Collaboration

Collaboration and mutual inspiration were an important part of the Beat Generation's literary process. Allen Ginsberg was a promoter of the works of a number of the other members of the Beat Generation. He considered himself a pro bono literary agent for all of his friends and for those with similar ideas. For example, he was instrumental in getting William S. Burroughs's first book, (Junkie,) published. Ginsberg had encouraged Burroughs to write in the first place. He did extensive editing on Naked Lunch, with some help from Kerouac and others. Burroughs and Ginsberg also collaborated on the book The Yage Letters. Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs collaborated early on a parody of hardboiled detective fiction called And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. Gregory Corso, Brion Gysin and William Burroughs collaborated in a book of cut-up poems "Minutes to Go" while living in Paris.

William Burrough's "Naked Lunch" was edited by Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin and Gregory Corso, while they lived in Paris Hotel in 1956. Early in 1956 Jack Kerouac, in Tangiers, had assisted Burroughs in putting his prose "fragments" into novel form. Jack Kerouac incorporates many important Beat figures as characters in his novels. Two of his most important novels, On the Road and The Dharma Bums, feature characters based on Neal Cassady and Gary Snyder, respectively, as their chief protagonists.

The Beats often provided titles for one another's work. The naming of two important works is the subject of Beat legend. Ginsberg gives Kerouac credit for the name "Howl," even though the original manuscript Ginsberg sent to Kerouac had already been given the title "Howl for Carl Solomon." It's uncertain why Ginsberg would give Kerouac credit, but it's not surprising, considering the nature of their relationship. Kerouac also provided Burroughs with the title Naked Lunch, and, according to legend, when Ginsberg asked what it meant, Kerouac said he didn't know but they'd figure it out. Ginsberg gives some suggestions in a later poem: "On Burroughs' Work." He says, "A naked lunch is natural to us,/we eat reality sandwiches." Ginsberg also supposedly coined the term "the subterraneans" (an early attempt at a name for the Beat Generation), which became the title of an early Kerouac novel that was later made into a movie. Ginsberg suggested "Gasoline" to Corso, as the title for his second volume of poetry.

Members of the Beat Generation provided subject-matter for much of Allen Ginsberg's poetry. Neal Cassady in particular was a favorite subject of Ginsberg. Ginsberg dedicates his most famous poem, Howl, to Carl Solomon; Cassady and Solomon are specifically referenced throughout the poem. Other Beat Generation figures referenced in Howl include: Kerouac, Burroughs, Herbert Huncke, Tuli Kupferberg, and many more. He dedicated his first collection of poems, Howl and Other Poems, to Kerouac, Burroughs, Cassady, and originally Lucien Carr, though his name was taken off later at Carr's request. The dedication included all of their accomplishments including then unpublished On the Road, Naked Lunch, and Cassady's The First Third. Carr requested his name be taken off because he didn't want the attention. He dedicated many of his other poetry collections and some individual to poems to other Beat figures, including: Huncke, Cassady, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Frank O'Hara. Many of them were also subjects of specific poems within these collections.^[21]

Kerouac used a "roman à clef" style, in which he used thinly disguised Beat characters and described their encounters. Allen Ginsberg appears in five novels as Irwin Garden, and under other names in four more books. William Burroughs is Bull or Will Hubbard, or Old Bull in four books. Corso is Raphael Urso in two books. Corso's letters indicate that Kerouac (as Leo Percepied) originally wrote the ending of The Subterraneans with Percepied killing Yuri Gilgoric (Corso) for sleeping with his African American girlfriend Mardou. Corso warned Kerouac that he would go "down in history as a murderer," and Kerouac rewrote the ending to spare Gilgoric's life by not hitting him with a raised cafe table.

Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Cassady collaborated on a poem called "Pull My Daisy." A section from "Pull My Daisy" was one of the first poems Ginsberg published. When Kerouac and Ginsberg later collaborated on a film with photographer Robert Frank based on a script by Kerouac for a play called The Beat Generation, they found that the title had already been copyrighted. They called the film Pull My Daisy instead. The actors included Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Corso, and Larry Rivers (a painter associated with the New York School), and Kerouac did the narration.^[22]Gary Snyder dedicated several poems to Lew Welch and has mentioned other Beat figures, such as Kerouac and Philip Whalen, in his poetry.Frank O'Hara in his conversational poems often talks about eating lunch with "LeRoi" (LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka) and often alludes to other Beat writers, such as Ginsberg and John Wieners. LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka occasionally refers to other Beats in his writing (Snyder and Kerouac, for example). For a time in New York, Baraka and Diane DiPrima edited a magazine called Yugen, which published many of the Beat writers.^[23]

Дата добавления: 2014-01-06