Columbia University

The beginning of the Beat Generation is often traced back to Columbia University to the meeting of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, Hal Chase, and others in the original circle. Although they were later considered anti-academic artists, the seed for the Beat Generation was planted in a highly academic environment. Many of their early ideas were formed during arguments with professors such as Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren. This was the same environment in which some of their classmates, such as Louis Simpson and Donald Hall, became champions of formalism. This is where Carr and Ginsberg discussed the need for a "New Vision" (a term borrowed from Arthur Rimbaud) to move away from Columbia University's conservative notions of literature.

They soon met people outside of Columbia University such as Burroughs, Hunke, and Cassady and the new focus became real life experiences in contrast to the academic environment of Columbia. Perhaps the most important early experience that drove many of the members of the Beat Generation apart was Lucien Carr's stabbing of David Kammerer. The stabbing was an incident that Kerouac tried to capture twice, once in his first novel The Town and the City and then again in one of his last, Vanity of Duluoz.

Burroughs was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1914; making him roughly ten years older than most of the other original beats. While still living in St. Louis, Burroughs met David Kammerer, and thus began an association presumably based on their shared homosexual orientation and intellectual tendencies. As a boys' youth-group-leader in the mid-1930s, David Kammerer had become infatuated with the young Lucien Carr (with what encouragement, if any, it is difficult to say). Kammerer formed a pattern of following Carr around the country as Carr attended (and was expelled from) different colleges. In the fall of 1942, at the University of Chicago, Kammerer introduced 17-year-old Lucien Carr to William S. Burroughs.

Burroughs was a Harvard-graduate who lived off a stipend from his relatively wealthy family. His grandfather had invented the Burroughs Adding Machine, though the amount of wealth in the family is often exaggerated (Kerouac remarked on "the Burroughs Millions," which didn't actually exist^[6]). The three became good friends, whose sprees got Burroughs kicked out of his rooming-house and culminated with Carr confined in a mental ward after an apparent attempted suicide with a gas oven (one version of the story holds that this was a way of avoiding military service). In the spring of 1943, Carr's family moved him to Columbia University in New York, where Kammerer, and then Burroughs shortly followed.

At Columbia, Carr met the freshman Allen Ginsberg, whom he introduced to Burroughs and Kammerer. Edie Parker, another member of the crowd, introduced Carr to her boyfriend Jack Kerouac when he came back from his stint as a merchant marine. In 1944, Carr introduced Kerouac and Burroughs. Kammerer's fixation was obvious to everyone in the circle, and he became jealous as Carr developed a relationship with a young woman (Celine Young). In mid-August, 1944, Lucien Carr killed him with a boy scout knife in what may have been self-defense after an altercation in a park on the Hudson River. Carr disposed of the body in the river. He then sought advice from Burroughs, who recommended that he get a lawyer and turn himself in with a claim of self-defense. Instead, Carr went to Kerouac, who helped him dispose of the weapon. The following morning, Carr turned himself in, and Kerouac and Burroughs were charged as accessories to the crime. Burroughs got the money for bail, but Kerouac's parents refused to post it for him. Edie Parker and her family came through, with the condition that she and Kerouac be married immediately.

Burroughs had an interest in experimenting with criminal behavior and gradually made contacts in the criminal underground of New York, becoming involved with dealing in stolen goods and narcotics and developing a decades-long addiction to opiates. Burroughs met Herbert Huncke, a small-time criminal and drug-addict who often hung around the Times Square area. The beats found Huncke a fascinating character. As Ginsberg put it, they were on a quest for "supreme reality", and felt that Huncke, as a member of the underclass, had learned things that were sheltered from them in their middle-class lives.

In 1949 Ginsberg got in trouble with the law because of this association. Ginsberg let Huncke stay with him for a brief time (as referenced in the line from Howl, "who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the showbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steamheat and opium;") Ginsberg's apartment was subsequently packed with stolen goods. He rode with Huncke to transport these stolen goods which led to a car chase with the police. Ginsberg pleaded insanity and was briefly committed to Bellevue Hospital, where he met Carl Solomon. When committed, Carl Solomon was more eccentric than psychotic.

A fan of Antonin Artaud, he indulged in some self-consciously "crazy" behavior, e.g. throwing potato salad at a lecturer on Dadaism. Ted Morgan also mentions an incident when he stole a peanut-butter sandwich in a cafeteria and showed it to a security-guard. If not crazy when he was admitted, Solomon was arguably driven mad by the shock treatments applied at Bellevue, and this is one of the things referred to many times by Ginsberg in "Howl" (which was dedicated to Carl Solomon). After his release, Solomon became the publishing contact who agreed to publish Burroughs' first novel Junky (1953), shortly before another episode resulted in his being committed again.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-06