Miscellanea

strictly speaking, the beat generation was not a school but a name applied afterward to a network of writers whose friendships preceded the work now grouped under it. allen ginsberg was principally a poet; jack kerouac and william s. burroughs were prose writers. they found one another in new york during the 1940s, before the books that later made them appear as a coherent movement. what looks unified in retrospect began as a set of personal relationships.

i started with howl. ginsberg first read the poem publicly in san francisco in 1955, and city lights published it the following year. from howl i watched kill your darlings, which concerns ginsberg's earlier years at columbia and the killing of david kammerer by lucien carr. that led to burroughs; burroughs led to queer; queer returned me to anthony bourdain's episode in tangier; bourdain led to paul bowles. i was fortunate enough to get a copy of bowles's the sheltering sky recently at harvard book store, and by then the sequence had ceased to feel arbitrary.

none of this began as research. once i wanted to combine it into some form of writing, however, the difference between recollection and fact became troublesome. films had altered my memory of events. details had migrated from one person to another. a few things i knew with considerable confidence turned out not to have happened at all. hence the internet rabbit hole, followed almost immediately by a reading rabbit hole. fact-checking did not dilute the story. the corrections usually made the chronology less tidy and the relationships more difficult to simplify. what follows is the record i ended up with.

before there was a “beat generation,” there was lucien carr. carr met ginsberg at columbia and subsequently introduced him to kerouac and burroughs. the association looks inevitable only in retrospect. at the time, no such coherence was apparent; the association was still provisional, acquiring its shape only as the people involved became increasingly entangled in one another's lives.

ginsberg fell deeply in love with carr. the columbia account has them first connecting over brahms, after which carr's ideas about literature began to acquire unusual authority for him. ginsberg later called carr his “ideal image of virtue and awareness.” the intellectual attachment cannot be very cleanly separated from the erotic one. carr's ideas mattered partly because carr mattered.

homosexuality therefore belongs near the beginning of the history rather than appearing later as one of the subjects of howl. desire already affected the friendships from which the writing emerged. who attracted whom could alter whose company was sought, whose ideas were taken seriously, and which relationships acquired an intensity disproportionate to an ordinary literary acquaintance. such distinctions become somewhat arbitrary when desire itself helps determine whose ideas acquire authority.

ginsberg called this early social world the “libertine circle.” “beat generation” belongs to the later history, when the books had been published and a movement could be attributed to their authors. the earlier phrase describes something less discrete. they were reading one another with a seriousness that could become almost religious; increasingly, drugs offered another route toward the altered consciousness they were already seeking in literature. the literary and the ecstatic were never wholly separate projects.

one of my false memories came directly from kill your darlings. the film has ginsberg and the others break into columbia's restricted library collection and rearrange its displays. at some point i stopped remembering this merely as a scene and began remembering it as an event. repeated attempts to locate the historical library raid produced nothing. the film's production material finally supplied the explanation: krokidas and bunn drew the sequence partly from their own experiences in college. i had been searching ginsberg's biography for something contributed by the screenwriters. (beautiful cinematography is, perhaps, a poor archival method.)

accounts of david kammerer diverge almost immediately. kammerer knew carr long before columbia. he had been carr's adult scoutmaster in st. louis while carr was still a boy, became intensely attached to him, and continued appearing in carr's life as carr moved through a succession of schools. by the time they were both in new york, carr was nineteen and kammerer was thirty-three.

kill your darlings both corrects an injustice and risks committing another one. after kammerer's death, carr's story was that an older homosexual predator had pursued him until he finally defended himself. the film is deeply suspicious of that account. krokidas and bunn have explained that in researching the murder they encountered people who remembered the later relationship as much more reciprocal than carr subsequently admitted; in their version, carr sometimes returns to kammerer even when kammerer is trying to separate himself. this matters because kammerer spent decades in the story as little more than the threatening homosexual whose own murder could be explained by his sexuality. the film restores a person where the legal narrative had produced a type.

yet the film's revision introduces a different simplification. in the film the relationship becomes something like a doomed romance, and it becomes very easy to forget where it began. kammerer first knew carr as an adult scoutmaster who had authority over a boy. whatever carr felt when he was nineteen does not travel backward through time and make that origin disappear. there is no need to choose between the later ambiguity and the earlier imbalance of power; the evidence permits both. the film is right to reject the homophobic caricature through which kammerer was reduced to a type, but that correction need not soften the predatory origin of his pursuit of carr. carr's later reciprocation complicates the relationship without erasing the fact that kammerer first attached himself to carr as an adult scoutmaster while carr was still a child. the distortion in the legal story lay elsewhere: homophobia made kammerer's sexuality, rather than the history of that pursuit, the fact through which his death was interpreted.

in august 1944 carr and kammerer went to riverside park after drinking together. carr later said that kammerer made an unwanted sexual advance and that a fight followed. he stabbed kammerer twice with an old boy scout knife, weighted the body, and put it into the hudson. afterward he went to burroughs, who advised him to get a lawyer and surrender. carr instead found kerouac, who accompanied him while he disposed of the knife and some of kammerer's belongings. once carr confessed, burroughs and kerouac were arrested as material witnesses.

the knife had survived from the same boy scout world in which kammerer first knew carr as a child. years later it became the murder weapon. the association between the beginning of their relationship and its end was therefore not supplied afterward by a novelist or filmmaker; it was already present in the object itself.

i had also remembered that carr somehow escaped murder through a bizarre law which essentially allowed somebody to kill a gay man who propositioned him. this is not quite what happened. carr was charged with second-degree murder, but the case was publicly interpreted through the idea of the respectable young man defending himself from a homosexual predator. the language later used for this was an “honor slaying” or homosexual-panic defense. prosecutors allowed carr to plead to manslaughter, and he served eighteen months at elmira. there was no magical line in the statute announcing that homosexual victims counted less. hence the more disturbing point: there did not need to be one. prejudice was already operating in the question of which account of the killing sounded plausible, and whose fear was permitted to explain whose death.

after the killing, ginsberg occupied an especially painful position. he had been in love with carr and was also close to kammerer; joyce johnson's reconstruction of the period even raises the possibility that he experimented sexually with both men. (may have: the surviving evidence does not justify anything stronger.) kammerer was dead and carr went to prison. whatever had existed among the three of them could no longer be clarified by the people involved. afterward, the relationship could only be reconstructed from records produced for very different purposes.

the disagreement over carr and kammerer is partly a disagreement between records created under different conditions. carr's account after the killing had an immediate legal purpose: his description of kammerer could affect how his own violence was judged. ginsberg's private writing had no such function and could register desires that he would not have described in the same terms to columbia officials or psychiatrists. later memoirs were written after homosexuality had become more publicly speakable, though not necessarily easier to remember accurately. hence the surviving record is uneven. the sources do not merely contradict one another; they preserve versions of the relationship shaped by what could safely or usefully be said at the time.

within a year of kammerer's death, ginsberg was himself in disciplinary trouble at columbia. the episode is easy to confuse with the much later obscenity history of howl, but the poem did not yet exist. in 1945 ginsberg was suspended after writing an obscenity in the grime on his dormitory window; kerouac had also been discovered staying in his room. ginsberg later insisted that nothing sexual had happened between them, but the suspicion surrounding two men sharing a bed belonged to the disciplinary atmosphere anyway. he eventually returned and graduated.

the drug history belongs partly to this early period as well, although not in the form i had absorbed from kill your darlings. i had constructed a college tableau in which ginsberg and kammerer were continually taking enormous quantities of drugs together; i cannot substantiate that particular image. ginsberg's documented use over the following years is considerable enough without embellishment: marijuana, benzedrine and other amphetamines, peyote, lsd, psilocybin, and yagé. he later associated part of howl with peyote, kaddish with amphetamines, and “wales — a visitation” with lsd. older ginsberg became less persuaded that chemical intensity was valuable in itself and increasingly compared drugs with meditation and yoga. the question shifted from how radically consciousness could be altered to what, if anything, an altered state could leave behind once it ended.

neal cassady entered the circle at the end of 1946 and soon became ginsberg's lover. kerouac, meanwhile, was transforming cassady into the figure who would become dean moriarty in on the road. cassady's life consequently entered the beat record through two very different attachments: ginsberg's desire for him and kerouac's attempt to render him in fiction. neither relationship was incidental to the later literature.

in 1949 ginsberg entered the new york state psychiatric institute after an episode involving herbert huncke and stolen property. he remained there for about eight months and met carl solomon, to whom howl would later be dedicated. the psychiatric world of the poem therefore had a literal institutional antecedent: one of the people to whom the poem speaks was someone ginsberg first knew while confined there.

the much longer psychiatric history of ginsberg's mother, naomi, later became central to kaddish. “madness” is especially easy to romanticize when the beats are read retrospectively, and institutionalization itself can become part of that romance: evidence of extremity or artistic authenticity. for ginsberg it also meant submitting to institutions with the authority to name an experience and determine how much control a person retained over his own life. that coercive dimension belongs beside, rather than in opposition to, the visionary language of the poems.

in 1953 burroughs stayed with ginsberg in his lower east side apartment after returning from south america. the photographs ginsberg took during those months preserve the domestic scale of the relationship particularly well. decades later he captioned one photograph of burroughs on the roof with the explanation that “we were lovers those months.” another shows burroughs lying in ginsberg's bedroom with junky nearby. ginsberg remembered returning from his newspaper job and talking with him late into the night, describing the attachment as a “great psychic marriage.” they were lovers while manuscripts were passing between them; the intimacy and the writing developed under the same conditions.

in december 1954 ginsberg met peter orlovsky in san francisco. they became lovers, moved in together, and understood the relationship as a marriage; despite periods of separation, it lasted until ginsberg's death. the chronology is useful precisely because it prevents a causal claim. orlovsky did not somehow produce howl, and some of the experiences and images from which the poem emerged already belonged to ginsberg's earlier life. but orlovsky entered that life before howl's first public reading and publication. by the time ginsberg became publicly identified with a poem unusually frank about homosexuality, he was also beginning a durable homosexual domestic life rather than merely writing retrospectively about frustrated or secret attachments.

howl was first read publicly in san francisco in 1955 and published by city lights in 1956. i had another false memory here: something about ginsberg being forced to redact carr's name from a poem, together with a phrase like “skeptical lovers” apparently supplied by nobody. the actual dispute concerned the dedication. carr was named in the first printing of howl and other poems, but by then he had spent years trying to prevent the 1944 killing and his place in beat history from defining his public identity. he asked ginsberg to remove him from later printings, and ginsberg did.

ginsberg then continued turning the relationship between private life and public authority into an actual political life. he became deeply involved in antiwar protest and was tear-gassed in chicago during the 1968 democratic convention. he spoke publicly about homosexuality when doing so still carried considerably more institutional risk than it later would. he opposed censorship and marijuana criminalization; years later he and peter orlovsky were arrested during an antinuclear protest at rocky flats. cuba expelled him after he criticized its treatment of gay people. czechoslovakia expelled him soon afterward after students elected him king of may. there is something almost procedural about this part of his biography: ginsberg enters an institution's field of vision, speaks rather more freely than the institution would prefer, and eventually somebody decides that allen ginsberg should probably leave.

the burroughs part of the story is where my rabbit hole left new york. i am currently in the process of reading naked lunch, but before that i saw luca guadagnino's queer. i thought it was beautiful, particularly because it renders burroughs's all-consuming desire and loneliness without turning him into a permanently composed icon of transgression. this sent me back into his biography.

burroughs had a serious narcotics addiction long before tangier. morphine and heroin recur through his life and through his writing about addiction. before tangier, however, there was mexico city and joan vollmer. in 1951 burroughs shot and killed vollmer during the drunken william tell episode in which a glass was placed on her head. he later altered parts of his account, and the event accumulated its own mythology, but the basic fact remains horribly simple: he pointed a loaded gun toward her head and fired.

the connection between queer and joan's death is stronger than the plot alone would suggest. burroughs wrote the manuscript in the aftermath of the 1951 shooting, but the shooting itself never appears as an episode in the novel. when queer was finally published decades later, burroughs said in his introduction that joan's death had “motivated and formulated” his writing. the event is therefore absent from the narrative while remaining explicit in burroughs's later account of why the book exists.

the novel turns instead toward lee's obsessive pursuit of allerton, his loneliness, and his increasingly desperate wish to achieve some form of contact with another person. burroughs later described joan's death through the “ugly spirit,” an invasive force which he believed had brought him into a lifelong struggle with possession and control. the language is metaphysical, but it also displaces agency: an inward conflict becomes an external force capable of acting upon him. joan's death remains central even as responsibility is narrated through a cosmology of possession.

guadagnino's film makes the connection which the novel leaves unspoken considerably more visible. its final surreal sequence invents a william tell tableau in which lee shoots eugene, directly recalling the circumstances of joan vollmer's death. that scene is not in burroughs's novel. the filmmakers deliberately threaded the real shooting into the adaptation, so the ending is indeed a reference to joan. in that respect the film adapts not merely the plot of queer, but burroughs's later explanation of what had been haunting the book from outside its narrative.

then comes tangier. burroughs settled there during the 1950s and spent part of the period in severe heroin addiction. much of what eventually became naked lunch existed first as routines and fragments sent in letters to ginsberg. in 1957 ginsberg and kerouac arrived and helped type and organize the material. the columbia archive still has the manuscripts and correspondence. i like this because naked lunch can seem, while reading it, like an object that simply erupted out of one person's damaged consciousness. materially it was also paper being passed between friends while they tried to work out what kind of book they had in front of them.

anthony bourdain is partly responsible for why this version of tangier stayed in my head. i went back to his parts unknown episode while writing this because i had misremembered one story as belonging to bourdain himself. it was burroughs. during his worst period of addiction in tangier, burroughs described barely leaving his room and eventually having his utilities shut off because he had stopped paying for them. bourdain reads the account in the episode and calls burroughs one of his heroes.

(there is also a poem in my notebook section which references anthony bourdain; it predates this particular tangier rabbit hole.)

the same episode led me toward paul bowles. bourdain arrives in tangier already aware that he is entering a city americans have spent decades turning into a literary idea. bowles is central to that idea because he actually made a long life there rather than merely passing through it. reading the sheltering sky has given me another route into tangier, apart from the version of the city i first encountered through burroughs and bourdain. by then the chain itself had become interesting.

some of this rabbit hole also entered a short work of fiction i started to write called the faraday train. the protagonist had once lived in tangier and reflects on that period after moving away. he remembers using copious amounts of kief, which bourdain discusses in parts unknown, and spending days in his room while the electricity went unpaid. he also remembers sitting beneath a triptych painting while a man in his apartment, absurdly intoxicated, had blood covering his face. the image later recurs in his dreams. that scene was consciously indebted to burroughs, particularly his use of grotesque, drug-saturated imagery that proceeds according to something closer to the logic of memory or nightmare than ordinary explanation.

years before the train journey, the protagonist had also betrayed another man. i had settled on the precise betrayal while writing it but have since forgotten the details; i believe drugs in tangier were involved and that the other man nearly died. years later, he finds the protagonist again and offers him an unknown drug without identifying himself. the protagonist thinks he looks vaguely familiar, takes it anyway, and gets on the train, where he begins hallucinating and eventually overdoses. i remember getting stalled on some of the mechanics of the revenge and will have to consult my old notes if i ever return to it. i mention the story mostly because it records one place this particular rabbit hole led me. the revenge in the faraday train is deliberate and retrospective; reading about carr complicated that category rather than supplying a model for it. carr's violence cannot be separated neatly from kammerer's long pursuit of him, which is perhaps why the case kept entering my thoughts about a story i had already begun.

elsewhere in the beat circle, the entanglement was less about revenge than about love and literature occupying the same relationships. ginsberg did not encounter carr at a professional distance and subsequently borrow some of his ideas; he loved him. burroughs and ginsberg exchanged manuscripts while also sharing an apartment and, for a period, a bed. literary influence was therefore not something occurring separately from intimacy. the people reading and revising one another were often also the people sleeping together, desiring one another, or arranging their ordinary lives around one another.

ginsberg's photographs preserve that scale particularly well. burroughs waits in a bedroom for him to come home from work; kerouac walks down east seventh street while ginsberg follows with a camera. the captions were written much later, after the people in the photographs had become literary figures, but they repeatedly return to ordinary circumstances: who was staying where, who was sleeping with whom, what they were reading, and what they said to one another.

none of this converts the violence and grief surrounding these relationships into literary romance. kammerer's death is not redeemed by the books his friends later wrote, and joan vollmer's death acquires no compensating meaning from burroughs's subsequent career. the writing instead preserves traces of the relationships around these events, including relationships that would otherwise be difficult to reconstruct at all.

their proximity left unusually dense records. writing became one means by which people continued to exist inside one another's lives after the circumstances themselves had changed. carr's request to be removed from the dedication changed later printings, but the earlier documents continued to record his place in the circle. burroughs's unfinished work passed through the hands of people who were also friends and lovers. private attachments consequently survived in public literature long after the relationships themselves had altered or ended.

“beat generation” consequently names more than the books usually gathered beneath it. it also refers to a social world recorded while the people inside it were still becoming themselves, before later biography separated roles which had originally overlapped. the surviving record preserves traces of that overlap.

to read / look into

allen ginsberg, howl and other poems
especially with the publication history in mind now: carr in the first dedication, carr asking to disappear from later ones, and the obscenity case that followed publication.

allen ginsberg, kaddish and other poems
i want to read this beside more of the history of naomi ginsberg and psychiatric institutionalization rather than treating the biographical material as something separate from the poem.

william s. burroughs, naked lunch
currently reading. i particularly want to keep the manuscript history beside the finished book, because knowing that ginsberg and kerouac were literally helping type and organize the material changes the way i imagine its creation.

william s. burroughs, queer
especially the later introduction on joan's death and the “ugly spirit.” i saw the film first and want to see what becomes different when the loneliness has burroughs's own sentences around it.

jack kerouac and william s. burroughs, and the hippos were boiled in their tanks
the carr-kammerer killing turned into fiction almost immediately, before either writer was famous and before the beat generation existed as a public category.

joyce johnson, the voice is all
partly because so many later accounts of the early circle depend on her reconstruction of it, including the more complicated picture of carr, kammerer, and ginsberg.

james campbell, this is the beat generation
for the early “libertine circle” before the story becomes the cleaner sequence of canonical books i already know.

paul bowles
more generally for now. i am still at the stage where tangier keeps opening another door and i would rather follow it before pretending i know which bowles book is going to matter most to me.

sources / rabbit hole

the last beat — columbia magazine
the most useful single piece i found for carr, kammerer, the murder, the legal aftermath, and ginsberg's place in the early circle.

kill your darlings — sony pictures classics
among other things, the production material is what finally solved my imaginary “ginsberg raided the library” memory.

interview with john krokidas and austin bunn — writers guild foundation
useful for what the filmmakers thought they were correcting in the carr / kammerer story.

allen ginsberg: beat poet, counterculture icon, psychiatric patient — columbia medicine
on ginsberg's eight months at the new york state psychiatric institute and the relationship between his psychiatric history and his writing.

allen ginsberg — poetry foundation
useful for the drug history, the poems ginsberg associated with particular drugs, and the later political chronology.

beat memories: the photographs of allen ginsberg — national gallery of art
ginsberg's photographs and his later captions are probably my favorite documents i found. they make the private history unusually literal; one of his photographs of burroughs is captioned with the fact that they were lovers in 1953.

naked lunch: the first fifty years — columbia university libraries
manuscripts, correspondence, and the paper trail showing ginsberg and kerouac helping burroughs assemble the book.

introduction to queer — william s. burroughs
the source for burroughs's own later account of joan's death, the “ugly spirit,” and why he connected the event to becoming a writer.

parts unknown: tangier — transcript
the bourdain episode which helped produce this entire secondary rabbit hole.

paul bowles collection — harry ransom center
biographical material and the tangier chronology.

recommendations

howl — allen ginsberg
probably the most obvious place to begin, but obvious for a reason. it is also where this entire rabbit hole began for me.

kill your darlings (2013)
not a documentary, and i would especially keep the carr / kammerer complications above in mind while watching it. still, i recommend it very much. daniel radcliffe's performance particularly impressed me, and some of the imagery is beautiful. my letterboxd review.

queer (2024)
beautiful, lonely, strange, and considerably less interested in making burroughs look cool than one might expect from a film about william burroughs. my letterboxd review.

william s. burroughs, naked lunch
i am currently in the process of reading this. it makes considerably more sense to me now that i know something about tangier, the addiction, and the friends who helped assemble the manuscript.

anthony bourdain, parts unknown: tangier
a very good route from burroughs into the larger mythology of tangier, and then beyond burroughs toward bowles. it is also responsible for at least one false memory i had to correct while writing this post.

paul bowles, the sheltering sky
the paul bowles book i have right now! this is the next direction my tangier rabbit hole is taking me.

tv on the radio, “wolf like me”
a song i like very much and recommend.

last edited: 20 september 2026