The French Genealogy of the Beat Generation: Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s Appropriations of Modern Literature, from Rimbaud to Michaux 9781501325045, 9781501325076, 9781501325069

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Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Beyond “Rimbaud in a Raincoat”
1. Burroughs or Kerouac’s Rimbaud: To Be or Not to Be “LITERARY”
2. French Poetic Realist Film in Kerouac’s Unknown Bookmovie
3. Kerouac’s Humanism: From Céline and Dostoevsky to Proust
4. Burroughs’ Queer Aesthetics: From Gide to Cocteau
5. Looking Back on Ginsberg’s “Howl” from “Apollinaire’s Grave”
6. The Pitfalls of Open Secrecy: “Has Nobody Noticed” St.-John Perse?
7. Burroughs’ (Anti)humanism: Saint Genet and the Last Lifeboat
8. Burroughs’ Mugwumps, Michaux’s Meidosems and the Future of Literature
Conclusion: A Purloined Genealogy
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Recommend Papers

The French Genealogy of the Beat Generation: Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s Appropriations of Modern Literature, from Rimbaud to Michaux
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The French Genealogy of the Beat Generation

The French Genealogy of the Beat Generation Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s Appropriations of Modern Literature, from Rimbaud to Michaux Véronique Lane

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in 2017 Paperback edition published 2019 Copyright © Véronique Lane, 2017 Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image © Allen Ginsberg LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-2504-5 PB: 978-1-5013-5200-3 ePub: 978-1-5013-2505-2 ePDF: 978-1-5013-2506-9 Names: Lane, Vâeronique author. Title: The French genealogy of the Beat generation : Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s appropriations of modern literature, from Rimbaud to Michaux / Vâeronique Lane. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017007922 (print) | LCCN 2017027765 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501325052 (ePub) | ISBN 9781501325069 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501325045 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: American literature–20th century–History and criticism. | Beat generation. | American literature–French influences. Classification: LCC PS228.B6 (ebook) | LCC PS228.B6 L36 2017 (print) | DDC 810.9/0054–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017007922 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Pour Viviane Harris, dont c’est aussi la généalogie

Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction: Beyond “Rimbaud in a Raincoat” 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Burroughs or Kerouac’s Rimbaud: To Be or Not to Be “L I T E R A R Y” French Poetic Realist Film in Kerouac’s Unknown Bookmovie Kerouac’s Humanism: From Céline and Dostoevsky to Proust Burroughs’ Queer Aesthetics: From Gide to Cocteau Looking Back on Ginsberg’s “Howl” from “Apollinaire’s Grave” The Pitfalls of Open Secrecy: “Has Nobody Noticed” St.-John Perse? Burroughs’ (Anti)humanism: Saint Genet and the Last Lifeboat Burroughs’ Mugwumps, Michaux’s Meidosems and the Future of Literature

viii x 1 25 43 57 93 115 143 169 187

Conclusion: A Purloined Genealogy

215

Notes Bibliography Index

219 235 247

List of Figures I.1

Allen Ginsberg in Room 25 of the Beat Hotel, 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur, Paris (1957) © Topfoto, Harold Chapman I.2 William Burroughs reading a bilingual edition of Vents by St.-John Perse (1953) © Allen Ginsberg LLC I.3 William Burroughs “camping as an André Gidean sophisticate lecturing the earnest Thomas Wolfean All-American youth Jack Kerouac” (1953) © Allen Ginsberg LLC 1.1 Facsimile, William Burroughs and Gregory Corso, “SONS OF YOUR IN,” in Minutes to Go (on the left), made from Arthur Rimbaud’s poem “A une Raison” (on the right) 1.2 William Burroughs, photomontage, “Untitled” (1964) © The Estate of William S. Burroughs, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC. Enlarged: front cover of the bilingual edition of Rimbaud’s Illuminations that Burroughs used for his cut-ups (Trans. Louise Varèse. New Directions, 1946) 2.1 Three characters’ points of view in Jack Kerouac’s I Wish I Were You 8.1 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate I (1948) © Gallimard 8.2 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate IX (1948) © Gallimard 8.3 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate II (1948) © Gallimard 8.4 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate VII (1948) © Gallimard 8.5 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate X (1948) © Gallimard 8.6 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate XII (1948) © Gallimard 8.7 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate III (1948) © Gallimard 8.8 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate VI (1948) © Gallimard 8.9 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate VIII (1948) © Gallimard 8.10 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate V (1948) © Gallimard 8.11 Facsimile, page of glyphs from William Burroughs’ letter to Allen Ginsberg (January 2, 1959) © The Estate of William S. Burroughs, courtesy of the Allen Ginsberg Papers at Columbia University, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC

18 21

23

39

41 55 196 196 197 198 199 199 200 201 202 203

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List of Figures

8.12 Facsimile, William Burroughs, Episode 9 of “Ten Episodes from Naked Lunch,” originally published in Big Table, no. 1 (Spring 1959) © The Estate of William S. Burroughs, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC

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Acknowledgements I should start by acknowledging the obvious, which is that Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s appropriations of French modern literature and culture reflect my own intellectual journey. While studying in my native Quebec, completing my PhD in France, teaching Comparative Literature in the United States, and researching this book as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the UK, I have met and corresponded with exceptional people, who helped this book take shape and whom I wish to thank. Without the brilliant professors of the Universities of Montreal and Paris Diderot—Paris VII who introduced me to the works of the French modernists that would cement the early Beat circle, this study would simply not exist. For initiating me without an inch of cynicism to their genius, my first thanks go to Evelyne Grossman, Jean Larose, Catherine Mavrikakis, Ginette Michaud, Michel Pierssens, Pierre Popovic and Sébastien Ruffo. As the following pages make clear, literary appropriation is a violent process that rarely goes without betrayal and if some of them have been encouraging—in particular Michel Pierssens, who immediately saw the importance of the Franco-American genealogy I wanted to explore as well as if not better than I could—I am aware others would disapprove of my comparing the French poems and novels they taught me so well to the works of the so-called founders of the Beat Generation. That is, in Francophone even more than in Anglophone academia, Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s works are still largely devalued, and I hope this book will prompt readers and scholars on both sides of the Atlantic to discover or rediscover them. In this vein, I would like to salute the open-mindedness of Jeff Rider and of my former colleagues Andrew Curran, Catherine Ostrow and Catherine Poisson in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Wesleyan University, who unconditionally allowed me—invited me, even—to include Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s works to the reading list of one of the modules of Comparative Literature I taught there; and I thank my students for their contagious enthusiasm about the Franco-American material I brought into our classroom, in particular Sanam Mechkat, Christopher Scott and Lauren Valentino.

Acknowledgements

xi

The patient close textual analyses that follow would also have been impossible without the two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship I was awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), to work on this book at the Research Institute for the Humanities of Keele University in the UK; and at Keele, I would like to give my warmest thanks to the members of the David Bruce Centre for American Studies for taking interest in my early research findings, in particular Ian Bell, James Peacock, Axel Schaeffer and John Shapcott. As most comparativist studies, this book was enriched by a multitude of intercultural exchanges. The European Beat Studies Network annual conferences have been the point of departure of many such longstanding conversations, and I am deeply grateful to its members for welcoming my comparativist papers, providing orientation and instilling their own energy and excitement in my work over the years, especially Peggy Pacini and Frank Rynne, but also: Anna Aublet, Jaap van der Bent, Alexander Greiffenstern, Tim Hunt, Hassan Melehy, Gerald Nicosia, A. Robert Lee, Polina Mackay, Ian MacFadyen, Arthur Nusbaum, Jim Pennington, Davis Schneiderman, Raven See, Keith Seward, Tomasz Stompor, Chad Weidner, Regina Weinreich and Alex Wermer-Colan. For supporting my two months of archival research in the William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac Papers kept in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, I thank curator Isaac Gewirtz, as well as librarians Lyndsi Barnes and Joshua McKeon for their assistance. I would also like to thank Haaris Naqvi, publisher at Bloomsbury, and his editorial assistant Katherine De Chant, for their diligence and genuine will to help at all stages of the book’s conception. For permission to reproduce unpublished material and for his precious words of encouragement over the years, I thank James Grauerholz, Executor of the Estate of William S. Burroughs, and for letting me use the New York Morningside Heights photograph for the book’s cover and reproduce two more photographs taken and captioned by Ginsberg, Peter Hale, Manager of the Allen Ginsberg Trust. I am also grateful to Harold Chapman for his kind permission to reproduce his photograph of Ginsberg seated under the portrait of Rimbaud, as well as to Micheline Phankim, Frank Leibovici and Charles Gil at Gallimard, for allowing me to reproduce the series of lithographs that Michaux created for the first edition of Meidosems. I acknowledge that preliminary versions of Chapters 1, 2 and 5 have been published in the following journals and volumes: “The Parting of Burroughs and Kerouac: The French Backstory to the First Beat Novel, from Rimbaud to Poetic

xii

Acknowledgements

Realist Cinema,” in Comparative American Studies 11.3 (2013); “Allen Ginsberg’s Translations of Apollinaire and Genet in the Development of his Poetics of ‘Open Secrecy,’” in Comparative Literature and Culture 18.5 (2016); and “Rimbaud and Genet: Burroughs’ Favourite mirrors,” in William S. Burroughs: Cutting Up The Century, edited by Joan Hawkins and Alex Wermer-Colan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018). Material for this book was also summarized in the paper I gave at the Centre Georges Pompidou in September 2016, published in French as “La Littérature française aux sources de la Beat Generation” in Beat Generation: l’inservitude volontaire, edited by Olivier Penot-Lacassagne (Paris: Presses du CNRS, 2017). Special thanks to Olivier Penot-Lacassagne for organizing the latter conference at the Centre Georges Pompidou, which opened a dialogue between French and English speaking scholars. I am also grateful to Albert Dichy, JeanJacques Lebel, and Christophe Lebold for their valuable comments on my paper, and to Luc Sante for inspiring discussions on the early Beat circle and New York’s evolution since then. Above all, I would like to thank my husband, Oliver Harris, for giving ear to my book project on that hot summer day in 2009, during the events to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Naked Lunch he co-organized in Paris. The plaque of the Beat Hotel had just been unveiled and Gît-le-Coeur was in full swing, when he left aside the feast and discerned through my franglais of the time what was to become this study. Most readers of Burroughs criticism will likely recognize that I have taken further and in new directions discoveries and insightful arguments he has made over the course of his scholarship. I am so grateful to him for his sharp readings, his faithful moral support, our literary and non-literary conversations, and for all the days he spent out and about with our little Viviane, which allowed me to complete this book: I dedicate it to her, but I owe it to him! May it remind us how lucky we are to have met and shared our unabashed love for that “whole boatload of sensitive bullshit […] into the street” that fine day in Paris.

Introduction: Beyond “Rimbaud in a Raincoat”

Allen Ginsberg sits cross-legged on the bed of his room in the Beat Hotel, posing for the camera with a self-conscious smile beneath a painted portrait of Arthur Rimbaud on the wall behind him. It is the Left Bank in Paris, late 1957, a decade after the early Beat circle formed in 1944 and Jack Kerouac hung a card on the wall of his room in Warren Hall round the corner from Columbia University, on which he had written “The Blood of the Poet” after Jean Cocteau’s film Le Sang d’un poète in his own blood. Downtown in Greenwich village, the library shelves of William Burroughs are an esoteric mix of literature, science and philosophy, but what catches the eye, what most fires the eager minds of Ginsberg and Kerouac when they discover it in 1944, are his copies of Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, Cocteau’s Opium and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud.1 This triptych of vignettes in 1940s New York and 1950s Paris make up a seductive scene in the popular imaginary, but it is not the French genealogy of the Beat Generation. To discover it, we need to start again, from the beginning, looking more carefully, reading more closely, rereading each of their oeuvres. ***

A French Education In August 1944, the eighteen-year old Columbia University freshman Allen Ginsberg writes to his new friend Jack Kerouac, addressing him as “Cher Jacques” (Kerouac and Ginsberg, Letters, 3). Ginsberg’s striking use of French, repeated in this letter and the many others he would exchange with Kerouac, might at first sight appear no more than a gesture to his correspondent’s Francophone childhood and Canuck heritage,2 since Kerouac himself affectionately addressed

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Ginsberg as “Mon garcon” [My boy] or “Cher jeune singe” [Dear young ape] (14, 17). But when a year later William Burroughs signs off his own first letter to Ginsberg with not one but two French closures, the common “Veuillez accepter mes sentiments les plus cordiaux” [Yours sincerely] and the passionate “Je vis pour te revoir” [I live to see you again], it completes a symbolic chain of correspondence (Burroughs, Letters, 3).3 Since Burroughs is writing to Ginsberg rather than to the bilingual Kerouac, it is even more emphatic: the early Beat circle is connected through the language of the literature that shaped the oeuvres of all three of its major writers. Not only were the first surviving documents of the Beat Generation bilingual or, to be more precise, written in English and framed by French, but the very term “Beat Generation” was first theorized through the French writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. In his 1952 New York Times essay “This Is the Beat Generation,” John Clellon Holmes defined it as the product of postwar Sartrean Existentialism and of the prewar Lost Generation—itself identified with American expatriate writers in Paris—and so established the crucially Franco-American historical narrative of its origins. The title of Holmes’ article in effect invokes the conversation in which Kerouac initially coined the phrase “Beat Generation” in fall 1948, a time when “Existentialism was so popular among young intellectuals in New York,” note Ann and Samuel Charters, “that had Kerouac shared Holmes’ passion for philosophy, he might have said, ‘We’re an Existentialist generation,’ and the word ‘Beat’ might not have come up at all” (Charters, Brother-Souls, 410). In the 1940s, foreign literature in general and French literature in particular were in fact inescapable for those with a dissenting philosophy of life and creative ambitions. In the prologue to his first published book, Junky in 1953, we thus find Burroughs invoking a roll call of non-American writers who seduced him as a teenager and implicitly formed him as a writer: “Oscar Wilde, Anatole France, Baudelaire, even Gide” (Burroughs, Junky, xxxviii). Backdated to childhood, the literary genealogy through which he defines his social and cultural alienation here is three-quarters French, and would inspire later critics to forge similar identifications. One of the earliest reviews of Burroughs, by Kenneth Allsop in 1960, hence declared: “He is a Rimbaud in a raincoat, with his nearest modern equivalent in Jean Genet” (Allsop, “Rimbaud in a Raincoat,” 8). This arresting image conveyed an astute insight, but one of a variety that has been repeated and repeated, rather than critically developed. The general visibility of the Beat Generation has been a measure of its wide and enduring cultural success. No other grouping of American writers

Beyond “Rimbaud in a Raincoat”

3

and few individuals can claim the popular and creative impact exercised by Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac. Their initial encounters in mid-1940s New York have long fascinated the imagination, so much so that it has become a familiar episode in American cultural history. However, their encounters came about not simply because Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac moved in a circle of Columbia University aspiring writers, but also because they were intense Francophiles. Ranging from a passion for 1930s films starring Jean Gabin to the paintings of Paul Cézanne, the Francophilia of the Beats colors their early correspondence and conversations. In fact, Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac were not only brought together by French modern writers; over decades, their own writing was materially sustained by the works of Rimbaud, Proust, Gide, Apollinaire, St.-John Perse, Céline, Cocteau, Genet, Michaux—and this list is by no means exhaustive. The case of this book, then, is double. Had it not been for French literature, there might well have been no Beat Generation, no crucial common ground of shared literary passion and curiosity to bring together those who would become its major writers: Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s immersion in French novels and poems was there from the beginning, from the genesis of their own individual oeuvres; and it would indeed prove inseparable from their works for more than a decade and remained a vital presence long after. The weighting of its importance, the role it played of course varied over time and from writer to writer. There was no program here, no manifesto. Most obviously, the trajectory of Kerouac’s career was not at all the same as that of Burroughs or Ginsberg, given the turn his life took—his tragic decline and early death—which robbed him of a chance to go beyond the intensely fertile “Duluoz Legend” he composed from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s. But as will become clear, to study the genealogy of the Beat Generation’s first major writers—how each in their distinct ways conceived and developed their work—is first and foremost to study a French genealogy. In order to recognize relationships between individual writers that are emphatically textual, omitted here are the broader connections between Beat literature and French cultural movements such as Surrealism and Situationism that have been addressed by other scholars in the field.4 Sustained close textual analysis also requires focusing on fewer authors, and here the choice of the “big three”—Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac—rests on the foundational nature of their works: the need to begin at the beginning. It goes without saying that this focus isn’t meant as a regressive move but as a resolutely pragmatic one, the

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necessary prerequisite for future scholarship to explore in detail the fertilizing presence of French and other literatures in the work of so many other Beat and later post-Beat artists: from Gregory Corso to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Brenda Frazer, Brion Gysin, Ted Joans, LeRoi Jones, Bob Kaufman, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Diane di Prima, Patti Smith, Gary Snyder or ruth weiss.5 Focusing on Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s oeuvres also necessarily means leaving to other scholars work inflected in terms of race and gender; to investigate, for example, if the Beats’ French pantheon of inspirational writers was as exclusively male as it seems, or to analyze comparatively the role of Genet for Patti Smith and Brenda Frazer.6 Indeed, this book hopes to stimulate further work along these lines, modeling what others might achieve through detailed genealogical studies of texts in the far larger field of Beat culture beyond the “big three.” More specifically, this study’s focus aims to redress from the origin point of the Beat movement—from the very first Beat novel cowritten by Burroughs and Kerouac in the 1940s—what the biographical accounts of the three authors living and writing as expatriates in Paris in the late 1950s have overlooked: long before they set foot in France, the founding authors of the Beat Generation distinguished themselves from one another, as well as from their contemporaries, by engaging with different French authors. Even when Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac were drawn to the same French texts, they constructed them in distinct ways, putting them to different symbolic or creative uses as if reading quite different works. It is no coincidence that one of the most famous landmarks in the well-documented narrative established by cultural historians Barry Miles and James Campbell, and the only building known by the label “Beat,” is located in Paris: the Beat Hotel, at 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur.7 But as this book clarifies, the allure of French culture and of France was in itself of very little importance for the foundational works of the Beat Generation. Rather, Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac engaged in a double movement with French writers and their writings. First, they identified with the poems and novels of specific authors whose status as outsiders within their own societies enabled them to explore ways out of their own. That is, Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac couldn’t have been more worthy successors of Artaud who affirmed writing for the “illiterates”; of Genet who saw himself as “the interpreter of human trash”; or of Michaux whose wish was to address “the weak, the ill and the ill-adapted, the children, the oppressed and misfits of all kinds.”8 There were personal motives for why they were drawn to certain French writers rather than others, but the historical

Beyond “Rimbaud in a Raincoat”

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reasons for their preferences remain more significant. Despite the class and ethnic heterogeneity of their backgrounds—put reductively, Burroughs the WASP midwesterner, Ginsberg the socialist intellectual Jew and Kerouac the Canuck scholarship football jock—and despite the distinctiveness of the oeuvres they went on to produce, they were all inspired by French writers of radical otherness who projected their own resistance as Americans to an increasingly conformist national identity. That is, put in the equally reductive terms of their American reception: Rimbaud who deserted not only his country but literature itself; Genet the orphan, exile and thief; Gide who defied the prohibitions on homosexuality; or Artaud who denouced the madness of society from the asylum. In the famous opening line of “Howl,” Ginsberg wrote that he had seen the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness, but he made no secret of having read it first in Artaud, the poet “suicided by society”: “Artaud alone made accusation/against America,/Before me” (Journals: Early Fifties, 195). That first level of appropriation, which consists in borrowing or adopting a certain author’s posture, is often noticed, but has also more often than not led to adding icons to icons, to augmenting an already problematic mythology. Misreading the Beats has indeed often gone hand in hand with misreading their French predecessors, most notably Artaud, whose complex concept of “cruelty” escaped Ginsberg and still escapes most readers, French ones included. For this reason, I touch upon Ginsberg’s rapport with Artaud’s works but don’t make it the focus of Chapter 5, instead giving priority to genealogical and intertextual relationships that were less obvious but turn out to be more profound, especially his relation with St.-John Perse. Second, and therefore more central to this study, are the engagements made by Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac with specific French texts that enabled them to develop their own experiments to achieve aesthetic and ontological otherness through writing. Paris was to that effect a natural but strictly symbolic destination. Gregory Corso’s reflections after meeting Genet and Michaux in late 1958 draw this crucial distinction, sharply dividing the authors and the French capital from the vitality of their works: “They are dead here, and all is good in their writing yet they, themselves as heroic or mad or eccentric, no: stale all of it” (An Accidental Autobiography, 182). What drew the Beats to such French writers was not so much the allure of national difference as an identification with those who resisted, even betrayed national identity through writing. In Beat Studies, the issue of national identity has been revised dramatically over time. Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac were once seen as quintessentially

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American cultural rebels, whether paralleled with nineteenth-century predecessors or situated historically as reacting to Cold War politics and consumer society. The opening chapter of Tim Hunt’s seminal study Kerouac’s Crooked Road (1981) is hence titled “An American Education” and convincingly analyzes Kerouac’s rewriting of Twain, Melville and Fitzgerald. In the last decade, however, the emphasis has shifted and the Beats have been redefined as global travellers whose works engaged the world beyond the borders of America and its national literature, notably in The Transnational Beat Generation edited by Jennie Skerl and Nancy Grace (2012), the “Beat Generation and Europe” special issue of Comparative American Studies edited by Polina Mackay and Chad Weidner (2013) and World Beats: Beat Generation Writing and the Worlding of U.S. Literature by Jimmy Fazzino (2016). Kerouac’s hybrid identity is, in that context, increasingly studied in ways that complement the quite different focus of this study, for example by critics who explore the legacy of his oeuvre in Quebec and Canada.9 In 2016, three major publications also opened up the question of his oeuvre’s national identity as never before: Hassan Melehy’s monograph Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory; the volume of Kerouac’s Francophone writings edited by Jean-Christophe Cloutier, thanks to which texts such as “Sur le chemin” and “La nuit est ma femme” that were only accessible to scholars in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library can now be read by all; and the publication of Kerouac’s journals and early works in the collection of archival writings The Unknown Kerouac edited by Todd Tietchen. Chapter 2 provides the first detailed analysis of such a text: that is, I Wish I Were You (1945). His journals from 1950 to 1951 are vital because they document just how important process was to Kerouac’s writing, and that is why they prove so valuable a resource for this study. Chapter 3 thus explores the genesis of the mysterious “IT” given as the goal of On the Road, rather than seeks to give it a meaning. Kerouac’s early journals also demonstrate how integral his French literary genealogy was to the emergence and development of his oeuvre. The density and intensity of Kerouac’s appropriations of Proust and Céline’s works, however, point up a striking absence. Despite claiming his FrancoAmerican origins and Canuck identity, Kerouac never once references works of literature or art from Quebec;10 his identifications with and appropriations of Francophone culture are with French culture. As Peggy Pacini argues in her astute reading of Satori in Paris (1966), where Kerouac relates his pilgrimage to Brittany in search of his family name, the frequency and range of his literary references—to Balzac, Breton, Céline, Chateaubriand,

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Hugo, de Montherlant, Pascal, Proust, Stendhal, Villon and Voltaire—indeed force us to wonder whether “the quest for his literary forbears might not be more important than the quest for his family ancestors” (Pacini, 297). Ironically, those references do not in themselves make Satori in Paris a valuable text for studying Kerouac’s literary genealogy; on the contrary, they float on its surface, and are therefore quite distinct from the integral presence of French writing in the creative process we find in the journals Kerouac kept at the beginning of his oeuvre. But acknowledging his literary forbears is essential, as Melehy rightly insists, for to omit Kerouac’s immersion in their works is “tantamount to denying him any chance at being a real writer” and to perpetuating the myth of his “semiliteracy.” This book, then, attempts to answer the “open question” raised by Melehy’s study of Kerouac’s Francophone origins and their impact on his writing, which is “how effectively” Kerouac’s appropriations of French literature also informed and shaped his oeuvre (Melehy, 4). If new publications of Kerouac’s Francophone and early writings further stress his hybrid identity, they raise one more question that equally applies to Ginsberg and Burroughs: What was their command of French? The evidence is often unclear, for there are, of course, important distinctions between abilities to read, write or translate another language, which compound the difficulty in drawing conclusions about the level of competence in French shown by the three writers. Burroughs’ case seems straightforward, since he was always modest about his ability. And yet, as Chapter 1 shows, he engaged in detail with a bilingual edition of Rimbaud’s poetry, and he was sufficiently sensitive to the issue to dispute the translation of one of Genet’s novels, “which is not bad except for the dialogue,” he tells Ginsberg; “Why not leave the French argot and explain meaning?” (Burroughs, Letters, 289). This was in fall 1955, at a time when Ginsberg was making his own highly sophisticated translations of Genet’s poetry, even though he later claimed he could barely “scan newspapers” and it took him half an hour with a dictionary to read a page (qtd. in Journals: MidFifties, 340). As Chapter 6 demonstrates, Ginsberg’s translations of Apollinaire actually reveal a systematic and creative appropriation of French modernist poetry, confirming his aesthetics were not only informed by a rich genealogy but inseparable from it. Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s use of French in their early correspondence symbolically put the seal on their desire to become “men of letters,” but for Kerouac this symbolism had a literal dimension, revealed in his first journals when he envisages writing his life’s work in the language of

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his youth: “My life’s work would be written in the language I was raised in— French, Canuck, or Cajun” (La Vie est d’hommage, 267; my translation).11 The hesitation in how best to name the language of his youth (“Français, Canuck, ou Cajun”) poignantly expresses the difficulty of Kerouac’s ambition. But just as telling is the phrase in Kerouac’s original, “l’ouvrage de ma vie,” which I translate here as “my life’s work,” for it is ambiguous, meaning both “autobiography” and “masterpiece.” Furthermore, this ambiguity is itself ambiguous; that is, it might be calculated—since for Kerouac there was no distinction between the two meanings—or it might be accidental; it depends on our sense of his command of French, the evidence for which is contradictory. His “Commentaire sur LouisFerdinand Céline” analyzed in Chapter 3, for example, seems to show a definite mastery of French, but the contrast to his other Francophone writings, full of misspellings or Québécois idioms, is so striking that Cloutier’s question—“Must we conclude he was helped?” (335; my translation)—begs another: Did someone else translate it into French for him? It turns out that Kerouac’s recently published “Commentaire” raises larger questions of reception, since this fascinating text was indeed mistaken for a work originally composed in French by Kerouac, when his piece was initially written and published in English (first in the Paris Review, and then in Good Blonde & Others). In short, the question of Kerouac’s mastery of French underlines the need for whoever raises it to take into account three factors: Kerouac’s multiple readerships, what is often lost or gained in translation and, above all, the impossibility of answering this question with an objective answer. In order to establish, if not always prove, the direct engagement of all three major Beat writers with French literature in the original, as well as in translation, I maintain as tight a textual focus as possible. But French literature is such a fundamental intertext for the works of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac that it far exceeds the scope of a single book. As a result, I have often given priority to relatively unknown or unpublished works at the expense of more familiar canonical texts. For instance, I analyze Burroughs’ neglected cut-ups of Rimbaud’s poetry in Minutes to Go (1960) rather than reread Naked Lunch as a work in the tradition of Céline. Lack of space to make detailed readings has also meant leaving out writers as important as Charles Baudelaire—whose structural role in Kerouac’s The Subterraneans deserves more recognition—or Tristan Corbière, a crucial source for Ginsberg’s “Howl” that is always passed over. Future scholars will, I hope, be inspired to redress these and many other lacunae. Finally, if I focus on modern French literature, it’s because that is the

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main field of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s appropriations, but it comes not only at the expense of significant pre-modern French writers such as Rabelais,12 but of other European traditions, from the German and Spanish to the Irish and the Russian, which also fed into the writers’ works; I found space here for Dostoevsky, but not Goethe, Kafka, Mann, Spengler, Lorca, Yeats, Joyce or Mayakovski. Other European literary genealogies and their interactions with AngloAmerican traditions indeed remain to be established at the level of close textual analysis, which is where the sweeping panoramic view often changes beyond recognition. The value of such a genealogical approach is quite distinct from, and yet complementary to, current trends in Beat Studies. For increasingly the field has been redefined from an American phenomenon into a broad area of writers and artists that geographically embraces Latin America, India and Europe as sites of reciprocal influence. What is the particular need and benefit, then, of a comparative reading of the three major American writers’ engagements with specifically French texts? Such an approach is necessary for historical reasons to do with the precise circumstances in which the early Beat circle formed; for cultural reasons to do with how the critical field has been constructed; and for methodological reasons to do with how the Franco-American connection has been studied so far.

Lost in Translation To begin with, the encounters of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac in mid1940s New York coincided with the rise of overwhelming American military, economic and cultural power. In such a context, they contested definitions of American national identity but lacked ideological alternatives or any models of writing and living beyond the nation state, and French literature had the appeal of a readymade mark of cultural difference, of moral and artistic otherness. That is, literature in France could transcend crime, as in the spectacular pardons given to Genet in 1943 and 1949, supported by testimony from Cocteau and letters signed by Sartre and Prévert among others.13 Still today, it is hard to imagine any other country exonerating a thief simply because he was a writer of genius, so that the traditions and status of French literature made it an historically determined choice for the Beats. This appeal is very precisely reflected in the references to national literatures made by Burroughs and Kerouac in the novel

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they coauthored in 1945, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (2008). Although generally dismissed as no more than a biographical curiosity, this short text is dense with reflections on literature, film, philosophy and visual art, and it comes as a shock to realize how few allusions there are to American culture (only eight out of thirty-two). The overwhelming majority of the cultural references are not only European (twenty-four out of thirty-two) but specifically French (out of these twenty-four references, eighteen are French). That is, French writers helped shape the thought of Kerouac and Burroughs, and indeed Ginsberg, as much as their American predecessors or contemporaries, and more than any other national literatures did, from the English (Shakespeare, Shelley, T.S. Eliot) and Irish (Yeats, Joyce, Beckett) to the German (Goethe, Rilke, Kafka) and Russian (Dostoevsky, Gogol, Mayakovski). At the same time, as Chapter 1 shows through close readings of Hippos, its focus on Rimbaud as the poet of Bohemia turns out to be a revealing site of conflict, showing how differently Burroughs and Kerouac read Rimbaud and approached literature. I take this more nuanced reading of Hippos further in Chapter 2, demonstrating how significantly Kerouac engaged with French poetic realist cinema in the novel’s revised version, I Wish I Were You, written solely by Kerouac in 1945 and only published in the “Appendix” of The Unknown Kerouac in 2016. In its namedropping and bohemianism, the novel Kerouac and Burroughs coauthored then reflects the superficial fascination that drew the Beat circle together around the rebellious postures taken by French authors, but Kerouac’s rewriting of it begins to critique and go beyond the lure of biography and sociology, shifting towards a direct involvement with the French texts and films themselves—which is likewise my approach in this study. Engaging with particular works by French writers remained creatively important across the entire oeuvres of Kerouac, Burroughs and Ginsberg because, for them, writing was never bound by issues defined by national identity. While French literature determined the emergence of the Beats in the 1940s, both the Beat field and the horizons of its major figures broadened to embrace other non-American cultures and societies from the 1950s onward: Burroughs moved through Mexico and Latin America to North Africa and then Europe, while Ginsberg and to a lesser extent Kerouac followed his tracks. In terms of national identity, the logic of their travels could be said to result in the 1959 publication in Paris of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, which Mary McCarthy accurately described as a novel “based on statelessness” (in Skerl and Lydenberg, 33). Identifying Burroughs’ masterpiece as one of the first truly transnational

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texts, McCarthy also logically called time on the Beat Generation. By 1959, even as media attention peaked, the label had already begun to lose its usefulness as a way to describe a specific form of American activity distinct from a broader countercultural movement. In other words, as an historical term, functional from 1945 to 1960, “the Beat Generation” was founded on an engagement with French texts.14 The second major reason for my comparativist approach is to redress the Americano-centrism that has characterized previous work in the field and confined the possibilities of studying the Beats’ appropriations of French literature and culture to Surrealism or Dadaism. This limitation is visible even when the most attentive transnational critics directly recognize the problem, as when Fazzino asserts that “the Beats owe as much to international traditions of futurism, Dada, and especially surrealism as they do a strictly American tradition of Whitminian democracy and the open-road mythos”(65). Whereas the “American tradition” is represented here by a named poet—Walt Whitman—“international traditions” are reduced to the names of movements. The Beats have often been linked with the surrealists, but they in fact actively resisted being identified with them. When interviewed by a French art magazine in 1959, Corso complained: “They wanted me to say the Beat Generation is founded on surrealism […] I don’t think surrealism has anything to do with Beat” (228; my emphasis). Corso’s act of resistance against this attempt to put words into his mouth powerfully expresses the importance of getting such genealogies right. It is forty years since John Tytell’s pioneering Naked Angels (1976), a study of the three major Beat writers in a traditional “Lives and Literature” format that nevertheless acknowledged the importance of European literary genealogies. Yet, in American criticism, the Beats’ French connection is still constructed overwhelmingly in two ways: sociologically, the Americans appear as mid-twentieth-century followers of late nineteenth-century French Bohemians; and biographically, their expatriate days in Paris have put them in the footsteps of the Lost Generation, updated to feature nostalgia for the city’s Dada and surrealist heritage. Corso and Ginsberg had arrived in Paris in 1957, followed a year later by Burroughs, and before they forged new creative circles involving the likes of Brion Gysin and Harold Norse; they did naturally seek out the past in the shape of Tristan Tzara, Man Ray, Benjamin Péret, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Jean-Jacques Lebel, from a younger generation, helped make such social introductions, but he also more substantively introduced Ginsberg, Burroughs and Corso to the notorious

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recording of To Have Done with the Judgment of God (“Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu” [1947]) that brought alive “the sound and the fury of Artaud” (Lebel, in Harris and MacFadyen, 85). However, while Burroughs embraced Tzara, he ignored Duchamp and attacked Breton as the Pope of Surrealism. In fact, like Corso, Burroughs had little admiration for Surrealism and would surely have agreed with Michaux’s definition of poetry against automatic writing as “graphic incontinence” (Michaux, Oeuvres I, 60; my translation).15 Ginsberg was also very aware of a definite tendency in American criticism to conflate “French” with “Surrealism,” and so in the variorum edition of “Howl” he took care to prevent the numerous and important French sources for his poem’s composition being associated even loosely with Surrealism, not mincing his words: “This is not surrealism—they made up an artificial literary imitation” (Howl, 153).16 Of course, the Beats’ recriminations can be interpreted as overly defensive, but many writers concur with Corso, Burroughs and Ginsberg’s own views that, if Beat and surrealist poetries have affinities, they nevertheless diverge in fundamental ways. In 2011, Bénédicte Gorrillot conducted an enlightening interview with the French poet Christian Prigent that problematizes, rather than succumbs to, this longstanding conjunction of the Beats with French Surrealism by both American and French scholars. Like most French readers, Prigent discovered Beat poetry through the anthology edited by Alain Jouffroy and translated by Jean-Jacques Lebel in 1965. In the interview, Prigent praises Jouffroy’s preface, but also blames him for what is now a quasi-automatic association of the American Beats with the French surrealists: “Jouffroy’s preface, I had read it a lot. It strongly influenced me, to read Ginsberg, even if he pulls the Beats too much towards Surrealism, like a transposition in the USA of Surrealism—what is inexact and drowns the ‘Beat’ difference” (Gorrillot, 118–19; my translation).17 In Burroughs and Ginsberg’s works, Prigent thus claims having found, more than a mere alternative to Surrealism, “the opposite of surrealist sublimation”: What overwhelmed me, in the 65 Lebel/Jouffroy anthology, […] is the power of this new lyricism […] Its auditory mode of apparition: euphoric threnody, wild song, hoarseness, obscene provocation. And writing-wise, its politico-sexual bluntness […]—the opposite of surrealist sublimation and, in general, of the sentimentalism and narrowness of contemporaneous French poetry. A reality effect, in sum (the reality as “what we bang ourselves on”).18

Prigent’s eloquent description of Beat poetry doesn’t only distinguish it from surrealist poetry; it attacks it through a criticism that Gorrillot rightly

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brings together with Georges Bataille’s own put-down of Surrealism as overly disconnected from reality.19 Prigent even goes so far as to affirm that Ginsberg’s works offered him a salutary way out of Surrealism.20 When Anglophone critics have discussed American appropriations of French culture, they have rarely drawn on such Francophone criticism or engaged with primary texts, except in translation. Reciprocally, French academic work in the Beat field lacks almost any engagement with the work of Anglo-American critics.21 Only very recently did the well-documented French volume Contre-Cultures! edited by Christophe Bourseiller and Olivier Penot-Lacassagne (2013) and the catalog of the exhibition Beat Generation: New York San Francisco Paris at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (2016) adopt a comparative approach fed by both cultures. Another short but important French publication intimates the possibility of change: the dossier “Under drug influence” published by Le Magazine Littéraire in April 2014, which devoted a special section to Burroughs alongside Baudelaire, Artaud and Michaux. In the same vein, one French monograph that might have developed a comparative reading of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s literary debts to French modernity is Max Milner’s L’imaginaire des drogues: De Thomas de Quincey à Henri Michaux (2000), had its author been less hostile, perhaps, towards American literature. Indeed, the introduction of this study curiously ends on an abrupt justification for excluding Beat writers: “The beatnik movement of the 1950s and beyond in America has deliberately been left out. Although it often claimed an association to Michaux (who explicitly denied it), it is a fact of civilization, linked to socio-political circumstances, spaces, means of communication, which calls for this wide phenomenon to be studied by itself ” (Milner, 12; my translation). It is telling of French criticism’s outdated perspective that Milner here “deliberately” succumbs to the unfortunate confusion of the terms “Beat” and “Beatnik” with which Anglophone Beat Studies had to battle for so long.22 Refusing even to name any Beat writer, Milner’s exclusion typifies a regressive attitude both towards comparative literature in general and towards the Beats in particular within French criticism, refusing them the status of writers and therefore their works the literary attention they deserve. In short, American Beat Studies might have taken a transnational turn over the last decade, but there are still few Francophone publications that study Beat literature comparatively, and Francophone and Anglophone Beat scholarships remain two solitudes. The cultural one-sidedness of each academic

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tradition has made it almost impossible to understand the very bridging of cultures that characterizes the oeuvres of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac, and has also made it impossible to grasp their misappropriations and creative misreadings of French texts. One more contribution of this study, then, is to bring the Francophone and Anglophone academic worlds together through a bicultural approach informed by both critical traditions and by my own frequent translations of French texts and criticism. The comparative approach taken in the following pages finally rests on a question of material necessity. The book’s purpose is to give depth to the familiar Franco-American axis invoked in Beat Studies, which demands making close textual readings of its three foundational oeuvres. The devil is in the textual detail, and the aim to explore material appropriations, rather than to speak in vague terms of authors exerting influence, is my response to seeing the dead ends into which such approaches have often led. What is needed are routes that take us further into the works themselves. And so, while I won’t favor on theoretical grounds any one of the possible range of terms to describe intertextual relationships—from “borrowing, stealing, appropriating, inheriting, assimilating,” to “rewriting, reworking, refashioning, re-vision, reevaluation” (Sanders, 3)—I will specifically avoid speaking loosely of “influence.” The comparative approach I embrace here is also distinct from the multiple readings unified by a single thematic or polemic that typifies transnational approaches to postwar American literature. Trading a survey of broad cultural histories or localized analyses for sustained textual readings across whole oeuvres is, I believe, the surest way to contest and revise from its starting point a Franco-American narrative that has long been highly visible and yet taken as read. The chapters that follow are accordingly structured by a chronology that, beginning with the first Beat novella in 1945, has a strong narrative line, but is flexible enough to work throughout the authors’ entire oeuvres. Because the genesis of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s texts from the mid-1940s and on through the 1950s coincided so precisely with their intense engagement with French literature, the weighting of attention is naturally but not exclusively on their earlier writing. That is, my interest has less to do with advancing interpretations of particular texts than with unravelling the process behind them, exploring how Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac conceived their work, in both meanings of the term. This study, then, not only explores how engaging with certain French texts was essential to the genesis of specific works, but also

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how Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac used those French texts to measure the achievement and reception of their own oeuvres. For example, Chapter 3 draws in detail on Kerouac’s early journals, which illuminate his writing as the progress of a constant appropriation, based on how closely he read and reflected on Céline and Proust when composing On the Road and Visions of Cody, while my analysis of his late commentary “On Céline” invites us to see Kerouac measuring his own work in the retrospective light of Céline’s. Chapters 5 and 6 likewise demonstrate the genetic role of French poetry for Ginsberg’s early poems, with special attention to Apollinaire, while they also enlighten how, in the variorum edition of “Howl” that Ginsberg assembled three decades after, he looks back on his most famous poem in order to project the genealogical context he desired for his oeuvre as a whole. In the same vein, Chapter 7 shows Burroughs’ intense but ambivalent admiration for Genet by closely reading his last book, My Education (1995), where he reflects on A Prisoner of Love, Genet’s own last book. This reading helps grasp Burroughs’ anxieties about his achievements as a writer that go back forty years to when he was reading Genet’s The Thief ’s Journal while writing Naked Lunch. Taken together, these comparative analyses reveal how Genet came to stand as a threatening ideal of the posthuman otherness to which Burroughs’ work had always been committed. Finally, to contextualize the book’s conclusion, which necessitates a more theorized frame of reference, we should go back to the beginning and recall that, while Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac met through Columbia University, they built their oeuvres outside the walls of the academy and against academic culture. At one moment or another, critics, scholars, let alone teachers, must therefore wrestle with the paradox that most types of critical discourse seem to go against the grain of their revolutionary oeuvres, to denature them. My micro-readings here aim to show that by appropriating French modern oeuvres that themselves shook French literature and society, Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac were not only revolutionary in transporting literature out of the suffocating world of academia and the conservative discourses of postwar America, but also in breathing life into literature itself. The horizon of this book, then, is the question: but what kind of life? What French life forms did Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac bring into American literature, and into what world would these life forms evolve? These large questions call for a different approach and in order to define the outcome of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s longstanding process of cross-

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fertilization for American literature and literature itself, at times micro-readings do need to work with macro-readings. I don’t particularly wish to affix another label to the Beat label that was always problematic itself. But “-isms” do have one pragmatic advantage: they help situate texts, ideas and practices in the bigger picture. And among all the necessarily reductive and always inadequate “-isms” available to us at the moment, the field of posthumanism emerged as the most appropriate, or perhaps least inadequate. Given that French modernism is the concern of this study, the choice of posthumanism over postmodernism for a framework might seem surprising. But for all the paradoxes that the revolutionary aesthetics of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac pose to critics, the fundamental nature of the challenges and transformations that their aesthetics entailed for literature and society remains their major contribution—and I believe this nature has much less to do with the awareness raised by the relativism advocated by postmodernism than with the critique of humanism advanced by posthumanism. The result for this book’s methodology is to shift the balance from close textual readings to a broader comparative analysis, and from appropriation to comparison, that is, from concentrating on material traces of French literature in Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s works to examining how their most innovative writing transformed the way we conceive the human in ways initiated by the French authors they read and admired, like Proust and Artaud, Genet and Michaux. As posthumanism offers a framework, not a set of tools, its use here is distinct from the way in which Beat literature has been increasingly studied through the prism of Critical Theory, a field dominated—some go so far as to say “invaded”—by French philosophy ever since the 1960s.23 I do not, for example, make sustained Sartrean or Deleuzian readings of On the Road or Visions of Cody, although I do call on on Deleuze’s reading of Proust and Kerouac’s own relation with Sartre to analyze how his texts appropriate Proust and Céline. Likewise, while it might be instructive to read the major works of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs through the three stages of posthumanism outlined by Rosi Braidotti (2013)—Kerouac’s works would represent the posthuman (life beyond the self), Ginsberg’s the post-anthropocentric (life beyond the species) and Burroughs’ the inhuman (life beyond death)—in practice, I only take the last term from her terminology, the inhuman, to clarify Burroughs’ ethics of evolution and revolution, to avoid overdetermining the outcome of my close

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textual readings that are in that last chapter, as in every other chapter, the lifeblood of this book. In sum, my approach here is comparative but emphatically textual, in order to give space to literary and artistic relationships that have generally been made in terms of broad cultural associations that on closer analysis often prove misleading. The Beats were indeed victims of intense and willful media misrepresentation during the 1950s, and Ginsberg in particular responded by constantly correcting errors and promoting alternative narratives, including literary lineages. When critiquing one of the first works of Beat criticism, a “Beat Literature” pamphlet in 1966, he accordingly drew attention to a specifically French lacuna: “St. Jean Perse [sic], Céline and Genet did always have influence on Kerouac myself Burroughs and everybody—they’re unmentioned” (Ginsberg, Letters, 323). In context of this writing and rewriting of Beat literary history, what better way to lay out this study’s approach to the narratives and counter-narratives, the myths and misprisions in representations of the French genealogy of the Beat Generation than through revisiting the significance of a series of well-known photographs from the 1950s? The reception of these photographs exemplifies the gap between cultural approaches that often aim to understand the success of Beat image—now promoting, now criticizing it—and in-depth analysis that aims to understand Beat creation: the gap, for instance, between Edmund White’s take on Ginsberg’s photography and Burroughs’ painting—now given as “fascinating,” now as mercenary opportunism24—and the reading that follows, which examines pictures of and by Ginsberg for what they were before becoming “legend,” that is, quite simply, works of photography and literature.

“A Funny Second’s Charade” The first in a sequence of three images I want to read closely here is the one with which this introduction began. Taken in late 1957 in room 25 of the Beat Hotel by the British photographer and fellow resident Harold Chapman, and published in Chapman’s book named after the hotel (135), this photograph has often been reproduced. It shows a smiling Ginsberg posing for his portrait beneath the framed reproduction of a detail from Henri Fantin-Latour’s painting “Le coin de table” (1872) representing Arthur Rimbaud.

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Figure I.1 Allen Ginsberg in room 25 of the Beat Hotel, 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur, Paris (1957) © Topfoto, Harold Chapman

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On one level, the photograph is exactly what it seems to be: an humble act of homage paid by the American poet to his French idol in the private space of the French capital he occupies in 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur. The picture visualizes the longstanding admiration for Rimbaud that Ginsberg had passionately expressed in a letter a decade earlier to Lionel Trilling in 1945, who was then not only Ginsberg’s professor at Columbia University but also the nation’s foremost literary critic. The young poet felt Trilling “must witness his defense” of Rimbaud as a “representative hero,” “genius,” “outcast,” “prophet” and “politically minded poet”; in short, as the very ideal to which Ginsberg himself aspired (Letters, 11–14). The image of Ginsberg sitting at the feet of Rimbaud in Paris, however, takes on new meaning when read in parallel with its complex and conflicted backstory: the collective narrative of the early Beat circle as depicted in And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks in 1945. The novella Burroughs and Kerouac composed together portrays the Beats as admirers of Rimbaud and French bohemia, and the aim of its plot is, logically enough, to leave New York for Paris. The two-shot of Ginsberg and Rimbaud in the Beat Hotel in 1957 might seem, therefore, to fulfill the twinned ambitions of this foundational text of Beat writing: to take, as it were, Rimbaud’s place. But at a textual level, the symbolism of the portrait is misleading, because despite Ginsberg’s appropriation of Rimbaud—discussed in Chapter 6—the two authors of Hippos conspicuously avoided representing Ginsberg within their lightly fictionalized narrative. Chapter 1 closely reads Hippos and also reveals that while all its characters identify with Rimbaud, it is in fact to differentiate themselves from one another: Rimbaud divides rather than unites the Beat circle. Burroughs’ narrating protagonist, for example, identifies with Rimbaud as a way to mock the literary romanticism of Kerouac’s own narrating protagonist and the naivety of his planned voyage to Paris, a city under Nazi occupation at that time. Moreover, while Ginsberg’s presence in Paris coincided with his writing such important texts as “At Apollinaire’s Grave” and “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!,” as Chapter 5 argues, these poems were paying homage to an engagement with French literature that had already taken place long before coming to Paris in 1957. To read this portrait of Ginsberg with Rimbaud in Paris as crystallizing the height of Beat creativity would therefore misrepresent the true literary significance of the Beat Hotel. That is, its most enduring and productive period was the distinctly post-Beat—even anti-Beat—experimentalism of Burroughs’ cut-up project. As Chapter 1 clarifies, in the Beat Hotel from 1959 to 1961, it is in fact Burroughs who would engage most directly with Rimbaud, literally

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cutting up his poetry—to make two texts included in Minutes to Go (1960) and many more—and discovering ways to follow the poetics rather than the poet of modernity. For him, there was no romantic cult of personality or place: in Paris Burroughs would put Rimbaud to work. We might also venture a new reading of this by-now iconic photograph of two icons of nineteenth-century French and twentieth-century American poetry, paying attention to that which these icons themselves partially conceal: the poster of a fruit still life painting. Without being able to identify the artist, we could only misread this framed picture as a simple background on the hotel room wall, useful for hanging the image of Rimbaud. But once we identify the painting as the reproduction of a work by Paul Cézanne, we can look at it again, knowing his work’s importance to Ginsberg’s own; in a May 1956 letter explaining the aesthetics of “Howl,” for instance, he evokes “my master who is Cezanne” (Howl, 152). We might also consider the distinction here between the painting of Rimbaud’s portrait—which represents the man, not his work—and the painting by Cézanne, which is the artist’s own work. In other words, an image of the man (Rimbaud), produced and circulated by others, comes before and gets in the way of a work itself (Cézanne’s). What Chapman’s photograph therefore shows us isn’t a simple act of homage at all, but a layered one, in which the author of the recently published “Howl” pays tribute to not only a poet but also a painter, and to not only one but two French sources, one behind the other, opening up the possibility of an almost infinite genealogical regress. A second photograph whose meaning shifts when closely analyzed is of Burroughs taken by Ginsberg in his Lower East Side apartment. It is one of a series that Ginsberg took in New York in fall 1953 that has also since become famous through major international exhibitions and catalogs of his photography. As we are told by the handwritten caption he added in the 1980s, the image shows Burroughs lying on the floor of Ginsberg’s apartment holding a bilingual edition of Winds (Vents) by the French poet St.-John Perse. If we contrast this “two-shot” with Chapman’s image of Ginsberg beneath the portrait of Rimbaud, we grasp the importance of Burroughs’ appearance with a book. Having just published his first novel Junky, he is recorded in the act of reading another writer’s work. The image invites us to interpret it as a statement of textual engagement, rather than as an act of homage. That the book is a bilingual edition, bringing the original French and English translation together, is also significant. For, just a few years after this photograph was taken, as

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Figure I.2 William Burroughs reading a bilingual edition of Vents by St.-John Perse (1953) © Allen Ginsberg LLC

Chapter 1 reveals, Burroughs made important creative use of another bilingual edition of French poetry: Louise Varèse’s translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations. More immediately, connecting Burroughs with Perse at a textual level, we are led to seek out the particular impact of Vents on Burroughs’ writing. Chapter 7 notes that Perse was indeed a major and long-neglected source for Burroughs, but the narrative created by Ginsberg’s camera misrepresents the significance of that relationship. For the work of Perse with which Burroughs textually engaged throughout his oeuvre was never Vents but his much earlier epic, Anabase (1924). Ironically, Vents is most important not for the writer holding the recently published book but for the writer holding the camera, and Chapter 7 establishes that the formal features of Vents were one of the crucial but overlooked sources of Ginsberg’s “Howl.” Finally, a gulf separates these two photographs, which is the difference between the images of Rimbaud and Perse. Rimbaud is represented by his portrait because he was for Ginsberg as for generations before and since the poster boy of Bohemia, whereas Perse was and remains influential as a poet, but relatively unknown as a man. As Chapter 7 points out, the contrast in the

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cultural reputations of Perse and Rimbaud—whose works Ginsberg regularly associated—was important for him as he elaborated what amounts to a veritable strategy for identifying and communicating his poetic lineage; while he engaged profoundly with Perse, only Rimbaud had a “name.” Taken together, these photographs hence make visible meaningful connections between American and French writers that cannot be taken at face value, but need to be deconstructed at a precise textual level in order to grasp their significance. A third photograph, in the series that Ginsberg took in Fall 1953 and captioned in the 1980s, is even more complex. It shows Burroughs in conversation with Kerouac, seated next to each other on the sofa of Ginsberg’s apartment. Since it features “an unexpectedly suave and theatrical Burroughs” in the act of talking and gesturing to “a browbeaten but adorable Jack Kerouac,” Edmund White rightly, if also patronizingly, describes it as visualizing the relationship between the older mentor figure and his young apprentice (White, “The Beats: Pictures of a Legend”). As such, the image supports a standard biographical reading. But while the image itself is mute, Ginsberg’s caption makes it talk:25 “Now Jack, as I warned you far back as 1945, if you keep going home to live with your ‘memère’ you’ll find yourself wound tighter and tighter in her apron strings ’til you’re an old man and can’t escape…” William Seward Burroughs camping as an André Gideian sophisticate lecturing the earnest Thomas Wolfean AllAmerican youth Jack Kerouac, who listens soberly dead-pan to “the most intelligent man in America” for a funny second’s charade in my living room 206 East 7th Street Apt 16, Manhattan, one evening Fall 1953.

Ginsberg’s caption presents this scene through a series of binaries that seem clear at first sight, but that on reflection are highly paradoxical. The most obvious of these binaries concerns national identities and opposes Burroughs (associated with the French writer Gide) to Kerouac (associated with the American writer Wolfe). The paradox is that while Burroughs is identified with the French Gide, he is also “the most intelligent man in America”; and while Kerouac is identified with the American Wolfe, in a nod to his Canuck origins, his mother is referred to in French as “memère.” French and American national identities are invoked only, it seems, in order to be confused. This confusion points to another structure of signification that is less about transnational identities or cultural difference than about what, for the Beat writers, images of national identity themselves stood for: displaced issues of literary and sexual identity.

Beyond “Rimbaud in a Raincoat”

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Figure I.3 William Burroughs “camping as an André Gidean sophisticate lecturing the earnest Thomas Wolfean All-American youth Jack Kerouac” (1953) © Allen Ginsberg LLC

The opposition constructed through the noun “sophisticate” and adjective “earnest” in Ginsberg’s caption conveys the traditional literary binary between the culturally accomplished French and the raw natural all-Americans. If the French “sophisticated” Burroughs is addressing the American “earnest” Kerouac, the hierarchy here is significantly pedagogical: Burroughs the old “lecturer” teaches his young student who “listens soberly.” But what might be no more than a playful pedagogic relation between two men indeed stands in for a structure of homosexual desire in which pedagogy is fused with pederasty. Since Gide is the author of The Immoralist, Corydon and The Counterfeiters, all infamous in their day for openly dealing with homosexuality, the “Gidean sophisticate” master implicitly threatens to seduce and corrupt the innocent all-American student. Ironically reinscribing Cold War definitions of desirable national identity, Ginsberg’s caption makes homosexual desire un-American, a foreign menace, a French disease. Ginsberg’s reference to Gide therefore functions according to a threelayered structure: first, as a marker of literary and national identity; second, as

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a pedagogical relationship; and finally, implied by the first two, as the sign of repressed homosexuality. Chapter 4 shows a similar structure of concealment and displaced reference operating through the name and works of Gide in Kerouac’s early writing, above all in his invocation of Gide’s The Counterfeiters in The Town and the City in relation to Burroughs. Ginsberg’s fascinating assemblages of image and text span three decades of Beat history and thus reproduce and reaffirm the role that French literature played in shaping his friends’ works and his own in complex strategies of signification. They are examples in miniature of the overlooked or unsuspected dimensions that are to be discovered through the close readings that follow. These show that there was more to Kerouac’s fascination for French poetic realist films than nostalgia for the language of his childhood, or to his infatuation for Proust and Céline than precursors to emulate; more to Ginsberg’s admiration for Apollinaire, Artaud and St.-John Perse than the ambition of inserting his own name in the pantheon of modernity; and more to Burroughs’ longstanding admiration for Gide, Cocteau and Genet than a European pose, or to his identification with Rimbaud than a model to forge his own image as a writer—far more to his works, indeed, than his biographical image: “Rimbaud in a raincoat.”

1

Burroughs or Kerouac’s Rimbaud: To Be or Not to Be “L I T E R A R Y”

“Hidden Under the Floorboards” And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks: even if it is the long-lost first novel of the Beat Generation, and even if it is a unique work for being coauthored in alternate chapters by Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, still, how can we take seriously a book with such a title? The only ones who have done so are the biographers for two historical reasons going back to the summer of 1944.1 First, because of the line that gave the novella its title, which is so silly that it irresistibly invites us to find out where it came from and to what it referred; that is, the phrase Burroughs overheard on a radio report about one of the worst fire catastrophes in the history of the United States, the circus blaze that occurred in Hartford, Connecticut, on July 6, 1944, which concluded “…and the hippos were boiled in their tanks.” Second, biographers embraced it because of the Greenwich village drama lying at the heart of the novella’s plot; that is, the reallife murder of Burroughs and Kerouac’s friend, David Kammerer, by another of their friends, Lucien Carr, which took place by the Hudson River in the small hours of August 14, 1944. The first event would have no connection whatsoever with the second, were it not for Burroughs’ peculiar interest in vaudeville-like disasters. The radio reporting of the circus fire must have struck him as odd enough to entitle the curious story he and Kerouac were writing that summer. Questionable humor or stroke of genius: by giving their novella that title, the crime of passion that brought the Beat circle together was forever bound to evoke for us the flames of the most absurd tragedy. As will become clearer, it also contained the tension at stake in Burroughs and Kerouac’s initial collaboration and the dramatic contrast in their attitudes towards literature. A serious close reading of Hippos indeed reveals Burroughs and Kerouac’s opposite takes on literature in the mid-1940s, but also the unsuspected seeds

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and signs of their later more experimental creative work. While readers have assumed and biographers have asserted the straightforward conventionality of the novella, the central feature of Hippos’ composition—its coauthorship—in fact strongly connects it to The Young and Evil (1933), the explicitly experimental novel of Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler. Viewed in such a light, it becomes more logical to find in the text attitudes towards literature that, in the 1950s, would lead Kerouac to the “bookmovie” hybrid form and that, in the 1960s, Burroughs would develop into the subversive tactics of cut-up methods. As we will see, these early traces of their future radical aesthetics are inextricably bound up with complex identifications with French literature and culture, most specifically with Arthur Rimbaud. Composed in spring 1945 but unpublished until 2008, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks was received as the lost treasure “hidden under the floorboards” to which Kerouac famously referred in his interview for The Paris Review (in Plimpton, 108), and since publication of the novella, literary critics have only reinforced, by their neglect as much as by their commentary, the view that the importance of this sensational tale is mostly biographical. The first Beat novel was accordingly praised by reviewers for its historical status, its vivid portrait of the New York bohemian scene in which Kerouac and Burroughs met in the very year of 1944. Certainly, the enduring allure of Beat biography and mythmaking explains the film adaptation of the Carr-Kammerer murder: Kill Your Darlings (2013). The film interestingly reoriented the drama by focusing on the Carr-Ginsberg relationship, which is a reminder that Allen Ginsberg was a crucial figure in the real-life circle, but was entirely written out by Kerouac and Burroughs in their version of events. Indeed, Hippos was not the first account of the murder, since although he was forced to abandon writing it by the chair of the English department and the assistant dean of Columbia University, Ginsberg had begun his own narrative entitled “The Bloodsong” within weeks of the murder, several months before Kerouac and Burroughs began theirs.2 All three major Beat authors were therefore involved in efforts to turn the dramatic events of August 1944 into writing, inaugurating Beat literature’s nettlesome relationship to autobiography. In fact, the coauthorship of Hippos and its use of two alternating narratingprotagonists, Will Dennison (based on Burroughs) and Mike Ryko (based on Kerouac), doubles the problem of fictionalized autobiography and complicates what might otherwise have been a relatively straightforward narrative: the tragic story of the youthful Phillip Tourian (based on Lucien Carr) pursued by the older

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Ramsey Allen (based on David Kammerer). The narrative’s inevitable trajectory towards Al’s murder is filled out by a series of scenes within the bohemian circle and by a minimal plot in which Ryko and Phil dream of shipping out as merchant seamen to reach France and finally Paris, the novella’s ineluctably symbolic destination. Described in such terms, it is not altogether surprising that, on its 2008 publication, Hippos was denigrated for being little more than a series of anecdotes built around a sordid murder, and for its lack of literariness. Such an approach takes the text of Hippos at face value, but upon closer inspection, its superficiality turns out to be more apparent than real. Criticism has therefore overlooked material essential to understand the genesis of Burroughs and Kerouac’s oeuvres. Most notably, this oversight includes neglecting the second version of Burroughs and Kerouac’s text (available in the archives for the past decade, but only published in The Unknown Kerouac in 2016). For just two months after they had completed their manuscript,3 Kerouac wrote his own version of the story he had coauthored with his older friend, and gave it a completely different title: I Wish I Were You.4 To Ginsberg’s abandoned draft and the Burroughs-Kerouac coproduction, we must therefore add Kerouac’s sole version as further evidence of how, through the dramatic events of 1944, the major Beat authors individually and collectively defined themselves as writers. I Wish I Were You is the most revealing version of all, for it bears the textual marks of how Kerouac parted from Burroughs and emerged as the stylist we know by following his passion for French literature and film.

When Kerouac “Got Literary” In Kerouac’s I Wish I Were You, not only do we find definite signs of the writer to come, we find that the stylist has already arrived. Several elements in Kerouac’s pre-1950 writings anticipate his first published novels, but his redrafting of Hippos is indeed the most revealing of them stylistically. It features one of Kerouac’s most distinctive motifs, “the phantom of darkness and death” hovering over the sleeping city of New York, which amalgamates “the vultures of human sadness” in The Sea Is My Brother (1943) with “the black age” of Orpheus Emerged (1945), and prefigures “the gloomy and obsessed time” of the narrator’s “own life” “haunting his family sleep” in The Town and the City (1950). But to understand the full implications of I Wish I Were You for Kerouac’s aesthetics, especially

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what they owe to French poetic realist film and its shadowy atmosphere inspired by Louis Feuillade’s popular serials Fantômas, we must begin by examining how exactly, that is, how materially, it differs from Hippos. The two titles Burroughs and Kerouac successively gave to the Carr-Kammerer story stand for the essential differences between the two versions of the text and the respective views of literature they embody. The first title, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, is a noir joke, a distinctly Burroughsian joke, whereas the second chosen by Kerouac, I Wish I Were You, is far more enigmatic and profound. It is openly literary. This distinction is crucial for grasping the peculiar qualities of Hippos. Both formally and stylistically, the text is divided by alternating narrators: the voices of Burroughs’ narrator (Will Dennison) and Kerouac’s (Mike Ryko) are relatively close in tone, which is not only a weakness in the text—why have two narrators and alternate chapters if their voices are similar?—but more importantly reveals the compromises made by the young Kerouac working alongside his mentor Burroughs. That Hippos begins and ends with chapters written by Burroughs is clear textual evidence of the balance of power in their relationship. Above all, when read in light of I Wish I Were You, it becomes obvious that the alternate chapters of Hippos barely conceal the conflict between the literary ambition of Kerouac on the one hand, and the refusal to be literary of Burroughs on the other. Neither Burroughs nor Kerouac’s narrators identify themselves as writers in Hippos, whereas in I Wish I Were You, Kerouac’s sole narrator, Mike Ryko, explicitly does so. What Ryko is working on is also a “huge prose poem” entitled “The American Night” (385), a serious, self-reflexive title that could well have been an alternative to I Wish I Were You, which would have stood even more sharply against the ludicrous And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. The comparison between Hippos and I Wish I Were You is most compelling for how it illuminates the distinct, indeed the diametrically opposed attitudes of Burroughs and Kerouac towards literature as an idea and, crucially mediated through French culture, towards writing as a practice. Reading the two texts in parallel makes absolutely clear, as Joyce Johnson observes in her brief but insightful commentary on which my close analysis builds here, that I Wish I Were You was Kerouac’s “declaration of independence from the influence of Burroughs” (Johnson, 204).5 More precisely, writing the new version was a way to cast off what restrained Kerouac while working in the shadow of Burroughs’ cynicism. Kerouac himself implied as much twenty years later in Vanity of Duluoz, when, revisiting the events of 1944, he has Hubbard,

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alias Burroughs, respond to his own gushing romanticism with the ultimate put-down: “My G A W D, I’m not going to buy you another drink if you get L I T E R A R Y!” (Vanity, 206). Kerouac’s block capitals here make as visible as possible the extent to which he and Burroughs found themselves in conflict on the subject of literature. His humoristic recollection conceals and yet reveals the vibrant creative effects this conflict can only have had on his thinking at the time of rewriting Hippos on his own terms. In the amusing dialogue leading up to Hubbard’s quip, Kerouac reworks his anxieties as a writer in face of Burroughs’ authoritative personality by depicting himself as a child asking endless questions. Significantly for the argument to follow, it is because he is yearning to visualize “the marvellous scene in a movie”—which his old friend Will has just seen—that he is first accused by him of being overly literary: “And what did the guy look like?” “Wild bushy hair…” “And he said Yip Yip Yippee as he rushed off ?” “With a girl in his arms.” “Across the dark field?” “Some kind of field—” “What was this field?” “My Gawd—we’re getting literary yet, don’t bother me with such idiotic questions, a field”—he says “field” with an angry or impatient shrieking choke—“like it’s a FIELD”—calming down—“a field… for God’s sake you see him rushing off into the dark horizon—” (Vanity, 203; Kerouac’s emphasis)

Kerouac’s seemingly light-hearted humor should not disguise the precise terms in which the opposed views his narrator and Hubbard take towards literature are constructed: his compulsive desire to fully visualize the scene from a film in this passage establishes the cinematic as a feature of the literary for him. Since we might naturally assume the literary and the cinematic as a binary, the one defined against the other, this is a striking desire and it becomes all the more so to discover its seed back in the mid-1940s. That is, in terms of the aesthetic dispute between the two aspirant writers, Hippos embodies Burroughs’ views at the expense of Kerouac’s, for to “get literary” in their narrative seems, like in Vanity, a seductive but superficial game, which is why it can so easily be read as lacking in literary depth. However, as shown by the following analysis of the text’s pattern of cultural references, Hippos may sound like a joke but it is already playing a quite sophisticated game, one that Kerouac would bring out into the open in I Wish I Were You.

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Sophomoric Name-Dropping? The literariness that divided Kerouac from Burroughs is reflected in the broad stylistic differences between Hippos and I Wish I Were You. Full of Kerouac’s admiration for Balzac and Stendhal and more broadly for French naturalism,6 I Wish I Were You features far more attention to detail and thrives on numerous lengthy descriptive passages of Manhattan’s splendor and squalor that Burroughs would not have cared for. Kerouac’s fascination for the shadowy decors, workingclass dialogues and doomed characters of poetic realist cinema, which will be analyzed later in this section, went hand in hand with his inclination for the long detailed descriptions of French naturalism, and is one of several ways in which he was to distinguish himself from Burroughs. For the aesthetics of French poetic realism indeed inherited one of the central debates of late nineteenthcentury French literature, namely that between romantics and naturalists. In fact, both Hippos and I Wish I Were You replay this very debate, Ryko’s idealism emulating the romantic ideas of a Julien Sorel (in Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir), and Dennison’s “factualism” resonating with the dark determinism afflicting a Nana (in Zola’s L’Assomoir). Burroughs and Kerouac’s contrasting views on the importance of decor and atmosphere for their story, specifically to establish its cultural and aesthetic context, are accordingly represented in Hippos by the fact that the overwhelming majority of allusions to artistic works appear in Kerouac’s chapters: out of thirtytwo such references, twenty-three are Kerouac’s and only nine are Burroughs.’7 In I Wish I Were You, many of these cultural allusions are also developed and their significance clarified, but in Hippos they are put in the mouths of characters like so much name-dropping: Brahms’ First (12), Robert Briffault’s Europa (89, 96, 124), Carné’s Le Quai des brumes (112, 172), Duvivier’s Pépé le moko (100), T.S. Eliot (124, 170), Faulkner’s Sanctuary (114), Goethe’s Doctor Faustus (42), Benny Goodman’s song “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise” (172), Guthrie’s Bound for Glory (66), Gerald Heard’s The Third Morality (46), Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend (177), Korda’s The Four Feathers (173), The Mills Brothers’ “You Always Hurt the One You Love” (31), Modigliani’s portrait of Cocteau (174), Roi Ottleys’ New World A-Coming (66), Claude Rains’ famous interpretation of Capitaine Louis Renault (163), Renoir’s La Grande illusion (152, 177, 179), Rimbaud (67, 92, 93, 120, 153), Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake (84), Tchelitchew’s Cache-cache (174), Verlaine (67) and Yeats (110). There is something sophomoric about this enumeration, but the sheer number of references it contains suggests otherwise,

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and on closer inspection we can discern in Hippos three distinctive patterns of cultural allusion. First, we notice how few references there are to American culture (eight out of thirty-two) and that, of the remaining twenty-four European references, no less than three-quarters are French (eighteen out of twenty-four). Second, French names and works strikingly come back several times in the text: Carné returns twice under Kerouac’s pen (112, 172), Briffault and Renoir each three times (89, 96, 124 and 152, 177, 179) and Rimbaud no less than five times across both Kerouac and Burroughs’ chapters (67, 92, 93, 120, 153). Third, the role of French references in Hippos is much more significant than any other. When Yeats, Eliot or Modigliani are named, it is to picture the bohemian literary landscape; their names are literally “dropped.” But in the case of French figures, they are not merely punctual but structural, integral to the writing itself. Consider the most obvious French figure: Rimbaud. We expect the famous Rimbaud-Verlaine homosexual couple to dramatize the central, passionate relationship among the American bohemians, involving the youthful Phil (based on Carr) and the older Al (based on Kammerer). But what looks like a cliché is complicated in multiple ways, starting with the way in which Dennison (based on Burroughs) also identifies himself with Rimbaud. In fact, except for Ryko (based on Kerouac), all the novella’s main characters identify with Rimbaud, whose name recurs in Hippos in four significant ways: as the bohemian writer par excellence, the role model for Phil’s so-called “New Vision” (92, 93, 153); as a figure with whom Burroughs’ narrator perversely identifies (120); paired with Verlaine as the implicit model for Phil and Al’s fatal relationship of homosexual desire; and as an explicit model for the double-act of Phil and Kerouac’s narrator who identify with Rimbaud and Verlaine in the most literal and emphatic way possible, by taking their names for their signatures (67). Such allusions might seem no more than name-dropping but, if so, it is precisely in the sense that they add up to a deliberate strategy of the text to mock itself. The mapping of Rimbaud and Verlaine onto Phil and Al, for example, seems so obvious, but it does not work at all, since the act of violence is the wrong way round: it is the older Verlaine who shoots the younger Rimbaud (whereas Hippos ends by the younger Phil killing the older Al). The fact that Phil identifies with Rimbaud, and Kerouac’s narrator Ryko with Verlaine, using their names to sign a trade union petition at the merchant marine shipping office, further messes up the parallel, the two sets of pairs adding up to a strange ménage-àtrois between Phil, Al and Ryko. In short, these references are all ironic. Through

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them, the text opens up a distance between itself and the expected Francophile frame of reference. This is most notably the case in the Burroughs’ half of Hippos, which goes so far as to mock the untouchable representative of modern French literature whom his fellows elected as both their literary and existential model. In a symbolic gesture, Burroughs’ narrator indeed fails to join in their collective reverence for the genius poet, by a most curious act of identification with Rimbaud.

“I’m the Later Bourgeois Rimbaud” Half way through Hippos, Kerouac’s narrator references Faulkner, already his twelfth literary allusion (114). In the next chapter, Burroughs’ narrator refers, in one of his very few literary allusions, to Rimbaud. Appearing in the course of an argument about the wisdom of Phil and Ryko’s naïve plans to join the merchant marine and ship out to Paris, it is emphatic and yet highly paradoxical: “I’m the later bourgeois Rimbaud” (120). If Kerouac’s narrator later signs a petition with the name of Verlaine because young wicked Phil can only identify with Rimbaud, here, Burroughs’ narrator invokes Rimbaud’s name in an egregious and openly ironic way, identifying not with the poet but with “the later bourgeois” man. In what amounts to an anti-literary reference, on the one hand, through his persona Dennison, Burroughs is asserting his identity with Rimbaud emphatically; on the other hand, he is doing so paradoxically because identifying with him only once he has ceased being a poet. Yet, who would be tempted to associate himself with that Rimbaud, not with the young poet but with the man obstinately living as far as possible from his literary milieu and dealing guns in Africa? The answer, surely, is someone as determined as was Rimbaud to stand apart through bold excess; someone with the ambition to be more than a genius, in fact to go beyond “genius” to the point of turning his back on both his genius and the society that would come to venerate it. The unexpected identification of Dennison with the later Rimbaud in Hippos is a drastic move thanks to which he escapes the horde of modern writers who idealize the early Rimbaud, and to the extent that Rimbaud serves here as shorthand for French literature as a whole, Burroughs’ identification is indeed a rebuke, a rejection of the biographical mythology and of the literary pretensions often going with it. The answer, therefore, is someone who mocks the very idea of identifying with

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Rimbaud the poet, given that Rimbaud had proved his genius and completed his oeuvre before any aspirant poets would be out of college. Burroughs’ lesson to the young Beats is clear: if you wish to emulate Rimbaud, bear in mind how he ended… as a bourgeois merchant. In sum, who would identify with the later Rimbaud but someone beginning in literature where Rimbaud left it, with absolutely no illusions about literature’s ability to keep on going, a stance Burroughs would still be taking in Last Words, his final journal: “Where is it going, or where can it go? After Conrad, Rimbaud, Genet […]?” (Last Words, 204). Despite appearing to be no more than a one-line cynical joke, Burroughs’ identification with Rimbaud in his first mature writing is rich in significance, and from it we can draw three conclusions about his attitude towards biography, style and the literary. Biographically, if “for the Beats, it was, of course, Rimbaud’s life rather than his art that was exemplary,” as Marjorie Perloff points out in the opening of her seminal study The Poetics of Indeterminacy, it certainly wasn’t the case for Burroughs, a distinction she fails to make (Perloff, 5). In fact, not only does Burroughs’ identification separate him from the Beats, it is at odds with that of the most influential writer through whom Americans were discovering Rimbaud in the mid-1940s, that is Henry Miller whose famous book The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud (1946) celebrates the first Rimbaud: “He did not belong—not anywhere. I have always had the same feeling about myself. The parallels are endless” (Miller, 6). What is underlined by the contrast between Burroughs’ playful identification with the older merchant in Africa and Miller’s passionate identification with the young poet is that Burroughs’ interest in Rimbaud has little to do with biography. In fact, the irony in his statement continues to place him at an unusual critical distance from Rimbaud’s aura within American literary culture. Burroughs’ rejection of bohemia and literature, through Dennison’s refusal to identify with Rimbaud in the same romantic way as his friends, is an early statement of his alienation from the historical options eagerly taken up by the younger crowd. However, anticipating a paradox explored in Chapter 7 in relation to Genet, we should already begin to see that Burroughs’ wisecrack has paradoxical effects, since making the most ironical identification (“I’m the later bourgeois Rimbaud”) still retains the syntax of identification (“I’m […]”). Within the economy of identification, the desire to be absolutely different—to be, in effect, an alien—can only backfire since identifying with an alien, of course, can only threaten your own sense of being an alien. That is, refusing to identify with Rimbaud, or with anyone else for that matter, itself identifies Burroughs

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with Rimbaud’s search for otherness, and so by extension with those modern, “abnormal writers” who make the same refusal as his. Perversely, through his identification with the other, later Rimbaud, Burroughs thus embodies the new “human type” that Miller was at this very time foreseeing in his study of the genius poet: I think the Rimbaud type will displace, in the world to come, the Hamlet type and the Faustian type. The trend is toward a deeper split. Until the old world dies out utterly, the “abnormal” individual will tend more and more to become the norm. The new man will find himself only when the warfare between the collectivity and the individual ceases. Then we shall see the human type in its fullness and splendor. (Miller, 6)

In short, Burroughs’ extravagant non-identification with Rimbaud the poet couldn’t be more Rimbaud-like. In terms of national, as well as literary, identity Dennison’s flamboyant quip in Hippos both “Frenchifies” himself (we can well imagine Burroughs’ narrator dealing guns in Africa) and, indirectly, critiques Rimbaud by “Americanizing” him (we can well envision the later Rimbaud living the life of Burroughs’ narrator, becoming a pragmatic barman dealing with brawls every night), and depicts portraits that are decidedly nonliterary. Burroughs’ repartee “I’m the later bourgeois Rimbaud” also prefigures the deadpan yet satirically dissident humor that would define his mature style. That is, in the sardonic line delivered by Dennison in Hippos, we can almost hear the voice of “the Ugly American” Burroughs would relish performing. In The Soft Machine, for example, this satirical voice addresses a promising young man that could have been Rimbaud after he had abandoned literature to travel in Africa: Now kid what are you doing over there with the niggers and the apes? Why don’t you straighten out and act like a white man?—After all, they’re only human cattle—You know that yourself—Hate to see a bright young man fuck up and get off on the wrong track. (147)

Burroughs’ one brief identification with Rimbaud in Hippos is therefore highly significant in combining a sketch of his own antiliterary identity with a unique critique of Rimbaud and a foretaste of his satirical voice. In retrospect, we can also recognize how Burroughs’ flippant identification with the “wrong” Rimbaud anticipates his complex and fascinating appropriation of Rimbaud’s poetry in the hundred literary cut-ups he created a decade-and-a-half later, most of which remain unpublished.8

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“Un règlement de comptes avec la Littérature” Burroughs made extensive use of Rimbaud’s works throughout his oeuvre, but it was one of the very foundations of his cut-ups of the 1960s, and, in this respect, his use of Rimbaud was both innovative and original. Few French writers really criticized Rimbaud for his decision to desert literature; rather, they deplored it. Albert Camus talked of “nihilist depression,” Stéphane Mallarmé of “selfvivisection,” and Jean Cocteau described the later Rimbaud as “defrocked” from poetry (Guyaux, 213; my translation). In contrast, Burroughs’ response to what is commonly referred to in French literature as the enigmatic silence de Rimbaud is creative: he will not abandon literature but work against it from within. This was the aesthetic rationale of cut-up methods and Burroughs’ commitment to “rub out the word” couldn’t have been more emphatically stated in Rimbauldian terms than by the original wraparound band of the manifesto Minutes to Go. Published in Paris in 1960, it launched the cut-up method by declaring, in French, an assault on literature with a capital “L”: “un règlement de comptes avec la Littérature.” In interviews and polemical statements promoting the cut-up method, Burroughs regularly drew the association between Rimbaud’s drive to be done with literature and the cut-up project. But name-checking the French poet is not enough to understand the role he played in it and there are major difficulties in accurately measuring what is at stake in Burroughs’ cut-up engagement with Rimbaud. To begin with, there is the difficulty that so many of Rimbaud’s appearances are in neglected locations: cut-ups in such marginal works as the pamphlets Minutes to Go and The Exterminator (1960), texts that were never reprinted (such as the 1961 edition of The Soft Machine), several dozen unpublished cut-up typescripts and a surprising number of scrapbook collages and photomontages. It is also obviously deeply problematic to take at face value some of Burroughs’ methodological statements such as, in The Exterminator, “anybody can be Rimbaud if he will cut up Rimbaud’s words and learn Rimbaud language” (in The Third Mind, 71; my emphasis).9 Burroughs’ identification here seems far-fetched—unless you believe in magic or possession; “Table-tapping, perhaps?” (32)—but in fact makes perfect sense in light of his equally improbable claim in Hippos to be “the later bourgeois Rimbaud.” Let us consider the paradox: on the one hand, we know Burroughs valorized Rimbaud in the highest possible terms; on the other hand, he reduces Rimbaud to merely words on a page that he encourages us to chop up with scissors!

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When we see the results of his own examples, as we do in the cut-up texts based on Rimbaud in Minutes to Go, they seem nothing if not negative, turning Rimbaud’s poetry into verbal rubble, the seemingly nonsensical fragments of words. Is this an act of homage or of sacrilege? To put it this way enables us, I think, to recognize the perverse logic in Burroughs’ identification in Hippos with the “wrong” Rimbaud, which is not merely flippant or ironic; it is the right thing to do, the proper tribute to Rimbaud. The remark Burroughs put in his character’s mouth in Hippos should be taken seriously as a rebuke or a warning to those who would make an icon out of an iconoclast. In The Exterminator and, as my textual examination will show, in Minutes to Go, this logic is what we find at the heart of the cut-up method, the application of which in Burroughs’ hands combined the visible sacrilege of the scissors’ seemingly random violence with the secret homage of serious attention to detail. Before examining Burroughs’ way to “be Rimbaud” by cutting up his words, the literalism of this claim needs to be understood in the broader context of his engagement with the French poet. In his final journal, when Burroughs raised the problem of literature’s future, a preoccupation of course as old as modernism—“Where is it going, or where can it go?”—he was implicitly reflecting back on what was at stake in the experiments of the cut-up project. Where should literature “go”? “N’importe où! n’importe où! pourvu que ce soit hors de ce monde!” [“Anywhere! Anywhere! So long as it is out of this world!”], as Baudelaire famously put it (Le Spleen de Paris, 207).10 This is the doomed desire that Burroughs inherited from Rimbaud, who himself inherited it together with specific aesthetic goals from Baudelaire. In The Third Mind, his most important polemical text, which references Rimbaud no fewer than nine times, Burroughs indeed misattributes to Rimbaud what in fact originated in Baudelaire’s “Correspondances” and theory of synesthesia: “This is where Rimbaud was going with his color of vowels. And his ‘systematic derangement of the senses.’ The place of mescaline hallucination: seeing colors tasting sounds smelling forms” (The Third Mind, 32). These often-cited lines are characteristic of how literally Burroughs sought to pursue the urge to escape “this world” and to find the means to achieve it. To attain Rimbaud’s “hallucination simple,” he experimented with practical methods, both chemical (mescaline) and more importantly textual (to reach, as he told Timothy Leary, “pure cut-up highs” [Rub Out the Words, 64]). In short, cutting up words was a way to produce visions “out of this world,” and Burroughs was thereby finishing the job that Baudelaire and Rimbaud initiated: “This is where Rimbaud was going…”

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Burroughs’ assertion in his cut-up manifestos that you can be Rimbaud by cutting up Rimbaud’s words is not merely playful or disrespectful, some kind of Dadaist provocation. It is fully consistent with his larger presentation of cutup methods, as when telling an interviewer in 1965 that most “serious writers” objected to the use of mechanical means for literary purposes as “some sort of a sacrilege” based on their “superstitious reverence for the word”: “I find it much easier to get interest in the cut-ups from people who are not writers—doctors, lawyers, or engineers, any open-minded, fairly intelligent person—than from those who are” (The Third Mind, 3). If cut-up methods took Burroughs where Rimbaud was “going,” the implication was that it took literature to places that literature no longer recognized. And yet, while cut-ups were absolutely an attack on “Literature,” as we will see, like Dennison’s perverse act of identification in Hippos that is nevertheless the truest homage to the French poet, so too did Burroughs’ use of his scissors show an extraordinary, if perverse, literariness. Burroughs’ realization of Rimbaud’s visionary aesthetics is performed at the core of Minutes to Go by two cut-up texts, “EVERYWHERE MARCH YOUR HEAD” and “SONS OF YOUR IN,” based on Rimbaud’s poem “A une Raison.” These cut-ups are credited to Burroughs and Corso, but textual evidence points to Burroughs’ “authorship” (such as his intensive use of the phrase “everywhere march your head” in a dozen other cut-up texts he created in the 1960s). The note of retractation Corso insisted should be in the pamphlet, in which he attributed the creation of cut-ups to “uninspired machine-poetry,” also affirms his distance from both collaboration and the method itself.11 A close reading of these two poems reveals the significance of Burroughs’ use of Rimbaud’s poem in two key respects: thematic and linguistic. At first, the results of Burroughs’ fragmentation of “A une Raison” seem virtually unintelligible: SONS OF YOUR IN sons of your in tea see rib tent of ten in (Minutes to Go, 24)

However, this fragmented obscurity is balanced by the emphatic way in which their source is named beneath the two cut-ups: “Cut up Rimbaud’s TO A REASON (A UNE RAISON) Words by Rimbaud, arrangement by Burroughs & Corso” (23). This insistence has the effect of inviting the reader to go back to the

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original poem to discover that, far from cutting randomly, Burroughs used his scissors with astonishing care. The urgency of time, as the central subject announced in the very title Minutes to Go, and the precision with which Burroughs cut up Rimbaud’s words, are most apparent in how the two texts rework the same key line from “To a Reason”: “Change our lots, confound the plagues, beginning with time” (Rimbaud, Illuminations, 39). The results are “see / the new / Change knows / the Time t…” and, punning on the different meanings of the word “lots” in French and English, the phrase “our lots con” (25, 23).12 The line in Rimbaud’s poem, which denounces our usual experience of time as a disease that must be cured, thereby becomes an economical statement of Burroughs’ word virus theory: our fate is a con trick scripted by language and fixed in time, and we must cut our way out to see the world anew. When Burroughs expands on this conspiracy at the start of The Exterminator (“The Word Lines Keep Thee in Slots […] The Word Lines keep you in Time... Cut the in lines”), it is in a passage where Rimbaud’s name appears more than a dozen times (in The Third Mind, 71). Cutting up Rimbaud not only signified a general claim of affinity, therefore; it also enabled Burroughs to start expressing his own thesis about the determinism of language, identity and time by using the words of another. If the “statement” of Burroughs’ theory seems unclear in these two cut-ups from Minutes to Go, which it is, this is because it demonstrates his commitment to performing rather than explaining how in cutting up his words he was following Rimbaud. Burroughs’ sensitivity to using the words of Rimbaud in Minutes to Go not only confirms his acute relation to French language, it also indicates an unsuspected dimension that should transform our understanding of his cut-up practice. This dimension is hinted at by the specific way that Rimbaud’s work is named not once but twice as a source for the first cut-up text: “TO A REASON (A UNE RAISON).” Here, the French is given not just as the original of the English translation but as a sign that, contrary to appearances, the cut-ups have used both versions of the poem. Or to be more precise, while “EVERYWHERE MARCH YOUR HEAD” seems to derive entirely from “To a Reason,” most of “SONS OF YOUR IN” can be shown to derive from “A une Raison”: from the “sons” in its title that comes from “tous les sons” (all the sounds), to “detour” that comes from “détourne” (turns back), “tent” from “chantent” (sing), “rib” from “crible” (confound) and “commence” from “à commencer par le temps” (beginning with time) (Rimbaud, Illuminations, 38).

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Figure 1.1 Facsimile, William Burroughs and Gregory Corso, “SONS OF YOUR IN,” in Minutes to Go (on the left), made from Arthur Rimbaud’s poem “A une Raison” (on the right)

What is so revealing here is the great care taken to use fragments or whole words from the French poem that also work as English. Far from randomly slashing verse into nonsense, the scissors shifted the sense of the words across languages in a primary instance of Burroughs’ command to “Cut word lines— shift linguals” (Nova Express, 63).13 Giving the poem’s title in both English and French was therefore a subtle way to make two poems out of one—and this is literally what Burroughs achieved by using Rimbaud’s poem to generate two cutup texts. This multiplication not only performs the open-ended principle of the cut-up method, its assault on the fixity of the single text, but also the attack on determinism in the very title of Rimbaud’s poem: “A une Raison” (rather than the expected “A la Raison”). For both Rimbaud and Burroughs, Cartesian Reason is a pernicious universal logic of “common sense,”14 and in Rimbaud’s preference for the indefinite article “une” rather than for the definite article “la,”

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we find a model for Burroughs’ emerging subversion of linguistic usage, time and fixed identity. Rimbaud’s subversive alternative to tyrannical Reason was in fact incorporated in the description of his own poetical method: “un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens” (Rimbaud, Complete Works, 306; my emphasis).15 Although Burroughs always quotes this famous line in the standard English translation, as “systematic derangement of the senses,” he may have known that in French the “derangement” was actually “raisonné” (“reasoned”). It is indeed more likely than not that Burroughs had Rimbaud’s visionary “derangement” in mind when using the unusual term “arrangement” to describe the composition of the cut-ups of Rimbaud (“arrangement by Burroughs & Corso”). For the fragmenting and multiplying effect of the cutup method here is precisely to derange Rimbaud’s “A une Raison,” thereby realizing Burroughs’ project to unseat Reason and escape the trap of Time by performing the way out on the page. Burroughs’ engagement with Rimbaud’s poetics in general and “A une Raison” in particular demonstrates how precisely he worked with his themes at a formal level through cut-up methods and why Rimbaud was so central to those methods. Naming Rimbaud was an act of homage and a claim to genealogy, not in some glib or haphazard manner—simplistically identifying with the iconic figure and citing his words—but in a form entirely consistent with a serious understanding of what such acts and claims meant. And just as Rimbaud was there from the beginning when Burroughs experimented with how cut-up methods could subvert literature from within, so too he was there as he went on to develop those methods into other media. Indeed, Burroughs’ engagement with “A une Raison” finds exemplary illustration in two photomontages from the era shortly after Minutes to Go: “Infinity” (1962) and “Untitled” (1964). A third, “All God’s Children Got Time” (1971–1973), features Jean-Louis Forain’s 1871 sketch of Rimbaud, while miniatures of Carjat’s famous photograph of the poet also appear in such well-known photomontages as “The Death of Mrs D” (1965), but Burroughs’ earliest visual works are the most revealing of the textual relationship he maintained with Rimbaud’s poetry.16 Burroughs’ first photomontage is one of many entitled “Infinity” he made in collaboration with Ian Sommerville, which features dozens of montaged photographs. At the core of the composition, one of the largest images and

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by far the most legible is Carjat’s photograph of Rimbaud, his head and upper body illuminated against the pale oval background. Why should Rimbaud appear at the center of “Infinity”? Whether strategically or unconsciously, I would argue that Burroughs’ 1962 photomontage is a response to the final line of Rimbaud’s “A une Raison”: “Arrivée de toujours, qui t’en iras partout” (Illuminations, 38). In other words: master time and you will master space, or, if you come from eternity you already have “infinity,” the photomontage’s very title. If we see here more evidence for the importance Burroughs gave to “A une Raison,” a second collage from 1964 confirms it in an absolutely literal way. For it features the cover of the New Directions edition of Rimbaud’s Illuminations—the very bilingual edition that Burroughs used for the cut-up permutations of “To a Reason” and “A une Raison” in Minutes to Go.17 The distinction here is crucial for Burroughs’ identification with Rimbaud: even in his photomontages, the face of the poet does not stand for the biographical man but for his poetry.

Figure 1.2 William Burroughs, photomontage, “Untitled” (1964) © The Estate of William S. Burroughs, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC. Enlarged: front cover of the bilingual edition of Rimbaud’s Illuminations that Burroughs used for his cut-ups (Trans. Louise Varèse. New Directions, 1946)

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In light of the true importance of Rimbaud’s works for Burroughs both at the time of his collaboration with Kerouac in the mid-1940s—a copy of A Season in Hell was in his library when Kerouac and Ginsberg first met him in 1944—and at the height of his experimental creativity with cut-ups in the 1960s, we can appreciate that his treatment of the French poet of modernity in Hippos was not only an ironic lesson for the young Kerouac; Burroughs’ pose of cynicism was also a statement about his own self-image, a knowing, indeed a prescient anxiety about the tendency for iconoclasts to be misunderstood by being treated as icons. This is confirmed by the ironical use Burroughs makes once again of the term “bourgeoisie” later on in the novella he wrote with Kerouac when, to emphasize the contrast between the maturity of his narrator Dennison and the immaturity of his friends, he not only gives a hint of superiority to Dennison’s speech but describes this hint in French: “I took on a bourgeois père de famille tone” (29). In sum, Burroughs and Kerouac’s narrators both define themselves through the culturally central figure of Rimbaud in Hippos, but in ways that are so opposed that they confirm the contrast between their views on the subject of literature. The transition from Hippos to I Wish I Were You characteristically makes this distinction much more explicit. In I Wish I Were You, Dennison may still prefer the man to the writer and identify with the Rimbaud who gave up on literature and traded literary Paris for African adventures, but Kerouac now finds himself free to identify in his own way with Rimbaud, so that Ryko, his story’s sole narrator, can at last spell out his admiration for Rimbaud, in categorically literary terms: “Rimbaud’s prose is what I’d like to achieve…” (The Unknown Kerouac, 416).

2

French Poetic Realist Film in Kerouac’s Unknown Bookmovie

In a scholarly context in which there has been increasing attention paid to Kerouac’s oeuvre, especially to the creative impact of his Québécois origins, it is doubly regrettable that I Wish I Were You, his very first accomplished bookmovie in which there are so many French references, has been left unpublished so long and therefore remains to be studied. The following analysis of Hippos and I Wish I Were You should complement, rather than directly contribute, to studies of Kerouac’s native language and origins. That is to say, it doesn’t focus on habits and tastes that the writer inherited from his early cultural environment, chiefly his family; rather, it concentrates on the artistic sensibility Kerouac developed later through his self-education in French works—books, paintings and films—the importance of which I Wish I Were You enlightens. Kerouac’s stunning work of rewriting Hippos indeed draws on an extensive knowledge of French culture that he acquired less through friends and family than by himself, at the Lowell public library and then in the bookshops, museums and cinema theatres of Manhattan. It deserves sustained critical attention, and the comparativist reading advanced here begins the task of analysis by focusing on two key scenes of I Wish I Were You. For reasons that will become clear, it is no coincidence that these scenes are both centered on the reception of visual works of art: the painting Cache-cache by Pavlev Tchelitchew (Hide and Seek, 1942) and the film Le Quai des brumes by Marcel Carné (Port of Shadows, 1938). Carné’s masterpiece is one of several French poetic realist films that were major sources of inspiration for Kerouac. Not long after having completed I Wish I Were You, he famously hung a card behind his working desk reading “Blood of the Poet,” after Cocteau’s film Le Sang d’un poète (1930), which, according to Barry Miles, he saw with Burroughs in early 1945 (Miles, Burroughs, 117). Kerouac also rushed to see Renoir’s Les Bas-fonds (The Lower Depths, 1936) and Carné’s Drôle de drame (Bizarre, Bizarre, 1937) almost immediately after

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their release in France (Nicosia, 60). In Hippos alone, two other French poetic realist classics from 1937 appear: La Grande illusion by Jean Renoir and Pépé le moko by Julien Duvivier. These last French films of the 1930s are part of the first Beat novel’s remarkably rich cultural landscape. But the significance of the two rewritten scenes involving Cache-cache and Port of Shadows is that Kerouac uses them to propose a specific form of cultural analysis, one that examines the dynamics of reception by reflecting upon the early Beat circle’s admiration for French culture—an admiration that will be approached here, in line with Kerouac’s own logic, through its mechanism of projection. As a term that neatly conflates the cinematic with the psychoanalytical, projection, and the broader process of identification of which it is a part, indeed offers a critical vocabulary and an appropriate frame of reference to read the French backstory to Kerouac’s aesthetic, as it emerged through the writing and rewriting of the sensational murder story evoked in the previous chapter. In Hippos, the characters’ reverence for Rimbaud stands for a larger romanticization of French culture. However, when Phil (based on Carr) becomes desperate to escape the predatory desire of Al (based on Kammerer) and so discusses with Ryko (Kerouac’s narrator) the plan to ship out together to Paris, we absolutely do not find what we might expect; the allure of France as the Promised Land, a dream vision. On the contrary, what the text gives us is a France defined by default, in relationship to America. Phil says to Ryko: “I want to get out as soon as possible.” “There’s no telling where our ship’ll be going,” I told him. “I don’t care, although I’d like France. […] The Latin Quarter’s what I want to see.” “The Latin Quarter’s in Paris,” I said, “and all we have is a strip of the Normandy peninsula. I don’t think we’ll see Paris this time.” “There might be a breakthrough to Paris at any event. However, the main thing is to get out of America.” (17)

The key words, repeated at both the beginning and the end of this exchange, are clearly “get out.” What is emphasized here is not the appeal of Paris, but the need to leave America, which is all the more paradoxical considering the historical reality of the world at the time of this dialogue set in August 1944. Except for a little part of Normandy, France is an occupied country and Paris is full of Nazis. In fact, Phil and Ryko don’t aim for Paris despite its being occupied; they choose Paris because it is occupied. Or to put it another way: these young Americans

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identify with Parisians inasmuch as they too are waiting, hoping to be “liberated,” perhaps not from occupation but certainly from social and cultural oppression. Looking ahead to the crucial importance of poetic realist film in I Wish I Were You, it is revealing that when Burroughs’ narrator questions the feasibility of Phil and Ryko’s fantasy of shipping out to occupied France—“What are you going to do for food? Everything is rationed. You need books for everything” (80)— they defend it by invoking a romantic scenario directly inspired by Renoir’s La Grande illusion (80, 81). In this classic of poetic realist cinema set during World War I, two escaped French prisoners of war seek refuge with a German woman on her farm. Despite not speaking German, the Lieutenant Maréchal played by the actor of French poetic realist cinema, that is Jean Gabin, charms the woman into providing him and his wounded friend with shelter. By planning to “pose as Frenchmen” and “sleep in haylofts till [they] get to the Left Bank,” Phil and Ryko identify with Renoir’s escaped French prisoners of war in a mise-en-abîme that corresponds to what, in psychoanalytical terms, would be an act of projection (80). By relating their plan to escape to Paris and their feeling of alienation to that of the characters of the French film, their exchange shows that Phil and Ryko’s dream is more to leave America than to ship out to France. The reference to Renoir’s film reveals that Paris materializes or mirrors back to them the truth of how they feel in New York: not free but trapped, barely surviving in a culture from which they feel estranged. Again and again in both versions of the murder story we encounter the boredom, violence and ugliness of life in New York, a city where brutal cops casually beat up innocent drunks. I Wish I Were You pulls no punches: “Manhattan is a death trap, built right over Hell: have you not seen smoke coming out of holes in its streets? What more proof does one need?” (The Unknown Kerouac, 336). In sum, Paris is not the Heaven to this American Hell (or Miller’s 1945 Air-Conditioned Nightmare). Rather, Paris operates here as shorthand for French culture, and its function as a mirror suggests the larger self-reflexive strategy of Hippos, half-hidden behind all the Joe College namedropping and the Vaudeville farce of the Greenwich village bohemians. The two key examples of this self-reflexive strategy in I Wish I Were You show how Kerouac would extensively develop French cultural references from Hippos. Since the literary is either repressed or treated ironically in Hippos, we might expect Kerouac writing on his own terms to make I Wish I Were You simply more literary. What we find, however, is an enhancement of the literary but mediated by works of visual culture rather than literature, as becomes clear from a close reading of the two scenes featuring the painting Cache-cache and the film Port of Shadows. On a

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narrative level, Kerouac had reasons for expanding these scenes: the first takes place in an art gallery, the second a cinema, and both locations are rich with dramatic possibilities. But at the creative level, they show how Kerouac actively incorporated art and film into his aesthetics of writing, leading towards what he would soon call “bookmovies.” Significantly, Kerouac made this breakthrough via his engagement with works of French visual culture, as well as in the context of a highly unusual act of rewriting. For while many authors rewrite themselves and some adapt and rewrite works by others, the act of rewriting a jointly composed original can only have been for Kerouac highly self-conscious. Within the narrative of I Wish I Were You, especially in these two scenes, Kerouac’s process of creation affirms itself through the contrast between his narrator’s thoughtful reflections on artistic works and the other characters’ unreflective process of identification with French culture.

Cache-cache: “America Is My Country and Paris Is My Home Town” The first of the two scenes rewritten by Kerouac revolves around a work of art whose very title points out how in Hippos cultural references are simultaneously revealed and concealed: Pavlev Tchelitchew’s Cache-cache. In Hippos, the allusion is easy to miss, but a game of hide and seek is indeed being played through the reference to Cache-cache, which should invite us to consider both the painting and the painter himself. For who was Tchelitchew? Born in Russia, he had for a decade lived and worked in France where he met his lifelong partner, Charles Henri Ford. And who was Ford? The coauthor, together with Parker Tyler, of The Young and Evil (1933). And what was The Young and Evil, if not the closest precursor to Hippos in both setting and composition: a coauthored novel about bohemian artists and homosexuals in New York. The novel also has a very specific French connection via Gertrude Stein, whose mark is evident in the style of the text and who was a patron to both Ford and Tchelitchew.1 How much of this backstory was known by Burroughs and Kerouac is unsure, but they certainly knew the novel itself, and so Hippos uses the name Tchelitchew as a wink to those in the know. Given the background and name of the painter, the title of his artwork also suggests that their definition of French culture is far from being narrowly national but is often distinctly hybrid. Once again, Kerouac makes that point even clearer in I Wish I Were You, when Ryko, Phil and Al visit bars that they didn’t visit in Hippos, and where they enjoy performances by an Italian man who sings “L’Amour toujours l’amour” and

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a German woman who sings “French naughty songs” (The Unknown Kerouac, 409). As noted in the introduction, Kerouac never once referenced Québécois literary or artistic works, so that in terms of national identity, his Francophone origins seemingly had little to do with the centrality of French culture for his rapidly evolving creativity in the mid-1940s. Echoing Stein’s famous quip “America is my country and Paris is my home town” (“An American and France,” 61), the meaning of French culture for him should therefore be seen as an artistic sensibility rather than being reduced to a literal linguistic or national identity. In other words, Kerouac was as French as Ford and Tchelitchew. This brings us to the second game being played by Cache-cache, which turns on precisely how well-known the painting itself was in its day. Finished in 1942, and almost immediately exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Cache-cache quickly became the museum’s most popular picture. Even if the painting is referred to en passant in Hippos, contemporary readers would surely have known what they were thinking of when, shortly after Phil has stabbed Al to death, he and Kerouac’s narrator, Ryko, go to the museum to look at it. What they see in the painting is not said, but we might imagine that they looked at it just as their contemporaries did, invited by the picture’s title to play the game in seeking something hidden in it. Significantly, Hippos uses the French title of the painting, not its Anglicized form, for the French term mirrors itself by performing the act of hiding: Cachecache. The joke here is that Hippos gives us only the title of the painting in French, whose importance we might well miss, but in I Wish I Were You the reference is unpacked over several paragraphs and, crucially, names it in both English and French: Kerouac hence unravels the hide-and-seek game played in Hippos, which only half-refers to the painting. Even more significantly, he does so when using the painting as a way to characterize the shallow identification of the early Beat circle with French language and culture: It was, as the French say, très formidable! We had, at least,—(this is essential)—a little collective womb of our own… in which to play hide and seek, cache-cache. (The Unknown Kerouac, 374)

Dashes and brackets in Kerouac’s rewriting are there to draw our attention to this moment, as does his resonating use of French. Cache-cache names the strategy of the text, as well as the lives of the characters represented in it, and Kerouac makes this mise-en-abîme fully explicit. As for what they see in the picture, this too is strikingly spelled out in I Wish I Were You, by the addition of a single

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key phrase: “Off they rushed, these kids, to see Tchelitchev’s Cache-cache at the Museum of Modern Art, to see themselves…” (374). Kerouac’s last ellipsis is again a telling use of punctuation. It invites us to share his understanding that “these kids,” as he mockingly calls them here fail to recognize that what they see in the picture is themselves—even though they are already represented in it as spectators. In other words, only Kerouac in the figure of the narrator Mike Ryko, a spectator of the spectators, grasps the point. To underscore the fact that the others miss that point, and to stress the shallowness of the way in which they relate to French culture, he then adds: “They talked about it endlessly over their Pernod. None of them had looked at that painting long enough to learn not to talk about it” (374). The reference to Pernod is perfect, the French drink par excellence, but here it is a sign of a superficial affectation of French culture, of talking about it, in contrast to genuinely experiencing it. That is, Tchelitchew’s canvas acts as a mirror calling for an act of identification— which happens, but without the spectators being fully conscious of it. This failure to grasp the process, or to reflect critically upon it, will be answered by Kerouac with a profound moment of identification achieved through the work of French culture that he reserves for the climax of I Wish I Were You.

“The Best Picture I Ever Saw” In this scene, instead of a canvas, it is a cinema screen that functions as a mirror. Kerouac’s narrator Ryko, Phil and Al are in a Times Square theatre to see Marcel Carné’s Port of Shadows. I Wish I Were You thus concludes a process that began in Hippos with projection—via Renoir’s La Grande illusion—and blind identification—via Tchelitchew’s Cache-cache—with an authentic act of identification. Through his rewriting, Kerouac indeed completes the cultural appropriation he had started with Burroughs, in an act of positive incorporation that asserts his identity as a writer. In Hippos, Kerouac and Burroughs name two other poetic realist film classics, but while Pépé le moko is merely mentioned in Burroughs’ chapters, La Grande illusion is inherently part of the narrative in Kerouac’s chapters that refer to it on two occasions. Kerouac has Phil express his remorse for the crime he has just committed by speaking the striking final line of the aristocrat de Boeldieu played by Pierre Fresnay in La Grande illusion: “I’m weak. The gloves are beginning to chafe” (Hippos, 179). All three films mentioned also star Jean Gabin, with whom

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Kerouac would strongly identify in his journals.2 However, Al’s striking response to Port of Shadows specifically, in both Hippos and I Wish I Were You, indicates that this French film for Kerouac is definitely the most significant of the three: “It’s the best picture I ever saw” (113). In this context, the drab summary of the film’s plot in Hippos is puzzling: Port of Shadows is about a French army deserter who is in Le Havre, trying to skip the country. Everything is set, he has a passport and is on a ship, when he gets the idea to go back and see his girl once again before he sails. The result is a gangster shoots him in the back and the ship sails without him. (112)

Were we to rely only on this sketchy summary, we couldn’t possibly grasp why, for Al, this picture is the best he ever saw, let alone why “his eyes were moist” after watching it (113). If we turn to I Wish I Were You, however, once again we find what was only hinted at in Hippos, which yet again has to do with a projection. When Kerouac rewrote the scene involving Cache-cache, he made it longer and also moved it in order to stress its importance: from near the beginning to a halfway point in the text. Likewise and even more emphatically, when he rewrote this passage on Port of Shadows, he moved it so that it appears at the very end of his text, and in rewriting the film synopsis made it four times longer than in Hippos. In the most radical revision of the text, Kerouac hence closes his text without the murder, and puts in its place this beautifully written scene in the cinema: They puffed on their cigarettes and paid rapt attention to the film… Its quality of shadowy street-ends, the carnival in it, the fog over the bay, the old man who played Bach and spoke in a whining voice and was lecherous with his niece, the fatigued little Frenchmen who worked on the waterfront—all this marvellous welter of human activity and weariness and slow sweet delight had been filmed for them. No one in the theater that night understood the film so well as they… and none could project himself into it, but Ramsay Allen. (The Unknown Kerouac, 418)

There are two striking aspects in this passage, both typical of Kerouac’s fine work of rewriting and of the central role that French culture played in it. First, the French movie becomes a means for self-understanding: it had all “been filmed for them.” The three spectators literally recognize themselves in Port of Shadows that therefore functions just like Cache-cache, in which the young New Yorkers “see themselves,” as a mise-en-abîme: “No one in the theater that night understood the film so well as they.” And second, to indicate the intensity of

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their identification—chiefly Al’s identification—Kerouac himself uses the term “projection,” full of the meaning that both film studies and psychoanalysis have invested it: “None could project himself into it, but Ramsey Allen.” In I Wish I Were You, Kerouac also introduces the key character that was left out of the brief plot summary in Hippos: “the old man who played Bach and spoke in a whining voice and was lecherous with his niece”—in other words, a character like Al in his predatory pursuit of the young Phil. In Port of Shadows, this is the unattractive yet tragic character Zabel, played by Michel Simon, who gets killed by Jean. In enabling us to make this connection, Kerouac allows us to understand why it should be Al who can best “project himself ” into Port of Shadows as a whole: quite simply because his fateful situation echoes that of the film’s all three main characters. First and most obviously, Al can identify himself with Zabel, who also plays the role of an older mentor and tormented, rejected suitor to the one he loves; second, with Jean, the morally outcast army deserter, who mirrors his own pessimism and inevitable fate; and third and most surprisingly, with Nelly, the film’s young femme fatale, who reflects the peculiar generosity and fatality of his own grand gesture. Al and Nelly indeed produce the exact same gesture for the one they love: they try to help him sail away from themselves, an attempt that engenders death. In sum, Zabel, Jean and Nelly all share with Al the three hallmarks of French poetic realist characters: a tragic fate that goes hand in hand with their isolation and establishes their moral superiority. Now we can better grasp the fundamental difference between Hippos and I Wish I Were You. Whereas the first appears merely superficial and self-conscious in its use of French culture, the second is precise and self-reflexive. Equally evident is the sheer intensity of Kerouac’s dramatization in the final lines of I Wish I Were You. In Hippos, surely internalizing Burroughs’ preference for straight dialogue and avoidance of any sentimentalism, Kerouac’s equivalent line was more restrained: “‘It’s the best picture I ever saw,’ he said, and I noticed his eyes were moist” (113). Now the final lines of the narrative, the rewritten words of I Wish I Were You, invite us to feel with the characters as intensely as possible an empathetic drive whose desired effects on the reader/spectator strongly echo those of French poetic realist cinema: “It was the best picture I ever saw,” Al said, and he turned and looked at Ryko for the first time with any semblance of compassion. It was as though he wanted Ryko to see the tears that were in his eyes, and to see everything. So Ryko wrote this. (The Unknown Kerouac, 419)

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This is an extraordinary conclusion, both to the scene and to the whole story. Unlike the spectators before Cache-cache, Al finds himself in Port of Shadows, and so does Ryko. Here, Al looks to Ryko as the writer, the one who must see his tears in order to tell his tragic story. And Kerouac accordingly responds by framing the entire text we have read as an act of writing, inspired by and dedicated to his dead friend. By adding one final phrase, written in hand on the original typescript—“So Ryko wrote this”—he completes a triad of self-reflexive scenes, for the page before us now operates as did both the canvas in the museum and the screen in the cinema theatre. Through these analogies across media, we are invited to make our choice: will we respond to Hippos or I Wish I Were You like the spectators of Cache-cache, talking over our drinks, or like Al and Ryko after watching Port of Shadows, communicating beyond words? Kerouac must have particularly appreciated the visual aesthetic of Carné’s Port of Shadows, and admired in it what Dudley Andrew, in his definitive study of poetic realist cinema, termed the genre’s fundamentally “autoreflective character” (Andrew, 226). For his use of French references through elaborate mise-en-abîmes gives I Wish I Were You the essential autoreflective quality of poetic realist films. Moreover, like poetic realist films, I Wish I Were You combines realism—the dayto-day hardboiled dialogue it shares with Hippos—with poetry—the constant quest of the characters for a “new vision” heightened by the self-reflexivity of Kerouac’s empathetic prose. In contrast, Hippos is fundamentally Burroughsian from its title to its style. To borrow Andrew’s terminology, in terms of French culture, while Hippos’ sensibility is nearer to that promoted by the surrealists— an “ethnography of violence”—the sensibility promoted by Kerouac couldn’t be closer to that of poetic realist films—a “phenomenology of pain” (49). The fact that Kerouac repositioned the scene involving Port of Shadows at the very end of I Wish I Were You certainly confirms his general admiration for the French cinema of the 1930s. How could the future author of The Town and the City (1950) not have been seduced by the genre’s legendary “atmosphere of mystery and alienation hovering above modern city life”? (Andrew, 27). The hallmarks of poetic realist cinema are in fact also those of Kerouac. The very first pages of I Wish I Were You couldn’t be more Kerouackian and poetic realist in their description of “the phantom of darkness and death” previously mentioned.That is, the atmospheric quality of poetic realist cinema, itself inspired by Feuillade’s popular serial Fantômas, undoubtedly participated in inspiring Kerouac’s creation of the phantom haunting the pages of his rewriting of Hippos.

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The innovative sensibility of I Wish I Were You can also be defined through its optique, a term coined by Roland Barthes with regard to writing and applied by Andrew to explain the reception of French poetic realism in general and of Jean Gabin’s acting in particular: “Arguably the focus of identification for an entire nation, his roles and his style condense the poetic realist optique into a single figure, a body, that moves on the screen” (226). Significantly, the eyes of Al in the finale of I Wish I Were You operate just like Gabin’s in Port of Shadows: as the “spiritual source of his body, authenticating, if not justifying, his most antisocial acts” (227).3 The new ending given by Kerouac certainly allows the comparison with the star of French poetic realism: the description of Al’s mute gaze seeking compassion in Ryko at the end of the story echoes Jean’s terrible gaze staring at Nelly, lying halfdead on the pavement in the final close-up of Port of Shadows. This final gaze has the power to redeem the morally reprehensible acts for which both Al and Jean must die (Al’s homosexual love was indeed as illegal as Jean’s desertion of the army), if not by the hand of society, then by that of the writer and director of the story. Dudley Andrew’s study of French poetic realism rests on the premise that “the films that beckon us are entrances to a different way of being a spectator […] different enough to tempt us to construct the spectator to which they are addressed” (23). Kerouac precisely gives us that spectator in the figure of Al, “for whom” Port of Shadows “has been filmed,” just as Ryko rewrites Hippos “for him”: “So Ryko wrote this.” By screening Port of Shadows as the finale of I Wish I Were You, Kerouac begins to invest in the emotional power of moving pictures, images that literally move the audience, in order to mirror back to us a logic of readership. That the film is French and the audience is American is crucial, and Kerouac may well have had such an optique in mind when, in a letter ten years later, he shared his wish to make “a vast French movie” entitled “A DAY IN NEW YORK” (Kerouac, Selected Letters, 121). Here, the term “French movie” is almost a tautology, since a good movie is for Kerouac definitively French, even if it is to be set and made in New York. But the point is less that he associates cinema with France, than that the two together mediate his own definition of literature. Kerouac wrote what he called bookmovies (“the movie in words”), and while he declared this “the visual American form,” his definition of the visual, like his definition of the literary, is distinctly French (Charters, Portable, 59). The importance of the foreignness of French culture for Kerouac, rather than the familiarity of American paintings or Hollywood movies, is that it introduces a difference which creates both emotional identification and self-critical distance.4 This is the significance of the scene in the cinema that concludes I

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Wish I Were You, and it is also the meaning of its title, which has little to do with the expression of a narcissistic desire on the part of Al (alias Kammerer) for Phil (alias Carr), as has been assumed.5 Rather, it spells out the writer’s vision and his mission to write bookmovies: that is, as Kerouac puts it, “to see everything.”

The Writer’s Wish A third cultural allusion is essential to grasp the fundamental shift of emphasis established by Kerouac’s work of rewriting: Edmund Wilson’s 1941 essay on Sophocles’ tragedy Philoctetes, “The Wound and the Bow.” Although it is not French but Greek, this allusion functions exactly like the French references previously examined, in making American literature access a culture other than itself. More specifically, this last reference enlightens the very title of I Wish I Were You and the singularity of the optique that Kerouac develops in it, especially the new cinematic dimension he brings to the text through his use of point of view. When Phil is on the verge of getting his papers to ship with Ryko in I Wish I Were You, he moves out of his apartment and asks Al to stay away from him. Al then uses Wilson’s essay as a last resort to keep him: “I’ve got something to show you, Phil […] It’s amazing how it fits in… with us. Really!” (The Unknown Kerouac, 387). It “fits” because Sophocles’ tragedy mirrors their fraught homosexual relationship. Philoctetes, who was given a magic bow by the Gods, suffers a repulsive wounding and is exiled on an island to suffer alone. Odysseus convinces the young Neoptolemus to go there, charm Philoctetes and steal the bow so they can use the magic weapon to defend Athens and defeat Troy. However, the charm operates inversely, and so the outcome is that the young Neoptolemus is seduced by the old Philoctetes. As with his use of Port of Shadows, Kerouac’s introduction of this reference into I Wish I Were You unexpectedly privileges the point of view of Al: we are invited to understand that Al identifies with the old Philoctetes, in hope that the essay will seduce Phil into recognizing himself in the young Neoptolemus. Following Wilson’s conclusion, Al’s hope is that, after reading the essay on Philoctetes, at last Phil will see his homosexual desire in a positive light and, like Neoptolemus, “instead of winning over the outlaw,” will heroically “outlaw himself ” (Wilson, 264). Homosexual desire has been central to interpretations of the title I Wish I Were You which, in the absence of a published text until 2016, has been read by biographers as the expression of Kammerer’s supposedly self-destructive feelings

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for the young Carr.6 This biographical reading of the title misrepresents the text it designates, as well as what distinguishes it from Hippos. The resonant, selfreflexive title Kerouac chose for his rewriting of Hippos should prompt many other interpretations, and the following is supported by Wilson’s essay on Philoctetes. If Kerouac introduces this essay into I Wish I Were You, it is not only because of the homosexual nature of the relation between its male protagonists, but also because of their number. For Wilson’s case is that, unlike most Greek tragedies, Philoctetes has the specificity of involving not two, but three main characters: it is “a triple affair, which makes more complicated demands on our sympathies” (245). Wilson’s original thesis marks a crucial difference between Hippos and I Wish I Were You. Like Philoctetes compared to, say, Antigone (involving two main characters, Antigone and Créon), and in contrast to Hippos (also involving two main characters, Phil and Al), I Wish I Were You complicates the unilateral tragic relationship and turns it into a triangular one between Phil, Al and Ryko. Confirming this interpretation, the second part of I Wish I Were You constantly visualizes the trio that Phil, Al and Ryko form: There walked Phillip, with the perennial cigarette in his mouth, eyes cast down in painful concentration… and over him, practically, hovering and bounding along with head cocked to one side, lunged Ramsay Allen solicitously. It was something to behold. They were both ragged and mad-seeming, and behind them scuffled the lazy Ryko. (The Unknown Kerouac, 398–99)

Shortly after, Kerouac refers again to this “picture of the three of them walking down a street” and calls it “the essential picture to be drawn” (400). What is most striking in this “picture” is the typically cinematic attention Kerouac pays to all three points of view in movement, and how they are imbricated in each other to form a much more complex optique than that of Hippos, which of course privileges the writer’s point of view. First dimension: Phil looks down and doesn’t care about anybody or anything else than himself; therefore his point of view is the most limited of the three. Then comes the second dimension: Al “hovering” “over him,” his point of view including that of Phil, the object of his affection in front of him. Finally, the third dimension: the privileged point of view of Ryko intrinsically related to Kerouac’s identity as the omniscient writer: “it was something to behold.” As Kerouac’s analysis of the young New Yorkers’ reception of Cache-cache has instructed us, for him, the writer’s mission is to never cease seeking to see, to see further, to “see everything.” Schematically:

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Figure 2.1 Three characters’ points of view in Jack Kerouac’s I Wish I Were You

In the final scene of his rewriting of Hippos, Kerouac undoes the binary relationship between Phil and Al, by bringing together the two characters who have the richest points of view, and the third is the cinema screen that mediates the intense relay of looks between them: Al turns and looks at Ryko “for the first time.” This key “look” is prepared for by the many “pictures” of the trio that Ryko has given us, and retrospectively imbues the whole story we have read with a totally different color and meaning. It is indeed a radical change: whereas the climax of Hippos lies in the murder scene where Phil stabs Al, I Wish I Were You excludes the murder and climaxes with the cinematic scene previously analyzed, where Al offers compassion and seeks it in return from Ryko. In view of this striking denouement, it makes sense to reinterpret the wish in the title I Wish I Were You: rather than representing Al’s narcissistic desire to ‘be’ Phil, it expresses the empathetic desire of the narrator Ryko, and through him, the compulsive vision of the writer to understand the other, to ‘see everything.’ From the beginning of I Wish I Were You to its very end, Kerouac appropriates cinema’s power to multiply points of view and create the three different types of identifications analyzed: first, the projection of Phil and Ryko through their plan to ship out to Paris borrowing a scenario from Renoir’s La Grande illusion; second, the blind identification of the bohemians with the characters represented in the painting Cache-cache; and third, the fully conscious identification of Al through Port of Shadows. Kerouac’s appropriation of cinema’s singular capacity to alternate points of view is most striking in the final chapter of I Wish I Were You, where this power becomes literary through his ingenious shifting use of the second person pronoun “you.” Kerouac uses it so that, to our surprise if not to our horror, we find ourselves identifying with the homosexual predator Al, the narrative’s definitive other. Forcing us not only to accept but to embrace his own empathy, the ending of I Wish I Were You establishes compassion as the type of structural relationship essential to Kerouac’s grand definition of writing as “seeing everything.” What

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was projection finally becomes incorporation: the writer takes the other—Al, the homosexual predator—inside himself, or rather, by taking the other inside he becomes the writer: “So Ryko wrote this.” While Kerouac concludes I Wish I Were You by honoring the memory of his friend, he also honors the identity of the writer by framing in his own hand the entire text we have read as an act of writing. In his afterword to Hippos, James Grauerholz observes that the CarrKammerer story returns throughout Kerouac’s oeuvre, from The Town and the City in 1950 to Vanity of Duluoz in 1973. Indeed, it literally frames Kerouac’s Duluoz legend, since it is central to the very first and last novels he published before his death.7 However, the murder that was the climax of Hippos disappears from I Wish I Were You and in its place Kerouac asserts his authorship in the most paradoxical and yet prescient manner: inaugurating the legend of the writer in a cinema, watching a French poetic realist film. While we might have expected the Canuck Kerouac to embrace French culture, in I Wish I Were You we see him define himself against his peers who rush to identify with French culture simply because it is French. Kerouac has a much more nuanced involvement with French culture that passes beyond the Frenchness of paintings or films to creatively inform his aesthetic. Cache-cache and Port of Shadows did much more than inspire or influence I Wish I Were You; the French painting and film each crowned half of the story, and so formed its architecture. Port of Shadows thus gave Kerouac’s rewriting of Hippos an original ending, deeper meaning and made it the first “bookmovie” of many others to follow.

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Kerouac’s Humanism: From Céline and Dostoevsky to Proust

Reading Voyage au bout d'la nuit was to me like seeing the greatest French movie ever made, a super heavenly Quai des Brumes a thousand times sadder than Jean Gabin’s bitter lip or Michel Simon’s lugubrious lechery or the carnival where lovers cry… —Kerouac, “On Céline,” in Good Blonde & Others, 90 There is a fundamental distinction between the narrator and the author of I Wish I Were You: their literary aspirations are based on two very different French stylists. That is, Mike Ryko dreams of writing like the poet of French modernity (“Rimbaud’s prose is what I’d like to achieve”), but Jack Kerouac affirms in his diary having modeled his style for I Wish I Were You on another French writer, Louis-Ferdinand Céline: “Wrote Céline-like version of Carr case”; “Worked on Tourian novel, in new version (Louis F. Célinist).”1 Kerouac’s unpublished 1945 short diary is indeed saturated with notes on and quotations from Céline, and that suggests what the epigraph above would later confirm, that Marcel Carné’s film Port of Shadows (Le Quai des brumes, 1938) and Céline’s novel Journey to the End of the Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit, 1932) were Kerouac’s two major sources of inspiration for reworking Hippos into I Wish I Were You. While the previous section has established the structural role of Carné’s poetic realist film in Kerouac’s first bookmovie, this one begins by turning to Kerouac’s appropriation of what he sees as the “super heavenly” literary version of Port of Shadows: Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night. In this dark yet humoristic picaresque French novel, Céline’s first person narrator, Ferdinand Bardamu, recounts his peregrinations in Paris as a doctor and his travels to Africa and America in the interwar period. Céline was a noncommissioned officer (“sous-officier”) in the First World War, and came back from it traumatized and wounded. As a result, Journey to the End of the Night is ardently antimilitarist, its African episode anticolonialist, and its American episode

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anticapitalist. Readers of On the Road will of course recognize in these aspects of Céline’s novel deep humanist values shared and promoted by Kerouac and the early Beat circle. But it is in fact the narrative structure and existentialist quality of Céline’s Journey that Kerouac transposed in On the Road. In the version of the famous text published in 1957, Kerouac quotes from an homage Céline had rendered to Zola that had appeared in 1951; the very year he composed his road-novel.2 The quotation itself—“‘Nine lines of crime, one of boredom,’ said Louis-Ferdinand Céline” (On the Road, 137)—has a simple functional purpose, which is to support the sarcastic remarks of his narrator about the American police fabricating proof when they can’t get any. But the date and source of this quotation establish just how attentive Kerouac was to any publication coming from the writer he regarded as his “master.” In an interview broadcast by Radio-Canada in 1959, he thus affirmed: “If they offer me the Nobel Prize when I’m 50 and they haven’t yet given it to Louis-Ferdinand Céline […], I’d say ‘no, not until you give it to my master’” (my translation).3 To understand how Kerouac came to measure the success of his own oeuvre against the French novelist’s in such an emphatic way, this chapter begins by retracing his progressive and complex appropriation of Céline in his journals and correspondence, from reworking Hippos into I Wish I Were You in 1945 to preparing On the Road between 1947 and 1951. During that period, the Russian oeuvre of Dostoevsky forms a crucial binary with Céline’s, and close textual analysis of Kerouac’s journals makes plain that Dostoevsky’s hope for humanity and Céline’s exasperation with it both fed into the structure and characters of On the Road. Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism is characterized by a similar tension, and Kerouac’s recently published “Commentaire sur Louis-Ferdinand Céline” strikingly suggests that his reading of Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night was informed by key concepts from Sartre’s philosophy. This evidence for Kerouac’s appropriation of Sartre turns out to be more apparent than real—the Sartrean notions we find in Kerouac’s “Commentaire” have almost certainly been introduced in the text by its French translator—and yet, as we will see, the invitation to read Céline’s work in Sartrean terms, and by implication Kerouac’s own, is not itself mistaken. In line with the recent scholarship of Nancy Grace (2006), Tim Hunt (2014) and Hassan Melehy (2016), this chapter goes against the still widespread view of Kerouac’s famous road-novel as lacking in literariness, summed up by Truman Capote’s famous lapidary comment in 1959: “that’s not writing, it’s typing” (qtd. in Melehy, 16), and confirms him as a well-read author who maneuvers and challenges literary traditions, religions and philosophies with ease, accuracy and imagination.

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Thick with literary allusions and the working through of ideas, Kerouac’s numerous journals play a crucial role in transforming our sense of his identity as a writer. Perhaps even more than his letters, they deserve a wide readership and to be read as vital parts of his oeuvre. As Kerouac himself understood, “maybe nothing gets done without a great, honest, grave, disciplined journal!” (The Unknown Kerouac, 123). Although he needed no model for his writer’s journals, he must have recognized himself in the figure of Edouard in André Gide’s antinovel The Counterfeiters (Les Faux-monnayeurs, 1925), who keeps a record of his own novel’s progress, fantasizing: Just think how interesting such a notebook kept by Dickens or Balzac would be; if we had the diary of the Education Sentimentale [by Flaubert] or of The Brothers Karamazov! [by Dostoevsky]—the story of the work—of its gestation! How thrilling it would be… more interesting than the work itself… (Gide, The Counterfeiters, 170)

Unlike Kerouac, Burroughs kept little to no record of his writing in progress or of his literary genealogy, so that a very different Gide features in Chapter 4, and if Burroughs’ Gide helps measure how distinctly the two Americans read even the same French author, needless to say their appropriations of Céline are also worlds apart.

1945: From Seeing to Caring If we recall the subject of I Wish I Were You (the months preceding the real-life murder of Burroughs and Kerouac’s friend by another of their friends) and the date Kerouac completed his manuscript (August 1945, the month that saw the end of the Second World War), it comes as no surprise to discover his diary of the time revolves around the notion of morality: The man who, out of human terror and desperation of the darkness is become full of quivering awareness, and who may even commit a crime… is more moral than the froggish man who wallows in his bath of stupid ignorance and halfrealized malice, and is respectable. The moron is the perfect amoralist. Morality is no longer, has never been, a matter of virtue and vice, “good and Evil,” and we all know it. It is a matter of consciousness.* All malice is a product of ignorance, all ignorance stems from the frog.4

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This passage from Kerouac’s unpublished 1945 diary significantly intertwines appropriations of Gide and Céline. From Gide, it borrows the “amoral” vocabulary and way of reasoning of The Counterfeiters, and Kerouac follows its attack of the traditional binary of “good and Evil” as insufficient to assess morality. Yet, in style and content, this entry is definitely not Gidean. Rather, it suggests Kerouac’s dissatisfaction with Gide’s transgressive morals much discussed and already appropriated by the early Beat circle: “we all know it.” Before Kerouac rewrote his “literary” version of Hippos, nothing perhaps distinguished his views of French literature and philosophy from his friends’ own views. But the next remarks in his diary suggest that reading Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night while composing I Wish I Were You contributed greatly to change that. For the reflection on “amorality” above is followed by a long quotation from the penultimate passage of Céline’s Journey in which Léon Robinson, the narrator’s recurrent foil, precisely admonishes his lover for being “ignorant” and embracing the “drivel” that surrounds her without questioning it. When copying this passage into his diary, Kerouac carefully removes from it all details concerning the lovers’ quarrel of Robinson to emphasize its shocking ethical dimension: And you don’t even guess that you make one sick… It’s enough for you just to repeat all the drivel people talk… You think that’s quite all right… That’s quite enough, you think, because other people have told you there’s nothing greater than love and that it would always work with everyone and that it would last for ever… Well, as far as I’m concerned you know what they can do with their love… D’you hear me? It doesn’t catch on with me, my good girl, that stinking love of theirs!… You’re out of luck! You’re too late! It no longer works with me, that’s all! And that’s what you go getting into such tempers about. Do you have to make love in the middle of all that’s going on? And seeing the things one sees? Or maybe you don’t notice anything? No. I think it’s that you just don’t care. (Céline, Journey, 430–31)5

Even such harmless notions as “love” deserve to be thought through for Céline’s Robinson, and it is better to have perverse or violent takes on social “drivel” than naïve acceptance. Given that brotherhood and love are and would remain the foundational humanist values of Kerouac’s oeuvre, we can readily grasp why he would have been taken aback by Céline’s tour de force here, which turns on its head the very slogan that counterculture would come to popularize in relation to the Vietnam War: “Make love, not war.” Rather, Robinson is implying that the aftermath of the war should make us appalled by lovemaking—an antihumanist argument that cannot be grasped by his romantic lover, who shoots him.

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The fact that Kerouac interrupts the brief fragments forming his diary entitled “Notes on last chapter of Philip Tourian novel” to quote Céline’s Journey at such length here establishes the importance of this passage for him and his “Tourian novel” (i.e. I Wish I Were You). If any doubt was left about the actual effect of Céline’s novel on Kerouac’s writing, the following note in pencil removes it, for it defines the concept of morality in the very terms laid out by Céline’s narrator’s conclusion: “*…Morality… The degree of care one has for what’s going on.”6 The asterisk before Kerouac’s note refers to the other asterisk after “consciousness” in the initial reflection quoted from his diary entry. This reference system establishes the crucial function of Journey in Kerouac’s reflection: Céline’s text doesn’t just allow him to forge his own definition of “morality”; it also enables him to clarify his own position on the central notion of “consciousness” developed by the early Beat circle. In short, this passage from Kerouac’s diary confirms the case made in the previous chapter, that his reworking of I Wish I Were You revolves around French works of art (Cache-cache and Port of Shadows) that allowed him to affirm his own point of view in contrast with the New Yorkers’ “drivel” (“they talked endlessly about it over their Pernod”). But to return to the title for this diary entry—“Notes on last chapter of Philip Tourian novel”—how exactly did Kerouac’s appropriation of Céline’s Journey impact upon the last chapter of I Wish I Were You? Kerouac’s third and final remark in his diary entry shows what an attentive reader he is, and once again adopts Céline’s own argument. After agreeing with the need for everyone to develop their own critical thinking, Kerouac closely emulates the movement of Robinson’s thought and displaces the focus on the way Céline’s character proposes to do just that: “seeing all the things one sees.” What concludes Kerouac’s entry here reinforces the other case made in the previous chapter, that the very title I Wish I Were You indicates the first and foremost wish of the writer should indeed be to “see everything”: Look long enough, as long as you are allowed to look, and you will finally see something—something that ought to satisfy you, once and for all. There are so many things to look at and understand, there’s no end to it… this seems to be the only break we get from the darkness, and from the malicious brotherhood of man… that we’ve got so much to look at, more than we can ever altogether see.7

That Kerouac’s journal entry features as many reflections on reading Céline as on rewriting the novella he had composed with Burroughs attests that both activities truly went together for him. It shows that, behind Kerouac’s claiming

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I  Wish I Were You as “Louis F. Célinist,” there is much more at stake than a French name easily brandished. That is, once he had read Céline’s Voyage, everything would change. I Wish I Were You crucially formulates Kerouac’s new objective as a writer: seeing everything, but also caring about it. From now on, what Robinson’s lover couldn’t notice, couldn’t care for, he would make sure that his readers do. Kerouac’s cinematic eye would give us a break from the darkness by seeking to see and make us feel “more than we can ever altogether see.”

1948–1949: From Humanism to Nationalism Kerouac valued Céline’s writing so much that he would begin to analyze everything that happened to him in light of it, going so far as to measure his real friends’ actions and decisions against the behaviors and values of Céline’s fictional characters. If nowadays, no one would even think to reproach an author for his mixture of reality and fiction, many would deem the premise of Kerouac’s judgment unfair, since fictional characters aren’t submitted to the same desires as humans made of flesh and blood. But in the case we are about to examine, oddly, it isn’t reality that pales when compared to fiction, quite the opposite. In July 1948, Kerouac describes in his journals a scenario in which he is at odds with his fiancée Edie and his friend Herbert Huncke unexpectedly intervenes on his behalf. To express the extent of his astonishment, he finds no better way than to compare Huncke to Céline’s dark character, Robinson. The passage begins with Kerouac exploring the humanism of his friend (“what makes him so human”) with his now well-trained encompassing and compassionate vision. To understand Huncke’s benevolent act, he starts by putting himself in his skin (“if I were Hunke”). But praising his friend’s generosity by putting himself down (“and my stupidity…”) is not enough. The human nature of Huncke proves so mysterious that Kerouac then resorts to Céline’s Robinson: What a surprise that was!—how strange can Hunkey[sic] get? Hunkey scares me because he has been the most miserable of men, jailed & beaten and cheated and starved and sickened and homeless, and still he knows there’s such a thing as love, and my stupidity… and what else is there in Hunkey’s wisdom? What does he know that makes him so human after all he has known—it seems to me if I were Huncke I would be dead now, someone would have killed me long ago. But

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he’s still alive, and strange, and wise, and beat, and human, and all blood-andflesh and staring as in a benny depression forever. He is truly more remarkable than Céline’s Leon Robinson, really so. He knows more, suffers more… sort of American in his wider range of terrors. (Kerouac, Windblown World, 100–1)

The extraordinary wisdom made of ghastliness and flamboyancy of Léon Robinson turns out to be nothing compared to Herbert Huncke’s. But who was really Huncke? Was he so mysterious? Ann and Samuel Charters’ description doesn’t pull punches: “Huncke was a junky who had turned his life into a series of thefts and robberies to support his habit, sometimes carrying a pistol if armed robbery seemed like a useful idea. To blur the picture, he was also gentle and intelligent, a small, diffident, soft-spoken gay man with pleasing manners and considerable charm” (Charters, Brother-Souls, 100). On a historical level, we should note with editor Douglas Brinkley that Kerouac’s depiction of Huncke features the first written use of “beat” as an adjective (“he’s still alive, and strange, and wise, and beat, and human”). If it is ultimately Kerouac’s close friend John Clellon Holmes who would publically coin the term “Beat” in his New York Times 1952 essay “This is the Beat Generation,” the word indeed first appeared four years earlier, in this very journal entry dated July 1948. On a philosophical level, however, that Kerouac creates the word “Beat” to describe Huncke’s surprising virtues is much less significant than the fact it was forged in opposition to Céline’s character. As Kerouac’s sentence makes plain here, Robinson is not a simple moral gauge, any more than Huncke is the Beat archetype. (“He knows more, suffers more… sort of American in his wider range of terrors.”) In the space of that single sentence, Robinson and Huncke are suddenly turned into allegories of France and America. That is, Céline’s writing didn’t merely inspire Kerouac, and Robinson was much more to him than a handy shorthand. Literary characters are at least as important as real-life friends in the genesis of Kerouac’s works. In fact, Céline’s character surpasses Kerouac’s friend in this passage, for Huncke’s extraordinary human nature can only be grasped when contrasted to Robinson’s. Reading Céline hence gave Kerouac key material to exercise his famous art of sketching, which would culminate two years later in the novel that would take his writing beyond the local settings of The Town and the City (Lowell and New York, Kerouac’s native town and adoptive city), that is On the Road: his own journey to the end of the American night, his “great [Town & City] of the nation itself ” (The Unknown Kerouac, 61).

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Night and Day: Céline or Dostoevsky? Kerouac didn’t write On the Road in three weeks as the myth has it. Scholars from Tim Hunt (1981) to Howard Cunnell (2007), Isaac Gewirtz (2007) and Matt Theado (2009) have established that in between 1949 and 1951, he in fact produced several Roads, including one in French entitled Sur le chemin.8 The title Kerouac gave to the road-novel he composed in French itself contradicts any idea we might still have of his book having a linear plot or simple history of composition. For the meaning of “chemin” specifies just what kind of “road” Kerouac followed and wrote about: not the highway but the twisted path; a “crooked road,” to borrow Hunt’s astute book title; or to take a figure out of On the Road itself, not one straight main road but many wandering paths. For when researching the maps but lacking in actual experience, Sal first sets out to cross the continent on Route 6, he thus realizes that he’d had a “stupid hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow one great red line across America instead of trying various roads and routes” (11). That sensitivity to variety, to multiple paths and to the complexity of the process of journeying is surely natural for a writer stimulated by so many literary sources and so self-conscious about his practices of writing. While conceiving the aesthetic principles of his forthcoming roadnovel, Kerouac often resorts to impressively long lists of authors. Far from being accessory to his stylistic evolution, these lists are indeed integral to Kerouac’s contributions to renew our conception of the “novel”: The great novel of the future is going to have all the virtues of Melville, Dostoevsky, Celine, Wolfe, Balzac, Dickens and the poets in it (and Twain). The novel is undeveloped, it probably needs a new name, and certainly needs more work, more research as it were. A “soulwork” instead of a “novel,” although of course such a name is too fancy, and laughable, but it does indicate someone’s writing all-out for the sake of earnestness and salvation. The idea is that such a work must infold the man like his one undeniable cloak and dream of things… his “vision of the world and of the proposition of things,” say. (Kerouac, Windblown World, 95)

In such lists, the names of Melville, Wolfe or Fitzgerald, Balzac, Hugo and Zola come and go, but Céline’s doesn’t. It sticks, and so does the name of Dostoevsky. They are, as it were, the longest of the paths that make up the road. In fact, the “visions of the world” of the French and Russian authors form a diptych that dominates his journals at a crucial moment of his career: between 1947 and 1951, while Kerouac is thinking through the ethics and aesthetics that

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are about to become the hallmarks of his writing. That is, the spiritual universe of Dostoevsky and the anarchist vision of Céline drive the two humanist impulses in the genesis of On the Road. When it comes to his deepest humanist concerns— love and hate, brotherhood and solitude, courage and cowardice—the two foreign authors offer Kerouac contradictory visions that impact the way he looks at his own writing, both past (The Town and the City) and future (On the Road). One journal entry is particularly telling of Dostoevsky and Céline’s privileged functions for Kerouac’s writing at the most material or phonological level. For in it, Balzac’s “sound” is only “guessed,” whereas Dostoevsky and Céline’s are most definite: Incidentally everybody in Dostoevsky says “H’m” all the time, interiorly… that is the key to his vision of man—“H’m.” (what mysteries?) (What’s he mean by that?)—I wonder if my own “sound” in T&C was not “Hah?” The key to my visions—“Hah?” As though to say, “I know perfectly what’s going on, but I’ll pretend I don’t even hear.” To which Dusty replies, “H’m.”—What is the sound in Balzac? Later I’ll guess it. Maybe it’s “Hup! Hup!”—everybody rushing through passions and fortunes, crazily. […] In Céline it’s “Wah! Wah!”—or “Hoik! hoik!” (Windblown World, 266)

Kerouac’s interest in Dostoevsky and Céline’s “sounds” signals that he intends to follow their footsteps in reinvigorating literature with the orality of his own writing. Their sounds also symbolize their opposed “visions of the world” from which Kerouac’s own is progressively emerging: Dostoevsky’s elliptical “H’m” embodies a spiritual mystery, which is challenged by the anarchic vitality in Céline’s double “Wah! Wah!” or “Hoik! hoik!” This looks like an amusing synthesis, but Kerouac’s analysis in fact shows deep understanding of these two great stylists, and rivals the best literary readings of a Deleuze. The importance of Céline and Dostoevsky’s works for his oeuvre went well beyond aesthetic preoccupations; they informed Kerouac’s own philosophical “vision of the world and proposition of things.” To take but one example, by 1949, Céline has become such a crucial measure of all things for Kerouac that he not only resorts to him to meditate the mores of his friends, but of his closest family members and of wider society. Here, “Céline’s people” help Kerouac rationalize the traumatic event that would famously come to open On the Road, the death of his father: The fact is, my father’s death was not serious at all. You don’t even die any more, you just slip away past the last streetlamp like Céline’s people do. It’s not even a mockery of anything. An accident. Who cares about naturalism? […] I want

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Kerouac clearly associates his individual sorrow with Céline’s universe, and his insistence on life being “holy” not only shows how hard he is trying to work through his loss, but also how powerfully Céline’s nihilism has invested his thoughts, for better or worse. That is, even if they have been “said a thousand million times,” Dostoevskyan truths are beginning to pale in comparison’s with Céline’s palpable ones (“who cares about naturalism?”) Dostoevsky, who was all but blind to the passions threatening the morals of mankind, still has the upper hand, for his novels obstinately convey the hopeful spirituality that is cruelly absent from Céline’s writing and that Kerouac is longing for (“I want a soul. I want a soul. I want a soul”). But for how long? In 1950, Kerouac continues to praise and favor the Russian author: “Dostoevsky is really an ambassador of Christ, and for me the modern Gospel. […] The vision of Dostoevsky is the vision of Christ translated in modern terms” (Windblown World, 273–74). In view of the crucial spiritual role that the works of the Russian author played for him, Jessee Menefee is right to elevate his admiration of Dostoevsky to the status of a “Karamazov religion” (“Dostoevsky and the Diamond Sutra,” 431). But I would argue that Kerouac hails Dostoevsky’s modernity all the harder here, for he very well knows his works belong to another century, and that his own syncretism consists less in a mixture of two religions (Christianity and Buddhism) than of two diametrically opposed philosophical stances (Dostoevsky’s romantic spirituality and Céline’s postwar nihilism), a most curious combination that explains both the richness and the pitfalls of the plot and characters of On the Road. Kerouac often ends his sentences with the expression “in the night”—most famously in On the Road’s rhetorical question “Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?” (119)—a stylistic trait that suggests constant appropriation of Céline’s novel title, Journey to the End of the Night. But since the night belongs to everyone, there would be no case for reading Kerouac’s stylistic habit as a form of appropriation, if it weren’t once again for Kerouac’s journals. His “odd notes” from March 1950 published in Windblown World (2004) and expanded in The Unknown Kerouac (2016) reveal the importance of Céline’s “night” for Kerouac’s gestation of On the Road in relation to Dostoevsky’s “day.” The very beginning of these “odd notes” makes plain that Kerouac’s conceptualization of the night in On the Road is indeed an appropriation of Céline:

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“The night is atonement for the sins of the day—in America. That is why they want ‘the end of the night’—complete purgation from sloppy decadent pursuits of noon” (The Unknown Kerouac, 44). The quotation marks surrounding “the end of the night” signal that Kerouac borrows the title of Céline’s famous novel. But as the larger national context suggests here, this credit stands for a much more complex structural debt to Céline. When reading “The night is atonement for the sins of the day—in America,” are we to believe that this statement only applies in America or that it also applies in America? And who are “they”? Who wants “the end of the night”? What follows clarifies how these statements should be transposed into On the Road, as Kerouac makes a note to himself to have his protagonist “wake up in middle of night” (44).9 In other words, Kerouac’s two dashes in the above passage visualize on the page his desire to adapt what applies in Céline’s French Journey to the End of the Night in his own American road-novel. But what meaning should we give “the end of the night,” exactly? Kerouac’s journals indicate that he read Céline’s “end of the night” as “death”: Gone on the Road: that’s what Dean says, when, after his green-tea visions, someone leans over the couch and asks how he is. “Gone on the road…” Life is a road-journey, from the womb to the end of the night, ever stretching the silver cord till it snaps somewhere along the way… maybe near the end, maybe not till the end; maybe early in the journey. Where are we all? Gone on the road… What’s at the end? Night… whatever Celine meant by giving death that name, whatever kind of death he meant. (Windblown World, 366)

However, nothing in Céline’s novel explicitly concurs with Kerouac’s reading. The only occurrence of the expression arises in the American episode of Journey to the End of the Night, which enigmatically defines it as geographical. “The end of the night” is given as the far location of an uncanny “it” that frightens people: If you go on being pushed out like that into the night, you end up somewhere, I supposed, all the same. That’s the consolation. “Cheer up, Ferdinand,” I told myself several times just to keep going. “Through being thrown out of every place, you’ll surely finish up by finding out what it is that frightens all these bloody people so, and it’s probably somewhere at the farther end of the night… That must be why they don’t go into the depths of the night themselves!” (Journey, 192; my emphasis)

Céline’s stylistic obscurity here is precisely what Kerouac is going to appropriate for On the Road: nothing less than what would become his protagonists’ famous quest for “IT.” What gives Kerouac’s appropriation of Céline’s structural

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obscurantism away in his journals, then, is this double movement: although he is drawn to attributing a meaning to Céline’s “end of the night,” although he falls into the trap by associating it with “death,” his repetition of the term “whatever” (“whatever Céline meant by giving death that name, whatever kind of death he meant”) shows he saw the potential of Céline’s trick, and that he got the point. Here, Kerouac succumbs to the temptation of giving Céline’s “end of the night” a fixed meaning, but not without leaving for the readers of his own novel a similar McGuffin, to borrow Hitchcock’s term for a red herring. That is, all the euphoric experiences we and the protagonists of On the Road might be tempted to associate with their quest for “IT”—musical revelation, sexual orgasm, drug kick, travel urge, sensation of controlling or of being indifferent to the passage of time, death drive—could also characterize Céline’s “end of the night.” If it takes unambiguously specific evidence to pin down Kerouac’s “night” as coming from Céline, nothing is ever likely to prove the provenance of his “IT.”10 Yet, a trace of this unattainable but motivating object of desire, the goal of all the restless movement in On the Road, might be glimpsed in the opening sentence of I Wish I Were You, Kerouac’s “Célinist” rewriting of Hippos, which combines the elusive pronoun with the key ethical issue Kerouac took from Céline: “We are all the possessors of a certain courage, that’s it” (The Unknown Kerouac, 335). Whatever “IT” is, it’s tricky and terribly exhausting to attain for Kerouac’s Sal and Dean, just like it’s “probably somewhere at the farther end of the night” for Céline’s Ferdinand and Robinson. And so, both pairs of men are as intrigued as we are hooked, and as they live on we read on to find out what “IT” is. Kerouac thus spells out the goal or “end” of his road-novel almost identically to Céline’s (“you’ll surely finish up by finding out what it is […] it’s probably somewhere at the farther end of the night”; Journey, 192): “All I wanted to do is sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere, and go and find out what everybody was doing all over the country” (On the Road, 67). But what Ferdinand sees as a mere “consolation to keep on going” becomes an interesting project for Sal: whereas in Céline’s novel the former is reluctantly “pushed out into the night” and “thrown out of every place,” in Kerouac’s novel the latter voluntarily “wants” to “go,” “sneak out and disappear into the night.” That is, Kerouac expresses the very desire at the source of On the Road with the uncanny structural device he borrowed from Journey, but the active verbs that characterize his narrator differentiate his Sal from Céline’s Ferdinand. We could read into this difference the trace of Dostoevsky’s optimism. For if Kerouac’s 1950 “odd notes” begin with Céline’s “end of the night,” we then

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find the pendulum movement in which the French novelist so often comes with Dostoevsky. The statements previously quoted (“That is why they want ‘the end of the night’—complete purgation from sloppy decadent pursuits of noon. And there is love”) are indeed followed by a long reflection on the Russian author clearly establishing the counterpart of Céline’s apocalyptic “end of the night”: Dostoevsky’s vision is that which we all dream at night, and sense in the day, and it is the Truth… merely that we love one another whether we like it or not, i.e., we recognize the other’s existence—and the Christ in us is the premium mobile of that recognition. Christ is at our shoulders, and is “our conscious in God’s university” as Cleo says… he is the recognizer in us. His “idea” is. (The Unknown Kerouac, 44; Kerouac’s emphasis)

Through the stress Kerouac twice puts on is, he presents “Christ in us” as one more meaning for “IT,” in fact as an incarnation of IT (“is”). The rigidity and constant return of the Dostoevsky/Céline binary certainly explains why Kerouac took so long to prepare his road-novel and made so many versions of it. Both Dostoevsky’s hopeful vision and Céline’s desperation of mankind fed into the picaresque plot and complex personalities of the characters in On the Road. But at this point, the binary becomes untenable, and Kerouac attempts to choose a dominant side. The following anecdote in Kerouac’s journals recounts his meeting with someone for whom he feels the “recognition” and the “love” he just described in relation to Dostoevsky, and again seems to favor the Russian author, for his “day” (love) now incorporates Céline’s “night” (fear): Lou is only an intensification of this feeling which I have for everyone; he is a dramatic example of mankind. Nevertheless I could not bear seeing him everyday, for fear of boredom, or the fear of boredom—perhaps fear of losing the fear & trembling which is a dramatization of my being alive. When I left I sighed… “It’s always the same… My position with one like that will never change… A relationship is established for eternity… This world we walk in is only the scene, the temporal scene, of eternal realities; this sidewalk only exists for souls to walk on.” Further than a “dramatization of my being alive” is that such a recognition of fear and love—or the fear and love itself—simply the love—is our existence, and mine too, and yours, and we try to avoid it more than anything else in the world. Thus, tonight, reading my new books, I find that Kafka avoids it in a dream of himself; Lawrence avoids it by masturbating (same thing); and Scott Fitzgerald […] only wrote his story to make money and omitted certain things […]. Then I read Dusty [i.e. Dostoevsky] and it

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Taken as a whole, Kerouac’s journals certainly show how hard he “wants” and “prays” to become an earthly prophet like Dostoevsky, for they contain more entries on him than on Céline, and these entries are also longer. But the very intensity of his desire to emulate his Russian idol betrays how strong Céline’s effect on the young American author really is. Kerouac wants and prays for the triumph of “Dusty,” he even decrees it here, but this entry gives away the reason for which he will in the end model his road-novel on Céline’s: the “fear of boredom” that goes with any system or religion. That is, the terms that Kerouac uses to establish “the recognition of fear and love” as “our existence” in this entry might be associated with Dostoevsky, and Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (1843). However, the application of these existentialist terms to literature— the way “it” is here successively “avoided” by the German Kafka, the English Lawrence and the American Fitzgerald—brings us back to Kerouac’s FrancoAmerican genealogy and into the territory, crucially mediated by Céline, of Jean-Paul Sartre.11

Céline’s Existentialism Is a Humanism: “That’s It” The desire characterizing both the characters and the plot of On the Road is expressed in Kerouac’s novel in terms that reveal his appropriation of Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night. But equally, if not more significant, is the particular narrative context in which this desire that is the goal of On the Road (“but all I wanted to do…”) is formulated, that is when Kerouac’s narrator finds himself in a classical Sartrean situation: Sal has applied for and got a job as a security guard but is not sure he likes or even wants it. When doing his job and knocking on a noisy door to ask men to be quiet, he thus faces an eloquent “What do you want?” (65, Kerouac’s emphasis), before being reminded by another representative of the law: “Now you got to make up your mind one way or the other, or you’ll never get anywhere. It’s your duty. You’re sworn in. You can’t compromise with things like this” (67). It is significantly when he is faced with no alternative but to make a choice that Sal confesses his desire of the road in picaresque Célinian terms: “I didn’t know what to say; he was right, but all I wanted to do is sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere, and go

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and find out what everybody was doing all over the country” (67). In context, the active verbs differentiating Kerouac’s active “project” from Céline’s passive “consolation” suddenly appear in another light: the hope they convey resonates less with Dostoevsky’s idealist existentialism than with Sartre’s pragmatic urge to stop avoiding our human condition, measure our responsibilities against our desires and make consistent choices. By 1950, Kerouac has gone past “‘the beyond-good-and-evil’ nonsense of Nietzsche, Rimbaud and Gide—NUTS EACH ONE” (Windblown World, 151) and aspires to write “soulworks.” But for his road-novel to attain this noble status, its protagonists need to be granted freewill and be tortured by moral dilemmas, faced with ethical responsibilities, be they professional (Sal’s job here) or familial (Dean’s struggling love life) and escaped or taken on (Sal and Dean’s responsibilities towards each other’s friendship is successively one and the other; Dean will in fact escape his moral responsibility towards his friend Sal, in order to fulfill his familial responsibility towards his wife and child). That is why the great French naturalist novels that Kerouac so admired no longer help him: Zola, Balzac or Hugo’s characters cannot change their minds and make contradictory choices or the whole structure of their novels would collapse, for each of their characters generally personify a moral stance. But with Céline and Dostoevsky, desires and passions triumph over social determinism, and bring about a totally different story. Their characters truly seem to have psychologies and lives of their own. In moral doubt, they inevitably opt for the least likely option, as if their creators were making a point to never cease surprising us or never cease surprising themselves, like in Kerouac’s journal page about Huncke: “What a surprise that was!—how strange can Hunkey [sic]get? […] What does he know that makes him so human?” (Windblown World, 100). The literary ability to surprise finds its philosophical corollary in Sartre’s existentialism. With Sartre, what was in the nineteenth century considered one’s fate or destiny becomes one’s responsibility: man can decide for himself and is defined as the sum of his choices and actions, be they consistent or inconsistent. While Walter Kaufmann sees “no reason for calling Dostoevsky an existentialist,” Sartre would certainly have agreed with his judgment of Notes from Underground as “the best overture for existentialism ever written” (Kaufmann, 14). For Sartre gives Dostoevsky’s works as the very starting point of existentialism. Scholars have rightly pointed out that Dostoevsky never actually wrote the words Sartre attributes to him in Existentialism Is a Humanism: “If God didn’t exist, everything would be permitted. That is the point of departure of

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Existentialism” (Sartre, L’Existentialisme est un humanisme, 39; my translation).12 True, Sartre paraphrases the thoughts of Dostoevsky’s character Yvan from Brothers Karamazov here, and so shouldn’t have used speech marks,13 but that he chose to base his philosophy on the works of the Russian author remains highly significant. As is the quotation from Céline that Sartre used for the epigraph of Nausea (1938): “He is a fellow without any collective significance, barely an individual” (7). That the epigraph opening Sartre’s famous existentialist novel borrows the words of Céline is meaningful, but the text from which he borrowed those words is even more significant for understanding Kerouac’s own use of Céline’s works: that is Céline’s satirical play entitled The Church (1933). In effect, Sartre grounded his philosophy in the works of the two authors—Dostoevsky and Céline—that Kerouac himself constantly opposes in his journals, and chose Céline over Dostoevsky for the very reason that governs Kerouac’s aesthetic binary: religion. Kerouac was raised Christian and faith was important to him and his writing, which explains the distinction he makes between “novels” and “soulworks”. But all his wishes and longings for a soul in his journals (“I want a soul, I want a soul, I want a soul”) indicate that his faith is more fragile than he would like it to be, and that he is in fact beset by the modern anxiety par excellence, the “death of God”. Sowed by Dostoevsky himself, this anxiety is put to rest by Sartre’s existentialism. Sartre postulates that if our essence isn’t created by God, then it doesn’t precede our existence: we have no other fate than the one we make for ourselves, and so everything is indeed permitted. In Sartre’s liberating optic, therefore, life should no longer be experienced passively but actively: rather than accepting and discovering our fate as it concretizes before our eyes, we all have the power to make choices and create ourselves. In short, there is nothing in existentialism to be pessimistic about! Yet, like many Americans both at the time and today, this would be the main reproach that Kerouac and the Beats would address to his philosophy. Holmes thus famously defined “The Philosophy of the Beat Generation” in contrast to Sartre’s: “To be beat is to be at the bottom of your personality, looking up; to be existential in the Kierkegaard, rather than the Jean-Paul Sartre, sense” (qtd. in Charters, “John Clellon Holmes,” 141). Just as Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac would be appalled by the fate of the “Beat” label, so Sartre lamented the reception of his philosophy in America, which was rapidly absorbed and reduced to the fashionable urge to be individually depressed and politically engaged. “Ironically,” writes Erik Mortenson, “existentialism came to signify what the term ‘Beatnik’ would signify a decade later: a black-

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sweatered bohemian smoking a cigarette at a cafe table” (Mortenson, 23). In order to analyze not only Kerouac’s repudiation but appropriation of Sartre’s existentialism, we need to follow Mortenson (20–27) in putting such misguided critiques back into their original context and realize this fundamental distinction: Kerouac had contempt for the New York School and American readers of Sartre, but respected the work of the French philosopher. Kerouac showed enough interest in Sartre’s existentialism to periodically debate it with his friend Holmes, but there seems no evidence in his letters, journals, notebooks or interviews of any close engagement with it, no visible sign he read Nausea (translated from the French in 1949), for example, let alone his major philosophical works. This surprising absence of reference to Sartre, which implies Kerouac did not work through his oeuvre as he did Dostoyevksy or Céline’s, makes all the more remarkable the appearance of Sartre’s complex concept of “pour-soi” (being-for-itself) in his relatively little-known text “On Céline”; or to be more precise, in its recently published French version, the “Commentaire sur Louis-Ferdinand Céline”: Il m’a toujours semblé que le Robinson de “Voyage” était continuellement poursuivi par Javert fantomatique, et que ce Javert était CELINE en personne, et que CELINE lui-même était Robinson, et qu’ainsi le “Voyage” est l’histoire du fantôme du “pour-soi” [being-for-itself] de CELINE à la poursuite du fantôme du “non-soi” de CELINE, Robinson. (La Vie est d’hommage, 338)14

What we have here is probably the most complex appropriation examined in this book, for it involves the works of three French writers, plus Kerouac’s own. It uses the philosophical concepts of Sartre (the notions of “being-for-itself ” and “being-in-itself ” theorized in Being and Nothingness) and the fictional character of Victor Hugo (the villain Inspector Javert from Les Misérables) to analyze the existentialist plot of Céline’s novel (Voyage or Journey to the End of the Night), and suggests that Kerouac actually found in Sartre’s existentialist ontology just the modern optimism he needed to complement Céline’s nihilist vision. However, if so, Kerouac would have found it long afterwriting On the Road because, as editor Cloutier reasonably proposes, his undated “Commentaire” must have been written at least a decade later, after Céline’s death in 1961. But the problem, it turns out, is not just one of chronology—of when Kerouac would have had access to concepts that Sartre elaborated in L’Être et le néant (1943), a forbiddingly difficult work of over 700 pages that was only translated into English as Being and Nothingness in 1956. The main issue of

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this triangulation of Kerouac with Céline via Sartre has to do with what is gained as well as lost in translation. The “Commentaire” not only implies that Kerouac appropriated key Sartrean concepts, but invites us to see that these informed Kerouac’s own reading of Céline’s oeuvre, specifically Journey to the End of the Night, which tempts a re-reading of On the Road in that light. But the French text is edited without awareness of the existence of its relatively obscure English original (“On Céline”), published in 1964 in the Paris Review and later reprinted in Good Blonde, in which there is nothing explicitly Sartrean (the terms Kerouac uses in English are “self ” and “non-self,” not “being-in-itself ” and “being-for-itself ”). In short, the “Commentaire” is the result of a creative act of translation—and yet, while it introduces a specific notion absent from the original and so is indeed an error, the irony is that the French version is not inappropriate. Or to put it more positively, Kerouac’s appropriation of Sartre may be imaginary, but it does make sense. We can put this otherwise unfortunate lapse in scholarship, this evidence of the continuing divide between French and American academic cultures, to good use, by advancing a Sartrean reading of Céline’s Journey to shed light on Kerouac’s On the Road. If Kerouac read Sartre’s philosophical work at the time he composed his famous road-novel, what was then available in America would, again with a rather neat irony, have been problematic precisely because of its translation. For what he might have known then would have been the talk Sartre published as L’Existentialisme est un humanisme, translated as Existentialism & Humanism in 1948. But we should be wary of the quality of that translation, as its very title problematically translates the verb “is,” which clearly identify existentialism with humanism, into the symbol for “and” (“&”), which can also divide them. This unfortunate translation was only recently corrected when the text was republished by Yale University Press in 2007. It is just a detail, but a telling one in terms of Kerouac’s Dostoevsky and Céline binary, as well as of the larger misunderstanding of Sartre’s philosophy in America, for Sartre himself was unhappy with the vulgarization of his ontology in Existentialism & Humanism, and had Kerouac and his fellow Americans had access to Being and Nothingness in the 1940s, their views of Sartre’s existentialist philosophy might have been quite different. Whether we appreciate the creativity of the translator of Kerouac’s commentary “On Céline” or not, the high level of subjectivity we find in phrases like “it always seemed to me that Robinson was pursued by Shroudy Javert, and

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that Javert was Céline himself, and Céline himself was Robinson, and therefore Voyage is the story of the Shroud of Céline’s self pursuing the Shroud of Céline’s non-self, Robinson” (Good Blonde & Others, 90; my emphasis) invites us to read it as a reflection on his own work. This fascinating text indeed draws the same parallel between Céline’s pair of adventurers (Ferdinand and Robinson) and his own (Sal and Dean) as the Scroll Version of On the Road: We got on a trolley and rode to downtown Detroit, and suddenly I remembered that Louis Ferdinand Celine had once rode on the same trolley with his friend Robinson, whoever Robinson was if not likely Celine himself; and Neal was like myself, for I’d had a dream of Neal the night before in the hotel, and Neal was me. In any case he was my brother and we stuck together. (On the Road, 345)

Clearly, in comparison to the passing quotation from Céline that appeared in the 1957 edition of On the Road (‘Nine lines of crime, one of boredom’), this sustained and complex association with Céline in the Scroll version is much more significant, if also highly confusing. And yet, it is the very confusion in these lines—in which Kerouac not only identifies his characters with those of Céline but blurs the ontological disctintions between life and literature, author and character, self and other by identifying Céline with Robinson and himself with Neal Cassady—that invites us to read one novel through the other. What these confusions actually signify may be left obscure at this point, but when we look back at it from the vantage of his commentary “On Céline,” and recognize how closely it echoes the Scroll in its equally striking and very similar conflation of identities, it becomes obvious that, in both texts, Kerouac is trying to make sense not only of Céline’s work but of his own. The convoluted ontological “pursuit” narrated in Kerouac’s commentary— “the story of the Shroud of Céline’s self pursuing the Shroud of Céline’s nonself, Robinson” (“On Céline”)—can indeed be transposed onto Kerouac’s famous novel, using the Sartrean terms introduced in the text’s French translation. Sal Paradise would then embody Sartre’s concept of being-for-itself (which can be simplified as the mental state of someone who doesn’t admit who he is, who doesn’t coincide with oneself) and Dean Moriarity the being-in-itself (the mental state of those lucky or wise ones who do coincide with themselves, like plants, animals, children, madmen or God). If Dean is depicted in such terms, they are emphatically Dostoevskian: he is, in block capitals, “the HOLY GOOF,” an identity that brings together a trinity of labels—“the Idiot, the Imbecile, the Saint of the Lot”—conflating Dostoevsky’s Prince Mnychkine with his Dean, and

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making him the saint archetype of On the Road (194). But just as the structure and vocabulary of Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night are used to describe the desire at the source of On the Road, Céline’s anarchic “delirium”15 eventually gets the upper hand in the design of Dean’s personality, for it carries what Kerouac termed in his March 1950 “odd notes” a stronger “dramatization of Being alive” (The Unknown Kerouac, 44). That is, the wisdom of the Dostoevskian Saint in On the Road ultimately hands over to the madness of the Célinian anarchic Goof. Since On the Road, initially subtitled “A modern novel,” was to describe the brand new realities of America, it needed to be in phase with its postwar era, but also with its language. This is the aesthetic reason for which Kerouac would ultimately brush off Balzac and Dostoevsky’s works as models, for “these were 19th century absorptions & hangups no longer genuinely possible, the thing now, as Céline, Proust, Wolfe, Genet & Joyce have shown, being no longer fictions, imaginings of reality, but the great interior monologue of the modern tongue written either in exile, jail or sickbed” (The Unknown Kerouac, 164). True, other writers than Céline feature in this new list, but this journal entry makes clear that he is indeed Kerouac’s main reference for the monologue: “Add Henry Miller to the list—an imitator of Céline” (164). The main reason Céline ultimately wins over Dostoevsky is, however, ontological: that’s “IT.” In November 1949, Kerouac initiates the dismissal of his Russian idol when, significantly “censoring his weak-kneed apologetic optimism,” he states his road-novel will borrow its obscure device—“the thing”16 as he calls “IT” for now—from Céline “most of all”: The thing is… ??? To me, “this thing” is that Shrouded Stranger I dreamt once. It is ever-present and ever-pursuing. […] The thing is central to our existence, and alone is our everlasting companion after parents and wives and children and friends may fade away. Wolfe’s “brother Loneliness,” Melville’s “inscrutable thing,” Blake’s “gate of Wrath,” Emily Dickinson’s “third event,” Shakespeare’s “nature”?—God? One can almost point with the finger. It’s also every man’s “mystery” and deepest being.—I would also find it most of all in L.-F. Celine’s climatic visions of “death” as he pushes it through for both Leon Robinson and de Pereires… What’s left after everything else has collapsed. It’s really one’s “Fate.” For Fate is never a man’s wish so much as the center of his life’s circle. (Windblown World, 249-51)

Kerouac’s description of “the thing” as “ever-present and ever-pursuing” here clearly parallels Sartre’s ontological concepts and anticipates his own account of Journey to the End of the Night in his commentary “On Céline” a decade

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later (“Voyage is the story of the Shroud of Céline’s self pursuing the Shroud of Céline’s non-self, Robinson”). In this 1949 entry, Céline’s triumph is also paradoxically stressed by Dostoevsky’s glaring absence from the authors listed, as well as by “most of all,” and Kerouac’s definite identifications of the “circle of life” as “a circle of despair” beforehand: “It is a circle; it is really despair” (249). Kerouac drew that circle in his journals, which he accompanied with a legend: “the experience of life is a regular series of deflections that finally result in a circle of despair” (250). The Sartrean word here is not “despair”—that belongs to Céline’s vocabulary—but “deflections”. For Sartre’s descriptions of the many forms of “bad faith” that man uses to “avoid” recognizing, or indeed to “deflect” from his condition and responsibilities, is at the center of his philosophy. In sum, while the appearance of Sartre’s terminology in Kerouac’s “Commentaire” was the result of a translator imposing a French cultural frame of reference, On the Road can certainly be read as the story of its author’s quest to coincide with himself, which, if fully developed into a Sartrean reading, would make it as existentialist a novel as Céline’s. For it does follow the structure of Journey: Just as Céline’s Ferdinand pursues his flamboyant companion Robinson, Kerouac’s Sal pursues the holy goof Dean, in the hope of catching up with himself—until he realizes like Ferdinand, in typical Sartrean fashion, that being Dean or Robinson comes at an ontological price he is not ready to pay: mental sanity. Meanwhile, Sal accumulates experiences that give him the maturity to see himself and his desires for what they are and makes his own choices accordingly. On a philosophical level, that Sartrean reading would be straightforward, but on a literary one, there is an oddity, which at first resists but in the end only reinforces the transposition of Kerouac’s existentialist reading of Journey onto his own road-novel. We would expect Kerouac to conflate “Céline himself ” with Céline’s narrator here, but his commentary “On Céline” makes no mention of Ferdinand, only of Robinson. Kerouac’s text goes even further in its exclusion of Céline’s narrator, concluding: “I only remember Robinson” (Good Blonde & Others, 91). Why is that so? And why is there in fact no mention of Ferdinand but dozens of allusions to Robinson in Kerouac’s journals? For the same exact reason that, of On the Road, we remember not its narrator, Sal Paradise, but the ghastly counterpart of Robinson: Dean Moriarty. That is to say, as well as its picaresque genre and McGuffin “IT,” On the Road borrows from Céline’s Journey its very particular narrative structure. Both novels have not one but two antiheroes, and the real one is not the one we would expect (the moralist narrator), but the mad and bad conscience who haunts him (his immoral, if not criminal road companion).

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Of course, there are many more couples of antiheroes in modern literature on which the relation of Sal and Dean could have been modeled, to begin with Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, but the brothers are four and they are not all antiheroes: Alyósha has a good nature that is idealized and the stárets Zósima is a Saint. “There are no ‘villains’ in Dostoevsky,” according to Kerouac; “That is why he is ‘the truest of the true’” (Windblown World, 272). The same goes for Céline, but he has over the Russian author the advantage of having no heroes either. Among his numerous lists of modern literary works, Kerouac oddly never mentions the classical picaresque novel, Cervantes’ Don Quixote. The only other novels presenting such an odd couple that he evokes in his journals are Melville’s Moby-Dick (Ishmael and Ahab) and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (Nick and Gatsby). But as previously noted, Kerouac dismisses Fitzgerald for having written for fame and money and “omitted certain things” (The Unknown Kerouac, 45). And although the Ishmael-Ahab model is indeed present in On the Road—Ishmael in the ‘Scroll” version (115); Ahab in the 1957 edition (235)17—“Céline towers above Melville” in most definite terms: “Celine is not the artist, not the poet that Melville is—but he swamps him under from sheer weight and tragic fury. There’s no getting around this, not at all. Every beautiful sentence in The Encantadas is but a pale pearl drenching in the tempests of Celine […] It’s not the words that count, but the rush of what is said” (Windblown World, 248; Kerouac’s emphasis). The “rush” that places Céline’s writing above that of Melville or Fitzgerald in Kerouac’s pantheon of great stylists doesn’t materialize through Céline and Kerouac’s narrators, but through the real antiheroes of their novels, Robinson and Dean, their monomaniac characters. On the Road attenuates the somber fate that Céline reserves for Robinson, but doesn’t pull his punches either: while the antihumanist morals of Robinson get him shot, Dean’s hysterical desire and logorrhea simply turn into a madness that leaves him no other choice than to shut up. The speech regression characterizing Dean over the course of On the Road indeed reproduces the dialogical structure of Journey to the End of the Night, which opens with a discussion (“It all began just like that. I hadn’t said anything. I hadn’t said a word. It was Arthur Ganate who started me off ”; 7) and ends with silence (“let’s hear no more of all of this”; 441). For by the end of On the Road, Dean’s delirium becomes such that it makes him stammer, be incoherent (“Ah— ah—you must listen to hear.” “We listened, all ears. But he forgot what he wanted to say”; 304), and ultimately makes him fail altogether to communicate with Sal, who can only suggest they remain silent (“no need to talk. Absolutely, now,

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yes?” “All right, we won’t talk”; 305). At least a while, since what On the Road represses in Dean, Visions of Cody will unleash. As if appropriating Céline’s “end of the night” and turning “it” into the focal trick of On the Road wasn’t enough, Kerouac will then also give it a twist or a “trickle,” and invert the order of the words in Céline’s title to give the “essentials” of his very own style: follow roughly outlines in outfanning movement over subject, as river rock, so mindflow over jewel-center need (run your mind over it, once) arriving at a pivot, where what was dim-formed “beginning” becomes sharp-necessitating “ending” and language shortens in race to wire of time-race of work. Following laws of Deep Form, to conclusion, last words, last trickle—Night is The End. (“Essentials of Spontaneous prose,” 58)

“Night Is the End” Already in 1948, Kerouac was announcing his intention to discover “a way of preserving the big rushing tremendousness in [him] and in all poets” (Windblown World, 95). Among the poets he then proceeded to name were Balzac, Céline and, of course, Dostoevsky. For all their stylistic differences, Balzac and Céline shared with Zola and Dickens, among other naturalists Kerouac praised in this journal entry, a natural talent for sketching almost anything, from decors and landscapes to sounds, tastes, visions, feelings, people and nations. Nothing was to escape Balzac and Céline’s comédies humaines. Kerouac likewise aspired to build more than an oeuvre, a universe: the Duluoz legend. That is, the mission that he set himself in I Wish I Were You, to see everything, proceeds from the outrageous wish of attaining an omniscient vision. Omniscience, of course, is first and foremost God’s attribute, and this is just what Kerouac’s ambition to write a legend was to make of him: the creator of an entire universe. We find a strikingly similar impulse in Céline’s hysterical desire to embark everyone and everything into his writing. In a little known but excruciatingly funny text entitled Conversations with Professor Y (1955), the modern French writer provides a fictional interviewer with nothing less than the key to his genius, which he refers to as his “emotive metro” or “subway.” “You take everything along?,” asks his interviewer: “Yes, Colonel… everything! eight-story buildings!… ferocious rumbling buses! I leave nothing on the surface! I leave nothing there! No kiosques, no badgering spinsters, no bridge bums! No! I take everything along!”

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The French Genealogy of the Beat Generation “Bridges too?” “Bridges too!” “Nothing gets in your way?” “No, Colonel!… powered with emotion, Colonel!… nothing but emotion! … breathless emotion!” “Yes, but… yes, but…” “No ‘buts’ about it!… all aboard!… I stash everything on my metro cars!… and I repeat! every emotion on my metro cars! with me! my emotive metro takes everything along, my books take everything along!” (Céline, Conversations with Professor Y, 97)

The energy, the rhythm, the outrageous scope of Céline’s vision, everything here concurs to link the “rush” of Céline’s craftwork to Kerouac’s, up to the modern choice of a speedy subway for stylistic metaphor. Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac would have loved this text, but composed in 1955 it was only translated in 1986, and so was probably not known to them. Still, it is particularly enlightening to compare Kerouac’s “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” and “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose: List of Essentials” to Céline’s own “poetics”: everything is film, you’re a film… transformed! become a film! and a film is nothing but snags, end to end!… hitches!… lost time!… shambles!… mixups!… cops, bikes, intersections, detours, this way, that way! bottlenecks!… grief! Boileau still enjoying the streets… be crushed nowadays… to hell with his rhymes!… old Pascal, in a jalopy, I’d like to see him make out, Place de la Concorde at rush hour!… more than his abyss’d give him a scare!… even twenty abysses! the Surface is hardly livable!… it’s true! so I don’t hesitate, not me!… my genius in action! No formalities!… I ship all my friends off on the metro, correction! I take everybody, willy-nilly, with me!… charge along!… the emotive subway, mine in a dream! no drawbacks, nor congestion!… never a stop, nowhere!… straight through! destination! in emotion!… powered with emotion! Only the goal in sight: full emotion… start to finish! (93)

Céline renders immediately visible his aesthetics through his writing’s excesses of punctuation—all the excited exclamation marks and impatient ellipses— and Kerouac will likewise use, and valorize the use of, punctuation to drive emotional expression in writing, getting rid of “false colons and timid usually needless commas” in favor of “the vigorous space dash” (“Essentials,” 57); or as he puts it in “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose”: “Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition” (“Belief & Technique,” 59). But while selective quotation can easily serve to compare Kerouac’s two major aesthetic

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statements with those implied by Céline’s writing, his two short manifestos—the one initially composed in 1953 and the other written in 1955 and revised in 1959—are in crucial ways that have always been overlooked very different from one another. Taken together, they suggest Kerouac’s awareness of the dangers in “spontaneous” or “modern” prose.18 In “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” the “vigorous” dash seems full only of vitality, a sign to enable the free flow of energy, but Kerouac’s slippery segueing of metaphors makes the jazz-like organic flowing of the “mind into limitless blowon-subject seas of thought” lead to an unexpectedly violent simile: “like a fist coming down on a table with each complete utterance, bang! (the space dash)—” (“Essentials,” 57). The image is surprising, even shocking, with a suggestion in it of the bumps and crashes of the Célinian anarchy let loose in “Place de la Concorde at rush hour!…” This disturbing movement or dangerous logic within the spontaneous overflow of the writing itself is repeated towards the end of Kerouac’s text in the equally unexpected, dark and downbeat Célinian terminus to the “time-race of work,” which leads to “last words, last trickle—Night is The End” (58). After this invocation of Céline, Kerouac names Yeats and Reich in the closing section of “Essentials,” and so appears to confirm the association he is making between poetry and biology on the ground of vitalism. As Omri Moses observes in his recent study of vitalism and modernism, “Vitalist philosophies focus on emergent processes that develop in unpredictable ways and sustain themselves by means of their own internal logic” (3). Moses’ book draws heavily on the work of William James, Friedrich Nietzsche and, above all, Henri Bergson (19). Bergson would also be a key figure for Kerouac, given how closely he was associated with Proust both personally (the two men were related by marriage) and philosophically (in their central preoccupation with time). Although Kerouac would cut out all the authors named in “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” (William Carlos Williams and Shakespeare, as well as Yeats and Reich), it is significant that he would include only one name in “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose,” Proust’s: “Like Proust be an old teahead of time” (“Belief & Technique,” 59). What makes the naming of Proust meaningful here is not only thematic—time is in fact much more heavily emphasized in Kerouac’s earlier aesthetic statement—but also formal, as a comparison of the poetics advanced and performed in “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” and in “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose” reveals. At a strictly aesthetic level, comparing the two statements suggests that Kerouac himself recognized the dash as a formal device—which he used no less

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than seventeen times in the first text and not once in the second—that goes together with the rush of writing away from inhibitions and censorship, but also towards no other end than death. In contrast to the overflowing writing in the titled but unnumbered categories of “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” running from “SET-UP” to “MENTAL STATE”; in “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose” Kerouac forces his aesthetics into thirty brief numbered points, as if to limit and fix the very flow of spontaneity and energy he celebrates. In other small but symbolic changes, the “Essentials” are no longer the same when that very word is displaced from the beginning of the first text’s title (“Essentials of Spontaneous Prose”) to the end of a subtitle for the second text (“Belief & Technique for Modern Prose: List of Essentials”). Equally telling, the essentials are turned into a list that makes them look like a business-like agenda.19 Limiting the meaning of Proust to just eight words—“Like Proust be an old teahead of time”—Kerouac makes ironic use of a phrase he first applied to Proust in a journal entry from November 1951, a month into the writing of Visions of Cody: “my God that old teahead of time!” (The Unknown Kerouac, 162) since teaheads are notoriously known for their rambling digressions rather than succinct articulation, a point brilliantly demonstrated through Jack and Cody’s stoned conversations in Visions of Cody. Overall, in the shift from “Spontaneous” to “Modern” to describe his prose, we see Kerouac still championing “wild typewritten pages,” “crazier the better” (“Belief & Technique,” 59), and yet applying the breaks, backtracking through the title and very form of his manifesto on where and how fast he was going. The example of Céline suggests one reason why that might be, why the formidable rush hour of his poetics went together with a troubling ethical dimension, in which the crazier was not necessarily the better. Most readers of Journey to the End of the Night are puzzled to learn Céline published vitriolic anti-Semitic pamphlets during the Second World War.20 A fervent admirer of Céline, Sartre was certainly taken aback. The French philosopher wrote an article in which he bluntly affirmed: “If Céline supported the socialist theses of the Nazis, it is because he was paid” (Sartre, “Portrait”; my translation).21 Infuriated by Sartre’s article when he got out of prison, Céline replied with the violent, scatalogical pamphlet À l’agité du bocal, to which Sartre did not respond.22 This typical French quarrel aside, how could the zealous antimilitarist discourse of Céline’s Journey possibly give way to vehemently antiSemitic pamphlets? The definition of anti-Semitism given by Sartre in Réflexions sur la question juive (1946) enlightens this paradox. For him, anti-Semitism is not an idea nor an opinion or even a feeling; it is fuelled by a passion, quite

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often an obsession. In light of Sartre’s definition, the very intensity with which Céline displayed his anti-militarist discourse in Journey can thus be interpreted as a breeding ground for another passion, the anti-Semitic discourse that Céline would develop in his pamphlets. In other words, passion breeds passion, or as the classic French pacifist adage has it: “la violence engendre la violence.” In stark contrast to Ginsberg, who put his “queer shoulder to the wheel” of many causes (Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 148), and Burroughs, whose cut-up project was launched against Henry Luce’s media machine and the American century, Kerouac was fiercely opposed to making political use of literature. Like most of his novels, On the Road wants little to do with politics, and war only appears as the historical background for the protagonists’ experiences of the majestic American landscape. Yet, the speed, the intensity, the aesthetic vitality that Kerouac appropriated from Céline’s Journey for On the Road came at a price. For Kerouac’s most famous novel is increasingly taught and studied in similar ways to Céline’s. The postcolonialist discourses of On the Road and Journey, for example, seem more and more dubious in retrospect. The onward rush of each narrative maintains the picaresque pace at the expense of leaving in the protagonists’ wake a trail of unresolved moral encounters. In On the Road, these often involve issues of race and gender, such as Sal’s abandonment of the Chicana Terry, the result of his “white ambitions” (On the Road, 180), which prompts Sal’s notorious “lilac evening” walk through the Denver colored section and his regret that he doesn’t have “enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night” (180). Sal’s desire for more darkness, more night, has made it easy to read in Kerouac’s text not a courageous compassion for the other, but a political naivety in his appropriations of non-white culture and an ethical recklessness in his romances with the other. Taking the “darkness” of which he wants more to denote literal skin color, we might logically deride Kerouac’s progression from the Chicana Terry in On the Road to the African-American Mardou in The Subterraneans. Then again, these are Kerouac’s romances with the racial other only if we ignore the material and textual identities of Sal and Leo, the books’ narrators, and the internal difference between characters and narrator-writers, distinctions that often get lost in critiques of Kerouac on grounds of race and gender.23 Addressing Kerouac’s poetics rather than history and sociology, Hrebeniak forcefully argues that “the concentration on the phenomenology of writing confers an independence upon the texts, something that consistently eludes his biographers” (Hrebeniak, 80). While we might agree or disagree with Sartre’s definition of “anti-Semitism” as a passion or about the dangers of Kerouac’s apolitical politics, we cannot fail

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to wonder: was Kerouac not aware of Céline’s collaboration during the war? He certainly was, for his commentary defends Céline, and defends him to the end by ignoring politics to the profit of literature; in fact by asserting Céline’s humanism as just as literary as his own: I can’t see how people could accuse Céline of vitriolic malice if they’d ever read the chapter on the young whore in Detroit, or the agonized priest climbing in through the window in Mort à crédit, or that marvelous inventor in the same story. I say he is a writer of great, supremely great charm and intelligence and no one compares to him. […] I only remember Robinson… I only remember the Doctor micturating in the Seine at dawn… Myself I’m only an ex-sailor, I have no politics, I don’t even vote. Adieu, pauvre suffrant [sic], mon docteur. (“On Céline,” in Good Blonde & Others, 91)

Contrarily to most readers of Céline and despite his propensity to periodically submit his literary muses to the harshest judgment, especially as he turned sour towards the end of his life, Kerouac’s admiration for the oeuvre of Céline therefore remained untouched by his anti-Semitic pamphlets, and if anything even grew. “Adieu, pauvre suffrant [sic], mon docteur:” “My doctor” are indeed Kerouac’s curious last words of farewell. Did Céline “cure” him of something? His anxious Christian faith exacerbated by Dostoevsky, and against which Sartre developed his existentialist ontology, perhaps? Perhaps, but the possessive pronoun “my” used by Kerouac in his commentary “On Céline” is also if not more significant. For it is a most definite mark of affection that acknowledges the extent of his appropriation of Céline’s work. Yet, to celebrate Céline’s humanism in his writing by seizing on sentimental anecdotes about young whores and anxious priests, he disregards the satirical dimension of Céline’s humor and the political power of literature altogether. That is, Kerouac does not defend Céline on Céline’s terms but on his own, through his absolute commitment to literature over life or politics. Or rather, when he calls Céline his literary master “my doctor,” Kerouac conflates his two identities, so that the writer doesn’t even redeem but simply supersedes the man who practiced medicine (and was anti-Semitic). This commitment to literature as life, as the only real life to be lived and valued, is a faith that cannot be found in Céline and that reveals the rise of Kerouac’s other French master: Marcel Proust. Kerouac’s commentary “On Céline” gives the measure of his literary appropriations—of how dialectically they kept feeding into his “view of all things”—for his defense of Céline indeed turns out to be Proustian.

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“A Running Proust” In light of what amounts to a veritable habit of listing authors by pairs or groups in order to situate or formulate his own poetics across his correspondence and journals, we should appreciate the unique prominence Kerouac gave Marcel Proust by making him the sole writer to appear in “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose: List of Essentials.” Compared to his long and thorny appropriation of Céline, Kerouac’s relation to Proust also appears fairly straightforward. While by the end of two decades he could recognize in Céline “his doctor,” Kerouac’s history with Proust began in the exact opposite way. In October 1951, after having been hospitalized for an attack of thrombophlebitis and while anxiously approaching the round number of thirty years, Kerouac prescribes himself the reading of Proust: Deciding once for all on the next six, crucial months—O dark thing… Reading old mad Proust; eating good food, taking long walks, getting hung up on sentences… This I’ve got to do for 6 months… then I’ll be 30, and twice an author. Worth it? (The Unknown Kerouac, 151; Kerouac’s emphasis)

Since what would emerge from his reading of Proust over the next six months is the discovery of spontaneous prose and the composition of Visions of Cody, a text which scholars increasingly regard as his masterpiece, Kerouac’s prescription definitely paid off and was indeed “worth it.” Proust, of course, doesn’t first appear in Kerouac’s journals in 1951, for Swann’s Way was part of the literary works he discussed with Burroughs and Ginsberg in the mid-1940s. Kerouac mentions him twice in 1948, and twice to put him down as lacking “life” in contrast with Céline and Dostoevsky: “Real intellectual concentration in a work of art is after all only a thing in itself—an analysis, an ‘insight’ like Proust(?)—it is not life itself, as in Dostoevsky and Shakespeare and sometimes even Céline” (Windblown World, 170; my emphasis). The question mark that Kerouac inserts after Proust’s name here underlines his typical honesty and suggests that he postpones his definitive judgment and for now gives Proust the benefit of the doubt. The most plausible explanation for Kerouac’s hesitation, his delay, is that he hadn’t yet finished reading Remembrance of Things Past. That would be understandable, since Proust’s cycle contains seven huge volumes, and it would certainly make sense of the prescription Kerouac gives himself three years later. Associating Proust with “petty details” and the failure of “straight naturalism” to “express life,” his second put-down, in 1949, offers further evidence

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that Kerouac was still engaged in reading Proust: “Who wants Dos Passos’ old camera eye?—or Proust’s subtleties? Everybody wants to GO!” (252). For Proust’s first volumes are full of brilliant psychological insights (“details” and “subtleties”), but his famous take on literature as creating “life itself,” for producing rather than re-producing it, only appears in the seventh and final volume of Remembrance of Things Past, that is, in Finding Time Again: “Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as in the artist” (Proust, 204). Real life is literature: Proust’s conclusion will become Kerouac’s own. In contrast to his remarks of 1948, Proust is evoked in glowing terms in 1951. Kerouac’s recently published 1951 journal is relatively short, and yet, over its sixty-two handwritten pages, Proust appears no fewer than nineteen times (one page out of three). Needless to say, no other author enjoys such a prominence. Still, Proust unsurprisingly makes his first appearance in opposition with another author, Thomas Wolfe, and in a most striking way. For the names of Wolfe and Proust appear in a schema dividing the page in two columns, representing Kerouac’s divided identity as a writer: from his two languages (Wolfe on the English side, Proust the “Canuck”) to the opinions of the people who matter for him (Wolfe with his family, Proust with his friends) and the types of personalities that appeal to him (Wolfe with Hal Chase, Proust with Neal Cassady) (The Unknown Kerouac, 112). If this seems like an unsolvable binary, and Kerouac often suffered from feeling “divided”—“it’s a terrible enough world without having to be divided in yr. own fucking soul. Divided—divided—divided— divided” (163)—there is one category in his schema that suggests Kerouac’s literary inclination. In light of the time and energy he put into the genesis of On the Road’s enigmatic “IT,” the column featuring Wolfe’s name contains “‘Best seller lists’—popularity,” which evidently pales in comparison with the opposing terms in Proust’s column that has “‘—’ —mystery” (112). Drawing this binary schema gives way to a positive verdict in which, deftly affirming the advantages of a bicultural identity, Kerouac refuses to privilege one side over the other: “If I hadn’t been split in the cradle I wouldn’t know half as much” (The Unknown Kerouac, 113). Kerouac’s language here is quantitative—speaking of how much he knows—and indeed has the advantage of overcoming the need to take sides. Kerouac goes on to clarify that by quantity he also means intensity: The only criteria to use for fiction is natural interest… how much to talk about gray days in the beginning is how much it interests you, and the intervening

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events in Frisco likewise and as memorable […] To tell a story with all your heart, is that grammar?—to explain yourself completely, in full truth, is that grammar? (113; my emphasis)

The insistence on “grammar” and “completeness” through the last two questions oddly sounds like a plea for what beforehand he disregarded as “petty details” or dismissed as “Proust’s subtleties”; that is, a defense of the very characteristic that made him in 1945 rewrite the story he had composed with Burroughs: his own excess of literariness. It is significantly through this defense that Proust comes in at the very core of his two poetic statements, “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” and “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose.” The “core” position of Proust was absolutely literal in Kerouac’s original, May 1955 draft of “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose,” which located the injunction “Like Proust, be an old teahead of time” at its dead center: point 14 in a list of 27 (Kerouac, Letters, 487). In another sign of how deliberately Kerouac constructed the statement of his poetics and how conscientiously he made Proust the nucleus of its genealogy, the points on either side of number 14 in both his draft and final versions of the text clearly relate above all to Proust and Céline. The explicit naming of Proust actually interrupts the continuity that runs from point 13—“Remove literary grammatical and syntactical inhibition”—to point 15—“Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog” (“Belief & Technique,” 59). The “true story” that must emerge by escaping the grids of conventional grammar and the Oedipal straitjackets of syntax evoke the label Kerouac gave his work after The Town and the City: “true-story novels” (Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler, vi). It also recalls the passage in his journal from November 1951 where he identified the genealogy of such novels, starting from Céline and Proust: the thing now, as Céline, Proust, Wolfe, Genet & Joyce have shown, being no longer fictions, imaginings of reality, but the great interior monologue of the modern tongue written either in exile, jail or sickbed… what I’d call THE TRU STORY OF THE WORLD— (The Unknown Kerouac, 164)

While it is tempting to isolate Proust in his sickbed as the one most crucial model for Kerouac, his list starts with Céline and is a reminder of how often Kerouac alternates between the two writers. Nevertheless, when writing to Malcolm Cowley in September 1955 as they discussed plans to publish On the Road, Kerouac made the strongest possible genealogical identification: “The Duluoz Legend now numbers seven volumes; when I’m done, in about 10, 15 years, it

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will cover all the years of my life, like Proust, but done on the run, a Running Proust” (Kerouac, Letters, 515). Kerouac’s final phrase—“a Running Proust”—points, I believe, to the decisive factor in understanding not only the importance of Proust to the creation of his work, but to our reading of it. Or to get at this idea another way, the phrase he uses for Cowley in 1955 reveals how Kerouac reread Proust, how he appropriated Remembrance of Things Past. It also confirms that this “running” came to him in November 1951 as he worked on Visions of Cody: “Goddamit,” he insists in his journal, “I want to use the Proustian method of recollection and amazement but as I go along in life, not after” (The Unknown Kerouac, 168; Kerouac’s emphasis). What he is insisting upon here, with his idea of being a “Running Proust” who recollects his life at the time “not after,” sounds paradoxical or even contradictory, but we can grasp it by turning to the reading of Remembrance made by Deleuze in Proust and Signs (Proust et les signes, 1964). To be clear: what follows here is no more a Deleuzian reading of Kerouac than the preceding section was a Sartrean reading. Deleuze himself refers to Kerouac on several occasions,24 and critics such as Marks, Abel, Hrebeniak and Melehy have all drawn briefly but insightfully on key terms like rhizome or nomadic thought in their analyses of his style. However, a sustained Deleuzian reading that would build on such work is not necessary to, and in fact runs the risk of obscuring, the chance to grasp the great value of a rapprochement between Kerouac and Proust’s works. Rather than reading Kerouac through Deleuze here, in a more comparative approach, I would like to show that Deleuze’s reading of Proust follows and thereby illuminates Kerouac’s own reading of Proust. This, in turn, enables us to read Kerouac in a new light, and to recognize in his writing the results of being a remarkable reader. Deleuze’s analysis reorients our understanding of Proust by insisting from the outset that his genius has much less to do with involuntary memory (the famous episode of the madeleine) than with the deciphering of signs (the glistening steeples of Martinville and Vinteuil’s musical phrase). It is the proliferation of signs like hieroglyphs that matters and makes us Egyptologists: “Truth depends upon an encounter with something which forces us to think and to seek the truth. The accident of encounters, the pressure of constraints are Proust’s two fundamental themes” (Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 16). This distinction is itself anticipated by Kerouac, who evokes “Proust’s Combray Cathedral, where the stone moved in eccentric waves” in Visions of Cody (37), and who was inspired to declare Proust an “old teahead of time” when recollecting Combray

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(The  Unknown Kerouac, 162), but who also significantly cut the Proustian concept of involuntary memory when deleting the original first point of “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose”: “Write on, cant change or go back, involuntary, unrevised, spontaneous, subconscious, pure” (Kerouac, Letters, 487; my emphasis). Why is this distinction so important? Because associating Kerouac with the Proust of the madeleine contributes to establish him as the “Great Rememberer,” a myth promoted by Ginsberg in his preface to Visions of Cody that does not do full justice either to Kerouac’s reading of Proust or to his own poetics. His “Running Proust” is not turned to the past but to the present and the future. Or as Deleuze puts it, Proust’s works are “not oriented to the past and the discoveries of memory, but to the future and the progress of an apprenticeship” (Proust and Signs, 26)—and the same can be said of Kerouac’s works, too. The impact of a backward-looking Proust on how we read Kerouac governs one of his recently published texts, Tics, since editor Todd Tietchen identifies it as “an exercise reminiscent of Proust’s exploration […] of involuntary memory” and notes a concrete parallel between the madeleine in Combray and Kerouac’s memory of eating bread and butter dusted with sugar in his mother’s kitchen (The Unknown Kerouac, 240). While understandable, I would say that this parallel points us in the wrong direction, and that the conclusion to which it leads— “Each entry in Tics serves as a verbal snapshot taking its place in a literary photo album”—freezes time past, brings it to a standstill, whereas, however doomed to failure, Kerouac commits to running along with time, to the rush of it, to the process of writing and to what Deleuze refers to as “the future and the progress of an apprenticeship.” What Deleuze means by identifying Proust as a reader of signs committed to the future is in fact clear from the progress of Kerouac’s own reflections on Proust in his journals, which are themselves a kind of huge apprenticeship, a process of learning to write by learning to read. To begin with, they are a series of disillusions, and (probably just before his reading of Finding Time Again) Kerouac thus finds Proust wanting in a comparison with Wolfe precisely because he sees him focusing on the past, for his “plan to rescue the past” (The Unknown Kerouac, 112). These moments of disillusion are actually vital for Kerouac, who with great excitement repeatedly believes he has found “IT”—the way to capture the rush of life in writing—only to experience the crash a few days or weeks later: “Oh what turmoils!” he laments in his journal in mid-November 1951; “It’s taken me all this time since Oct. 25th to really realize why I couldn’t sleep that night and why my ‘IT WORKED’ of 2 days ago wasn’t enthusiastic at all” (163).

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And yet, he cannot help but in the heat of the moment declare, as if definitively, in the same entry, “Now I’m REALLY a ‘writer’—no more stultifying artifice…” (165) Through a series of revelations and disillusions, Kerouac’s journals themselves perform the intensity of the present as it rushes and roars through him that he finds so precious in Proust. In the very next entry, for November 16, 1951, he records a striking commitment to the poetics of Visions of Cody: Made important decision about the Neal book—no false action, just visions of what I know he did, NO TIME, NO CHRONOLOGY, composing willy-nilly, as Holmes says, a book surpassing the problem of time by itself being full of the roar of Time (not his words). […] I’m about to be 30. I’ve finally solved the lifework. What remains is intensities only. Intense writing, intense drunks, intense travels, intense responsibilities, intense laughter.—(The Unknown Kerouac, 166; Kerouac’s emphasis)

Kerouac’s insistence on intensities emerges from his recognition, as we saw, that the only criterion for fiction is “how much it interests you” (113), an insistence that Deleuze consistently made—“Everything must be interpreted in intensity” (Deleuze and Guattari, 173)—and recognized in Proust. In Proust and Signs, Deleuze argues that writing is less about the goal of constructing meaning than about the process of deciphering the signs that force themselves upon us. Involuntary memory is indeed intense, but the point is that the process continues, passes from the past through the present to a future. It’s a process that cannot be completed, of course, and when Kerouac identifies himself as a “Running Proust,” he significantly embraces for his Duluoz legend Proust’s great metaphor for his own work: “I see now the whole Cathedral of Form which this is […] the eventual LEGEND will run into millions of words” (Kerouac, Letters, 515). The echo here is of a passage in Finding Time Again, which Deleuze also seizes upon, where Proust describes great books, parts of which can only be “sketched in” and that “will probably never be finished because of the very extent of the architect’s plan. Think how many great cathedrals have been left unfinished!” (Proust, 342). Of course, one of the grounds on which Kerouac’s work was attacked, above all Visions of Cody, was its appearance of being sketched rather than completed, by critics who refused to accept the validity of his aesthetics or its proximity to Proust’s. Kerouac appropriates Proust—sometimes to the extent of speaking for him: “as Proust says, or might have said” (The Unknown Kerouac, 160)—in the same way Deleuze reads him, seeking forms that will allow him to adapt Proust’s conception of writing to his desire for a writing that is running into millions of words with the roar of time.

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Kerouac narrates such genealogical intensities in Visions of Cody in a particular passage that not only names and quotes Proust and is itself absolutely Proustian, almost a pastiche, but that theorizes Kerouac’s entire book through the reference (Kerouac, Visions of Cody, 44). The passage describes a series of father figures evoked by the “unforgettable inexpressively rich” smell of their pipe smoke (43). Although such passages might easily be read as just “illustrating” Proust’s involuntary memory in the manner of the madeleine or frozen moments in a “literary photo album,” I would argue that they are more valuably identified as the essential ingredient of Kerouac’s “apprenticeship.” That is, in its preoccupation with fathers, as well as memories, Visions of Cody performs the genealogy and dynamic process of learning and teaching through writing into which, thanks to Proust, in November 1951 Kerouac inserts his own work in a key rhapsodic journal entry: And my teachings, as Proust’s teachings through Neal, earlier Wolfe’s teachings through Sammy, and Joyce’s teachings thru the young man who called himself Duluoz & was myself, will reach somebody through somebody and something else strange and living will happen, the purpose of which will always be a mystery […] the world that ever proceeds towards a light, a thing, won’t be able to talk about it till it happens and it always happens, that is to say, it’s already happened, is happening in fact now and every single moment, and the name of it is Life. (The Unknown Kerouac, 168)

While it might seem grandiose and overblown, this passage has a Biblical rhythm to it that is inflected with a certain humor, as Kerouac replaces the genealogical “who begat whom” with who “will reach somebody through somebody.” It is certainly a ringing affirmation of the power of the writer to create and to communicate life, to pass it on, as he inherited it from his teachers, here named as Joyce and Wolfe as well as Proust—although it might just as well have been Céline and Dostoevsky, as well as Proust. The power of literature is expressed as a hope, almost a prayer, in anticipation that one day his work “will mean a lot,” in the epilogue to Kerouac’s 1951 journal that is no longer addressed to himself but directly to the reader, to the future, to the genealogies to come, “whether my children, historians, or that ancient-history worm reads this”: I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life but that great consciousness of life that made cathedrals rise from the smoke. (172)

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What rises from the smoke are cathedrals of literary form, like his own, like Proust’s, but again the grand rhetoric gives way to a humbler one, and Kerouac ends his 1951 journal with an appeal to a shared vision—“crying, till all eyes see”—that echoes very precisely the ending of I Wish I Were You—“to see the tears that were in his eyes, and to see everything” (419). Making the connection between the breakthrough he was achieving in 1951 with Visions of Cody and the first breakthrough he had made in 1945 with I Wish I Were You, Kerouac was perhaps reconsidering whether the “Céline-like version” of the novel he had coauthored with Burroughs was so Céline-like after all. Perhaps in retrospect he sensed that his vision had always been Proustian, long before he knew it himself. So which is the true “master” for Kerouac? In this one great epiphany signaling his maturity as a writer, the very idea of “mastery” vanishes in the grand chain of genealogies that runs through the writer, from text to reader and from reader to text, without end.25

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Burroughs’ Queer Aesthetics: From Gide to Cocteau

Burroughs’ Céline: “Wouldn’t You?” Proust was important for Burroughs too, but after “Kerouac’s Céline” it is especially tempting to identify his own Céline as a counterpoint. For where Kerouac sought the compassionate humanism in Céline, Burroughs clearly found and relished his cynical humor. Indeed, it is entirely possible to see a Célinian dark energy and trenchant political satire driving all the narratives of his first decade as a writer, through the ratcheting up of the tempo and cynicism of his picaresque alter ego, William Lee, from Junky via Queer and The Yage Letters to Naked Lunch. Far from reading Céline against the grain, as Kerouac needs at times to do, Burroughs presses him to the limit, cuts up the compassion to leave only the passion, the brutal force—the “fury” and “tempests,” to recall Kerouac’s own terms. The catchphrase of Naked Lunch—“Wouldn’t you?” (Naked Lunch, 208)—radicalizes the challenge posed in Journey to the End of the Night by such provocations in complicity as Ferdinand’s “I don’t care a hoot about human morality myself—just like everyone else” (Journey to the End of the Night, 273). Far from thinking to excuse or defend Céline, and far from keeping antiSemitism out of his texts, Burroughs identifies with him insofar as his narrator doesn’t balk from making Jew jokes in Queer or Naked Lunch. While in the first text Lee openly anticipates the accusation—“I must be careful not to lay myself open to a charge of anti-Semitism” (Queer, 44)—in the second, he gleefully invites it: “you know yourself all a Jew wants to do is doodle a Christian girl… One of these days we’ll cut the rest of it off ” (Naked Lunch, 148). If for Kerouac the frenetic pace of Céline’s prose—“Place de la Concorde at rush hour!” (Céline, Conversations with Professor Y, 93)—matched the passionate spontaneity he desired for his own, throwing off the shackles of novelistic form; for Burroughs, it is the unchecked violence of Céline’s satire that

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models a shattering of the novel’s traditional humanism, leading him towards an aesthetic of fragmentation and excess to match his posthuman ethics. One of Burroughs’ earliest routines, “Roosevelt after Inauguration” written in May 1953, is the purest Céline in its cultivation of an outrage beyond liberal humanist limits: “Roosevelt was convulsed with such hate for the human species as it is, that he wished to degrade it beyond recognition […] ‘I’ll make the cocksuckers glad to mutate’, he would say, looking off into space as if seeking new frontiers of depravity” (Burroughs, Yage Letters, 44). Although supposedly about the American political scene of the 1930s, Burroughs’ routine was written on his travels in South America and, in a displaced fashion, shares Céline’s coruscating vision of colonial Africa in Journey to the End of the Night, where “the white man’s revolting nature” (103) truly comes out into the open. For Burroughs, revolting leads to mutating. That is, unlike Kerouac’s Céline, Burroughs’ embraces a problematic relation between aesthetics and ethics. Burroughs savors complicity rather than moral clarity, and this is why he shares with Céline the grotesque cynicism that reflects back the even more grotesque bad faith of a cynical readership: readers who are anything other than disgusted by what they see in the mirror. This is also precisely why Burroughs’ own moral position, his authorial distance from his alter ego, is often so hard to pin down: Are his anti-Semitic jokes meant to be funny, or are they not meant to be anti-Semitic? One thing we can be sure of is that, in interviews over a thirty-year period, Burroughs consistently repeated that Céline’s unsettling mood and humor confused readers and prompted the same kind of misunderstandings as his own: “When I read Céline he immediately struck me as being very funny. But the critics talked about his cry of despair. They seemed to have missed the point entirely”; “I find the same critical misconceptions put forth by critics with regard to his work are put forth to mine”; “The good critics have pointed out the humor, whereas bad critics say flatly there is none. They said this about Céline” (Lotringer, Burroughs Live, 53, 273, 579). Of no other writer did Burroughs make such strong statements of aesthetic identification, and it would clearly be possible to develop a case that is textual—comparatively analyzing, say, Journey to the End of the Night with The Yage Letters or episodes from Naked Lunch—while also addressing issues of authorial identity, political purpose and critical reception. Such a reading would illuminate not only how different are Burroughs’ and Kerouac’s appropriations of Céline, but also how differently they wrote about their major predecessors. Kerouac’s journals are fascinating

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resources for scholars and critics in this respect, and are crucial measure of how differently Burroughs worked as a writer. That is to say, there are almost no journals of Burroughs’ works in progress where he engaged with source-texts, authors and ideas as he redrafted his novels, an absence barely made up for by contemporaneous letters or later interviews.1 As a result, we have simply far less information about what Burroughs was reading as he wrote than we have for Kerouac, or, with the monthly book lists he compiled for his own journals, Ginsberg. In this context, the clarity of Burroughs’ identifications with Céline in interviews dating from the 1960s to the 1980s is significant but unsatisfactory if the goal is to understand the genealogy of his writing of the 1950s through his own writing. For these chronological and material reasons, rather than taking further the invitation to read Burroughs through Céline, the following two sections pursue the seemingly less promising cases of André Gide and Jean Cocteau, who each have a small but pregnant textual presence in Burroughs’ early work. Always just name-checked in the biographies, Gide and Cocteau have remained two of the most overlooked writers in the critical field, so that their fundamental importance for the evolution of Burroughs’ writing in the early 1950s has passed unnoticed. This may seem understandable, since in the Burroughs oeuvre there are only two direct references to Gide—one in his preface to Junky and another, which reworks the first, in a mid-1950s routine.2 As for Cocteau, Burroughs only makes a single, if more extended reference to his film Orpheus (Orphée, 1950) in Queer. However, this is to misunderstand the act of naming in Burroughs’ work, which is so rare—in the absolute, but also especially in comparison to Ginsberg or Kerouac—that his explicit allusions are never mere name-checking and always function on several levels of meaning at once. That Burroughs should have referenced Gide and Cocteau in Junky and Queer, his first two texts, each completed in summer 1952, is striking in that context, and a close reading reveals that each reference operates with the same odd economy to condense similar fields of significance. Cocteau’s textual presence has been ignored or briskly dismissed, and while Gide’s even more limited presence has been analyzed in relation to Junky and Queer by Oliver Harris,3 it has not been framed in connection to Gide’s own work or to broader parallels between his oeuvre and that of Burroughs, so that its larger textual importance has not yet been grasped. The allusions to Gide and Cocteau made in 1952 reveal crucial points of intersection for the author of Junky and Queer, as he struggled with the aesthetic and ethical terms of making

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fiction out of his identities as a heroin addict and a homosexual, while keeping at bay the guilt and trauma of shooting his wife, Joan Vollmer, in September 1951. This infamous event took place as Burroughs was working on his early semiautobiographical novels, but was of course not represented in either of them. That is to say, at the threshold of his oeuvre, Gide and Cocteau mediated for Burroughs a deeply problematic relation of life to literature, in which the issue of where his writing belonged, its genealogy, was emotionally charged by the question of what did and did not belong in it.

“A First-Rate Fabricator of Gidean Romances” The textual presence of Gide in Burroughs’ work was preceded, and to an extent shaped, by both Kerouac and Ginsberg. Long before Ginsberg’s photographic caption describing “Burroughs camping as an André Gidean sophisticate lecturing the earnest Thomas Wolfean All-American youth Jack Kerouac” (see Fig. I.3; page 23), Ginsberg and Kerouac had indeed made persistent associations between Burroughs and Gide throughout the mid-1940s and early 1950s. In March 1945, Kerouac hence wrote in his journal: Seeing a lot of Burroughs. He is responsible for the education of Lucien [Carr], whom I had found, in lieu of his anarchy (rather than in spite of it), an extremely important person: “I lean with a fearful attraction over the depths of each creature’s possibilities and weep for all that lies atrophied under the heavy lid of custom and morality”—and—“The bastard alone has the right to be natural.” (Gide) These lines elicit a picture of the Burroughs thought. However, the psychoanalytical probing has upset me prodigiously. (Kerouac, Orpheus Emerged, 159–60)

Leaving aside for a moment the “education of Lucien,” the quotations that come after the colon in Kerouac’s journal entry appear at first to be citing Burroughs, and this impression is reinforced by Kerouac’s following comment: “These lines elicit a picture of the Burroughs thought.” The only thing separating Burroughs from the quotations apparently attributed to him here is the single word in parenthesis giving their true provenance: “(Gide).” Kerouac’s association of Burroughs with Gide is thus made all the more striking by the format of his journal entry, whose punctuation and construction insinuate their virtual identification.4 Whether or not Gide was the source of “the Burroughs thought,” the larger aim of both their

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works was certainly to overthrow oppressive social and familial structures to escape the death-in-life of “custom and morality.” In his journal, Kerouac makes a more exact connection between Burroughs and Gide via the young Lucien Carr, whose “education” casts Burroughs as a tutor, anticipating Ginsberg’s photographic captions in implying that the relation of student to tutor combines pedagogy with pederasty. The specific source of Kerouac’s quotations from Gide strengthens that significance, since he was copying into his own journal one of Gide’s fictional journal entries from The Counterfeiters (1925), a novel whose combination of literary and sexual awakening exercised a “fearful attraction” within the early Beat circle. The closing line of Kerouac’s journal entry—“However, the psychoanalytical probing has upset me prodigiously” (Orpheus Emerged, 160)—also suggests that he made the Burroughs-Gide connection out of his own anxieties about his sexual identity, stirred up by Burroughs in his capacity as his master. Kerouac’s disquiet here hints at the wider historical context that will govern the significance of Burroughs’ own references to Gide; that is to say, the pejorative moralistic and moralizing dominant view of Gide, according to mid-century American values. This view is revealed with great force and clarity in a letter concerning both Kerouac and Burroughs written just a month before Kerouac’s entry in his journal. In February 1945, Louis Ginsberg invoked Gide in a letter to his son’s professor at Columbia, Lionel Trilling, worried that young Allen had “fallen in with some undesirable friends,” certainly thinking above all of Burroughs and Kerouac (Ginsberg, Family Business, 6). What makes Ginsberg’s friends “undesirable” is their seduction of his son into “making clever but false verbal rationalizations that the immoralist way of life (à la Gide, I think) is a valid one […] He seeks to philosophise abnormality into normality” (5). In his father’s eyes, Ginsberg as a reader of The Counterfeiters had in effect himself become a counterfeit (“clever but false”) and had become immoral by imitating the author of The Immoralist (Gide’s L’Immoraliste, 1902). Louis Ginsberg’s values look back at Kerouac’s from the other end of the telescope, as it were, but the apparently opposite point of view of Gide held by Kerouac in his 1945 journal gives way to one astonishingly similar to that of Ginsberg’s father in his first published novel, where The Counterfeiters is discussed at length as precisely “a novel about the falsity of people” (Kerouac, The Town and the City, 153). What makes this inversion so significant is that once again Kerouac associates Gide with Burroughs to the point of identification. In The Town and the City, “the notorious Monsieur Gide,” “noted for his monstrous

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perversity of character” and as an “unnatural corrupter of youth” (154), is indeed linked to Burroughs via the character of Dennison, a thinly disguised portrait, who, with an affected sarcasm, is accused of being a “first-rate fabricator of Gidean romances, my dear” (393). Through a chain of associations in Kerouac’s novel, the name of Gide therefore stands for both literary and sexual corruption, spelling out what Louis Ginsberg’s letter had left to be understood between the lines: for “abnormality,” read “homosexuality.” When two years later, in April 1952, Allen Ginsberg himself asserted the Burroughs-Gide connection, it would unsurprisingly be on the same ground of sexual identity. What makes Ginsberg’s triangulation of Burroughs, Gide and homosexuality particularly notable is its context: an “Appreciation” he penned for Ace Books in his capacity as Burroughs’ amateur literary agent to promote and preface his first novel, Junky. In a very material way, therefore, Ginsberg was bringing into Burroughs’ first published work the use of Gide as a marker of the identity established two years earlier by Kerouac’s own first published novel, as well as seven years earlier in his private journal. In his “Appreciation,” Ginsberg filled in the missing past of Junky’s narrator, William Lee: His next move, in true American style, was the Grand Tour of Europe. He spent a year in Paris in the early thirties, went on through Germany and Austria (as did his English contemporaries in the Isherwood-Auden group), and ended up in Cairo, looking at the pyramids with the practiced eye of an archaeology student. He spent some time in the cities of the north coast of Africa, earlier and later popularized by Gide and Paul Bowles, and returned then to America. (Ginsberg, “An Appreciation,” in Burroughs, Junky, 147)

The overseas trips taken in “true American style” ironically feature scenes of un-American sexual tourism, starting in Europe by parenthetically invoking two of the most well-known English homosexual writers, Isherwood and Auden (in Berlin), and culminating in North Africa with Gide (Algeria) and Bowles (Morocco). This much was historically accurate, since in summer 1934 Burroughs had indeed visited Biskra and Touggourt with his friend Rex Weisenberger (Miles, Burroughs: A Life, 55). The real significance of these specific locations, however, is to identify his journey as a literary pilgrimage, since Burroughs was following in the footsteps of Gide’s own North African travels as documented in his journals, Amyntas. Mopsus. Feuilles de route. De Biskra à Touggourt. Le Renoncement au voyage (1906) and, more importantly, his novel set partly in Biskra, L’Immoraliste (1902).

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The (Im)moralist Although Ginsberg imitated a mid-century moral tone in his 1952 “Appreciation” by referring to “subterranean vices” (Ginsberg, “An Appreciation,” in Burroughs, Junky, 148), what is striking in retrospect is that, to help promote Junky, a novel supposedly focused on Burroughs’ identity as a drug addict, he should think to invoke by association Burroughs’ sexual identity at all. There was no need to reference Gide here, let alone to imply the particular relevance of The Immoralist. This is what makes even more surprising and meaningful the use to which Burroughs himself then put Ginsberg’s text. For later that same year, he took it as a kind of template for the preface that his publishers now required him to write for Junky and, while cutting out the names of Auden, Isherwood and Bowles, he left in Gide’s. If Ginsberg’s evocation of Gide was gratuitous, the fact that Burroughs erased it only to then reinscribe the name within his preface makes plain how very odd its appearance there really is. While redacting the “Grand Tour” described by Ginsberg and omitting all reference to North Africa, Burroughs introduced into his preface to Junky instead a list of authors as symptoms of his sense of difference from others at an early age: “I read more than was usual for an American boy of that time and place: Oscar Wilde, Anatole France, Baudelaire, even Gide” (Burroughs, Junky, xxxvi).5 From Wilde to Gide by way of France and Baudelaire, the list of what the young Lee read is marked by three features: most obviously, it is emphatically French (three out of four names); it is framed by writers well-known for their homosexuality; and it gives special emphasis to the writer named last: “even Gide.” Why even Gide? As shorthand, “Gide” is highly suggestive but wide open to interpretation, standing for both the homosexual author and his literary oeuvre without pointing to any specific elements of either or both. Burroughs’ allusion to Gide is as puzzling as it is significant and therefore requires unpacking. Oliver Harris has persuasively argued for an aesthetic explanation, in which Gide’s name stands for a “suspect sophistication” (The Secret of Fascination, 71). However, this applies to the author of the modernist antinovel The Counterfeiters. That is, in a sense, the “obvious” meaning behind the name of Gide: because of the text’s fame in its own right; because we know how important it was for Burroughs, Kerouac and the original Beat circle of the mid-1940s; and because it features so prominently in The Town and the City. But an aesthetic case doesn’t work for Gide’s earlier realist work such as The Immoralist, and it is surely this text that lies behind Burroughs’ evocative phrasing, “even Gide.” Why? Because when

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Burroughs references Gide in his preface to Junky, he is echoing Ginsberg’s own reference to Gide in his “Appreciation” to Junky (written just a couple of months earlier), and from his allusion to the “north coast of Africa” we know Ginsberg meant—and Burroughs knew he meant—The Immoralist. Two or three years later, Burroughs then reworked this passage from his preface to Junky into a short routine, a satirical skit about the reminiscences of youthful homoerotic encounters, and retained Gide’s name in another but different list of four writers: “I had read Oscar Wilde and Gide and Proust and Havelock Ellis” (Burroughs, Interzone, 122). Proust and Havelock Ellis here replace Anatole France and Baudelaire, bringing out into the open the construction of a canon of homosexual literature, into which Burroughs ambivalently inserts himself. Revising the preface to Junky in order to create an homosexual genealogy in this routine, Burroughs now brings to the fore the crucial pairing, which is of the writers named first and last in the preface but now placed together: Wilde and Gide. “Wilde and Gide”: the repeated sequence of the names is important not only in terms of chronology (Gide had died in February 1951, just eighteen months before Burroughs wrote the preface to Junky, whereas Wilde died a half-century earlier in 1900), but in terms of causality and literary genealogy: Wilde leads to Gide. As Burroughs knew, Gide’s novel The Immoralist featured a fictionalization of Wilde in the figure of Ménalque, a non-too-subtle marker of Wilde’s own enormous personal and aesthetic impact on Gide. Having made his Gidean pilgrimage to Biskra in 1934, Burroughs was surely familiar with the famous encounter that had taken place there between Gide and Wilde forty years earlier, when Wilde had forced Gide to fully embrace his homosexuality, a scene of sexual awakening also fictionalized in The Immoralist. The biographical relationship between Wilde and Gide as discussed, for example, by Jonathan Dollimore in the “Wilde and Gide in Algiers” chapter of his classic study Sexual Dissidence (1991), falls outside the textual scope of this reading, but Burroughs’ repeated association of their names does enable us to see what lies behind his initial tantalizing reference to “even Gide.” Dollimore describes how Wilde set out to shatter the young Frenchman’s “self-identity, rooted as it was in a Protestant ethic and high bourgeois moral rigour and repression, which generated a kind of conformity which Wilde scorned” (Dollimore, 3). In other words, Wilde wanted Gide to become the author of the very lines from The Counterfeiters quoted by Kerouac, lamenting, and aiming to liberate “all that lies atrophied under the heavy lid of custom and morality”—lines which

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themselves reworked The Immoralist, whose narrator attains “consciousness of untouched treasures somewhere lying covered up, hidden, smothered by culture and decency and morality” (Gide, The Immoralist, 137). However, the point here is not only the shift in values that required Gide to embrace what he first saw as “evil,” namely his latent homosexual desire, but the actual process by which Wilde communicated those values. Richard Ellmann describes this process as “psychic possession”; “in effect, Wilde spiritually seduced Gide” (qtd. in Dollimore, 3, 5). These terms are uncannily similar to those used by Louis Ginsberg in his 1945 letter and by Kerouac in The Town and the City, and if we return to Burroughs’ preface to Junky, we find a further twist to this Gidean tale of seduction and corruption. Rather than invoking Gide’s name in a physical journey undertaken overseas, as had Ginsberg in his “Appreciation,” Burroughs in his preface to Junky locates Gide in a list of authors read at home by a young boy, a backdating that alters the name’s significance. His reading of Gide is no longer connected with his future destiny—as the writer of Junky—but with his past and present behavior, as is implied by the sentence that immediately follows the words “even Gide”: “I formed a romantic attachment for another boy” (Burroughs, Junky, xxxvi). The causality is all the more striking for being left in the form of a mere juxtaposition: after reading Gide, Lee became homosexual. Burroughs thus goes one better than Kerouac in The Town and the City, where Gide is “regarded as an unnatural corrupter of French youth” (154), since in the preface to his own first published novel, the queer French writer now proves able to reach into the Midwest and corrupt the morals of a wholesome American boy. Or to put it in terms of the Burroughs–Gide–Wilde triangular relation, as Gide had been sexually awakened by Wilde, so Burroughs claims he had been by Gide. The implicit gay literary genealogical tradition that runs from Wilde to Gide to Burroughs invites us to ask to what extent did the aesthetic transformation of Gide, that went together with his ethical transformation, go for Burroughs too. To answer this, we need to recognize that Burroughs’ invocation of Gide did not properly belong in Junky at all, but in Queer, which he wrote at the same time he completed the preface to Junky in summer 1952. Critics have perhaps understandably overlooked the importance of Gide for Queer because Burroughs’ act of naming oddly occurs in Junky, and even the one full-length critical study to focus on Burroughs’ sexuality, Jamie Russell’s Queer Burroughs, makes references to Wilde but none to Gide.6 Had Gide’s name appeared in Queer, it might have prompted us to recognize in Burroughs’ text another, doubly

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displaced allusion to Gide. For in his novel characterized by an almost complete absence of cultural reference, the solitary literary name of Frank Harris—the Irish writer and Wilde’s biographer—stands out and invites speculation. It is quite possible that Burroughs’ allusion to Frank Harris is not only a coded invocation of Wilde, but also, through Wilde, of Gide. An encrypted reference within the text of Queer is certainly plausible, since the narrative is constantly evoking hidden meaning and a broader sense of enigmatic or heavily coded communication: “When Lee talked, he seemed to mean more than what he said” (Burroughs, Queer, 21). It would also confirm the ambivalence that underlies Burroughs’ seemingly gratuitous naming of Gide in the “wrong” text: in Junky, rather than where it belonged, in Queer. In the ethical and aesthetic senses implied by Kerouac in The Town and the City, Queer is the obviously “Gidean” novel, a text of “monstrous perversity” because of the predatory behavior of its narrator, William Lee, and the obscene routines that pour out of his mouth. It is entirely fitting that this was Kerouac’s own immediate verdict in the manuscript of Doctor Sax, which he wrote while staying with Burroughs in Mexico City the summer Burroughs composed Queer. The manuscript identifies Burroughs and his novel in terms of Gide through a series of allusions7 and comparisons between “Bull Hubbard” (based on Burroughs) and Sax himself. While framed in a fictional context, the “secret, malevolent leer” concealed under Sax’s slouch hat in particular points to an image of Burroughs truly beyond the human pale, beyond even Gide: “He knew something that no other man knew; a something reptilian; pray, was he a man?” (Kerouac, Doctor Sax, 127, 129). The humanist terms of Kerouac’s question here would resonate throughout Burroughs’ reception; think of Edmund White’s 1981 interview titled “This is not a mammal.” But more immediately, they lead us into Gide’s novel The Immoralist, published fifty years before Burroughs wrote Queer, in which the latent homosexual narrator, Michel, is directly challenged by his wife, Marceline: “You like what is inhuman” (Gide, The Immoralist, 152). Marceline is actually referring to the desert on the way to Touggourt, and there is no desert in Burroughs’ Queer to test what “human” means for a Western couple in an alien land. In this vein, Ginsberg’s pairing of Gide with Paul Bowles gestures towards The Sheltering Sky (1949) much more naturally than to Queer. But the obvious differences in plot and setting between Queer and The Immoralist indicate what Burroughs couldn’t possibly take from Gide, which turns out to be as important as what he did.

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“A fearful attraction” Gide’s short, highly accomplished novel of psychological realism differs in key respects from the fragmentary novella that Burroughs abandoned incomplete and left unpublished for thirty years. Most obviously, while Gide’s narrating protagonist, Michel, undergoes a journey of sexual self-discovery, William Lee begins his narrative fully conscious of his sexuality. Both writers drew heavily on personal experience here; Burroughs was not following Gide’s narrative trajectory but his own. However, there are points of textual intersection, both general and precise, which imply the relevance of The Immoralist for Queer. At the most formal level, Gide makes constant use of the ellipsis—the narrative even ends with one—as does Burroughs in Queer. These ellipses are highly unusual for the French author, as well as for Burroughs at this time, and give to the sexual ambivalence described in their novels a formal corollary, a way to speak the unspeakable. To put it another way, in each case, the punctuation dramatizes and visualizes the resistance to meaning or explanation of what most concerns them. Gide prefaces his narrative with an account of his method, which is to refuse to “take sides,” to pass moral judgment, because—making use of a notable ellipsis—he is “very loath to… conclude” (The Immoralist, 7-8). Gide’s only conclusion—“I have not tried to prove anything” (8)—is echoed precisely by Burroughs’ narrator, William Lee, who has no interest “to prove anything to anybody” (Queer, 43), and more generally by Burroughs’ text, whose incompleteness is itself the sign of a refusal or inability to conclude. Above all, the central drama of Gide’s story, which coincides with the story of sexual awakening, is the discovery of a hidden dimension, a secret world behind and beyond that of mundane appearances and tedious limitations. Can a man, wonders Michel, do “nothing but repeat himself?”: It seemed to me then that I had been born to make discoveries of a kind hitherto undreamed of; and I grew strangely and passionately eager in the pursuit of my dark and mysterious researches, for the sake of which, I well knew, the searcher must abjure and repudiate culture and decency and morality. (The Immoralist, 137)

In Queer, Lee’s contempt for “middle-class morality” and for “the stupid, ordinary, disapproving people who kept him from doing what he wanted to do” (Queer, 35, 86–87) is phrased negatively. It is only his quest for yagé, and with it the possibility of telepathic communication, that confirms an accompanying commitment to

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“dark and mysterious researches,” which might lead to “undreamed of ” radical change rather than repetition. That is to say, Burroughs, in contrast to Gide, and against the expectations raised by the text’s title, signally fails to make sexuality the central issue of Queer: the retrospective introduction he penned on its publication in 1985 even makes the narrative more about the effects of drug-withdrawal than desire. When Burroughs does spell out the nature of his “researches” in his early work, he will indeed identify it not with desire but with drugs, as in “The Conspiracy,” the short story where Lee claims to have been “searching for some secret, some key”: “The addict has glimpsed the formula, the bare bones of life, and this knowledge has destroyed for him the ordinary sources of satisfaction that make life endurable” (Interzone, 110). When Burroughs addresses his sexual identity, as in the second list he made of his youthful readings featuring the name of Gide, it is emphatically a routine, a “second-rate novel kick” mocking his own identity and ambitions, and belittling the very idea of a gay literary genealogy: “After all, so many great writers had been like that” (Interzone, 122). However, Queer closely follows The Immoralist by representing sexual desire for the other as a sensation of physical projection. Focusing on one boy in a group of six or seven in Ecuador, Lee “could feel himself in the body of the boy,” a scenario that extends an earlier scene when he strains “to enter the other’s body, to breathe with his lungs, see with his eyes, learn the feel of his viscera and genitals” (Queer, 85, 33). In The Immoralist, Michel experiences a very similar kind of physical “sympathy” with Arab boys whose bodies he desires, so that “their alien sensations immediately awoke the echo of [his] own—no vague echo, but a sharp and precise one” such that he “seemed to feel things with their senses rather than with [his] own” (114). But once again, it is the difference between Gide and Burroughs’ novels that is much more crucial than what they have in common. To begin with, Lee experiences the pull of desire not as an awakening to a world of suppressed sensations, but as a physical torment, an agony; whereas Michel experiences a “recrudescence of life, the influx of a richer, warmer blood” (The Immoralist, 52), Lee “felt the tearing ache of limitless desire” (Queer, 85). Metaphorically feeding on the warm blood of their young bodies, Michel eulogizes the racial and class of the “others” that he desires and vampiristically possesses. In contrast, Lee subjects his own desire for such bodies to grotesque exaggeration, as when drooling over a Mexican boy: “Taint as if it was being queer, Allerton. After all, they’s only Mexicans” (66). In this way, Queer brings the colonialist sexual exploitation of Gide’s text out into the open and presses it to a point of satirical excess.

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Lee’s behavior and Burroughs’ ethical values are nevertheless left uncomfortably open to judgment. To recall the terms of Gide’s preface to The Immoralist, Burroughs too fails to make his moral position clear. In Queer we sometimes know when Lee is being parodic; for example, when fabricating the moment he recognized his sexuality: “I thought of the painted, simpering female impersonators I had seen in a Baltimore night club. Could it be possible that I was one of those subhuman things?” (Queer, 35). But elsewhere, Lee’s routines run away with him, to the extent of “coming like dictation” and carrying on when nobody is listening, and it becomes increasingly clear that he fails to coincide with his speech every bit as much as he fails to coincide with his body: “I’m disembodied. I can’t use my own body for some reason” (57, 88). In this sense, while not “subhuman,” Lee shockingly lacks the faculties we normally take to define the human (agency, language, body). Far from discovering his true self, as Gide’s Michel does, Burroughs’ Lee appears to be losing it altogether. Lee’s psychic collapse in Queer exposes an inner void in subjectivity that Burroughs would press further in Naked Lunch: “‘Possession’ they call it… […] As if I was usually there but subject to goof now and then… Wrong! I am never here…” (184-85; Burroughs’ emphasis). This brief comparative analysis of Burroughs and Gide’s novels helps us to realize that, in Queer, the ontological status of William Lee as both a character and as an autobiographical stand-in for Burroughs is precisely a matter of whether or not “I” am here. For in writing Queer, Burroughs retained Lee as a character and nom-de-plume, while making a dramatic shift to the third-person narration from the first-person narration of Lee in Junky. Burroughs therefore seems to have followed the request that Wilde famously made of Gide, whose preference for confessional writing he disliked: to “never write “I” again… In art, you see, there is no first person” (qtd. in Dollimore, 74).8 Looking back at the writing of Queer on its publication thirty years later, Burroughs crucially interpreted his own shift of narrating person in terms of his motivation as a writer, or rather his inability in 1952 to lay claim to it: “While it was I who wrote Junky, I feel that I was being written in Queer” (128). Although critics have been rightly suspicious of his retrospective introduction to Queer, it is unarguable that when he claims that “Lee is being inexorably pressed into the world of fiction,” Burroughs utterly blurs the distinction between himself and his fictionalized self, “Lee.” It is no coincidence that the context for this blurring of textual insides and outsides is Burroughs’ notorious “appalling conclusion”: that Queer was “motivated and formed by an event which is never mentioned”—the shooting of

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his wife, Joan Vollmer—and that he “would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death” (Queer, 131, 134–35).9 The terrible event external to his text suggests one reason why Burroughs should have been so ambivalent about Gide’s name. To echo the phrase from The Counterfeiters that had caught Kerouac’s attention, Burroughs surely felt a “fearful attraction” for The Immoralist because Michel achieves his sexual selfdiscovery only at the expense of the death of his wife, Marceline, an outcome that is the occasion for remorse, as well as mourning, admitting in effect his culpability. In the light of that fateful evening in September 1951 in Mexico City when Burroughs accidentally shot his wife, the narrative trajectory of Gide’s novel must have taken on a completely new meaning for him. For it could only mirror back to him his own life. Is this why, prompted by Ginsberg’s invocation of The Immoralist, and writing barely six months after his wife’s death, Burroughs was ambivalently but ineluctably drawn to thinking of “even Gide”? It would certainly explain why the allusion Burroughs made to Jean Cocteau at the very same period, only now inside the text of Queer—where a reference to The Immoralist might properly have appeared—shares the same enigmatic structure and almost the same encrypted content.

Cocteau: A Double Take Burroughs generally made disparaging comments about Cocteau on the few occasions he spoke about him in interviews. But if his textual presence in the Burroughs oeuvre has been either ignored or dismissed, it is probably because it’s not the expected one. That is to say, from biographical accounts and Beat cultural histories, we know that Cocteau’s Opium: The Diary of a Cure (Opium: Journal d’une désintoxication, 1930) featured on the shelves of Burroughs’ library that impressed Ginsberg and Kerouac in the mid-1940s. But Burroughs does not name Cocteau’s Opium in his preface to Junky, even though he would later make clear its relevance: “I always had a romantic literary relationship to drugs, like you find in De Quincey or in Cocteau’s Opium” (Lotringer, 388). The absence of Opium from Junky is all the more significant because, in his 1952 “Appreciation” that functioned as a template for Burroughs’ preface, Ginsberg once again made the expected allusion, inserting Cocteau’s name and book title in between Spengler and Baudelaire in his recollection of Burroughs’ famous library (Junky, 147). Instead of the literary reference we would expect—to

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Opium in Junky—Burroughs invokes a quite different Cocteau in Queer, when his central characters visit the cinema: “Lee and Allerton went to see Cocteau’s Orpheus” (32). As with Burroughs’ reference to Gide, so too with Cocteau: we must begin by recognizing that the allusion to his film in Queer cannot be understood like any other cultural reference featuring in a modern or postmodern novel. For one thing, it stands out as unique in the text: Queer makes no mention of any other film or book or artwork (except, as noted above, to Frank Harris, legible as a displaced reference to Gide via Wilde). The significance of naming Cocteau’s Orpheus (Orphée, 1950) is further enhanced by being far more than a passing allusion: on the contrary, Burroughs makes an entire scene out of it and has his characters enter into a discussion of Cocteau’s film. While such passages are common in the work of a writer like Kerouac, or other novelists drawn to staging cultural discussions that can operate as a mise-en-abîme of their fictional text, it is hard to think of anything remotely like this happening in any other Burroughs text.10 Its singular significance has also to be understood in terms of Queer’s openly autobiographical basis; far from thinking the reference has been made up, the reader assumes that if Lee and Allerton “see Cocteau’s Orpheus,” it is because Burroughs and Lewis Marker went to see it in real life. As with Burroughs’ reference to Gide, so too here, the extratextual dimension has to be considered in order to understand the significance of the reference’s very existence in the text. The critical history of Cocteau’s presence in Queer comprises a single parenthetical remark about his film—“a classic exploration of narcissism,” according to Jamie Russell (21)—that conforms to the widely held view of Cocteau’s lack of depth, his self-promoting and superficial brilliance. But in the context of Queer, the question of surfaces and depths, of what is visible and invisible, real and fantasy, is central to a narrative whose realism is so fragile that it finally collapses altogether. In part, this fragility is to do with the ostentatious artifice of Lee’s performances—‘“A hard day at the studio’, he said, in affected theatrical accents” (Queer, 27)—and, as his routines turn increasingly excessive, a sense of the menacing unconscious forces driving them. But more broadly, the atmosphere of Burroughs’ novel resembles Orpheus insofar as it echoes Cocteau’s film’s disturbing mix of the seemingly real and the apparently symbolic, actual locations (the bourgeois home of Orpheus and Eurydice, the café where the poets hang out, street scenes in Paris) and otherworldly mythic spaces (“la Zone”). In this general sense, the reference to Cocteau’s film functions as an allegory for

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Burroughs’ narrative whose central character himself appears at times “curiously spectral, as though you could see through his face” (10). To press the point and claim that Orpheus governs the eerie mood and ontological status of Queer may be to go too far, but Burroughs’ text does make evocations of Cocteau beyond the single scene in the cinema that suggest a larger appropriation. Thus in the Bar Cuba, where Lee and Allerton dine out after watching Cocteau’s film, Burroughs describes murals depicting mermaids, mermen and “androgynous beings”: the bar has “an interior like the set for a surrealist ballet’, whose “effect was disquieting” (Queer, 38). We are not told which “surrealist ballet” Burroughs has in mind, but it might plausibly be Le Boeuf sur le toit (1920), with music by Darius Milhaud, that is also set in a South American bar (in Brazil), and whose scenario was written by none other than Cocteau. While it is in keeping with the spirit of Burroughs’ text that the enigmatic quality of the surrealist décor itself functions enigmatically, in its “disquieting” effect, as well as in its disturbing sexuality, we can also recognize in it issues raised when “Lee and Allerton went to see Cocteau’s Orpheus.” To begin with, the scene in the cinema has a crucial and entirely pragmatic place within the plot, where it functions as part of Lee’s strategy of coming out to Allerton. Indeed, in the very next scene Lee regales him with the routine where he first makes his sexual identity and intentions fully explicit. Like the phrasing “even Gide” in the preface to Junky, taking Allerton to see Cocteau’s Orpheus might be read as a sign of homosexual seduction, a prelude to forming “a romantic attachment.” However, while the “narcissism” of Cocteau’s film might be obvious to a knowing spectator, Orpheus could certainly pass as straight to someone who (like Allerton) has little to no experience of gay culture or codes of communication. We might assume he lacks the necessary extra-diegetic knowledge, either about the Greek myth—of “Orpheus the founder of pederasty,” according to Ovid (Pollard, 444)—or about the French director—whose lovers featured in the film (Jean Marais playing Orpheus, Edouard Dermit playing Cégeste). Young Allerton might well not know what “Greek love” means either, and nothing in his dialogue with Lee about the film indicates he grasps why Lee has taken him to see it. If Cocteau’s film therefore functions within the narrative as the sign of a failed attempt to use a work of art to communicate, and as a sign of Allerton’s unsuitability as the object of Lee’s desire, it nevertheless suggests Burroughs’ precise understanding of Cocteau’s film, in which the urge to explain is itself constantly rebuked. As Heurtebise insists to Orpheus, while the poet stands

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before the mirror through which he must pass to enter the underworld: “It is not necessary to understand, but to believe!” [“Il ne s’agit pas de comprendre, il s’agit de croire!”]. Burroughs would also have savored the crucial scene that represents the poet’s muse as a mechanical mystery, when Orpheus takes dictation from his car radio; he may have recalled from his reading of Opium that Apollinaire was the source of one of the most cryptic phrases Orpheus writes down: “the bird sings with its fingers” [“l’oiseau chante avec ses doigts”]. There are suggestive parallels here with the routines that come to Lee “like dictation,” as well as with the pervasive haunting of both Lee as a character and Queer as a narrative by “some undercurrent of life that was hidden” (Queer, 84). And finally, although Burroughs’ fantasy space “Interzone” in Queer drew directly from the International Zone of Tangier, it surely also echoes “la Zone” in Orpheus, a ghostly netherworld that exists parallel to the conscious world of the living: “Far side of the world’s mirror,” to borrow a phrase from Naked Lunch (181). In view of such resonant echoes, which confirm how precisely relevant Cocteau’s film was to Burroughs, what Lee actually says after seeing Orpheus is vague and seemingly superficial: “He always gets some innaresting effects,” and; “The innaresting thing about Cocteau is his ability to bring the myth alive in modern terms” (Queer, 33). What we immediately notice in fact is not what Lee says but his repeated use of the idiomatic “innaresting.” The word sounds flippant, insincere; responding perhaps to Cocteau as a director of mere superficial cinematic “effects”, a master of trickery rather than substance. However, the opposite is equally possible, if not indicated given Lee’s habitual irony and the sense that he “seemed to mean more than what he said” (21): Lee is not merely “interested” by Cocteau’s effects or by his appropriation of the Orpheus myth; he is (in)arrested by them. What invites such a reading is the specific nature of the effects that feature in Cocteau’s film, indeed in all Cocteau’s films; since Lee notes that he always gets “innaresting effects,” we know he is a connoisseur of Cocteau’s cinema. While in Orpheus the standout “effect” is the way characters pass through mirrors, a trick performed using liquid mercury in one scene, the most recurrent of Cocteau’s trademark special effects is to run film in reverse. The trick is used several times in Orpheus, cleverly disguised so that, for example, a pair of gloves seem magically to put themselves on Orpheus’ hands. It is also used entirely openly at the end of the film, when Cocteau plays the entire scene of Orpheus’ descent into the underworld backwards, reversing time in order

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to undo the central tragic event of the film and rewrite the myth. The effect would have been “interesting” for most people, but for William Burroughs it would have been “innaresting” because of course the central event of Orpheus is the death of Orpheus’ wife, Eurydice. Orpheus kills Eurydice twice, once by neglect (he is too busy trying to improve his poetry by taking dictation from the car radio) and again, by careless accident, after he has taken her back from the underworld (glancing at her in the rearview mirror of the car, breaking the terms of her resurrection, that he must not look at her). Cocteau’s effects enable him to rewind time and end his film by giving the poet and his wife a second chance. In this way, Cocteau’s Orpheus, even more precisely than Gide’s The Immoralist, comes unbearably close to the death of Burroughs’ wife that remains a ghostly extratextual presence in Queer. Had he not killed Joan by neglect (abandoning her in order to romance Marker on the Central American journey fictionalized in Queer), and by carelessness (playing a shooting game with her when drunk)? Had Burroughs, stupidly performing a William Tell act, not tried to bring a “myth alive,” with deadly consequences that could not be undone or rewritten? To be clear, this is not to argue that the “real” significance of Cocteau or Gide for Burroughs is biographical. Rather, it is to establish that his allusions to the two French writers not only signal Burroughs’ literary genealogy and not only function as signs of seduction within the contexts of their use, but share a multilevel specificity: The Immoralist and Orpheus are narratives of homosexual desire that both feature the death of the protagonist’s wife in ways that can only have resonated uniquely for Burroughs. The references to Gide and Cocteau are there in his writing of mid-1952, linking the first two works of his oeuvre, both because of and despite mirroring Burroughs’ personal trauma and guilt. In fact, what Queer’s reference to Orpheus makes plain is the need to read Burroughs’ text twice. First, we read the narrative as a fictionalized chronology of events that actually happened: Burroughs, as we surmise, took Marker to see Orpheus in spring 1951, perhaps indeed hoping Cocteau’s film would help him seduce the young man he desired. Second, we read the text in terms of its chronology of composition a full year later, in spring 1952, and recognize that, by then, the film’s meaning has changed utterly; instead of the promise of desire, it was the fact of death. Writing the scene six months after killing his wife, Burroughs must now have found Orpheus the most appallingly ominous choice of film imaginable. Its importance and function as a cultural reference within his fiction is thus, retrospectively, imbued with another dimension of

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meaning precisely because it has become a factual reference in light of what happened, and Burroughs let it stand. In other words, what we have here is, far from coincidentally, precisely the bizarre double temporal structure of Burroughs’ notorious retrospective introduction to Queer. His intuition of Joan’s impending death is put there in terms of his having “precognitive” dreams and a “portentous second sight,” leading him to speak in terms of his character Lee “knowing and yet not knowing” what would happen, as if existing in two time zones and realities (Queer, 134, 132). Cocteau’s film haunts Burroughs’ introduction of 1985, just as it must have done his writing of Queer in 1952. Finally, while it is true that Cocteau appears only once in Burroughs’ published oeuvre, he makes a kind of ghostly second appearance if we take into account lines canceled on a draft manuscript. This is especially interesting because it doesn’t merely repeat the reference to Cocteau but, in a double movement, Burroughs uses Cocteau’s retrospective backward glance to look back at his own work in Queer. The canceled lines appear in a draft Burroughs made for the 1968 British edition of The Soft Machine, the final revision of his cut-up trilogy of novels, as part of new material concerning the “visiting” of beings in other people’s bodies, a kind of psychic haunting: His dreams were written by Francoise Sagan with musical accompaniment by Edith Piaf. I was not surprised to meet my old friend Cocteau but he was very surprised to meet me and did a double take from his last movie. (Burroughs, The Soft Machine, 271)

The references to Sagan and Piaf make these lines already unusual, since women are named even more rarely than men in Burroughs’ writing, and of course we note the emphatically French cultural context. We might also observe the unspoken connection between Cocteau and Piaf, who were not only friends but who died within hours of each other in October 1963. And although Sagan was alive and well at this time, just before these canceled lines, Burroughs introduced another rare reference to another dead French writer: “I am Anatole France le vieux cadavre de France. Your assignment resuscitate me!” (202; Burroughs’ emphasis). In a sign of how densely Burroughs is working here, how his text condenses intertextual references very much according to the logic of the “dreams” being invoked, the allusion to Anatole France not only takes us back to the preface to Junky, where, as we have seen, his name appears in an emphatically French list of authors in Burroughs/Lee’s

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early readings; it also anticipates the allusion Burroughs makes in this passage to his “old friend Cocteau.” By Cocteau’s “last movie” in these canceled lines, Burroughs meant The Testament of Orpheus (Le Testament d’Orphée, 1960) where Cocteau played himself as the poet. The idea of resuscitation has a very prominent role in the film because, in the somewhat obscure logic of its narrative, Cocteau must die and come back from the dead in order to escape being stuck in space-time. This curiously exact connection between Jean Cocteau and Anatole France does not, however, seem sufficient to explain their pairing here.11 Was Burroughs thinking back to the last time he referred in his texts to Cocteau and Anatole France, spring and summer 1952, in Queer and the preface to Junky respectively? Or should we read the “corpse” in question as not only a mortal physical body but also a body of work, an oeuvre? Both possibilities seem affirmed by Burroughs’ very precise allusion to the “double take” in Cocteau’s film. There are in fact numerous double takes in The Testament of Orpheus, including one when Cocteau passes his own “double” in the street and turns back to see him/himself; but the entire film is quite explicitly a “double take,” a retrospective on the Cocteau oeuvre. The Testament of Orpheus looks back above all at Orpheus, to the extent that most of its original cast members return (Edouard Dermit as Cégeste, Maria Casares as The Princess, Francois Périer as Heurtebise). The structure implied by the reference now becomes clear: as Cocteau used The Testament of Orpheus to look back at Orpheus, so too Burroughs’ evocation of Cocteau in The Soft Machine look backs at Queer. The Testament of Orpheus replays Orpheus at a formal level by employing its trick of reverse filming, which now functions even more openly as a way of travelling back in time in order to change the future. This theme was central to Burroughs’ work from the 1960s onwards, and features most explicitly in “The Mayan Caper” section of The Soft Machine. Here, the narrator travels back in time by learning “to talk and think backward on all levels—This was done by running film and sound track backward” (80). Clearly, Burroughs’ goal of rewriting history by reversing the film closely parallels the methods of Cocteau’s cinema, and these formal connections are themselves connected to highly specific actions. In a revision of Orpheus that must have resonated for Burroughs, in order to undo the past in The Testament of Orpheus, Cocteau requires someone to shoot him (with special bullets that travel faster than light). Although rightly considered a poor sequel to Orpheus and finale to his cinematic

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oeuvre, Cocteau’s Testament is thus referenced by Burroughs in order to connect his experimental cut-up methods of the 1960s back to the significance of his allusion to Orpheus in Queer: a shared vision of desire and death, genealogy and guilt, the predestined future and the doomed dream of rewriting the past. Had Burroughs not canceled this passage for the 1968 edition of The Soft Machine, his two evocations of Cocteau would thus have framed the first decades of his literary oeuvre, and allowed Cocteau’s backward glance at his cinematic oeuvre to stand in for his own retrospective double take.

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Looking Back on Ginsberg’s “Howl” from “Apollinaire’s Grave”

Whitman: A Mountain Too Vast In May 1956, Allen Ginsberg sent Lionel Trilling a prepublication mimeo copy of “Howl,” along with a letter that implied the literary lineage in which he hoped to inscribe his new poem: “Though my tastes at school were not so, I’m reading a lot of Lorca, Apollinaire, Crane, Thomas—and Whitman” (Ginsberg, Howl, 176). A decade earlier, as a sophomore at Columbia, Ginsberg had lectured his professor on the need to take Rimbaud seriously. Now, on the verge of his sudden and spectacular rise to fame, he dismissed his former professor’s High Modernists (“Eliot & Pound are like Dryden & Pope”) in the name above all of Walt Whitman, still marginal to the university curriculum in the 1950s, famously declaring to Trilling: “He is a mountain too vast to be seen.”1 Since the publication of Howl and Other Poems in 1956, however, Whitman has loomed so large over Ginsberg and his most celebrated poem that it has been very difficult to see anything else. The nineteenth-century American poet has indeed eclipsed the much broader modernist genealogies tirelessly promoted by Ginsberg, most materially in the variorum edition of Howl published to mark the poem’s thirtieth anniversary, where his letter to Trilling is reprinted. Howl, Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript, and Variant Versions, Fully Annotated by Author (1986) both documented Ginsberg’s efforts to produce his own reception and in itself constituted a major text in that effort, one that might have taken studies of “Howl” in particular and Ginsberg’s poetry more broadly in a French direction—had Whitman, that vast literary mountain, not cast such a long shadow. Thirty years on, it is timely to pick up the trail hinted at by Ginsberg’s reference to Apollinaire in his letter to Trilling and, analyzing “Howl” through its variorum incarnation, to reassess the place of French literature in his breakthrough as a poet.

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A landmark in Beat Studies scholarship, which had not previously been known for its attention to manuscripts, Ginsberg’s variorum edition of “Howl” brought together an impressive array of primary materials, as its full subtitle spelled out at almost comic length: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript, and Variant Versions, Fully Annotated by Author, with Contemporaneous Correspondence, Account of First Public Reading, Legal Skirmishes, Precursor Texts, and Bibliography. But the book should not be taken at face value, for it is both more and other than the valuable documentary resource it appears to be. The edition has a sophistication and an agenda that has been missed even by Ginsberg’s most astute critics, such as Timothy Yu who reads its annotations as “testimony to the poem’s biographical grounding” (Yu, 25).2 What Yu has in mind are Ginsberg’s clarifications of private allusions in the vein of his famously cryptic reference to “N.C. secret hero of these poems,” that is Neal Cassady (Howl, 4). But the variorum edition in fact problematizes the poem’s grounding in biography, and focuses on quite different heroes: those poets whose texts constitute the literary lineage of “Howl,” which Ginsberg presents with varying degrees of secrecy, very much in the manner of “Howl” itself. This unsuspected parallel is not coincidental: the variorum edition can be understood as a response dictated by the cryptic strategy of Ginsberg’s original poem. What it reveals above all are secrets about the formal affiliations of “Howl,” and this chapter establishes in the genealogy of Ginsberg’s poem the central place of those French poets long hidden in Whitman’s shadow, from the least secret—Apollinaire and Artaud—to the most hidden and most significant, shadowed behind them, St.-John Perse. As the following analysis reveals, Ginsberg constructed the genealogy of his poetics through a threefold strategy of quotation, translation and encryption, and once this complex strategy is understood, it becomes clear that it was largely through his engagement with French literature that Ginsberg developed the very aesthetic and hermeneutic method of his poetry. To recognize the key role that French poetry played in the genesis of “Howl,” it is necessary to grasp not only the poem’s prehistory but, crucially, how and why its reception has overlooked or obscured that role. If the poem’s reception has consistently entailed retelling the same national narratives at the expense of others, there are several obvious reasons for it, ranging from the Americanist expertise of Ginsberg’s critics to the fact that the 1956 original publication of Howl and Other Poems appeared to have nothing whatsoever to do with a Franco-American literary history. The titles of both Jonah Raskin’s study, American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the Making of the Beat Generation

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(2004), and Jason Shinder’s anniversary volume, The Poem That Changed America: “Howl” Fifty Years Later (2006), sum up the emphatically nationalistic historical context in which “Howl” has almost always been read. And indeed, Ginsberg’s first volume of poetry seems to fit perfectly the trajectory of his poetic apprenticeship in the standard American-centric accounts. Such accounts limit the role of French literature to the young poet’s “New Vision” infatuation with Rimbaud in the mid-1940s; then, passing quickly over the phase of sonnet writing modeled on his curriculum at Columbia (“college imitations of Marlowe, Marvell and Donne” [Collected Poems, 749]), narrate his famous 1948 vision of William Blake, before proceeding to stress his first breakthrough inspired by William Carlos Williams; and end by declaring that Ginsberg achieves in “Howl” the Beat equivalent to Whitman’s “barbaric yawp.” According to this now familiar story, from the Francophilia of youthful fascination, via deferential copying of the English canon, in the 1950s Ginsberg in two stages realizes his destiny as a radical American poet. In terms of content, “Howl” stands with Whitmanian candor against the mass conformity, materialism, red and lavender scares of Cold War America; while, formally, the poem adopts Whitman’s democratically open verse with its long catalogs and lists to celebrate the self and refuse all hierarchies. This specifically American frame of reference is upheld by Howl and Other Poems as a whole, which has an introduction by Williams and is graced by a personal appearance from Whitman himself in “A Supermarket in California.” True, Lorca is in Ginsberg’s supermarket too, but since he is the “fairy son of Whitman” (Collected Poems, 167),3 the Spaniard’s presence might be read as an act of literary Americanization rather than a gesture of internationalism. As for “Howl” itself, the only writers it names are Poe and Blake, while its geographical references are as insistently local as the Brooklyn Bridge (mentioned twice). The addition in the “Footnote” to “Howl” of “Holy Paris!” as part of a list blessing New York, San Francisco, Peoria, Seattle, Tangiers, Moscow and Istanbul hardly points the reader towards France and away from San Francisco and Berkeley, the locations given for the text’s composition (Howl, 8). Leaving aside the youthful “New Vision” phase that Ginsberg shared with Burroughs and Kerouac, and that Chapter 1 has discussed in relation to Rimbaud, the logical place to look for his relationship with French literature has been those poems written after “Howl” and in France. While “Howl” was going on trial in San Francisco, Ginsberg had relocated to Paris by fall 1957, a move that had been on the horizon so long that he mocked its inevitability throughout the decade. “I don’t want to go so much to Europe and play the

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Whitman character,” he admitted in 1952; “I don’t want to go to Paris so I can write: How strange I am in Paris;” and he continued the self-parody two years later: “Paris! City of Light! Ici mouru Racine! Here Proust sipped his delicate tea” (Kerouac and Ginsberg, 155). When he finally arrived, however, Ginsberg seemed to abandon his irony: “I am all hung up on French poetry,” he told Kerouac that November, specifying he had been “reading book on Apollinaire and learning more French” (210). Going on to describe finding fellow poet Gregory Corso “like an Apollinaire, prolific and golden period for him,” in this letter, Ginsberg gives away the hopes he had for his own writing in Paris (367). As the biographers and cultural historians of the Beats have noted, in Paris Ginsberg wrote several important poems, two of whose titles associated him with French poets: “At Apollinaire’s Grave” and “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!” (that evokes Artaud via his infamous text “Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society”). But although the first of these two poems in particular rewards close analysis, it would be a fundamental error to associate either of them with the geographic and cultural location of their writing. Here it is necessary to contest the argument made by Richard Swope, the only critic to have made a sustained reading of “At Apollinaire’s Grave,” one that takes the poem as evidence of Ginsberg’s engagement with “literary Paris” (188).4 Rather than reading it as a homage demonstrating what “Ginsberg produced during and from his experience in Paris” in 1957, we should identify a more subtle strategic logic at work in this poem that Ginsberg himself acknowledged three decades later. Asked about the significance of Apollinaire for him, in 1989 he replied: Yes, when I lived in Paris I wrote a homage at his tomb. And it was supposed to be a signal to the American academics where I was coming from, but I don’t think they picked up on it. (Spontaneous Mind, 504)

To speak of where he “was coming from” makes clear the backward glance in Ginsberg’s “signal”—that it was aimed at an American audience before he left for Paris—and we might add that academics have still not picked up on his signal, continuing either to neglect or misread the importance for “Howl” of those French poets hidden in Whitman’s shadow. Ginsberg’s precision that “At Apollinaire’s Grave” was intended as a signal to “American academics” certainly registers how acutely he felt in 1956 that he was not being taken seriously, which, to a significant extent, meant not being read as a poet working within the French, as well as within the American, tradition.

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Prophecy at “Apollinaire’s Grave” To take “At Apollinaire’s Grave” seriously means going beyond the biographical narrative that begins with the first lines’ simple factual statements of location and purpose: I visited Père Lachaise to look for the remains of Apollinaire the day the U.S. President appeared in France for the grand conference of heads of state so let it be the airport at blue Orly a springtime clarity in the air over Paris Eisenhower winging in from his American graveyard. (Collected Poems, 180)

It means going beyond the political irony that Ginsberg implies by the parallel he draws between his visit to the Paris cemetery and Eisenhower’s arrival at Orly airport. For while the president’s coming to Paris for the first summit meeting of NATO was of course politically significant, Ginsberg’s planes and airports are also allusions to the aerial vision and references of Apollinaire’s Zone some forty years earlier (“The airplane lands at last without folding its wings”) (in Howl, 180). Equally, while Ginsberg’s attention to “that fantastic cranial bandage” points to Apollinaire’s head wound from the First World War and, as he notes, “the West is at war again,” the poem does not—unlike “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!” or “America”—maintain such political rhetoric (Collected Poems, 180). Rather, it uses the presence of the poet at a site that marks another poet’s absence to construct a hermeneutic procedure precisely based on degrees of presence and absence, on what can be recognized and what remains encrypted, there but hidden in plain sight. Ginsberg begins by describing his walk through the cemetery with Peter Orlovsky to look “for the lost address of a notable Frenchman of the Void” and pay their “tender crime of homage to his helpless menhir” (Collected Poems, 180). The “crime of homage” is such a puzzling phrase that it immediately invites speculative biographical readings. Since “an illusory mist as thick as marijuana smoke” floats above the “foggy graves” of the poem, did Ginsberg and Orlovsky pay their homage by inhaling inspirational drugs in the cemetery? Or, since his menhir is “a piece of thin granite like an unfinished phallus,” was their “tender crime” an illegal sexual act they committed on Apollinaire’s gravestone? If textual evidence supports the latter and evidence from Ginsberg’s journals the former,5 neither possibility should

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distract us from the real crime here, which is literary, something Ginsberg insists upon in the ironic act at the center of the poem’s first part: and lay my temporary American Howl on top of his silent Calligramme for him to read between the lines with Xray eyes of Poet as he by miracle had read his own death lyric in the Seine I hope some wild kidmonk lays his pamphlet on my grave for God to read me on cold winter nights in heaven (Collected Poems, 180)

The act of homage is multilayered and carefully judged tonally: the poet-narrator offers his “Howl” as “temporary”—of its moment in time, not yet in eternity like Apollinaire’s “Calligrammes”—while by opposing “American” to “silent,” he admits to a noisy vulgarity in “Howl.” There is an element of Ginsberg’s typical self-mockery here: what nerve, to fantasize at Apollinaire’s graveside future acts of homage paid to him! Such a rudimentary reading misses, however, that Ginsberg combines being loud and open with also being silent and subtle, and that beyond the homage brashly announced in the poem’s title, there lies an affiliation that works through the quietest of hints. To recognize the hints or “signals” Ginsberg was giving in “At Apollinaire’s Grave,” and to see in them a hermeneutic strategy, a code for inscribing his literary lineage through concealment and revelation, we have to reread the opening of the poem. More precisely, we have to pay attention to the epigraph that comes between the poem’s title and its first line. Before Ginsberg makes his search for Apollinaire’s physical remains, a search that can only be biographical, he gives us what will always “remain” of the poet, his actual words:6 …voici le temps Où l’on connaîtra l’avenir Sans mourir de connaissance (Collected Poems, 180)

Even readers untutored in French would identify these words as those of Apollinaire, given the very title of Ginsberg’s poem; but why not name their source? Visibly quoting from and yet failing to indicate the provenance of these lines as Apollinaire’s “Les collines” (“The Hills”), at the very outset of his text Ginsberg addresses the aesthetic and hermeneutic issue of naming names, of when to do it and when not. What makes the reticence of the epigraph so striking is that “At Apollinaire’s Grave” is otherwise so explicit in its naming of literary heroes, giving us not only Apollinaire but also Artaud, Jacob, Picasso,

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Rousseau, Tzara, Breton, Cendrars, Vaché, Cocteau, Rigaut and Gide. In this respect, Ginsberg’s text strongly resembles the other major poem he wrote at this time, “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!,” which gives us Artaud, Genet, Lorca, Crane, Whitman, Mayakovsky, Lindsay, Blok, Pound and Poe. Such long lists draw attention to themselves, as well as to the poetic lineage Ginsberg desired for his poetry. But the most significant connection between these two poems and the most telling gesture weaving “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!” into the French tradition is again as subtle as subtle can be. In “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!,” Ginsberg quotes the very same verse from “Les collines” that forms the epigraph of “At Apollinaire’s Grave,” but this time in the body of the poem, in English, and without quotation marks: “Now is the time for prophecy without death as a consequence” (Collected Poems, 168). Although the presence of Apollinaire in “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!” has not quite passed unnoticed, its complex significance has. The first draft of “At Apollinaire’s Grave” figures in Ginsberg’s journals under the heading “Now time for Prophecy,” and editor Gordon Ball’s footnote rightly notices the return of Apollinaire’s verse in “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!” (Journals, 404). However, Ball overlooks the originality of the recurrent quotation. That is, we would naturally assume Ginsberg was quoting Apollinaire in translation, but in fact, no translation of “Les collines” was available at the time he composed “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!” and “At Apollinaire’s Grave,” between November 1957 and spring 1958. The first translation of Apollinaire’s Calligrammes by Roger Shattuck was not printed until 1971; “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!” was written and indeed published in Kaddish and Other Poems more than a decade earlier: its composition therefore implied an unprecedented act of translation, and a very revealing one of Ginsberg’s engagement with French poetry and of its role in the development of his aesthetics and hermeneutics. Comparing Ginsberg’s translation to Shattuck’s clarifies both the nature and the depth of the poet’s relationship to Apollinaire’s works. Shattuck translates “voici le temps/Où l’on connaîtra l’avenir/Sans mourir de sa connaissance” as “The time is here/In which the future can be known/Without death as a consequence” (Apollinaire, Selected Writings, 147). This translation has five words where Ginsberg has a single one—a word so fundamental to his poetry that it would become a landmark of its criticism: “prophecy.” In Ginsberg’s translation, “prophecy” boldly replaces the impersonal pronoun “on” in “où l’on connaîtra l’avenir” and becomes the heart of the verse: “Now is the time for prophecy without death as a consequence” (Collected Poems, 168). Not only is “prophecy” central under Ginsberg’s pen, it also clearly stands for “poetry.” Bearing in mind

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the trial “Howl” was undergoing at the time Ginsberg translated Apollinaire’s verse in “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!,” the line can logically be interpreted as “Now is the time for poetry without death as consequence,” “death” standing for the cumulative effect on the poet of censorship and social exclusion. Does Ginsberg’s audacious translation drag Apollinaire too far into his own territory? Or does it quite simply reflect the result of his finding himself so much at home in Apollinaire’s universe that he felt he had the necessary authority to recreate—rather than literally translate—his poetry? I would argue for the latter. Ginsberg’s bold insertion of “prophecy” inviting its equation with “poetry” is not far removed from Apollinaire’s own vision of the poet and his faculties, for “Les collines” does portray poets as prophets: Certain men stand out like hills Rising above their fellow men To see the future from afar Better than they see today Clearer than if it were the past. (Apollinaire, Selected Writings, 145)

It was an ambitious solution on Ginsberg’s part to condense what Apollinaire expressed in six words (“où l’on connaîtra l’avenir”) into a single one (“prophecy”), but we should admire his economical translation that turns three lines into perfect octameters. In comparison, Shattuck’s passive structure heavy with prepositions (“in which the future can be known”) stands closer to the original line, but is far less elegant. Ginsberg’s version is the distinctive work of a writertranslator. Every good translation of course includes the “becoming-writer” of its translator, but his or her name remains in the shadow of the authors’ name. Ginsberg’s translation is doubly transgressive in this sense: not only is it “unfaithful” to the original verse, it also furtively silences its author’s name. The epigraph of “At Apollinaire’s Grave” didn’t identify Apollinaire as its author, but its predominant position (outside the text) and its foreign language (French), its formatting (italics) and its placement within quotation marks guaranteed that readers wouldn’t take Ginsberg as its author either. In “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!” the poet’s relationship to French literature deepens as he goes several steps further: from quoting Apollinaire’s words to translating them without acknowledging their source, so that they are passed off as his own. In short, the “tender crime of homage” evoked in “At Apollinaire’s Grave” is fully materialized by Ginsberg’s secret act of translation in “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!”

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Primed by knowledge of the importance of Apollinaire’s “Les collines” and by Ginsberg’s repeated quotations of the poem’s passage dealing with death and prophecy, from “At Apollinaire’s Grave” to “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!,” we can, finally, identify in “Europe! Europe!” written a few months later a remarkably condensed series of allusions: “Apollonic radiance in hillsides/littered with empty tombs” (Collected Poems, 173). Here we have encryptions of the poet’s name (“Apollonic”) and of his poem “The Hills” (“hillsides”), as well as of Ginsberg’s graveyard “search” in Père Lachaise (“empty tombs”). The extreme density and obliqueness of these three allusions echo the imagistic method Ginsberg had developed in “Howl” and crucially implies his method’s affinity with the works of the French poet. Recognizing Ginsberg’s use of Apollinaire’s verse from “Les collines” both in French and English allows us to confirm its importance for him, while it also stresses how, thirty years before the variorum edition of “Howl,” the poet was already trying to inscribe his works in a nexus of textual allusions formally relating it to Apollinaire’s. The point, then, is not simply the recurrence of allusions to Apollinaire across several poems composed in Paris during the late fifties, but that Ginsberg manifestly meant them as a trail of clues or “signals” to be deciphered. To borrow a phrase he would later apply to “Howl,” from quoting to translating Apollinaire, Ginsberg developed a multilayered hermeneutic strategy of “open secrecy” (Ginsberg, “Notes,” 80). In the case of “At Apollinaire’s Grave,” it is not so much the epigraph itself as the words missing from it that matter, which are represented by the enigma of an ellipsis. What does the ellipsis omit? Thematically, what Ginsberg cut turns out to be the key phrase from “Les collines,” that is “Jeunesse adieu” (“Farewell, my youth”; Apollinaire, Calligrammes, 32).7 We are now in a position to appreciate Ginsberg’s complex play of revelation and concealment across several levels of reference: from openly naming Apollinaire in his poem’s title, to quoting from a poem that has precise significance for him without identifying it, to omitting one of its phrases and leaving three dots for the reader to join up. Ginsberg’s “reader,” here, designates readerships with different levels of prior knowledge, attention to detail and curiosity. As a sign, the ellipsis is especially easy to overlook and yet of particular interest, as it presents an enigma, an invitation to go back to Apollinaire’s original to find what in the poem was left out; that is to say, the thirty-one-year-old Ginsberg’s anxiety at the loss of youth: “Adieu jeunesse…” At first sight, this subject appears mortifying, and seems to support readings such as Tony Trigilio’s, which sees Ginsberg as “trapped in a graveyard” and his poem as therefore a dead-end: “the speaker of ‘At Apollinaire’s Grave’ never

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leaves the Père Lachaise Cemetery itself […], never leaves the place of the dead” (Trigilio, 210). But the finality of Ginsberg’s final line—“I am buried here and sit by my grave beneath a tree”—is more apparent than real, or at least more complicated (Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 182), for it doubles the poem’s narrator, implicitly into a body that lies in the grave and the self or soul that sits nearby under a symbol of life (“beneath a tree”). “At Apollinaire’s Grave” also transcends the inevitable closure of death by projecting Ginsberg beyond the cemetery and writing a “future poem”: [I] will walk down the streets of New York in the black cloak of French poetry improvising our conversation in Paris at Père Lachaise and the future poem that takes its inspiration from the light bleeding into your grave. (Collected Poems, 181)

Following Apollinaire’s own innovative practice of spatial projection—which Ginsberg would later coin “jump cut”8—the American in Paris can imaginatively switch places, finding himself back in New York dressed as a French poet. This switch mirrors Ginsberg’s surprising Anglicization of Guillaume Apollinaire, whom he initially addresses as “William,” and the “envy” he claims to feel for his fame and “accomplishment for American letters” (180). The image of the “cloak” is dramatic, melodramatic even, and that it is “black” might suggest death; but it also implies disguise, anonymity, concealment. The “black cloak of French poetry” is a central figure in the poem because it combines the opaque with that which is made explicit. It is a reminder that the ellipsis at the start of the epigraph, which stands in for the words of French poetry that Ginsberg leaves out, calls attention to the many French poets named explicitly in his poem. As we will see, the question of naming names, of how explicit Ginsberg needed to be about identifying his poetic genealogy, was a key issue in “Howl.” The difference between the implicit and explicit strategies of the two poems in fact suggests that Ginsberg wrote “At Apollinaire’s Grave” looking back at “Howl” with some regret, perhaps thinking he had veiled himself too well in that “black cloak of French poetry.” This regret is hinted at in the extraordinary line that identifies Apollinaire as his own ideal reader: when Ginsberg lays a copy of “Howl” on the Frenchman’s grave, it is “for him to read between the lines with Xray eyes of Poet” (180; my emphasis).

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Since Apollinaire is dead and cannot fulfill Ginsberg’s wish to be “read between the lines,” who is this wish really addressed to—if not us, unknown yet ideal readers of today? This line reveals the most cryptic manner in which “At Apollinaire’s Grave” operates as an act of homage and demonstrates how subtly Ginsberg contrived its hermeneutic procedure. For the phrase invites an acute “Xray” reading that looks for meaning not where we expect it—in the words printed on the page—but in their “negativity,” in the gaps and spaces between them. In “At Apollinaire’s Grave,” Ginsberg artificially introduced such spaces through the ellipsis he inserted in place of Apollinaire’s own words in the poem’s epigraph. This elision invites a thematic interpretation focused on the missing words “Adieu jeunesse,” which requires the reader to know “Les collines.” However, the three dots also invite a strictly formal poetic interpretation that demands technical awareness and knowledge. That is, we can only grasp the significance of the ellipsis if we notice the otherwise total absence of punctuation marks in Ginsberg’s poem—not a comma, not a period—and identify this absence as itself the purest form of homage to Apollinaire, famous as a modernist poet for his refusal of punctuation. Inserting the ellipsis was in short the most secret sign of Ginsberg’s “tender homage.” But how exactly was it also a “crime” (180)? There is perhaps no better way to understand a crime than to repeat it: take Apollinaire out of the poem’s line referring to “Howl” and you get the true nature and dedicatee of Ginsberg’s wish: “read between the lines.” Rather than a fantasy to honor Apollinaire, Ginsberg’s poem is an imperative destined to us: this is the true crime perpetrated “At Apollinaire’s Grave.” By partly quoting Apollinaire and retrospectively identifying him as the ideal reader of “Howl,” Ginsberg does more than inscribe his poetry in a French modernist tradition (for if that was a crime, it wouldn’t be very original and most writers would be criminals); he is using Apollinaire’s very name, words and tomb to win over a new readership. If one of Ginsberg’s aims in writing this poem was to honor Apollinaire, another was to re-launch his own image as a poet, to “signal” himself as an author preoccupied with hermeneutics and to present his poetry as full of secrets to decipher. Like “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!” and “Europe! Europe!,” “At Apollinaire’s Grave” challenges our way of reading. In these poems, Ginsberg constantly prompts us to work out what names, what filiations lie behind his literary catalogs and creative juxtapositions, while his furtive acts of quotation and translation reveal in the democratic author of all the exigent poet of a happy few—those who can read “with Xray eyes of poets” what even lies behind an ellipsis.

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“Howl”: “Cryptic Picture Postcards” “At Apollinaire’s Grave” establishes that the poems Ginsberg wrote in Paris in late 1957 and early 1958 were informed by a complex strategy of genealogical reference. Focused specifically, if not exclusively, on his engagement with French poetry, this strategy ranged beyond open acts of homage—naming Apollinaire in the poem’s title and a dozen more writers in its text—to subtle citations and signs that communicate in English, French, and even marks of punctuation. Since the only poets named in “Howl” were Blake and Poe, and in the absence of any French signposts, it might seem that Ginsberg had no such strategy in fall 1955, presumably because the poem he wrote then lacked the genealogy that demanded it. But the very existence of the variorum edition proves otherwise, and although this has gone unremarked, its main task was precisely to make visible the literary genealogy of “Howl” and, by documenting its revised drafts, the poem’s original inscription of that genealogy. Looking back on “Howl” through the rearview mirror of “At Apollinaire’s Grave” therefore enables us to see that, in key respects, the later poem restored a general strategy of genealogical reference that Ginsberg had already worked out in and for “Howl” but that he had concealed in revision. The drafts of “Howl” demonstrate how self-conscious and conflicted Ginsberg was about communicating his genealogy, in the course of writing and rewriting the poem. This ambivalence is captured by an image that seems to serve as a mise-en-abîme of the poem, figured as “leaving a trail of ambiguous postcards,” or, as the first draft had it, as “posting cryptic picture postcards” (Howl, 3, 13). Ginsberg’s revision of this very line—shifting from the hermetic secrecy of encryption to the teasing equivocation of ambiguity—exposes his wrestling with the hermeneutical problem: Was it better to be cryptically closed or ambiguously open? The very question is internalized within “Howl,” a sign of how blurred the distinction was already becoming for Ginsberg between primary and secondary text, between poem and commentary. The answer Ginsberg arrived at seems to be that it was better to say as little as possible, which is why thirty years later for the variorum edition of “Howl” he needed to say so much. He felt obliged to spell out what was missing from or hidden in “Howl” because so few readers, including so few “American academics” to recall his 1989 interview, had acknowledged its formal affiliations with European—especially French— modernist poetry. Indeed, it remains the case that Apollinaire and Artaud are absent from many standard critical works or are merely name-checked, while

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St.-John Perse, whose impact on Ginsberg I analyze in the next chapter, is never mentioned.9 Putting a copy of the 194-page large format hardcover Harper and Row Howl, Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript, and Variant Versions, Fully Annotated by Author next to the 57-page Pocket Poets City Lights paperback edition of Howl and Other Poems makes physically visible the ambition of the variorum edition to situate “Howl” in Ginsberg’s desired context. There is nothing new about authorized biographies and Estate-sponsored scholarship, but as Ginsberg himself notes, “Few poets have enjoyed the opportunity to expound their celebrated texts,” the chance to do for themselves what is normally “the lamplit study of an academic scholar” (Howl, xi). Already in his “Authors’ Preface,” we thus begin to discern the subtle play of signs and the self-contradictions in Ginsberg taking on the role of exegesis. On the one hand, it is his fortune to play the role of the scholar; on the other, it is an indictment of academia’s shortcomings that he has had “the liberty to annotate each verse regarding appropriate cultural references which few critics have examined.” What we see at work here, and what contextualizes the edition’s rich but often cryptic construction of a French literary genealogy, is the well-known biographical binary according to which Ginsberg typically invites contrary responses: either the very model of personal generosity and poetic candor, telling us the uncensored truth and revealing all, or the self-promoting narcissist with a relentless desire to control the historical record.10 Does the text “fully annotated” by its author not overdress a poem that Ginsberg infamously read stark naked on occasion? Are his 1980s notes and commentaries in or against the grain of the “Footnote” he added to complete the poem in 1955? Given the ambiguity of Ginsberg’s role as his own scholar, it might seem inevitable that the genealogy he constructed for “Howl” sends mixed messages to academics about his poem’s literary and national identity. It is as if he acknowledged that the aim to demystify the genesis of “Howl”—“dissolving mystery’s veil of private allusion,” as he puts it in his “Author’s Preface” (Howl, xii)—did risk contradicting the spirit of the poem. This contradiction is generally seen in relation to personal biography, to revealing the “private allusion” behind the text, as when Ginsberg prefaces his “Author’s Annotations” by promising “images traced to personal anecdote” and “testimony & clarifications by persons obliquely modelled in the poem” (Howl, 123). But the tension between what is clear and what is oblique also applies to literary allusions, both in the variorum edition and the text of “Howl,” in the manner signaled in “At Apollinaire’s Grave.”

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And so, if Ginsberg’s famous reference to “N.C. secret hero of these poems” is, as Timothy Yu says, a “study in contradiction” whose effect is to divide readers “into the initiated and the uninitiated” (29), I would argue that the same goes aesthetically, that “Howl” encodes formal secrets that also produce insiders and outsiders. The poem’s manuscript revisions suggest why Ginsberg initially embraced and then retracted a strategy that anticipates “At Apollinaire’s Grave,” and that originally included a direct allusion to Apollinaire. The appearance and then disappearance of Apollinaire’s name in “Howl” has a curious genetic history. The first draft for Part III had named two poets in a line canceled for the final version: “I am with you in Rockland/where you play pingpong with Malcolm Chazal and Christopher Smart” (Howl, 89). In the variorum edition, one of Ginsberg’s annotations for a different line identifies the relevance of Chazal, the Mauritian writer and painter, as someone to whom he and Carl Solomon wrote a joint letter in 1949 while they were in the same psychiatric institution represented in “Howl” as Rockland. Since Smart famously wrote his Jubilate Agno while incarcerated in St. Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics, the obvious connection between poets is biographical. In autograph, Ginsberg then made cancellations and insertions that changed the line so that it read: “where you play pingpong with Apollinaire and Smart.” Pairing the English eighteenthcentury poet with the French modernist makes little sense in terms of biography, but Ginsberg repeated it in his third draft, this time in type and more strikingly: “where you play pingpong with William Apollinaire and Christopher Smart” (Howl, 91). Most immediately, we see how, in fall 1955, Ginsberg anticipated the Anglicization of the French poet’s name that would stand out in “At Apollinaire’s Grave” two years later: “Ah William what grit in the brain you had what’s death” (Collected Poems, 180). In “Howl,” however, the substitution of “William” for “Guillaume” seems only to compound the already-obscure connection of Apollinaire with Smart. Before he abandoned the attempt, what was Ginsberg trying to communicate about Apollinaire’s meaning for “Howl”? Prior to anthologizing Apollinaire’s “Zone” and some of Smart’s Jubilate Agno (along with texts by Shelley, Schwitters, Mayakovsky, Artaud, Lorca, Crane and Williams) in the variorum edition, Ginsberg hints at his reason for naming together the French modernist with the English eighteenth-century poet by connecting them in a very precise way: “In Apollinaire’s “Zone” we have the variable breath-stop line of Smart with the superimposition of the Modern” (Howl, 175). The exactness here of the technical poetic grounds for identifying

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Apollinaire and Smart as precursors of “Howl” contrasts absolutely with the implicitly biographical grounds of his original line naming Chazal with Smart. In short, what the variorum edition clarifies is not only the importance of Apollinaire to Ginsberg at the time of writing “Howl,” but that it was formal in character, a matter of technique. From this note, we can deduce that his desire to avoid a biographical reading is in fact what probably led Ginsberg to change his mind and cut the line. Ginsberg’s comments on the relevance of Apollinaire’s versification went further, to embrace the larger aesthetic of “Zone”: “montage of time & space, surrealist juxtaposition of opposites, compression of images, mind gaps or dissociations, ‘hydrogen jukeboxes’” (Howl, 175). Here the poet is effectively glossing the lines of “Howl” that openly spell out his poem’s aesthetic technique (“who made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed”) and the exemplary image from the poem he never tired of repeating (“hydrogen jukebox”), attributing both of them to Apollinaire (Howl, 6, 3). The inference that the poetics and trademark image of Ginsberg’s most famous poem derive from the French poet is so startling that we have to wonder why it has been overlooked. Ironically enough, one answer is that the famous “hydrogen jukebox” is almost always cited by his critics as in debt to the aesthetics of another Frenchman, Paul Cézanne. Ginsberg’s often-repeated claim was that, as the painter juxtaposed planes within his pictures to create gaps that the viewer had to imaginatively bridge, so too wild juxtapositions in verbal language could achieve an equivalent stimulus. In his first draft for Part I of “Howl” Ginsberg had openly named Cézanne (Howl, 25), to make explicit the connection between his own use of “variable measure” and the painter’s “vibrating plane,” but he left the relationship implicit by cutting the name in revision.11 What has been missed here is the link between Ginsberg’s aesthetic technique—whether derived from Apollinaire or Cézanne—and its representation in “Howl.” That is, Ginsberg’s very desire to name names within his poem, to clarify its relationship to the work of Apollinaire and Cézanne and so guide its reception, had to be revised because it contradicted what was essential to the aesthetic they shared. As he put it in his annotation: This stanza concerns itself with aesthetic technique, the mechanisms of surrealist or ideogrammatic method, the juxtaposition of disparate images to create a gap of understanding which the mind fills in with a flash of recognition of the unstated relationship (as “hydrogen jukebox”). (Howl, 130)

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To create “a gap of understanding” and let the reader work out the association, it was necessary for the poet to leave his essential relationship to Apollinaire or Cézanne’s practice “unstated” in “Howl.” In the variorum edition thirty years later, however, Ginsberg found himself in the uncomfortable position of filling in the very gaps that were essential to his poem’s aesthetics. He also found himself once again needing to separate the biographical from the formal, in order to establish the technical level of his engagement with poets like Apollinaire. Ginsberg promoted the genealogy of “Howl” in the 1980s in ways that therefore responded to and even reproduced the very ambivalences out of which he had originally created the poem.

Ginsberg’s Artaud: “Most of All a Madman”? A glance at the variorum’s index shows that Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams dominate the edition’s many paratexts, and that they are closely followed by references to Apollinaire, Artaud and Rimbaud. The balance is inverted, however, by the half dozen texts that immediately follow the facsimile drafts of “Howl,” collected under the heading “Carl Solomon Speaks,” a section that places the poem within an exclusively French context: from Solomon’s opening “Statement” that begins by recalling his “immature romantic” youthful “dreams of Paris” and then names as “laying the groundwork” for “Howl” nine French writers (Rolland, Sartre, Prévert, Michaux, Artaud, Mallarmé, Genet, Lautréamont, Isou), to “Report from the Asylum” (his 1950 article in Neurotica magazine that quotes at length from Artaud), to an excerpt from his 1966 book Mishaps, Perhaps simply titled “Artaud,” mentioning another five French writers (Rimbaud, Gide, Jean-Louis Barrault, Anatole France, Baudelaire) (Howl, 112).12 Solomon’s texts guide the reader, to borrow Ginsberg’s own terms, by grounding the poem in their friendship—announced in the full title: “Howl for Carl Solomon”—and by documenting how insistently that relationship was mediated not only by the New York Psychiatric Institute where they met and that gives the poem its narrative center, but also by the French literature Solomon introduced Ginsberg to there. One result of this insistence is to reconsider the story of Ginsberg’s encounter with Solomon in 1949, which, in terms of national accent is ironically often reduced to their Russian exchange on first meeting, via Dostoevsky (Ginsberg: “I’m Prince Myshkin”; Solomon: “I’m Kirilov”).13

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Writing to Jack Kerouac on July 13, 1949, two weeks after entering the Columbia Psychiatric Institute, Ginsberg described his encounter with Solomon in a letter whose opening and closing frames (“Comprenez”; “Adieu ancien ami”) signal just how emphatically French culture was central to the occasion (Kerouac and Ginsberg, 98, 106). What is striking in Ginsberg’s account, and often forgotten in its frequent retelling, is that when Solomon produced books and magazines that introduced Ginsberg to the “latest Frenchmen,” he was giving him three major writers simultaneously: “One is named Jean Genet […] Also a man named Henri Michaux […] Most of all, a madman lately died named Antonin Artaud” (104). Ginsberg had been especially impressed by Solomon’s claim to have encountered Artaud in person, reporting to Kerouac: “Solomon was wandering around Paris and suddenly he heard barbaric, electrifying cries on the street”: “this madman dancing down the street repeating be-bop phrases—in such a voice—the body rigid, like a bolt of lightening ‘radiating’ energy.” If “Howl” echoes this report of Artaud’s “barbaric” “be-bop,” as well as Whitman’s “barbaric yawp,” there is considerable debate among scholars about precisely which Artaud texts Ginsberg had access to and when, and in what language or medium, with disagreements specifically about The Theatre and Its Double in the 1950s (Le Théâtre et son Double, 1938, published in translation by Grove Press in 1958) and the legendary banned recording of To Have Done with the Judgment of God (1947) in the 1960s.14 Questions of chronology are essential to determining whether Ginsberg appropriated Artaud’s ideas only retrospectively or at the time of composing “Howl,” and indeed when performing its opening section at the Six Gallery in October 1955. More often documented as a landmark in American literary history (the West Coast Beat scene, the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance) than as a key event in the valorization of Artaud by the American avant-garde, the Six Gallery reading was very much imbued with the spirit of Artaud’s conception of theatre. In Appendix II of the variorum edition of “Howl,” this is first attested to by Ginsberg’s 1957 invocation of Artaud’s presence at the gallery, when placing the poem in a tradition “till now neglected in the U.S., of Apollinaire, Whitman, Artaud, Lorca, Mayakovsky” (Howl, 165). And second, it is attested to most strongly in Michael McClure’s claim that the inspiration for the poem he himself read at the gallery (“Point Lobos: Animism”) was that Artaud “fascinated” him (the word is repeated three times for emphasis) (168). Was Ginsberg’s intense interest in the spoken rhythm of poetry consciously matched that night with Artaud’s goal to achieve a visceral impact on the audience’s nerves through voice? Certainly,

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Anaïs Nin, who witnessed him reading the poem shortly after the Six Gallery event, confirmed that its “savage power” was reminiscent of Artaud, specifying his “mad conference at the Sorbonne” in 1933, when he had performed “The Theatre and the Plague” (“Le Théâtre et la peste”) later published in The Theatre and Its Double (Nin, 64).15 But what her often-cited remarks really confirm was that it took someone raised in France and familiar with the European avantgarde to appreciate what few contemporary Americans could about the lineage of Ginsberg’s poem. So the question remains: was the performance of “Howl for Carl Solomon” in 1955 a direct tribute to Artaud, whose work Solomon had introduced Ginsberg to six years before? We know from his journals that as early as December 1955 Ginsberg was reading Artaud’s To Have Done with the Judgment of God, translated by Guy Wernham who was then his neighbor in Berkeley (Ginsberg, Journals: MidFifties, 215). Since he had helped him translate Genet’s poetry that August—the very time Ginsberg began to write “Howl”—it is entirely plausible that Wernham also discussed with him The Theatre and Its Double. It is indeed more plausible that Ginsberg did know it in some detail than that he did not know it at all. On the other hand, without a fully translated edition, could Ginsberg have grasped the distinctive properties of Artaud’s unclassifiable work (usually misdescribed as a “manifesto”)? He hints as much when claiming, in the “Model Texts” section of the variorum edition, that “Artaud’s holy despair breaks all old verse forms” (Howl, 175). Breaking forms may give permission to experiment, but it hardly offers technical direction, and when Ginsberg adds that “Artaud’s physical breath has inevitable propulsion toward specific inviolable insight on ‘Moloch whose name is the Mind!’” it is significant that the result is a philosophical “insight,” not a poetic innovation. Ginsberg’s comments in interviews also suggest a rather limited grasp of Artaud and that he shared common misperceptions about his “theatre of cruelty.” For example, with Tom Clark in 1965, he discusses the effects of sonic rhythm on the body in extremely loose terms (“or something like that… and whatnot”) with reference to “a statement by Artaud” (Ginsberg, Spontaneous Mind, 33), when what he was surely thinking of was “No More Masterpieces” (“En finir avec les chefs-d’oeuvre”) in The Theatre and Its Double. There, wryly comparing theatre audiences to snakes, Artaud argues for the use of expressive vibrations in his theatre of cruelty, and affirms that the “risks” of his radical aesthetics are “in present-day conditions worth running”: “I do not believe we have succeeded in reanimating the world we live in […] I propose something

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to get us out of the slump, instead of continuing to moan about it, about the boredom, dullness and stupidity of everything” (Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, 59). In general terms, it is easy to imagine Ginsberg agreeing completely with Artaud; but more narrowly, the question of his technical understanding of Artaud’s art is the difference between seeing “Howl” as a “moan” or as doing something to reanimate the world. Two answers to the question of Artaud’s impact on “Howl” are inscribed within its draft manuscripts presented in the variorum edition and in the curious use Ginsberg makes there of texts by Carl Solomon. Solomon’s texts in the variorum edition evoke a strangely ambiguous context: emphatically French in literary reference, but just as emphatically biographical. By fixing the connection between Solomon and Ginsberg mediated by Artaud in biocentric terms, readers are asked to see “Howl” as the product of encounters between three men who belonged in an asylum—echoing the connection Ginsberg originally made with Malcolm de Chazal and Christopher Smart—rather than to figure out any affinity between American and French experimental poetics. In his line-by-line annotations of the poem, however, Ginsberg then uses Solomon’s own words in a most remarkable way: to discredit this very biographical narrative. That is, he repeatedly cites Solomon disputing the events he mythologized in “Howl” and denouncing the interpretation given to them: from “This section of the poem garbles history completely” to “Thus he [Ginsberg] enshrined falsehood as truth and raving as common sense for future generations to ponder over and be misled” (Howl, 131).16 It is tempting to view such annotations as evidence of Ginsberg’s commitment to the uncensored truth, however unflattering, or as perversely masochistic indulgences, but there is a third possibility: to problematize the biographical approach itself, to undermine its relevance to the poem, not only in regard to Solomon but more importantly in relation to Artaud. Did Ginsberg identify with Artaud the man, fellow asylum inmate and self-proclaimed scapegoat of a merciless society? Of course he did, often very exactly: “He wrote a big poem—article about Van Gogh (translated in Tiger’s Eye),” Ginsberg enthused to Kerouac in his July 1949 letter from the Psychiatric Institute, clearly referencing Artaud’s “Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society,” “saying the same things about the U.S. that I said about Cézanne” (Kerouac and Ginsberg, Letters, 54). Ginsberg would in fact reiterate his political identification with Artaud a decade later in “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!” (1957) and again, in his journal for 1961: “Artaud alone made accusation / against America, / Before me” (Ginsberg, Journals, Early Fifties, Early Sixties, 195). But what mattered above all

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to him was their kinship as avant-garde artists: “Antonin Artaud’s holy despair breaks all old verse forms” (Howl, 175). The variorum’s many invocations of Artaud should, then, be read as ways to subvert the biographical dimension from within, pressing it to a point of excess, enabling Ginsberg to restore for the reader the aesthetic nature of his “unstated relationship” to Artaud. In terms of which Artaud texts Ginsberg read, when he read them, and therefore which Artaud he knew at the time of composing “Howl,” Douglas Kahn has traced both the textual and circumstantial evidence and come to similar but not identical conclusions. That is, the opening line of “Howl” (“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”) for Kahn echoes the proposition that there is “in every lunatic a misunderstood genius” that appears in “Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society,” and for him it is this anti-psychiatric Artaud that Ginsberg communicates most strongly in “Howl,” since it was “unlikely that Ginsberg had a working knowledge of To Have Done with the Judgment of God. (Kahn, 333). Or rather, while Ginsberg may have seen the script, he had surely not heard a recording of the radio broadcast. This is a crucial distinction, if the issue is whether Ginsberg’s “Howl” takes after Artaud’s screams and so whether his poem, rather than later readings of it, learned from Artaud’s performance. Kahn cites to this effect a significant yet rarely quoted passage from the journals of Anais Nin, in which she describes Artaud’s performance at the Sorbonne, and Artaud’s own enlightening comment on the audience’s response afterwards: “They always want to hear about; they want to hear an objective conference on ‘The Theatre and the Plague’, and I want to give them the experience itself, the plague itself, so they will be terrified, and awaken. I want to awaken them. They do not realize they are dead” (Nin qtd. in Kahn, 349). Again, Ginsberg would have agreed with Artaud in his goal to awaken a slumbering society, but the harmonium-playing poet of later years would not try to terrify anyone into awareness. As Kahn argues, fellow Six Gallery performer Michael McClure would recall years later that he “heard Artaud in Howl,” but this was “because, more than any other Beat, he had an ear out for Artaud, experiencing such kinship that he felt he could have been Artaud’s younger brother” (334). Kahn’s case is well supported by his own detailed reading of McClure’s poetry, and the upshot confirms how relatively limited is Ginsberg’s genealogical debt to Artaud in “Howl.” Yet, the manuscript history of “Howl” offers evidence for how deeply conflicted Ginsberg himself was about that debt. Artaud featured very prominently in the most revealing of all the many revisions that Ginsberg made to “Howl” through successive manuscript drafts.

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Appearing in the first draft of Part I, corresponding to roughly half way through the opening section of the published text, and showing numerous cancellations and retyping, the passage in question is a reading list in the form of a catalog of names. In retrospect, it seems like a trial run for the rosters of names that appear in “At Apollinaire’s Grave” and “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!” If we set aside those in Ginsberg’s circle (Kerouac, Burroughs, Cassady and Carr) and Buddha, we are left with eleven writers of whom four are European (Marx, Spengler, Gurdjieff, Dostoevsky), two are American (Wolfe, Whitman), and five— almost half the total—are French: Artaud, Genet, Rimbaud, Céline and Proust. Uniquely, Artaud’s name is given in full (Antonin Artaud) not once but twice, and is then canceled twice. Echoing the emphasis in his July 1949 letter from the Psychiatric Institute (“Most of all […] Antonin Artaud”), this distinctive act of double naming, double inscription and double erasure, certainly suggests the special place of Artaud in and for the composition of “Howl.” The intensity of his hesitation, however, implies the conflict in Ginsberg’s desire to name Artaud. Was he aware that, in the end, much though he wanted to claim for his poem a genealogical relation to Artaud’s works he admired, on artistic grounds it didn’t fully merit it? Or was Ginsberg conscious of how inevitably his poem would be read biographically, if his own name was to be associated with that of the “madman”? Thirty years later in the variorum edition of “Howl,” Ginsberg makes no comment about this standout erasure in his manuscript and chooses to incorporate Artaud’s “Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society” in his list of “Model Texts” for “Howl.” That choice certainly implies he no longer had anxieties about being associated with the biographical Artaud, but in the “Commentary” presenting his “Model Texts” Ginsberg makes sure to redress the usual interpretation of the role played by Artaud’s works in the genesis of his poem by reframing it in terms of poetic form and technique (Howl, 175).

“This Ponderous Lineage”: From Quoting to Translating Genet More broadly, we should recognize that the list of authors’ names Ginsberg canceled in the first draft of “Howl” is both the longest section of deleted material and the most eye-catching from the point of view of the poem’s genealogical identity. And yet, Ginsberg’s annotation of this passage is remarkably disparaging, as well as laconic: “Next drafts eliminate this ponderous lineage” (Howl, 136).17

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Since the variorum edition sets out to resurrect and indeed expand upon the very lineage Ginsberg cut from the poem, there is here a curious contradiction; to dismiss his original lines as too awkwardly weighty in a book that, weighing two pounds because of its aim to recover the poem’s manuscript history and name names, is quite literally ponderous. If we might read Ginsberg’s original inscription of this literary and intellectual lineage, with its heavy French accent, as a sign of passionate identification, we might see its subsequent deletion in contrary ways: as a sign of anxiety, removing what on reflection could have seemed like naive name-dropping; or as a sign of maturity, realizing he did not need to pay homage to his masters. Since the catalog of names appears immediately after the phrase “who investigated the FBI” (Howl, 22), we might also read it politically in terms of national identities at the height of the Cold War, when naming names meant betraying un-American conspirators: Marx and Dostoevsky, most obviously, but in fact everyone else in the poem besides Whitman and Wolfe. However, there is another way of understanding Ginsberg’s withdrawal of testimony, which is hinted at in an earlier note where he glosses a shorter and less literary list of names also redacted in revision (changed from “Gurdjieff, Reich, Fludd and Vico” to “Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross”): Overt intention of this mystical name-dropping was to connect younger readers, Whitman’s children, already familiar with Poe and Bop, to older Gnostic tradition. Whitman dropped such hints to his fancied readers. (126)

The “fancied” younger readers Ginsberg inherits from Whitman are, as the low pun implies, erotically imagined, but they are also a model of Ginsberg’s desired readership, one able to pick up on his vocabulary of open motivation (“overt intention”) that turns name-dropping into hint-dropping. This clandestine communication was clearly a conscious strategy on Ginsberg’s part, since the variorum edition of “Howl” also offers “bibliographic hints for inquisitive readers” (Howl, 123) and the “Author’s Preface, Reader’s Manual” to his Collected Poems announces “mini-essays” that “hint further reading for innocent-eyed youths” (Collected Poems, xx–xxi ). Rather than dismissing the sexual dimension of such commentaries as unwelcome biographical distractions, we might appreciate Ginsberg’s awareness of the seductive, quasi-erotic relation with the reader formed by texts that communicate through coded hints and secret signs. Indeed, if Ginsberg was “a name-dropper on an epic scale,” it is surely because he saw in the practice a way to intensify his relationship with his readers, because it enticed them to follow his path, to “investigate his names, ingest his tradition”

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as John Muckle has compellingly argued (Muckle, 10, 30). The manuscript of “Howl” nevertheless shows how fraught naming names was for Ginsberg, since his decision to cut the “ponderous lineage” featuring his French literary masters (Artaud, Genet, Rimbaud, Céline and Proust) was the sign of a larger indecision throughout the poem involving the names of Apollinaire and Cézanne (as well as Chazal, Smart and Catullus). The process of inserting and cutting names across drafts in several parts of “Howl” was in fact part of a larger and more complex effort to communicate his poem’s genealogy. What the drafts reveal is that in “Howl” Ginsberg tried out a variety of other strategies of literary allusion, including some that would feature in later poems. For example, where “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!” references Apollinaire by silently incorporating a line from one of his poems, in “Howl” Ginsberg originally did something very similar with Jean Genet. After giving his “ponderous” list of authors, the first draft of the opening section of “Howl” continues with a line that surreptitiously translates Genet: “who didn’t have time to speak among themselves of love” [“Nous n’avions pas fini de nous parler d’amour”] (Howl, 23; Genet, “Le Condamné à mort,” Oeuvres complètes, vol. II, 215). Few if any contemporary readers would have recognized this line’s provenance as the long poem that Genet composed in prison to honor his friend Maurice Pilorge sentenced to death, since “Le Condamné à mort” (Man in Death Cell in Ginsberg’s version) had not yet been translated into English. Another long poem by Genet, “Un Chant d’amour” (“A Love Song”), had been translated in The Window in 1954, and Ginsberg might have had access to it before composing “Howl” in 1955, but there would be no translation of “Le Condamné à mort” until City Lights published Lola Pozo’s in 1960. Ginsberg’s involvement with “Le Condamné à mort” rivals his longstanding engagement with “Les collines” by Apollinaire as it goes back three years before he started composing “Howl.” “I am translating a poem called ‘Le Condamné à mort’ (‘Man in Death cell’),” he told Kerouac as early as in February 1952, declaring it as “great” as Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau ivre,” before transcribing no fewer than six lines of the formidable task he had set himself (Kerouac and Ginsberg, Letters, 141). His translation of Genet’s stanza in 1952 was just as audacious as his translation of Apollinaire’s line would be in 1957: Genet’s “Gamin d’or sois plutôt princesse d’une tour,” for instance, implies a classic passive comparison (“plutôt”/“rather”) that Ginsberg’s “Golden boy, go be a Princess in a tower,” brilliantly transforms into an active poetic projection (“go be”). Considering the sophisticated vocabulary and thorny syntax of Genet’s “Le Condamné à mort,”

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let alone its length—264 lines or “65 huge Dakar Doldrums” as Ginsberg put it to Kerouac—we shouldn’t take the amount of time and energy necessary to such a translation lightly (Ginsberg, Letters, 141). In fact, we have every reason to believe that Ginsberg was still translating Genet’s long poem three years later when he began to compose “Howl,” since in mid-August 1955 he wrote to Kerouac he was now having help translating “Genet poetry,” surely meaning “Le Condammé à mort,” from his neighbor in Berkeley, “Guy Wernham the translator of Lautréamont” (Ginsberg, Letters, 317). In the 1950s, modern French literature for New Yorkers was almost exclusively to be found in little magazines, the editors of which privileged short stories and poems for obvious reasons of format. In that context, the translators played a crucial role, and critics who could read but not quite write in French also had to improvise themselves as translators, if only to give a taste of the texts they were asked to review. Such was apparently the case for the reviewer of Genet’s novel Miracle de la rose in Partisan Review, who translated the first excerpt of Genet’s works that Ginsberg commented on, in 1949: “I read a 3 page excerpt on the mysteries of shoplifting ending (as I remember) ‘and so it is that at the judgement of the apocalypse God will call me to the dolmen realms with my own tender voice, crying, ‘Jean, Hean’ (Dolmen realms is my own phrase)” (Kerouac and Ginsberg, Letters, 104). In this letter to Kerouac, Ginsberg’s parentheses are highly significant. The first parenthesis, “(as I remember),” reveals an extremely complex act of appropriation: the recollection of a translation of Genet’s novel, which the second parenthesis contradicts, “(Dolmen realms is my own phrase).” How could Ginsberg be certain that “dolmen realms” was his “own phrase” if he wrote the excerpt relying on a vague memory (“as I remember”)? If only out of pride, would he not have double-checked the version given in the Partisan article to be sure that this was indeed his own translation? Certainly, the need to insist to Kerouac that “dolmen realms” are his words sets the tone and intensity of Ginsberg’s relationship to Genet: the poet is so struck by Genet’s style that he cannot resist stealing the translator’s place and inventing a phrase of his own. Ginsberg pushed his involvement with Genet’s works even further by thus turning translation into creation. “Howl” may no longer feature his draft line translating “Le Condamné à mort”—“who didn’t have time to speak among themselves of love” (Howl, 23)—but Ginsberg’s famous poem still bears the mark of his even earlier translation of Genet’s Miracle de la rose: “rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love” (Howl, 6). “Dolmen-realms” here has an interesting status, for it is neither a quotation

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nor a translation per se, but a form of creative adaptation that André Lefevere has termed “refraction” (Lefevere, 233–49). That the phrase Ginsberg derived from Genet and claimed so insistently as his own in 1949 remains in “Howl” symbolizes his intense appropriation of Genet’s oeuvre before, as well as while composing, “Howl.” It also suggests that Genet’s writing played a very similar role to Apollinaire’s in the development of his poetics. And yet, the provenance and significance of this phrase are allowed to pass without notice, both in the poem and in its variorum edition thirty years later. The drafts of “Howl” show how conflicted Ginsberg had, in fact, always been about communicating his poem’s genealogy. His ambivalence is captured not only by lines such as the “ponderous lineage” or the translation of Genet’s “Le Condamné à mort” he cut in revision (who didn’t have enough time to speak among themselves of love), but also by images such as “hydrogen jukebox” (derived from Apollinaire) and “dolmen-realms” (derived from Genet) that would remain in the text. His translation of Genet’s verse from “Le Condamné à mort” was cut outright, but the textual presence of Rimbaud’s poetry survives through Ginsberg’s covert strategy of hinting. Towards the end of Part II of “Howl” there appears the line “Heaven which exists, and is everywhere about us!” that Ginsberg annotates: “See Arthur Rimbaud, ‘Morning’ […] Christmas on the earth.’ Season in Hell, trans. Louise Varese (New York: New Directions, 1945)” (Howl, 7, 142). The fullness of this bibliographical entry contrasts with the minimalism of the connection we assume Ginsberg implies between the line in “Howl” and Rimbaud’s Season in Hell via the terse injunction “See.” The note seems not so much cryptic as gratuitous. It therefore calls attention to other annotations that invoke French literary allusions, and that also appear unwarranted at first sight: from his brief but wanton gloss of the phrase “Cocksucker in Moloch”—“Ref. also Jean Genet, another literary cocksucker”— to the excessively long note giving the source of “Lamma lamma sabacthani” (in Aramaic, the last words of Christ), which Ginsberg traces not merely to the Bible (“Matthew 27:46”) but to its use in a poem by Tristan Corbière, “Cris d’aveugle” (Howl, 142, 134–35). This latter case appears especially arbitrary, since Ginsberg cites the Corbière poem at length in French and in English, until, however, we notice that seemingly unnecessary lines turn out in translation to include the very title of Ginsberg’s poem: “I have howled for my turn too long.” Behind Ginsberg’s kinship with the nineteenth-century poète maudit, whom he had been reading in May 1955, here we are invited to discover a precise textual relation, an unacknowledged source of great significance for “Howl” (Kerouac

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and Ginsberg, Letters, 287). In short, Ginsberg’s explication of literary allusions in the variorum edition of his poem do not conform to our expectations of scholarly annotations, but work through subtle hints and displacements, as does his annotation that invokes Rimbaud seemingly without reason. If the note that invokes A Season in Hell is gratuitous in the sense that nothing in the line from “Howl” warrants it, through it Ginsberg actually hints at the very next lines in his poem—lines for which he gives no annotation—where we recognize what can only be an inscription of Rimbaud: Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit! (Howl, 7)

As Jeffrey Meyers notes, that “whole boatload” is a telling phrase in conjunction with “illuminations,” alluding to Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau ivre,” as well as to Les Illuminations (Meyers, 89). Ginsberg’s strategy in the variorum edition seems, here, to mimic in specific ways the very process of inscription and encryption, inclusion and omission at work in his original poem, operating as much by hints, gaps and juxtapositions as by the standard clarifications expected of scholarly apparatus. In this sense, Rimbaud has for Ginsberg “gone down the American river” twice; first politically, in the nation’s loss of vision, its crushing of spiritual or sexual desire in the name of Cold War capitalism (no more “miracles! ecstasies!”); and second hermeneutically, in the longstanding inability of American readers of his poem to see the traces of Rimbaud’s vision in front of their eyes. No wonder, looking back from Apollinaire’s grave two years later, Ginsberg fantasized a French reader able to read “Howl” “between the lines with Xray eyes of Poet.” Appropriately enough, Ginsberg’s strategy of hinting is itself only hinted at in the variorum edition, but there is compelling contemporary evidence that this ambivalent approach to communication was in Ginsberg’s mind in the months leading up to the composition of “Howl.” In early 1955, he had been encouraged by Kerouac to follow his own enthusiastic embrace of Buddhist teaching and, returning from the library in San Francisco with an armful of texts, he quickly connected them to the key aesthetic and philosophical issues that would inform the writing of “Howl,” above all how to achieve the “breakthrough of eternity into time”: I begin with a basic X which is “unspeakable,” “unknowable” and “unthinkable.” Believe this X can however be experienced. I image [sic] it can also be

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communicated, or hinted at, pointed to (with finger, image, X, poem, word, etc.) (letter too). Communications on the subject are limited. (Kerouac and Ginsberg, Letters, 263)

While a discussion of the poet’s philosophical aims does not belong here, we should now recognize that, as he worked towards “Howl,” Ginsberg was indeed evolving a strategy of “limited” communication—of what can only be “hinted at, pointed to”—and that if thirty years later he returns to it for the variorum edition, it is because the question of his poem’s literary genealogy and the question of its aesthetics were always one and the same. Ginsberg’s strategy of “open secrecy” itself has a literary genealogy to which he characteristically pointed only cryptically. To see this in action, let us return finally to the case of Corbière, a major influence on both Pound and Eliot, whose importance for Ginsberg has long been neglected. Behind the biographical figure of the poète maudit, we are invited to discover an overlooked source for the title of “Howl.” However, the more revealing relationship between Ginsberg and Corbière, one that hints at the strategic lesson the American poet inherited from his French predecessor, is hinted at in his use of “Deaf Man’s Rhapsody” to make an epigraph for “The Lion for Real” (“Soyez muette pour moi, Idole Contemplative...”; Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 174). Echoing the contemporaneously written “At Apollinaire’s Grave,” we immediately notice that this epigraph too features an ellipsis. What is more, this ellipsis stands in for lines in Corbière’s poem that are precisely expressing… a strategy of open secrecy: Meditative Idol, for me be dumb, Both, the one through the other, forgetting phraseology, You won’t say a word: I’ll keep mum... And then nothing will be able to tarnish our colloquy. (Corbière, 51)

Ginsberg quite literally took the hint, so that his French genealogy in his major Parisian poems is both more explicit than it was in the published version of “Howl” and even more cryptic.

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The Pitfalls of Open Secrecy: “Has Nobody Noticed” St.-John Perse?

The variorum edition of “Howl” represented a concerted effort on Ginsberg’s part to fully establish his poem’s literary credentials. Howl, Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript and Variant Versions, Fully Annotated by Author, with Contemporaneous Correspondence, Account of First Public Reading, Legal Skirmishes, Precursor Texts, and Bibliography aimed to put an end to the emphasis on the biographical and historical content of “Howl” and to counter both the positive-but-shallow readings hailing its “spontaneity” and the attacks of critics mocking it for the same supposed freedom from formal artifice. Ginsberg wanted to be read as a poet who had immersed himself in European modernist traditions at odds with the American orthodoxies of his day but whose experimental forms were as, if not more, subtle and sophisticated. It is for this very reason that the role of French poetry was so crucial to “Howl,” both at the time of its composition in the 1950s and thirty years later when Ginsberg documented its creative lineage and history of reception. Two texts in particular, included in redacted form in the variorum edition of the poem, reveal how emphatically Ginsberg associated “Howl” with French literary forms and how that association worked through his aesthetic strategy of hinting rather than stating: his lengthy letter of May 1956 to Richard Eberhart (who reviewed “Howl” favorably for the New York Times later that year) and his even longer letter of September 1958 to John Hollander (who had savaged his poem in the pages of Partisan Review in spring 1957). At the time of writing “Howl,” Ginsberg’s letters and journals were thick with references to the poem’s broader cultural background that ranged from Catullus in the Latin to Blues ballads (Ginsberg, Letters, 120-21). Even before the poem was published, Ginsberg had shared the aesthetic ambitions he had in “Howl,” or promoted the reading he desired, to friends, family and fellow-writers. In December 1955, he stressed to his brother both his reading of Whitman (“a great personal Colossus of American poetry”) and of “translations of XX Century

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French poetry, Apollinaire, Cendrars (Blaise), Cocteau” (127). This letter is probably where Ginsberg makes his most characteristic effort to situate “Howl,” setting it emphatically against the “mealy-mouthed, meaningless, abstract, tight, controlled, tight-assed, scared, academic” poetry of his day, while at the same time refuting the Cold War university establishment’s claims to authority in poetics: Tight formal poetry seems to me result of basic lack of technical understanding and not subtlety, mastery, control etc. which academic poets like to think of themselves as “exhibiting.” Like trained dogs. (127)

Here, Ginsberg challenges the binary terms in which “Howl” would generally be read—equating the antiacademic and political stance of his poem with its refusal of poetic technique—and this challenge, passionately made, was the context for his correspondence with Eberhart in advance of his review for the Times. Ginsberg’s May 1956 letter to Eberhart names Crane, Blake, Dostoevsky, Williams, Wordsworth, Yeats, Lorca, Baudelaire, Apollinaire and Pound, as well as broader aesthetic movements or categories (haiku, surrealism, imagism), but most emphatically Whitman (mentioned nine times) and “my master who is Cezanne” (Howl, 152). If we read the letter closely, however, more subtle implications of Ginsberg’s genealogical agenda appear, for example his detailed attention to one of the three essential formal features of “Howl”; its “long line.” In the standard critical accounts and works of Beat reference, this feature has been unambiguously glossed: “The long lines looked to be straight out of Whitman” (Schumacher, 123).1 But to Eberhart, Ginsberg spells out the place of Whitman’s long line as only a chronological starting point, the source of a lineage, and does so spatially on the page: Whitman --Apollinaire Lorca (Howl, 153)

Preceded by two dashes, it is the middle term, the French poet Apollinaire, who is visually privileged here. In Ginsberg’s genealogy of the long line, the American and Spanish poets are indeed using a form that is essentially French, as are the other two key formal features of “Howl”: “The long line, the prose poem, the spontaneous sketch are XX century French forms which Academic versifiers […] have completely ignored.” (Howl, 153). So too, we might add, has this stunning statement defining “Howl” in terms of French forms been ignored by academic critics.

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Instead, it is common to find repeated the comparisons Ginsberg made between “Howl” and Kerouac’s “rhythmic style of prose” (Ginsberg, Letters, 121). In the midst of composing “Howl,” Ginsberg writes to Kerouac: it is “nearer in your style than anything” (Kerouac and Ginsberg, Letters, 315). That statement was bound to identify “Howl” as American.2 Then again, this nationalist binary does not hold since, for Ginsberg, Kerouac was a distinctly French American writer, not so much due to his Franco-American biographical roots as to Kerouac’s own literary genealogy. Ginsberg gladly reported to him just such an identification three months earlier, in May 1955, after Kenneth Rexroth on his San Francisco FM radio book program had praised Kerouac, who “wrote like Céline and Genet” (Kerouac and Ginsberg, Letters, 286). Certainly, Ginsberg’s letter to Eberhart could not be more emphatic about the national identity of his poem, its closing summary specifying that its standout formal feature was French: “Howl’s 3 parts consist of 3 different approaches to the use of the long line (longer than Whitman’s, more French)” (Howl, 154). If the longer the line, the more French it is, then “Howl” is very French indeed. Aiming to make his poetics understood, Ginsberg’s letter to Eberhart was also prompted by his anxiety about being misunderstood by the mass media: “It occurred to me with alarm how really horrible generalisations might be if they are off-the-point as in newspapers,” he had begun, before didactically insisting “let me have my say” (Howl, 151). His conflicts with the media only magnified Ginsberg’s dispute with the academy, which went back to his Columbia days, and as early as “Howl” he saw his poetry as a form of counter-pedagogy. Writing to Trilling in the same month as his letter to Eberhart, it is in provocative terms that Ginsberg reports to his former professor his experience at San Francisco State College: I am a really good teacher, naked half the time with big blue flashes of communication. I read them Whitman aloud. If you read him aloud with understanding and some personal passion he comes on what he’s supposed to, near saint. Anybody can understand. (Howl, 156)

Here Ginsberg is in fact less describing Whitman’s poetry than his own vision of “Howl” (“big blue flashes of communication”), of himself (“near saint”), and how he desires to be read (“aloud with understanding and some personal passion”). The letter also lays bare the basic contradiction between Ginsberg’s hopes for his work to reach out to all (“Anybody can understand”) and the need for an “understanding” that necessarily entailed the kind of literary and aesthetic knowledge he labored to provide Eberhart and then Hollander.

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“I went out of my head last week and rapped out twelve page single-space heap of complaints,” was how Ginsberg described his letter to Hollander, a former classmate at Columbia under Trilling and, by 1958, an already respected poet and professor (Kerouac and Ginsberg, Letters, 411).3 A passionate, sometimes bitter attack on the academy—“this horde of half educated deathly academicians”—the letter is again and above all an appeal to be taken seriously,4 and defines “Howl” in terms of its formal qualities: “the whole poem is an experiment in what you can do with the long line” (Ginsberg, Letters, 205). But what makes this second letter so significant is the central contradiction it reveals in how Ginsberg wanted the lineage of his poem to be understood. For Hollander’s review, while contemptuous of Ginsberg’s “dreadful little volume,” had identified many of his key points of literary reference, both American and French. In addition to “some dismal pastiches of William Carlos Williams,” Hollander observed “avowed post-Poundian pacts with Walt Whitman and Apollinaire and perhaps an unacknowledged one with Lautréamont. I don’t know” (Howl, 161). The dismissive final phrase might translate as “and I don’t care,” but the review actually drew a very insightful distinction between poetic affiliations that are “avowed” and those “perhaps unacknowledged.” Hollander recognized that “Howl” operated on at least two levels, and that Ginsberg’s poem was overtly written for one audience—those who would understand by reading it aloud and with passion—while secretly addressing another—who could intuit, for example, an homage to Lautréamont that was no longer there (Les Chants de Maldoror he cut from the original draft). One reason for the length and anger of Ginsberg’s response to Hollander may therefore be that it drew his aesthetic strategy out into the open but without appreciating its magnitude. Ginsberg’s response is indeed fascinatingly selfcontradictory. For it is peppered with recurrent formulations of the same phrase attacking the ignorance of the poem’s reviewers: “and anybody who doesn’t understand…”; “anybody can’t hear…”; “Anyone noticing…”; “has nobody noticed…”; “nor has anybody noticed…” (Ginsberg, Letters, 205–7). Ginsberg’s exasperation at what the reviewers had missed continually admits the problematic division of his readers into insiders and outsiders, and comes surprisingly close to limiting the proper audience of his poem to poets with X-ray eyes. In fact, Ginsberg’s letter to Hollander invokes Apollinaire in relation to “Howl” quite specifically, although this is when speaking on behalf of not just himself but of a whole new generation of American poets—Corso, McClure,

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Creeley, Kerouac, Snyder, Whalen, Olson—to denounce the broader failure of American academics and professors: What a Columbia instructor can recognize in Pound he can’t see in Olson’s method, what he can see in Lorca or Apollinaire, he can’t see in “Howl”—it’s fantastic. You call this education? (Ginsberg, Letters, 216)

The parallel, the equation, between Apollinaire and himself, could hardly be clearer. Ginsberg claimed his hope in sending “Howl” to Hollander in the first place was that he had “the technical knowledge” to see this, to “fuck the whole sociological-tone-revolut[ion] whatever bullshit that everyone else comes on with,” but the binary between form and content reveals another fundamental one between those who have the training to decode the poem’s deep lineage and those constrained to its surface (212, 214). Ginsberg wanted recognition, not just as a poet and by the academy that had never accepted him, but also more precisely for the sophistication of his poetics: I read 50 reviews of Howl and not one of them written by anyone with enough technical interests to notice the fucking obvious construction of the poem, all the details besides (to say nothing of the various esoteric classical allusions built in like references to Cézanne’s theory of composition). (205)

The example he gives of the poem’s “esoteric classical allusions” is painterly, but of course also French, and it is to French language that Ginsberg turns most tellingly at the climax of his despair with the reception of “Howl”: “anybody henceforth comes up to me with a silly look in his eye & begins bullshitting about morals and sociology & tradition and technique & Juvenile Delinquency—I mean Je ne sais plus parler” (205). Left speechless by the failure of critics to understand the formal lineage of “Howl,” Ginsberg uses French in order to embody the literary context in which he should be understood. But this is far more than a simple linguistic gesture. In the variorum edition, there is a helpful footnote for the phrase “Je ne sais plus parler,” not in order to translate it but to identify its literary source: “Arthur Rimbaud, ‘Matin,’ in A Season in Hell, trans. Louise Varese (New York: New Directions, 1961), p. 80” (Howl, 163). The reader of the variorum edition of “Howl” is assumed to know a little French, but not to identify this as a quotation from Rimbaud (unlike Hollander, for whom Ginsberg did not need to explain the reference). It is entirely typical of the contrariness in Ginsberg’s approach to promoting himself as a particular kind of poet by the company he keeps that, while he adds a note to make the reader notice one French poet, here Rimbaud, he redacts his

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letter to Hollander to leave out another—cutting a rare reference to one of the most crucial “esoteric classical” allusions to the French literature behind “Howl”: Anyone noticing the constructions and the series of poems in Howl would then notice that the next task I set myself to was adapting that kind of open long line to tender lyric feelings and short form, so next is Supermarket in California, where I pay homage to Whitman in realistic terms (eyeing the grocery boys) and it’s a little lyric, and since it’s almost prose it’s cast in form of prose paragraphs like St. Perse—and has nobody noticed that I was aware enough of that to make that shift there. (Ginsberg, Letters, 206)

Indeed, to answer Ginsberg’s rhetorical question, nobody has noticed that, behind his homage to Whitman, there lay St.-John Perse.

Perse’s Line: “Longer Than Whitman” Ginsberg’s complaints in 1958 that critics of “Howl” had failed to “notice the fucking obvious,” let alone detect its “esoteric classical allusions” or his debt to St.-John Perse, reveal an acute concern with literary genealogy and its communication, so much so that we might conclude he suffered from a kind of inverted anxiety of influence, to use Harold Bloom’s classic diagnostic term, and that his obsessive desire to be identified in relation to specific poets was compounded by psychological, cultural and sexual factors (as the poet son of a poet father, as a Jew, and as a gay man desiring to perpetuate himself creatively rather than biologically).5 And yet, whether in his poetry or in his comments about it, the demands that Ginsberg placed on the reader to recognize his kinship with French poetry were as we have seen often subtle to the point of being cryptic, from using an ellipsis in the epigraph of “At Apollinaire’s Grave,” to letting Rimbaud speak for his exasperation at being misunderstood in his letter to Hollander. Ginsberg’s ambivalent desires not only leave their traces in the manuscript genealogy of “Howl”—naming names only to retract them as he wrote and rewrote the poem—but also marked the genealogies he promoted in the decades that followed. In the case of St.-John Perse, the evidence for his place within the literary genealogy of Ginsberg’s works is problematic to such an extent that it is difficult to say he has been “neglected” or “overlooked,” since he has not been noticed in the first place. In general terms, this is because few scholars working in the field

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are at all familiar with Perse and because Ginsberg, seemingly so fulsome about declaring his influences, made few invitations to consider Perse’s significance for his poetry. However, my aim here is not merely to make good the oversight of a particular literary source for “Howl,” any more than it is to rectify the imbalance in critical readings of Ginsberg by promoting French poets over American. Rather, it is to establish for the first time the precise and significant role that Perse played in the development of Ginsberg’s poetics, a role that can be traced back to the very beginnings of his career in 1945, a full decade before “Howl.” It also is to show how Perse uniquely triangulated a series of crucial binary contradictions within the genealogy of Ginsberg’s practice and identity as a poet. These binaries are both broadly cultural—the French and American poetic lineages of his poetry—and specific to individual poets—the opposition between Whitman and T.S. Eliot Ginsberg had set up in his letter to Trilling. But in order to establish Perse’s textual and mediating significance, we have first to see why his presence, and indeed his absence, has not been noticed, which brings us back to Ginsberg’s complaint to Hollander that “nobody noticed” “A Supermarket in California” was “cast in form of prose paragraphs like St. Perse.” Ginsberg’s lament is astonishing for two reasons. Most obviously, because “A Supermarket” is an emphatic marker not of St.-John Perse but of Walt Whitman’s presence in Howl and Other Poems. However we judge the Whitmanian qualities of “Howl,” here Whitman is not just named (three times) but appears on the page, fantasized as both the subject of the narrator’s address (“What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman”) and as a character (“I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys”) (Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 136). Whitman does not need to be “noticed”: he is impossible to miss. We immediately grasp the spirit of kinship one poet projects onto the other, and intuit Ginsberg’s faith that poetry transcends time and death. But what Ginsberg is saying to Hollander is that St.-John Perse is also in “A Supermarket” if you can recognize him. Perse is hidden in plain sight because he is not represented in the content of the poem; he is embodied formally (“cast in the form of prose paragraphs like St. Perse”). It’s an astonishing claim that has consequences far beyond the interpretation of “A Supermarket in California.” It implies for Ginsberg’s poetry that behind Whitman—that “mountain too vast to be seen”—there stands Perse. Or to put it another way, when Ginsberg speaks of Whitman he may actually be talking about Perse. It would be hard to imagine a bolder rewriting of Ginsberg’s literary genealogy. Few readers familiar with the work of both Perse and Ginsberg

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would be likely to make the connection between “A Supermarket in California” and Perse’s poetry. That is not to say there are no similarities. Perse wrote lyric poetry and the central formal characteristic of his oeuvre, its combination of verse with prose, is certainly evident in “A Supermarket.” Ginsberg’s absurdist comic voice also finds a rough equivalent in Perse’s sharp humor. The editors of Saint-John Perse sans masque establish a distinction to this effect that is crucial to understanding how surprisingly close Ginsberg and Perse are in tone: “Lucidity, when it doesn’t want to lapse into sentimentalism or academism, has humor for a corollary, a transgressive laughter. Anabase refrains from lingering in a noble register” (Camelin and Gardes Tamine, 24; my translation). If the formal connection that Ginsberg establishes between “A Supermarket” and Perse’s poetry is astonishing, it is because it displaces the most distinctive and indeed obvious point of comparison between their work, which is that both are writers of epic-scale long-lined poetry, if not actual “epics” in the classical sense.6 That is to say, the impact Perse had on Ginsberg’s poetry is far less to be found in the lyric “Supermarket” than in the epic “Howl,” a poem that shares with Perse’s major works—the very long prose poems Anabasis (Anabase, 1924) and Winds (Vents, 1945)—a direct line of descent from Whitman. When Ginsberg implies to Hollander that, in “A Supermarket,” behind Whitman we find Perse, what he really means is that behind Perse we find Whitman. Of course, Whitman was a major influence on almost all French symbolist poetry, including that of Rimbaud, and his literary reputation in France was second only to Poe’s.7 However, thanks to the open access to Perse’s personal library granted by the Fondation Saint-John Perse, we can see just how central his engagement with Whitman was: his two volume translation of Whitman’s complete works, for example, are the most annotated of all Perse’s books (Rigolot, 145). The connection between the French and the American poets was in fact noted in the very first critical article on Perse, by Valery Larbaud in December 1911 (Patterson, 32), and is self-evident in Winds, which Carol Rigolot astutely termed Perse’s “American Epic of Leaves and Grass” (Rigolot, 144). Rigolot’s forceful study has established that Perse not only took Whitman as a paradigm for both his lyric and epic poetry; he also embraced academic recognition of their connection, underlining in his copy of Alain Bosquet’s Anthologie de la poésie américaine (1956) the passage specifically linking his poetry with Whitman’s (144, 153). Their works also share many distinctive stylistic traits, as Betsy Erkkila has pointed out, from the use of exclamations and parentheses to a penchant for scientific terms and highly specialized vocabularies (Erkkila, 215–25). More

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broadly, both poets saw themselves as explorers making inventories of the world and invested the figure of the poet with healing, sacred and messianic qualities. Perse was, however, “careful to highlight” their differences including the distance between Whitman’s vers libre and his own “stricter metrics” (Rigolot, 147). The question of genealogy was Perse’s central poetic preoccupation, rarely simple, and the relation of Vents to Leaves of Grass was one of “kinship and rivalry”; “homage and fronde, tribute and struggle” (153). In contrast, when Ginsberg claims to “pay homage to Whitman” in “A Supermarket in California,” we believe him without reservation, and the jokey tone—“childless, lonely old grubber”— does not imply struggle or rivalry but the mockery of self-deprecation: Ginsberg identifies with Whitman. Did Ginsberg identify with Perse? In biographical terms, it would seem hard to imagine two poets less alike: behind the already-imposing pseudonym St.-John Perse stood Alexis Leger-Leger, born in Guadeloupe, who until 1940 had been a high ranking and internationally respected diplomat in the French government. While Ginsberg was morphing from Beat rebel into a bearded icon of the counterculture, 1960 saw Perse being honored with the Nobel Prize for literature. More to the point, no two poets could be further apart in terms of the relationship of biography to their work, Ginsberg’s oeuvre being as centered around his life as Perse’s is cordoned off from it, a split he formalized by forging the pseudonym St.-John Perse. One of the more obvious reasons why the St.John Persian quality of Ginsberg’s poetry has been missed is that, taken at face value, the two poets and their work seem worlds apart. Perse’s model of the poet was lofty and noble, “The Prince”; Ginsberg’s “the madman bum and angel” in the street (Howl, 6). Differences in tone and idiom seem equally irreconcilable: in a poem like Anabase the esoteric quality of Perse’s vocabulary and the universal sweep of Biblical rhythms from the opening line onwards—“I have built myself, with honour and dignity have I built myself on three great seasons, and it promises well, the soil whereon I have established my Law” (Anabasis, 25)—do not invite comparison with a narrator wandering “the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix” or being “fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists” (Howl, 3). And yet, a closer reading of Perse’s Vents reveals a series of surprisingly precise stylistic parallels with Ginsberg’s “Howl” that in turn warrant considering how Ginsberg found in Perse a foundation for his own idea of the poet. Putting the texts side-by-side makes visible how similar to Winds are some of the phrasings and rhythms that seem most peculiar to “Howl.” Dense and imaginative formulations as Ginsberg’s “the lamb stew of the

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imagination,” “the lava and ash of poetry” or “the total animal soup of time” (Howl, 4–6) elaborate on what Ginsberg called the “hypertrophic metaphors” of St. Perse (Book of Martyrdom, 430), such as “the alcoves of love,” “the coaches of dream” or “the octopus of knowledge” in Vents (Perse, Winds, 186, 211, 153). The alliterations in “w” and “s” giving its rhythm to Ginsberg’s poem also give away its relation to Winds. Rhythmically, as well as metaphorically, the heroes of “Howl” “who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism” and “who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts” (Ginsberg, Howl, 4, 3) indeed evoke Vent’s protagonists “who wandered at peace under assumed names in the great Titles of Absence” when “it is Noon on the chessboard of the sciences, in the pure maze of error illuminated like a sanctuary” (Perse, Winds, 176, 179); while syntactically, the distinctive use of “whose” in Part II of “Howl” (“Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money!” [Howl, 6]) also has precursors in Vents (“And Anhinga, the bird, fabled water-turkey whose existence is no fable, whose presence is my delight, my rapture”) (Winds, 159; my emphasis). The strongest link between “Howl” and Winds is, however, structural. The violent refrain of exclamations that characterizes part II of Ginsberg’s poem (“Moloch! Moloch!”) and the long benediction that constitutes the “Footnote to Howl” (“Holy! Holy! Holy!”) closely reflect the elementary structure of Vents. In Perse’s universe, only after everything is destroyed by the forces of poetry—as by fire, wind or water—can the poet re-create and celebrate the world: Let the rivers in their risings multiply! […] And in the same movement, to all this movement joined, my poem, continuing in the wind, from city to city and river to river, flows onward with the highest waves of the earth, themselves wives and daughters of other waves. (Perse, Winds, 150)

In Ginsberg’s poem, it is likewise only once destruction has happened that true communication can be restored between men. This is Part III of “Howl” with its refrain addressing Carl Solomon “I’m with you in Rockland,” following Part II in which Ginsberg orchestrates a violent flood—“over the river!,” “gone down the flood!,” “down to the river!” (Howl, 7)—that is as joyfully St.-John Persian as the blessing of the “Footnote to Howl.” The steps necessary for such destruction, re-creation and celebration are economically spelled out in the very last prose

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paragraph of Vents, whose lexicon and concern with filiation clearly bear the mark of Perse’s kinship with Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: When violence had remade the bed of men on the earth, A very old tree, barren of leaves, resumed the thread of its maxims… And another tree of high degree was already rising from the great subterranean Indies, With its magnetic leaf and its burden of fruits. (Perse, Winds, 220)

If Ginsberg made significant stylistic borrowings from Perse, they nevertheless remain minor in comparison to the larger allure of prose poetry that he put in service of his own messianic conception of the poet. Perse’s mythic figure of the poet, evident in both Anabase and Vents, could only appeal to Ginsberg’s mystic and political visions.8 Although at first sight “Howl” and Vents appear antithetical images of one another—the former speaking directly to Cold War America, the latter ahistorically universal—the contrast does not hold. Ginsberg objected to readings of “Howl” as a “protest poem” because, like Perse, he was aiming beyond the immediate terrors and injustices of his times. The invocation of Moloch declares the poem apocalyptic in Biblical terms that echo the winds that blast the old and bring closer the new world in Vents. While the grandeur of Perse’s rhetoric does give the impression of speaking in abstractions from a great height, on closer inspection we see that Vents is itself rooted in exact historical allusions, most importantly to the atomic bomb (from “the Exterminator” to “Ballistic engineers”) (Perse, Winds, 180, 183).9 Constantly invoking “the century” and “new men” on “new shores,” a “new dawn” and even “a new vision of the sky,” Perse offers his poem as a rehearsal for new futures to be fulfilled by the reader: “And the Poet is with us. His thoughts amongst you like watchtowers […] And you will turn into acts the dreams he has dared” (Perse, Winds, 156, 218, 216). Those “watchtowers” are corollaries to the hills of Apollinaire from which the poet can see the future, and anticipate Ginsberg’s declaration in “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!” of his function as a poet: “I am the defense early warning radar system” (Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 168). Although it was meant negatively, the reviewer who said of “Howl” that “Ginsberg’s poem had the effect of a natural disaster” was therefore correct.10 That was the idea. For Ginsberg, as for Perse, the disaster is cleansing, a prophetic source of joy: “Down on the rocks of Time! / Real holy laughter in the river!” (Howl, 7).

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The “American epic” Perse wrote in exile following the fall of France in 1940, Vents is a surprisingly upbeat poem in historical context, which has always scandalized French critics. The cheerful affront of Perse’s poem made it very much in the vein of Whitman and a suitably inspiring source for Ginsberg. When, in May 1955, he wrote in his journal that “here in America we are gathered independently of one soil’s history and begin anew with the dreamlike arrival of strangers gathering and propagating on a continent newly created,” in rhetorical tone and spirit he was thus following Perse from a decade earlier (Ginsberg, Journals: Mid-Fifties, 133). Not only did Ginsberg share Perse’s conceptions of the Poet, he also had a very similar ideal Reader. At first sight this again seems unlikely: Perse appears forbiddingly difficult, esoteric, enigmatic, his work that of “a poet’s poet” rather than a populist like Ginsberg. But if we generalize what Muckle says of Ginsberg’s readers, that they are led to “investigate his names, ingest his tradition,” we have precisely the goal set by Perse from the beginning of his career, which was, as Rigolot indicates, coded into the title of his most famous poem: “For Perse the word anabasis denoted the journey not only of writers but also of critics. His ideal reader, imagined in a 1910 letter to Jacques Rivière, is a person who recreates a work of art by restoring its framework and context” (Rigolot, 63). So long as we think of Ginsberg in sociological terms of addressing the Beat Generation, and later the counterculture, we miss this much more literary goal to establish a community of readers in his own image. Ginsberg shared with Whitman the desire to create a new lineage, a new America, and, for all their differences in biography and in the relationship of their work to biography, he also shared it with Perse. The ending of Vents’ penultimate section stresses that the future will be bred from such cross-fertilization of poetry, in lines that mix the collective pronoun (“our poems”) and the personal (“my cry”) to suggest common cause: And our poems will go forth again on the roadway of men, bearing seed and fruit in the lineage of men of another age— […] and my cry of a living being on the causeway of men, from place to place, and from man to man, Unto the distant shores where death deserts! (Perse, Winds, 219)

Perhaps, then, we should take quite literally Ginsberg’s claim that in “A Supermarket in California” behind Whitman we find Perse; which is to say that, behind the biographical figure of the poet (his “homage to Whitman in realistic

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terms”) we find the poetic technician (“Perse in form of prose paragraphs”). Of course, it is standing the received wisdom on its head to argue that, instead of directly laying claim to a definitively American lineage (“I Allen Ginsberg Bard out of New Jersey take up the laurel tree cudgel from Whitman”), in fact Ginsberg was drawn to Whitman by way of a French poet (Ginsberg, Journals: Mid-Fifties, 207).11 But it could be argued that Ginsberg read Whitman like a Frenchman, in the sense that much of what appealed to him about Whitman also appealed to Perse, from the open and onward rush of the vers libre line to the grand, sacred vision of the poet’s mission. Then again, such a reading is only truly surprising if we forget just how reciprocal were the connections between Whitman and French poetry, since it had shaped him almost as much as he would shape it.12 Is it an overstatement to say that Ginsberg’s Perse is “hidden”? Certainly, his presence is often implied where it might easily have been stated. But once we formulate the triangulation Ginsberg-Whitman-Perse, what Ginsberg did not specify in his letter to Eberhart about the formal construction of “Howl” becomes clear. To say that each part of “Howl” takes a different approach to “the use of the long line (longer than Whitman’s, more French)” sounds like a crossword clue whose answer must be: St.-John Perse. It is impossible to think Ginsberg could mean anyone else, just as it is when he explained to Hollander that “Howl” “experiments with the possibilities of an expressive long line, and perhaps carries on from where Whitman in U.S. left off ” (Ginsberg, Letters, 208). One reason for the absence of Perse’s name where it might be expected is suggested by Ginsberg’s decision to name and address another poet—Lorca— alongside Whitman in “A Supermarket in California.” For Ginsberg’s encounters with Whitman and Lorca (his “fairy son”) are clearly coded terms that imply a shared homo-social poetics, “the vision of poetic influence as a scene of samesex erotic and intellectual exchange,” as Aidan Wasley puts it in his comment on the poem (56). In other words—and ironically enough, in context of the lavender scares of the 1950s—Ginsberg’s need to affirm his literary identity through a technical lineage was trumped by his desire to establish an openly gay poetic tradition. As a poet, Perse was definitely one of “Whitman’s children,” to borrow Ginsberg’s own expression; but, unlike Ginsberg or Lorca, Perse was not one of Whitman’s Queer Children, to borrow the title of Catherine Davies’ recent study. To put it less polemically, St.-John Perse’s name was not “talismanic,” in Muckle’s terms; it lacked the right symbolic or “star” qualities (Muckle, 11). And so, if we ask why Perse is left hidden behind Ginsberg’s homage to Whitman in

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“A Supermarket in California,” why he did not make more of what he took from him at the time of “Howl” in the variorum edition, here is one possible answer: his desire to make that mountain too vast to be seen visible. Such a reading is suggested by the way in which Perse’s name appears in the variorum edition of “Howl.” On the one hand, the reference is strikingly affirmative about Perse’s importance for the poem. On the other, it’s not surprising it has been overlooked since Ginsberg gives Perse’s name only to take it back again, pairing it with another that was bound to completely overshadow it: Rimbaud. In notes about a line that is both lexically and thematically evocative of Perse (“Dolmens mark a vanished civilization”), Ginsberg observes: At this point, with an unusually extended line, the triadic form of William Carlos Williams definitely broke down and author realised it couldn’t be restored as measure for the verse. The only option was to expand the verse beyond that of Christopher Smart, as on occasion Whitman did, and the modernist Kenneth Fearing, more loosely. Paragraphic prose poetry by Rimbaud and St.-John Perse provided more electric model. (Howl, 130)

While on reflection we might wonder what Ginsberg meant by an “electric model” of prose poetry, what he is stating here is striking: that from “this point” in “Howl” onwards—less than half way through its first part—he modeled his poem formally on Rimbaud and St.-John Perse. It is a major statement about the form of “Howl,” made briefly and with no further clarification: Ginsberg says nothing about which works by Rimbaud he had in mind or who St.-John Perse was. In his 1949 preface to Anabasis, T.S. Eliot decreed St.-John Perse “a name known to everyone, I think, who is seriously concerned with contemporary poetry in America,” a claim that hedges its bets twice (with the qualifiers “I think” and “seriously”) (Eliot, Preface to Anabasis, 13). In those pre-Internet days, it is worth observing, it was not easy to find out more about poets known only by the cognoscenti. Ginsberg understood this, and as early as 1984 stated that the annotations in his Collected Poems aimed to “transmit cultural archetypes to electronic laser TV generations that don’t read Dostoyevsky Buddha bibles” (“Author’s Preface,” Collected Poems, xx). And yet the variorum edition of “Howl” adds nothing about a name Ginsberg knew was obscure, in total contrast to the other with which he pairs it. What the claim for Perse’s importance as a “model” for “Howl” therefore gave, his pairing of Perse with Rimbaud took back. Just as Perse was hidden formally behind the figure of Whitman in “A Supermarket in California,” so is he here behind Rimbaud, the most famous of French modern

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poets, the poster boy for radicalism in life and poetics beneath whose portrait Ginsberg famously posed in the Beat Hotel (Figure I.1; see p. 18).

“Burroughs Amusing Himself with Perse” Pairing Perse with Rimbaud is not in itself unusual. It was, for example, made prominently at the time of “Howl” by Henry Miller, whose 1955 preface to a new edition of his study of Rimbaud, The Time of the Assassins, described Perse as the “only living poet who is able to give me anything approaching the pleasure and excitement of Rimbaud” (Miller, xv). Wallace Fowlie also made the comparison in Mid-Century French Poetry, an edited volume that Ginsberg was reading in August 1955 (Journals: Mid-Fifties, 215).13 Perse and Rimbaud were therefore on his mind the very month Ginsberg started writing “Howl.” In fact, Ginsberg himself would regularly pair Perse with Rimbaud in the 1950s and 1960s. However, he consistently made this combination not in order to characterize his own work, but that of Burroughs: “Burroughs is a poet too, really. In the sense that a page of his prose is as dense with imagery as anything in St. Perse or Rimbaud” (Spontaneous Mind, 52; Ginsberg’s emphasis). Here, Ginsberg affirms Perse and Rimbaud’s comparability, even though it means identifying Burroughs as a poet, without giving any hint that the connection might also apply to his own work, and the same goes for the numerous letters Ginsberg wrote in the 1950s to promote Burroughs’ writing. In September 1953, the month he photographed Burroughs posing with a copy of Winds in his Lower East Side apartment (Figure I.2; see p. 21), Ginsberg thus invokes the name of Perse to persuade Malcolm Cowley to read what would become Burroughs’ “In Search of Yage”: “Writing gets to a kind of laconism and compression so that in parts the description resembles the anthropologicaleastern deep psychic intensity of St. J-Perse’s poetry” (qtd. in Burroughs and Ginsberg, The Yage Letters Redux, xxxv). Later in the decade, Ginsberg routinely compared the manuscript of Naked Lunch to either Perse alone or to Perse with Rimbaud, and in 1960, for testimony in support of Big Table magazine, he asserted that Burroughs’ novel “approaches a kind of prose poetry which is found in 20th century French writing—notably St. John Perse” (Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 175).14 To compare Burroughs with Perse already implies not only Ginsberg’s familiarity with the French poet, but also his desire to make a connection that nobody else ever made. Was Ginsberg describing Burroughs’

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work or his own? Thematically, that “anthropological-eastern deep psychic intensity” gives an accurate description of a strain in Ginsberg’s poetry, as does the emphasis he puts on “density,” “laconism and compression” formally, and when we recall the terms in which he defined “Howl” in 1956—“The long line, the prose poem, the spontaneous sketch are XX century French forms”—the imprint of St.-John Perse becomes unmistakable. Ginsberg’s consistent effort to associate Rimbaud and Perse with Burroughs’ writing enacts the same kind of displaced allusion we find in the captions he wrote in the late 1980s to add to his 1953 photograph of Burroughs holding St.John Perse’s Winds (Figure I.2 ; see p. 21). That is to say, just as we shouldn’t take at face value the apparently objective scholarly function of the variorum edition of “Howl,” so too we should see past the seemingly documentary function of Ginsberg’s captions. Formally, because they are handwritten, they invite us to reconsider Burroughs’ relationship with the book he holds by implying that the man behind the camera is not a disinterested observer. Indeed, we might speculate that the copy of Winds Burroughs is “amusing himself with” actually belongs to Ginsberg, and that, as well as or maybe even more than Burroughs, Ginsberg had an investment in posing Burroughs with Perse for the snapshot. In fact, the photograph had a previous caption and its subject was not Burroughs at all: “St. Perse’s new book just published 1953; Bill had given me his 1945 Anabase. 206 E. 7st.”15 In this draft caption, Ginsberg’s focus falls on Winds independently of Burroughs, and on Anabase as a gift, one we can presume was precious to him. That this is the only photograph capturing any of the Beat writers from this era in the act of reading makes the interpretation of the picture all the more significant. While the connection between Perse and Burroughs may not be widely known outside scholarly circles, it is still the case that Ginsberg helped to make and publicize it, hence overshadowing, deliberately or not, his own rapport to Perse. There is a precise textual relationship between the two poets that is important both in itself and for our general approach to Ginsberg and his poetic lineage. For if we are to take him seriously as a poet, then we must be able to recognize his relation to Perse, a French poet whose significance is not connected to an iconic biography—as is so manifestly the case with Rimbaud or most of the other names Ginsberg names. The popularized equation of French poetry with the trope of the poète maudit has always made it easy to take Ginsberg’s affiliations lightly. St.-John Perse short-circuits any such readings, because his poetry, which is as demanding as Rimbaud’s, cannot be reduced to sound-bites (“the derangement of all the senses”) or subsumed

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into the identity of a radical icon. Perhaps this is why Ginsberg dropped so few hints, why he left Perse hidden for the reader to discover, even if that meant, as Eliot puts it, only those readers “seriously concerned with contemporary poetry in America.”

“A Romantic Period” or “Being Hard-Up and Classical”? If Ginsberg was conscious of writing for a divided readership from the time of composing “Howl” onwards, then he must have been aware that, like his letters to critics, his later annotations were necessarily problematic. Not to name names risked failing to pass on the message, failing to disseminate his genealogy, while adding them paradoxically positioned the reader as a passive outsider in the very act of being invited to become an active initiate. In the “Author’s Preface, Reader’s Manual” to his 1984 Collected Poems, Ginsberg offered precedents for his scholarship: “Mary Wollstonecraft wrote extensive commentaries for Percy Shelley’s posthumous collections. Wordsworth and Eliot favored readers by composing their own notes” (Ginsberg, Collected Poems, xxi). The comment is particularly significant in relation to both Perse and the bigger picture of Ginsberg’s ambivalent relation to his own poetry’s genealogy. For his 1986 variorum edition of “Howl” was meticulously modeled on Valerie Eliot’s The Waste Land: Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts (1971). And yet, while critics have duly noted the obvious, they have overlooked the remarkable irony that in the “fully annotated” variorum edition itself, a scholarly project to establish the comparable seriousness of Ginsberg’s great poem through its genealogy, there is no acknowledgement of its own singular genealogical model. Its origins remain a kind of open secret, visible in its form yet never mentioned. This curious treatment of Eliot is, I would argue, both more evidence of how ambiguously Ginsberg related to his own literary identity, and specifically relevant to his treatment of Perse. The Whitman-Eliot binary that Ginsberg made to Trilling in 1956 could not have been more emphatic: I think what is coming is a romantic period (strangely tho everybody thinks that by being hard-up and classical they are going to make it like Eliot which is silly) […] Perhaps Whitman will be seen to have set the example and been bypassed for half a century. (Howl, 156)

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However, as we know from his contemporaneous journals—and as the silent homage thirty years later of the variorum edition of “Howl” suggests—Ginsberg was in 1955 as immersed in Eliot as he was in Whitman, whether quoting The Waste Land (“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”) or that July, just a month before he started to write “Howl,” recording a dream fantasy of meeting Eliot in his London flat: “Eliot sees me & says ‘and may I see your work,’ and I am weeping with loneliness and grief & love unexpressed that chokes my breath, gratitude for his desire to read me” (Ginsberg, Journals: Mid-Fifties, 118, 145). Although much has and could still be said about his conflicted relationship with Eliot, the point here is that the binary Ginsberg set up for Trilling was false: he knew that, despite their obvious differences in outlook, “Howl” was related to as well as comparable to The Waste Land. And as Ginsberg also knew, there was only one poet who bridged the Whitman-Eliot binary: St.-John Perse. While Perse’s poetics owed much to Whitman, he was enormously indebted to T.S. Eliot, who translated his Anabase in 1936 and later updated both his translation and prefaces, for his introduction into American letters and to a wider Anglo-readership. It was the Eliot translation of Anabase that Burroughs gave to Ginsberg in 1945, and since Burroughs never tired of repeating the association between Perse and Eliot, it was surely one he made for Ginsberg from the start.16 The Perse-Eliot relationship was a very particular instance of the dense and reciprocal literary exchanges linking French and American modernist poetry—Eliot’s work was of course hugely and visibly shaped by French symbolist poetry, from Laforgue to Corbière—and Ginsberg may also have known that Perse returned the interest by translating Eliot. In any event, Ginsberg surely recognized the aesthetic parallels, as well as the common difficulty of their work and, no doubt, agreed with Eliot’s 1930 preface to Anabase, which argued that the obscurity of Perse was “due to the suppression of links in the chain of explanatory and connecting matter, and not to incoherence, or to the love of cryptogram” (Eliot, Preface, Anabasis, 10). While it’s obvious that Eliot might have been describing his own Waste Land here as much as Perse’s Anabase, it’s also true, to an unrecognized extent, that the same could be said of “Howl,” whose aesthetic of cryptic juxtapositions and gaps was mistaken for incoherence too. As Anita Patterson notes, there were “many striking similarities between Eliot and Perse that would help explain the ease, and force, of their reciprocal, formative influence” (Patterson, 32). But what’s most fascinating from the viewpoint of Ginsberg’s poetics leading up to “Howl,” and the way it is marked

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by the seemingly contradictory pulls of Eliot on one side and Whitman on the other, is that one element that drew Eliot and Perse together was in fact Whitman. “One reason Eliot may have been especially drawn to Perse’s frontier setting in Anabase,” Patterson judiciously notes, “is that it lays bare Perse’s ambivalent affinity with Whitman and, in so doing, brings Eliot one step closer to a rapprochement with a poet who represented all that Eliot had tried hardest to avoid in his American past” (32). Here we see how the modernist collagelike poetry of Eliot and Perse, so dense and apparently culturally elitist, could yet be related to the loud free verse and democratic vistas of Whitman and Ginsberg. Just as Perse triangulated Eliot’s relationship with Whitman, so too he triangulated Ginsberg’s opposition between Eliot and Whitman.

“What Do You Want—To Be a Neo-Rimbaud—a la St. Perse?” If Perse modeled for Ginsberg ways to reconcile antithetical affiliations between poets in the mid-1950s, he had played the same role for him at the very start of his career in the mid-1940s. The month he began writing “Howl,” in August 1955, Ginsberg’s reading list included Wallace Fowlies’ recently published Mid-Century French Poetry, as well as A Mirror for French Poetry, an anthology featuring a selection from Anabase in Eliot’s translation. Ginsberg’s comment in his journal about the book is telling: “read book read already in N.Y.” (Journals: Mid-Fifties, 215). In rereading Eliot’s translation of Perse as he began working on “Howl,” Ginsberg was indeed completing a full decade of engaging with Perse’s poetry and, in a sure sign of how seriously he read him, with his critical reception. That Ginsberg was one of Perse’s ideal readers, defined by Eliot as those “seriously concerned with contemporary poetry in America,” was already clear from his first recorded mention of the French poet, an unusually detailed and informed journal entry for May 1946: “Perse, Saint-Jean. Anabasis, a poem; essay by S.A. Rhodes / Éloges (translated by Louise Varèse); Exile (limped thru); also his Pluies (translated by Denis Devlin) Bibliography” (Ginsberg, The Book of Martyrdom, 132). Rhodes’ essay would have significantly situated Ginsberg’s encounter with Perse philosophically (“Perse begins with the rationalism of the West, and ends—like so many poets before him—with the wisdom of the East”) and poetically (“Outside of France, the poet the closest to Perse, I think, is Walt Whitman. Perse has the same sweeping inspiration as the American bard”) (Rhodes, 42, 48). Early traces of Ginsberg’s engagement with Perse also appear

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in his very first effort at writing a major poem, “The Last Voyage,” from 1945, and its creative fruits are signaled, for once openly, in his even more ambitious early poem written the following year, “The Character of the Happy Warrior.” Ginsberg wrote “The Last Voyage” (and rewrote it; there were at least four versions) in early 1945, and in 2006 the poem was finally published in The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice, an important collection of his juvenilia and early journals. As has been noted, “The Last Voyage” shows the heavy influence of Rimbaud and to a lesser extent Baudelaire, and the two French poets are explicitly named in the poem. However, “The Last Voyage” also openly alludes to other sources, including Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelstrom.”17 Editor Morgan’s assumption that Ginsberg was writing after Rimbaud, specifically in the wake of “Le Bateau ivre,” likewise needs to be revisited in order to fully grasp the role of French poetry in Ginsberg’s attempted debut as a serious poet. In terms of versification and length, Ginsberg’s poem actually departs from Rimbaud: his use of octosyllables contrasts with the classical Alexandrines of “Le Bateau ivre,” while, at some 250 lines, “The Last Voyage” is more than double the length of Rimbaud’s supposed model text. Although Ginsberg’s poem shows no formal connection to Anabase either, its central thematic preoccupation with voyaging and exploration quite clearly does. It could be argued that to find Perse here is only to recognize Perse’s own debts to Rimbaud, but there is strong circumstantial evidence for identifying the Perse-like qualities of “The Last Voyage” in the long letter acclaiming Rimbaud that Ginsberg wrote to Trilling in September 1945. At first sight, the letter seems to argue against any connection to Perse, since Ginsberg’s passionate advocacy of Rimbaud was a direct response to the feedback his professor had given him about “the poem with the portentous title,” namely “The Last Voyage” (Ginsberg, Letters, 10). But while there are no references to Perse in Ginsberg’s letter to Trilling, his description of Rimbaud does seem to invoke him, as when claiming to admire him “not as the poet maudit, the decadent, but the representative hero, the socio-politically concerned, and in the highest manner politically minded poet” (14). That final phrasing in particular sounds like Ginsberg is talking about St.-John Perse/ Alexis Léger, the mature poet and senior diplomat in one, rather than Rimbaud, the young communard who then abandoned literature for commerce. While it would seem wholly implausible to claim that Ginsberg suppressed references to Perse in this letter, appearances do in fact turn out to be deceptive, as he admitted almost immediately: “I wrote Trilling an 8-page letter explaining (my version) the Rimbaud Weltschauung,” he told Kerouac; “It was mostly an exegesis of Bill’s

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Spenglerian and anthropological ideas. I feel sort of foolish now” (Kerouac and Ginsberg, Letters, 27). Ginsberg’s confession that the Weltanschauung (“world view”) he attributed to Rimbaud was actually plagiarized from Burroughs should make us rethink not only his letter to Trilling, but also “The Last Voyage” itself. For while Ginsberg specifies Spengler and refers to anthropology, there are obvious parallels between these references and the work of Perse, especially Anabase that explores vast historical structures and conveys a global vision of mankind. Or to put it otherwise, if Ginsberg’s defense of “The Last Voyage” in terms of Rimbaud really came from Burroughs, then it would be surprising not to find such parallels. It would be an oversimplification to say that, just as Burroughs was behind Ginsberg, so Perse was behind Rimbaud, but the connection between the two French poets had recently been made by Burroughs in person, during the visit Ginsberg and Kerouac paid him in late 1944 to inspect his library. This is one of the most retold anecdotes in Beat biography, and one of the few places where Perse’s name sometimes appears, as in Miles’ account: “He told them he read Rimbaud for his description of the derangement of the senses, and both Rimbaud and St. John Perse for ‘the foreign perfume, the juxtaposition of strange experience and the images of cities glittering in the distance’” (Miles, Ginsberg, 54).18 Although Ginsberg himself never mentioned seeing Perse on Burroughs’ bookshelves, we know from one of the captions of his photograph of Burroughs reading Perse that he was given his copy of Anabase, and so even if this did not happen in time to make an impression on him while writing “The Last Voyage,” it would surely have done so in retrospect. Certainly, by the time he made the significant gesture of lending Anabase to Trilling, in December 1946, Ginsberg had creatively embraced the book that Burroughs gave him. Between January and March 1946, Ginsberg completed a poem several times longer than “The Last Voyage”: “The Character of the Happy Warrior.” Who is the Happy Warrior? Most literally, the title of a poem by William Wordsworth. But it would also be an apt description of St.-John Perse’s ideal of the poet, and the fact that Ginsberg dedicated the poem to Burroughs and gave it a Burroughsian subtitle (“Death in Violence”) affirms the way in which Burroughs mediated Ginsberg’s early engagement with Perse.19 Written in a series of cantos marked by roman numerals (up to IX), “The Character of the Happy Warrior” echoes Anabase structurally (numbered up to X). Moreover, Ginsberg’s poem quotes from Anabase Canto III as an epigraph to its own Canto VII. Hence, Perse figures in Ginsberg’s first pantheon of writers, following epigraphs that cite Auden, Huncke (clearly, the odd one out), Rimbaud, Mahler, Rilke and Kafka,

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and preceding Eliot and Yeats. More precisely, Ginsberg’s citation of Anabase Canto III, which is about killing the “rhetorician” in yourself and letting go of your personal anguish, acknowledges that the Happy Warrior was in fact the poet he wanted to become. Through this poem and through Perse, Ginsberg gave himself the courage to get through his apprenticeship in order to “leave your youths, your youthful cities, to attain the strength of voyage” (Ginsberg, Book of Martyrdom, 448). Although written a year afterwards, “The Character of the Happy Warrior” seems to retrospectively validate “The Last Voyage” both thematically (the adventure of travel and exploration) and formally (the canto structure) in terms that are distinctly St.-John Persian. Just how central Perse was to Ginsberg’s writing at this period is most fully visible in a “Critical Introduction” he wrote immediately after completing “The Character of the Happy Warrior.” The text establishes that in the mid-1940s Perse played for Ginsberg the same vital roles he would play a decade later in the run-up to “Howl”; that is, both in the development of his poetics and in uniquely triangulating apparently binary contradictions within his practice and identity as a poet. Ginsberg felt his long poem was a failure, “an artificial fiction” that invalidated its goal to achieve “objectivity” and “unity of being”: Therefore, this poem is a white elephant, as I imagine most poetry is now; a parade of sentimentalities, an “indecent exposure.” It is this knowledge, I believe, which turned Rimbaud against poetry. It is the attainment of this knowledge, and the mastery of self which lends grandeur, power, nobility, and authenticity to the poetry of St. Perse, also the Vision of Yeats and his last poems […] (Ginsberg, Book of Martyrdom, 431–32)

It is hard to imagine a more powerful statement of Ginsberg’s admiration for a poet than his description of Perse’s poetry in terms of “grandeur, power, nobility, and authenticity,” and it is equally striking that he sees Perse triumphing where Rimbaud failed: Perse attains “mastery of self ” where Rimbaud could only overexpose himself. However, while the opposition of Perse and Rimbaud in the genealogy of “The Character of the Happy Warrior” aligns Perse as Classical and Rimbaud as Romantic, Ginsberg cannot maintain the binary even when trying to make it: I had recourse to the various anti-romantic devices developed for poetry by T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden. I have made use, on one hand of the elegiac style of Rilke, and the hypertrophic metaphors of St. Perse and Rimbaud. (Book of Martyrdom, 430)

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Once again Ginsberg ends up pairing Perse and Rimbaud, in terms of their “hypertrophic metaphors,” while his invocation of Eliot and Auden clearly sets them against Rimbaud and on the side of Perse. In terms of Ginsberg’s aesthetics, Perse and Rimbaud belong together. But in terms of Ginsberg’s aim to master the self and avoid “indecent exposure”—to attain Eliot’s famous separation of man from his art—Perse belongs with Eliot against Rimbaud. Sharing qualities of both Rimbaud and Eliot, Perse therefore triangulates the binary of Romantic and Classical for Ginsberg in 1946, just as he would ten years later when triangulating the binary of Whitman and Eliot. In sum, over the course of the decade, however much Ginsberg changed his ideas about poetry, Perse remained the constant point of reference because his poetry had the unique ability to contain the contradictory tensions within Ginsberg’s identity and poetics. Finally, the role that Perse played for Ginsberg in the mid-1940s was central to the broader philosophical underpinnings of the early Beat circle, as he tried to “illustrate” when lending Trilling his copy of Anabase in December 1946. After an hour-long discussion about “The Character of the Happy Warrior,” which convinced the young poet that his professor had missed “the whole point of the poem” (“to purge self and rhetoric of self-pity”), he noted in his journal: I keep wavering now between absolute dislike of writing, and a desire to write well and “in extension” as he calls it, or “objectively” or as part of unity of being à la St. Perse. I gave Trilling a copy of the “Anabasis” to look over to illustrate the point. (Book of Martyrdom, 155)

What makes Perse’s name so significant here is not only that Ginsberg uses it to express his “desire to write well,” or in fact his desire to write at all (by implication, for Ginsberg it’s Perse or nothing), but that it also characterizes “unity of being,” an expression Ginsberg used repeatedly to describe the aim of “The Character of the Happy Warrior.” As Miles notes, Ginsberg and Kerouac had “spent the early months of 1945 attempting to define their idea of the New Vision, a notion of the unity of being, taken mostly from William Butler Yeats’ A Vision” (Miles, Ginsberg, 58). Ginsberg’s “à la St. Perse” therefore forces us to revise the standard account of the early Beat circle, since the central ideal of the New Vision, the desire to achieve eternity through poetry, may have come from Yeats and may have been most famously embodied by the ubiquitously cited Rimbaud, but for Ginsberg it was actually “illustrated” by St.-John Perse, a name absent from all accounts.20

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“A Flash of Recognition” By the time Ginsberg reread Perse as he started to compose “Howl” in August 1955, he had been reading him for a decade, and while the exact place of Perse in the genealogy of his poem is difficult to fix, that he had an important one ought by now to be clear. Reconstructing a poem’s genealogy is all the more necessary when the poet himself has invested so much effort in doing so, and this was the case not only for Ginsberg but also for Perse. It has become a commonplace in the French criticism of Perse to note that his preference for anonymity and for separating biography from poetry through the use of his pseudonym was only one part of a wide-ranging manipulation of his identity. There is no better symbol of Perse’s desire to conceal as much as to reveal than the Pléiade edition of his complete works—the definitive annotated texts of major French authors produced posthumously—which was, uniquely, edited by Perse himself, and on whose cover appears, instead of the author’s photograph, the image of a bronze mask of his face. As this chapter has demonstrated, the manipulations in Ginsberg’s variorum edition of “Howl” should likewise revise our views of the American poet, the famous exhibitionist who bared his naked body and mind, to see that he was more a follower of Perse than his mirror-opposite. The face mask that St.-John Perse chose as an epitaph to visualize the artifice of the poet’s identity is a striking correlative for “this fiction named Allen Ginsberg,” to use the potent phrase from a letter he wrote in Paris, after “Howl” had suddenly made its author famous: “So finally it even begins dawning on me to stop thinking of myself as an American. And often in the dead of night I wonder who this fiction named Allen Ginsberg is—it certainly isn’t me” (qtd. in Raskin, 191). The irony is that when it comes to separating the public identity from the private self, Ginsberg largely failed where Perse largely succeeded precisely because fame and popular success brought him an unexpected and unprecedentedly wide public readership. “Howl” alone has sold an astonishing million copies, and confirmed the impression that he was writing for a mass audience. But his despair at being misread, so evident in the letters to Trilling, Eberhart and Hollander, makes plain that Ginsberg had a poetically sophisticated reader in mind, one who would never take his texts at face value or confuse author with first person narrator. That Ginsberg’s life eclipsed his work, effectively became his work, is all the more ironic for someone who from the start was drawn so strongly to St.-John Perse, the very model of promoting the poetry not the poet.

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The oeuvres of Ginsberg and Perse differ in nearly as many respects as their lives, and Ginsberg admired and learned from many other writers, but it is hard to think of any one poet who brought together so much of poetic significance for the author of “Howl,” not Williams or Whitman, or Apollinaire, Artaud, Lorca, Mayakovsky, Smart, Shelley, Crane, Pound or Eliot. It is not just that, if the long line was vital to his creative breakthrough, then no line was longer—and “more French”—than that of Perse, or that if the long epic was a model, then no modern epic was longer than Vents. It’s that Perse combined the long line with the prose poem, and epic scale with a mode of condensed juxtaposition, and that these features of his poetics served definitions of both the ideal poet and the ideal reader that matched Ginsberg’s own. To recognize the Perse in Ginsberg is therefore not only to acknowledge shared formal properties in their work, but also to identify common visions of authorship and readership. It is to appreciate Ginsberg as a more technically serious poet, and his poems as more subtle and demanding. It is, finally, to see what Ginsberg wanted to show his readers, rather than what he wanted to tell them. That Ginsberg and Perse had so much in common despite appearances— including those appearances created by Ginsberg as the genealogist of his own work—suggests, finally, that in “Howl” he paid secret homage to Perse through an even more subtle encryption of a French literary lineage than the inscription of Rimbaud through his boatload of illuminations or than the ellipsis in “At Apollinaire’s Grave.” We can find Perse’s name in “Howl” by recalling that, after Ginsberg redacted its “ponderous lineage,” the only two poets left named in the text are Poe and Blake. Poe was a major influence on Perse and, among many other things, the master of cryptograms, while Blake was the focal point for Ginsberg’s seminal mystical experience in summer 1948. Blake’s name was there from the start but Ginsberg inserted Poe into “Howl” only at a very late draft stage, when completely revising the line that originally referenced Gurdjieff and Reich and then Vico and Fludd, his so-called “mystical name-dropping,” in order to insert three new names: “who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross” (Howl, 4). Is there not, in the alliteration of “p” in Plotinus and Poe and the consonance of “s” in Plotinus and Cross, the subtlest of subliminal hints that the name coming after Poe is going to be St.-John… Perse? We have to wonder whether this is Ginsberg’s most secret stratagem of hinting, ironically naming names in order to hint at another name that is left tantalizingly incomplete, or the sign of either the poet’s creative unconscious at work or that of his reader. Barry Miles

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provides what looks like compelling circumstantial evidence for detecting and solving this crossword puzzle in “Howl” when he notes that, in the immediate aftermath of his Blake vision, Ginsberg looked at other texts in order to stimulate the same state of ecstatic illumination: “He found amazing images of horses in Plato’s Phaedrus, dipped into St. John Perse, picked up Plotinus” (Miles, Ginsberg, 100–1). The alliteration in “Howl” that points from Poe and Plotinus to St.-John Perse thus appears rooted in an historical connection of profound significance. Verifying the source of Ginsberg’s comments (his 1965 interview for the Paris Review), however, it turns out that Miles’ account is mistaken, and that what Ginsberg “dipped into” in 1948 was not St.-John Perse but indeed St. John of the Cross (Ginsberg, Spontaneous Mind, 40). Then again, this is no simple mistake, since Miles is the editor of the variorum edition of “Howl,” as well as Ginsberg’s biographer, deeply knowledgeable about his work and the culture that informed it, and as such the embodiment of Ginsberg’s ideal reader. And so when Miles appears to make a slip, his very familiarity with “Howl” and its background is enabling him to read between the lines, and fulfill the associative logic of alliteration to turn St. John into St.-John Perse. To intuit Ginsberg’s evocation of the French poet in “Howl” is an imaginative “flash of recognition” of the kind Ginsberg’s visionary poetics of juxtaposition invited (Howl, 130).21 Certainly, if Perse is in “A Supermarket in California,” hidden in plain view in the poem’s form, then the cumulative historical and textual evidence establishes that he is very much in “Howl.” Perhaps Ginsberg was thinking of what was left in or had been cut out of the poem, of what was plainly visible and what remained encrypted, when, in June 1956, just weeks after sending Lionel Trilling his prepublication mimeo copy of “Howl,” he made this brief report in his journal: “Dream of extremely polite & courteous meeting with St.-Jean Perse over MS of Howl” (Ginsberg, Journals: Mid-Fifties, 265). This rare and tantalizing reference invites us to wonder whether, in his unconscious, Ginsberg wanted Perse to recognize himself in his poem. It certainly and rightly identifies the author of Anabasis as a reader, like Apollinaire, with the X-ray eyes to see through “Howl” its true genealogy.

7

Burroughs’ (Anti)humanism: Saint Genet and the Last Lifeboat

Cut Rimbaud but imitate Genet In the middle of May 1952, when Burroughs wrote from Mexico City to tell Allen Ginsberg he had just airmailed him “60 pages of Queer,” his letter makes a reference to Jean Genet (Burroughs, Letters, 124). This reference is significant both in and of itself, given how infrequently in his correspondence Burroughs mentions other writers, and for its specific timing and content. “Would like to hear all details on Genet. I think we should organize an international rescue brigade to liberate his talented ass by force of arms” (124). Burroughs was responding to news that Ginsberg had passed on to Kerouac the previous month; that “Genet is in jail now in France on a murder charge” (Kerouac and Ginsberg, Letters, 162). In fact, Ginsberg was completely mistaken, since, following his pardon by French president Vincent Auriol in August 1949, Genet had not been in jail and was never charged with murder. However, while Ginsberg’s information about Genet was wrong, it must have struck a chord with Burroughs. That is, when he wrote him in May 1952, Burroughs had just documented his experience of prisons in Junky, was currently out on bail charged with a killing and in the midst of composing his second novel Queer: in that context, how could he not identify with the infamous French queer criminal writer? The biographical bond between Burroughs and Genet is precise and resonant at this key early point in his career as a writer. However, it is unclear what, at this time, he knew of Genet’s actual writing, and so whether or not it might have had any impact on the writing of Queer. According to Miles, Burroughs was only introduced to the work of Genet in fall 1953, when Alan Ansen lent him his copy of Our Lady of the Flowers (Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, 1943). This limited edition of Genet’s debut novel, published in 1949 by Morihien Press and

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featuring a profile of Genet drawn by Cocteau on the front cover, had come indirectly from the novel’s translator, Bernard Frechtman (Miles, Burroughs, 243). In fact, it is possible Burroughs already knew the book in this edition, since Carl Solomon leant Ginsberg a copy after their rendezvous in the Columbia Psychiatric Institute; “It had a tremendous affect on us,” Ginsberg later recalled (Lotringer, 337). At that time, again thanks to Solomon, Ginsberg also knew The Miracle of the Rose (Miracle de la rose, 1946), which prompted his declaration in July 1949 that Genet was “greater than Céline, perhaps, but similar. Huge apocalyptic novels by homosexual hipster” (Kerouac and Ginsberg, Letters, 104). The issue of what texts Burroughs might have known, when, and in what editions or translations, matters not only to rule in or out the possible impact of Genet’s work on his own emerging writing, but in terms of how he would come to identify with Genet in, as we will see, the intense but paradoxical way that he did. Was it initially only biographical, or was Burroughs’ relationship with Genet also from the start textual? Since Burroughs’ reference to Genet in May 1952 comes just as he is completing his manuscript of Queer, it is tempting to see Genet’s presence in the novel in one particular passage at least. When Burroughs’ narrator, William Lee, has forced himself to recognize that his desire for Allerton is impossible, he finds himself at a point of no return: “He was ready to take any risk, to proceed to any extreme of action. Like a saint or a wanted criminal with nothing to lose, Lee had stepped beyond the claims of his nagging, cautious, aging, frightened flesh” (Burroughs, Queer, 55). The perversity of Lee’s sexual attraction and the pairing of “saint” with “criminal” are certainly strongly suggestive of Genet’s works. In Burroughs’ plans for his Queer manuscript, we also find a strong connection with Genet. May 1952 was a turning point in Burroughs’ literary career, coming just weeks after he could finally identify himself as a soon-to-be-published writer thanks to a contract with Ace Books, negotiated through Solomon and Ginsberg. The publication plans for Junky and—even though they did not materialize—for Queer, not only changed radically how Burroughs saw himself, but suddenly opened up the prospect of associating his work’s publication with no other than Genet’s. The very same day Burroughs wrote to Ginsberg mentioning Genet, May 15, 1952, Ginsberg wrote to Kerouac to repeat the tantalizing prospect he had raised a month or two earlier, of Ace Books publishing Genet “in pocket-book in drugstores all over America” (Kerouac and Ginsberg, Letters, 171). Although in 1953 it would only be Junky that appeared in American drugstores thanks to Ace

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Books, by the end of the decade Burroughs would indeed be sharing publishers with Genet, courtesy of Olympia Press: Naked Lunch was number 76 in Maurice Girodias’ famous Traveller’s Companion series, Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers number 36, and The Thief ’s Journal number 78. In 1960, Grove Press considered formalizing the connection, as it were, by floating the idea of packaging Naked Lunch in America as a single volume with Our Lady of the Flowers.1 Kenneth Allsop, who that same year dressed up Burroughs as “Rimbaud in a raincoat,” was therefore not alone in finding “his nearest modern equivalent in Jean Genet” (Allsop, 8). The association of Burroughs with Genet at the start and end of his first decade as a writer is a reminder that, from the outset, contextualizing Burroughs’ works posed problems for critics and publishers. The Beat Generation label would never really fit him and his writing could not be pigeonholed within American literary traditions; therefore, he “belonged” with others who “did not belong.” Burroughs himself always insisted on being the alien: the junky outcast, the queer outsider, even the Beat who was not a Beat. If he could avoid comparing himself with other writers, he did, and when he couldn’t, faced with the insatiable demands of interviewers and publishers, the name he most often gave them was Genet. His special admiration for Genet’s oeuvre is evident from the index of Sylvère Lotringer’s enormous Collected Interviews, where Genet’s name has by far the longest entry. Often evasive about what he specifically knew of this or that writer’s work, when it came to Genet, Burroughs was clear that he had read “all of his books,” and that “All of Genet’s books are great” (Hibbard, 102). In 1996, the year before he died, Burroughs also recalled his famous first meeting with Genet, at the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968, in quite remarkable terms: “you could just see right away this is somebody extraordinary, just as if they had a halo” (Lotringer, 774). Burroughs here seems to mirror back Genet’s own desire in The Thief ’s Journal—where his narrator hopes to be “guided by a will to saintliness until I am so luminous that people will say, ‘He is a saint’” (186)—and indeed to be taking the “Saint” title famously bestowed on Genet by Sartre, in his 1952 monumental book Saint Genet, absolutely literally. While it is well known that he admired Genet in the strongest terms, and while it is obvious that the thief, the queer, the prisoner, the traitor appealed to Burroughs biographically, at a more material and textual level of engagement, the relationship of their oeuvres has been very little explored. This is especially important because the high praise in his references to Genet do not disguise

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Burroughs’ fundamental problem with any form of identification. Was this problematic for him in the 1950s, as he worked on Naked Lunch? It doesn’t seem necessarily so in October 1955, for example, when telling Ginsberg he had been reading and rereading The Thief ’s Journal “many times” (Burroughs, Letters, 289). Entering into a detailed discussion of the Frechtman translation of the novel— which would have interested Ginsberg, then working on his own translations of Genet2—Burroughs finally declared him unambiguously the “greatest living writer of prose.” His interest in the challenge of translating Genet’s “French argot” confirms how very closely he was reading his works and his unsuspected mastery of the French language, while also suggesting a particular sense of kinship through their shared attention to underworld and outsider idioms. But it is not obvious that Genet meant more to Burroughs while he was working on Naked Lunch beyond a landmark in defying literary censorship. Genet’s presumed impact on Burroughs is in fact often claimed in the case of The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (1969), perhaps his most bluntly homosexual book, which has a chapter titled after Genet’s Miracle of the Rose. Since The Wild Boys was published in the wake of their 1968 encounter in Chicago, when Burroughs and Genet marched alongside Ginsberg to form a trio of politicized queer writers, the association in the novel has been taken by critics for a clear act of homage.3 However, far more revealing, I believe, are unknown and overlooked textual connections that arise in the unpublished cut-ups that Burroughs made of Genet in the mid-1960s and in the last book published in his lifetime, My Education (1996)—a book of fragments that took as its model and point of departure Genet’s own last book of fragments, Prisoner of Love (Un Captif amoureux, 1986), published shortly after Genet’s death.4 Throughout the 1960s, Burroughs cut up the work of many writers, more often for research than for publication. His use of Genet in his cut-ups is so brief that it may seem insignificant in comparison to his substantial engagement with texts by Rimbaud, St.-John Perse, or T.S. Eliot. But cut-up methods are not just collage-based technical procedures of appropriation; inherent to cutting up another writer’s words is a problematic of identification, and viewed in this light, Burroughs’ minor engagement with Genet is revealing. As Chapter 1 established, Burroughs had no problem identifying with Rimbaud: living a century apart and writing in different genres kept a safe distance between them. The method also allowed him to adjust where he stood within the process of appropriation, and he signaled as much in the titles of several Rimbaud cut-ups through his choice

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of prepositions: “Cut-Ups With Rimbaud 1960”; “CUT UPS FROM ARTHUR RIMBAUD POEMES THRU W.S.B.”5 These shifting prepositions—with, from, thru—reveal Burroughs tried out different ways to verbalize his creative identification: with implies collaboration, poets in partnership; from prioritizes the source text, the origins of the words; whereas thru has to do with possession, ventriloquism. This variety of prepositions stresses how meticulously Burroughs thought through his methods and how extensively he did that thinking through Rimbaud. With Genet, however, we find the very inverse, not a creative process mediated by his writing but an impasse, visible in a typescript that Burroughs most probably composed in the mid-1960s: “Cut ups with Jean Genet and writing in his style” (Burroughs, The Travel Agency Is on Fire, 40–43). “With” again suggests collaboration, a partnership of equals. But “In His Style” clearly means something else: imitating Genet. While Burroughs had no problem cutting up other novelists, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Paul Bowles, in the case of Genet he could not resist the temptation to “write in his style.” Was it an act of deference, a sign of his unlimited admiration for “the greatest living writer of prose,” as he had labeled him in 1955? If so, perhaps the cut-up as a mode of identification turned out to be far more problematic in this case precisely because of Burroughs and Genet’s many similarities: novelists born just four years apart, fellow queer outsiders, and above all prose stylists with shared tastes (an unusual combination of graphic homosexual fantasy, poetic imagery and criminal argot). The results of this cut-up experiment, and the fact that it is the sole attempt Burroughs seems to have made to cut up Genet, certainly suggest a dead end. “Cut ups with Jean Genet and writing in his style” is less a cut-up than a rather unconvincing, incoherent pastiche: This ventriloquist dummy made from a bleeding rib will now create itself from the manure the bone meal the rich intestines and the pubic hairs of Adam. The baneful flower has stolen its colors from the small souls of hoodlums and fairies from the virginal cruelties of children, from the hardness we feel in the presence of some one who bears the brand of misfortune and despair lest we be infected by his misery. (Burroughs, The Travel Agency Is on Fire, 40)

Burroughs openly attempts to appropriate the vocabulary of Genet’s novels, from combining religious and sexual material to using the term “hoodlums” that appears in all the Bernard Frechtman translations. However, even in a paragraph

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that does not mix in quite different material, the effect is unsuccessful, if what Burroughs also sought to capture was the convoluted syntax and distinctive rhythm of Genet’s prose. It is this stylistic feature that completely escaped the possibility of cut-up methods. Genet’s style evidently eluded the creative poetics that dominated Burroughs’ work of the 1960s, but if we rephrase the issue we see that something else is at stake here. Where Burroughs “failed” in cutting up Genet—to such an extent he does not seem to have repeated the experiment—in what sense had he “succeeded” when cutting up Rimbaud? As the discussion in Chapter 1 demonstrated, Burroughs understood Rimbaud well enough to appropriate his poetry with a necessary perversity; hence the outrageous claim to “be” Rimbaud just by cutting up his words. The preposition “with” in the title of Burroughs’ cut-up of Genet implies mutual respect as fellow-writers and the addition of “in his style” comes close to the ventriloquism or act of possession implied by the preposition “thru” he used for Rimbaud. And yet, the terms in which Burroughs presents Rimbaud and Genet are not reversible: he did not try to write “in Rimbaud’s style” and he did not claim that “anybody can be Genet” by cutting up his prose. Why could anybody with a pair of scissors be Rimbaud,6 but only he could be Genet? Did Burroughs desire to “be” Genet by imitating his style? Although it took place several decades later, there is in fact a compelling if quite bizarre scene dramatizing such a desire that follows a brief discussion of Genet’s Prisoner of Love during the middle of an interview in Burroughs’ house in Lawrence, Kansas, with Victor Bockris and James Grauerholz. Burroughs, “glowing, gliding across the room” on his way back from the toilet, suddenly declares himself possessed by Genet’s spirit: WB: I just had a tremendous feeling of Genet coming in as I walked into the toilet to take a piss. Genet, Genet, Genet. Oh, my God, it was overwhelming! VB: He was right there in the room? WB: No, right in me. He’s not just wandering around—he was in me. Genet, Genet, Genet. Oh! (Lotringer, 801)

And to top this extraordinary moment, Burroughs then proceeds to be interviewed “as Genet” by Grauerholz (801). It is hard to imagine a more spectacular act of imitation or indeed identification. And yet, when we turn to Burroughs’ textual commentary on Genet’s Prisoner of Love in My Education, composed about the same time as this 1991 interview, we do not find the passionate eulogy or total empathy we might have expected, but something entirely different.

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The Last Lifeboat It is hard to know whether it was because his own oeuvre was coming to an end or despite it that, right from the opening pages of My Education (1996), Burroughs’ engagement with Genet is so complex, unexpected and revealing. The first of four substantial passages centered on Genet begins: “Thoughts that arise palpable as a haze from the pages of Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love” (My Education, 6). Burroughs’ initial thoughts are to do with belonging: “I have never felt close to any cause or people” (6). He then claims to envy those who can say “my people,” which suggests that Burroughs was misreading Genet here, falling into the biographical trap of taking at face value his support for the Palestinian people in Prisoner of Love. The implication that he envies Genet is ambiguous, but far more so is the highly distinctive metaphor with which Burroughs describes the way his thoughts “arise palpable as a haze” from Genet’s pages. For this particular phrase has an ominous history in Burroughs’ writing, echoing his 1985 introduction to Queer, where “palpable as a haze” visualizes the traumatic “ugly menace” that “rises from the pages” of his own novel as he reads its 1952 manuscript (“Appendix,” Queer, 132).7 By repeating the phrase in the context of reading Prisoner of Love, Burroughs seems to imply the most devastating parallel possible between the menace of reading Genet and the trauma he claimed underwrote Queer: the accidental shooting of his wife. As forty years earlier with Gide and Cocteau, so too now here, the name of Genet is associated by Burroughs with the death of Joan, suggesting a kind of ineluctable logic whereby the French writers are called upon to mediate the most terrible and haunting event of Burroughs’ life, an event he described explicitly in terms of his being possessed. The issue here is not the psychological validity of Burroughs’ claims about what happened one night in Mexico City in September 1951, but the way in which he so consistently associates it with those French authors whose works are closest to his own. While the invocations of Gide and Cocteau in 1952 were made at the very beginning of his oeuvre, just as he was completing Junky and Queer, Burroughs’ engagement with Genet here comes at the very end of his writing career. In fact, it becomes increasingly clear that what Burroughs is doing in My Education is to review his life’s work through the eyes of Genet. The mediating role and retrospective “double take” he had considered but rejected for Cocteau in the late 1960s, he now gives to Genet but with an even more intense ambivalence.8 If the initial thoughts inspired by

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reading Genet are subtly but evidently sinister, what follows is indeed a display of increasingly overt hostility. Twice, Burroughs proceeds to brush off what is the central moral concern of Genet’s oeuvre, snapping: “Genet is concerned with betrayal, to me a meaningless concept, like patriotism […] Genet is concerned with betrayal. I have nothing and nobody to betray, moi” (Burroughs, My Education, 6, 8). Moi! Paradoxically, perversely even, Burroughs uses the language of Genet and the very word that means “me,” to put Genet down and deny their affinity. That he should devote such a special place to Genet in the first pages of his last book, only in order to take back what he seems to give is clearly the sign of a profound internal conflict. Burroughs’ conflicted response to reading Genet returns when quoting a key passage of Prisoner of Love based on the parable about the medieval Spanish leader El Cid kissing a leper. Mocking the heroic act admired by Genet, he quips: “Bring me a leper and I will kiss it” (12). As if to knock the halo off Genet’s head, Burroughs then completes the put-down by going outside the realm of literature to call on detailed scientific evidence that proves Genet wrong, beginning: “Now leprosy is one of the least contagious of diseases, so the Saintly Cid was in no danger of infection” (12). Burroughs’ reference to “the Saintly Cid” may well be an echo of Sartre’s humor in titling his study Saint Genet, but if so, the joke here is at Genet’s expense. Once again, we are led to wonder why Burroughs goes so far to invoke, only to demean, the writer he perhaps most admired, if not because his admiration for Genet’s oeuvre revealed to him an ambivalence about his own. What is most significant about Burroughs’ curious put-down of Genet via El Cid is its real subject matter, not betrayal but heroism, which features in the longest passage from Prisoner of Love that he quotes: “If you’re a hero you are as good as dead. So we render to you a funeral tribute. We’ve got springs under our feet and as soon as a hero comes in we are ejected into mourning.” What a writer and what a meaning sensitive observer. “I grovel in admiration.” This phrase I lift from a book where some behind-thelines Scotch-drinking PLO speaks of a girl who will ride a donkey loaded with explosives into Israeli lines. It occurred to me that prostrate groveling would be a wise procedure for anyone in the vicinity of this admirable act. (Burroughs, My Education, 11–12).

After citing Genet, Burroughs comments on his writing approvingly here, and then, most oddly, cites Genet a second time. What is so odd comes in

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between Burroughs’ speech marks: he grovels in admiration before Genet, but by quoting Genet himself groveling in admiration before the PLO girl in his own book. That Burroughs also omits to name Genet or Prisoner of Love here is equally strange: to say of the phrase he applauds that he “lifted” it from “a book,” as if he had stolen the phrase or fallen on Genet’s Prisoner of love by chance, or as if it were any book to him, seems almost contemptuous. What is normally a simple gesture of admiration, to quote and praise a fellow writer, thus reveals a complicated act of identification tainted with a stain of rejection. The convoluted ways in which Burroughs expresses his admiration for Genet— via the honorable action of his character—and omits to mention his name or even the title of his book when he does so in this fragment, is astonishing: with no other writer, in his entire works, does Burroughs identify so deeply that he feels impelled to insist on distance. The clue to understanding the extreme ambivalence in Burroughs’ comparison of his work and ethics with Genet’s is a section that interrupts his musings about Prisoner of Love and at first sight has nothing to do with them. Right in between his two references to Genet and betrayal, Burroughs retells one of his favorite satirical anecdotes, that of the officer who abandons a sinking ship by dressing up in women’s clothing and rushes into the first lifeboat. In fact, this outrageous image, first seen in “Twilight’s Last Gleaming,” the skit from 1938 that featured the debut of Dr Benway, was for Burroughs the foundational story of his oeuvre, which is why he invoked it in so many texts (from “Roosevelt after Inauguration” in the 1950s to Last Words in the 1990s via The Third Mind, where he offers it as an ethical precedent for his cut-up project, an illustration that the “first step in re-creation is to cut the old lines that hold you right where you are sitting now”; Burroughs and Gysin, The Third Mind, 28).9 In previous versions, Burroughs found in such “anti-heroes a purity of motive, a halo of dazzling shameless innocence,” and imagined joining their ranks: “I have a deep reverence for life. And I’d like to see any sinking passengers beat me into the first lifeboat” (“Roosevelt after Inauguration,” 334). But in My Education, describing how the old class elites went down with the Titanic “like gentlemen,” Burroughs admits that he would do just the same, that, “in an actual emergency,” he “would probably react with exemplary selflessness” (My Education, 8). Bound finally by his class and by respectable human morality, he doesn’t consider what Genet would have done in such a situation, but we already know; he would have beaten Burroughs into that first lifeboat. Genet is the glittering shameless anti-hero that Burroughs could never be.

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In a hypothetical contest, an imaginary competition between writers for which is the least human, or therefore the most alien, we can only admit—and reading Prisoner of Love Burroughs himself seems to fear—that Genet would win. In fact, Burroughs in effect had staged this very competition in 1955, when contemplating a posthumanist plan to commit “some excess of feeling or behavior that will shatter the human pattern” (Burroughs, Interzone, 128). Back then, Burroughs quoted a sentence from The Thief ’s Journal before commenting: Genet says he chose the life of a French thief for the sake of depth. By the fact of this depth, which is his greatness, he is more humanly involved than I am. He carries more excess baggage. I only have one “creature” to be concerned with: myself. (128-29; Burroughs’ emphasis)10

Forty years later, however, the unredeemed junky author who once declared that in the face of absolute need “You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything”—“Wouldn’t you?” (Naked Lunch, 201; Burroughs’ emphasis)— again measures himself against Genet, but now finds himself the shorter man because the more human.

“We are the cats inside” Burroughs’ 1955 competition for who should wear the halo of shamelessness is, it needs to be stressed, not a joke or a casual, passing idea on his part. On the contrary, both the context and content of this imaginary contest reveal how crucially important measuring the ethics of his own oeuvre to Genet’s was for him. The context was an entry in “Lee’s Letters and Journals,” a fortypage typescript drawn from his own letters, that in October 1955 Burroughs assembled as “Chapter II of Interzone novel” (Burroughs, Letters, 288). In other words, his reflections on Genet in this “epistolary-diaristic format” were originally intended to be part of what became Naked Lunch (Harris, The Secret of Fascination, 206).11 This is a vital distinction: Burroughs’ comments on Genet and his citation of The Thief ’s Journal were not extra-textual but integrated within the novel he was writing. And in terms of timing, this competition for which of them was the more “humanly involved” was composed at exactly the same moment (the third week of October 1955) that Burroughs hailed Genet as “the greatest living writer of prose.” So, far from being untroubled by Genet’s “greatness” at the time of Naked Lunch, an anxiety about it and a competitive

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attitude towards his work’s ethics was already inseparable from Burroughs’ sense of his own identity and writing. The extent of Burroughs’ anxiety was such that he claimed for himself the ascetic ground of Genet’s work (“I only have one ‘creature’ to be concerned with: myself ”), in a move that was part of a larger consideration of his own ethics as well as aesthetics: My thoughts turn to crime, incredible journeys of exploration, expression in terms of an extreme act, some excess of feeling or behavior that will shatter the human pattern. (Interzone, 128; Burroughs’ emphasis)

While Burroughs’ idea of an “extreme act” to “shatter the human pattern” comes at the end of a sentence whose beginning evokes Genet (“My thoughts turn to crime”), the very next phrase (“incredible journeys of exploration”) even more clearly evokes St.-John Perse, specifically his Anabasis. Far from being a digression or an irrelevance, the pairing of the two French writers here not only implies how Burroughs read Perse through Genet but how he was reading and appropriating Genet’s own works. Burroughs incorporated fragments of Perse’s Anabasis in many texts, and cut it up with Rimbaud’s Illuminations over and over again in the early phase of his cut-up work, but he very rarely made explicit its significance through context or commentary. The major exception is a key passage in The Place of Dead Roads (1983), an impassioned lyrical address to: Those who are ready to leave the whole human comedy behind and walk into the unknown with no commitments. Those who have not from birth sniffed such embers, what have they to do with us? Only those who are ready to leave behind everything they have ever known need apply. (202)

To identify this as an “explicit” interpretation of St.-John Perse’s meaning for Burroughs depends, it has to be said, on recognizing the question that interrupts his appeal to discover a posthuman future—“Those who have not from birth sniffed such embers, what have they to do with us?”—as a line from Anabasis in T.S. Eliot’s translation. But once we have identified it as coming from Perse, we can see how Burroughs looks from The Place of Dead Roads in the early 1980s back to his evocation of Perse’s “incredible journeys of exploration” in 1955. Framed in this context, not only does Burroughs clarify his reading of Perse, but also of Genet. Genet’s “excess baggage” on journeys of exploration is to be concerned with more than one “creature” than himself, insists Burroughs,

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in contrast to the need to have “no commitments” at all in order to walk out into the unknown (Interzone, 128); and by definition a posthuman future is unknown, as we will see in more detail in Chapter 8. The point, however, is not so much that Burroughs puts Genet down in 1955, but that he does so on the exact terms of Genet’s own work. This passage from “Lee’s Letters and Journals” naming Genet and Perse (and Klee) is highly unusual in reflecting so directly on writers or painters, but it forms part of a bigger picture where Burroughs combined reflections on art, politics, philosophy and, most pertinently, morality and ethics. The validity of these last two terms, Burroughs rejects in the most categorical terms: “Morality (at this point an unqualified evil)” (Interzone, 123). The term “evil” here is bluntly paradoxical, since Burroughs appropriates its definition within morality in order to denounce moral thinking itself. In so doing, he employs the very same strategy that Genet devised in the concept of betrayal that features in The Thief ’s Journal and was the central ethical issue of his oeuvre. Indeed, Burroughs could hardly have failed to notice that in Genet’s novel, the narrator makes repeated associations between betrayal and the very city that Burroughs had made his home since 1954 and where he was now writing “Lee’s Letters and Journals” in 1955: “I would have liked to embark for Tangiers,” Genet’s narrator observes; “It was the very symbol of treason […] this city represented Treason so accurately, so magnificently that I felt I was bound to land there” (Genet, The Thief ’s Journal, 74, 75). That Burroughs was now reading these words from The Thief ’s Journal in the city named in it as the symbol of treason explains, surely, the urgency of his determination to best the “greatest living writer of prose,” as if to escape the uncanny sensation of finding himself scripted inside Genet’s novel. And yet, both despite the tension he feels with Genet and because of it, when speaking of morality as “evil,” Burroughs takes for himself Genet’s own strategy of linguistic subversion. Genet embraced “betrayal” as his ethics precisely in order to shortcircuit and ruin the very language of the moral paradigm from which the term derives. That is, rather than attacking morality through perversion, Genet works through subversion—attacking from the inside, from within. What Burroughs’ ethics have in common with Genet’s—and with Artaud’s, whose “theatre of cruelty” also short-circuits ethical norms—is his challenge to think beyond and outside the given language.12 Having declared morality an “unqualified evil,” what can be the basis for ethical behavior? For Burroughs, ethics “can no longer maintain an existence separate from the facts of physiology, bodily chemistry, LSD, electronics, physics” (Interzone, 123). The question

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of how human conduct might be directed when electronics replaces ethics is perhaps less nettlesome for Burroughs because he has already actively embraced the dangerous consequences of shattering the human pattern for himself. But this was already Artaud’s point, insisting that “a ‘theatre of cruelty’ means theatre that is difficult and cruel for myself first of all” (Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, 57); and Genet’s own move, since for him “betrayal” was also above all an issue of shame and therefore solitude; of how to live with oneself first of all, before thinking of living in society. In other words, Burroughs’ problem with Genet is that he finds himself—or rather his desired self—already there too well in Genet’s writing. We can see Genet’s ethics at work in a key passage from his novel Funeral Rites (Pompes funèbres, 1945) that has such extraordinary similarities to a passage in Junky that it would seem likely Burroughs wrote his own novel with Genet’s example before him—were this not effectively impossible. For Junky was written between 1950 and 1952, and Funeral Rites was not translated until 1969, and even in French, the text was not widely available until 1953.13 The similarities are not, however, as we will see, entirely coincidental and confirm both how close Burroughs and Genet are in specific ethical and aesthetic ways, and why, looking back on his own oeuvre in the 1990s in My Education, Burroughs found himself so conflicted about Genet. The passage from Funeral Rites concerns the character Riton, who, close to starving for lack of food in war-torn France, finds a cat that he has to kill in order to eat. The description is “ghastly” beyond the point of farce, as Riton beats the cat with a hammer while the cat tries to scratch him back: “He kept whacking wildly and missing. ‘The bastard.’ […] The cat was a big gray tom that he would have liked to stroke” (Genet, Funeral Rites, 85-86). Riton attempts to strangle the poor beast and, later, we learn that he hung it on a wall and “cut it up” before eating the “mutilated remains” (161). Filled now by a sensation of “terrible emptiness,” of feeling “alone with his solitude,” Riton speculates; “Maybe it’s the cat that made me like that” (225). For “ever since that day [of killing the cat] Riton had been aware of the presence” of “the cat he carried within him” (162). Burroughs’ Junky does not involve eating a cat, but does feature an “ugly-looking gray cat” that scratches Lee, so that he begins “slapping it back and forth” while the cat “screamed and clawed” at him; “‘Now I’ll finish the bastard off,’ I said, picking up a heavy painted cane” (Burroughs, Junky, 102-3). The scene ends with the intervention of Lee’s wife, who saves the cat and admonishes him: “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” (103).

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While certain shared details—the gray color of the cat, calling it “Bastard”— seem incidental, and Genet’s scene is more complicated in its narration (like Funeral Rites as a whole), these scenes are similar not only in their significance, but materially because of their common intertextual origins, their shared literary source. That is, as a series of other details demonstrate, both Genet in Funeral Rites and Burroughs in Junky are rewriting the same tale by Edgar Allan Poe: “The Black Cat.”14 Burroughs’ passage has already been convincingly interpreted by Kelly Anspaugh as a complex act of literary appropriation that, in 1952, offered Burroughs “a means of representing an event otherwise unrepresentable for the author”—the act of violence that killed his wife (Anspaugh, 127).15 That is not our interest here, however, and while Genet’s own work is as inextricably bound up with biography as is Burroughs’—Funeral Rites is dedicated to a dead Genet had loved16—the issue is less Burroughs’ conscious or unconscious use of allusion in Junky than his literary reference to Poe’s black cat to allegorize a reallife one here, which coincides so closely with Genet’s own wider autobiographical practice. If Burroughs did not read Pompes funèbres by 1952, whenever he did read it, he would surely have recognized in the novel not just the close but the uncanny resemblance of Genet’s work to his own.17 After all, Burroughs was not only a lover of the writing of Genet and Poe but of real cats, and he might well have been translating Genet’s resonant phrasing from Funeral Rites (“the cat he carried within him”) for his title, The Cat Inside (1986), a book that at one point openly reflects on the scene of cat torture represented in Junky.18 The Cat Inside indeed features another highly specific reference to torturing cats, which relates it to Genet’s Funeral Rites. One of the most contentious issues with Genet’s novel in French criticism is the way it represents the Nazis in occupied France. Not only is Riton himself a traitor who joins the Vichy militia, and so a perverse object of the narrator’s sexual desire, but, far more controversially, through his first person narrator Genet assumes the point of view of Hitler. Ann Douglas thus observed that for “Burroughs, as for Jean Genet, one of his literary heroes, Hitler became a seminal figure” (in Burroughs, Word Virus, xvi). Her remark is particularly insightful, insofar as it stresses the affinity of Burroughs and Genet’s writing via their literary rapport for Hitler. That is, accusations of anti-Semitism have been made against both authors, the accuracy of which remains to be determined biographically.19 But when Burroughs and Genet’s texts stage Hitler, they do it so ironically that a case against their detractors as poor readers becomes easy to make. Albert Dichy’s response to Ivan Jablonka’s study of Genet’s “anti-Semitism” (2004) illustrates

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the problem of political readings that don’t engage with the humor so crucial to grasping such texts as Genet and Burroughs’: “Genet would have been a worshipper of Hitler, ‘blindly’ adhering to the Nazi model. Let’s read in Funeral Rites the evocation of his idol: ‘Could it be that a simple mustache composed of stiff black hair—and dyed with L’Oréal perhaps—meant: cruelty, despotism, violence, rage, foam, asps, strangulation, death, forced marches, ostentation, prison, daggers?’” (Dichy, “La Part d’ombre de Genet”; my translation).20 This satirical treatment of Hitler in Genet’s Funeral Rights resonates with a multitude of routines in Burroughs’ oeuvre that mock political power and its reliance on the media. But The Cat Inside is Burroughs’ text that invites the most specific parallel. One of the most disturbing scenes of his text thus describes an S.S. initiation rite, “an exercise designed to eliminate all traces of pity-poison and mold a full Ubermensch”: “to gouge out the eye of a pet cat” (Burroughs, The Cat Inside, 33). Here we see most forcibly Burroughs’ combination of cats with ethics, or rather, posthuman ethics. This unexpected relation sheds new light on Lee’s behavior in Junky and Queer in the terms of Genet. Implicit in Burroughs’ novel and explicit in Genet’s, the cat is for Lee and Riton not only an other but also themselves. In Junky, this identification is implied through the precise echoing of numerous key words from the episode of cat torture in a following one where Lee’s attempt to quit junk through alcohol brings about his total collapse. After a delirium in which he witnesses a terrifying vision of “the final place where the human road ends,” Lee is left “panting and whimpering” in a direct echo of the “groaning and whimpering” cat (Burroughs, Junky, 111–12).21 That Lee is the cat confirms the act of violence as self-directed—a point Burroughs himself recognized when looking back on the scene from The Cat Inside: “I was literally hurting myself and I didn’t know it” (Burroughs, The Cat Inside, 48). What happens to Riton in Funeral Rites invites a comparison with the posthuman possibility raised in Junky by Lee’s vision of “where the human road ends.” For Riton’s upshot is to have freed himself through his extreme act of cruelty, as Mairéad Hanrahan acutely points out: The death of the cat confronted Riton to his solitude, the solitude that comes from one’s feeling of an otherness located, sheltered inside oneself. Having made his choice, having committed the irredeemable, Riton now finds himself “alone with his solitude in the midst of himself.” Freeing him from unthinking obedience to social convention, it embarks him on a path that leads, via destruction, to the solitude of those brooking no constraints on their freedom (“Une écriture retorse: la réponse de Genet à ses juges,” 520; my translation).22

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Hanrahan’s powerful analysis of Riton’s behavior very closely parallels the moment in Queer when Lee identifies himself with “a saint or a wanted criminal” at the point of being able “to proceed to any extreme of action” (a phrase echoed by the “extreme act” that will “shatter the human pattern” previously noted in Burroughs’ 1955 journal). That collapsing of distinctions between saint and criminal, and with it of the language of moral distinctions, now appears all the more connected to Genet. Indeed, although Lee’s breakthrough occurs in Queer rather than in Junky, the manuscript history of the two texts reveals that this material overlapped (Harris, The Secret of Fascination, 253). To be precise, Burroughs almost certainly wrote the passage where Lee attacks the cat in May 1952, probably a few days after he sent Ginsberg the manuscript of Queer. And so, while in Junky the act of violence ends with another person mirroring back Lee’s shame—his wife’s challenge, “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”—followed by his own identification with the brutalized animal, through Queer we can see it leads to Lee’s identification with a saint or criminal who has “nothing to lose,” who has “stepped beyond” (Burroughs, Queer, 55). If Lee’s freedom resembles Riton’s, the larger point is that Burroughs’ ethics strongly resonate with Genet’s. Hanrahan’s philosophical reading of Riton’s solitude after having eaten the cat is all the more relevant for it is reinforced by Genet’s own ethical stance: “I stand with all solitary men” [“Je suis avec tout homme seul”] (Genet, The Declared Enemy, 15). Would Burroughs stand together with Genet? The last words of The Cat Inside take Burroughs’ own statement of solitude—“I am the cat who walks alone. And to me all supermarkets are alike”—and reworks it into a stance that might indeed be directly addressed to Genet: “We are the cats inside. We are the cats who cannot walk alone, and for us there is only one place” (The Cat Inside, 94; Burroughs’ emphasis). That “place,” of course, can only be the space “beyond.” Why, then, did reading Prisoner of Love cause Burroughs so much grief and lead to such intense ambivalence in My Education? Let us formulate a hypothesis: it was Genet’s most political book and Burroughs, like so many readers, couldn’t bear the political consequences of his ethical stance. Genet’s idea of standing together with those who are alone turned out to mean abandoning those who are no longer alone. He made no secret that he paradoxically showed no loyalty to those whose cause he joined, often claiming his love for revolution was selfinterestedly aesthetic: “You can see how beautiful the fedayeen are. Certainly, their revolt is gratifying to me, as is that of the Black Panthers, but I don’t know whether I could have stayed so long with them if physically they had been less

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attractive” (Genet, The Declared Enemy, 191). Genet even went so far as to state that if the Palestinians’ revolution ever did succeed, he would lose interest in it, because fundamentally he couldn’t help but remain in the position of the outsider.23 Asked to give his vision of a political revolution, he again made a reply that couldn’t be more alienated and alienating: I’m not all that eager for there to be a revolution. If I’m really sincere, I have to say that I don’t particularly want it. […] If there were a real revolution, I might not be able to be against it. There would be adherence, and I am not that kind of man; I am not a man of adherence, but a man of revolt. My point of view is very egotistic. I would like for the world—now pay close attention to the way I say this—I would like for the world not to change so that I can be against the world. (Genet, The Declared Enemy, 132)

In contrast, the political dimension of Burroughs’ works cannot conceal, for all the black Célinian relish of their rhetoric, the deeply moral values at their heart. Burroughs’ interest in revolution was not aesthetic, as Genet insisted his was, which is surely why My Education openly mocks Genet’s attachment to physical appearances. “In Prisoner of Love, a perceptive black officer from Sudan named Mubarak says to Genet’s narrator: ‘The Israeli soldiers are young. Would you be glad to be with them? I expect they would be very nice to you’” (Burroughs, My Education, 8). If Burroughs’ political support is unoriginally ethical, it nevertheless emerges after the display of a characteristic cynicism in My Education: “As for moi it would make no difference to me which side I was with. (With, not on.) I can see value in both. But when it comes to the situation in South Africa there is for me only one side possible” (9). Here, Burroughs once again carefully thinks through his prepositions in order to differentiate himself from Genet, to avoid any insinuation of an erotic or aesthetic selfinterest, and to unambiguously take an ethical stance on the apartheid regime. Then again, this regime was of course routinely compared with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in the 1980s, so that Burroughs’ very effort to draw a clear distinction between himself and Genet, when it comes to taking political sides, forces him to acknowledge that his own notorious cynicism was a false front. There are indeed uncanny parallels between his mockery of Genet’s conflation of the ethical with the aesthetic/erotic in My Education, and Burroughs’ own political posture during his first decade as a writer, at the time of Queer in 1952 and, even more so, The Yage Letters in 1953. Finding himself caught up in the Colombian Civil war, Burroughs sounds remarkably like Genet, opposing

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Spanish colonialism and supporting the indigenous people on aesthetic grounds tainted by shameless self-interest. Writing to Ginsberg, he too couldn’t resist equating his political sympathies with his erotic desires: “The Conservatives are not only a bunch of shits they are all ugly […] I literally only saw one I would consider eligible […] The best people in S.A. are the Indians. Certainly the bestlooking people” (Letters, 159: Burroughs’ emphasis). But for all his hardboiled cynicism—“Always was a pushover for a just cause and a pretty face” (160)— Burroughs couldn’t help himself: “However it is impossible to remain neutral […] Wouldn’t surprise me if I end up with the Liberal guerrillas” (159; Burroughs’ emphasis). That is, Burroughs and Genet were for the guerrillas—“with” (if not “on”) the same side of Justice—but Burroughs’ stance is unambiguously ethical, which is why in the end, unlike Genet, he must refuse “the last lifeboat.” The intensity of Burroughs’ ambivalence towards Genet, especially towards his central concept of betrayal, stresses just how seriously, in retrospect and on reflection, he used Genet’s oeuvre to re-evaluate his own ethics. Measuring his works against Genet’s revealed his own humanism to Burroughs, which confirms the audacious case argued by Hadrien Laroche for Genet as the man who gave birth to humanism.24 However, as the next chapter shows, while Burroughs ultimately fails in the contest he had set Genet and himself for which would be the most alien or inhuman, there was a point in his oeuvre—its zenith or nadir, depending on the view taken of his most experimental cut-up work—when he did seem “ready to leave the whole human comedy behind and walk into the unknown.”

8

Burroughs’ Mugwumps, Michaux’s Meidosems and the Future of Literature

“I spit on my life. I want nothing to do with it. Who can do no better than his life?” —Henri Michaux, Life in the Folds “No writer has any secrets. It’s all in his work.” —William Burroughs

“A life of its own” In fall 1961, Ginsberg visited Burroughs in Tangier and was “horrified at how inhuman” he had become (Miles, Beat Hotel, 255). To be more precise, Ginsberg’s horror was to encounter in person the same otherness he had encountered on paper earlier that year in Burroughs’ first cut-up novel, The Soft Machine (1961). Writing in early October to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg hailed it as an “astounding idea, the book. The point is, to mutate consciousness, get it outside of language” (Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg, Letters, 126–27). However, the “point” left Ginsberg feeling physically nauseated (“I was vomiting”), because of “big arguments about future of universe” they had in Tangier: “Burroughs wanted it to be unknown Artaud mutation out of bodies.”1 Summing up fear of an otherness too extreme, the prospect of a Burroughsian future seemed “to have killed ‘Hope’ in any known form” (Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg, Letters, 127). Ginsberg’s way to explain the “astounding” quality of The Soft Machine by invoking the name of Artaud indicates that Burroughs’ appropriation of Artaud’s works was far more extreme than his own. Paraphrasing “a statement by Artaud” in a 1965 interview, Ginsberg readily embraced the idea that art might physically effect the body, that sound “changes the molecular composition of the nerve

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cells or something like that, it permanently alters the being that has experience of this” (Ginsberg, Spontaneous Mind, 32). While his unusual and frustrating vagueness (“or something like that”) admits Ginsberg’s own uncertain grasp of Artaud, as discussed in Chapter 6, his emphasis here in 1961 on “mutation” establishes his acute anxiety at the radical shift in consciousness and the body that Burroughs was proposing, from “any known form” to the “unknown.” What made Ginsberg physically sick in Tangier is, I believe, rather too easily lost or forgotten in most accounts of Burroughs’ cut-up work. Readers and critics sometimes wonder if Burroughs is serious, but this is the wrong way around; his work, just like Artaud’s works, should make us question whether we are serious.2 Do we really want literature to change us? Vomiting up, Ginsberg certainly took his friend seriously in 1961, and he may well have felt Burroughs was now winning the wager he had made five years earlier when comparing himself with Genet for which of them was the least “humanly involved” (Burroughs, Interzone, 128). For Burroughs’ experimental commitment to the “unknown” in The Soft Machine was both ethical and aesthetic, just as it had been in 1955 when his goal to “shatter the human pattern” through some “extreme act” went together with his aim to “create something that will have a life of its own, that can put me in real danger” (128; Burroughs’ emphasis). The life Burroughs spoke of wanting to create and the danger he sought out in 1955 were the very antithesis of the “human pattern” in the traditional novel form, which he felt was now dead: “This novel,” he declares of what was then becoming Naked Lunch, “is not posthumous” (128). To which, with The Soft Machine in mind, we might add: not posthumous but posthuman. Taking its critical terminology from posthuman studies, what follows here and provides the finale of this book is an attempt to recover the stakes for the future of literature of the radical transition in Burroughs’ work from Naked Lunch to The Soft Machine. We might usefully locate Burroughs in relation to Kerouac and Ginsberg by taking as shorthand the terminology of Rosi Braidotti (2013), according to which Kerouac’s vision would be post-human (life beyond the self); Ginsberg’s poetry post-anthropocentric (life beyond the species); and, borrowing the title of Lyotard’s 1988 book, Burroughs’ writing the inhuman (life beyond death).3 The value of these large critical terms—to help situate work within a bigger picture—however, once again needs to be balanced with concrete texts and particular readings. That is, I will read Burroughs’ “inhuman” work leading up to The Soft Machine with and through the work of the Belgian poet and painter Henri Michaux, which offers a specific comparative optic that

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transcends the literary by combining the verbal with the visual. While this chapter therefore falls within the tradition of comparative literature to a greater extent than previous ones, it also transcends the literary through a distinctively material specificity. But more immediately, having emphasized how in 1961 Burroughs and his cut-up texts left Ginsberg stunned, we must, as it were, compare Burroughs with himself and acknowledge that his radical experimental commitment to the “unknown” remained in tension with far more conventional ambitions. Take, for example, the claim Burroughs made in the mid-1980s for his literary identity and legacy: “I am concerned with the creation of character. In fact I can say that this is my principal preoccupation. If I am remembered for anything, it will be for my characters.” (Burroughs, Adding Machine, 217). We are tempted to ask, what on earth was Burroughs thinking? Remembered for the creation of character? In the sense “character” has in the classical tradition of the realist novel, the claim is obviously nonsense, and when Burroughs offers a list of seventeen names as evidence, it is noticeable that most are colorful monikers (“the Heavy Metal Kid,” “Hamburger Mary,” “the Beagle,” “Daddy Long Legs”) for bit-parts no reader could possibly visualize; did he ever describe them? We can’t remember. But we can understand and situate Burroughs’ claim within both the bigger picture of his oeuvre and larger debates about cultural history when we consider the specific context in which he made it: his essay “Beckett and Proust.” If we imagine that, in a comparison of the two writers, Burroughs would naturally side with Beckett, as an experimental artist and near-contemporary, rather than with Proust, the novelist who died just eight years after he was born, we would be mistaken. In the line preceding his claim to be concerned with creating character, Burroughs states categorically that his affinity is for the Frenchman: “I am very much closer to Proust than to Beckett” (217). Burroughs’ grounds for distancing himself from Beckett are revealing because, in asserting his own Proustian interest in character, time, memory, place and history, he rejects precisely the features of Beckett’s work that seem most Burroughsian: from “Beckett violates all the rules and conventions of the novelist,” and “There is no suspense in Beckett” to “There are no characters as such, and certainly no character development,” and “Beckett is quite literally inhuman” (218-20). Burroughs’ unexpected identification of his writing with that of Proust over Beckett could hardly go any further than this final remark, and we might wonder if he is not protesting too much. But in broader terms, what he is doing here in this 1985 essay, by identifying so strongly with the modernist French novelist,

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amounts to a precise rejection of the label that would shortly come to dominate discussion and analysis of literature and culture in the late twentieth century: postmodernism. Burroughs always appeared the most postmodern of those writers labeled “Beat,” and it is unsurprising that the field of criticism which emerged in the 1980s, especially the landmark books by Jennie Skerl (1985) and Robin Lydenberg (1987), pointed in that direction.4 As the term “postmodern” began to be more precisely defined aesthetically (enumerating features such as collage, pastiche, and fragmentation) and philosophically (focusing on relativism, the loss of the “real,” and a decentering of subjectivity and agency), the fit with Burroughs made increasing sense, and he became widely acknowledged as a postmodernist avant la lettre. And yet, within just a decade, Timothy Murphy’s Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs (1997) would actively resist Burroughs’ identification as postmodern. While Murphy’s “amodern” thesis deserves consideration on its own terms—arguing that Burroughs’ work is too politically engaged to be subsumed within “reflexive” postmodern aesthetics (2)—his book can also be taken as evidence of critical reluctance to accept that any label fits Burroughs. The contradiction staged above, between Proust’s “creation of character” on one side and Artaud’s “mutation out of bodies” on the other, is exemplary of how difficult it is to reconcile the radical internal contradictions that mark Burroughs’ work, and why critics inevitably denature it by choosing sides (as, ironically enough, Burroughs himself does by recognizing himself in Proust but not in Beckett). And so if we return to what he claimed was his “principal preoccupation,” we should not simply dismiss as self-deluded Burroughs’ claim to be creating character. Instead, we should rethink the mutation of the “human” and the “known” beyond the novel form, taking the journey Burroughs made from Naked Lunch to The Soft Machine. That experimental journey transcended genres and indeed media, as did the oeuvre of Henri Michaux, and a comparative reading of their work enables us to rethink the transition from “creating character” to creating something with “a life of its own.” Burroughs’ list of supposedly memorable characters in “Beckett and Proust” concludes with the distinctly minor figure of “the Rube,” who makes only a brief appearance early on in Naked Lunch, but begins predictably with his most famous, Dr. Benway. Missing from his list is where, I would argue, Burroughs placed his paradoxical last best hope for literature: Mugwumps. Of course, these creatures are emphatically not characters, in the sense that they are not named individuals but a species, and an alien species at that. They are, however, certainly

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memorable, and although, for better or worse, when thinking of Mugwumps the image that immediately comes to mind is from David Cronenberg’s film Naked Lunch (1991), they were so distinctive and their name was so catchy that within a year of Burroughs’ book appearing in America, in 1963 they had already inspired the name of a folk rock band. That other artists gave Mugwumps first a sound and then an image might seem inconsequential or entirely distinct from their appearance in Naked Lunch. But if we understand Burroughs’ “principal preoccupation” as aiming to “create something that will have a life of its own,” and if we take Burroughs seriously—or as he always demanded, literally—then the independent musical and cinematic existence of the Mugwump is simply evidence of what he meant. Mugwumps are memorable characters, perhaps, but to understand their place in the development of Burroughs’ work, from Naked Lunch to The Soft Machine, a comparative analysis with the characters of another novelist will not do. And the work of another writer will not do either, which is why, instead, I propose to read the Mugwumps of Burroughs through alien creatures that exist in two media: the “Meidosems” of Henri Michaux.

“Who can do no better than his life?” Michaux’s Meidosems exist in two forms at once: as a book of seventy enigmatic poetic fragments, published a decade before Naked Lunch, entitled “Portrait of the Meidosems” within the larger text Life in the Folds (La Vie dans les plis, 1949); and as a series of twelve lithographs published with the poems in a deluxe edition the previous year, simply entitled Meidosems. While Mugwumps and Meidosems share some uncanny similarities, the aim is not to compare how these creatures are represented, but to see how they point beyond representation itself. The work of Michaux is especially illuminating in this regard, since the hybrid biological properties of his Meidosems and the verbal and visual media in which he represents them, enable us to better grasp where Burroughs was going with his Mugwumps. Michaux goes beyond representation by making visible the signs’ autonomy and undermining their referential function. Rethinking Burroughs in these terms makes the move from analyzing posthuman creatures represented within the “cyborgian” text—examining its hybrid fantasy creatures—to recognizing the text itself as cyborg, as indeed a “soft machine.” This dimension of Burroughs’ work has been relatively little examined and when it has, the emphasis has been placed on “machine” rather than “soft,” whereas it is vital to

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stress both. And so, while Brent Wood rightly deconstructs the terms “science” and “fiction” that make up the literary genre “science fiction” in order to argue that Burroughs’ experimental work is not merely metaphoric but has a “selfconsciously operational inspiration” (Wood, 12), we might go one step further. For the work of Burroughs envisions the future of literature as the creation of life beyond representation and beyond the human. That is, the “unknown Artaud mutation” Ginsberg feared appears, momentarily but materially, in the transition from Naked Lunch to The Soft Machine, when Burroughs produced what, to adapt the term Evelyne Grossman coined in her analysis of Michaux, we could call inhuman “insect writing.” Reading Burroughs through Michaux doesn’t respond to a line of causal influence: unlike previous chapters, there is no claim to genealogy as such here. Rather, there are specific contiguities and coincidences that not only sustain a comparative reading but are highly apposite given the nature of both their oeuvres, especially Burroughs’, which always embraced the revelatory power of hazard through curious points of intersection and chance encounters. The oeuvres of Burroughs and Michaux indeed come together at a very precise moment through a chain of timely coincidences. Although it is well known that the two men met briefly in Paris in the late 1950s when Burroughs was living in the Beat Hotel, what matters most here is not their encounter but their textual rendezvous generated by events taking place in Paris just a couple of months after the publication of Naked Lunch by Olympia Press. To be precise: in October 1959, a month that began when Brion Gysin momentously introduced Burroughs to cut-up methods and that ended with the opening of a major exhibition of Michaux’s inks, gouaches and drawings at the Galerie Daniel Cordier on rue Miromesnil, a mile or so north and west of the Beat Hotel. The literary oeuvres of Burroughs and Michaux already had much in common, of course. Both authors had written about their experiments with a range of drugs: Michaux wrote no fewer than four books on the subject of his experiences with drugs including mescaline, marijuana, ether, LSD, cocaine, hashish and even caffeine and love. Both also made scientific research a central part of their artistic projects, in Michaux’s case ranging from human biology to zoology, with a special interest in entomology. Indeed, both authors saw their oeuvres as scientific research, and admired De Quincey’s foundational work of drug writing as “medical and poetic at the same time.”5 Burroughs was not just as interested in science as in science fiction but, through his multi-media cut-up experimentations, combined the traditional literary writer’s desk with

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technical equipment and methods more at home in a laboratory. The two authors also wrote about their major geographical journeys, including trips to Latin America. Michaux’s Ecuador (1929) would have appealed to Burroughs not only in general but for the attention it gives to details that are both bizarre and yet accurate, such as the description of pernicious, invisible water-borne parasites that anticipate the silent Anopheles mosquitos of Naked Lunch and Dr. Benway’s claim to have been ship’s doctor on the S.S. Filariasis, named after a parasitic roundworm disease spread by mosquitos (Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 39, 28). There are also striking parallels in their personal lives, and in any other context it would be remarkable to note the most uncanny parallel of all between the lives of Burroughs and Michaux; but having witnessed how Burroughs’ invocations of Gide, Cocteau and Genet all conflated questions of literary genealogy with private trauma, it is perhaps less shocking to observe that, like Burroughs’ wife, Michaux’s wife also suffered a tragic and traumatizing death. In 1948, Michaux visited her in hospital for a month before she succumbed to the appalling burns she suffered after accidentally setting her nightgown on fire. What might otherwise be an entirely extra-textual matter, best left to the biographers, turns out in fact to connect Michaux with his Meidosems and Burroughs with Michaux in precisely textual ways. The key evidence for how Burroughs engaged textually with Michaux by associating genealogy with trauma is an unpublished, 500-word cut-up text produced in December 1959, entitled “GALLERY DESTROYED ON EVE OF VERNISSAGE.”6 Presented as a report in the Paris Herald Tribune, it describes a fire gutting the Galerie Daniel Cordier—where, it notes, Michaux’s canvasses had just been exhibited. The very existence of this text demonstrates how closely Burroughs thought about Michaux’s work at this early stage in his development of cut-up methods, and how interested he was in the visual as well as the verbal. Burroughs’ cut-up situates Michaux’s work in two specific ways that mirror back his own main concerns. First, in relation to the identity and genealogy of Michaux’s oeuvre, the text invokes French cultural history by several times naming André Breton, the “Pope of the Surrealist Movement.” Michaux is then introduced as “painter and poet of no movement,” pointedly insisting on his independence from Surrealism as well as from any one form of creativity (painting or poetry). At this point, the text becomes a scrambled cut-up alluding to: mescaline (Michaux’s drug—although Burroughs was also taking it at this time), yagé (Burroughs’ drug), Dr Marc Schlumberger (the French psychoanalyst who had been treating Burroughs in Paris), Jean Genet and, quite strikingly via

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a phrase mixing English with French (“cet attempt to resuscitate un cadaver”), Anatole France. Genet returns at the end of Burroughs’ cut-up, as if being quoted in a newspaper interview, to pronounce explicitly on the issue of literary history and genealogy: “Apollinaire was not a surrealist.” By this point, it is clear that Burroughs’ text is less about Surrealism than about the cut-up project he was launching with Brion Gysin, or rather, about the genealogical relation between the two: they were not Surrealists! The conclusion of this already remarkable text then suddenly shifts the ground from art historical disputes to biographical trauma, as Burroughs compares the fire in the art gallery to the death of Michaux’s wife. This he describes with a mixture of factual accuracy (adding by hand the correct date, “Feb 1948”) and strangely detailed fantasy in which the blame is placed on the husband. Although Michaux was not in fact present at the time, the cut-up text describes his tragic attempt “to extinguish the fire with a rug upon which turpentine had been inadvertently spilled by a disgruntled former maid.” Burroughs’ text ends by declaring that “Michaux had been in ill health recently […] depressed since the recent death of his wife.” Even on such a quick summary, it is evident that at this momentous period in the development of Burroughs’ oeuvre, he was using the relationship between Michaux’s creative work and personal tragedy to think through his own: why else insert the name of his own previous psychoanalyst, Marc Schlumberger, in the mix of fires destroying artwork and life that he was cutting up? And if he did not know it, then Burroughs intuited Michaux’s own meditations on this very relationship that informed Life in the Folds (La Vie dans les plis, 1949), the text in which he published “Portrait of the Meidosems” the year after his wife died. It is now a commonplace to read the text and its lithographs as Michaux’s response to the trauma: in the Preface to the English translation of Meidosems (1992), Elizabeth Jackson speculates that her death “may explain the nature of the aesthetic intensity” with which Michaux depicted “the poignant drama of these ectoplasmic life-forms” (Michaux, Meidosems, x); while Raymond Bellour goes so far as to present the Meidosems’ metamorphic variety of forms as directly linked to “a burnt, disfigured woman lying on a hospital bed” (328; my translation). As we will see, metamorphosis and suffering are indeed qualities associated with Michaux’s Meidosems, but it is clearly perverse, as well as reductive, to search for biographical origins when Michaux actually begins La Vie dans les plis with an epigraph violently refuting the conflation of life and art: “I spit on my life. I want nothing to do with it. Who can do no better than his life?” (Michaux, La Vie dans les plis, 9; my translation).7 It is not hard to imagine Burroughs agreeing with

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Michaux, and his claim that a writer has no secrets because they are “all in his work” (Lotringer, 302) amounts to the same position. And so if I evoke biographical parallels between Michaux and Burroughs, these include above all the way each attacked biography, spitting on it, cutting it up. Used as epigraphs for this chapter, their statements direct us both into the text and beyond life—“in any known form,” as Ginsberg would have said, with great anxiety.

Hieroglyphs of Mockery Michaux’s epigraph takes us directly to his Meidosems since it honors one of their main attributes: they are not individuals with a singular life, but an imaginary species of thousands who constantly change form. In this respect, their existence in two media is crucial, since Michaux simultaneously wrote them into existence and created them visually in the dozen simple but beautiful lithographs he produced for the first edition of his book, Meidosems (1948). Burroughs, of course, left us no portraits of Mugwumps other than brief verbal accounts in Naked Lunch, where the creatures appear in paradoxical but almost identically described terms in four sections. Significantly, on the proofs of his text for “Portrait of Meidosems,” Michaux crossed out the title several times, indicating how important but problematic it was. Indeed, although he also hesitated over how to gender his creatures—whether to call them Meidosems or Meidosemmes—most revealing is his hesitation over the term portrait, which usually indicates the representation of individuals at their most individual, their face. Canceling the original phrasing “Portraits & façons,”8 and replacing it by the singular “Portrait” reveals Michaux’s intention to make “representation”—in the political as well as aesthetic sense—problematic, since the Meidosems not only move all the time, and so cannot sit still for a portrait, but also constantly change shape and form. There is a tension here in the language that embodies the very material process by which the lithographs were produced, the stone and the ink physically bringing together the hard with the soft, the fixed with the fluid. Visually and verbally, Michaux’s creatures are nothing if not enigmatic, as confirmed by the astonishing number of questions in the poems, such as What’s happening? What’s the matter? Was it yesterday? Will it finally hold him up? But his eyes? Whoever, strangled, doesn’t talk one day of breaking loose? But the roofs? But the houses? (Michaux, Meidosems, 31, 43, 45, 58, 87).

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Figure 8.1 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate I (1948) © Gallimard

Figure 8.2 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate IX (1948) © Gallimard

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The question “what are Meidosems?” has, then, to give way to the mystery of how they are described. We are told that they have viscous insides and are accordingly unctuous, translucent and elastic, and have no armature: “their vertebral columns (really vertebral?) showing through beneath the ectoplasm of their being” (Michaux, Meidosems, 46). They are so elastic, in fact, that they struggle to stay put and are helped or tortured by dozens of tutors or “spears,” up to 34 of them (9). Above all, these creatures are paradoxical, such that their strengths and weaknesses are one and the same: “Extraordinary elasticity; that’s the source of the Meidosems’ pleasure. Of their misfortune too” (11). The key characteristic of Michaux’s creatures is their physical vulnerability, which is not how we generally think of Burroughs’ Mugwumps, but if Meidosems are made of “ectoplasm” and subject to “losing their very substance” (27), they are at risk of the liquefaction that dominates bodily matter in Naked Lunch. Like Michaux’s Meidosems, Burroughs’ Mugwumps experience substance loss on a daily basis. Burroughs has them produce a longevity serum of which they are “milked” by the Reptiles who are addicted to it. After a violent sexual act, one Mugwump thus “falls with a fluid, sated plop” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 65).

Figure 8.3 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate II (1948) © Gallimard

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Figure 8.4 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate VII (1948) © Gallimard

In Naked Lunch, liquefaction is not merely a risk of particular fantasy creatures but the aim of an entire political strategy: “the Liquefaction Program involves the eventual merging of everyone into One Man by a process of protoplasmic absorption” (123). Across the text, Burroughs satirizes liquefaction as the extreme degeneration of matter to its lowest and most primitive level of organization; and yet, the danger of this extreme is inherent in the desire of avoiding the other extreme of rigid, fixed, unchanging identity. “We must not,” according to Burroughs’ Factualist Bulletin, “reject or deny our protoplasmic core, striving at all times to maintain a maximum of flexibility without falling into the morass of liquefaction…” (140; Burroughs’ ellipsis). Burroughs’ vision of biology as caught in between viscid jelly and brittle bone has long been interpreted in political terms, going back to Tony Tanner, who in 1970 inferred “you cannot be free; instead you must continually be freeing yourself ” (Tanner, 123). As is hinted by the characteristic ellipsis in Burroughs’ Bulletin, and as a detailed comparative analysis of Mugwumps and Meidosems shows, Tanner’s broad ethics of “freedom” also apply at a precise aesthetic and formal level. For Mugwumps and Meidosems both raise the biological-literary question of species-genre, that is to say, of classification.

Burroughs’ Mugwumps and Michaux’s Meidosems

Figure 8.5 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate X (1948) © Gallimard

Figure 8.6 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate XII (1948) © Gallimard

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Are Meidosems closer to the human or to the animal (the human on the right or the bird on the left of Plate X)? Likewise, from Burroughs’ description, we do not know whether to situate Mugwumps with birds of prey or mammals, since they have “purple-blue lips [that] cover a razor-sharp beak of black bone with which they frequently tear each other to shreds,” but also “erect penises” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 46). The hybridity of the Mugwump is not unique in Naked Lunch. Bradley the Buyer, for example, is in consecutive sentences compared to physically incompatible predators— “Like a vampire bat” and “like a gorged boa constrictor” (17)—but Mugwumps give such similes a biological form. Michaux’s lithographs visualize how bafflingly his Meidosems also swerve in scale and nature, from representing them as tiny aerial organisms falling as a delicate and graceful spectacle, likened to a room filled with dust shining in the afternoon sunlight (Plate XII), to images where some appear like long goofy insects or Mandrill monkeys (Plate III) and others like giant spiders (Plate VI). “Contracted spherule, insect’s head, like the head of a dragonfly,” affirms Michaux’s text at one point (Meidosems, 59). Likewise, despite their mammalian penises and avian beaks, Mugwumps have eyes that are “blank with insect calm” (Naked Lunch, 63).

Figure 8.7 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate III (1948) © Gallimard

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Figure 8.8 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate VI (1948) © Gallimard

Burroughs’ jumbled up biology is no more haphazard than Michaux’s. Indeed, they are not simply a flight of fantasy, as these same terms are repeated verbatim throughout Naked Lunch. These terms are also consistent with the Mugwump’s textual origins in Junky, and so establish, as it were, the stability of their genetic DNA make-up across Burroughs’ oeuvre. In Junky, when Lee reaches Mexico City, he enters one of the “ambiguous or transitional districts” adjacent to those where he can find drugs, and it is here that he encounters the obscene of the Mugwump (Burroughs, Junky, 93). In a short account, whose key details are reprised in Naked Lunch, this creature’s “place of origin is the Near East, probably Egypt,” his “lips are thin and purple-blue like the lips of a penis,” he is “milked” for a longevity substance, and his eyes have “an insect’s unseeing calm”: “He is as specialized as an insect, for the performance of some inconceivably vile function” (93). While identified as a “man,” Burroughs emphasizes the creature’s ambiguity and hybridity, and the “transitional” urban geography surrounding them suggest some evolutionary throwback or possible future mutation for them. Indeed, the Mugwump’s function is to take one evolutionary stage further Burroughs’ association of narcotic addiction with biological degeneration, to the dehumanizing collapse of the “human form” into “protoplasm” and “ectoplasm,” terms that appear often interchangeably two dozen times in Naked Lunch. Junky confirms that the inhumanity of Mugwumps is associated with narcotic addiction, but its sequel, Queer, also asserts a parallel association with sexual desire; only this time, it is not some alien creature but the narrator

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himself who demonstrates it. Sitting in the cinema—watching Orpheus—Lee feels “an amoeboid protoplasmic projection, straining with a blind worm hunger to enter the other’s body” (Burroughs, Queer, 33). These points of origin in Burroughs’ earlier, seemingly realist works, indicate the conclusion that the “worm” or the insect do not represent in his writing some disgusting other, utterly inhuman, but the alien within, emerging when “the human form can no longer contain the crustacean horror that has grown inside it” (Burroughs, Junky, 111). To discover here “a horrific other inside the self,” in the terms of Chris Beard’s insightful reading of Burroughs and Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (Beard, 837), is convincing but does not address the importance of form in his writings, which is the essential lesson arising from comparing Mugwumps and Meidosems. Just like Michaux’s Meidosems that “reappear, disappear” in chimneys and cracks and “from between the slats” in a room (Michaux, Meidosems, 83), Burroughs’ Mugwumps “take refuge in the deepest wall crevices” where they “seal themselves” and remain for weeks “in biostasis” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 46). If biostasis further identifies Mugwumps with insects, who behave likewise according to the seasons, this scientific term more broadly designates their ability

Figure 8.9 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate VIII (1948) © Gallimard

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Figure 8.10 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate V (1948) © Gallimard

to tolerate environmental changes without their metabolism needing to adapt to them. They may secrete a fluid that prolongs life “by slowing metabolism” (46), but their own organisms need to be slowed down by seasonal rebooting. Meidosems are also constantly described as waiting, surviving, holding on for the right moment to emerge from their biostasis. Then again, they have “more arms than an octopus” and “heads studded with suckers” (Michaux, Meidosems, 38). One of them could even be mistaken for a Mugwump (Plate V), who is equipped with what does look like an erect penis, to be milked of serum, or a long black tongue in search of warm honey (Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 63). In other words, these hypersensitive metabolisms keep changing and the descriptions of them are wildly incompatible, from the miniscule to the gigantic, the delicate to the monstrous. What is at stake with Burroughs and Michaux’s creatures is less a matter of external appearances or insides or of species categories than of some irreducible resistance to being itself, a resistance that is fundamentally aesthetic. That is, the title “Portrait of the Meidosems” is, in Michaux’s typically dry humor, a mockery, a joke against us. Burroughs’ Mugwumps appear more singularly repulsive and static, but of course their very name combines opposites in conflict, as played out in the

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“Talking Asshole” routine, which is precisely a story of the “wump” (the ass) taking over the “mug” (the face). Burroughs also knew the political etymology of the term (Mugwump designated Republicans who switched sides to the Democrats in the late nineteenth century), but turns it into a joke about a bigger binary than political parties, as indicated by A.J., who addresses his guests in Naked Lunch as “Cunts, pricks, fence straddlers” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 74); unable to make up their minds, Mugwumps want it both ways. At one point, Michaux also humoristically mentions the Meidosems’ inability to decide, noting they are “more distracted” than monkeys and “always daydreaming about something else” (Michaux, Meidosems, 82), while at another point, we are told the highly Burroughsian anecdote of a Meidosem tragi-comically divided between his left and right hemispheres: Danger! Run for safety: it’s urgent. Quick. He won’t run away. His right dominator won’t let him do it. But it’s urgent. His right dominator won’t let him. His left terrifier thrases, twists around, in agony, shrieking. It’s no use, his right dominator won’t let him. And so dies the Meidosem who, undivided, could have escaped. (Meidosems, 33)

Burroughs’ own assault on the contradictory demands of binary logic is not only apparent in the paradoxical hybridity of his Mugwumps, but more generally in the incompatible biology that characterizes creatures in Naked Lunch. Michaux’s Meidosems help us to rethink the Mugwumps place within the confusion about corporeal insides and outsides and species identity. They clarify that, while memorable within Naked Lunch—and Cronenberg’s film— they are in fact a dead-end. That Burroughs’ description of them barely changed from Junky and that they quickly vanished from his work (making only a passing reappearance in The Ticket That Exploded), confirms that these monstrous hybrids are not themselves in evolutionary terms going anywhere, not in process. No wonder the longevity serum they produce “prolongs life by slowing metabolism” (Naked Lunch, 46), implying their resemblance to Burroughs’ thermodynamically-defined terminal addict: “his metabolism approaching Absolute ZERO” (208). When Chris Breu argues that, within the biopolitical economy of Naked Lunch, Mugwumps are Burroughs’ “science-fiction figuration of a posthuman being” and his “most striking metaphor” for the emergence of posthuman bodies (Breu, 212, 214), the limitations in his critical terminology of figures and metaphors indicates the precise limitations of the Mugwumps themselves: they exist frozen within representation.

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The importance of what can and cannot be figured will return in a discussion of Burroughs and Michaux’s “insect writing,” but for now we should observe that Michaux’s Meidosems enable us to grasp not only the limitations of Mugwumps but also their overlooked material and philosophical dimension, taking the judicious invitation Grossman makes in La Défiguration: Artaud, Beckett, Michaux to read Meidosems in terms of the language of representation itself: The Meidosem is as malleable as a brush stroke, a paint stain, a scarcely traced sign, still unfixed, balancing between writing and drawing, between shape and shapelessness. Pre-signs forever in suspense, they are at one and the same time the poetical syntax of a writing (“On her long, slim curvaceous legs, a tall and graceful Meidosemme”) and the paradoxical figuration of the unfigurable movement of thought. (Grossman, La Défiguration, 100; my translation)

There are likewise signs that Mugwumps had for Burroughs a specific relation to writing. The “Near East Mugwump” that appears in “Hassan’s Rumpus Room” gives orders to the boy he is about to rape “in telepathic pictographs” and then caresses him “in hieroglyphs of mockery” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 63, 64). In case we miss it, Burroughs repeats the key word—which appears nowhere else in the text—by referring to the Mugwump’s “stylized hieroglyph hands” (64). Through the over-determined lexis of “style” and “hand” here, Burroughs connects the alien creature’s body to his own writing at a physical level as well as to the language of Ancient Egypt, hieroglyphs (“sacred writing” or “sacred engraving”) in which ideas are represented visually by images.9 The protean and provisional form of Michaux’s Meidosems point to where Burroughs will take writing after Naked Lunch, which resembles the “washing away the human lines” that overtakes the Vigilante, when “no organ is constant as regards either function or position… sex organs sprout anywhere… rectums open, deface and close… the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second adjustments…” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 9). It should come as no surprise that this passage is quoted by Deleuze and Guattari to illustrate the “body without organs” that they appropriated from Artaud. This is not the place to address in detail the intersection of Burroughs with French critical theory, but we might observe how the repeated ellipses in his textual body here do their best to visualize the chaotic pace and logic of constant physical change— “energy transformation and kinetic movements,” in the terms of Deleuze and Guattari (Anti-Oedipus, 170)—and that these ellipses nevertheless hint at what

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is limiting Burroughs’ attempt to imagine a posthuman biology: language itself, the presumed hallmark of the human. Although Paul Sheehan is absolutely right to say that Naked Lunch “explores posthuman aesthetics at the level of form,” in the sense that the text is “assembled from disparate parts, like Frankenstein’s monster or Moreau’s hybrids” (Sheehan, 249), here again the case remains too narrowly defined and limited within literature.10 Combining words with images, Michaux’s work offers us, as it might have offered Burroughs, an exemplary way to simultaneously mock representation and go beyond the human.

Living Organisms Although they met in 1958, it remains unclear how well Burroughs knew Michaux’s work: whether, for example, he had read Miserable Miracle (Misérable miracle, 1956), which was not translated into English until 1963.11 Had he done so, Burroughs would have recognized not only the general compatibility of their research into drugs, their equal fascination for what Michaux called “l’espace du dedans,” but a number of very precise convergences that might have fostered a deep sense of creative affinity.12 Michaux’s observation that when under the influence “everything is vibrant and teeming with reality” (Michaux, Miserable Miracle, 40) would indeed have resonated for Burroughs who described the impact of yagé in summer 1953: “Everything stirs with a peculiar furtive writing life like a Van Gogh painting” (Burroughs, Letters, 180). And had Burroughs recalled his own aside at that time—“If I could only paint I could convey it all”—it would have taken on new meaning in the context of the fifty drawings featured in Miserable Miracle. He might have especially admired and appreciated the dry visual joke signaling the impossible task Michaux set himself—to write what can only be felt—with which Miserable Miracle begins, that is a drawing of the chemical formula for mescaline: C11 H17 NO3 (4). Following on from Michaux’s opening epigraph that speaks of the mescaline experience as being “in a situation that nothing less than fifty different, simultaneous, contradictory onomatopoeias, changing every half second, could adequately convey” (3), the empty abstraction of the simple, singular and static molecular formula on the page is, just like the lithographs depicting his Meidosems, a mockery that visualizes the central issue of representation. The point that Michaux labors in Miserable Miracle, both through his text and its images, is not simply the difficulty of representing experience or the need for

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an experimental format: this is an attack on representation. That is why Michaux stresses his published book hits a “typographical wall,” because it could be no more than a pale copy of an original manuscript that was “more tangible than legible, drawn rather than written” (Miserable Miracle, 5), but that would itself also have been inadequate. Michaux’s reproduced images are primary insofar as they formally register the vibrations of the mescaline experience but they cannot “convey it all,” as Burroughs imagined either. The lesson he might have taken from Miserable Miracle, from Meidosems or from much of Michaux’s verbal-visual work, Burroughs effectively learned from Brion Gysin. Of course, Gysin’s painting, art-historical knowledge, and polemical pitch (“writing is fifty years behind painting”) has long been recognized as the crucible for the cutup experiments Burroughs began after publication of Naked Lunch in summer 1959. Some of Gysin’s calligraphic work also bears an astonishing similarity to Michaux’s. However, neither the preceding analysis of Miserable Miracle nor the comparison of Burroughs’ purely verbal Mugwumps with Michaux’s verbal and visual Meidosems should obscure an essential fact that has long gone unnoticed: it was not after Naked Lunch that Burroughs became a visual artist, nor for that matter during or before it. Pointing the way forward, the way beyond, the convergence of the verbal and visual took place within Naked Lunch. The one, already reasonably well-known visual dimension of Naked Lunch is the front cover of the Olympia Press original edition, which featured a design by Burroughs himself: six rows of glyphs almost always interpreted as his versions of Gysin’s calligraphic drawings. Although not untrue, this account is lacking in two essential respects that conceal a fundamental proximity between the work of Burroughs and Michaux and that should transform our understanding of the relation between the verbal and the visual in Burroughs’ attempt to give writing a new future.13 The first of these two missing elements is the vital genesis of Burroughs’ cover design for Naked Lunch. While self-evidently Gysin-like, the calligraphic figures on the book’s cover emerged from an intense series of graphic experiments Burroughs made at the start of 1959. The context for these works was a sense of danger—precisely the kind of danger Burroughs had demanded back in 1955 (when aiming to “create something that will have a life of its own, that can put me in real danger”): “I know that I am in a very dangerous place, but point of no return is way back yonder,” he types on his January 2, 1959 letter to Ginsberg, on a page that is then filled by seven rows of glyphs similar to, if slightly more complex than, those that would appear six months later on the Olympia Press

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front cover of Naked Lunch (Burroughs, Letters, 406). At the foot of the page he adds, in hand: “Above to be read upside down and backward. They are alive, these forms like living organisms” (Burroughs’ emphasis). The meaning of these “living organisms” is completely lost if we see them as mere copies of Gysin’s glyphs or as made in his style, for Burroughs’ point is that they created themselves: “I suddenly began writing in word forms, of which enclose samples,” he comments, as if taken by surprise (405). The autonomy of this writing-thatis-not-writing goes together with the forms’ identity as living creatures, in the

Figure 8.11 Facsimile, page of glyphs from William Burroughs’ letter to Allen Ginsberg (January 2, 1959) © The Estate of William S. Burroughs, courtesy of the Allen Ginsberg Papers at Columbia University, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC

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biological sense, and with their spatial transcendence of the left-right and topdown linearity of conventional English writing direction. Rather than dead symbols, abstract signs that stand in for some other reality that is not present, and rather than operating representationally and obeying arbitrary principles of formal organization, Burroughs’ word forms present themselves and move freely. They are not metaphorically alive, any more than they are metaphors. The experience of giving birth to these graphic “living organisms” in 1959 had a precedent in the yagé-inspired “asemic” writing Burroughs drew in his notebook during summer 1953 in Mexico. Inspired by the effects of the drug, those swirling glyphs were then connected to St.-John Perse’s Anabasis, which Burroughs identified as “yagé poetry” (Burroughs, Everything Lost, 41). He would find painterly points of reference for his yagé experience not only in Van Gogh, but especially in Paul Klee whose pictures he also felt “are literally alive” (Burroughs, Letters, 180, 289, 290). However, what Burroughs discovered at the beginning and end of the decade is also highly similar to the work Michaux was doing throughout the 1950s, specifically to his Indian ink series in Mouvements (1951). Although the book combined part of a longer poem with sixty-four images, Michaux covered over a thousand pages with his thin ink lines and stains; elementary life forms, “moving creatures” as much as signs (Michaux, Catalogue, 69). Anticipating Burroughs’ experience, Michaux observes that these lines and blobs of ink, far from representing or imitating anything else, seemed to be released by the technique itself. He wrote in the book’s preface that “their movements came buoyantly to me […] I see in them a new language, spurning the verbal, and so I see them as liberators” (qtd. in Catalogue, 71; Michaux’s emphasis). Michaux is clear that his graphic forms “freed [him] of words,” and that “the words, the words came afterwards, afterwards, always afterwards” (Catalogue, 71). In her acute analysis, Grossman likewise argues that what is taking place across Michaux’s oeuvre is, in evolutionary terms, a regression: a movement back to a pre-verbal, pre-corporeal, pre-subjective state, a movement that precedes thinking (Grossman, La Défiguration, 84-85). So too, Burroughs’ emphasis on reading in reverse, instructing Ginsberg in his letter to work from right to left and bottom to top (“upside down and backward”), describes an inversion of our habitual Western organization of chronology and space as well as writing. But a case could of course be made for the opposite, that the evolutionary direction implied by Burroughs and Michaux’s works is not pre- but postverbal. Or we might call into question the teleology inherent to the language of linear thinking itself, following the lead of Burroughs and Michaux: “causal

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thinking never yields accurate description of metabolic process—limitations of existing language” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 23). Those “limitations of existing language” were inscribed on the very front cover of the original Naked Lunch, where, however, they could not be recognized because its cover design appears just that: a cover design, a piece of artwork, mere decorative illustration, and therefore secondary and contingent, not a part of the text itself. The second crucial factor to understanding Naked Lunch’s intrinsic relation to the visual is thus the historical fact that Burroughs had previously incorporated the visual within the verbal in the “Ten Episodes from Naked Lunch” published in Big Table Magazine (Spring 1959). Although its significance has not been noticed, the ninth out of these “Ten Episodes” should revise quite radically our understanding of Naked Lunch and where Burroughs’ work was going before he made his cut-up breakthrough. To be clear, what is included in Big Table (see Figure 8.12) was not offered as an “illustration” of anything else in the text but constituted in itself an “episode” of it. And what we see identified as Episode 9, opposite a facing page of print (the start of the tenth episode, the “Joselito” section) are rows of what start out looking like hand-written characters becoming less and less written and more and more drawn.

Figure 8.12 Facsimile, William Burroughs, Episode 9 of “Ten Episodes from Naked Lunch,” originally published in Big Table, no. 1 (Spring 1959) © The Estate of William S. Burroughs, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC

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One result of being unable to read these mute forms, these silent shapes, is to remind us of the strangeness of writing and the materiality lost in the abstraction of standardized typeface. But the larger significance of what we might call this “lost episode” of Naked Lunch is to clarify Burroughs’ move against and beyond verbal representation. Whether by calculated design or lucky accident—a distinction Burroughs’ work of course subverted—the facing page from the “Joselito” section includes his allusion to the silent Anopheles mosquito, and with it Burroughs’ parenthetical insistence: “(Footnote: this is not a figure. Anopheles mosquitos are silent)” (“Ten Episodes,” 133; Naked Lunch, 39). With this prompt, refusing figurative language and asserting silence, we recognize in Episode 9 the seeds of the “terminal writing” that closed his cut-up trilogy, the lines of calligraphy that in 1962 Gysin added after the book’s last words: “Silence to say good bye” (Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded, 230). The lost episode of Naked Lunch makes clear that by depicting impossible creatures such as Mugwumps, Burroughs subverted representation within realism, but fell short of turning the means of representation, the medium of language, against itself. There was, however, a problem with these “word forms” that were not words, for Burroughs now found himself, as he wrote Gysin in January 1959, “seemingly at the end of verbal communication…” (Burroughs, Letters, 407). Although there would be three more decades of writing to come, at this point in time Burroughs saw no way forward: whereas Michaux recognized his ink forms as “liberators,” Burroughs’ glyphs left him at an impasse. The situation enables us to see not only why he so urgently embraced cut-up methods when Gysin demonstrated them, but how the application of painterly techniques to writing in October 1959 responded to the mutation of the verbal into the visual with which, nine months earlier, Burroughs had produced the living organisms of Naked Lunch’s Episode 9. Although far from identical, Burroughs’ self-generating graphic “word forms” anticipated the extraordinary productivity of cut-up methods, mechanical and material practices with an autonomously organic fertility.

Insect Writing By juxtaposing a page of typed text with a page of drawn non-signifying signs, with Episode 9 of Naked Lunch Burroughs invited the reader to see through the devious transparency of language: to see, that is, the alien within. This alien language might quite accurately be called “insect writing,” adapting Grossman’s

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“insectuous writing” (“langue insectueuse” [86]) to describe Michaux’s work, a term fusing his own fascination with the insect, as the creatures that most viscerally challenge our human identity, and incest, as the fundamental psychoanalytical drama for humans within Oedipal organization.14 Grossman’s expression implies a psychoanalytical reading that is not as helpful to grasp Burroughs’ movement from writing to pre-verbal signs, but her claim that Michaux’s “mixing of human and non human, pulling man into the swarm of signs, is at the very core of his poetics” helpfully applies to Burroughs’ trilogy of cut-up novels: The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express (87; my translation).15 Saturated with insect imagery, hybrid figures (fish-boys, vegetable people) and human-mechanical composites, the textual bodies of Burroughs’ cut-up trilogy are themselves “soft machines,” pulling both his characters and readers into a fusion of flesh with wiring, technology with biology. Why then call this “insect writing” instead of, for example, “cyborgian writing” as does David Punday, taking up the term from Donna Harraway’s famous “Cyborg Manifesto”? Because what makes Burroughs radical is not his approach to “narrative” or “style,” as Punday claims, but his material attention to media and processes, and these are not necessarily “post-evolutionary” (Punday, 50). On the contrary, Burroughs’ point about language as the alien within, like the posthumanist argument about the inhuman inside, is that the most supposedly “natural” is simply the best disguised alien, a parasite that has achieved symbiosis with its host, in the language of his virology. And so, to see his textual bodies as unnatural Frankenstein assemblages, outside the norms of evolution, presumes a bogus normal model of genetic origins and misses the point that cut-up methods make explicit what is always happening. That is, Burroughs’ commitment to evolution is the very definition of the human and what’s inhuman for him is a static conception of humanity, to recall Roosevelt in his 1953 routine, who abhors “the human species as it is” (Burroughs and Ginsberg, The Yage Letters, 44). Ironically, this is surely why the cyborg was of less interest to Burroughs than the insects he loathed so much: the more alien the point of view, the more valuable for mutating human language, body and thought, and reaching what Ginsberg called the “Artaud unknown.” Burroughs’ “insect writing” was not a sustainable form, of course, but an experiment, like all his work. And the experiment was not only aesthetic but also ethical. When in a 1961 text related to The Soft Machine we are told—seemingly in Burroughs’ authorial voice—“I find it a useful literary exercise to think and feel in terms of micro-organism” (Burroughs, The Soft Machine, 193–94)—we realize

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that the attempt to think beyond the human, to shatter the anthropocentrism of thought, to inhabit an alien point of view is not a “literary exercise” at all. It is an ethical commitment to serving the goal of evolution, to mutating in order to survive. Given the dire urgency of our condition “as it is,” it is up to the artists to force the pace of change, in order to escape the impasse dramatized by Michaux in his tragicomic tale of the Meidosem who dies unable to flee dangers to the left or to the right, or, even more darkly, the Meidosems who are falling “calmly, calmly” towards imminent death: “Why worry yet?” asks Michaux with quiet but bitter irony, as they head towards the scrapheap; “They’ve still got a few more seconds before the crash” (Meidsosems, 57).16 Michaux’s apocalyptic point and black humor are not so far from Burroughs’ own here, best caught in an old New Yorker cartoon from the 1930s that he savored, depicting a small airplane about to crash into the side of a mountain in which one passenger turns to another and says: “My God, we’re out of gin!”17 In the mid-1950s, Burroughs expressed his conviction that what “distinguished Man from all other species is that he can not become static […] ‘He must continue to develop or perish’” (Burroughs, Letters, 226–27). And so, in his final novel thirty years later he was still declaring “a biological revolution, fought with new species and new ways of thinking and feeling”: “At the end of the human line everything is permitted” (Burroughs, Western Lands, 34). Although that promised “end” horrified Ginsberg in 1961, and although we yearn for truth as well as for change, Burroughs’ vision was human precisely insofar as it was committed to producing work that is posthuman. It was a commitment to creativity and hope that truly answered Michaux’s challenge: “Who can do no better than his life?”

Conclusion: A Purloined Genealogy

The case made in the last chapter of this book for reading Burroughs through Michaux, while intended to be innovative, also aimed to demonstrate the rich potential for making critical interpretations within the traditions of comparative literature. That is, it stands out methodologically from the rest of this study, which approached the writings of Burroughs, Kerouac and Ginsberg through genealogy, through their traceable appropriations of past works. It is hard to think of any other grouping of writers for whom it would be possible to undertake a similar study, such is the remarkable consistency and coherence of their oeuvres’ engagement with French modern literature and culture. French culture did not merely inspire or engage the so-called founders of the Beat Generation; it shaped their works. That is, Marcel Carné’s Port of Shadows cannot be taken out of Kerouac’s I Wish I Were You, any more than Jean Cocteau’s Orphée can be taken out of Burroughs’ Queer, or Apollinaire and Genet’s verses out of Ginsberg’s poems, for that would affect their meaning, structure or aesthetic. Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s French genealogy is inextricable from their works, an integral part of their oeuvres. Hence, when Ginsberg succumbed to removing the “ponderous lineage” from his most famous poem “Howl,” it was only to regret it and reinsert the lineage in the poems that followed. The major Beat writers were all great appropriators, and what they took from their predecessors and near contemporaries was both precise and part of their creative process. This is quite different from speaking of influences, which are bound to be broad and vague, rather than textually specific. Throughout their oeuvres, all three writers developed a relationship to French literature that is therefore much deeper and more textually important than it has long appeared. Like Edgar Allen Poe’s “purloined letter,” the role and meaning of their French genealogy always seemed at our fingertips, thanks to the diligent work of the biographers of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac who rightly took care to name-check their French modern forebears; but I hope to have shown

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that unveiling the multiple significance of that genealogy takes meticulous textual readings. For Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac made extensive and sophisticated use of French modern literature and culture, both to distinguish their works from that of their contemporaries and from the works of each other. Indeed, the names of their French predecessors had different connotations for all three writers so that, as we have seen through their use of Rimbaud and Céline, Kerouac and Burroughs defined their identities as writers against one another by affirming their respective works along a spectrum of aesthetic and ethical values: from literary to non-literary, humanist to post-humanist. In the 1940s and 1950s, they set out to write not just to emulate, but also to challenge or surpass their French literary predecessors. Far from being simple acts of homage or evidence of a general influence, the work of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac was typically precise and problematic in its engagement with specific source texts. Burroughs’ cut-up practice is exemplary of the violence inherent to—if not always visible in—the process of appropriation that is at stake in the development of their complex French filiations. In this sense, it is no surprise at all that poems by Rimbaud, the poet of French Modernity, should be among the first and most prominent material sliced up by Burroughs’ scissors. Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s French references were also “purloined” insofar as they were more often unacknowledged than acknowledged, more characteristically encrypted within their texts than openly displayed. Here, we see both sides of their ambivalence, with regard to past genealogy and future reception: that is, an anxiety in relation to their French predecessors and an uncertainty in relation to their own American readers. The poems by Ginsberg that have thus been read in terms of his deference to Apollinaire and Genet, on closer inspection turn out to proceed from thorny practices bordering on theft and self-promotion. Quoting, but also translating and adapting lines from Apollinaire and Genet’s poems, Ginsberg furtively sowed them across his own poetry to signal and promote his modernity. Ironically, his French “signals” have remained largely overlooked, not just because of the Americanist expertise of Ginsberg’s critics but for the very reason they were so inherent to his larger poetic strategy of “open secrecy.” All too often, Burroughs and Kerouac’s critics have likewise taken the meaning of their French references for granted, rather than tried to discern in the way they made these references their very process of writing at work. The close examination of Kerouac’s journals

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and of his long appropriation of Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night and Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, for example, reward us not only with new readings of On the Road and Visions of Cody, but also with better understanding of how Kerouac came to formulate his aesthetics in “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.” Likewise, the discovery of the bilingual edition that Burroughs used to produce his early cut-ups of Rimbaud allows us to establish how directly he engaged with his sources (by cutting Rimbaud’s original French text to produce new words that work in English), while it more generally prompts us to rethink our conception of the cut-up method itself (since Burroughs used his scissors to cut Rimbaud’s poems with astonishing care, he must have done so with the other texts he produced). In short, the sophistication in Burroughs’ use of Rimbaud that passes undetected because hidden in plain sight, and not expected from his supposedly random methods, might stand as an exemplar of all three writers’ purloined genealogy. While French modern literature was loved by Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac, when categorized as “Beat literature” their own work was and is still relatively hated within the American literary academy. That is, French literature played the same role and impacted the works of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac in the same way as their own literature impacted the American literary canon: as the alien within. This is not to say that my intention with this book was to advocate that their works should be integrated into the American literary canon or the vast corpus of world literature—they already have been—but rather, to invite us to read or re-read the works of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac for what they were and should remain: literary oeuvres that sought and fulfilled the posthumanist task undertaken by Rimbaud, Proust, Gide, Apollinaire, St.-John Perse, Artaud, Céline, Cocteau, Genet and Michaux. For Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac were committed to the same experiment as their French modernist predecessors, and did nothing less than contribute to transforming our conception of “man,” destitute it from its bourgeois humanist throne, and put it, not on top of everything like a postmodern artist or god, “a magician, an angel, free from all moral constraint,” but “back to the soil to seek some obligation, to wrap gnarled reality” in his arms (Rimbaud, “Farewell”). They return us back to the street with centipedes and weeds and drugs and cyborgs (Burroughs), to the graveyards and kindergartens with ants and plants and children and madmen (Ginsberg), to the rivers that flow through towns and the seas that border cities, with the fishes and the whales and the waves, from the womb to the end of the

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night, ever stretching the silver cord (Kerouac), to see how we get along and what happens. Whatever the result of this experiment might be for literature and mankind—its celebration and rejuvenation or self-destruction and extinction; Rimbaud’s “Christmas on earth” or Michaux’s “Meidosems”—it cannot happen if the appropriations of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac are not recognized and their works not read for the deeply informed and innovative oeuvres they are.

Notes Introduction 1

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Burroughs’ famous library not only inspired Ginsberg and Kerouac in 1944, but has also exercised a fascination for scholars and readers ever since; in part because Ginsberg and Kerouac discovering it appears as a fundational moment of the Beat Generation, and in part because accounts of its precise contents vary so greatly. For a close reading of its mythologization, see Thom Robinson, “Burroughs’ Library.” However, what French authors Burroughs did or did not have on his bookshelves, which Ginsberg and Kerouac admired, matters far less for this study than how French texts manifest in their works. “Canuck”: Kerouac’s preferred term to designate his hybrid language and national identity over “French-Canadian” or “Québécois.” French was Kerouac’s native language, but since he had to give it up at school age, writing in it for him was bound to remain a struggle, as editor Jean-Christophe Cloutier clarifies in his insightful introduction to Kerouac’s French writings, La Vie est d’hommage (2016). The original letter contains grammatical errors that have been corrected here, but I would argue that Burroughs’ juxtaposition of formulas from two incompatible registers, the rigidly formal and the highly personal, is too striking to be caused by linguistic clumsiness. Calculated coming-out or Freudian slip? Burroughs’ use of French slyly leaves the decision up to his reader. For the Beats’ broader connections with Surrealism, see Fazzino’s World Beats and Harris’ “Cutting-up the Corpse,” and with Situationism, see Murphy and Hussey. The French volume Contre-Cultures! recently edited by Bourseiller and PenotLacassagne also features essays that study the Beats’ larger connections to both movements with refreshing nuance. On Philip Lamantia, see Fazzino’s excellent account of the importance for his poetry of such sources as Apollinaire, Artaud and Breton (95–127). On Bob Kaufman as “the black Rimbaud,” see Starer. For a list of modernist sources that evidence “the larger scope of Beat ancestries and intersections conjoining the men and women,” see Grace (70, 71). On the importance of Genet for Brenda Frazer, see Grace and Johnson (115, 116). See Miles’ The Beat Hotel (2000) and Campbell’s This Is the Beat Generation (2001).

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Notes “J’écris pour les analphabètes” (Artaud, Oeuvres, 21); “l’interprète du déchet humain” (Genet, in Poulet, Aveux spontanés, 34); “aux faibles, aux malades et maladifs, aux enfants, aux opprimés et inadaptés de toute sorte” (Michaux, Oeuvres complètes, vol. I, 512). On the role that Victor-Lévy Beaulieu played in the reception of Kerouac’s works in Quebec and for a survey of Canadian “historical revisions” of On the Road, see Skinazi (31–59); for a brief but compelling reading of Québécois author Jacques Poulin’s appropriations of Kerouac, see Melehy (178-79); and for a well-documented panorama of the complex history of Quebec’s own counterculture, see Labelle-Hogue’s article in Bourseiller and Penot-Lacassagne (145–53). Parallels can certainly be found between the works of Québécois authors and his own, but whether from lack of interest or repression, Kerouac himself, who so tirelessly claimed his literary models, never once mentioned Québécois literature as a source of inspiration. “L’ouvrage de ma vie serait écrit dans la langue que j’ai commencez [sic] avec— Français, Canuck, ou Cajun.” On the importance of Rabelais for Kerouac, see Melehy (163–77). See Dichy and Fouché (420–31). In this sense, the “Transnational Beat Generation” may be a contradiction in terms, since the Beat Generation began to lose its identity at the very moment national literatures began to pass into history. “C’est de l’incontinence graphique.” Yet, critics continue to find “surreal impressions” in Ginsberg’s writing, to quote one recent essay title (Jackson, “Modernist Looking: Surreal Impressions in the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg,” 2010), and to find in phrases like his “hydrogen jukebox” from “Howl” “a surrealising aftertaste” [“un arrière-goût surréalisant”] (Lebel, “Dadaistes, surréalistes, clochards célestes et compagnie,” 2016). “La préface de Jouffroy, je l’avais beaucoup lue. Elle m’a fortement influencé, pour lire Ginsberg, même s’il tire trop les ‘Beats,’ vers le Surréalisme, comme une transposition aux USA du surréalisme—ce qui n’est pas exact et noie la différence ‘Beat.’” “Ce qui m’a retenu et bouleversé, dans l’anthologie Lebel/Jouffroy de 65, […] c’est la puissance de ce nouveau lyrisme […]. Son mode d’apparition sonore: mélopée exaltée, chant sauvage, raucité, provocation obscène. Et côté écriture, sa crudité politicosexuelle […]—le contraire de la sublimation surréaliste et, en général, de la mièvrerie et du côté pisse-trois-gouttes de la poésie contemporaine. Un… ‘effet de réel,’ en somme (le réel comme ‘ce sur quoi on se cogne.’)” See Georges Bataille, “La ‘vieille taupe’ et le préfixe sur dans les mots surhomme et surréalisme,” in Oeuvres complètes, vol. II. Paris: Gallimard, 1970 (93–109).

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20 “This association of the Beats with Surrealism is problematic insofar as we have seen […] just how much Beat poetry had helped [Prigent] to ‘get out of surrealism […] where he was floundering’” (Gorrillot in Bourseiller and Penot-Lacassagne, 118; my translation). 21 Apart from memoirs and biographies, there have been very few French scholarly contributions to the field, and they remain traditionally centered on the poetics of single authors, such as Victor-Lévy Beaulieu’s Jack Kerouac (1972), Jacques Darras’ Allen Ginsberg: la voix, le souffle (2002) and Clémentine Hougue’s Le Cut-up de William S. Burroughs: Histoire d’une révolution du langage (2014). When they do take a comparative approach, they are generally bound by a theme, so their scope is limited to depictions of Tangier or Mexico analyzed from a postcolonial angle (see Caraës and Fernandez, 2003; Legros Chapuis, 2011). 22 For the history of both terms, see “Beat and Beatnik” (Lawlor, 12–13). 23 For a compelling analysis of the current status of Critical Theory within academia see Patrick Ffrench, “The Fetishization of ‘Theory.’” 24 “Both Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs discovered late in life that making works of art is the way to get money” (White, “The Beats: Pictures of a Legend”). 25 A sign of its importance to him, Ginsberg produced at least a dozen different versions of this caption “ranging from 21 to 695 words in length,” as Oliver Harris notes in his politically focused article on these photographs “Minute Particulars of the Counter-Culture” (26).

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For the most analytical accounts of the long and complex history of Burroughs and Kerouac’s And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, see James Grauerholz’s afterword (185–214); and Joyce Johnson’s biography, The Voice Is All (155–84). According to Grauerholz, Ginsberg’s fictionalization of the Carr-Kammerer story was biographically the most accurate (Hippos, 193). “The Bloodsong” features in Ginsberg, The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice (88–116). Although there has long been confusion in biographical and scholarly accounts as to which version came first, getting the chronology right is therefore crucial for understanding the relation between Hippos and I Wish I Were You. I Wish I Were You, in The Unknown Kerouac (335–419). Unless specified, all further references to I Wish I Were You are to this published version. Kerouac’s rewriting of Hippos into I Wish I Were You was entirely his, although he let stand the name of Burroughs on the title page of his typescript (Jack Kerouac Papers, Berg Collection, New York Public Library, 15.19), a detail not included in The Unknown Kerouac.

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Notes As well as curator Isaac Gewirtz, I would like to thank James Grauerholz, executor of the Burroughs Estate, for assisting in and supporting my archival research in the William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac papers kept in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the NYPL for this chapter. Since the opening of the Kerouac archives in 2006, I Wish I Were You has barely been discussed, let alone analyzed. In fact, most attention has focused on its title (see Chapter 2, note 5). In his early journals, Kerouac refers to Balzac a dozen times and theorizes his writing technique through French naturalism (see Windblown World, 268–69). Burroughs’ cultural references in Hippos are to Briffault’s Europa (124), Duvivier’s Pépé le moko (100), T.S. Eliot (124), The Mills Brothers’ “You Always Hurt the One You Love” (31), Claude Rains’ interpretation of Capitaine Louis Renault (163), Renoir’s La Grande illusion (152), Rimbaud (120, 153) and Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake (84). In the 1960s, Burroughs produced a hundred literary cut-ups, some of which (made from Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Byron, Rimbaud, Perse, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Genet, Salinger, Kerouac and Burgess) have recently been edited by Alex WermerColan and published in the “Lost and Found” series of the Graduate Center of CUNY (see Burroughs, The Travel Agency Is on Fire). Elsewhere in The Third Mind, Burroughs makes very similar claims in “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin”: “cut up Rimbaud and you are in Rimbaud’s place” (31). Strangely, Burroughs never specifically refers to Le Spleen de Paris, Baudelaire’s most vitriolic—and so most Burroughsian—collection of poems. Gregory Corso, “Note for my contribution to the Cut-up System” in Minutes to Go (63). For Oliver Harris’ interpretation of this line, on which I have built, see “Burroughs is a poet too, really.” The refrain “Shift lingual” first appears in Minutes to Go (20). My take on Rimbaud’s preference for the indefinite article here concurs with the analyses of French scholars Daniel Leuwers (“to the reassuring shelters of Reason, Rimbaud substitutes the mirages of an elusive poetic Reason, dazzling and shattered”) and Daniel Huguenin (“Reason of the imagination that abolishes our social sense of time and moves freely in another, poetic, temporality”), both quoted by Pierre Brunel, who concludes: “That Reason can only be a Reason, for it is attached, like antique Genius, to each individual” (Brunel, 223; my translations). Rimbaud’s second letter of May 15, 1871 to Paul Demeny rather than to Georges Izambard, May 13, 1871, two days earlier. The four collages feature in Taking Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs, edited by Patricia Allmer and John Sears. I am grateful to John Sears and Patricia Allmer for confirming the provenance of Rimbaud’s image in Burroughs’ 1964 collage.

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Chapter 2 1 2 3 4

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See Tyler, The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew. “Someday I’ll go to France, to Paris, that’s what… where, like Jean Gabin, you can find a pretty love at the carnival in the night” (Kerouac, Windblown World, 93). Here, Andrew is summarizing the argument developed by Vincendeau and Gauteur in Jean Gabin: anatomie d’un mythe (1993). Typical of the text, in both Hippos and I Wish I Were You, no American films are mentioned. The only one that is not French is a British production from the same era: Korda’s The Four Feathers (1939), in which one of the central characters is coincidentally a “General Burroughs.” Readings of the title in terms of homosexual desire include, for example, Bill Morgan’s case that I Wish I Were You was chosen as a title “in homage to the fact that Kammerer worshipped Carr” (The Typewriter Is Holy, 17). See note 5 above. Characters based on Lucien Carr feature in two other texts by Kerouac: a novel he also completed in 1945, Orpheus Emerged (2002), and the unpublished draft story “Claude.” In that story, Claude sings the words of Baudelaire—tellingly misattributed by Kerouac to Rimbaud—as a fateful nursery rhyme anticipating his crime: “Just before he murdered his frustrated lover […] he had developed the habit of chanting Rimbaud’s words from A Season in Hell: ‘Plonger au fond du gouffre… ciel ou enfer, qu’importe?’” (Berg, 43.14).

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Jack Kerouac Papers, Berg Collection, New York Public Library, 15.2; 43.5. The provenance of Kerouac’s quotation of Céline was established by Douglas Brinkley as “Homage to Emile Zola,” in New Directions in Prose & Poetry, vol. 13, 1951 (Kerouac: Road Novels 1957–1960, 852). Kerouac’s interview with Pierre Nadeau was broadcast by Radio-Canada in 1959 and is available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xePzjd7_JGE. Jack Kerouac Papers, 15.2. I am quoting from the John H.P. Marks translation, which was published by Chatto & Windus in 1934, and that Kerouac must have used since his journal entry reproduces it word for word, up to the translator’s choice to italicize the word “have” that isn’t stressed in Céline’s original text. Jack Kerouac Papers, 15.2. Jack Kerouac Papers, 15.2.

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Notes To read Sur le chemin and for more information about the history of its composition, see La Vie est d’hommage (2016). “Have Champa Gavin wake up in middle of night, much like the Elizur-preacher, wanting ‘out’ from his sins which he cannot name—and talks (confesses he feels like a slob). And there is love.” The odd name Kerouac first gave his protagonist (Champa Gavin) might even have come from Journey to the End of the Night, for the hotel where Céline’s narrator lives in New York is the “Gay Calvin” (in French, the Laugh Calvin). While not staking a claim as such, Hrebeniak cites D.H. Lawrence’s emphatic use of “IT” from “The Spirit of Place” (Hrebeniak, 35). Jean-Pierre Richard’s brilliant phenomenological reading of Céline’s writing in Nausée de Céline establishes a clear relation between Céline’s works and Sartre’s. “Si Dieu n’existait pas, tout serait permis. C’est là le point de depart de l’existentialisme.’ (Sartre, L’Existentialisme est un humanisme, 39). Although attributed to Hassan i Sabbah, from 1960 onwards Burroughs famously recited the very similar phrasing “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.” Sartre pushes his imprudent use of Dostoevsky even further in Qu’est-ce que la littérature, where his quip is no longer expressed through the conditional but the present mode: “The famous ‘If God doesn’t exist, everything is permitted, of Dostoevsky” (165; my translation of “Le fameux ‘Si Dieu n’existe pas’ de Dostoïevski”). “It always seemed to me that Robinson of Voyage was being pursued by Shroudy Javert, and that Javert was Céline himself, and Céline himself was Robinson, and therefore Voyage is the story of the Shroud of Céline’s self pursuing the Shroud of Céline’s non-self, Robinson.” (“On Céline,” in Good Blonde & Others, 91). “Delirium,” the term Céline favored to refer to his own writing. For a study of Céline’s own use of “things,” see my article “Artaud et Céline: les choses à leur paroxysme.” For a detailed analysis of Kerouac’s revisions of the textual presence of Ishmael and Ahab, see Hunt, The Textuality of Soulwork (85–89). The shift in titles is itself quite telling. Hrebeniak makes insightful use of Kerouac’s two texts but fails, significantly, to distinguish between them in terms of how, through their own form, each dissolves the “classical dialectic of form and content” in very different ways. To argue that they both oppose “predictive rationalism” may be true on the level of content, but not on the level of form, since the text presented as a numbered list is clearly not one “charged with […] intuition.” (Hrebeniak, 151) For an objective account of Céline’s collaborations, and to read his anti-Semitic pamphlets, see François Gibault’s Céline (1985). “Si Céline a pu soutenir les thèses socialistes des nazis, c’est qu’il était payé.”

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22 See Cahiers de L’Herne, “Céline,” 36–38. The expression “agité du bocal” could be translated as “nutcase.” 23 For criticism of Kerouac on gender or racial grounds, see Corber and Malcolm, and for defenses of Kerouac’s appropriations of black culture, see Abel (245) and Melehy (90). 24 See, for example, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (144, 305). 25 Such is the power of literary genealogies that Kerouac’s commentary “On Céline” accomplishes what Sal and Dean only dream of in On the Road: it transcends time. For in this text, it’s “really” the Proustian lesson that Kerouac has acquired a decade earlier—it’s Proust from a century earlier—that comes to defend Céline.

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Burroughs occasionally refers in his letters to keeping notebooks during the 1950s, but only the mid-1950s material published as “Lee’s Journals” and “Ginsberg Notes” in the Interzone collection suggests any extended or self-conscious use of a writer’s diary. There is also a passing reference to Gide in Burroughs’ Last Words (21). See Harris, William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination (34-35 and 71-72). So much so, in fact, that we may well wonder whether the specific source of Kerouac’s quotations here, Gide’s The Counterfeiters, was not also the source of the most telling instance of “the Burroughs thought” expressed in Hippos: “I’m the later bourgeois Rimbaud” (120). For, as Kerouac and Burroughs knew, one of the most provocative moments in Gide’s antinovel is the claim that “writing prevents one from living,” an idea that prompts Bernard to declare: “That’s what I admire most of all in Rimbaud—to have preferred life” (240). The quips are certainly unusual and similar, suggesting that the equation Kerouac makes between Burroughs and Gide took a step further Burroughs’ own acts of identification with Rimbaud. Biographical accounts also record that Burroughs and Kerouac acted out scenes from The Counterfeiters, and these are supplemented by photographic evidence, such as the image of Kerouac “imitating a character from André Gide’s novel The Counterfeiters” reproduced in Bill Morgan’s The Typewriter Is Holy (between pages 200 and 201), and an entire series of unpublished images held in the Ted Morgan William Burroughs Papers at Arizona State University entitled “Acted Out Scenes from André Gide’s The Counterfeiters on Morningside Heights” (Ted Morgan Papers, 1983–1988). Clearly, much could be said about Burroughs’ naming of Baudelaire, especially since he appears in lieu of the more predictable Rimbaud. However, the reference to Anatole France is the most surprising, since he was a pillar of the French literary establishment. See note 11 on France in this section.

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In keeping with the Anglocentric frame of reference typical of Burroughs criticism, Jamie Russell’s Queer Burroughs also briefly references Baldwin and Vidal. 7 Kerouac notably introduces an “evil Gidean” character who recounts what sounds like the “Slave Trader” routine from Queer, which makes Burroughs a “fabricator of Gidean romances,” to recall The Town and the City (see Queer, xvii). 8 Scott Branson, on the other hand, has convincingly argued that “Gide goes further than Wilde in his dismantling of identity precisely in his commitment to the first person narration which blurs the boundaries of life and art” (1236). 9 Burroughs had referred to Lee’s wife a few times in Junky, but in Queer she has a curious absence-presence that seems to have gone unnoticed in criticism. Lee tells Moor about an argument with a Mexican doctor, which he cuts short: “Besides, I had to go home to my wife in any case. So he says, ‘You don’t have any wife, you are just as queer as I am’” (Queer, 4). 10 As argued in Chapter 2, the difference is precisely what prompted Kerouac to restructure Hippos, the text he coauthored with Burroughs, by using the painting Cache-cache and the film Port of Shadows as mise-en-abîmes for I Wish I Were You. 11 Burroughs also seems to make a connection between Anatole France and Cocteau via the surrealists; his allusion to the “corpse” references the notorious attack by Breton, Aragon and others on France at his funeral, a scandal Burroughs mentioned several times in letters and interviews (see Morgan, Rub Out the Words, 132; or Lotringer, 749). For the significant return of Anatole France’s corpse in an unpublished cut-up Burroughs created in 1959, see Chapter 8.

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Ginsberg would emphasize the status of Whitman (“a mountain too vast to be seen”) by repeating the line from his letter to Trilling in the appendix of the variorum edition of his poem in 1986 (Howl, 176), and he would still use the phrase four decades later, as in the title of his 1992 essay, “Whitman’s Influence: A Mountain Too Vast to Be Seen” (reprinted in Deliberate Prose). Raskin likewise describes the variorum edition as “providing information about the biographical and autobiographical roots of ‘Howl’” (Raskin, 169). According to “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!” Setting out to redress the lack of “detailed explication” of “At Apollinaire’s Grave,” Swope insists on the importance to Ginsberg of actually being in Paris (“he had read Apollinaire some years before, but, again, living in Paris offered him a more direct experience of these writers”) and stresses its legacy (referring to the “lineage he would continue to display in his work well after his time abroad”) (Swope, 193, 203).

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While plausible, the argument conceals the vital impact of Ginsberg’s engagement with French poetry on his pre-Paris work, including “Howl.” A comparison of his letters to Richard Eberhart in 1956 and John Hollander in 1958, discussed in the following chapter, also shows no shift of balance in Ginsberg’s references between American and French poets: the stress on French poetry appears just as strongly before as after Ginsberg’s years in Paris. 5 In Journals: Mid-Fifties (1995), a draft of the poem’s Part I is immediately followed by “Images of Junk,” a text in which Apollinaire is invoked three times and whose refrain abuses alliterations linked to “At Apollinaire’s Grave”: “Green walks on graveyard/Grass lives by graves”; “green” and “grass” suggest marijuana (Ginsberg, Journals: Mid-Fifties, 405). 6 Roger Shattuck translates the French lines: “the time is here/In which the future can be known/Without death as a consequence” (Selected Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire, 147). 7 In “Les collines,” “jeunesse” appears five times and “adieu” four, usually in combination. 8 Ginsberg clearly indicates the relevance of what he calls Apollinaire’s “jump cut” in the composition of “Howl,” going so far as to point the reader to a specific passage of “Zone”: “from ‘Coblenz at the Hotel of the Giant’ to ‘Rome sitting under a Japanese tree’: montage of time & space […]” (Ginsberg, Howl, 175). 9 Brian Jackson’s article is one of the few exceptions that prove the rule. Focusing on Ginsberg, Artaud, Cézanne, Pound and Williams, it begins by noting that literary history has not taken seriously Ginsberg’s claims for his poetry “as a continuation of the French avant-garde, especially the Surrealism of Antonin Artaud” (Jackson, 298). While this conflation of Artaud with surrealism is highly problematic—given the level of dispute between Artaud and Breton and the looseness with which Anglophone criticism typically uses the term “Surrealism”—Jackson is surely right to see the neglect of Ginsberg’s French avant-garde affiliations as the result of his reception as a “neo-romantic” Beat. In Howl for Now: A Celebration of Allen Ginsberg’s Epic Protest Poem (Ed. Simon Warner), only Rodosthenous makes any sustained reference to a French source, although there is no textual analysis in his comparison of Ginsberg with Rimbaud. Even Raskin makes no mention of Apollinaire or St.-John Perse. 10 See Jason Arthur’s “Allen Ginsberg’s Biographical Gestures,” which studies his pre“Howl” career to reveal how Ginsberg “always exercised an editor’s control of the public face of his private life” (Arthur, 227). 11 Critics have taken up Ginsberg’s stated indebtedness to Cézanne, at the expense of recognizing the crucial role of Apollinaire in the genesis of his aesthetics, I would argue, because the parallels between such different media as painting and poetry

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Notes have tended to inhibit further analysis. Jackson’s article is again the exception that proves a rule. Solomon does refer to non-French writers (Miller and Kafka), but they are strictly passing references. See Miles, Ginsberg (117). On disputes about the tape recording, see Pawlik. In her well-documented article on Artaud and Ginsberg, she logically deduces that it “is evident” Ginsberg had access to The Theatre and Its Double in Richards’ translation before its publication in 1958, because he quotes from it “in a journal entry dated April 1956” (Pawlik, 11). However, this is more plausibly an editorial confusion in Ginsberg’s published journals, since the citation is actually demarcated, by an inserted row of asterisks, from the journal entry in question (see Ginsberg’s Journals, Early Fifties, Early Sixties, 97). Others have claimed to find precise traces of Artaud in “Howl,” including Steve Finbow who suggests the poem’s opening lines echo Artaud’s “Fragmentations”: “I saw Yvonne’s swollen sac, I saw the sac puffed up with the dregs of Yvonne’s blistered soul […]” (Finbow, 53). Nin noted that Ginsberg’s performance “reached a kind of American surrealism,” a point she underlined by concluding her diary entry: “I left thinking it was like a new surrealism born of the Brooklyn gutter and supermarkets” (Nin, 64–65). Solomon dismisses Ginsberg as hopelessly naïve for accepting as fact the “apocryphal history” he had told him, a history “compounded partly of truth, but for the most part raving self-justification, crypto-Bohemian boasting a la Rimbaud” (Ginsberg, Howl, 131); but is it not Solomon who appears naïve for thinking that Ginsberg’s poem offers historical “facts”? For manuscript facsimile and transcription, see Ginsberg, Howl (22–23).

Chapter 6 1 2 3

Yu also refers to the catalog format in “Howl” in unambiguous terms: “Ginsberg’s model is, of course, Whitman” (Yu, 23). See, for example, Raskin (168) or Gelpi (99). The context of Ginsberg’s letter is also important. Firstly, because it followed his return to America after his year in Paris, and secondly, because his relationship with Hollander had been marked by embarrassments about his identity as a poet, going back at least to 1949 when he was concerned that Mark Van Doren thought he took himself “too seriously”: “he had an exaggerated idea of my self hood based on what recently he had been told by Hollander and others about my fancying myself as Rimbaud” (Ginsberg, Letters, 37).

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Explaining to Hollander the various formal “tasks” he had set himself in writing the poem that reviewers had missed (Ginsberg, Letters, 206–8), Ginsberg was asserting how seriously he had prepared for “Howl,” which his journals bear out: a 1955 entry details a five-year plan for mastering poetic techniques (Journals: Mid-Fifties, 128). See Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (1973). There is considerable debate over what constitutes an epic in modern poetry. One of the features Ginsberg and Perse have in common, and that goes against defining their work as “epic,” is the use of an undercutting humor. See Erkkila’s classic Walt Whitman Among the French: Poet and Myth (1980). Ginsberg’s citations of Canto III from Anabase for his poem “The Character of the Happy Warrior,” which I go on to discuss, make especially clear the appeal of Perse’s conception of the poet for Ginsberg. Readings of Vents as a response to the war began early, including Joseph McMahon’s “A question of man,” in Commonweal, while the aim to reveal the historical references behind Perse’s most obscure verses is the strategy of such studies as Camelin and Gardes Tamine’s Saint-John Perse sans masque. Reed Whittemore, “Review of Indian Journals,” The New Republic (July 23, 1970), in Shinder (142). The line is from an early draft of “America,” composed in fall 1955. Interestingly, in 1958, Rexroth’s “The Influence of French Poetry on American” was dismissive of Whitman’s French genealogy, insisting that “for all the doctors of comparative literature try to do with him, [he] is an autochthone, a real original” (Rexroth, 146). In his “Saint-John Perse,” Poetry 79.1 (October 1951), 31–35, reprinted in the bilingual anthology Modern French Poets, Fowlie approached Perse in philosophical and technical terms that would surely have appealed to Ginsberg, finding Perse “martyred by his visions” and claiming he had “perfected a broad stanza containing its own beat and pulsion […] His speech is breath and concrete words” (Fowlie, 34). This is the only allusion to Perse in Ginsberg’s selected essays covering forty years, as if he could only invoke Perse at one remove, by association with Burroughs. Unpublished caption described as a “Working Proof,” courtesy of Peter Hale, Manager of the Allen Ginsberg Trust. Depicting Ginsberg’s introduction to Burroughs’ library, Miles comments: “Burroughs particularly liked the T.S. Eliot translation of St. John Perse’s Anabase which had a dry, St Louis edge to it that he could appreciate” (Miles, Ginsberg, 54). The word “maelstrom” appears in the opening stanza of “The Last Voyage.” For a more detailed case, see Pollin’s article “Edgar Allan Poe as a major influence upon Allen Ginsberg.”

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18 The juxtaposition of events in Miles’ narrative implies that Ginsberg’s discovery of Burroughs’ library came after his writing “The Last Voyage,” but the evidence suggests a different chronology. Since the poem was not in Ginsberg’s list of completed works for January–February 1945, and was most likely written between March and May 1945, then it is almost certain he had already paid the visit to Burroughs, which in most accounts took place between late 1944 and early 1945. 19 Ginsberg’s embarrassment at having written Trilling what was in effect “an exegesis of Bill’s Spenglerian and anthropological ideas” (Kerouac and Ginsberg, Letters, 27) recalls the situation of Kerouac cowriting with Burroughs And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, which he needed to rewrite in order to find his own voice (see Chapter 2). 20 Tellingly, while there are ten direct references to St.-John Perse in The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice, his name is not listed in the index. Raskin, one of the only critics to use the book for a brief analysis of “The Character of the Happy Warrior,” notes the appeal of Eliot and Auden for their “anti-romantic devices,” but makes no mention of Perse either (Raskin, 76). 21 St.-John Perse’s own poetics upheld such “flashes”: “…And everything is recognition for us” (Winds, 201).

Chapter 7 1

2 3 4

5 6

7

See Allen Ginsberg’s letter to Burroughs, October 29, 1960 (William Burroughs Papers, Berg Collection, New York Public Library, 82.2.20). We can only wonder whether Grove would have printed the novels of Burroughs and Genet backto-back, like the 1953 Ace Double Book edition of Junkie (printed with Narcotic Agent by Maurice Helbrandt), “69’d so to speak,” as Ginsberg put it (Burroughs, “Appendix 7,” Junky, 157). On Ginsberg’s translations of Genet, see Chapter 5. Murphy cites the chapter title as an example of Burroughs’ “hommages to other writers” (Murphy, Wising Up the Marks, 159; Murphy’s emphasis). Describing Genet’s book as “fascinating,” in an interview Burroughs affirms it as a mirror of his own: “It’s very much like what I’ve been doing lately—here, in The Book of Dreams [i.e. My Education]” (Lotringer, 774). William Burroughs Papers, 16.76; 7.42. “Anybody can be Rimbaud if he will cut up Rimbaud’s words and learn Rimbaud language” (The Third Mind, 71; my emphasis). For an analysis of Burroughs’ cutups of Rimbaud, see Chapter 1. Before appearing in the Introduction to Queer in 1985, Burroughs used the phrase “palpable as a haze” twice in Cities of the Red Night (77, 168).

Notes 8 9

10

11 12

13 14

15

16 17

231

See section entitled “Cocteau: a double take” in Chapter 4. See “Roosevelt after Inauguration” in The Yage Letters (45) and Last Words, where Burroughs describes it as one of his “two most outrageous images” (141). Recognizing its significance, Ginsberg alludes to the skit in his 1952 “Appreciation” for Junky (146). Although Burroughs is an astute reader of Genet and rightly discerns in his writing his main ethical concerns, by implying that Genet is deeply concerned by other creatures than himself here, he seems to be making the common mistake of associating his philosophical statements in The Thief ’s Journal and his late political statements with a genuine empathy and a loyal commitment for the people he wrote about—Black Panthers, Red Army Faction, Palestinians—that Genet might have never had (in any case, Genet made a point of refuting such interpretations; see note 23 in this section). I am grateful to Oliver Harris for sharing his knowledge of the manuscript history, which has not been documented since publication of the Interzone collection. For a detailed comparative study of how Genet’s concept of “betrayal” and Artaud’s concept of “cruelty” subvert the language of ethics, see Chapter 3 of my PhD thesis “Tenir l’évanouissement. Entre maîtrise intégrale et abandon anéantissant: Jean Genet et Antonin Artaud.” Available online: https://papyrus.bib.umontreal.ca/xmlui/ handle/1866/7080 (Accessed May 2, 2012). A clandestine edition of Genet’s Pompes funèbres was published in 1947, but Burroughs getting hold of one of its 470 copies is highly unlikely. Like any well-read Frenchman, Genet would have known Poe’s work, but there are also numerous specific echoes of “The Black Cat” in Funeral Rites, from the hanging of the cat to Riton’s speculation that it is really the devil in disguise. Burroughs didn’t dedicate Junky to the death of Joan, but in his belated “Introduction” to Queer (his second novel, which he had initially conceived as a single book with Junky) he couldn’t have associated it with her death more strongly: “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would have 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”. (Burroughs, Queer, 134). Jean Decarnin: “the death of Jean D., which is the ostensible reason for this book” (Genet, Funeral Rites, 11). While it does not offer evidence that Burroughs read Funeral Rites, it is fascinating to note that in his pre-publication copy of Edmund White’s 800-page biography of Genet, Burroughs made significant annotations on pages focusing on the novel. On consecutive pages, indeed, his marginal comments insistently identify his work with Genet’s: below a quotation in which Genet compares Funeral Rites to fireworks, Burroughs evokes the fireworks at the end of his own short story “Where he was going,” and then, above Genet’s claim that “the characters in my books all

232

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

Notes resemble each other,” Burroughs adds, simply but emphatically “mine too” (White, Genet, 324–25). My gratitude to Jim Pennington for generously sharing facsimiles of Burroughs’ annotated copy of the book. The details are a little different—the cat is described as white not gray—but the slapping and the location in Mexico City make it clear that Burroughs is thinking of the same incident. The “slapping” is also echoed within Junky to connect the cat to Lee’s wife, a detail that would further support Anspaugh’s reading. Burroughs’ manuscript was even more explicit about “tormenting and terrorizing cats” (Burroughs, Junky, 164). David Savran argues the main source of critical “dismay” with Burroughs continues to be “the absence of clear signals of meaning in a body of fiction that, at first glance, is so flamboyantly misogynist, racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic” (Savran, 85). “Genet aurait été un adorateur d’Hitler, adhérant ‘jusqu’à l’égarement’ au modèle nazi. Lisons dans Pompes funèbres l’évocation de son idole: ‘Se pouvait-il qu’une simple moustache composée de poils raides, noirs et peut-être teints par L’Oréal, possédât le sens de: cruauté, despotisme, violence, rage, écume, aspics, strangulation, mort, marches forcées, parades, prison, poignards?’ ” Likewise, the cat “spraying piss” onto Lee becomes the “shot [of junk that] sprayed” over him; “sweat was running down my face” becomes “sweat ran down my nose” (Burroughs, Junky, 102, 103, 112). “La mort du chat aura confronté Riton à sa solitude, mais une solitude qui relève du sentiment de la présence d’une altérité logée, nichée à l’intérieur de soi. Ayant fait son choix, ayant accompli l’irrémédiable, Riton est désormais ‘seul avec sa solitude au milieu de lui.’ Se libérant d’une obéissance irréfléchie et automatique aux lois sociales, le milicien emprunte le chemin qui le mène, par la destruction, à la solitude de ceux qui n’acceptent plus aucune contrainte sociale.” “The day the Palestinians become a nation like other nations, I won’t be there anymore. […] I think that’s where I’m going to betray them. They don’t know it” (Genet, The Declared Enemy, 244). “To become monstruous, this is perhaps the wish of the man who gave birth to humanism” (Laroche, The Last Genet, 295).

Chapter 8 1

Allen Ginsberg to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, October 1961 (Lawrence Ferlinghetti Papers, University of California, Berkeley). In a transcription or printing error, this line is missing from the version published in Morgan’s edition of Ginsberg’s letter.

Notes 2

233

Here, I am reworking Cocteau in Opium: “Radiguet said ‘The public asks us if the author is serious. I ask the public if they are serious’” (Cocteau, Entretiens sur le cinématographe, 69). 3 Although Kerouac’s autobiographical fiction might seem entirely self-centered, in key works like On the Road and Visions of Cody, it is very precisely centered beyond the self by the narrating protoganist/writer’s focus on Dean or Cody. Ginsberg’s critique of anthropocentrism is apparent in works ranging from “Sunflower Sutra” in the 1950s to “The Changes” or “Wales Visitation” in the 1960s. Taking Lyotard’s term “the inhuman” for Burroughs indeed resumes the shift from postmodernism to posthumanism in Lyotard’s own progression from La Condition postmoderne (1979) to L’Inhumain (1988). 4 In different ways, Skerl (1985) and Lydenberg (1987) eagerly embraced a postmodern Burroughs. Or to be more exact, Skerl (using the terms “pop-art novel” and “avant-garde”) and Lydenberg (cross-referencing post-structuralism and deconstruction) actually anticipated the postmodern turn, since their studies came before the label had become fully established. Both were, however, very much in step with it, in large part as a way to promote the case for Burroughs’ relevance and importance. For a fuller discussion see Harris, “William Burroughs: Beating Postmodernism,” in Belletto (123–36). 5 See Olivier Gallet’s essay “Écrire une monographie ‘médicale et poétique à la fois’ (Baudelaire, Michaux)” in Grossman, Halpern and Vilar, 149–59. 6 “GALLERY DESTROYED ON EVE OF VERNISSAGE,” William Burroughs Papers, Berg Collection, 7.49 (1959) © The Estate of William S. Burroughs, courtesy of the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC. The rough two-page typescript discussed here is part of a larger, sevenpage folder that shows Burroughs creating further cut-up variations with many annotations, each making constant use of Michaux, Genet and Breton’s names. 7 “Je crache sur ma vie. Je m’en désolidarise. Qui ne fait mieux que sa vie?” 8 Michaux, Oeuvres complètes, 1129. 9 It is surely not a coincidence that in specifying “Near East,” Burroughs echoes the phrasing that introduced the Mugwump in Junky, whose “place of origin is the Near East, probably Egypt” (Burroughs, Junky, 3). We are reminded of Deleuze’s insistence that “language is always the language of bodies,” saying of the hysteric: “He rediscovers a primary language, the true language of symbols and hieroglyphs. His body is an Egypt” (Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 92, 93). 10 For the same reason, Sean Bolton’s analysis of the Burroughsian subject in “From Self-Alienation to Posthumanism,” while theoretically cogent, remains formally too abstract. 11 When directly asked in a 1965 interview “Have you read Henri Michaux’s book on mescaline?,” Burroughs’ reply was notably critical and evasive: “His idea was to go into his room and close the door and hold in the experiences” (Lotringer, 62, 63).

234

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12 In the introduction added to later editions of Miserable Miracle, Octavio Paz not only uses expressions to describe Michaux’s book that might fit Burroughs’ own, but might be using Burroughs’ own phrasing: “Destruction of language. Mescaline reigns through silence—and it screams, screams without a mouth […] Heterogeneity, a continuous eruption of fragments, particles, pieces […] Gangrenous space, cancerous time” (Paz in Michaux, Miserable Miracle, ix–x). 13 Although she too slights the significance of the “Ten Episodes,” for the closest attention to Naked Lunch’s variant forms and potential visual content, see Joanna Harrop’s 2011 PhD thesis “The Yagé Aesthetic of William Burroughs.” 14 Lynn Snowden’s 1992 interview with Burroughs and Cronenberg features this amusing exchange: “‘William, are you interested in insects?’ says Cronenberg […] ‘Not entirely,’ he finally says. After a few minutes of completely addled discussion, Burroughs exclaims, ‘Oh, insects! I thought you said incest’ ” (Hibbard, 212). 15 “Cette pensée pulsionnelle où humain et non humain se mêlent, où l’homme se fond dans la masse du fourmillement des signes, est au coeur même de sa poétique.” 16 Michaux’s term “la casse” (La vie dans les plis, 152) suggests not merely a “crash” but an ending of life that leaves only its material scrap value. 17 Burroughs refers to the cartoon in a January 12, 1984, letter to Ginsberg (Allen Ginsberg Papers, Correspondence, Stanford University, 211.34).

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Index Abel, Marco, 225n23 Allmer, Patricia, 222n16, 222n17 Allsop, Kenneth, 2 American-centric approaches, to the Beat Generation, 9, 11–14, 216–17 to Burroughs, 171, 226n2 to Ginsberg’s “Howl,” 116–18, 126, 131–32, 146–47 to Kerouac, 6 Andrew, Dudley, 51–52, 223n3 Anspaugh, Kelly, 182, 232n18 anti-Semitism and Burroughs, 93, 182–83, 232n19 and Céline, 82–84, 220n20 and Genet, 182–83 and Kerouac, 84 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 3, 15, 24, 131, 219n5 and Cocteau, 109 and Ginsberg, 115–16, 118, 139–40, 215–17 and Ginsberg’s aesthetics in “Howl,” 128–30, 137, 144, 146–47, 167, 227n8, 227n9, 227n11 Ginsberg’s affiliation to merely namechecked, 126 Ginsberg’s Anglicisation of his name, 124, 128 Ginsberg’s homage to in “At Apollinaire’s Grave,” 19, 118–26, 128, 227n5 Ginsberg’s translation of “Les collines,” 7, 121–22, 137 Apollinaire, Guillaume, works of “The Hills” [“Les collines”], 120–23, 125, 137, 227n7 Zone, 119, 128–29, 227n8 appropriation, 9, 11, 13–16, 215–18 Beat writers and, 215 of Dada and Surrealism by the Beats, 11

defined against “influence,” 14 and homage, 19–21, 36–37, 40, 118, 167, 172, 216 and misappropriations, 14 of the posture of another author, 5 appropriation and Burroughs of Artaud, 187 of Cocteau, 106–13 cut-up methods as procedure of, 172–74 of Gide, 99–100 of Perse, 179 of Poe, 182 of Rimbaud, 34 appropriation and Ginsberg of Apollinaire, 7, 119–25 of Genet, 138–39 of Rimbaud, 19, 140 appropriation and Kerouac of Céline, 6, 16, 57–62, 66–70, 73, 84–85, 93 of French literature, 7 of Gide, 59–60 of Gide and Céline compared to Burroughs’, 59, 94 of Hugo, 73 of non-white cultures, 83 of poetic realist film, 48–53, 55, 57 of Proust, 6, 15, 85–92 of Sartre, 58, 73–74 Aragon, Louis, 226n11 Artaud, Antonin, 4, 217, 219n5, 227n9 and body without organs, 205 Burroughs, compared to, 180–81, 187–89, 192, 213 concept of cruelty, 5, 132 concept of cruelty compared to Genet’s concept of betrayal, 180–81, 231n12 drugs and, 13 and Ginsberg, 24, 116, 126

248

Index

Ginsberg’s affiliation to merely name-checked, 126 in Ginsberg’s “At Apollinaire’s Grave,” 120 in Ginsberg’s “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!,” 118, 121, 133 Ginsberg’s fear of, 187, 192 and Ginsberg’s “Howl,” 5, 12, 128, 130–35, 167, 228n14 Ginsberg’s identification with, 5, 133 Ginsberg’s naming of in draft of “Howl,” 134–35, 137 Michael McClure’s fascination for, 131, 134 and the posthuman, 16, 187–88, 217 and the Six Gallery reading, 131 and Solomon, 130–33 transformative power of, 132–34, 187–88 Artaud, Antonin, works of: “To Have Done with the Judgment of God” [“Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu”], 12, 131–32, 134 The Theatre and Its Double [Le Théâtre et son double], 131–33, 181, 228n14 Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society [Van Gogh le suicidé de la société], 118, 133–35 in variorum edition of Ginsberg’s “Howl,” 135 Auden, W.H., 98–99, 163–65, 230n20 Auriol, Vincent, 169 Ball, Gordon, 121 Balzac, Honoré de, 6, 30, 64, 71, 76, 79, 222n6 Barrault, Jean-Louis, 130 Barthes, Roland, 52 Bataille, Georges, 13, 220n19 Baudelaire, Charles, 130 aesthetic goals of inherited by Burroughs via Rimbaud, 36 and Burroughs, 222n10 in Burroughs’ 1940s library, 1, 106 Burroughs’ naming of in Junky, 2, 99–100, 225n5 and drugs, 13

Ginsberg’s evocation of, 106, 144 Ginsberg’s “The Last Voyage” marked by, 162 and Kerouac, 8, 223n7 Baudelaire, Charles, works of: “Correspondances,” 36 Le Spleen de Paris, 36, 222n10 Beard, Chris, 202 Beat Generation, Francophilia and formation of, 3 and French literature, 1–17 French reception of, 12–13 and national identity, 5–6, 9–11, 23, 34 and the “New Vision,” 31, 117, 165 and transnationalism, 6, 10–14, 22 Beat Hotel, 1, 4, 17–19, 192 Beaulieu, Victor-Lévy, 220n9, 221n21 Beckett, Samuel, 10 Burroughs distancing himself from, 189–90 Bergson, Henri, 81 biography, 4, 22, 24, 32, 95, 100, 110, 136, 141, 143, 158, 166, 169–71, 175, 182 and Beat literature, 11, 26, 215 and the Beats’ French connection, 11, 33 Burroughs’ attitude toward, 33, 41, 187 Burroughs and Genet linked by, 169 Burroughs and Michaux linked by, 187, 192–95 Ginsberg and Perse separated by, 151, 166 Ginsberg’s attitude toward, 129–30, 133–35, 143, 151, 154–55 and Miles as biographer of Ginsberg, 168 and readings of Burroughs and Kerouac’s Hippos, 10–11, 25–26 and readings of Ginsberg’s poetry, 116, 118–20, 127, 129, 226n2 and readings of Kerouac’s I Wish I Were You, 53–54 and readings of Kerouac’s work, 83 Blake, William, Ginsberg and, 144 Ginsberg’s naming of in “Howl,” 117, 126, 167 Ginsberg’s vision of, 117, 167–68 Kerouac and, 76

Index Blok, Alexander, 121 Bloom, Harold, 148, 229n5 Bockris, Victor, 174 Bolton, Sean, 233n10 Bosquet, Alain, 150 Bourseiller, Christophe, 13, 219n4 Bowles, Paul, 98–99, 102, 173 The Sheltering Sky, 102 Braidotti, Rosi, 16, 188 Branson, Scott, 226n8 Breton, André, 6, 11–12, 120, 193, 219n5, 226n11, 227n9, 233n6 Breu, Chris, 204 Briffault, Robert, 30–31, 222n7 Brinkley, Douglas, 63, 223n2 Brunel, Pierre, 222n14 Buddha, Ginsberg’s naming of in draft of “Howl,” 135 Burgess, Anthony, 222n8 Burroughs, Joan Vollmer, shooting of, 96, 105, 231n15 Burroughs’ evocation of through Cocteau’s Orpheus [Orphée], 110–11 Burroughs’ evocation of through Genet’s Prisoner of Love [Un Captif amoureux], 175 Burroughs’ evocation of through Gide’s The Immoralist [L’Immoraliste], 106 Burroughs, William S., literary relationships with: Baudelaire, 1–2, 36, 99–100, 106, 225n5, 222n10 Céline, 8, 59, 80, 93–95, 216 Cocteau, 24, 43, 95–96, 106–13, 175, 193, 202, 215, 226n11 Genet, 2, 7, 15, 24, 95–96, 169–86, 188, 193–94, 230n1, 230n4, 231n10, 231n13, 231n14, 231n17 Gide, 22–24, 59, 95–108, 110, 175, 193, 225n2, 225n4, 226n7 Perse, 21, 157–58, 160, 162–63, 172, 179–80, 209, 222n8 Proust, 85, 93, 100, 189–90 Rimbaud, 2, 7–8, 19–20, 24, 32–42, 157–58, 163, 171–74, 179, 216–17, 225n4, 230n6

249

Burroughs, William S., 1–5, 8–10, 17, 19, 43, 45, 48, 72 and addiction, 96, 99, 104, 106, 201, 204 as alien, 33, 102, 178, 212 anti-Semitism, accusations of, compared to Genet’s, 182–83, 232n19 Artaud, appropriation of, 187 and Beckett, 189–90 and the body, 104–05, 188, 198, 202, 205, 213 and cats, 181–84 and Céline, 94–95 Célinean quality of satire, 93–94, 185 Céline, relation with compared to Kerouac’s, 59, 93–94 Cocteau, appropriation of, 108–09 Cocteau’s overlooked importance for, 95 Cocteau referenced in draft of The Soft Machine by, 111–13, 226n11 Cocteau referenced in Queer by, 95, 106–13 cut-ups of, 19–20, 26, 34–42, 83, 111, 113, 172–74, 177, 179, 186, 187–89, 192–94, 210–13, 216–17, 222n8, 222n9 and cut-up methods as a procedure of appropriation, 172–74 cut-ups as literary and anti-literary, 37, 40 and drugs, 13, 106, 192, 206 Eliot cut up by, 172 ethics of, 16, 93–95, 101–02, 105, 177–86, 188, 198, 213, 216 ethics of, compared to Genet’s, 180–81, 183–86, 231n10 and evolution, 201, 204, 209, 212–13 and French language, 2, 7, 38–39 French literary genealogy of, 2, 59 gay literary canon of, 100–01, 104 Genet, compared to, 2 Genet, admiration for, 171–72 Genet, ambivalence toward, 15, 33, 175–78, 186 Genet in Chicago with, 171 Genet, cut-ups of, 172–74, 222n8, 233n6

250

Index

Genet’s Funeral Rights, compared with Junky, 181–83 Genet, identification with, 169–70, 173–74 Genet, paired with Perse by, 179 Genet, posthumanist competition with, 177–78 Genet’s Prisoner of Love discussed in My Education by, 172, 175–86 Genet in Queer, 170 and Genet, shared publishers, 170–71 Genet’s The Thief ’s Journal in early drafts of Naked Lunch, 15, 178, 180 Genet’s writing, knowledge of, 169–71, 231n13 and Gide, compared to, 22, 24, 96–98, 102 and Gide’s The Counterfeiters, 24, 99 and Gide’s overlooked importance for, 95, 101 Gide referenced in Junky and Queer by, 95, 102–08 Gide, relation with compared to Kerouac’s, 59 Gidean pilgrimage of to North Africa, 98 Gidean quality of Queer, 102–08 Ginsberg’s comparison of to Perse and Rimbaud, 157–58 Ginsberg’s dedication of “The Character of the Happy Warrior” to, 163 and Ginsberg’s engagement with Perse, 160, 163 Ginsberg’s naming of in draft of “Howl,” 135 Hippos, co-writing of with Kerouac, 10, 19, 25–30, 50–51, 61, 87, 92 and Hippos’ title, 25, 28, 51 Ginsberg’s photographs of, 20–23, 158 Gysin, as source for Burroughs’ experimental writing, 207 and homosexuality, 23, 96–110, 172–73 humor of, compared to Céline’s, 93–94 humor of, compared to Michaux’s, 213 “insect writing” of, 192, 205, 212–13 as Kerouac’s master, 97 Kerouac’s portrait of in Doctor Sax, 102

and language, 38–39, 212 library of in the 1940s, 1, 42, 106, 163, 219n1, 229n16, 230n18 literature, approach to in contrast to Kerouac’s, 10, 25, 28–30, 42–43 literature’s future for, 33, 36, 192, 213 Michaux in cut-up text by, 193–95, 233n6 Michaux’s verbal-visual work, compared to, 188–213, 234n12 Mugwumps of compared to Michaux’s Meidosems, 191, 195–200, 202–04 and Naked Lunch, 207–12 and the “New Vision,” 117 in Paris, 11–12, 19, 192 and Perse’s Anabasis, 21, 158, 160, 163 Perse cut up by, 172, 179 photomontages of, 35, 40–42 Poe used by in Queer, compared to Genet’s use in Funeral Rights, 181–83 on politics of literature, 83 and posthumanism, 15–16, 94, 178–80, 183, 188, 191, 204, 206, 212, 217, 233n3, 233n10 and postmodernism, 190 and Proust, 189–90 and rarity of naming literary sources, 95 representation, writing beyond, 204–10 Rimbaud, cut-ups of, 19–20, 34–42, 172–74, 179 Rimbaud, approach to in Hippos compared to Kerouac’s, 10, 19, 43 Rimbaud, ironic identification with, in Hippos, 32–34, 42, 225n4 satire of, 34, 93–94, 100, 104, 177, 198 and shooting of Joan Burroughs mediated by literary allusions, 96, 106, 110–11, 175, 182, 193–94, 232n18 (see also under Burroughs, Joan Vollmer) and Spengler, 163 on Surrealism, 12, 194 and transnationalism of Naked Lunch, 11–12 and the unknown, 179–80, 186–89, 192, 213 visionary goals of inherited from Baudelaire and Rimbaud, 36

Index Wilde referenced in Junky and Queer by, 99, 100, 102 on writing as soft machine, 37, 191–93, 212 and yagé (ayahuasca), 103, 193, 206, 209, 234n13 Burroughs, William S., works of: The Adding Machine, 189 And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (with Kerouac), 10, 19, 25–37, 42, 43–56, 58, 60, 68, 221n1, 221n3, 221n4, 222n7, 223n4, 225n4, 226n10, 230n19 The Cat Inside, 182–84 Cities of the Red Night, 230n7 The Exterminator, 35–38 Interzone, 225n1 Junky, 2, 20, 93, 95, 98–102, 105–08, 111–12, 169–70, 175, 181–84, 201–02, 204, 226n9, 231n9, 231n15, 232n18, 232n21, 233n9 Last Words, 33, 177, 225n2, 231n9 Minutes to Go (with Beiles, Corso, Gysin), 8, 20, 35–41, 222n11, 222n12, 222n13 My Education, 15, 172, 174–77, 181, 184–85, 230n4 Naked Lunch, 8, 10, 15, 93–94, 105, 109, 157, 171–72, 178, 188, 190–93, 195, 197–98, 200–12, 234n13 Nova Express, 39, 212 The Place of Dead Roads, 179 Queer, 93, 95, 101–13, 169–70, 175, 183–85, 201–02, 215, 226n6, 226n7, 226n9, 230n7, 231n15 “Roosevelt After Inauguration,” 94, 177, 213, 231n9 The Soft Machine, 34–35, 111–13, 187–88, 190–92, 212–13 The Third Mind (with Gysin), 36–38, 177, 222n9 The Ticket That Exploded, 204, 210 “Twilight’s Last Gleaming,” 177 The Western Lands, 213 The Wild Boys, 172 The Yage Letters (with Ginsberg), 94, 185–86, 213, 231n9 Byron, Lord, 222n8

251

Campbell, James, 4, 219n7 Camus, Albert, 35 Capote, Truman, 58 Carjat, Etienne, 40–41 Carné, Marcel, Port of Shadows[Le Quai des brumes], in Burroughs and Kerouac’s Hippos, 30, 31, 43, 48–50, 57 Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night as literary version of for Kerouac, 57 Gabin in, 48, 52 in Kerouac’s I Wish I Were You, 43–45, 48–51, 53, 55–57, 61, 215, 226n10 as mise-en-abîme in I Wish I Were You, 49 (see also poetic realist cinema) Carr, Lucien, 25, 97, 223n7 Cassady, Neal, 75, 86, 116 in Ginsberg’s draft of “Howl,” 135 Catullus, 137, 143 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 3, 6, 15–17, 185, 216–17, 224n16, 224n20 Beat writers’ visit to, 11 Burroughs’ identification with, 94–95 and Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, 8 in Burroughs’ 1940s library, 1 Burroughs’ reading of compared to Kerouac’s, 93–94 Ginsberg’s naming of in draft of “Howl,” 135, 137 Ginsberg’s reading of, 170 Journey to the End of the Night as source for Kerouac’s I Wish I Were You, 60–61 Journey to the End of the Night as source of existentialist quality and narrative structure of Kerouac’s On the Road, 58, 77 Journey to the End of the Night as modelled on Port of Shadows for Kerouac, 57 Kerouac’s binary of with Dostoevsky, 58, 64–66, 68–72, 74 Kerouac compared to by Rexroth, 145 Kerouac’s identification with and reading of, 57–92, 223n2, 224n9, 224n11, 224n15, 225n25

252

Index

as Kerouac’s “master,” 58 in Kerouac’s On the Road, 58 in Kerouac’s “Scroll” On the Road, 75 nihilism of, 63, 73 (see also under anti-Semitism; appropriation; Burroughs; ellipses; genealogy; Kerouac) Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, works of: The Church [L’Eglise], 72 Death on Credit [Mort à credit], 84 Journey to the End of the Night [Voyage au bout de la nuit], 1, 57–58, 60–61, 66–70, 73–79, 82, 93–94, 217, 224n9 Cendrars, Blaise, 120, 144 censorship, Genet’s work as landmark against, 172: and Ginsberg’s candor, 127, 133 and trial of Ginsberg’s Howl, 122 and Kerouac’s spontaneous prose, 82 Cervantes, Miguel de, 78 Cézanne, Paul, 3, 133, 227n9 and aesthetics of Ginsberg’s “Howl,” 129–30, 137, 147, 227n11 as Ginsberg’s master, 20, 144 Chapman, Harold, 17, 18, 20 Charters, Ann and Samuel, Brother-Souls, 2, 63 Chase, Hal, 86 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 6 Chazal, Malcolm de, 133, 137 in Ginsberg’s draft of “Howl,” 128–29 Clark, Tom, 132 Cloutier, Jean-Christophe, 6, 73, 219n2 Cocteau, Jean, 3, 9, 24, 30, 35, 144, 170, 217, 231n8, 233n2 Burroughs’ failure to reference in Junky, 106–07 in Burroughs’ 1940s library, 1, 106 Burroughs’ reference to in draft of The Soft Machine, 111–13, 226n11 Burroughs’ reference to in Queer, 95, 106–13, 202, 215 cinema of, 109–10 and homosexuality in Queer, 106, 110 importance of for Burroughs overlooked, 95

mediating role of for Burroughs, 95–96, 106, 111, 175, 193 (see also Burroughs, Joan Vollmer) mediating role of for Burroughs compared to that of Genet, 175, 193 mediating role of for Burroughs compared to that of Gide, 95–96, 106, 110, 175, 193 time travel in cinema of, 109–13 (see also Burroughs, literary relationships; Ginsberg, literary relationships; Kerouac, literary relationships) Cocteau, Jean, works of: Blood of the Poet [Le Sang d’un poète], 1, 43 Opium, 1, 106–07, 109, 233n2 Orpheus [Orphée], 95, 107–10, 112–13, 202 The Testament of Orpheus [Le Testament d’Orphée], 112–13 Cold War America, 6, 23, 117, 136, 140, 144, 153 comparative approach, 9, 13, 14, 88, 94, 105, 188–92, 198, 215, 221n21, 229n12, 231n12 Conrad, Joseph, 33 Corbière, Tristan, 139, 141, 160 Corbière, Tristan, works of: “Blind Man’s Cry” [“Cris d’aveugle”] as source for Ginsberg’s “Howl,” 8, 139, 141 “Deaf Man’s Rhapsody” [“Rapsodie du sourd”], in Ginsberg’s “The Lion for Real,” 141 Corso, Gregory, 4, 5, 11–12, 37, 118, 146, 222n8 on Genet and Michaux, 5 Cowley, Malcolm, 87, 157 Crane, Hart, 115, 121, 128, 144, 167 Creeley, Robert, 147 Cronenberg, David, 191, 202, 204, 234n14 Cunnell, Howard, 64 Dada, 11, 37 Davies, Catherine, 155 Deleuze, Gilles, 225n24

Index and Burroughs, 205, 233n9 Deleuzian reading of Kerouac, 16, 88 on Proust, 88–90 De Quincey, Thomas, 192 Dichy, Albert, 182–83, 220n13 Dickens, Charles, 64, 79 Dollimore, Jonathan, 100–01 Donne, John, 117 Dos Passos, John, 86 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 9–10, 59, 78 existentialism of, 70–72, 224n13 and Ginsberg, 130, 135–36, 144, 156 Ginsberg’s naming of in “Howl,” 135–36 Kerouac’s binary of with Céline, 58, 64–66, 68–72, 74 in Kerouac’s On the Road, 64–79, 84–85 spiritual faith of, 65–66, 71, 75–77, 84 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, works of: Brothers Karamazov, 59, 72, 78 Notes from Underground, 71 Douglas, Ann, 182 Dryden, John, 115 Duchamp, Marcel, 11–12 Duvivier, Julien, Pépé le moko, 30, 44, 48, 222n7 Eberhart, Richard, Ginsberg’s letter to, 143–45, 155, 227n4 Eliot, T.S., 10, 115, 141, 167; Burroughs’ cut-ups of, 172 in Burroughs and Kerouac’s Hippos, 30–31, 222n7 and French poetry, 160 Ginsberg’s binary pairing of with Whitman, 149, 159–61 in Ginsberg’s “The Character of the Happy Warrior,” 164–65, 230n20 importance of for Ginsberg’s “Howl,” 160 modernist poetics of, compared to Perse’s, 160–61 and Perse, 156, 159–61, 164–65 as translator of Perse, 160–61, 179, 229n16 variorum edition of The Waste Land as model for variorum edition of Ginsberg’s “Howl,” 159 The Waste Land, 159–60 (see also Perse)

253

Eliot, Valerie, as editor of variorum edition of The Waste Land (T.S. Eliot), 159 ellipses: Burroughs’ use of, 103, 198, 205–06 Céline’s use of, 80 Gide’s use of, 103 Ginsberg’s use of in “At Apollinaire’s Grave,” 123–25, 141, 148, 167 Kerouac’s use of, 48, 80 encryption, of French literary references, 216 as strategy in Burroughs’ Queer, 102, 106 as strategy in Ginsberg’s poetry, 116, 119, 123, 126, 140, 167–68 Ellis, Havelock, in Burroughs’ gay literary canon, 100 Ellmann, Richard, 101 Erkkila, Betsy, 150, 229n7 existentialism, 2, 58, 70–74, 77, 84. See also Dostoevsky; Sartre Fantin-Latour, Henri, 17 Fazzino, Jimmy, 6, 11, 219n4, 219n5 Fearing, Kenneth, 156 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 4, 187 Feuillade, Louis, Fantômas, 28, 51 Ffrench, Patrick, 221n23 Finbow, Steve, 228n14 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 6, 64, 70, 78, 173, 222n8 Flaubert, Gustave, Sentimental Education [L’Education sentimentale], 59 Fludd, Robert, 136, 167 Forain, Jean-Louis, 40 Ford, Charles Henri, The Young and Evil (with Parker Tyler), 26, 46 Fowlie, Wallace, 157, 161, 229n13 France, Anatole, 2, 99–100, 111–12, 130, 225n5, 226n11 Frazer, Brenda (Bonnie Bremser), 4, 219n6 Frechtman, Bernard, and translations of Genet, 7, 170, 172–73 Gabin, Jean, 3, 45, 48–49, 52, 57, 223n2 Genealogy of Apollinaire in Ginsberg’s work, 116

254

Index

as approach, 1, 3–5, 8–9, 11, 14–15, 17, 20, 59, 215–18 of Artaud in Ginsberg’s work, 116, 134–35 of Céline in Burroughs’ work, 95 of Cocteau in Burroughs’ work, 110, 113 of Gide in Burroughs’ work, 100, 110 Ginsberg as genealogist of his own work, 15, 115, 124, 126, 127, 130, 135–37, 139, 141, 144, 148, 159, 167 (see also under Ginsberg, Howl, variorum edition of) and Ginsberg’s aesthetics, 141 of Ginsberg’s work, 7, 20 Kerouac as genealogist of his own work, 87, 91–92 and Kerouac’s work, 6–7, 70, 145, 225n25 Perse’s place in the genealogy of Ginsberg’s work, 116, 148–49, 164, 166–68 Whitman’s French genealogy, 229n12 Genet, Jean, 3, 4, 5, 9, 16–17, 24, 130, 138, 193–94 anti-Semitism, accusations of, 182–83 and betrayal as key concept, 176–77, 180–81, 186, 231n12 Burroughs’ admiration for, 171–72 Burroughs’ ambivalence toward, 15, 33, 175–78 Burroughs’ biographical bond with, 169–70 Burroughs compared to, 2 Burroughs’ engagement with Prisoner of Love in My Education, 172, 175–86 Burroughs’ identification with, 169–70, 174 Burroughs’ knowledge of his writing, 169–71, 231n13 in Burroughs’ My Education, 175, 193 Burroughs’ pairing of with Perse, 179–80 in Burroughs’ Queer, 170 Burroughs’ use of The Thief ’s Journal in early drafts of Naked Lunch, 15, 178, 180

Burroughs’ unpublished cut-ups of, 172–74, 222n8, 233n6 in Burroughs’ The Wild Boys, 172 ethics of, compared to Artaud’s, 180, 231n12 ethics of, compared to Burroughs’, 180–81, 183–86, 231n10 Frechtman’s translations of questioned by Burroughs, 7, 172 Funeral Rights compared with Burroughs’ Junky, 181–83 Ginsberg’s admiration for, 170 in Ginsberg’s draft of “Howl,” 135 Ginsberg’s reference to, 121, 131, 135, 137 Ginsberg’s translations of, 7, 132, 137–39, 230n2 in Ginsberg’s variorum edition of “Howl,” 139 and homosexuality, 5, 170, 172–73 Kerouac and, 76, 87 Kerouac compared to by Rexroth, 145 Poe used by in Funeral Rights, 182, 231n14 posthuman otherness of, for Burroughs, 15, 178, 186, 217 publication of associated with Burroughs, 170–71, 230n1 role of for Patti Smith and Brenda Frazer, 4, 219n6 Genet, Jean, works of: The Declared Enemy [L’Ennemi déclaré], 184–85, 232n23 Funeral Rights [Pompes funèbres], 181–83, 231n14, 231n17 “The Man Condemned to Death” [“Le Condammé à mort”], 137–39 The Miracle of the Rose [Miracle de la rose], 170, 172 Our Lady of the Flowers [Notre-Damedes-Fleurs], 171 Prisoner of Love [Un Captif amoureux], 15, 172, 174–78, 184–85 The Thief ’s Journal [Le Journal du voleur], 15, 171–72, 178, 180, 231n10 Gewirtz, Isaac, 64, 222n4

Index Gibault, François, 224n20 Gide, André, 2, 5, 59–60, 71, 95–106, 120, 175, 193, 217, 225n2, 225n24, 226n7, 226n8 in Burroughs’ gay literary canon, 101 Burroughs’ paring of with Wilde, 100–01 ellipses, used by, 103 Ginsberg’s identification of Burroughs with, 22–24, 98–99, 106 homosexuality and, 5, 23, 97–101, 104 importance of for Burroughs overlooked, 95 Kerouac’s identification of Burroughs with, 24, 96–98 referenced by Burroughs in Junky, 95, 102–08 seduced by Wilde, 100–01 Gide, André, works of: Corydon, 23 The Counterfeiters [Les Fauxmonnayeurs], 23–24, 59–60, 97, 99–100, 106, 225n4 The Immoralist [L’Immoraliste], 23, 97–106, 110 Ginsberg, Allen, literary relationships with: Apollinaire, 7, 15, 24, 115–31, 135, 137, 139–41, 144, 146–48, 153, 167, 215–16, 226n4, 227n5, 227n8, 227n9, 227n11 Artaud, 5, 24, 116, 118, 120–21, 126, 130–35, 137, 167, 187–88, 227n9, 228n14 Baudelaire, 106, 130, 144, 162 Céline, 135, 137, 170 Cocteau, 120, 144 Dostoevsky, 130, 135–36, 144 Eliot, 115, 149, 159–61, 164–65, 167 Genet, 7, 121, 131–32, 135, 137–39, 170, 215–16, 230n2 Perse, 5, 17, 20–21, 24, 116, 127, 148–68 Rimbaud, 17–19, 22, 115, 117, 130, 135, 137, 139–40, 147–48, 150, 156–58, 161–65, 167 Whitman, Walt, 115–18, 130–31, 135–36, 143–46, 148–51, 154–56, 159, 165, 167, 226n1, 228n1

255

Ginsberg, Allen, 1–24, 85, 89, 95 American academic response to “Howl,” criticism of, 143–47 American-centric accounts of poetry by, 116–17 Apollinaire’s genetic role for poetry by, 15 Apollinaire, homage to as hermeneutic strategy, 120–25 Artaud, appropriation of, 187 Artaud, knowledge of during writing of “Howl,” 131–33 in Beat Hotel, 1, 18–20 Burroughs identified with Gide by, 23–24, 96, 98–99, 106 Burroughs, first meeting with, 1, 42 Burroughs’ Junky, “Appreciation” written for, 98–101, 106, 231n9 and Burroughs’ 1940s library, 1, 106 and Burroughs’ The Soft Machine, 187 Carr-Kammerer case, fictionalization of, 26–27 Cézanne as master of, 20, 144 ellipses used by, 123–25, 141, 148, 167 French language used by, 1–2, 7 French modernist lineage of hidden by Whitman, 115, 118 French literature, role of in breakthrough as poet, 115–16, 126, 143 genealogical reference as strategy of, 15, 116, 126–28, 136–39 genealogy of “Howl” cut from draft by, 135–37 Gide in photographic captions by, 23–24, 97 hinting as strategy of, 136, 139–41, 143, 159, 167 and homosexuality, 119, 136 ideal reader for, 124–25, 154, 161, 164, 166–68 long line in, 144–48, 150, 155, 158, 167 misunderstood, fear of being, 145, 148, 166 morality of compared to Gide, 97 naming as strategy of, 120–21, 123–24, 126, 128–29, 135–37, 148, 159, 167 and the “New Vision,” 165

256

Index

open secrecy as strategy of, 123, 141, 159, 216, chapter 6 passim Perse, biographical difference from, 151, 166 Perse’s genealogical importance for, 5, 148, 168 Perse concealed behind homage to Whitman by, 148–50, 154–56 and Perse’s Winds as overlooked source for “Howl,” 21–22, 150–54 in Paris, 11, 19–20, 117 Parisian poems of, 19, 117–19, 126 Parisian poems of as sharing genealogical strategy of “Howl,” 126, 128, 140–41 and Perse, 149, 155, 160–1, 164–5 photographs and captions by, 17, 20–23, 96–97, 158, 163, 221n25 poet, ideal conception of, 148, 151, 153–55, 158–59, 162–64, 166, 229n8 and the poète maudit, 139–41, 158, 162 and politics of poetry, 83 poetry as prophecy for, 121–23 queer poetic tradition of, 155 quotation as strategy of, 116, 121–25, 138–39, 147 Rimbaud, admiration for, 19, 115, 117, 228n16, 228n3 Romantic and Classical affiliations of, 147, 159, 164–65, 227n9, 230n20 as a scholar in the variorum edition of “Howl,” 127, 159 first encounter of with Solomon, 130–31 on Surrealism, 12 translations of Apollinaire by, 7, 121–25 translations of Genet by, 7, 137–39 translation as strategy of, 116, 121–25, 137–39 Trilling, letters to, 19, 115, 145, 149, 159–60, 162–63, 166, 168, 226n1, 230n19 variorum edition of “Howl” used by to project genealogy, 15, 126 (see also Howl Original Draft Facsimile) Ginsberg, Allen, works of: “America,” 119 “At Apollinaire’s Grave,” 19, 118–28,

135, 141, 148, 167, 226n4, 227n5 “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!” compared to, 119, 121, 125 ellipsis in, 123–25 hermeneutic strategy in, 118–25 as homage, 119–20, 125 misreading of as Parisian poem, 118 quotation of Apollinaire in, 118–22 as signal to American readers, 118, 120 translation of Apollinaire in, 121–25 “The Bloodsong,” 26, 221n2 “The Character of the Happy Warrior,” 162–65, 229n8, 230n20 and Burroughs, 163 and Perse, 162–65 and Wordsworth, 163 “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!,” 19, 118–19, 121–23, 125, 133, 135, 137, 153, 226n3 misreading of as Parisian poem, 118 prophecy as theme in, 121–22 translation of Apollinaire in, 121–22 “Europe! Europe!,” 123, 125 Apollinaire in, 123 “Howl,” 5, 8, 15: aesthetics of, 20, 129, 139 aesthetics of described to Eberhart, 143–45, 155, 227n4 aesthetics of described to Hollander, 143, 145–50, 227n4, 228n3, 229n4 Apollinaire in, 116, 128, 129, 137, 139, 144, 147 and “At Apollinaire’s Grave,” 125–28, 140 Artaud in, 116, 131–33 Artaud named twice in draft of, 134–35, 137 biographical readings of, 129, 143 Blake named in, 117, 126 Buddha named in draft of, 135 Burroughs named in draft of, 135 Carr named in draft of, 135 Cassady, named in draft of, 135

Index Céline named in draft of, 135, 137 Cézanne in, 129, 137, 144 Chazal named in draft of, 128 and Cold War America, 117, 136, 140, 144, 153 Corbière as source for, 8, 139, 141 Dostoevsky named in draft of, 135–36 French modernist poetry, role of in, 116, 126, 143 Genet in draft of, 137–39 Genet named in draft of, 135 Gurdjieff named in draft of, 135 “hydrogen jukebox” aesthetic in, 129, 139, 220n16 Kerouac in, 145 Kerouac named in draft of, 135 literary lineage of, 115, 148 long line of as French, 144–46, 158, 167 Lorca in, 144, 167 Marx named in draft of, 135–36 naming names in, 124, 137 Perse as overlooked model for, 21, 156 Perse in, 116, 168 Perse’s Winds [Vents] compared to, 151–54 Poe named in, 117, 126 “ponderous lineage” in draft of, 135–37, 139, 167, 215 Proust named in draft of, 135 reception in American literary context, 116–20, 146–47 read in French literary context, 116–20 Rimbaud in, 139–40 Rimbaud named in draft of, 135 Six Gallery reading of, 131, 132, 134 Smart named in draft of, 128 sources of, 8, 20–21, 115–16 Spengler named in draft of, 135 strategy of genealogical reference in, 126, 128, 136–39 and Whitman, 115–18, 143–45 Whitman named in draft of, 135 Wolfe named in draft of, 135 Howl and Other Poems, 127, 149

257

absence of French literary reference in, 116–17 American frame of reference to, 117 Howl Original Draft Facsimile (variorum edition of “Howl”), 12, 15, 115–16, 123, 139, 147, 156, 168 American and French references in, 130 Artaud’s presence in, 131–35 as more than biographical source text, 116, 226n2 cryptic strategy of as response to “Howl,” 116, 130 T.S. Eliot’s relevance as model for, 159–60 genealogical aim of, 15, 115, 126–36, 143 (see also under genealogy) Genet in, 139 as landmark in Beat scholarship, 116 Perse in, 156, 159, 166 as more than a scholarly edition, 116, 140–41, 158 Whitman and William Carlos Williams, references to in, 130 Kaddish and Other Poems, 121 “The Last Voyage,” 162–64, 229n17, 230n18 and Baudelaire, 162 and Perse, 162–64 and Poe and Rimbaud, 162–63 “The Lion for Real,” Corbière in, 141 “A Supermarket in California,” 148–51, 154–56, 168 Lorca in, 117 Perse in, 148–50, 154–56, 168 Whitman in, 117, 148 Ginsberg, Louis, 97–98, 101 Girodias, Maurice, 171 Goethe, Johann, Wolfgang, 9–10, 30 Gogol, Nikolai, 10 Gorrillot, Bénédecite, 12, 221n20 Grace, Nancy, 6, 58, 219n6 Grauerholz, James, 56, 174, 221n1, 221n2, 222n4 Grossman, Evelyne, 192, 205, 209, 212

258 Guattari, Félix, 205, 225n24 Gurdjueff, George, Ginsberg’s naming of in draft of “Howl,” 135–36, 167 Gysin, Brion, 4, 11, 177, 194, 210 calligraphy of compared to Michaux’s, 207 as source for Burroughs’ experimental writing, 207 Hale, Peter, 229n15 Hanrahan, Mairéad, 183–84 Harraway, Donna, 212 Harris, Frank, 102, 107 Harris, Oliver, 95, 99, 184, 219n4, 221n25, 222n12, 225n3, 231n11, 233n4 Harrop, Joanna, 234n13 Helbrandt, Maurice, 230n1 Hitchcock, Alfred, 68 Hollander, John, letter to Ginsberg, 143, 145–50, 227n4, 228n3, 229n4 Holmes, John Clellon, “This Is the Beat Generation,” 2, 63, 72–73 homosexuality, 5, 23–24, 31, 46, 52–56, 96–110, 119, 136, 148, 155, 170, 172–73, 182, 201, 223n5 and coming out, 108, 219n3. See also under Burroughs; Cocteau; Genet; Gide; Ginsberg Hougue, Clementine, 221n21 Hrebeniak, Michael, 83, 224n10, 224n19 Hugo, Victor, 6, 64, 71, 73 Huncke, Herbert, 62, 71, 163 Hunt, Tim, 6, 58, 64, 224n17 Hussey, Andrew, 219n4 inhuman, the, 102, 186, 187–89, 192, 201–02, 212–13 and Beckett, 189 Braidotti on, 16, 188 and Burroughs, 16, 186–88, 213, 233n3 of Burroughs’ Mugwumps, 201–02 and Genet, 186 in Gide, 102 Lyotard on, 233n3 and Michaux’s “insect writing,” 192 and posthumanism, 212

Index intertextuality, 5, 14, 111, 182 Isherwood, Christopher, 98–99 Isou, Isidore, 130 Jablonka, Ivan, 182 Jackson, Brian, 220n16, 227n9 Jackson, Elizabeth, 194 Jacob, Max, 120 James, William, 81 Joans, Ted, 4 Johnson, Joyce, 28, 221n1 Johnson, Ronna, 219n6 Jones, Leroi, 4 Jouffroy, Alain, 12 Joyce, James, 9–10, 76, 91, 222n8 Kafka, Franz, 9–10, 70, 163, 228n12 Kahn, Douglas, 134 Kammerer, Dave, 25 Kaufman, Bob, 4, 219n5 Kaufmann, Walter, 71 Kerouac, Jack, literary relationships with: Balzac, 6, 59, 64–65, 71, 76, 79, 222n6 Baudelaire, 8, 223n7 Céline, 6, 15–16, 24, 57–92 Cocteau, 1, 43 Dostoevsky, 58–59, 64–66, 68–79, 84–85, 91 Fitzgerald, 6, 64, 69, 78 Gide, 59–60, 97, 100, 106, 225n4 Proust, 6, 15–16, 24, 76, 81–92 Rimbaud, 19, 31–33, 42, 57, 71 Wolfe, 22, 64, 96 Kerouac, Jack, and American culture, 10–11, 47, 52–53, 67, 97 in American literary tradition, 6, 22–23, 70, 78 Balzac, admiration for, 30, 64–65, 79, 222n6 Baudelaire’s structural role in The Subterraneans, 8 bilingualism of, 2, 219n2 and “bookmovie,” 26, 29, 43, 46, 52–53, 56 and Buddhism, 66, 140 and Carné’s Port of Shadows in Hippos and I Wish I Were You, 43, 45, 48–57, 61

Index Céline, appropriation of, 6, 16, 57–62, 66–70, 73, 84–85, 93 Céline, mistranslation of text about, 8, 58, 73–74, 77 Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night and On the Road, 57–58, 63, 66–72, 75–79, 83 Céline as model for I Wish I Were You, 57, 60–62, 68 and Céline’s nihilism, 63, 66 Céline in On the Road, 58 Céline in the “Scroll” On the Road, 75 and Christianity, 66, 69, 72, 84 and Cocteau’s Blood of the Poet, 1, 43 and the coining of the phrase Beat Generation, 2, 63 Deleuze on, 88 Deleuze’s reading of Proust compared to Kerouac’s reading, 88–89 Dostoevsky, binary of with Céline, 58, 64–66, 68–72, 74 Dostoevsky in On the Road, 64–79, 84–85 and Dostoevsky’s spiritual faith, 65–6, 71, 75–77, 84 Duluoz Legend of as Proustian, 87–88, 90 Francophone writings of, 6 and French culture, 6, 43–44 French culture, allusions to in Hippos, 30–31, 44–48, 50 French culture, allusions to in I Wish I Were You, 43–47, 50, 56, 61 and French film, 27, 49, 51–52 (see also under poetic realist cinema) and French language, 1–2, 7–8, 47 French literature, appropriation of, 6–7, 10, 15–16, 27, 30 and French naturalism and, 30, 66, 85, 222n6 Gabin, Kerouac’s identification with, 49 and Gide’s The Counterfeiters, 23–24, 59–60, 97, 99–100, 106, 225n4 Ginsberg’s comparison of “Howl” to prose style of, 145 Greek references in I Wish I Were You, 53–54 Hippos, co-writing of with Burroughs, 10, 19, 25–30, 50–51, 61, 87, 92

259 homosexuality in I Wish I Were You, 52–53 Hugo, appropriation of, 73 hybrid Franco-American identity of, 6, 22, 86, 145 and I Wish I Were You as first “bookmovie,” 43, 46, 56 and I Wish I Were You as literary breakthrough, 28, 92 and I Wish I Were You, long-delayed publication of, 6, 10, 27, 43 I Wish I Were You as rewriting of Hippos, 10, 27–28, 48–49, 51, 55–56, 60, 68 “IT” in On the Road as Célinean, 67–71, 76 journals of, 6–7, 15, 49, 58–59, 62, 64, 66–70, 72–73, 77–78, 85, 89–90, 94–95 and literariness, 27–30, 42, 45, 58 literature, approach to compared to Burroughs’, 10, 25, 28–30, 42–43 literature, lists of, 64, 76–77, 85 Melville evoked in journals, 64, 76, 78 Melville’s Moby Dick referenced in On the Road and the “Scroll” version, 78 and morality, 59–61, 63, 66, 71 and national identity, 6–8 and the “New Vision,” 117, 165 On the Road, writing of, 15 photograph of, 22 and poetic realist cinema, 10, 24, 28, 30, 43, 45, 50–52, 56 (see also Carné; Duvivier; Renoir) and politics of writing, 83–84 postcolonial readings of, 95, 221n21 and posthumanism, 16, 188, 217 process, importance of to writing, 6–7, 89–90 projection and identification of poetic realist cinema used in I Wish I Were You by, 44–45, 48–51, 55–56 Proust, appropriation of, 6, 15–16, 85–92 Proust, binary of with Wolfe, 86, 89 Proustian quality of I Wish I Were You, 92 Proust, reading of by, 85, 88

260

Index

Québécois identity of, 6, 8, 22, 43, 47, 219n2, 220n10 and Renoir’s La Grande illusion, 30, 44–45, 48, 55 Rimbaud, approach to in Hippos compared to Burroughs’, 10, 19, 43 Rimbaud identified with in Hippos, 32 Rimbaud identified with in I Wish I Were You, 42, 57 Sartre and Sartrean reading of On the Road, 58, 70–77 spontaneous prose and Céline, 80–82, 93 spontaneous prose and Proust, 81–82, 85, 87–88 Stendhal, admiration for, 7, 30 and Tchelitchew’s Cache-cache in Hippos and I Wish I Were You, 30, 43–51, 54–56, 61, 226n10 Tics as Proustian, 89 and “true-story novels,” genealogy of, 87 Visions of Cody as breakthrough, 92 Visions of Cody, and Proust, 85–92 Kerouac, Jack, works of: And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (with Burroughs), 10, 19, 25–37, 42, 43–56, 58, 60, 68, 221n1, 221n3, 221n4, 222n7, 223n4, 225n4, 226n10, 230n19 “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose,” 80–82, 85, 87, 89 “On Céline” (in Good Blonde) [“Commentaire sur Louis-Ferdinand Céline”], 8, 58, 73–77, 84 Doctor Sax, 102 “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” 79–82, 85, 87, 217 I Wish I Were You, 6, 10, 27–30, 42, 43–56, 57–62, 68, 79, 92, 215, 221n3, 221n4, 222n5, 223n4, 223n5, 226n10 La nuit est ma femme, 6 La Vie est d’hommage, 8, 73, 219n2, 224n8 On the Road, 6, 15–16, 58, 63–70, 73–79, 83, 86–87, 217, 220n9, 225n25, 233n3 On the Road: The Original Scroll, 75, 78

Orpheus Emerged, 27, 223n7 Satori in Paris, 6–7 The Sea Is My Brother, 27 The Subterraneans, 8, 83 Sur le chemin, 6, 64, 224n8 Tics, 89 The Town and the City, 24, 27, 51, 56, 63, 65, 87, 97, 99, 101–02, 226n7 Vanity of Duluoz, 28–29, 56 Visions of Cody, 15–16, 79, 82, 85, 88–92, 217, 233n3 Kierkegaard, Søren, 70 Klee, Paul, 180, 209 Korda, Zoltan, The Four Feathers, 223n4 Krokidas, John, Kill Your Darlings, 26 Laforgue, Jules, 160 Lamantia, Philip, 4, 219n5 Larbaud, Valery, 150 Laroche, Hadrien, 186 Lautréamont, Comte de, 130, 138, 146 Les Chants de Maldoror, 146 Lawrence, D.H., 70, 224n10 Leary, Timothy, 36 Lebel, Jean-Jacques, 11–12, 220n16 Lefevere, André, 139 Lindsay, Vachel, 121 Lorca, Federico Garcia, 9, 115, 117, 121, 128, 131, 144, 147, 155, 167 Lotringer, Sylvère, 171 Luce, Henry, 83 Lydenberg, Robin, 190, 233n4 Lyotard, Jean-François, 188, 232n3 Mahler, Gustave, 163 Makay, Polina, 6 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 35, 130 Mann, Thomas, 9 Marks, H.P., 223n5 Marlowe, Christopher, 117 Marvel, Andrew, 117 Marx, Karl, Ginsberg’s naming of in draft of “Howl,” 135–36 Mayakovski, Vladimir, 9–10, 121, 128, 131, 167 McCarthy, Mary, 10–11 McClure, Michael, 4, 131, 134, 146 McMahon, Joseph, 229n8

Index Melehy, Hassan, 6–7, 58, 88, 220n9, 220n12, 225n23 Melville, Herman, and Kerouac, 6, 64, 76, 78, 224n17 Menefee, Jessee, 66 Meyers, Jeffrey, 140 Michaux, Henri, 3, 4, 12, 16, 215, 217–18, 234n16 Burroughs’ cut-up text about, 193–95, 233n6 Corso’s observation of, 5 and drugs, 13, 233n11 Ginsberg introduced to by Solomon, 130–31 Gysin’s calligraphy compared to, 207 “insect writing” of, 192, 205, 212–13 Meidosems of compared to Burroughs’ Mugwumps, 191, 195–200, 202–04 oeuvre of compared to Burroughs’, 192–93, 234n12 representation subverted by, 206–07, 209 verbal-visual work of compared to Burroughs, 188–213 Michaux, Henri, works of: Ecuador, 193 La Vie dans les plis, 191, 194–95 Meidosems, 191, 194–204, 207, 213 Miserable Miracle [Misérable miracle], 206–07, 234n12 Mouvements, 209–10 Miles, Barry, 4, 43, 163, 165, 167–68, 169, 187, 219n7, 228n13, 229n16, 230n18 as Ginsberg’s ideal reader, 168 Milhaud, Darius, 108 Miller, Henry, 33–34, 45, 76, 157, 228n12 Milner, Max, 13 mise-en-abîme, in Burroughs’ Queer, 107 in Ginsberg’s “Howl,” 127 in Kerouac’s I Wish I Were You, 45, 47, 49, 51, 226n10 Modernism, 16, 36, 81 Montherlant, Henry de, 6 Morgan, Bill, 162, 223n5, 225n4, 232n1 Morgan, Ted, 225n4 Mortenson, Erik, 72–73 Moses, Omri, 81

261

Muckle, John, 136, 154–55 Murphy, Timothy, 190, 219n4, 230n5 Nadeau, Pierre, 223n3 Nicosia, Gerald, 44 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 71, 81 Nin, Anais, 132, 134, 228n15 Norse, Harold, 11 Olson, Charles, 147 Orlovsky, Peter, 119 Pacini, Peggy, 6–7 Paris, 1, 4–5, 11, 19, 27, 32, 44–45, 47, 57, 98, 107 as destination of plot in Burroughs and Kerouac’ Hippos, 19, 44–45, 55 occupied, 44–45, 182 Ginsberg and, 117–19, 123–24, 130– 31, 141, 166, 192, 223n2, 226n4 Pascal, Blaise, 6 Patterson, Anita, 160 Pawlik, Joanna, 228n14 Paz, Octavio, 234n12 Pennington, Jim, 232n17 Penot-Lacassagne, Olivier, 13, 219n4 Pérét, Benjamin, 11 Perloff, Marjorie, 33 Perse, St.-John, 5, 17, 20–22, 24, 116, 127, 148–68, 217, 229n13, 230n21 Burroughs’ cut-ups of, 172, 179 conception of the poet of, as model for Ginsberg, 153–54, 229n8 differences as poet to Ginsberg, 151, 166–67 epic poetry of compared to Ginsberg’s “Howl,” 150, 229n6 genealogy as central poetic preoccupation of, 151 in Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California,” 149–50, 154, 156 Ginsberg’s cryptic inscription of in “Howl,” 168 Ginsberg’s neglected affiliation to, 127, 148–49, 155, 229n14, 230n20 and Ginsberg’s “The Character of the Happy Warrior” and “The Lost Voyage,” 162–66

262

Index

long line of, as model for Ginsberg, 150, 155, 156, 158, 167 prose poetry of compared to Burroughs’ by Ginsberg, 157–58 and Rimbaud, 155–58 style of, 151 and T.S. Eliot, 156, 159–61, 164–65 as triangulating binaries for Ginsberg, 149, 160–65 and Whitman, 149–51, 153–55, 157 Perse, St.-John, works of: Anabasis [Anabase], 161, 165, 168 aesthetics of, 160 Burroughs’ evocation of, 179, 209 as epic, 150 as gift from Burroughs to Ginsberg, 158 source for Burroughs, 21, 150, 156 stylistic difference to “Howl,” 151 title’s meaning, 154 as “yagé poetry” for Burroughs, 209 Winds [Vents], as an “American epic,” 150, 154, 230n21 compared to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, 150–51, 154 as epic, 150, 167 historical as well as mythic, 153, 229n9 as source for “Howl,” 20–21, 150–54 photograph of Burroughs holding copy of, 20–22, 158, 163, 229n15 stylistic parallels with “Howl,” 151–52 structural parallels with “Howl,” 152 Piaf, Edith, 111 Picasso, Pablo, 120 Plato, 168 Plotinus, 136, 167–68 Poe, Edgar Alan, 117, 121, 126, 136, 150, 162, 167, 182, 215, 229n17, 231n14 poetic realist cinema. See also Carné; Duvivier; Kerouac; Renoir Pollard, Patrick, 108 Pope, Alexander, 115 posthumanism, 15–16, 217 and Burroughs, 15, 191, 204, 206, 212, 233n3 and the unknown, 180, 186

postmodernism, 16, 190, 217 Burroughs and, 107, 190, 233n3, 233n4 Poulin, Jacques, 220n9 Pound, Ezra, 115, 121, 144, 146–47, 167, 227n9 Prévert, Jacques, 9, 130 Prigent, Christian, 12–13, 221n20 Prima di, Diane, 4 Proust, Marcel, 15–16, 24, 76, 137, 189–90, 217, 225n25 in Burroughs’ gay literary canon, 100 Ginsberg’s naming of in draft of “Howl,” 135 and involuntary memory, 88–92 Kerouac’s appropriation of, 6, 15, 85–92 Punday, David, 212 Québécois literature and culture, 6, 8, 43, 47, 219n2, 220n9, 220n10 Rabelais, François, 9, 220n12 Racine, Jean, 118 Raskin, Jonah, 116, 226n2, 228n2, 230n20 Ray, Man, 11 Reich, Wilhelm, 81, 136, 167 Renoir, Jean, The Grand Illusion [La Grande illusion] in Burroughs and Kerouac’s Hippos, 30–31, 43–45, 48, 55, 222n7 The Lower Depths [Les Bas-fonds], 43. See also poetic realist cinema Rexroth, Kenneth, 145, 229n12 Rhodes, S.A., 161 Richard, Jean-Pierre, 224n11 Rigaut, Jacques, 120 Rigolot, Carol, 150–51 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 10, 163–64 Rimbaud, Arthur, 1, 3, 5, 30, 44, 147–48, 216–18, 222n14, 223n7, 225n5, 228n16 and Baudelaire, 36 bilingual edition of used by Burroughs, 38–41, 73 as biographical figure for Beats, 19–20, 33 Burroughs compared to, 2, 24, 171

Index Burroughs’ cut-ups of, 8, 19–20, 34, 37, 172–74, 179, 222n8, 222n9, 222n12, 230n6 in Burroughs’ 1940s library, 1, 42 Burroughs’ perverse identification with in Burroughs and Kerouac’ Hippos, 32–34, 42, 225n4 in Burroughs’ photomontages, 40–41 in Burroughs’ The Exterminator, 35–36 in Burroughs’ The Soft Machine, 35 in Burroughs and Gysin’s The Third Mind, 36 “derangement of the senses” [“dérèglement de tous les sens”] of, 40, 158 as Ginsberg’s ideal poet, 19, 115, 117, 228n16, 228n3 Ginsberg’s naming of in draft of “Howl,” 135, 137 and Ginsberg’s “The Last Voyage,” 162–64 in Hippos, 10, 19, 26, 31–42, 222n7 in “Howl,” 139–40, 167 iconic images of, 1, 17–22, 157–59 iconicity of compared to Perse, 21–22, 156–58 Kerouac’s reading of compared to Burroughs’, 10, 19 Kerouac’s view of, 57, 71 Miller’s identification with, 33–34 in Minutes to Go (Burroughs et al), 35–41 paired with Perse, 156–58, 164–65 in variorum edition of “Howl,” 130, 139–40, 156 and Verlaine in Hippos, 3 Whitman as influence on, 150 Rimbaud, Arthur, works of: “The Drunken Boat [“Le Bateau ivre”], 137, 140, 162 Illuminations, 21, 41, 140, 179 A Season in Hell [Une Saison en enfer], 42, 139–40, 147 “To a Reason” [“A une Raison”] cut up by Burroughs, 37–41 Rivière, Jacques, 154 Robinson, Thom, 219n1

263

Rolland, Romain, 130 Rousseau, Jacques, 120 Russell, Jamie, 101, 226n6 Sagan, Françoise, 111 Salinger, J.D., 222n8 Sanders, Julie, 14 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 130 American reception of, 72–73 and the Beat Generation, 2, 72 and Céline, 58, 70, 72, 77, 82–83, 224n11 and Dostoevsky, 71–72, 224n13 and Genet, 9, 171 and Sartrean reading of On the Road, 16, 58, 70–77 terms of used in translation of Kerouac’s “On Céline,” 73–74 Sartre, Jean-Paul, works of: Being and Nothingness [L’Être et le néant], 73–74 Existentialism Is A Humanism [L’Existentialism est un humanisme], 71–72 Nausea [La Nausée], 72–73 Reflections on the Jewish Question [Réflexions sur la question juive], 82–83 Saint Genet: comédien et martyr, 171, 176 Savran, David, 232n19 Schlumberger, Marc, 193–94 Schumacher, Michael, 144 Schwitters, Kurt, 128 Sears, John, 222n16, 222n17 sexual identity, 22–24, 31, 140. See also homosexuality Shakespeare, William, 10, 81, 85, 222n8 Shattuck, Roger, 121–22, 227n6 Sheehan, Paul, 206 Shelley, Percy Byshhe, 10, 128, 159, 167 Shinder, Jason, 116 Situationism, 3, 219n4 Skerl, Jennie, 6, 190, 233n4 Skinazi, Karen, 220n9 Smart, Christopher, 128–29, 133, 137, 156, 167 Ginsberg’s naming of in draft of “Howl,” 128 Jubilate Agno, 128

264

Index

Smith, Patti, 4 Snyder, Gary, 4, 147 Solomon, Carl, 128, 133, 152, 170, 228n12 Artaud, Genet and Michaux introduced to Ginsberg by, 131 and biographical approach to Ginsberg’s “Howl,” 130–31, 133, 228n16 Sommerville, Ian, 40 Sophocles, 53–54 Spengler, Oswald, 9, 106, 163, 230n19 Ginsberg’s naming of in draft of “Howl,” 135 Stein, Gertrude, 46–47 Stendhal, 6 Le Rouge et le noir, 30 Surrealism, 3, 11–13, 51, 108, 129, 144, 193–94, 219n4, 220n16, 221n20, 226n11, 227n9, 228n15 Swope, Richard, 118, 226n4 Tanner, Tony, 198 Tchelitchew, Pavlev, Hide and Seek [Cachecache], in Burroughs and Kerouac’s Hippos, 30, 43–49 in Kerouac’s I Wish I Were You, 9, 43, 51, 54–56, 61, 223n1, 226n10 Theado, Matt, 64 Thomas, Dylan, 115 Tietchen, Todd, 6, 89 translation, 7, 13, 20, 38, 73–75, 121–22, 137–39, 160–61, 170, 172–73, 223n5, 228n14, 229n16 and Lefevere’s “refraction,” 139 (see also under Ginsberg) Trigilio, Tony, 123 Trilling, Lionel, 19, 97, 115, 145–46, 149, 159–60, 162–63, 165, 168, 226n1, 230n19 Twain, Mark, 6, 64 Tyler, Parker, 223n1 The Young and Evil (with Charles Henri Ford), 26, 46 Tytell, John, 11 Tzara, Tristan, 11–12, 120 Vaché, Jacques, 120 Van Doren, Mark, 228n3 Van Gogh, Vincent, 206, 209

Varèse, Louise, 21, 41, 139 147, 161 Verlaine, Paul, 30–31 Vico, Giambattista, 136, 167 Vidal, Gore, 226n6 Villon, François, 6 Vincendeau, Ginette, 223n3 Voltaire, 6 Wasley, Aidan, 155 Weidner, Chad, 6 Weiss, Ruth, 4 Wermer-Colan, Alex, 222n8 Wernham, Guy, 132, 138 Whalen, Philip, 147 White, Edmund, 22, 102, 231n17 Whitman, Walt, 11, 115–19, 121, 130–31 and Ginsberg, 136, 143–46, 148–50, 159–61, 165, 167, 226n1, 228n1, 229n12 Ginsberg’s naming of in draft of “Howl,” 135–36 as “mountain” overshadowing “Howl,” 115, 144, 149, 156, 226n1 and Perse, 149–51, 154–55, 157 (see also under Ginsberg) Whitman, Walt, works of: Leaves of Grass, 151, 153 Whittemore, Reed, 229n10 Wilde, Oscar, 2, 99–102, 105, 107, 226n8 in Burroughs’ gay literary canon, 100 Burroughs’ paring of with Gide, 100–01 in The Immoralist (Gide), 100 Williams, William Carlos, 81, 117, 128, 130, 144, 146, 156, 167, 227n9 Wilson, Edmund, 53–54 Wolfe, Thomas, 22, 76, 86, 89, 91, 96 Ginsberg’s naming of in draft of “Howl,” 135–36 Wolstonecraft, Mary, 159 Wood, Brent, 192 Wordsworth, William, 144, 159, 163, 222n8 Yeats, William Butler, 9–10, 30–31, 81, 144, 164–65 Yu, Timothy, 116, 128, 228n1 Zola, Emile, 30, 58, 64, 71, 79