[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: August 3, 2007]
Hey, I couldn't do it in a day. Both the Greenwich Village tours in Bill Morgan's book, I mean. I had to gird my withers and set out again on a sunny Sunday morning. No, not another burger, although it doesn't hurt to look.
I think the second part of the tour is a little sunnier. Not so much in the way of violence, although probably a little junk here and there. And a reading list.
You Should Already Know
I am typing this on a never-ending roll of virtual toilet paper, the hologram of which will one day be worth virtual greenbacks.
Rue Gite-le-Coeur
Why do I keep taking this back to Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, l'Impasse du Doyenné, l'Hotel Pimodan? Because, as far as the west is concerned at any rate, that was the first artistic bohemia. Sure, like-minded creative figures found each other in earlier periods: Goethe and Schiller, Hölderlin and Hegel and Schelling, Wordsworth and Coleridge and Southey. But it was in Paris that they lived together, shared beds, shared lovers, and encompassed all the added attractions of the underground: dope, drink, sexual ambiguity, radical dress and manners, not to mention poverty, madness and the odd early death.
And what does this have to do with the Beats? Remember Liebling's opening paean to history in The Sweet Science? He had been hit - for demonstration purposes - by a fighter who had been hit by a former champion, who had been hit by a former champion, all the way back to Jem Mace. It's a similarly short, straight line from Murger and Gautier, through Verlaine, to Jarry, Apollinaire and Cendrars - the literary core of the great pre-1914 Parisian avant garde. Cendrars knew Henry Miller. Ginsberg found Miller, and all the other banned Olympia Press writers, in his 1950s Paris sojourns. He learned about Jarry on ther Rue Gite-le-Coeur (see The Beat Hotel below).
Okay, How About University Place?
Where Frank O'Hara's residence at number 90 now bears a plaque. O'Hara knew the Beats, read alongside them regularly, but was not one of them. He also drank alongside both the Beats and the Abstract Expressionists at the Cedar Tavern - which was not where it now is. The Cedar at 82, currently undergoing some kind of restcure, was another bar I found on my first New York visit. At the time, I'm sure I was convinced I was treading the same planks as Kerouac and Pollock. It was a cool, dark room with one of the city's most extravagant wooden bars; but it was not O'Hara's Cedar. That was at 24.
The Lafayette between 8th and 9th is still there - now an apartment building, once a hotel home to all kinds of Beat bohemians, including City Lights founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Another old hotel, much seedier, survives the other side of Fifth Avenue, at 5 West 8th. The Marlton, where Kerouac wrote the first pages of Tristessa. In tribute to Tristessa, and the Mexican love story in On the Road's tenderest pages, I took lunch at Pio Maya. Hot yellow plantains scorched my lips. The horchata, like most in New York, too sweet and cinnamony. Tacos were a little heavy, but the chorizo kicked.
Pony Stable Inn
And here's a surprise. When I try to imagine the Greenwich Village diner where Joe Mitchell sat down with Joe Gould and watched him make tomato soup out of ketchup and hot water, my mind's eye always conjures the Washington Square Restaurant. No reason, except the right neighborhood and it looks pretty old.
I haven't knowingly set foot in here since my first trip to the city, when I stayed at the nearby Washington Square Hotel. I think the Beats would have recognized the menu - pasta blue plates, sandwiches, soups - if not the prices. In fact, it wasn't there then. In 1950, it was a lesbian bar, the Pony Stable Inn - and doesn't it look like a stable, now you think about it? The first meeting between Gibsberg and Gregory Corso - neither of them lesbians, as best I know - apparently took place here.
What's New Pussycat?
Bars? Desolate Fugazzi's, of "Howl" fame, long gone. There's a Fat Black Pussycat, though. On West 3rd Street, just off Sixth Avenue. Djs and 31 martinis, says CitySearch. Now, confusingly, this is just where I used to drink when it called itself The Kettle of Fish: a much humbler establishment, with old pictures of Kerouac on the wall. But that name, as we saw last week, has migrated to Christopher Place (to what was once the Lion's Head). Wait...breathe deep...we'll find the original Kettle in a moment. For now, let's head down Minetta Street and find the original Fat Black Pussycat.
Is that a beauty? Credit to the Morgan book - I must have walked past a thousand times without noticing that the painted Pussycat name still exists above what is now Panchito's Mexican restaurant.
Sanity. Stop for a drink at the Minetta Tavern. Really, almost unchanged, and for god's sake unmoved, since the '40s and earlier. Fine sketches of local characters on the wall, including Joe "Professor Seagull" Gould. Jazz on the radio. One of the few survivors - although in ur-Beat days, there were free plates of pasta for sturdy drinkers.
Another Kettle of Fish
Okay, I think I have it. At 116 MacDougal, the original Kettle, now a standard issue Village café (oh, it may be grand: it is little I repair to these streets now).
Living Beat
Back on Sixth Avenue, at 461, a familiar sight: the long facade of Sammy's endless Noodleshop. Upstairs, from the '50s almost to the present, David Amram held court. A jazz eminence, he scored the movie of the Ginsberg/Kerouac/Cassady poem "Pull My Daisy" here. And along with Tuli Kupferberg, later of Fugs fame, he is someone you might still see in the bars. Still playing and writing, I've seen him at work at the Bowery Poetry Club (where I also saw The Fugs in full flight, on the occasion of Ed Sanders' seventieth birthday).
The End of This Road
Finally, a sad sight. The most storied Village bar, not only within the Beat circle, but for all the downtown writers of the '40s and '50s, the New York schools of Poets and Painters, a perpetual scene of drunkenness and mayhem in period novels (under its own name or pseudonyms): the San Remo.
The northwest corner of Bleecker and MacDougal has been some kind of coffee shop ever since I arrived in town. This was once the Remo, where thirsty American Italian workers met aspiring artists with a resounding thud. Today...not even a cappucino to be had.
Still, co-ops are available upstairs. Would suit young angels who "woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy-ment offices." Maybe, anyway.
The Poems, the Books
Other than "Howl", what of Ginsberg can still be read? Surprisingly little, I fear, although I respect his long poem about his mother, "Kaddish". He wanted to be an icon, and that's what he became.
Similarly, I can well understand the difficulty today in facing up to Kerouac's actual novels. Everyone should read On the Road when they're young. It was a breakthrough, it was brightly different from contemporary prose, even taking Thomas Wolfe and Henry Miller into account - the former infinitely more pompous and less self-deprecating, the latter, believe it or not, more cerebral. At this distance, winning passages in The Vanity of Duluoz and Dr Sax aside, it is hard to see that Kerouac was able to do anything more than repeat the Road formula at ever lower intensity. If the ur-Beat story of the late forties has resonance, though, try his first novel, Time And the City. In the later sections, New York makes its appearance, thinly disguised versions of Herbert Huncke and the others trailing in its wake. And next to Road, it's underwritten.
Bringing the writing down to degree zero, Burroughs' account of the same period, Junky, is an austere, gritty account of the drug scene around Columbia and downtown. Published as a sensational paperback, under the pen-name William Lee, the work bears no resemblance to the later experimental Burroughs style. Perhaps best, though, for a detailed and authentic account of early New York beat - from an involved observer - read Go! by John Clellon Holmes. Holmes knew Kerouac, hung with the crowd, but never mimicked the Kerouac-Ginsberg proto-Beat voice. This means that Go! is both less exciting and less annoying than On the Road. The parties are here, the so-called death trips, the relentless drinking, Huncke with his habit and bloodied feet - structured around a love story and delivered in lucid prose.
For a non-Beat take on the downtown '40s and '50s scenes, Chandler Brossard's novel Who Walk In Darkness, or indeed James Baldwin's Another Country (another San Remo brawl); nonfiction, Dan Wakefield's memoir New York in the Fifties. The latter has a chapter on the beats, but reminds the reader that Kerouac's bop prosody was only one of many threads in the period's downtown bohemian literature. Background? You can worse than Barry Miles for biographies of Ginsberg and Burroughs, and some of the Parisian detail above comes from his The Beat Hotel. Ann Charters for Kerouac. Finally, credit again to Bill Morgan, who remotely guided this tour: The Beat Generation in New York: A Walking Tour of Jack Kerouac's City (City Lights, 1997).
I haven't said what I wanted to say about William Burroughs. Expect Part 3 in the Fall.
