to cut off his allowance.

All signs pointed him back to Tangier, a place where his parents would have to continue the support and one where drugs were freely available. He left in November 1954 and spent the next four years there working on the fiction that would later become Naked Lunch, as well as attempting to write commercial articles about Tangier. He sent these writings to Ginsberg, his literary agent for Junkie, but none were published until 1989 when Interzone, a collection of short stories, was published. Under the strong influence of a marijuana confection known as majoun and a German-made opioid called Eukodol, Burroughs settled in to write. Eventually, Ginsberg and Kerouac, who had traveled to Tangier in 1957, helped Burroughs type, edit, and arrange these episodes into Naked Lunch.

Whereas Junkie and Queer were conventional in style, Naked Lunch was his first venture into a non-linear style. After the publication of Naked Lunch, a book whose creation was to a certain extent the result of a series of contingencies, Burroughs was exposed to Brion Gysin's cut-up technique at the Beat Hotel in Paris in September 1959. He began slicing up phrases and words to create new sentences. At the Beat Hotel Burroughs discovered "a port of entry" into Gysin's canvases: "I don't think I had ever seen painting until I saw the painting of Brion Gysin." The two would cultivate a long-term friendship that revolved around a mutual interest in artworks and cut-up techniques. Scenes were slid together with little care for narrative. Perhaps thinking of his crazed physician, Dr Benway, he described Naked Lunch as a book that could be cut into at any point. Although not science fiction, the book does seem to forecast — with eerie prescience — such later phenomena as AIDS, liposuction, autoerotic fatalities and the crack pandemic.

Excerpts from Naked Lunch were first published in the United States in 1958. The novel was initially rejected by City Lights Books, the publisher of Ginsberg's Howl, and Olympia Press publisher Maurice Girodias, who had published English language novels in France that were controversial for their subjective views of sex and anti-social characters. But Allen Ginsberg worked to get excerpts published in Black Mountain Review and Chicago Review in 1958. Irving Rosenthal, student editor of Chicago Review, a quarterly journal partially subsidized by the university, promised to publish more excerpts from Naked Lunch, but he was fired from his position in 1958 after Chicago Daily News columnist Jack Mabley (1915-2006) called the first excerpt obscene. Rosenthal went on to publish more in his newly created literary journal Big Table No. 1; however, these copies elicited such contempt, the editors were accused of sending obscene material through the United States Mail by the United States Postmaster General, who ruled that copies could not be mailed to subscribers. This controversy made Naked Lunch interesting to Maurice Girodias again, and he published the novel in 1959.

After the novel was published, it slowly became notorious across Europe and the United States, garnering interest from not just members of the counterculture of the 1960s, but literary critics such as Mary McCarthy. Once published in the United States, Naked Lunch was prosecuted as obscene by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, followed by other states. In 1966 the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court declared the work "not obscene" on the basis of criteria developed largely to defend the book. The case against Burroughs's novel still stands as the last obscenity trial against a work of literature — that is, a work consisting of words only, and not including illustrations or photographs — prosecuted in the United States.

The manuscripts that produced Naked Lunch also produced the later works The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1963). These novels feature extensive use of the cut-up technique, which influenced all of Burroughs' subsequent fiction to a degree. During his friendship and artistic collaborations with Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville the technique was combined with images, Gysin's paintings, and sound, via Somerville's tape recorders. Burroughs was so dedicated to the cut-up method that he often defended his use of the technique before editors and publishers, most notably Dick Seaver at Grove Press in the 1960s and Holt, Rinehart & Winston in the 1980s. The cut-up method, because of its random or mechanical basis for text generation, combined with the possibilities of mixing in text written by other writers, de-emphasizes the traditional role of the writer as creator or originator of a string of words, while simultaneously exalting the importance of the writer's sensibility as an editor. In this sense the cut-up method may be considered as analogous to the collage method in the visual arts.

 

Paris and the 'Beat Hotel'

Burroughs moved to a run down hotel in Latin Quarter of Paris in 1959 when Naked Lunch was still looking for a publisher. Tangier with its easy access to drugs, small groups of homosexuals, growing political unrest and odd collection of criminals became increasingly unhealthy for Burroughs. He went to Paris to meet Ginsberg and talk with Olympia Press. In so doing, he left a brewing legal problem, which eventually transferred itself to Paris. Paul Lund, a former British career criminal and cigarette smuggler Burroughs met in Tangier, was arrested on suspicion of importing narcotics into France. Lund gave up Burroughs and some evidence implicated Burroughs in the possible importation into France of narcotics. Once again, the man faced criminal charges, this time in Paris for conspiracy to import opiates, when the Moroccan authorities forwarded their investigation to French officials. Yet it was under this impending threat of criminal sanction that Maurice Girodias published Naked Lunch, and it was helpful in getting Burroughs a suspended sentence, as a literary career, according to Ted Morgan, is a respected profession in France.

The 'Beat Hotel' was a typical European style rooming house hotel, with common toilets on every floor, and a small place for personal cooking in the room. Life there was documented by the photographer Harold Chapman, who lived in the attic room. This shabby, inexpensive hotel was populated by Gregory Corso, Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky for several months after Naked Lunch first appeared. The actual process of publication was partly a function of its 'cut-up' presentation to the printer. Girodias had given Burroughs only ten days to prepare the manuscript for print galleys, and Burroughs sent over the manuscript in pieces, preparing the parts in no particular order. When it was published in this authentically random manner, Burroughs liked it better than the initial plan. International rights to the work were sold soon after, and Burroughs used the $3,000 advance from Grove Press to buy drugs. Naked Lunch was featured in a 1959 Life magazine cover story, partly as an article that highlighted the growing Beat literary movement.

 

The London years

Burroughs left Paris for London in 1966 to take the cure again with Dr. Dent, a well known English medical doctor who spearheaded a painless heroin withdrawal treatment using an electronic box affixed to the patient's temple. Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg would take this same cure over a decade later from Dr. Dent's nurse, Smitty.^[28] Though he ultimately relapsed, Burroughs ended up working out of London for six years, traveling back to the United States on several notable occasions, including one time escorting his son to Lexington Narcotics Farm and Prison after the younger Burroughs had been convicted of prescription fraud in Florida. In the "Afterward" to the compilation of his son's two previously published novels Speed and Kentucky Ham, Burroughs writes that he thought he had a "small habit" and left London quickly without any narcotics because he suspected the U.S. customs would search him very thoroughly on arrival. He claims he went through the most excruciating two months of opiate withdrawal while seeing his son through his trial and sentencing, actually traveling with Billy to Lexington, Kentucky from Miami to ensure his son entered the hospital he once spent time in as a volunteer admission. This confession, published in 1981, might strike many readers as proof of Burroughs poor parenting and example, but read in full light of the difficult circumstances he found himself in, it seems like some stubborn proof that Burroughs did care enough about his son to return and see him through the criminal process, even though it caused him much personal pain. Earlier Burroughs revisited St. Louis, Missouri taking a large advance from Playboy to write an article about his trip back to St. Louis that eventually was published in The Paris Review, after Burroughs refused to alter the style for Playboy's publishers. In 1968 Burroughs joined Jean Genet, John Sack, and Terry Southern in covering the 1968 Democratic National Convention for Esquire magazine. Southern and Burroughs, who had first become acquainted in London, would remain lifelong friends and collaborators. In 1972, Burroughs and Southern unsuccessfully attempted to adapt Naked Lunch for the screen in conjunction with American game show producer Chuck Barris.

Burroughs supported himself and his addiction by publishing pieces in small literary presses. His avant garde reputation grew internationally as the hippie counterculture discovered his earlier works. He developed a close friendship with Anthony Balch and lived with a young hustler named John Brady who continuously brought home young women despite Burroughs' protestations. In the midst of this personal turmoil, Burroughs managed to complete two works: a novel written in screen play format, The Last Words of Dutch Schulz (1969); and the traditional prose-format novel The Wild Boys (1971).

Burroughs was a fan of Harold S. Schroeppel and passionately studied the manuscripts that were made available from the Institute for Advanced Perception. The teachings were known as the Lessons in Advanced Perception. Copies of these manuscripts along with four pages of notes exist in the William S. Burroughs archives at Ohio State University. They are dated February 1960.

In the 1960s Burroughs also joined and left the Church of Scientology. In talking about the experience, he claimed that the techniques and philosophy of Scientology helped him and that he felt that further study into Scientology would produce great results. However, he was skeptical of the organization itself, and felt that it fostered an environment that did not accept critical discussion.^[33] His subsequent critical writings about the church and his review of Inside Scientology by Robert Kaufman led to a battle of letters between Burroughs and Scientology supporters in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine.

 

Exile returns

In 1974, concerned about his friend's well-being, Allen Ginsberg gained for Burroughs a contract to teach creative writing at the City College of New York. Burroughs successfully withdrew from heroin use and moved to New York. He eventually found an apartment, affectionately dubbed 'The Bunker', on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The dwelling was a partially converted YMCA gym, complete with lockers and communal showers. The building fell within New York City rent control policies that made it extremely cheap; in fact, it was only about four hundred dollars a month until 1981 when the rent control rules changed, doubling the rent overnight. Burroughs chalked up 'teacher' to another one of the jobs he did not like, as he lasted only a semester teaching; he found the students uninteresting and without much creative talent. Although he needed income desperately, he even turned down a teaching position at the University at Buffalo for $15,000 a semester. "The teaching gig was a lesson in never again. You were giving out all this energy and nothing was coming back." His savior was the newly arrived, twenty-one-year-old book seller and Beat Generation devotee James Grauerholz, who worked for Burroughs part-time as a secretary as well as in a book store. It was Grauerholz who floated the idea of reading tours, something similar to rock and roll touring, or stand-up comedian dates in clubs across the country. Grauerholz had managed several rock bands in Kansas and took the lead in booking Burroughs reading tours that would help support him throughout the next two decades. It raised his public profile, which eventually aided in obtaining new publishing contracts. Through Grauerholz, Burroughs became a monthly columnist for the noted popular culture magazine Crawdaddy, for which he interviewed Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page in 1975. Thus, Burroughs decided to relocate back to the United States permanently in 1976. He then began to associate with New York cultural players Andy Warhol, John Giorno, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and Susan Sontag, frequently entertaining them at the Bunker. Throughout early 1977, Burroughs collaborated with Southern and Dennis Hopper on a screen adaptation of Junky. Financed by a reclusive acquaintance of Burroughs, the project lost traction after financial problems and creative disagreements between Hopper and Burroughs.

Organized by Columbia professor Sylvère Lotringer, Giorno, and Grauerholz, the Nova Convention was a multimedia retrospective of Burroughs's work held from 30 November to 2 December 1978 at various locations throughout New York. The event included readings from Southern, Ginsberg, Smith, and Frank Zappa (who filled in at the last minute for Keith Richards, then entangled in a legal problem) in addition to panel discussions with Timothy Leary & Robert Anton Wilson and concerts featuring The B-52's, Suicide, Philip Glass, and Debbie Harry & Chris Stein.

In 1976, Billy Burroughs was eating dinner with his father and Allen Ginsberg in Boulder, Colorado at Ginsberg’s Buddhist poetry school (Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics) at Chogyam Trungpa's Naropa University when he began to vomit blood. Burroughs senior had not seen his son for over a year and was alarmed at his appearance when Billy arrived at Ginsberg’s apartment. Although Billy had successfully published two short novels in the 1970s, and was deemed by literary critics like Ann Charters as a bona fide "second generation beat writer", his brief marriage to a teenage waitress had disintegrated. Under his constant drinking, there were long periods where Billy was out of contact with any of his family or friends. The diagnosis was liver cirrhosis so complete that the only treatment was a rarely performed liver transplant operation. Fortunately, the University of Colorado Medical Center was one of two places in the nation that performed transplants under the pioneering work of Dr. Thomas Starzl. Billy underwent the procedure and beat the thirty percent survival odds. His father spent many months in 1976 and 1977 in Colorado, helping Billy through many additional surgeries and complications. Ted Morgan’s biography asserts that their relationship was not spontaneous and lacked real warmth or intimacy. Allen Ginsberg was supportive to both Burroughs and his son throughout the long period of recovery.

In London, he had begun to write what would become the first novel of a three book trilogy. Between 1981 and 1987 he published Cities of the Red Night (1981), The Place of Dead Roads (1983) and The Western Lands (1987). Grauerholz helped edit Cities when it was first rejected by Burroughs’ long-time editor Dick Seaver at Holt Rinehart, after it was deemed too disjointed. The novel was written as a straight narrative and then chopped up into a more random pattern leaving the reader to sort through the characters and events. This technique was definitely different than earlier cut-up methods which were organically accidental from the start. Nevertheless, the novel was reassembled and published, still without a straight linear form, but with fewer breaks in the story. The back and forth sway of the read replicated the theme of the trilogy, time travel adventures where Burroughs’ narrators re-write episodes in history and thus reform mankind.^[38] Reviews were mixed for Cities. Novelist and critic Anthony Burgess panned the work in Saturday Review, saying Burroughs was boring readers with repetitive episodes of pederast fantasy and sexual strangulation that lacked any comprehensible world view or theology, but other writers, like J. G. Ballard, argued Burroughs was shaping a new literary "mythography".

In 1981, Billy Burroughs died in Florida. He had cut off contact with his father several years before, even publishing an article in Esquire magazine claiming the author had poisoned his life and revealing that he had been molested by one of his father's friends as a fourteen-year-old while visiting his father in Tangier, something that he had previously kept to himself. The liver transplant had not cured his urge to drink and Billy suffered from serious health complications years after the operation. He had stopped taking his transplant rejection drugs, and was found near the side of a Florida highway by a stranger. He died shortly afterwards. Burroughs was in New York when he heard from Allen Ginsberg of the tragedy.

Burroughs himself, by 1979, was once again addicted to heroin. The cheap heroin that was easily purchased outside his door in the Lower East Side "made its way" into his veins, coupled with "gifts" from the overzealous if well-intentioned admirers who frequently visited the Bunker. Although Burroughs would have episodes of being free from heroin, from this point until his death, he was regularly addicted to the drug. He died in 1997 on a methadone maintenance program. In an introduction to Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs James Grauerholz (who managed Burroughs reading tours in the 80s and 90s) mentions that part of his job was to deal with the “underworld” in each city to secure the author’s needed drugs.

 

Later years in Kansas

Burroughs moved to Lawrence, Kansas, in 1981 and lived the remainder of his life there. In 1984 he signed a seven-book deal with Viking Press after he signed with literary agent Andrew Wylie. This deal included the publication rights to the 1953 unpublished novel Queer. With this money he purchased a small bungalow for $29,000. He was finally inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983 after several attempts by Allen Ginsberg to get him accepted. He attended the induction ceremony in May 1983. Lawrence Ferlinghetti remarked the induction of Burroughs into the Academy proved Herbert Marcuse's point that capitalistic society had a great ability to incorporate its one-time outsiders.

By late 1980s, Burroughs had become a counterculture figure and collaborated with performers ranging from Bill Laswell's Material and Laurie Anderson to Throbbing Gristle, Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy and Ministry, and in Gus Van Sant's 1989 film Drugstore Cowboy, playing a character based on a short story he published in Exterminator!, "the "Priest" they called him". In 1990, he released the spoken word album Dead City Radio, with musical back-up from producers Hal Willner and Nelson Lyon, and alternative rock band Sonic Youth. A collaboration with musicians Nick Cave and Tom Waits resulted in a collection of short prose, Smack My Crack, later released as a spoken word album in 1987. He also collaborated with Tom Waits and director Robert Wilson to create The Black Rider, a play which opened at the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg in 1990, to critical acclaim, and was later performed all over Europe and the U.S. In 1991, with Burroughs's sanction, director David Cronenberg took on the seemingly impossible task of adapting Naked Lunch into a full-length feature film. The film opened to critical acclaim. He became a member of a chaos magic organization, the Illuminates of Thanateros in 1993, a group whose very existence would not have been possible without Burroughs's works.

During his later years in Kansas, Burroughs also developed a painting technique whereby he created abstract compositions by placing spray paint cans in front of, and some distance from, blank canvasses, and then shooting at the paint cans with a shotgun. These splattered canvasses were shown in at least one New York City gallery in the early 1990s.

Burroughs's final filmed performance was in the video for "Last Night on Earth" by Irish rock band U2, filmed in Kansas City, Missouri, directed by Richie Smyth and also featuring Sophie Dahl.

 

Death

Burroughs died in Lawrence, at 6:50 p.m. on August 2, 1997 from complications of a heart attack he had suffered the previous day. He was interred in the family plot in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri, with a marker bearing his full name and the epitaph "American Writer." The grave lies to the right of the white granite obelisk of William Seward Burroughs I (1857-1898).

 

After his death

Since 1997, several posthumous collections of Burroughs's work have been published. A few months after his death, a collection of writings spanning his entire career, Word Virus, was published (according to the book's introduction, Burroughs himself approved its contents prior to his death). Aside from numerous previously released pieces, Word Virus also included one of the few surviving fragments of And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, an unpublished novel by Burroughs and Kerouac. A collection of journal entries written during the final months of Burrough's life was published as the book Last Words in 2000. Publication of a memoir by Burroughs entitled Evil River by Viking Press has been delayed several times; after initially being announced for a 2005 release, Web retailers such as Amazon.com indicated a 2007 release, complete with an ISBN number (ISBN 0670813516), but no such release has, to date, occurred. In December 2007, Ohio State University Press released Everything Lost: The Latin American Journals of William S. Burroughs. Edited by Oliver Harris, the book contains transcriptions of journal entries made by Burroughs during the time of composing Queer and The Yage Letters. In addition, special editions of The Yage Letters, Naked Lunch and Junkie/Junky have been published in recent years, all containing additional material and essays on the works.

The Kerouac/Burroughs manuscript, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks was published for the first time in November 2008. Previously, a fragment of the manuscript had been published in the compendium, Word Virus.

 

 

In Cold Blood is a 1966 book by Truman Capote, an American author.

The book details the brutal 1959 murder of Herbert Clutter, a wealthy farmer from Holcomb, Kansas; his wife, and two children. When Capote learned of the quadruple murder before the killers were captured, he decided to travel to Kansas and write about the crime. Bringing his childhood friend and fellow author Harper Lee along, together they interviewed local residents and investigators assigned to the case and took thousands of pages of notes. The killers, Richard "Dick" Hickock and Perry Smith, were arrested not long after the murders, and Capote ultimately spent six years working on the book. It is considered the originator of the non-fiction novel and the forerunner of the New Journalism movement.

The plot weaves a complicated psychological story of two parolees who together commit a mass murder, an act they were not capable of individually. Capote's book also details the lives of the victims and the effect the crime had on the community where they lived. A large part of the story involves the dynamic psychological relationship of the two felons that culminated in this senseless crime. In Cold Blood is often regarded as a pioneering work of true crime.

 

Herb Clutter was a dedicated Methodist and a widely respected self-made man, who had established a successful farm from modest beginnings. He employed as many as eighteen farm hands, and former employees reportedly admired and respected him for his fair treatment and good wages. His four children, three girls and a boy, were widely respected in the community. The two eldest, Eveanna and Beverly, had moved out of their parents' home and started their adult lives. The two younger children, Nancy, 16, and Kenyon, 15, were high school students still living at home. Clutter's wife, Bonnie, a member of the local garden club, had been incapacitated by clinical depression and physical ailments since the births of her children, although this characterization of her has been disputed by surviving family members.

Two ex-convicts on parole from the Kansas State Penitentiary, Richard "Dick" Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, committed the robbery and murders on November 15, 1959. Richard Hickock had heard from a fellow prisoner, Floyd Wells, who had once worked for the Clutters, said that he thought there was a safe at the ranch where Herb Clutter kept large amounts of cash, but he couldn't be sure. Hickock later contacted Smith about committing the robbery with him. Hickock hatched the idea in prison to commit the robbery, leave no witnesses and start a new life in Mexico with the cash from the Clutter home. Hickock described his plan as "a cinch, the perfect score." The information proved to be false, since Herb Clutter did not keep cash on hand, had no safe, and did all his business using checks to better keep track of transactions.

After driving across the state of Kansas on Saturday, November 14, 1959, and discovering that there was no money to be found at the Clutters' home, Smith slit Herb Clutter's throat and then shot him in the head. As Smith recounted later, "I didn't want to harm the man. I thought he was a very nice gentleman. Soft spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat." Kenyon, then Nancy, and then Bonnie were murdered, each by single shotgun blasts to the head.

Smith claimed in his oral confession that Hickock murdered the two women. When asked to sign his confession, however, Smith refused. He wanted to accept responsibility for all four killings because he said he was "sorry for Dick's mother." Smith added, "She's a real sweet person." Hickock always maintained that Smith did all four killings.

Hickock and Smith were ultimately arrested in Las Vegas about six weeks after the murders. They pleaded temporary insanity during the trial, but local GPs evaluated the accused and pronounced them sane. After five years on death row, Smith and Hickock were executed by hanging just after midnight on April 14, 1965, in Lansing, Kansas, at the Kansas State Penitentiary (now known as Lansing Correctional Facility). The gallows from which they were hanged is now part of the collections of the Kansas State Historical Society.

 

Criticism

Tom Wolfe wrote in his essay Pornoviolence: "The book is neither a who-done-it nor a will-they-be-caught, since the answers to both questions are known from the outset ... Instead, the book's suspense is based largely on a totally new idea in detective stories: the promise of gory details, and the withholding of them until the end."

Despite the book's billing as a factual "True Crime" account, critics have challenged the authenticity of the book, arguing that Capote changed facts to suit his story, added scenes which never occurred, and re-created dialogue. Capote relied entirely on memorization when talking to subjects in the book, and did not use a tape recorder or take any written notes; this alone may have contributed to several inaccuracies in the book.

One of these critics was J. J. Maloney (d. 1999), a convicted murderer who upon release in 1972 became an investigative reporter for the Kansas City Star (he was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize five times) and later a Web publisher (he launched www.crimemagazine.com). Maloney gave much thought in his crime writing to criminal intent. He surmised that Smith and Hickock had begun a homosexual relationship in prison, and that at the Clutter house Smith had “exploded” when he found Hickcock intent on raping the bound Nancy Clutter. At this point, in Maloney’s view, Smith challenged Hickock to kill the family, beginning with the father, as Hickock had previously bragged he would do when talking the future robbery in prison (though Smith expected Hickock to renege on his threat and thereby show himself humiliated, at least to the two of them, as an unmanly coward). When Hickock did back down, Smith killed the whole family, to show Hickock that he, Smith, the passive partner in their relationship, was even manlier than his active-role sex partner. Maloney felt Capote missed all of this; or rather, he believed Capote had ulterior motives for covering the true account up. His view of Capote's account was that it was, at its core, a dishonest book

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Cold Blood        Truman Capote

 

The Last to See Them Alive: 1

 

 

Holcomb is a small town on the high plains of western Kansas. Herbert Clutter owns a farm in the area, River Valley Farm. On November 14, 1959, he wakes up, eats a light breakfast, and begins the day's work. It will be his last.

On the other side of the state, Perry Smith eats a breakfast of aspirin and cigarettes. His friend Dick Hickock comes to pick him up.

 

Back at the Clutter household, a phone call wakes Nancy Clutter. A local girl wants to learn how to make apple pies. Nancy rearranges her schedule to make time. Her friend Susan also calls. They talk about Nancy's date with Bobby the previous night and how Herb Clutter wants Nancy to slow down their relationship. Nancy also mentions that, inexplicably, she has been smelling cigarette smoke. Also, her father seems to be worried about something.

 

Dick is driving a black Cadillac. He and Perry take it to the shop where Dick works, where they tune the car, preparing for a long drive.

 

Nancy has finished teaching Jolene Katz how to bake apple pies. She leaves, and Bonnie Clutter talks with the girl. She shows Jolene her collection of miniatures. After Jolene leaves she goes to bed, very depressed, as usual.

 

Perry and Dick are getting cleaned up for their drive. Dick is athletic but small; Perry has a muscular upper body, but his legs were badly damaged in a motorcycle wreck. They are both tattooed--Dick in many places, Perry only in a few places, but his tattoos are polished and intricate.

 

Four hundred miles away, Herb Clutter is driving Mrs. Ashida home from a 4-H meeting. The meeting was in Garden City, a small city close to Holcomb. Mrs. Ashida and her young family are new to Holcomb, but they may have to move. Herb hopes that they do not move.

 

Commentary

 

The killers approach Holcomb, while the Clutters go about their wholesome, everyday business. This sequence is crafted so as to heighten the sense of suspense. Capote shifts quickly from scene to scene. It is like a film in which the scene shifts between simultaneous events in different places. The reader knows that the Clutters are going to die, but the Clutters are blissfully ignorant of this fact. Capote capitalizes on this irony. At the end of almost each chapter about the Clutters, Capote writes that this will be their last day, their last apple pie, etc.

 

It is obvious that Capote is the narrator, because the narrator is obviously more sophisticated than many of the characters in the book. His descriptions sound almost like anthropological investigations; he is aloof from his subjects. Although Capote had a rural childhood, his cosmopolitan experience comes through clearly as he describes "local color." In many ways, he is an urban sophisticate giving us a voyeuristic window into the "heartland" of America.

The Last to See Them Alive: 2

 

Driving across the state, Dick and Perry stop to buy rubber gloves and rope. Perry suggests buying stockings to wear over their heads, but Dick reminds him that no witnesses will survive.

 

Kenyon Clutter is in the basement recreational room, working on a hope chest for one of his older sisters. Kenyon is fifteen; he is interested in cars and tinkering with inventions, but not in girls. He and his best friend sometimes go out in his car, the Coyote Wagon, to round up coyotes. Kenyon goes outside and speaks to Mr. Helms, the husband of the housekeeper. They note that an insurance salesman is visiting Mr. Clutter.

 

Dick and Perry have paused once again, this time to try to get black stockings at a convent. Perry remembers the real reason he came to Kansas, which for him is a parole violation. He had hoped to meet up with Willie-Jay, who was a kind of religious mentor to him when he was in prison. Not finding Willie-Jay, he agreed to do a "score" with Dick.

 

Back at River Valley Farm, Mr. Clutter makes a deal for a large life insurance plan. The agent leaves with the first payment in his pocket.

 

Driving down the highway, Perry is playing songs on his guitar and the two are sharing a bottle of orange drink and vodka.

 

The next Monday, Bobby Rupp describes his last night with the Clutters to the police. He went over to the Clutters home and watched TV with the family. At eleven, he left.

 

Dick and Perry have a steak dinner. They move on to Garden City, where they buy a tank of gas. Perry's legs cause him great pain, and he spends a long time in the bathroom, trying to find the strength to stand up again. Dick thinks that his partner must be having second thoughts.

 

Nancy, in her bedroom, makes an entry in her diary.

 

Dick and Perry pull up to the Clutter home.

 

Commentary

 

In Cold Blood is divided into small chapters. In this part of the narrative, Capote uses the short chapter lengths to their full effect--the chapters come quicker, like brief, alternating glances as Dick and Perry near the River Valley Farm. This heightens the sense of simultaneity. It is as if the mind's eye were quickly toggling back and forth between a view of the Clutter home and one of the approaching black Cadillac, trying not to miss a thing.

 

Capote makes the most of the fact that he is telling a true story. To describe Billy's visit to the Clutter home, he simply uses Billy's testimony. He is calling attention to the fact that this is a true story. The factuality of his story becomes something like a gimmick.

 

As the killers race toward Holcomb, Capote sketches the developing working relationship between Dick and Perry. Perry wants to tell Dick about his dream that a giant parrot will come and rescue him, but Dick ignores him. Dick is practical; he does not understand the romantic side of Perry. Also, he underestimates Perry. Dick thinks that Perry may be having second thoughts when in fact he is trying to overcome excruciating pain so that he can carry on.

 

The Last to See Them Alive: 3

 

Nancy Ewalt, a schoolmate of Nancy Clutter, comes to the house the next morning. No one answers, so she and her father go to ask Susan Kidwell if she knows anything. Together, they return to the house and find the bodies.

 

The local mail messenger, Sadie Truitt, sees ambulances approaching the Clutter farm. Soon, she and her daughter (who is also the postmistress) Myrtle Clare hear news of the murders over the radio. Myrt is cynical about the news, but they are both shocked.

 

That morning the news was announced from Sunday morning church pulpits and over the radio. Many men converged on Hartman's Cafe, where Bess Hartman realizes that the killer was probably someone she knows, someone from the town. Susan and Bobby Rupp are hysterical.

 

Meanwhile, Perry is sleeping in a hotel, while Dick has sat down to dinner with his family. He told them that he and Perry were going to visit Perry's sister in Fort Scott. After dinner, Dick falls asleep, exhausted.

 

Commentary

 

Capote wisely leaves out the murder scene. Later, when the killers finally confess, Capote simply includes their description of what happened. Of course, he could have included those descriptions here, but that would detract from the novel. One of the most important plot elements of the novel is the race to discover who the killers are. And for the reader there is the mystery of exactly how the murders took place. Capote leaves the details of the murder out of the book, encouraging the reader to guess exactly what happened, as in a detective novel. He also chooses not to reveal the motive for the crime until the killers confess.

 

The final chapters of "The Last to See Them Alive" describe Holcomb's reaction to the murders. The main characters of the first chapters of the novel, Dick and Perry and the Clutters, recede, and various citizens of Holcomb come to the fore. Although Dick and Perry will remain important throughout the novel, they are not the heroes or even the anti-heroes of the novel, in the traditional sense of the word. Instead of having heroes, this "nonfiction novel" focuses on whatever figures are relevant to the murder case at any given time. For now, the public's reaction is important. Later, the focus will shift to the police.