Lesson 7
Burroughs, Snyder, and Ferlinghetti
Lesson 7 provides an introduction to the lives and works of Burroughs, Snyder, and Ferlinghetti.
Burroughs: Biographical Notes
The longest lived of the original Beats and the only one to grace the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album, William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. His grandfather founded the Burroughs Adding Machine Company, and the family lived in upper class ease. He graduated from Harvard in 1936 with a degree in English literature; thereafter he studied anthropology as a graduate student at Harvard and a year later he studied medicine in Vienna. Still later, he studied architecture and Aztec and Mayan culture in Mexico City.
As an adult, he got a steady supply of money from a family trust fund (though some sources say he denied getting money from his family), and he worked an amazing array of jobs: copywriter, bartender, exterminator, and private detective. He married Ilse Herzfeld Klapper to rescue her from the Nazi government in 1937, and they divorced in 1946, when he married Joan Vollmer.
Not long after Burroughs met Kerouac and Ginsberg around Columbia, the “outlaw” life called, and one unforeseen result was that he became a morphine addict. He and Joan (she was addicted to benzedrine) and their son and her daughter moved to Texas, then to New Orleans, where they farmed marijuana, among other things.
A police raid in 1949 drove them to Mexico to avoid illegal weapons and drug charges, and it was in Mexico that one of the defining moments of his life occurred: trying to shoot a glass off his wife’s head, he shot her in the head and she died instantly. Much speculation followed, and Burroughs told the story many years later in a documentary: According to the documentary, “Burroughs had been spending more time with his homosexual friends than he had with her, and at a drinking party she balanced a glass on her head and dared him to shoot it off.” We know from On the Road that there were weapons aplenty around the house.
Thereafter, Bill left Mexico and wandered around South America. Much of the time he was searching for yage, a drug that is supposed to make people telepathic. Morphine remained his drug of choice, and he ended up writing a book, Junky (subtitled Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict), which details the process by which he became a morphine addict.
Ginsberg arranged for its publication with Carl Solomon, and it was released as a pulp paperback — arguably the first Beat novel — in 1953. That same year he moved to Tangier, Morocco, where he lived and wrote for five years. The account of his drug addiction that you read describes this time in his life.
Not long after Junky was published, he wrote a second book, Queer, about a homosexual romance, but it was not published until 1986. In the preface, he wrote that “the book is motivated and formed by an event which is never mentioned, in fact is carefully avoided: the accidental shooting of my wife.”
In 1957, Burroughs “wrote” the book that established his fame as an avant-garde artist of the underground. It was first published in Paris in 1959 as The Naked Lunch, and the American version was published in 1962 as Naked Lunch. As with “Howl,” Kerouac is credited with titling the work, and he and Ginsberg put it together from fragments of writing they found in the disarray of Burroughs’ Tangiers apartment. The book received mixed critical reviews, but it was an instant popular success.
Three more novels followed (The Soft Machine, The Ticket that Exploded, and Nova Express), though they were constructed in an unusual way, which Burroughs called the “cut up” method: he would cut texts in half and realign them so that the lines formed new and bizarre sentences. He later experimented with a “fold in” method as well, which involved folding texts and discovering new structures that way.
Burroughs returned to the United States in 1973, and lived in New York and then in rural Kansas. He was in great demand as a reader, and he even performed on Saturday Night Live in 1981. Unlike Ginsberg and Kerouac, who were inspired by jazz, Burroughs actually inspired generations of musicians during the Sixties and Seventies; one source dubs him the grandfather of punk rock. Naked Lunch inspired a number of rock bands, and some terminology, including “heavy metal.” You probably don’t want to know how the band Steely Dan got its name.
The “cut up” method has been used by David Bowie and Patti Smith, and some of his conversations with Mick Jagger, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, and Richard Hell have been published. He even made a recording with Kurt Cobain.
Burroughs is the prototype of Old Bull Lee in On the Road, and Kerouac provides a thorough description of the short time he spent with Burroughs in New Orleans, which is recounted in sections six and seven of Part Two. Memorable are the short, characterizing lines:
On the wall hung a picture of an ugly old Cape Cod house. His friends said, “Why do you have that ugly thing hanging there?” And Bull said, “I like it because it’s ugly.” All his life was in that line.
Burroughs lived almost a half century after Kerouac typed that line. It’s up to you to decide whether you think it’s a fitting epitaph.
Burroughs’ Works
As you know already, Naked Lunch was by far his most famous work, and from the letters, essay, and excerpts from the novel, you can see that Burroughs was a hard-boiled, almost journalistically factual writer. He is not writing to make epics, to elevate a story to an archetypal level. “America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians,” he writes. “The evil is there waiting.”
Junky is a straightforward narrative, detailed, easy to follow. Burroughs is an intensely visual writer with a great ear for dialogue — a great documentarian and much-published essayist.
By the time we get to Naked Lunch, though, the style has become elliptical, a jagged stream of consciousness with great dialogue. Not a wasted word. Fragmented experiences and snippets of conversation. You have to read more closely to perceive a narrative line.
Burroughs laces his autobiographical works with piercing social commentary; he was convinced that drugs were the most serious threat to public health, and he writes, “since Naked Lunch treats this health problem, it is necessarily brutal, obscene and disgusting. Sickness is often repulsive details not for weak stomachs.”
Now and Zen: Snyder’s Biographical Notes
Gary Snyder was born in 1930 in San Francisco and currently lives around Davis, California, where he teaches. He met Ginsberg and later Kerouac in San Francisco, and he followed Ginsberg the night of the famous Six Gallery readings. In his 70 years, he has studied Oriental language and philosophy, translated many poems into English, and published a great number of his own poems. He was the primary force behind the Beats’ interest in Buddhism, and when he met Ginsberg, he was saving his money to go to Japan and study, planning to stay for several years.
He took Kerouac on a hiking trip, and Kerouac’s account, The Dharma Bums, is utterly worth reading.
Snyder still travels extensively and gives numerous readings — don’t miss him if you get a chance. I once drove 70 miles one way in a snowstorm to hear him read, and it was worth every syllable, there and back.
Snyder was a lifelong friend of Allen Ginsberg, and he participated in many of the same political rallies that Ginsberg did. He remains an outspoken advocate of the living earth. As you can see from his poems, Snyder seeks, in his own words, “real commitment to the stewpot of the world and real insight into the vision-lands of the unconscious” (The Portable Beat Reader, 306).
Snyder’s Works
Snyder shares many of the same origins, influences, and social philosophies as the primary Beats, but his work has a more outward focus, an attention more on the world itself than on himself in the world, if you will. Snyder is something of a naturalist, something of an American Wordsworth or a 20th-century Thoreau. His poems have a flat, descriptive surface that is so natural that you can almost miss the transcendent layer that hovers over his words, almost as solid as the earth he describes.
You can see his appealing mixture of Buddhist detachment and appreciation of nature in “Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout.” The surface is deceptively simple, the Zen emptiness finds a perfect form of expression — or non-expression, if you prefer. Just reading it several times, immersing in the words, you may find your own mind coming to the stillness.
“Riprap” takes a concrete metaphor and applies it to the craft of art and living, crystallizing around the substance that is inlaid in eroding mountain trails to preserve them. If the mountain trail is symbolic of the journey that dissolves beneath the very path we trod, then language, which keeps a lot of things in place for us, is equally unreliable. And unnecessary. The seamless fusion of word and earth makes the poem truly remarkable. It’s difficult to make poetry look so deceptively simple. Read the poem aloud, slowly, again.
“Praise for Sick Women” works against the Beat grain of denigrating women, or seeing them as useful only in the kitchen and the bedroom. In this poem Snyder celebrates the moony ways of women experiencing the dregs of their fertility. Rarely has a male poet so well and sensitively shown the female as mother earth, the mother earth as female.
Finally, have another look at his “Note on the Religious Tendencies” — the three points of his philosophy compressed into a single grand sentence: “The unstartling conclusion is that if a person cannot comprehend all three of these aspects — contemplation (and not by use of drugs), morality (which usually means social protest to me), and wisdom — in his beat life, he just won’t make it” (306). Words to live by? You decide.
Ferlinghetti: Biographical Notes
A native of Yonkers, New York, Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born March 24, 1919. Some 30 years later at the Sorbonne in Paris he earned a doctorate in poetry with a dissertation called “The City as Symbol in Modern Poetry: In Search of a Metropolitan Tradition.” Then he lived his dissertation, going to a place many people simply refer to as “the city,” San Francisco, and became one of its shining lights — and a Beat Beacon.
Somebody has to take care of business, and Ferlinghetti did. In 1953, he and Peter Martin founded a magazine, City Lights. The name was inspired by the Charlie Chaplin film. To help pay the magazine’s rent, they put a store in the ground floor of their property, the City Lights Bookstore. The following year, Martin left and Shigeyoshi Murao took his place and eventually became co-owner. The ultimate Beat bookstore, City Lights still stands at Broadway and Columbus, and Ferlinghetti still runs it. (You can check out its Web site at http://www.citylights.com.) Who says businessmen can’t be — and make — poets?
Indeed, it would not be an understatement to say that Ferlinghetti is largely responsible for the enormous popularity of the Beat poets. You know already that Ferlinghetti published the Pocket Poets Series, which published Howl and other Poems as its fourth title, and you know something of the obscenity trial that followed. As the publisher, Ferlinghetti was the defendant in the trial, by the way, not Ginsberg. The case not only demonstrated the power of the press in the United States, it also made people want to read the poem that created the furor. The rest, as they say, is history. Without Ferlinghetti to publish the Beats in those early years, however, it is unlikely that their fame would have spread as quickly and as intensely as it did. Ferlinghetti provided the medium by which the Beats’ notoriety could spread — and still does.
You may not know that City Lights has continued to publish Pocket Poets for nearly half a century, and a short list of their poets is much bigger than anything that can fit into the average pocket. The first books in the series reads like a Who’s Who of Beat Poetry: Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, Ginsberg, Marie Ponsot, Denise Levertov, William Carlos Williams, Gregory Corso, and Jacques Prevert. City Lights also published several more Ginsberg collections, and collections by Diane Di Prima, Philip Lamantia, Pablo Picasso (yes, the painter), and at least two by a man named Jack Kerouac. City Lights still publishes 10 to 15 titles each year.
As he tended to the business of publishing and selling books, Ferlinghetti also continued writing poetry and a couple of plays and novels. His most highly regarded volume is A Coney Island of the Mind, published in 1958.
One final biographical note: Ferlinghetti was among the most politically active of the Beats. He was sent to the ruins of Nagasaki, Japan, only six weeks after the atomic bomb blast, and the horrors he saw there instantly transformed him into a fervent pacifist. He has been a strong, demonstrative advocate of liberal causes all his life.
Ferlinghetti’s Works
The influence of jazz on Ferlinghetti’s work is apparent in the way he puts his lines down (and you can read about it in the introduction to his section in the anthology). First, just look at the shape of the poem “Dog.” See how it shows the ramblings of the “dog” until the “real tale to tell” will not be contained any longer in its linear verse form. The poem literally breaks loose, starts running, starts telling the tale. The poem ends with the fantastic image of the famous dog of R.C.A. Victor sitting next to the big oracular horn. Do you see how Ferlinghetti takes the familiar image of a dog wandering the city and the R.C.A. dog, puts them together, and changes them into something else? What do the transforming images mean to you?
“Constantly Risking Absurdity” tiptoes across a high wire, showing the sure, steady progress of an authentic life, an authentic poem. The poet walks the highwire of language with the same need of certainty, with the threat and thrill of death- and gravity-defying antics. The sure ground at the end of the wire, for the poet, is Beauty, but the tightrope walker has to approach with caution. Step by step, syllable by syllable, the poet stretches impossibly across the lines; the poet risks delivering a carcass instead of a live poem. For the poet, getting the poem right is a matter of life and death.
“In Goya’s Greatest Scenes” is a fantastic poem that compares the Spanish painter Lucientes Goya’s wretched scenes of obvious horror with the masked horror of the tranquil, freeway images of contemporary American life. We do not see our horrors as Goya’s monsters, gargoyles, and incubi; we do not see the demons that emerge over the sleepers, in our own lives. We do not see that we have become the horror, that its shapes are familiar to us, that we devour the earth with our machines. Like Goya’s paintings, the poem shows aspects of ourselves that we would rather not be conscious of — and responsible for. We might have to change our lives.
Try reading the poem aloud in the rhythm of the lines on the page. Have someone read the poem aloud to you so you can listen to the way that the very sounds of the words reflect the subject matter of the poems. (Yes, good poets actually take their concerns that far.) Better yet, find some instrumental jazz that seems to fit the mood of each poem and read them aloud. Perform them. Then write some of your own poems to the jazz and read them aloud as you play various recordings.
Finally, I did not ask you to read the essay, “Horn on Howl,” but if you’re interested, you might want to take a look at Ferlinghetti’s account of the seizure, trial, and testimony, particularly Judge Horn’s 12 points about obscenity in literature. He also has a great one-sentence explication of Howl. Do you think Judge Horn might be quietly linked with the symbolism of the R.C.A. dog sitting next to the gramophone horn?
As you proceed with the final lesson, bear in mind that Ferlinghetti was one of the voices of the Beats, but perhaps his greatest contribution to the movement was publishing all those poetry collections that put the Beats on the map — and kept them there.
Assignment: Burroughs, Snyder, and Ferlinghetti
All of the readings are in The Portable Beat Reader. Read Corso’s “I Am 25″ (page 172), “Visions of Rotterdam” (173), “Bomb” (174), and “Marriage” (179); the excerpt of Rexroth’s “Thou Shalt Not Kill” (233); McClure’s “Point Lobos: Animism” (283) and “For the Death of 100 Whales” (285); Kesey’s excerpt from “The Day after Superman Died” (495); and DiPrima’s “The Practice of Magical Evocation” (361) and “April Fool Birthday Poem for Grandpa” (529).
