The Typewriter Is Holy by Bill Morgan

Author:Bill Morgan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2010-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

The Threads Loosen

A few days after Herb Caen’s 1958 invention of beatnikery, Neal Cassady was arrested in San Francisco for giving a small amount of marijuana to undercover policemen. It was no secret in the city that Neal was the model for Kerouac’s On the Road character Dean Moriarity, and many suspected that the police had singled him out because of that notoriety. Whatever brought about his arrest, Neal was tried and harshly sentenced to five years to life for the possession and sale of two joints. Kerouac did not rush to his friend’s defense, worried perhaps that the police spotlight might fall on him next. He began to avoid mention of Cassady in his letters and distanced himself from Neal. Even when Jack had the chance to visit Neal in San Quentin the following year, he chose not to go. His treatment of Neal became typical of his growing attitude toward many of his old friends. Over the next decade, Kerouac slowly withdrew from the people he had been closest to and retreated to a reclusive life with his mother and his liquor.

So it happened that by the time Snyder got back to San Francisco to share his old cabin in Marin County with his Reed College classmate, Lew Welch, Neal was already on his way to prison. For the next nine months Gary played an active role in the literary scene around the Bay Area, with the intention of returning to Japan as soon as he could afford it. More than ever his writing alluded to Asian and Buddhist subjects combined with the inspiration he found in the serenity of the forest. In December, in response to Snyder’s repeated invitations to visit, Kerouac wrote, “ If you only knew how horrible it is to be ‘famous’ you wouldn’t want it, in fact you don’t want it. No wonder Hemingway went to Cuba and Joyce to France.” In his midthirties, but sounding more like a bitter old man, Jack went on to reminisce about their hikes of only a few years earlier, “I was in love with the world through blue purple curtains when I knew you and now have to look at it thru hard iron eyes.”

From Europe, Ginsberg wrote regularly to publishers like Grove and New Directions, soliciting their attention to Snyder’s poetry. Now that Corso was being published, Allen regarded Gary as the next great unpublished poet who should have a book contract. Ginsberg and Corso were still living in the Beat Hotel in Paris but had been invited to Oxford in May 1958 to read their work there. On that occasion, Gregory created controversy by reading his poem Bomb. Corso took an unexpected position in the poem by refusing to denounce the obvious evils of nuclear annihilation. Instead, he delighted in a romantic fantasy about the atomic bomb in which he considered the device a poor, misunderstood creature. The students didn’t get the tongue-in-cheek irony and were outraged by what they considered flippant remarks about the destruction of mankind.

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