Jack Seney Reviews "The Beat Vision"

This sounds fascinating, especially since I met both Ginsberg & Burroughs. Ginsberg gave a reading at my university and ended up in my apartment, drinking wine & I lived in Lawrence, KS where Burroughs retired. He used to shop in a bookstore in which I worked.

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The Beat Vision, circa 1987 and edited by Arthur and Kit Knight, might not be the easiest book to find. I got it at the huge Brooklyn Public Library Central Branch. But it is worth a read if one does track it down online. It is a series of interviews, articles and other works covering not only the typical "Beat" writers like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg or William S. Burroughs but many lesser-known names as well.

Ginsberg and Burroughs had about ten years of life left at the time of publication here, and both still wrote one thing or another until their death. But there is nothing jarringly outdated about this book and it can be read simply as a look at Beat lives and works.

Novelist Kerouac and poet Ginsberg do of course get their due credit here. There is a long letter from the "Buddhist" (and apparently drunk) Kerouac to Ginsberg going on and on about his "Buddhist" insights, which Ginsberg claimed to have to an even greater extent.

That Kerouac would largely re-embrace Catholicism before his alcoholic death and even Ginsberg would express devotion to the Sacred Heart of Christ among his many deities tends to demonstrate that their "Buddhist wisdom" wasn't all that they cracked it up to be.

Poet Gregory Corso is interviewed here at a literary event at a North Dakota college by some blowhard. It is much to his credit that the streetwise Corso manages to communicate some matters of interest in spite of the blowhard.

Corso reports at the time of the interview that he is free of the heroin addiction that plagued him for much of his life. As he gives lucid and thoughtful answers whenever the interviewer's ego leaves room for this, Corso does indeed seem sober even if very hip. The interviewer does not seem to be either one, even if his only intoxicant is his own self-regard.

Why interviewers with ego problems take on the task of talking to someone else is beyond me. Why don't they find ways of telling the world directly all about their wonderful ideas, instead of using an interview with ANOTHER for that purpose? Perhaps the several guilty interviewers in this book were experimenting with "new forms" of interviews involving a self-aggrandizing interviewer. Well, the experiment was a flop!

Burroughs gets interviewed here while he was living in a basement sort-of apartment in downtown Manhattan in the 1970s. Just by reading the questions and answers, one can sense Burroughs' reticence and caution with the interviewer, his supposed friend Gerard Malanga. This hardly makes for a revealing exchange.

Once again the interviewer is a self-touting know-it-all. Burroughs probably sensed this about him from the get-go and promptly put all his shields in place. But Burroughs couldn't help but be at least partially interesting and this talk is still no exception to that.

At one point, the spoiled Malanga goes off on a boring tangent about personal finances. "Do you own any land?" the clueless Malanga finally asks Burroughs. "Don't own a thing," Burroughs flatly and hilariously answers.

I have long agreed with the few folks who realistically say that there wasn't much of artistic merit to Neal Cassady, the Colorado con man believed by Kerouac, Ginsberg (who had homosexual lusts concerning him) and others to be a "great and magnetic spraker" who could "bed any girl" (and some homosexuals) and yada, yada.

Burroughs, who was older and wiser than his Beat peers, was one person who never fell for Cassady's rap, and always kept him at a safe distance. In my view Kerouac's famous "On the Road," the book most full of Cassady as a character, is actually the least of Kerouac's many writings. And Kerouac himself would eventually stop communicating with Cassady - after having a fling with his wife, that is (so much for Cassady's "magical control over women").

Yet we still get two chapters and long interviews about Cassady here, the first with that ex-wife Carolyn who was an accomplished designer with no need of Cassady's "inspiration." The second Cassady interview oddly enough is with some ex-hippy in Mexico who admits he didn't know Cassady all that well (?).

The usual baloney about what an astounding speaker Cassady was is here. But his pointless babbling can be found on You Tube, so anyone who can make any sense of it can hear it there, while others might realize that there was nothing to it and that Cassady's beatnik and hippy audiences were likely heavily drugged.

It is admitted here that Cassady died sadly drunk and alone next to a Mexican railroad track in 1968 at only 42, which hardly seems like a fit ending for a "genius" with a "Svengali-like" charm over the ladies. It is apparent to me that some Beats' heroizing of Cassady distracted him from becoming his own man, unto the point of death.

One thing that this book does accomplish is to feature John Clellon Holmes, author of the 1952 novel "Go" which was the actual, original "Beat" novel before Kerouac, Ginsberg and company were publishing anything at all Beat-like.

Holmes was not a personally colorful type like other Beat writers, so is forgotten by many. But he is given due diligence here. He was friends with the other Beats in New York, but worked harder at writing and got a related novel published first. Anyone who has a read of "Go" now might be surprised at how it was Holmes who first wrote about Beat types in a style that everyone would mistakenly attribute solely to Kerouac. Holmes continued to write books and had become a professor by the time of his death from cancer in 1988.

Poet Ted Joans is interviewed here in 1985 and, pre- the irrationality of current times, he talks little about "being a militant black and a poet." He talks about being a poet, period, about being shown around New York as a newby by Kerouac, about New York jazz clubs and about largely giving up on painting in favor of writing.

Joans is also politically incorrect as he talks about fleeing one New York YMCA for another because of the number of homosexuals in the first one. Interviewed in his single-room home with his cat in San Francisco (he would later settle in Seattle and Vancouver) Joans was a model of the poet as poor man who nonetheless remains a poet writing what he pleases, not what he needs to write to get published and be famous.

Somehow Joans managed to become a world traveler despite his poverty, publishing 30 books via alternative outlets and fathering 10 children (!!).

And poet Diane di Prima is interviewed and talks about her New York Italian youth of being overprotected by her family, which led to her bursting onto the artistic scene once she was old enough. She remained a tough and always active writer till her death in San Francisco at 86.

Di Prima's heavily sheltered youth is not necessarily typical of New York Italians, though, as my Italian grandmother was not restricted from working and being actively involved in the Ladies Garment Workers Union in her youth.

Numerous other figures are covered in this book as well, so anyone with a "Beat" interest might seek it out wherever they can.