The French Genealogy of The Beat Generation - Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac's Appropriations of Modern Literature, From Rimbaud To Michaux

The French Genealogy
of the Beat Generation

The French Genealogy
of the Beat Generation
Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s
Appropriations of Modern Literature,
from Rimbaud to Michaux
Véronique Lane
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
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Names: Lane, Vâeronique author.
Title: The French genealogy of the Beat generation : Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s
appropriations of modern literature, from Rimbaud to Michaux / Vâeronique Lane.
Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017007922 (print) | LCCN 2017027765 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781501325052 (ePub) | ISBN 9781501325069 (ePDF) |
ISBN 9781501325045 (alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: American literature–20th century–History and criticism. |
Beat generation. | American literature–French influences.
Classification: LCC PS228.B6 (ebook) | LCC PS228.B6 L36 2017 (print) |
DDC 810.9/0054–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017007922
ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-2504-5

ePub: 978-1-5013-2505-2
ePDF: 978-1-5013-2506-9
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Pour Viviane Harris,
dont c’est aussi la généalogie
Contents
List of Figures viii

Acknowledgements x
Introduction: Beyond “Rimbaud in a Raincoat” 1
1 Burroughs or Kerouac’s Rimbaud: To Be or Not to Be “L I T E R A R Y” 25

2 French Poetic Realist Film in Kerouac’s Unknown Bookmovie 43
3 Kerouac’s Humanism: From Céline and Dostoevsky to Proust 57
4 Burroughs’ Queer Aesthetics: From Gide to Cocteau 93
5 Looking Back on Ginsberg’s “Howl” from “Apollinaire’s Grave” 115
6 The Pitfalls of Open Secrecy: “Has Nobody Noticed” St.-John Perse? 143
7 Burroughs’ (Anti)humanism: Saint Genet and the Last Lifeboat 169
8 Burroughs’ Mugwumps, Michaux’s Meidosems and the Future
of Literature 187
Conclusion: A Purloined Genealogy 215
Notes 219
Bibliography 235
Index 247
List of Figures
I.1 Allen Ginsberg in Room 25 of the Beat Hotel, 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur,

Paris (1957) © Topfoto, Harold Chapman 18
I.2 William Burroughs reading a bilingual edition of Vents by
St.-John Perse (1953) © Allen Ginsberg LLC 21
I.3 William Burroughs “camping as an André Gidean sophisticate
lecturing the earnest Thomas Wolfean All-American youth Jack
Kerouac” (1953) © Allen Ginsberg LLC 23
1.1 Facsimile, William Burroughs and Gregory Corso, “SONS OF
YOUR IN,” in Minutes to Go (on the left), made from Arthur
Rimbaud’s poem “A une Raison” (on the right) 39
1.2 William Burroughs, photomontage, “Untitled” (1964) © The Estate
of William S. Burroughs, used by permission of The Wylie Agency
LLC. Enlarged: front cover of the bilingual edition of Rimbaud’s
Illuminations that Burroughs used for his cut-ups (Trans. Louise
Varèse. New Directions, 1946) 41
2.1 Three characters’ points of view in Jack Kerouac’s
I Wish I Were You55
8.1 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate I (1948) © Gallimard 196
8.2 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate IX (1948) © Gallimard 196
8.3 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate II (1948) © Gallimard 197
8.4 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate VII (1948) © Gallimard 198
8.5 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate X (1948) © Gallimard 199
8.6 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate XII (1948) © Gallimard 199
8.7 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate III (1948) © Gallimard 200
8.8 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate VI (1948) © Gallimard 201
8.9 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate VIII (1948) © Gallimard 202
8.10 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate V (1948) © Gallimard 203
8.11 Facsimile, page of glyphs from William Burroughs’ letter to Allen
Ginsberg (January 2, 1959) © The Estate of William S. Burroughs,
courtesy of the Allen Ginsberg Papers at Columbia University,
used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC 208
List of Figures ix
8.12 Facsimile, William Burroughs, Episode 9 of “Ten Episodes from

Naked Lunch,” originally published in Big Table, no. 1 (Spring
1959) © The Estate of William S. Burroughs, used by permission
of The Wylie Agency LLC 210
Acknowledgements
I should start by acknowledging the obvious, which is that Burroughs, Ginsberg

and Kerouac’s appropriations of French modern literature and culture reflect
my own intellectual journey. While studying in my native Quebec, completing
my PhD in France, teaching Comparative Literature in the United States, and
researching this book as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the UK, I have met and
corresponded with exceptional people, who helped this book take shape and
whom I wish to thank.
Without the brilliant professors of the Universities of Montreal and Paris
Diderot—Paris VII who introduced me to the works of the French modernists
that would cement the early Beat circle, this study would simply not exist. For
initiating me without an inch of cynicism to their genius, my first thanks go
to Evelyne Grossman, Jean Larose, Catherine Mavrikakis, Ginette Michaud,
Michel Pierssens, Pierre Popovic and Sébastien Ruffo. As the following pages
make clear, literary appropriation is a violent process that rarely goes without
betrayal and if some of them have been encouraging—in particular Michel
Pierssens, who immediately saw the importance of the Franco-American
genealogy I wanted to explore as well as if not better than I could—I am aware
others would disapprove of my comparing the French poems and novels they
taught me so well to the works of the so-called founders of the Beat Generation.
That is, in Francophone even more than in Anglophone academia, Burroughs,
Ginsberg and Kerouac’s works are still largely devalued, and I hope this book
will prompt readers and scholars on both sides of the Atlantic to discover or
rediscover them.
In this vein, I would like to salute the open-mindedness of Jeff Rider and
of my former colleagues Andrew Curran, Catherine Ostrow and Catherine
Poisson in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Wesleyan
University, who unconditionally allowed me—invited me, even—to include
Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s works to the reading list of one of the
modules of Comparative Literature I taught there; and I thank my students for
their contagious enthusiasm about the Franco-American material I brought into
our classroom, in particular Sanam Mechkat, Christopher Scott and Lauren
Valentino.
Acknowledgements xi
The patient close textual analyses that follow would also have been impossible
without the two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship I was awarded by the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), to work on
this book at the Research Institute for the Humanities of Keele University in
the UK; and at Keele, I would like to give my warmest thanks to the members
of the David Bruce Centre for American Studies for taking interest in my early
research findings, in particular Ian Bell, James Peacock, Axel Schaeffer and John
Shapcott.
As most comparativist studies, this book was enriched by a multitude of
intercultural exchanges. The European Beat Studies Network annual conferences
have been the point of departure of many such longstanding conversations, and
I am deeply grateful to its members for welcoming my comparativist papers,
providing orientation and instilling their own energy and excitement in my work
over the years, especially Peggy Pacini and Frank Rynne, but also: Anna Aublet,
Jaap van der Bent, Alexander Greiffenstern, Tim Hunt, Hassan Melehy, Gerald
Nicosia, A. Robert Lee, Polina Mackay, Ian MacFadyen, Arthur Nusbaum, Jim
Pennington, Davis Schneiderman, Raven See, Keith Seward, Tomasz Stompor,
Chad Weidner, Regina Weinreich and Alex Wermer-Colan.
For supporting my two months of archival research in the William Burroughs
and Jack Kerouac Papers kept in the Berg Collection of the New York Public
Library, I thank curator Isaac Gewirtz, as well as librarians Lyndsi Barnes and
Joshua McKeon for their assistance. I would also like to thank Haaris Naqvi,
publisher at Bloomsbury, and his editorial assistant Katherine De Chant, for
their diligence and genuine will to help at all stages of the book’s conception.
For permission to reproduce unpublished material and for his precious
words of encouragement over the years, I thank James Grauerholz, Executor
of the Estate of William S. Burroughs, and for letting me use the New York
Morningside Heights photograph for the book’s cover and reproduce two more
photographs taken and captioned by Ginsberg, Peter Hale, Manager of the Allen
Ginsberg Trust. I am also grateful to Harold Chapman for his kind permission
to reproduce his photograph of Ginsberg seated under the portrait of Rimbaud,
as well as to Micheline Phankim, Frank Leibovici and Charles Gil at Gallimard,
for allowing me to reproduce the series of lithographs that Michaux created for
the first edition of Meidosems.
I acknowledge that preliminary versions of Chapters 1, 2 and 5 have been
published in the following journals and volumes: “The Parting of Burroughs and
Kerouac: The French Backstory to the First Beat Novel, from Rimbaud to Poetic
xii Acknowledgements
Realist Cinema,” in Comparative American Studies 11.3 (2013); “Allen Ginsberg’s

Translations of Apollinaire and Genet in the Development of his Poetics of ‘Open
Secrecy,’” in Comparative Literature and Culture 18.5 (2016); and “Rimbaud
and Genet: Burroughs’ Favourite mirrors,” in William S. Burroughs: Cutting Up
The Century, edited by Joan Hawkins and Alex Wermer-Colan (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2018). Material for this book was also summarized in
the paper I gave at the Centre Georges Pompidou in September 2016, published
in French as “La Littérature française aux sources de la Beat Generation” in Beat
Generation: l’inservitude volontaire, edited by Olivier Penot-Lacassagne (Paris:
Presses du CNRS, 2017).
Special thanks to Olivier Penot-Lacassagne for organizing the latter
conference at the Centre Georges Pompidou, which opened a dialogue between
French and English speaking scholars. I am also grateful to Albert Dichy, Jean-
Jacques Lebel, and Christophe Lebold for their valuable comments on my paper,
and to Luc Sante for inspiring discussions on the early Beat circle and New York’s
evolution since then.
Above all, I would like to thank my husband, Oliver Harris, for giving ear to
my book project on that hot summer day in 2009, during the events to mark the
fiftieth anniversary of Naked Lunch he co-organized in Paris. The plaque of the
Beat Hotel had just been unveiled and Gît-le-Coeur was in full swing, when he
left aside the feast and discerned through my franglais of the time what was to
become this study. Most readers of Burroughs criticism will likely recognize that
I have taken further and in new directions discoveries and insightful arguments
he has made over the course of his scholarship. I am so grateful to him for
his sharp readings, his faithful moral support, our literary and non-literary
conversations, and for all the days he spent out and about with our little Viviane,
which allowed me to complete this book: I dedicate it to her, but I owe it to him!
May it remind us how lucky we are to have met and shared our unabashed love
for that “whole boatload of sensitive bullshit […] into the street” that fine day
in Paris.
Introduction:
Beyond “Rimbaud in a Raincoat”
Allen Ginsberg sits cross-legged on the bed of his room in the Beat Hotel, posing
for the camera with a self-conscious smile beneath a painted portrait of Arthur
Rimbaud on the wall behind him. It is the Left Bank in Paris, late 1957, a decade
after the early Beat circle formed in 1944 and Jack Kerouac hung a card on the
wall of his room in Warren Hall round the corner from Columbia University, on
which he had written “The Blood of the Poet” after Jean Cocteau’s film Le Sang
d’un poète in his own blood. Downtown in Greenwich village, the library shelves
of William Burroughs are an esoteric mix of literature, science and philosophy,
but what catches the eye, what most fires the eager minds of Ginsberg and
Kerouac when they discover it in 1944, are his copies of Céline’s Journey to the
End of the Night, Cocteau’s Opium and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud.1
This triptych of vignettes in 1940s New York and 1950s Paris make up a seductive
scene in the popular imaginary, but it is not the French genealogy of the Beat
Generation. To discover it, we need to start again, from the beginning, looking
more carefully, reading more closely, rereading each of their oeuvres.
***
A French Education
In August 1944, the eighteen-year old Columbia University freshman Allen

Ginsberg writes to his new friend Jack Kerouac, addressing him as “Cher Jacques”
(Kerouac and Ginsberg, Letters, 3). Ginsberg’s striking use of French, repeated
in this letter and the many others he would exchange with Kerouac, might at
first sight appear no more than a gesture to his correspondent’s Francophone
childhood and Canuck heritage,2 since Kerouac himself affectionately addressed
2 The French Genealogy of the Beat Generation
Ginsberg as “Mon garcon” [My boy] or “Cher jeune singe” [Dear young ape]
(14, 17). But when a year later William Burroughs signs off his own first letter
to Ginsberg with not one but two French closures, the common “Veuillez
accepter mes sentiments les plus cordiaux” [Yours sincerely] and the passionate
“Je vis pour te revoir” [I live to see you again], it completes a symbolic chain of
correspondence (Burroughs, Letters, 3).3 Since Burroughs is writing to Ginsberg
rather than to the bilingual Kerouac, it is even more emphatic: the early Beat
circle is connected through the language of the literature that shaped the oeuvres
of all three of its major writers.
Not only were the first surviving documents of the Beat Generation bilingual
or, to be more precise, written in English and framed by French, but the very term
“Beat Generation” was first theorized through the French writer and philosopher
Jean-Paul Sartre. In his 1952 New York Times essay “This Is the Beat Generation,”
John Clellon Holmes defined it as the product of postwar Sartrean Existentialism
and of the prewar Lost Generation—itself identified with American expatriate
writers in Paris—and so established the crucially Franco-American historical
narrative of its origins. The title of Holmes’ article in effect invokes the
conversation in which Kerouac initially coined the phrase “Beat Generation” in
fall 1948, a time when “Existentialism was so popular among young intellectuals
in New York,” note Ann and Samuel Charters, “that had Kerouac shared Holmes’
passion for philosophy, he might have said, ‘We’re an Existentialist generation,’
and the word ‘Beat’ might not have come up at all” (Charters, Brother-Souls, 410).
In the 1940s, foreign literature in general and French literature in particular
were in fact inescapable for those with a dissenting philosophy of life and creative
ambitions. In the prologue to his first published book, Junky in 1953, we thus find
Burroughs invoking a roll call of non-American writers who seduced him as a
teenager and implicitly formed him as a writer: “Oscar Wilde, Anatole France,
Baudelaire, even Gide” (Burroughs, Junky, xxxviii). Backdated to childhood, the
literary genealogy through which he defines his social and cultural alienation
here is three-quarters French, and would inspire later critics to forge similar
identifications. One of the earliest reviews of Burroughs, by Kenneth Allsop in
1960, hence declared: “He is a Rimbaud in a raincoat, with his nearest modern
equivalent in Jean Genet” (Allsop, “Rimbaud in a Raincoat,” 8). This arresting
image conveyed an astute insight, but one of a variety that has been repeated and
repeated, rather than critically developed.
The general visibility of the Beat Generation has been a measure of its
wide and enduring cultural success. No other grouping of American writers
Beyond “Rimbaud in a Raincoat” 3
and few individuals can claim the popular and creative impact exercised by
Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac. Their initial encounters in mid-1940s New
York have long fascinated the imagination, so much so that it has become a
familiar episode in American cultural history. However, their encounters came
about not simply because Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac moved in a circle
of Columbia University aspiring writers, but also because they were intense
Francophiles. Ranging from a passion for 1930s films starring Jean Gabin to
the paintings of Paul Cézanne, the Francophilia of the Beats colors their early
correspondence and conversations. In fact, Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac
were not only brought together by French modern writers; over decades, their
own writing was materially sustained by the works of Rimbaud, Proust, Gide,
Apollinaire, St.-John Perse, Céline, Cocteau, Genet, Michaux—and this list is by
no means exhaustive.
The case of this book, then, is double. Had it not been for French literature,
there might well have been no Beat Generation, no crucial common ground
of shared literary passion and curiosity to bring together those who would
become its major writers: Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s immersion in
French novels and poems was there from the beginning, from the genesis of
their own individual oeuvres; and it would indeed prove inseparable from their
works for more than a decade and remained a vital presence long after. The
weighting of its importance, the role it played of course varied over time and
from writer to writer. There was no program here, no manifesto. Most obviously,
the trajectory of Kerouac’s career was not at all the same as that of Burroughs or
Ginsberg, given the turn his life took—his tragic decline and early death—which
robbed him of a chance to go beyond the intensely fertile “Duluoz Legend” he
composed from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s. But as will become clear, to
study the genealogy of the Beat Generation’s first major writers—how each in
their distinct ways conceived and developed their work—is first and foremost to
study a French genealogy.
In order to recognize relationships between individual writers that are
emphatically textual, omitted here are the broader connections between Beat
literature and French cultural movements such as Surrealism and Situationism
that have been addressed by other scholars in the field.4 Sustained close textual
analysis also requires focusing on fewer authors, and here the choice of the “big
three”—Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac—rests on the foundational nature
of their works: the need to begin at the beginning. It goes without saying that
this focus isn’t meant as a regressive move but as a resolutely pragmatic one, the
necessary prerequisite for future scholarship to explore in detail the fertilizing

presence of French and other literatures in the work of so many other Beat and
later post-Beat artists: from Gregory Corso to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Brenda
Frazer, Brion Gysin, Ted Joans, LeRoi Jones, Bob Kaufman, Philip Lamantia,
Michael McClure, Diane di Prima, Patti Smith, Gary Snyder or ruth weiss.5
Focusing on Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s oeuvres also necessarily
means leaving to other scholars work inflected in terms of race and gender; to
investigate, for example, if the Beats’ French pantheon of inspirational writers
was as exclusively male as it seems, or to analyze comparatively the role of Genet
for Patti Smith and Brenda Frazer.6 Indeed, this book hopes to stimulate further
work along these lines, modeling what others might achieve through detailed
genealogical studies of texts in the far larger field of Beat culture beyond the
“big three.”
More specifically, this study’s focus aims to redress from the origin point of
the Beat movement—from the very first Beat novel cowritten by Burroughs
and Kerouac in the 1940s—what the biographical accounts of the three authors
living and writing as expatriates in Paris in the late 1950s have overlooked: long
before they set foot in France, the founding authors of the Beat Generation
distinguished themselves from one another, as well as from their contemporaries,
by engaging with different French authors. Even when Burroughs, Ginsberg and
Kerouac were drawn to the same French texts, they constructed them in distinct
ways, putting them to different symbolic or creative uses as if reading quite
different works. It is no coincidence that one of the most famous landmarks
in the well-documented narrative established by cultural historians Barry Miles
and James Campbell, and the only building known by the label “Beat,” is located
in Paris: the Beat Hotel, at 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur.7 But as this book clarifies, the
allure of French culture and of France was in itself of very little importance for
the foundational works of the Beat Generation. Rather, Burroughs, Ginsberg and
Kerouac engaged in a double movement with French writers and their writings.
First, they identified with the poems and novels of specific authors whose
status as outsiders within their own societies enabled them to explore ways
out of their own. That is, Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac couldn’t have been
more worthy successors of Artaud who affirmed writing for the “illiterates”;
of Genet who saw himself as “the interpreter of human trash”; or of Michaux
whose wish was to address “the weak, the ill and the ill-adapted, the children,
the oppressed and misfits of all kinds.”8 There were personal motives for why
they were drawn to certain French writers rather than others, but the historical
reasons for their preferences remain more significant. Despite the class and
ethnic heterogeneity of their backgrounds—put reductively, Burroughs the
WASP midwesterner, Ginsberg the socialist intellectual Jew and Kerouac the
Canuck scholarship football jock—and despite the distinctiveness of the oeuvres
they went on to produce, they were all inspired by French writers of radical
otherness who projected their own resistance as Americans to an increasingly
conformist national identity. That is, put in the equally reductive terms of their
American reception: Rimbaud who deserted not only his country but literature
itself; Genet the orphan, exile and thief; Gide who defied the prohibitions on
homosexuality; or Artaud who denouced the madness of society from the
asylum. In the famous opening line of “Howl,” Ginsberg wrote that he had seen
the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness, but he made no secret
of having read it first in Artaud, the poet “suicided by society”: “Artaud alone
made accusation/against America,/Before me” (Journals: Early Fifties, 195). That
first level of appropriation, which consists in borrowing or adopting a certain
author’s posture, is often noticed, but has also more often than not led to adding
icons to icons, to augmenting an already problematic mythology. Misreading
the Beats has indeed often gone hand in hand with misreading their French
predecessors, most notably Artaud, whose complex concept of “cruelty” escaped
Ginsberg and still escapes most readers, French ones included. For this reason, I
touch upon Ginsberg’s rapport with Artaud’s works but don’t make it the focus of
Chapter 5, instead giving priority to genealogical and intertextual relationships
that were less obvious but turn out to be more profound, especially his relation
with St.-John Perse.
Second, and therefore more central to this study, are the engagements made
by Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac with specific French texts that enabled
them to develop their own experiments to achieve aesthetic and ontological
otherness through writing. Paris was to that effect a natural but strictly symbolic
destination. Gregory Corso’s reflections after meeting Genet and Michaux in late
1958 draw this crucial distinction, sharply dividing the authors and the French
capital from the vitality of their works: “They are dead here, and all is good in
their writing yet they, themselves as heroic or mad or eccentric, no: stale all of it”
(An Accidental Autobiography, 182). What drew the Beats to such French writers
was not so much the allure of national difference as an identification with those
who resisted, even betrayed national identity through writing.
In Beat Studies, the issue of national identity has been revised dramatically
over time. Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac were once seen as quintessentially
American cultural rebels, whether paralleled with nineteenth-century

predecessors or situated historically as reacting to Cold War politics and
consumer society. The opening chapter of Tim Hunt’s seminal study Kerouac’s
Crooked Road (1981) is hence titled “An American Education” and convincingly
analyzes Kerouac’s rewriting of Twain, Melville and Fitzgerald. In the last decade,
however, the emphasis has shifted and the Beats have been redefined as global
travellers whose works engaged the world beyond the borders of America and
its national literature, notably in The Transnational Beat Generation edited by
Jennie Skerl and Nancy Grace (2012), the “Beat Generation and Europe” special
issue of Comparative American Studies edited by Polina Mackay and Chad
Weidner (2013) and World Beats: Beat Generation Writing and the Worlding of
U.S. Literature by Jimmy Fazzino (2016).
Kerouac’s hybrid identity is, in that context, increasingly studied in ways that
complement the quite different focus of this study, for example by critics who
explore the legacy of his oeuvre in Quebec and Canada.9 In 2016, three major
publications also opened up the question of his oeuvre’s national identity as never
before: Hassan Melehy’s monograph Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory; the
volume of Kerouac’s Francophone writings edited by Jean-Christophe Cloutier,
thanks to which texts such as “Sur le chemin” and “La nuit est ma femme” that
were only accessible to scholars in the Berg Collection of the New York Public
Library can now be read by all; and the publication of Kerouac’s journals and
early works in the collection of archival writings The Unknown Kerouac edited
by Todd Tietchen. Chapter 2 provides the first detailed analysis of such a text:
that is, I Wish I Were You (1945). His journals from 1950 to 1951 are vital because
they document just how important process was to Kerouac’s writing, and that is
why they prove so valuable a resource for this study. Chapter 3 thus explores the
genesis of the mysterious “IT” given as the goal of On the Road, rather than seeks
to give it a meaning. Kerouac’s early journals also demonstrate how integral his
French literary genealogy was to the emergence and development of his oeuvre.
The density and intensity of Kerouac’s appropriations of Proust and Céline’s
works, however, point up a striking absence. Despite claiming his Franco-
American origins and Canuck identity, Kerouac never once references works
of literature or art from Quebec;10 his identifications with and appropriations of
Francophone culture are with French culture.
As Peggy Pacini argues in her astute reading of Satori in Paris (1966), where
Kerouac relates his pilgrimage to Brittany in search of his family name, the frequency
and range of his literary references—to Balzac, Breton, Céline, Chateaubriand,
Hugo, de Montherlant, Pascal, Proust, Stendhal, Villon and Voltaire—indeed

force us to wonder whether “the quest for his literary forbears might not be
more important than the quest for his family ancestors” (Pacini, 297). Ironically,
those references do not in themselves make Satori in Paris a valuable text for
studying Kerouac’s literary genealogy; on the contrary, they float on its surface,
and are therefore quite distinct from the integral presence of French writing
in the creative process we find in the journals Kerouac kept at the beginning
of his oeuvre. But acknowledging his literary forbears is essential, as Melehy
rightly insists, for to omit Kerouac’s immersion in their works is “tantamount to
denying him any chance at being a real writer” and to perpetuating the myth of
his “semiliteracy.” This book, then, attempts to answer the “open question” raised
by Melehy’s study of Kerouac’s Francophone origins and their impact on his
writing, which is “how effectively” Kerouac’s appropriations of French literature
also informed and shaped his oeuvre (Melehy, 4).
If new publications of Kerouac’s Francophone and early writings further
stress his hybrid identity, they raise one more question that equally applies to
Ginsberg and Burroughs: What was their command of French? The evidence is
often unclear, for there are, of course, important distinctions between abilities
to read, write or translate another language, which compound the difficulty
in drawing conclusions about the level of competence in French shown by
the three writers. Burroughs’ case seems straightforward, since he was always
modest about his ability. And yet, as Chapter 1 shows, he engaged in detail
with a bilingual edition of Rimbaud’s poetry, and he was sufficiently sensitive
to the issue to dispute the translation of one of Genet’s novels, “which is not
bad except for the dialogue,” he tells Ginsberg; “Why not leave the French argot
and explain meaning?” (Burroughs, Letters, 289). This was in fall 1955, at a time
when Ginsberg was making his own highly sophisticated translations of Genet’s
poetry, even though he later claimed he could barely “scan newspapers” and it
took him half an hour with a dictionary to read a page (qtd. in Journals: Mid-
Fifties, 340). As Chapter 6 demonstrates, Ginsberg’s translations of Apollinaire
actually reveal a systematic and creative appropriation of French modernist
poetry, confirming his aesthetics were not only informed by a rich genealogy
but inseparable from it.
Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s use of French in their early
correspondence symbolically put the seal on their desire to become “men of
letters,” but for Kerouac this symbolism had a literal dimension, revealed in
his first journals when he envisages writing his life’s work in the language of
his youth: “My life’s work would be written in the language I was raised in—
French, Canuck, or Cajun” (La Vie est d’hommage, 267; my translation).11 The
hesitation in how best to name the language of his youth (“Français, Canuck,
ou Cajun”) poignantly expresses the difficulty of Kerouac’s ambition. But just as
telling is the phrase in Kerouac’s original, “l’ouvrage de ma vie,” which I translate
here as “my life’s work,” for it is ambiguous, meaning both “autobiography” and
“masterpiece.” Furthermore, this ambiguity is itself ambiguous; that is, it might
be calculated—since for Kerouac there was no distinction between the two
meanings—or it might be accidental; it depends on our sense of his command
of French, the evidence for which is contradictory. His “Commentaire sur Louis-
Ferdinand Céline” analyzed in Chapter 3, for example, seems to show a definite
mastery of French, but the contrast to his other Francophone writings, full of
misspellings or Québécois idioms, is so striking that Cloutier’s question—“Must
we conclude he was helped?” (335; my translation)—begs another: Did someone
else translate it into French for him? It turns out that Kerouac’s recently published
“Commentaire” raises larger questions of reception, since this fascinating text
was indeed mistaken for a work originally composed in French by Kerouac,
when his piece was initially written and published in English (first in the Paris
Review, and then in Good Blonde & Others). In short, the question of Kerouac’s
mastery of French underlines the need for whoever raises it to take into account
three factors: Kerouac’s multiple readerships, what is often lost or gained in
translation and, above all, the impossibility of answering this question with an
objective answer.
In order to establish, if not always prove, the direct engagement of all three
major Beat writers with French literature in the original, as well as in translation,
I maintain as tight a textual focus as possible. But French literature is such a
fundamental intertext for the works of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac
that it far exceeds the scope of a single book. As a result, I have often given
priority to relatively unknown or unpublished works at the expense of more
familiar canonical texts. For instance, I analyze Burroughs’ neglected cut-ups
of Rimbaud’s poetry in Minutes to Go (1960) rather than reread Naked Lunch
as a work in the tradition of Céline. Lack of space to make detailed readings
has also meant leaving out writers as important as Charles Baudelaire—whose
structural role in Kerouac’s The Subterraneans deserves more recognition—or
Tristan Corbière, a crucial source for Ginsberg’s “Howl” that is always passed
over. Future scholars will, I hope, be inspired to redress these and many other
lacunae. Finally, if I focus on modern French literature, it’s because that is the
main field of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s appropriations, but it comes

not only at the expense of significant pre-modern French writers such as
Rabelais,12 but of other European traditions, from the German and Spanish to
the Irish and the Russian, which also fed into the writers’ works; I found space
here for Dostoevsky, but not Goethe, Kafka, Mann, Spengler, Lorca, Yeats, Joyce
or Mayakovski.
Other European literary genealogies and their interactions with Anglo-
American traditions indeed remain to be established at the level of close textual
analysis, which is where the sweeping panoramic view often changes beyond
recognition. The value of such a genealogical approach is quite distinct from, and
yet complementary to, current trends in Beat Studies. For increasingly the field
has been redefined from an American phenomenon into a broad area of writers
and artists that geographically embraces Latin America, India and Europe as
sites of reciprocal influence. What is the particular need and benefit, then, of
a comparative reading of the three major American writers’ engagements with
specifically French texts? Such an approach is necessary for historical reasons
to do with the precise circumstances in which the early Beat circle formed; for
cultural reasons to do with how the critical field has been constructed; and for
methodological reasons to do with how the Franco-American connection has
been studied so far.
Lost in Translation
To begin with, the encounters of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac in mid-

1940s New York coincided with the rise of overwhelming American military,
economic and cultural power. In such a context, they contested definitions of
American national identity but lacked ideological alternatives or any models of
writing and living beyond the nation state, and French literature had the appeal
of a readymade mark of cultural difference, of moral and artistic otherness. That
is, literature in France could transcend crime, as in the spectacular pardons given
to Genet in 1943 and 1949, supported by testimony from Cocteau and letters
signed by Sartre and Prévert among others.13 Still today, it is hard to imagine
any other country exonerating a thief simply because he was a writer of genius,
so that the traditions and status of French literature made it an historically
determined choice for the Beats. This appeal is very precisely reflected in the
references to national literatures made by Burroughs and Kerouac in the novel
they coauthored in 1945, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (2008).
Although generally dismissed as no more than a biographical curiosity, this
short text is dense with reflections on literature, film, philosophy and visual
art, and it comes as a shock to realize how few allusions there are to American
culture (only eight out of thirty-two). The overwhelming majority of the cultural
references are not only European (twenty-four out of thirty-two) but specifically
French (out of these twenty-four references, eighteen are French). That is,
French writers helped shape the thought of Kerouac and Burroughs, and indeed
Ginsberg, as much as their American predecessors or contemporaries, and more
than any other national literatures did, from the English (Shakespeare, Shelley,
T.S. Eliot) and Irish (Yeats, Joyce, Beckett) to the German (Goethe, Rilke, Kafka)
and Russian (Dostoevsky, Gogol, Mayakovski). At the same time, as Chapter 1
shows through close readings of Hippos, its focus on Rimbaud as the poet of
Bohemia turns out to be a revealing site of conflict, showing how differently
Burroughs and Kerouac read Rimbaud and approached literature. I take this
more nuanced reading of Hippos further in Chapter 2, demonstrating how
significantly Kerouac engaged with French poetic realist cinema in the novel’s
revised version, I Wish I Were You, written solely by Kerouac in 1945 and only
published in the “Appendix” of The Unknown Kerouac in 2016. In its name-
dropping and bohemianism, the novel Kerouac and Burroughs coauthored then
reflects the superficial fascination that drew the Beat circle together around
the rebellious postures taken by French authors, but Kerouac’s rewriting of it
begins to critique and go beyond the lure of biography and sociology, shifting
towards a direct involvement with the French texts and films themselves—which
is likewise my approach in this study.
Engaging with particular works by French writers remained creatively
important across the entire oeuvres of Kerouac, Burroughs and Ginsberg
because, for them, writing was never bound by issues defined by national
identity. While French literature determined the emergence of the Beats in the
1940s, both the Beat field and the horizons of its major figures broadened to
embrace other non-American cultures and societies from the 1950s onward:
Burroughs moved through Mexico and Latin America to North Africa and then
Europe, while Ginsberg and to a lesser extent Kerouac followed his tracks. In
terms of national identity, the logic of their travels could be said to result in the
1959 publication in Paris of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, which Mary McCarthy
accurately described as a novel “based on statelessness” (in Skerl and Lydenberg,
33). Identifying Burroughs’ masterpiece as one of the first truly transnational
texts, McCarthy also logically called time on the Beat Generation. By 1959, even
as media attention peaked, the label had already begun to lose its usefulness as
a way to describe a specific form of American activity distinct from a broader
countercultural movement. In other words, as an historical term, functional
from 1945 to 1960, “the Beat Generation” was founded on an engagement with
French texts.14
The second major reason for my comparativist approach is to redress the
Americano-centrism that has characterized previous work in the field and
confined the possibilities of studying the Beats’ appropriations of French
literature and culture to Surrealism or Dadaism. This limitation is visible
even when the most attentive transnational critics directly recognize the
problem, as when Fazzino asserts that “the Beats owe as much to international
traditions of futurism, Dada, and especially surrealism as they do a strictly
American tradition of Whitminian democracy and the open-road mythos”(65).
Whereas the “American tradition” is represented here by a named poet—Walt
Whitman—“international traditions” are reduced to the names of movements.
The Beats have often been linked with the surrealists, but they in fact actively
resisted being identified with them. When interviewed by a French art magazine
in 1959, Corso complained: “They wanted me to say the Beat Generation is
founded on surrealism […] I don’t think surrealism has anything to do with
Beat” (228; my emphasis). Corso’s act of resistance against this attempt to put
words into his mouth powerfully expresses the importance of getting such
genealogies right. It is forty years since John Tytell’s pioneering Naked Angels
(1976), a study of the three major Beat writers in a traditional “Lives and
Literature” format that nevertheless acknowledged the importance of European
literary genealogies. Yet, in American criticism, the Beats’ French connection
is still constructed overwhelmingly in two ways: sociologically, the Americans
appear as mid-twentieth-century followers of late nineteenth-century French
Bohemians; and biographically, their expatriate days in Paris have put them in
the footsteps of the Lost Generation, updated to feature nostalgia for the city’s
Dada and surrealist heritage. Corso and Ginsberg had arrived in Paris in 1957,
followed a year later by Burroughs, and before they forged new creative circles
involving the likes of Brion Gysin and Harold Norse; they did naturally seek
out the past in the shape of Tristan Tzara, Man Ray, Benjamin Péret, André
Breton, Marcel Duchamp and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Jean-Jacques Lebel,
from a younger generation, helped make such social introductions, but he also
more substantively introduced Ginsberg, Burroughs and Corso to the notorious
recording of To Have Done with the Judgment of God (“Pour en finir avec le
jugement de dieu” [1947]) that brought alive “the sound and the fury of Artaud”
(Lebel, in Harris and MacFadyen, 85). However, while Burroughs embraced
Tzara, he ignored Duchamp and attacked Breton as the Pope of Surrealism. In
fact, like Corso, Burroughs had little admiration for Surrealism and would surely
have agreed with Michaux’s definition of poetry against automatic writing as
“graphic incontinence” (Michaux, Oeuvres I, 60; my translation).15 Ginsberg was
also very aware of a definite tendency in American criticism to conflate “French”
with “Surrealism,” and so in the variorum edition of “Howl” he took care to
prevent the numerous and important French sources for his poem’s composition
being associated even loosely with Surrealism, not mincing his words: “This is
not surrealism—they made up an artificial literary imitation” (Howl, 153).16
Of course, the Beats’ recriminations can be interpreted as overly defensive, but
many writers concur with Corso, Burroughs and Ginsberg’s own views that, if Beat
and surrealist poetries have affinities, they nevertheless diverge in fundamental
ways. In 2011, Bénédicte Gorrillot conducted an enlightening interview with the
French poet Christian Prigent that problematizes, rather than succumbs to, this
longstanding conjunction of the Beats with French Surrealism by both American
and French scholars. Like most French readers, Prigent discovered Beat poetry
through the anthology edited by Alain Jouffroy and translated by Jean-Jacques
Lebel in 1965. In the interview, Prigent praises Jouffroy’s preface, but also blames
him for what is now a quasi-automatic association of the American Beats with
the French surrealists: “Jouffroy’s preface, I had read it a lot. It strongly influenced
me, to read Ginsberg, even if he pulls the Beats too much towards Surrealism,
like a transposition in the USA of Surrealism—what is inexact and drowns
the ‘Beat’ difference” (Gorrillot, 118–19; my translation).17 In Burroughs and
Ginsberg’s works, Prigent thus claims having found, more than a mere alternative
to Surrealism, “the opposite of surrealist sublimation”:
What overwhelmed me, in the 65 Lebel/Jouffroy anthology, […] is the power of

this new lyricism […] Its auditory mode of apparition: euphoric threnody, wild
song, hoarseness, obscene provocation. And writing-wise, its politico-sexual
bluntness […]—the opposite of surrealist sublimation and, in general, of the
sentimentalism and narrowness of contemporaneous French poetry. A reality
effect, in sum (the reality as “what we bang ourselves on”).18
Prigent’s eloquent description of Beat poetry doesn’t only distinguish it

from surrealist poetry; it attacks it through a criticism that Gorrillot rightly
brings together with Georges Bataille’s own put-down of Surrealism as overly

disconnected from reality.19 Prigent even goes so far as to affirm that Ginsberg’s
works offered him a salutary way out of Surrealism.20
When Anglophone critics have discussed American appropriations of
French culture, they have rarely drawn on such Francophone criticism or
engaged with primary texts, except in translation. Reciprocally, French
academic work in the Beat field lacks almost any engagement with the work
of Anglo-American critics.21 Only very recently did the well-documented
French volume Contre-Cultures! edited by Christophe Bourseiller and Olivier
Penot-Lacassagne (2013) and the catalog of the exhibition Beat Generation:
New York San Francisco Paris at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris
(2016) adopt a comparative approach fed by both cultures. Another short
but important French publication intimates the possibility of change: the
dossier “Under drug influence” published by Le Magazine Littéraire in April
2014, which devoted a special section to Burroughs alongside Baudelaire,
Artaud and Michaux. In the same vein, one French monograph that might
have developed a comparative reading of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s
literary debts to French modernity is Max Milner’s L’imaginaire des drogues: De
Thomas de Quincey à Henri Michaux (2000), had its author been less hostile,
perhaps, towards American literature. Indeed, the introduction of this study
curiously ends on an abrupt justification for excluding Beat writers: “The
beatnik movement of the 1950s and beyond in America has deliberately been
left out. Although it often claimed an association to Michaux (who explicitly
denied it), it is a fact of civilization, linked to socio-political circumstances,
spaces, means of communication, which calls for this wide phenomenon
to be studied by itself ” (Milner, 12; my translation). It is telling of French
criticism’s outdated perspective that Milner here “deliberately” succumbs
to the unfortunate confusion of the terms “Beat” and “Beatnik” with which
Anglophone Beat Studies had to battle for so long.22 Refusing even to name
any Beat writer, Milner’s exclusion typifies a regressive attitude both towards
comparative literature in general and towards the Beats in particular within
French criticism, refusing them the status of writers and therefore their works
the literary attention they deserve.
In short, American Beat Studies might have taken a transnational turn
over the last decade, but there are still few Francophone publications that
study Beat literature comparatively, and Francophone and Anglophone Beat
scholarships remain two solitudes. The cultural one-sidedness of each academic
tradition has made it almost impossible to understand the very bridging of

cultures that characterizes the oeuvres of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac,
and has also made it impossible to grasp their misappropriations and creative
misreadings of French texts. One more contribution of this study, then, is to
bring the Francophone and Anglophone academic worlds together through a
bicultural approach informed by both critical traditions and by my own frequent
translations of French texts and criticism.
The comparative approach taken in the following pages finally rests on a
question of material necessity. The book’s purpose is to give depth to the
familiar Franco-American axis invoked in Beat Studies, which demands
making close textual readings of its three foundational oeuvres. The devil is
in the textual detail, and the aim to explore material appropriations, rather
than to speak in vague terms of authors exerting influence, is my response
to seeing the dead ends into which such approaches have often led. What is
needed are routes that take us further into the works themselves. And so, while
I won’t favor on theoretical grounds any one of the possible range of terms to
describe intertextual relationships—from “borrowing, stealing, appropriating,
inheriting, assimilating,” to “rewriting, reworking, refashioning, re-vision, re-
evaluation” (Sanders, 3)—I will specifically avoid speaking loosely of “influence.”
The comparative approach I embrace here is also distinct from the multiple
readings unified by a single thematic or polemic that typifies transnational
approaches to postwar American literature. Trading a survey of broad cultural
histories or localized analyses for sustained textual readings across whole
oeuvres is, I believe, the surest way to contest and revise from its starting
point a Franco-American narrative that has long been highly visible and yet
taken as read.
The chapters that follow are accordingly structured by a chronology that,
beginning with the first Beat novella in 1945, has a strong narrative line, but
is flexible enough to work throughout the authors’ entire oeuvres. Because the
genesis of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s texts from the mid-1940s and on
through the 1950s coincided so precisely with their intense engagement with
French literature, the weighting of attention is naturally but not exclusively
on their earlier writing. That is, my interest has less to do with advancing
interpretations of particular texts than with unravelling the process behind
them, exploring how Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac conceived their work,
in both meanings of the term. This study, then, not only explores how engaging
with certain French texts was essential to the genesis of specific works, but also
how Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac used those French texts to measure
the achievement and reception of their own oeuvres. For example, Chapter 3
draws in detail on Kerouac’s early journals, which illuminate his writing as the
progress of a constant appropriation, based on how closely he read and reflected
on Céline and Proust when composing On the Road and Visions of Cody, while
my analysis of his late commentary “On Céline” invites us to see Kerouac
measuring his own work in the retrospective light of Céline’s. Chapters 5 and
6 likewise demonstrate the genetic role of French poetry for Ginsberg’s early
poems, with special attention to Apollinaire, while they also enlighten how, in
the variorum edition of “Howl” that Ginsberg assembled three decades after,
he looks back on his most famous poem in order to project the genealogical
context he desired for his oeuvre as a whole. In the same vein, Chapter 7
shows Burroughs’ intense but ambivalent admiration for Genet by closely
reading his last book, My Education (1995), where he reflects on A Prisoner
of Love, Genet’s own last book. This reading helps grasp Burroughs’ anxieties
about his achievements as a writer that go back forty years to when he was
reading Genet’s The Thief ’s Journal while writing Naked Lunch. Taken together,
these comparative analyses reveal how Genet came to stand as a threatening
ideal of the posthuman otherness to which Burroughs’ work had always been
committed.
Finally, to contextualize the book’s conclusion, which necessitates a more
theorized frame of reference, we should go back to the beginning and recall that,
while Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac met through Columbia University, they
built their oeuvres outside the walls of the academy and against academic culture.
At one moment or another, critics, scholars, let alone teachers, must therefore
wrestle with the paradox that most types of critical discourse seem to go against
the grain of their revolutionary oeuvres, to denature them. My micro-readings
here aim to show that by appropriating French modern oeuvres that themselves
shook French literature and society, Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac were
not only revolutionary in transporting literature out of the suffocating world
of academia and the conservative discourses of postwar America, but also in
breathing life into literature itself. The horizon of this book, then, is the question:
but what kind of life? What French life forms did Burroughs, Ginsberg and
Kerouac bring into American literature, and into what world would these life
forms evolve?
These large questions call for a different approach and in order to define the
outcome of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s longstanding process of cross-
fertilization for American literature and literature itself, at times micro-readings

do need to work with macro-readings. I don’t particularly wish to affix another
label to the Beat label that was always problematic itself. But “-isms” do have one
pragmatic advantage: they help situate texts, ideas and practices in the bigger
picture. And among all the necessarily reductive and always inadequate “-isms”
available to us at the moment, the field of posthumanism emerged as the most
appropriate, or perhaps least inadequate.
Given that French modernism is the concern of this study, the choice of
posthumanism over postmodernism for a framework might seem surprising.
But for all the paradoxes that the revolutionary aesthetics of Burroughs,
Ginsberg and Kerouac pose to critics, the fundamental nature of the challenges
and transformations that their aesthetics entailed for literature and society
remains their major contribution—and I believe this nature has much less to
do with the awareness raised by the relativism advocated by postmodernism
than with the critique of humanism advanced by posthumanism. The result for
this book’s methodology is to shift the balance from close textual readings to
a broader comparative analysis, and from appropriation to comparison, that
is, from concentrating on material traces of French literature in Burroughs,
Ginsberg and Kerouac’s works to examining how their most innovative
writing transformed the way we conceive the human in ways initiated by the
French authors they read and admired, like Proust and Artaud, Genet and
Michaux.
As posthumanism offers a framework, not a set of tools, its use here is
distinct from the way in which Beat literature has been increasingly studied
through the prism of Critical Theory, a field dominated—some go so far as to say
“invaded”—by French philosophy ever since the 1960s.23 I do not, for example,
make sustained Sartrean or Deleuzian readings of On the Road or Visions of
Cody, although I do call on on Deleuze’s reading of Proust and Kerouac’s own
relation with Sartre to analyze how his texts appropriate Proust and Céline.
Likewise, while it might be instructive to read the major works of Kerouac,
Ginsberg and Burroughs through the three stages of posthumanism outlined
by Rosi Braidotti (2013)—Kerouac’s works would represent the posthuman (life
beyond the self), Ginsberg’s the post-anthropocentric (life beyond the species)
and Burroughs’ the inhuman (life beyond death)—in practice, I only take the
last term from her terminology, the inhuman, to clarify Burroughs’ ethics of
evolution and revolution, to avoid overdetermining the outcome of my close
textual readings that are in that last chapter, as in every other chapter, the
lifeblood of this book.
In sum, my approach here is comparative but emphatically textual, in order
to give space to literary and artistic relationships that have generally been
made in terms of broad cultural associations that on closer analysis often
prove misleading. The Beats were indeed victims of intense and willful media
misrepresentation during the 1950s, and Ginsberg in particular responded by
constantly correcting errors and promoting alternative narratives, including
literary lineages. When critiquing one of the first works of Beat criticism, a “Beat
Literature” pamphlet in 1966, he accordingly drew attention to a specifically
French lacuna: “St. Jean Perse [sic], Céline and Genet did always have influence
on Kerouac myself Burroughs and everybody—they’re unmentioned” (Ginsberg,
Letters, 323).
In context of this writing and rewriting of Beat literary history, what better
way to lay out this study’s approach to the narratives and counter-narratives, the
myths and misprisions in representations of the French genealogy of the Beat
Generation than through revisiting the significance of a series of well-known
photographs from the 1950s? The reception of these photographs exemplifies
the gap between cultural approaches that often aim to understand the success
of Beat image—now promoting, now criticizing it—and in-depth analysis
that aims to understand Beat creation: the gap, for instance, between Edmund
White’s take on Ginsberg’s photography and Burroughs’ painting—now given as
“fascinating,” now as mercenary opportunism24—and the reading that follows,
which examines pictures of and by Ginsberg for what they were before becoming
“legend,” that is, quite simply, works of photography and literature.
“A Funny Second’s Charade”
The first in a sequence of three images I want to read closely here is the one with
which this introduction began. Taken in late 1957 in room 25 of the Beat Hotel
by the British photographer and fellow resident Harold Chapman, and published
in Chapman’s book named after the hotel (135), this photograph has often been
reproduced. It shows a smiling Ginsberg posing for his portrait beneath the
framed reproduction of a detail from Henri Fantin-Latour’s painting “Le coin de
table” (1872) representing Arthur Rimbaud.
Figure I.1 Allen Ginsberg in room 25 of the Beat Hotel, 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur, Paris
(1957) © Topfoto, Harold Chapman
On one level, the photograph is exactly what it seems to be: an humble act
of homage paid by the American poet to his French idol in the private space of
the French capital he occupies in 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur. The picture visualizes the
longstanding admiration for Rimbaud that Ginsberg had passionately expressed
in a letter a decade earlier to Lionel Trilling in 1945, who was then not only
Ginsberg’s professor at Columbia University but also the nation’s foremost literary
critic. The young poet felt Trilling “must witness his defense” of Rimbaud as a
“representative hero,” “genius,” “outcast,” “prophet” and “politically minded poet”;
in short, as the very ideal to which Ginsberg himself aspired (Letters, 11–14).
The image of Ginsberg sitting at the feet of Rimbaud in Paris, however, takes
on new meaning when read in parallel with its complex and conflicted backstory:
the collective narrative of the early Beat circle as depicted in And the Hippos Were
Boiled in Their Tanks in 1945. The novella Burroughs and Kerouac composed
together portrays the Beats as admirers of Rimbaud and French bohemia, and
the aim of its plot is, logically enough, to leave New York for Paris. The two-shot
of Ginsberg and Rimbaud in the Beat Hotel in 1957 might seem, therefore, to
fulfill the twinned ambitions of this foundational text of Beat writing: to take,
as it were, Rimbaud’s place. But at a textual level, the symbolism of the portrait
is misleading, because despite Ginsberg’s appropriation of Rimbaud—discussed
in Chapter 6—the two authors of Hippos conspicuously avoided representing
Ginsberg within their lightly fictionalized narrative. Chapter 1 closely reads
Hippos and also reveals that while all its characters identify with Rimbaud, it
is in fact to differentiate themselves from one another: Rimbaud divides rather
than unites the Beat circle. Burroughs’ narrating protagonist, for example,
identifies with Rimbaud as a way to mock the literary romanticism of Kerouac’s
own narrating protagonist and the naivety of his planned voyage to Paris, a city
under Nazi occupation at that time.
Moreover, while Ginsberg’s presence in Paris coincided with his writing such
important texts as “At Apollinaire’s Grave” and “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!,” as
Chapter 5 argues, these poems were paying homage to an engagement with
French literature that had already taken place long before coming to Paris in
1957. To read this portrait of Ginsberg with Rimbaud in Paris as crystallizing
the height of Beat creativity would therefore misrepresent the true literary
significance of the Beat Hotel. That is, its most enduring and productive period
was the distinctly post-Beat—even anti-Beat—experimentalism of Burroughs’
cut-up project. As Chapter 1 clarifies, in the Beat Hotel from 1959 to 1961, it
is in fact Burroughs who would engage most directly with Rimbaud, literally
cutting up his poetry—to make two texts included in Minutes to Go (1960) and
many more—and discovering ways to follow the poetics rather than the poet of
modernity. For him, there was no romantic cult of personality or place: in Paris
Burroughs would put Rimbaud to work.
We might also venture a new reading of this by-now iconic photograph
of two icons of nineteenth-century French and twentieth-century American
poetry, paying attention to that which these icons themselves partially
conceal: the poster of a fruit still life painting. Without being able to identify
the artist, we could only misread this framed picture as a simple background
on the hotel room wall, useful for hanging the image of Rimbaud. But once we
identify the painting as the reproduction of a work by Paul Cézanne, we can
look at it again, knowing his work’s importance to Ginsberg’s own; in a May
1956 letter explaining the aesthetics of “Howl,” for instance, he evokes “my
master who is Cezanne” (Howl, 152). We might also consider the distinction
here between the painting of Rimbaud’s portrait—which represents the man,
not his work—and the painting by Cézanne, which is the artist’s own work.
In other words, an image of the man (Rimbaud), produced and circulated by
others, comes before and gets in the way of a work itself (Cézanne’s). What
Chapman’s photograph therefore shows us isn’t a simple act of homage at all,
but a layered one, in which the author of the recently published “Howl” pays
tribute to not only a poet but also a painter, and to not only one but two French
sources, one behind the other, opening up the possibility of an almost infinite
genealogical regress.
A second photograph whose meaning shifts when closely analyzed is of
Burroughs taken by Ginsberg in his Lower East Side apartment. It is one of a
series that Ginsberg took in New York in fall 1953 that has also since become
famous through major international exhibitions and catalogs of his photography.
As we are told by the handwritten caption he added in the 1980s, the image
shows Burroughs lying on the floor of Ginsberg’s apartment holding a bilingual
edition of Winds (Vents) by the French poet St.-John Perse.
If we contrast this “two-shot” with Chapman’s image of Ginsberg beneath the
portrait of Rimbaud, we grasp the importance of Burroughs’ appearance with
a book. Having just published his first novel Junky, he is recorded in the act of
reading another writer’s work. The image invites us to interpret it as a statement
of textual engagement, rather than as an act of homage. That the book is a
bilingual edition, bringing the original French and English translation together,
is also significant. For, just a few years after this photograph was taken, as
Figure I.2 William Burroughs reading a bilingual edition of Vents by St.-John Perse
(1953) © Allen Ginsberg LLC
Chapter 1 reveals, Burroughs made important creative use of another bilingual

edition of French poetry: Louise Varèse’s translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations.
More immediately, connecting Burroughs with Perse at a textual level, we are
led to seek out the particular impact of Vents on Burroughs’ writing. Chapter 7
notes that Perse was indeed a major and long-neglected source for Burroughs,
but the narrative created by Ginsberg’s camera misrepresents the significance of
that relationship. For the work of Perse with which Burroughs textually engaged
throughout his oeuvre was never Vents but his much earlier epic, Anabase
(1924). Ironically, Vents is most important not for the writer holding the recently
published book but for the writer holding the camera, and Chapter 7 establishes
that the formal features of Vents were one of the crucial but overlooked sources
of Ginsberg’s “Howl.”
Finally, a gulf separates these two photographs, which is the difference
between the images of Rimbaud and Perse. Rimbaud is represented by his
portrait because he was for Ginsberg as for generations before and since the
poster boy of Bohemia, whereas Perse was and remains influential as a poet,
but relatively unknown as a man. As Chapter 7 points out, the contrast in the
cultural reputations of Perse and Rimbaud—whose works Ginsberg regularly

associated—was important for him as he elaborated what amounts to a veritable
strategy for identifying and communicating his poetic lineage; while he engaged
profoundly with Perse, only Rimbaud had a “name.” Taken together, these
photographs hence make visible meaningful connections between American and
French writers that cannot be taken at face value, but need to be deconstructed
at a precise textual level in order to grasp their significance.
A third photograph, in the series that Ginsberg took in Fall 1953 and captioned
in the 1980s, is even more complex. It shows Burroughs in conversation with
Kerouac, seated next to each other on the sofa of Ginsberg’s apartment. Since it
features “an unexpectedly suave and theatrical Burroughs” in the act of talking
and gesturing to “a browbeaten but adorable Jack Kerouac,” Edmund White
rightly, if also patronizingly, describes it as visualizing the relationship between
the older mentor figure and his young apprentice (White, “The Beats: Pictures
of a Legend”). As such, the image supports a standard biographical reading. But
while the image itself is mute, Ginsberg’s caption makes it talk:25
“Now Jack, as I warned you far back as 1945, if you keep going home to live with
your ‘memère’ you’ll find yourself wound tighter and tighter in her apron strings
’til you’re an old man and can’t escape…” William Seward Burroughs camping
as an André Gideian sophisticate lecturing the earnest Thomas Wolfean All-
American youth Jack Kerouac, who listens soberly dead-pan to “the most
intelligent man in America” for a funny second’s charade in my living room 206
East 7th Street Apt 16, Manhattan, one evening Fall 1953.
Ginsberg’s caption presents this scene through a series of binaries that

seem clear at first sight, but that on reflection are highly paradoxical. The most
obvious of these binaries concerns national identities and opposes Burroughs
(associated with the French writer Gide) to Kerouac (associated with the
American writer Wolfe). The paradox is that while Burroughs is identified with
the French Gide, he is also “the most intelligent man in America”; and while
Kerouac is identified with the American Wolfe, in a nod to his Canuck origins,
his mother is referred to in French as “memère.” French and American national
identities are invoked only, it seems, in order to be confused. This confusion
points to another structure of signification that is less about transnational
identities or cultural difference than about what, for the Beat writers, images of
national identity themselves stood for: displaced issues of literary and sexual
identity.
Figure I.3 William Burroughs “camping as an André Gidean sophisticate lecturing

the earnest Thomas Wolfean All-American youth Jack Kerouac” (1953) © Allen
Ginsberg LLC
The opposition constructed through the noun “sophisticate” and adjective

“earnest” in Ginsberg’s caption conveys the traditional literary binary between the
culturally accomplished French and the raw natural all-Americans. If the French
“sophisticated” Burroughs is addressing the American “earnest” Kerouac, the
hierarchy here is significantly pedagogical: Burroughs the old “lecturer” teaches
his young student who “listens soberly.” But what might be no more than a playful
pedagogic relation between two men indeed stands in for a structure of homosexual
desire in which pedagogy is fused with pederasty. Since Gide is the author of The
Immoralist, Corydon and The Counterfeiters, all infamous in their day for openly
dealing with homosexuality, the “Gidean sophisticate” master implicitly threatens
to seduce and corrupt the innocent all-American student. Ironically reinscribing
Cold War definitions of desirable national identity, Ginsberg’s caption makes
homosexual desire un-American, a foreign menace, a French disease.
Ginsberg’s reference to Gide therefore functions according to a three-
layered structure: first, as a marker of literary and national identity; second, as
a pedagogical relationship; and finally, implied by the first two, as the sign of
repressed homosexuality. Chapter 4 shows a similar structure of concealment
and displaced reference operating through the name and works of Gide in
Kerouac’s early writing, above all in his invocation of Gide’s The Counterfeiters in
The Town and the City in relation to Burroughs.
Ginsberg’s fascinating assemblages of image and text span three decades of
Beat history and thus reproduce and reaffirm the role that French literature
played in shaping his friends’ works and his own in complex strategies of
signification. They are examples in miniature of the overlooked or unsuspected
dimensions that are to be discovered through the close readings that follow.
These show that there was more to Kerouac’s fascination for French poetic realist
films than nostalgia for the language of his childhood, or to his infatuation for
Proust and Céline than precursors to emulate; more to Ginsberg’s admiration
for Apollinaire, Artaud and St.-John Perse than the ambition of inserting his
own name in the pantheon of modernity; and more to Burroughs’ longstanding
admiration for Gide, Cocteau and Genet than a European pose, or to his
identification with Rimbaud than a model to forge his own image as a writer—far
more to his works, indeed, than his biographical image: “Rimbaud in a raincoat.”
1
Burroughs or Kerouac’s Rimbaud:

To Be or Not to Be “L I T E R A R Y”
“Hidden Under the Floorboards”
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks: even if it is the long-lost first novel
of the Beat Generation, and even if it is a unique work for being coauthored in
alternate chapters by Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, still, how can we
take seriously a book with such a title? The only ones who have done so are
the biographers for two historical reasons going back to the summer of 1944.1
First, because of the line that gave the novella its title, which is so silly that it
irresistibly invites us to find out where it came from and to what it referred; that
is, the phrase Burroughs overheard on a radio report about one of the worst fire
catastrophes in the history of the United States, the circus blaze that occurred
in Hartford, Connecticut, on July 6, 1944, which concluded “…and the hippos
were boiled in their tanks.” Second, biographers embraced it because of the
Greenwich village drama lying at the heart of the novella’s plot; that is, the real-
life murder of Burroughs and Kerouac’s friend, David Kammerer, by another of
their friends, Lucien Carr, which took place by the Hudson River in the small
hours of August 14, 1944. The first event would have no connection whatsoever
with the second, were it not for Burroughs’ peculiar interest in vaudeville-like
disasters. The radio reporting of the circus fire must have struck him as odd
enough to entitle the curious story he and Kerouac were writing that summer.
Questionable humor or stroke of genius: by giving their novella that title, the
crime of passion that brought the Beat circle together was forever bound to
evoke for us the flames of the most absurd tragedy. As will become clearer, it also
contained the tension at stake in Burroughs and Kerouac’s initial collaboration
and the dramatic contrast in their attitudes towards literature.
A serious close reading of Hippos indeed reveals Burroughs and Kerouac’s
opposite takes on literature in the mid-1940s, but also the unsuspected seeds
and signs of their later more experimental creative work. While readers have
assumed and biographers have asserted the straightforward conventionality of
the novella, the central feature of Hippos’ composition—its coauthorship—in
fact strongly connects it to The Young and Evil (1933), the explicitly experimental
novel of Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler. Viewed in such a light, it becomes
more logical to find in the text attitudes towards literature that, in the 1950s,
would lead Kerouac to the “bookmovie” hybrid form and that, in the 1960s,
Burroughs would develop into the subversive tactics of cut-up methods. As
we will see, these early traces of their future radical aesthetics are inextricably
bound up with complex identifications with French literature and culture, most
specifically with Arthur Rimbaud.
Composed in spring 1945 but unpublished until 2008, And the Hippos
Were Boiled in Their Tanks was received as the lost treasure “hidden under the
floorboards” to which Kerouac famously referred in his interview for The Paris
Review (in Plimpton, 108), and since publication of the novella, literary critics
have only reinforced, by their neglect as much as by their commentary, the view
that the importance of this sensational tale is mostly biographical. The first Beat
novel was accordingly praised by reviewers for its historical status, its vivid
portrait of the New York bohemian scene in which Kerouac and Burroughs met
in the very year of 1944. Certainly, the enduring allure of Beat biography and
mythmaking explains the film adaptation of the Carr-Kammerer murder: Kill
Your Darlings (2013). The film interestingly reoriented the drama by focusing on
the Carr-Ginsberg relationship, which is a reminder that Allen Ginsberg was a
crucial figure in the real-life circle, but was entirely written out by Kerouac and
Burroughs in their version of events. Indeed, Hippos was not the first account
of the murder, since although he was forced to abandon writing it by the chair
of the English department and the assistant dean of Columbia University,
Ginsberg had begun his own narrative entitled “The Bloodsong” within weeks
of the murder, several months before Kerouac and Burroughs began theirs.2 All
three major Beat authors were therefore involved in efforts to turn the dramatic
events of August 1944 into writing, inaugurating Beat literature’s nettlesome
relationship to autobiography.
In fact, the coauthorship of Hippos and its use of two alternating narrating-
protagonists, Will Dennison (based on Burroughs) and Mike Ryko (based on
Kerouac), doubles the problem of fictionalized autobiography and complicates
what might otherwise have been a relatively straightforward narrative: the tragic
story of the youthful Phillip Tourian (based on Lucien Carr) pursued by the older
Burroughs or Kerouac’s Rimbaud 27
Ramsey Allen (based on David Kammerer). The narrative’s inevitable trajectory

towards Al’s murder is filled out by a series of scenes within the bohemian
circle and by a minimal plot in which Ryko and Phil dream of shipping out
as merchant seamen to reach France and finally Paris, the novella’s ineluctably
symbolic destination.
Described in such terms, it is not altogether surprising that, on its 2008
publication, Hippos was denigrated for being little more than a series of anecdotes
built around a sordid murder, and for its lack of literariness. Such an approach
takes the text of Hippos at face value, but upon closer inspection, its superficiality
turns out to be more apparent than real. Criticism has therefore overlooked
material essential to understand the genesis of Burroughs and Kerouac’s
oeuvres. Most notably, this oversight includes neglecting the second version of
Burroughs and Kerouac’s text (available in the archives for the past decade, but
only published in The Unknown Kerouac in 2016). For just two months after they
had completed their manuscript,3 Kerouac wrote his own version of the story he
had coauthored with his older friend, and gave it a completely different title: I
Wish I Were You.4 To Ginsberg’s abandoned draft and the Burroughs-Kerouac
coproduction, we must therefore add Kerouac’s sole version as further evidence
of how, through the dramatic events of 1944, the major Beat authors individually
and collectively defined themselves as writers. I Wish I Were You is the most
revealing version of all, for it bears the textual marks of how Kerouac parted
from Burroughs and emerged as the stylist we know by following his passion for
French literature and film.
When Kerouac “Got Literary”
In Kerouac’s I Wish I Were You, not only do we find definite signs of the writer to
come, we find that the stylist has already arrived. Several elements in Kerouac’s
pre-1950 writings anticipate his first published novels, but his redrafting of Hippos
is indeed the most revealing of them stylistically. It features one of Kerouac’s
most distinctive motifs, “the phantom of darkness and death” hovering over the
sleeping city of New York, which amalgamates “the vultures of human sadness”
in The Sea Is My Brother (1943) with “the black age” of Orpheus Emerged (1945),
and prefigures “the gloomy and obsessed time” of the narrator’s “own life”
“haunting his family sleep” in The Town and the City (1950). But to understand
the full implications of I Wish I Were You for Kerouac’s aesthetics, especially
what they owe to French poetic realist film and its shadowy atmosphere inspired
by Louis Feuillade’s popular serials Fantômas, we must begin by examining how
exactly, that is, how materially, it differs from Hippos. The two titles Burroughs
and Kerouac successively gave to the Carr-Kammerer story stand for the
essential differences between the two versions of the text and the respective
views of literature they embody. The first title, And the Hippos Were Boiled in
Their Tanks, is a noir joke, a distinctly Burroughsian joke, whereas the second
chosen by Kerouac, I Wish I Were You, is far more enigmatic and profound. It is
openly literary.
This distinction is crucial for grasping the peculiar qualities of Hippos. Both
formally and stylistically, the text is divided by alternating narrators: the voices
of Burroughs’ narrator (Will Dennison) and Kerouac’s (Mike Ryko) are relatively
close in tone, which is not only a weakness in the text—why have two narrators
and alternate chapters if their voices are similar?—but more importantly reveals
the compromises made by the young Kerouac working alongside his mentor
Burroughs. That Hippos begins and ends with chapters written by Burroughs is
clear textual evidence of the balance of power in their relationship. Above all,
when read in light of I Wish I Were You, it becomes obvious that the alternate
chapters of Hippos barely conceal the conflict between the literary ambition of
Kerouac on the one hand, and the refusal to be literary of Burroughs on the
other. Neither Burroughs nor Kerouac’s narrators identify themselves as writers
in Hippos, whereas in I Wish I Were You, Kerouac’s sole narrator, Mike Ryko,
explicitly does so. What Ryko is working on is also a “huge prose poem” entitled
“The American Night” (385), a serious, self-reflexive title that could well have
been an alternative to I Wish I Were You, which would have stood even more
sharply against the ludicrous And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. The
comparison between Hippos and I Wish I Were You is most compelling for
how it illuminates the distinct, indeed the diametrically opposed attitudes of
Burroughs and Kerouac towards literature as an idea and, crucially mediated
through French culture, towards writing as a practice.
Reading the two texts in parallel makes absolutely clear, as Joyce Johnson
observes in her brief but insightful commentary on which my close analysis
builds here, that I Wish I Were You was Kerouac’s “declaration of independence
from the influence of Burroughs” (Johnson, 204).5 More precisely, writing the
new version was a way to cast off what restrained Kerouac while working in the
shadow of Burroughs’ cynicism. Kerouac himself implied as much twenty years
later in Vanity of Duluoz, when, revisiting the events of 1944, he has Hubbard,
alias Burroughs, respond to his own gushing romanticism with the ultimate
put-down: “My G A W D, I’m not going to buy you another drink if you get
L I T E R A R Y!” (Vanity, 206). Kerouac’s block capitals here make as visible as
possible the extent to which he and Burroughs found themselves in conflict on
the subject of literature. His humoristic recollection conceals and yet reveals the
vibrant creative effects this conflict can only have had on his thinking at the time
of rewriting Hippos on his own terms. In the amusing dialogue leading up to
Hubbard’s quip, Kerouac reworks his anxieties as a writer in face of Burroughs’
authoritative personality by depicting himself as a child asking endless questions.
Significantly for the argument to follow, it is because he is yearning to visualize
“the marvellous scene in a movie”—which his old friend Will has just seen—that
he is first accused by him of being overly literary:
“And what did the guy look like?”

“Wild bushy hair…”
“And he said Yip Yip Yippee as he rushed off?”
“With a girl in his arms.”
“Across the dark field?”
“Some kind of field—”
“What was this field?”
“My Gawd—we’re getting literary yet, don’t bother me with such idiotic questions,
a field”—he says “field” with an angry or impatient shrieking choke—“like it’s a
FIELD”—calming down—“a field… for God’s sake you see him rushing off into
the dark horizon—” (Vanity, 203; Kerouac’s emphasis)
Kerouac’s seemingly light-hearted humor should not disguise the precise terms
in which the opposed views his narrator and Hubbard take towards literature are
constructed: his compulsive desire to fully visualize the scene from a film in this
passage establishes the cinematic as a feature of the literary for him. Since we might
naturally assume the literary and the cinematic as a binary, the one defined against
the other, this is a striking desire and it becomes all the more so to discover its seed
back in the mid-1940s. That is, in terms of the aesthetic dispute between the two
aspirant writers, Hippos embodies Burroughs’ views at the expense of Kerouac’s, for
to “get literary” in their narrative seems, like in Vanity, a seductive but superficial
game, which is why it can so easily be read as lacking in literary depth. However, as
shown by the following analysis of the text’s pattern of cultural references, Hippos
may sound like a joke but it is already playing a quite sophisticated game, one that
Kerouac would bring out into the open in I Wish I Were You.
Sophomoric Name-Dropping?
The literariness that divided Kerouac from Burroughs is reflected in the broad
stylistic differences between Hippos and I Wish I Were You. Full of Kerouac’s
admiration for Balzac and Stendhal and more broadly for French naturalism,6 I
Wish I Were You features far more attention to detail and thrives on numerous
lengthy descriptive passages of Manhattan’s splendor and squalor that Burroughs
would not have cared for. Kerouac’s fascination for the shadowy decors, working-
class dialogues and doomed characters of poetic realist cinema, which will be
analyzed later in this section, went hand in hand with his inclination for the long
detailed descriptions of French naturalism, and is one of several ways in which
he was to distinguish himself from Burroughs. For the aesthetics of French
poetic realism indeed inherited one of the central debates of late nineteenth-
century French literature, namely that between romantics and naturalists. In
fact, both Hippos and I Wish I Were You replay this very debate, Ryko’s idealism
emulating the romantic ideas of a Julien Sorel (in Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir),
and Dennison’s “factualism” resonating with the dark determinism afflicting a
Nana (in Zola’s L’Assomoir).
Burroughs and Kerouac’s contrasting views on the importance of decor and
atmosphere for their story, specifically to establish its cultural and aesthetic
context, are accordingly represented in Hippos by the fact that the overwhelming
majority of allusions to artistic works appear in Kerouac’s chapters: out of thirty-
two such references, twenty-three are Kerouac’s and only nine are Burroughs.’7 In
I Wish I Were You, many of these cultural allusions are also developed and their
significance clarified, but in Hippos they are put in the mouths of characters like so
much name-dropping: Brahms’ First (12), Robert Briffault’s Europa (89, 96, 124),
Carné’s Le Quai des brumes (112, 172), Duvivier’s Pépé le moko (100), T.S. Eliot
(124, 170), Faulkner’s Sanctuary (114), Goethe’s Doctor Faustus (42), Benny
Goodman’s song “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise” (172), Guthrie’s Bound
for Glory (66), Gerald Heard’s The Third Morality (46), Charles Jackson’s The Lost
Weekend (177), Korda’s The Four Feathers (173), The Mills Brothers’ “You Always
Hurt the One You Love” (31), Modigliani’s portrait of Cocteau (174), Roi Ottleys’
New World A-Coming (66), Claude Rains’ famous interpretation of Capitaine
Louis Renault (163), Renoir’s La Grande illusion (152, 177, 179), Rimbaud (67,
92, 93, 120, 153), Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake (84), Tchelitchew’s Cache-cache
(174), Verlaine (67) and Yeats (110). There is something sophomoric about this
enumeration, but the sheer number of references it contains suggests otherwise,
and on closer inspection we can discern in Hippos three distinctive patterns of

cultural allusion.
First, we notice how few references there are to American culture (eight out of
thirty-two) and that, of the remaining twenty-four European references, no less
than three-quarters are French (eighteen out of twenty-four). Second, French
names and works strikingly come back several times in the text: Carné returns
twice under Kerouac’s pen (112, 172), Briffault and Renoir each three times (89,
96, 124 and 152, 177, 179) and Rimbaud no less than five times across both
Kerouac and Burroughs’ chapters (67, 92, 93, 120, 153). Third, the role of French
references in Hippos is much more significant than any other. When Yeats, Eliot
or Modigliani are named, it is to picture the bohemian literary landscape; their
names are literally “dropped.” But in the case of French figures, they are not
merely punctual but structural, integral to the writing itself.
Consider the most obvious French figure: Rimbaud. We expect the famous
Rimbaud-Verlaine homosexual couple to dramatize the central, passionate
relationship among the American bohemians, involving the youthful Phil (based
on Carr) and the older Al (based on Kammerer). But what looks like a cliché is
complicated in multiple ways, starting with the way in which Dennison (based
on Burroughs) also identifies himself with Rimbaud. In fact, except for Ryko
(based on Kerouac), all the novella’s main characters identify with Rimbaud,
whose name recurs in Hippos in four significant ways: as the bohemian writer
par excellence, the role model for Phil’s so-called “New Vision” (92, 93, 153); as
a figure with whom Burroughs’ narrator perversely identifies (120); paired with
Verlaine as the implicit model for Phil and Al’s fatal relationship of homosexual
desire; and as an explicit model for the double-act of Phil and Kerouac’s narrator
who identify with Rimbaud and Verlaine in the most literal and emphatic way
possible, by taking their names for their signatures (67).
Such allusions might seem no more than name-dropping but, if so, it is
precisely in the sense that they add up to a deliberate strategy of the text to mock
itself. The mapping of Rimbaud and Verlaine onto Phil and Al, for example,
seems so obvious, but it does not work at all, since the act of violence is the wrong
way round: it is the older Verlaine who shoots the younger Rimbaud (whereas
Hippos ends by the younger Phil killing the older Al). The fact that Phil identifies
with Rimbaud, and Kerouac’s narrator Ryko with Verlaine, using their names
to sign a trade union petition at the merchant marine shipping office, further
messes up the parallel, the two sets of pairs adding up to a strange ménage-à-
trois between Phil, Al and Ryko. In short, these references are all ironic. Through
them, the text opens up a distance between itself and the expected Francophile
frame of reference. This is most notably the case in the Burroughs’ half of
Hippos, which goes so far as to mock the untouchable representative of modern
French literature whom his fellows elected as both their literary and existential
model. In a symbolic gesture, Burroughs’ narrator indeed fails to join in their
collective reverence for the genius poet, by a most curious act of identification
with Rimbaud.
“I’m the Later Bourgeois Rimbaud”
Half way through Hippos, Kerouac’s narrator references Faulkner, already

his twelfth literary allusion (114). In the next chapter, Burroughs’ narrator
refers, in one of his very few literary allusions, to Rimbaud. Appearing in the
course of an argument about the wisdom of Phil and Ryko’s naïve plans to
join the merchant marine and ship out to Paris, it is emphatic and yet highly
paradoxical: “I’m the later bourgeois Rimbaud” (120). If Kerouac’s narrator later
signs a petition with the name of Verlaine because young wicked Phil can only
identify with Rimbaud, here, Burroughs’ narrator invokes Rimbaud’s name in
an egregious and openly ironic way, identifying not with the poet but with “the
later bourgeois” man. In what amounts to an anti-literary reference, on the one
hand, through his persona Dennison, Burroughs is asserting his identity with
Rimbaud emphatically; on the other hand, he is doing so paradoxically because
identifying with him only once he has ceased being a poet. Yet, who would be
tempted to associate himself with that Rimbaud, not with the young poet but
with the man obstinately living as far as possible from his literary milieu and
dealing guns in Africa?
The answer, surely, is someone as determined as was Rimbaud to stand apart
through bold excess; someone with the ambition to be more than a genius, in
fact to go beyond “genius” to the point of turning his back on both his genius
and the society that would come to venerate it. The unexpected identification
of Dennison with the later Rimbaud in Hippos is a drastic move thanks to
which he escapes the horde of modern writers who idealize the early Rimbaud,
and to the extent that Rimbaud serves here as shorthand for French literature
as a whole, Burroughs’ identification is indeed a rebuke, a rejection of the
biographical mythology and of the literary pretensions often going with it. The
answer, therefore, is someone who mocks the very idea of identifying with
Rimbaud the poet, given that Rimbaud had proved his genius and completed his
oeuvre before any aspirant poets would be out of college. Burroughs’ lesson to the
young Beats is clear: if you wish to emulate Rimbaud, bear in mind how he ended…
as a bourgeois merchant. In sum, who would identify with the later Rimbaud
but someone beginning in literature where Rimbaud left it, with absolutely no
illusions about literature’s ability to keep on going, a stance Burroughs would
still be taking in Last Words, his final journal: “Where is it going, or where can it
go? After Conrad, Rimbaud, Genet […]?” (Last Words, 204).
Despite appearing to be no more than a one-line cynical joke, Burroughs’
identification with Rimbaud in his first mature writing is rich in significance,
and from it we can draw three conclusions about his attitude towards biography,
style and the literary. Biographically, if “for the Beats, it was, of course, Rimbaud’s
life rather than his art that was exemplary,” as Marjorie Perloff points out in the
opening of her seminal study The Poetics of Indeterminacy, it certainly wasn’t the
case for Burroughs, a distinction she fails to make (Perloff, 5). In fact, not only
does Burroughs’ identification separate him from the Beats, it is at odds with
that of the most influential writer through whom Americans were discovering
Rimbaud in the mid-1940s, that is Henry Miller whose famous book The
Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud (1946) celebrates the first Rimbaud:
“He did not belong—not anywhere. I have always had the same feeling about
myself. The parallels are endless” (Miller, 6). What is underlined by the contrast
between Burroughs’ playful identification with the older merchant in Africa and
Miller’s passionate identification with the young poet is that Burroughs’ interest
in Rimbaud has little to do with biography. In fact, the irony in his statement
continues to place him at an unusual critical distance from Rimbaud’s aura
within American literary culture.
Burroughs’ rejection of bohemia and literature, through Dennison’s refusal
to identify with Rimbaud in the same romantic way as his friends, is an early
statement of his alienation from the historical options eagerly taken up by
the younger crowd. However, anticipating a paradox explored in Chapter 7 in
relation to Genet, we should already begin to see that Burroughs’ wisecrack
has paradoxical effects, since making the most ironical identification (“I’m the
later bourgeois Rimbaud”) still retains the syntax of identification (“I’m […]”).
Within the economy of identification, the desire to be absolutely different—to be,
in effect, an alien—can only backfire since identifying with an alien, of course,
can only threaten your own sense of being an alien. That is, refusing to identify
with Rimbaud, or with anyone else for that matter, itself identifies Burroughs
with Rimbaud’s search for otherness, and so by extension with those modern,
“abnormal writers” who make the same refusal as his. Perversely, through his
identification with the other, later Rimbaud, Burroughs thus embodies the new
“human type” that Miller was at this very time foreseeing in his study of the
genius poet:
I think the Rimbaud type will displace, in the world to come, the Hamlet type
and the Faustian type. The trend is toward a deeper split. Until the old world
dies out utterly, the “abnormal” individual will tend more and more to become
the norm. The new man will find himself only when the warfare between the
collectivity and the individual ceases. Then we shall see the human type in its
fullness and splendor. (Miller, 6)
In short, Burroughs’ extravagant non-identification with Rimbaud the poet

couldn’t be more Rimbaud-like.
In terms of national, as well as literary, identity Dennison’s flamboyant quip
in Hippos both “Frenchifies” himself (we can well imagine Burroughs’ narrator
dealing guns in Africa) and, indirectly, critiques Rimbaud by “Americanizing”
him (we can well envision the later Rimbaud living the life of Burroughs’
narrator, becoming a pragmatic barman dealing with brawls every night), and
depicts portraits that are decidedly nonliterary. Burroughs’ repartee “I’m the
later bourgeois Rimbaud” also prefigures the deadpan yet satirically dissident
humor that would define his mature style. That is, in the sardonic line delivered
by Dennison in Hippos, we can almost hear the voice of “the Ugly American”
Burroughs would relish performing. In The Soft Machine, for example, this
satirical voice addresses a promising young man that could have been Rimbaud
after he had abandoned literature to travel in Africa:
Now kid what are you doing over there with the niggers and the apes? Why
don’t you straighten out and act like a white man?—After all, they’re only human
cattle—You know that yourself—Hate to see a bright young man fuck up and get
off on the wrong track. (147)
Burroughs’ one brief identification with Rimbaud in Hippos is therefore highly

significant in combining a sketch of his own antiliterary identity with a unique
critique of Rimbaud and a foretaste of his satirical voice. In retrospect, we can
also recognize how Burroughs’ flippant identification with the “wrong” Rimbaud
anticipates his complex and fascinating appropriation of Rimbaud’s poetry in
the hundred literary cut-ups he created a decade-and-a-half later, most of which
remain unpublished.8
“Un règlement de comptes avec la Littérature”
Burroughs made extensive use of Rimbaud’s works throughout his oeuvre, but it
was one of the very foundations of his cut-ups of the 1960s, and, in this respect,
his use of Rimbaud was both innovative and original. Few French writers really
criticized Rimbaud for his decision to desert literature; rather, they deplored
it. Albert Camus talked of “nihilist depression,” Stéphane Mallarmé of “self-
vivisection,” and Jean Cocteau described the later Rimbaud as “defrocked”
from poetry (Guyaux, 213; my translation). In contrast, Burroughs’ response
to what is commonly referred to in French literature as the enigmatic silence
de Rimbaud is creative: he will not abandon literature but work against it from
within. This was the aesthetic rationale of cut-up methods and Burroughs’
commitment to “rub out the word” couldn’t have been more emphatically stated
in Rimbauldian terms than by the original wraparound band of the manifesto
Minutes to Go. Published in Paris in 1960, it launched the cut-up method by
declaring, in French, an assault on literature with a capital “L”: “un règlement de
comptes avec la Littérature.”
In interviews and polemical statements promoting the cut-up method,
Burroughs regularly drew the association between Rimbaud’s drive to be done
with literature and the cut-up project. But name-checking the French poet is not
enough to understand the role he played in it and there are major difficulties
in accurately measuring what is at stake in Burroughs’ cut-up engagement
with Rimbaud. To begin with, there is the difficulty that so many of Rimbaud’s
appearances are in neglected locations: cut-ups in such marginal works as
the pamphlets Minutes to Go and The Exterminator (1960), texts that were
never reprinted (such as the 1961 edition of The Soft Machine), several dozen
unpublished cut-up typescripts and a surprising number of scrapbook collages
and photomontages. It is also obviously deeply problematic to take at face value
some of Burroughs’ methodological statements such as, in The Exterminator,
“anybody can be Rimbaud if he will cut up Rimbaud’s words and learn Rimbaud
language” (in The Third Mind, 71; my emphasis).9 Burroughs’ identification here
seems far-fetched—unless you believe in magic or possession; “Table-tapping,
perhaps?” (32)—but in fact makes perfect sense in light of his equally improbable
claim in Hippos to be “the later bourgeois Rimbaud.”
Let us consider the paradox: on the one hand, we know Burroughs valorized
Rimbaud in the highest possible terms; on the other hand, he reduces Rimbaud
to merely words on a page that he encourages us to chop up with scissors!
When we see the results of his own examples, as we do in the cut-up texts
based on Rimbaud in Minutes to Go, they seem nothing if not negative, turning
Rimbaud’s poetry into verbal rubble, the seemingly nonsensical fragments of
words. Is this an act of homage or of sacrilege? To put it this way enables us,
I think, to recognize the perverse logic in Burroughs’ identification in Hippos
with the “wrong” Rimbaud, which is not merely flippant or ironic; it is the right
thing to do, the proper tribute to Rimbaud. The remark Burroughs put in his
character’s mouth in Hippos should be taken seriously as a rebuke or a warning
to those who would make an icon out of an iconoclast. In The Exterminator and,
as my textual examination will show, in Minutes to Go, this logic is what we find
at the heart of the cut-up method, the application of which in Burroughs’ hands
combined the visible sacrilege of the scissors’ seemingly random violence with
the secret homage of serious attention to detail.
Before examining Burroughs’ way to “be Rimbaud” by cutting up his words,
the literalism of this claim needs to be understood in the broader context of
his engagement with the French poet. In his final journal, when Burroughs
raised the problem of literature’s future, a preoccupation of course as old as
modernism—“Where is it going, or where can it go?”—he was implicitly
reflecting back on what was at stake in the experiments of the cut-up project.
Where should literature “go”? “N’importe où! n’importe où! pourvu que ce soit
hors de ce monde!” [“Anywhere! Anywhere! So long as it is out of this world!”], as
Baudelaire famously put it (Le Spleen de Paris, 207).10 This is the doomed desire
that Burroughs inherited from Rimbaud, who himself inherited it together with
specific aesthetic goals from Baudelaire. In The Third Mind, his most important
polemical text, which references Rimbaud no fewer than nine times, Burroughs
indeed misattributes to Rimbaud what in fact originated in Baudelaire’s
“Correspondances” and theory of synesthesia: “This is where Rimbaud was going
with his color of vowels. And his ‘systematic derangement of the senses.’ The
place of mescaline hallucination: seeing colors tasting sounds smelling forms”
(The Third Mind, 32). These often-cited lines are characteristic of how literally
Burroughs sought to pursue the urge to escape “this world” and to find the means
to achieve it. To attain Rimbaud’s “hallucination simple,” he experimented with
practical methods, both chemical (mescaline) and more importantly textual (to
reach, as he told Timothy Leary, “pure cut-up highs” [Rub Out the Words, 64]).
In short, cutting up words was a way to produce visions “out of this world,” and
Burroughs was thereby finishing the job that Baudelaire and Rimbaud initiated:
“This is where Rimbaud was going…”
Burroughs’ assertion in his cut-up manifestos that you can be Rimbaud by

cutting up Rimbaud’s words is not merely playful or disrespectful, some kind
of Dadaist provocation. It is fully consistent with his larger presentation of cut-
up methods, as when telling an interviewer in 1965 that most “serious writers”
objected to the use of mechanical means for literary purposes as “some sort of a
sacrilege” based on their “superstitious reverence for the word”: “I find it much
easier to get interest in the cut-ups from people who are not writers—doctors,
lawyers, or engineers, any open-minded, fairly intelligent person—than from
those who are” (The Third Mind, 3). If cut-up methods took Burroughs where
Rimbaud was “going,” the implication was that it took literature to places that
literature no longer recognized. And yet, while cut-ups were absolutely an attack
on “Literature,” as we will see, like Dennison’s perverse act of identification in
Hippos that is nevertheless the truest homage to the French poet, so too did
Burroughs’ use of his scissors show an extraordinary, if perverse, literariness.
Burroughs’ realization of Rimbaud’s visionary aesthetics is performed at the
core of Minutes to Go by two cut-up texts, “EVERYWHERE MARCH YOUR
HEAD” and “SONS OF YOUR IN,” based on Rimbaud’s poem “A une Raison.”
These cut-ups are credited to Burroughs and Corso, but textual evidence points
to Burroughs’ “authorship” (such as his intensive use of the phrase “everywhere
march your head” in a dozen other cut-up texts he created in the 1960s). The note
of retractation Corso insisted should be in the pamphlet, in which he attributed
the creation of cut-ups to “uninspired machine-poetry,” also affirms his distance
from both collaboration and the method itself.11
A close reading of these two poems reveals the significance of Burroughs’
use of Rimbaud’s poem in two key respects: thematic and linguistic. At first,
the results of Burroughs’ fragmentation of “A une Raison” seem virtually
unintelligible:
SONS OF YOUR IN
sons of your in
tea see
rib tent
of ten in (Minutes to Go, 24)
However, this fragmented obscurity is balanced by the emphatic way in which

their source is named beneath the two cut-ups: “Cut up Rimbaud’s TO A
REASON (A UNE RAISON) Words by Rimbaud, arrangement by Burroughs &
Corso” (23). This insistence has the effect of inviting the reader to go back to the
original poem to discover that, far from cutting randomly, Burroughs used his
scissors with astonishing care.
The urgency of time, as the central subject announced in the very title
Minutes to Go, and the precision with which Burroughs cut up Rimbaud’s
words, are most apparent in how the two texts rework the same key line from
“To a Reason”: “Change our lots, confound the plagues, beginning with time”
(Rimbaud, Illuminations, 39). The results are “see / the new / Change knows / the
Time t…” and, punning on the different meanings of the word “lots” in French
and English, the phrase “our lots con” (25, 23).12 The line in Rimbaud’s poem,
which denounces our usual experience of time as a disease that must be cured,
thereby becomes an economical statement of Burroughs’ word virus theory: our
fate is a con trick scripted by language and fixed in time, and we must cut our way
out to see the world anew. When Burroughs expands on this conspiracy at the
start of The Exterminator (“The Word Lines Keep Thee in Slots […] The Word
Lines keep you in Time... Cut the in lines”), it is in a passage where Rimbaud’s
name appears more than a dozen times (in The Third Mind, 71). Cutting up
Rimbaud not only signified a general claim of affinity, therefore; it also enabled
Burroughs to start expressing his own thesis about the determinism of language,
identity and time by using the words of another. If the “statement” of Burroughs’
theory seems unclear in these two cut-ups from Minutes to Go, which it is, this is
because it demonstrates his commitment to performing rather than explaining
how in cutting up his words he was following Rimbaud.
Burroughs’ sensitivity to using the words of Rimbaud in Minutes to Go not only
confirms his acute relation to French language, it also indicates an unsuspected
dimension that should transform our understanding of his cut-up practice. This
dimension is hinted at by the specific way that Rimbaud’s work is named not once
but twice as a source for the first cut-up text: “TO A REASON (A UNE RAISON).”
Here, the French is given not just as the original of the English translation but as
a sign that, contrary to appearances, the cut-ups have used both versions of the
poem. Or to be more precise, while “EVERYWHERE MARCH YOUR HEAD”
seems to derive entirely from “To a Reason,” most of “SONS OF YOUR IN” can
be shown to derive from “A une Raison”: from the “sons” in its title that comes
from “tous les sons” (all the sounds), to “detour” that comes from “détourne”
(turns back), “tent” from “chantent” (sing), “rib” from “crible” (confound) and
“commence” from “à commencer par le temps” (beginning with time) (Rimbaud,
Illuminations, 38).
Figure 1.1 Facsimile, William Burroughs and Gregory Corso, “SONS OF YOUR IN,”
in Minutes to Go (on the left), made from Arthur Rimbaud’s poem “A une Raison”
(on the right)
What is so revealing here is the great care taken to use fragments or whole
words from the French poem that also work as English. Far from randomly
slashing verse into nonsense, the scissors shifted the sense of the words across
languages in a primary instance of Burroughs’ command to “Cut word lines—
shift linguals” (Nova Express, 63).13 Giving the poem’s title in both English and
French was therefore a subtle way to make two poems out of one—and this is
literally what Burroughs achieved by using Rimbaud’s poem to generate two cut-
up texts.
This multiplication not only performs the open-ended principle of the
cut-up method, its assault on the fixity of the single text, but also the attack
on determinism in the very title of Rimbaud’s poem: “A une Raison” (rather
than the expected “A la Raison”). For both Rimbaud and Burroughs, Cartesian
Reason is a pernicious universal logic of “common sense,”14 and in Rimbaud’s
preference for the indefinite article “une” rather than for the definite article “la,”
we find a model for Burroughs’ emerging subversion of linguistic usage, time

and fixed identity.
Rimbaud’s subversive alternative to tyrannical Reason was in fact incorporated
in the description of his own poetical method: “un long, immense et raisonné
dérèglement de tous les sens” (Rimbaud, Complete Works, 306; my emphasis).15
Although Burroughs always quotes this famous line in the standard English
translation, as “systematic derangement of the senses,” he may have known
that in French the “derangement” was actually “raisonné” (“reasoned”). It
is indeed more likely than not that Burroughs had Rimbaud’s visionary
“derangement” in mind when using the unusual term “arrangement” to
describe the composition of the cut-ups of Rimbaud (“arrangement by
Burroughs & Corso”). For the fragmenting and multiplying effect of the cut-
up method here is precisely to derange Rimbaud’s “A une Raison,” thereby
realizing Burroughs’ project to unseat Reason and escape the trap of Time by
performing the way out on the page.
Burroughs’ engagement with Rimbaud’s poetics in general and “A une
Raison” in particular demonstrates how precisely he worked with his themes
at a formal level through cut-up methods and why Rimbaud was so central
to those methods. Naming Rimbaud was an act of homage and a claim to
genealogy, not in some glib or haphazard manner—simplistically identifying
with the iconic figure and citing his words—but in a form entirely consistent
with a serious understanding of what such acts and claims meant. And just
as Rimbaud was there from the beginning when Burroughs experimented
with how cut-up methods could subvert literature from within, so too he
was there as he went on to develop those methods into other media. Indeed,
Burroughs’ engagement with “A une Raison” finds exemplary illustration in
two photomontages from the era shortly after Minutes to Go: “Infinity” (1962)
and “Untitled” (1964). A third, “All God’s Children Got Time” (1971–1973),
features Jean-Louis Forain’s 1871 sketch of Rimbaud, while miniatures of
Carjat’s famous photograph of the poet also appear in such well-known
photomontages as “The Death of Mrs D” (1965), but Burroughs’ earliest visual
works are the most revealing of the textual relationship he maintained with
Rimbaud’s poetry.16
Burroughs’ first photomontage is one of many entitled “Infinity” he made
in collaboration with Ian Sommerville, which features dozens of montaged
photographs. At the core of the composition, one of the largest images and
by far the most legible is Carjat’s photograph of Rimbaud, his head and upper
body illuminated against the pale oval background. Why should Rimbaud
appear at the center of “Infinity”? Whether strategically or unconsciously, I
would argue that Burroughs’ 1962 photomontage is a response to the final
line of Rimbaud’s “A une Raison”: “Arrivée de toujours, qui t’en iras partout”
(Illuminations, 38). In other words: master time and you will master space,
or, if you come from eternity you already have “infinity,” the photomontage’s
very title. If we see here more evidence for the importance Burroughs gave
to “A une Raison,” a second collage from 1964 confirms it in an absolutely
literal way. For it features the cover of the New Directions edition of Rimbaud’s
Illuminations—the very bilingual edition that Burroughs used for the cut-up
permutations of “To a Reason” and “A une Raison” in Minutes to Go.17 The
distinction here is crucial for Burroughs’ identification with Rimbaud: even
in his photomontages, the face of the poet does not stand for the biographical
man but for his poetry.
Figure 1.2 William Burroughs, photomontage, “Untitled” (1964) © The Estate of

William S. Burroughs, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC. Enlarged: front
cover of the bilingual edition of Rimbaud’s Illuminations that Burroughs used for his
cut-ups (Trans. Louise Varèse. New Directions, 1946)
In light of the true importance of Rimbaud’s works for Burroughs both at the
time of his collaboration with Kerouac in the mid-1940s—a copy of A Season in
Hell was in his library when Kerouac and Ginsberg first met him in 1944—and
at the height of his experimental creativity with cut-ups in the 1960s, we can
appreciate that his treatment of the French poet of modernity in Hippos was not
only an ironic lesson for the young Kerouac; Burroughs’ pose of cynicism was
also a statement about his own self-image, a knowing, indeed a prescient anxiety
about the tendency for iconoclasts to be misunderstood by being treated as icons.
This is confirmed by the ironical use Burroughs makes once again of the term
“bourgeoisie” later on in the novella he wrote with Kerouac when, to emphasize
the contrast between the maturity of his narrator Dennison and the immaturity
of his friends, he not only gives a hint of superiority to Dennison’s speech but
describes this hint in French: “I took on a bourgeois père de famille tone” (29).
In sum, Burroughs and Kerouac’s narrators both define themselves through
the culturally central figure of Rimbaud in Hippos, but in ways that are so
opposed that they confirm the contrast between their views on the subject of
literature. The transition from Hippos to I Wish I Were You characteristically
makes this distinction much more explicit. In I Wish I Were You, Dennison may
still prefer the man to the writer and identify with the Rimbaud who gave up on
literature and traded literary Paris for African adventures, but Kerouac now finds
himself free to identify in his own way with Rimbaud, so that Ryko, his story’s
sole narrator, can at last spell out his admiration for Rimbaud, in categorically
literary terms: “Rimbaud’s prose is what I’d like to achieve…” (The Unknown
Kerouac, 416).
2
French Poetic Realist Film in Kerouac’s

Unknown Bookmovie
In a scholarly context in which there has been increasing attention paid to

Kerouac’s oeuvre, especially to the creative impact of his Québécois origins, it is
doubly regrettable that I Wish I Were You, his very first accomplished bookmovie
in which there are so many French references, has been left unpublished so long
and therefore remains to be studied. The following analysis of Hippos and I Wish
I Were You should complement, rather than directly contribute, to studies of
Kerouac’s native language and origins. That is to say, it doesn’t focus on habits and
tastes that the writer inherited from his early cultural environment, chiefly his
family; rather, it concentrates on the artistic sensibility Kerouac developed later
through his self-education in French works—books, paintings and films—the
importance of which I Wish I Were You enlightens. Kerouac’s stunning work of
rewriting Hippos indeed draws on an extensive knowledge of French culture that
he acquired less through friends and family than by himself, at the Lowell public
library and then in the bookshops, museums and cinema theatres of Manhattan.
It deserves sustained critical attention, and the comparativist reading advanced
here begins the task of analysis by focusing on two key scenes of I Wish I Were
You. For reasons that will become clear, it is no coincidence that these scenes are
both centered on the reception of visual works of art: the painting Cache-cache
by Pavlev Tchelitchew (Hide and Seek, 1942) and the film Le Quai des brumes by
Marcel Carné (Port of Shadows, 1938).
Carné’s masterpiece is one of several French poetic realist films that were
major sources of inspiration for Kerouac. Not long after having completed I Wish
I Were You, he famously hung a card behind his working desk reading “Blood
of the Poet,” after Cocteau’s film Le Sang d’un poète (1930), which, according
to Barry Miles, he saw with Burroughs in early 1945 (Miles, Burroughs, 117).
Kerouac also rushed to see Renoir’s Les Bas-fonds (The Lower Depths, 1936)
and Carné’s Drôle de drame (Bizarre, Bizarre, 1937) almost immediately after
their release in France (Nicosia, 60). In Hippos alone, two other French poetic
realist classics from 1937 appear: La Grande illusion by Jean Renoir and Pépé
le moko by Julien Duvivier. These last French films of the 1930s are part of the
first Beat novel’s remarkably rich cultural landscape. But the significance of the
two rewritten scenes involving Cache-cache and Port of Shadows is that Kerouac
uses them to propose a specific form of cultural analysis, one that examines
the dynamics of reception by reflecting upon the early Beat circle’s admiration
for French culture—an admiration that will be approached here, in line with
Kerouac’s own logic, through its mechanism of projection. As a term that neatly
conflates the cinematic with the psychoanalytical, projection, and the broader
process of identification of which it is a part, indeed offers a critical vocabulary
and an appropriate frame of reference to read the French backstory to Kerouac’s
aesthetic, as it emerged through the writing and rewriting of the sensational
murder story evoked in the previous chapter.
In Hippos, the characters’ reverence for Rimbaud stands for a larger
romanticization of French culture. However, when Phil (based on Carr)
becomes desperate to escape the predatory desire of Al (based on Kammerer)
and so discusses with Ryko (Kerouac’s narrator) the plan to ship out together
to Paris, we absolutely do not find what we might expect; the allure of France as
the Promised Land, a dream vision. On the contrary, what the text gives us is a
France defined by default, in relationship to America. Phil says to Ryko:
“I want to get out as soon as possible.”

“There’s no telling where our ship’ll be going,” I told him.
“I don’t care, although I’d like France. […] The Latin Quarter’s what I want
to see.”
“The Latin Quarter’s in Paris,” I said, “and all we have is a strip of the
Normandy peninsula. I don’t think we’ll see Paris this time.”
“There might be a breakthrough to Paris at any event. However, the main
thing is to get out of America.” (17)
The key words, repeated at both the beginning and the end of this exchange, are
clearly “get out.” What is emphasized here is not the appeal of Paris, but the need
to leave America, which is all the more paradoxical considering the historical
reality of the world at the time of this dialogue set in August 1944. Except for a
little part of Normandy, France is an occupied country and Paris is full of Nazis.
In fact, Phil and Ryko don’t aim for Paris despite its being occupied; they choose
Paris because it is occupied. Or to put it another way: these young Americans
Kerouac’s Unknown Bookmovie 45
identify with Parisians inasmuch as they too are waiting, hoping to be “liberated,”
perhaps not from occupation but certainly from social and cultural oppression.
Looking ahead to the crucial importance of poetic realist film in I Wish I Were
You, it is revealing that when Burroughs’ narrator questions the feasibility of Phil
and Ryko’s fantasy of shipping out to occupied France—“What are you going
to do for food? Everything is rationed. You need books for everything” (80)—
they defend it by invoking a romantic scenario directly inspired by Renoir’s La
Grande illusion (80, 81). In this classic of poetic realist cinema set during World
War I, two escaped French prisoners of war seek refuge with a German woman
on her farm. Despite not speaking German, the Lieutenant Maréchal played by
the actor of French poetic realist cinema, that is Jean Gabin, charms the woman
into providing him and his wounded friend with shelter. By planning to “pose as
Frenchmen” and “sleep in haylofts till [they] get to the Left Bank,” Phil and Ryko
identify with Renoir’s escaped French prisoners of war in a mise-en-abîme that
corresponds to what, in psychoanalytical terms, would be an act of projection
(80). By relating their plan to escape to Paris and their feeling of alienation to
that of the characters of the French film, their exchange shows that Phil and
Ryko’s dream is more to leave America than to ship out to France. The reference
to Renoir’s film reveals that Paris materializes or mirrors back to them the truth
of how they feel in New York: not free but trapped, barely surviving in a culture
from which they feel estranged. Again and again in both versions of the murder
story we encounter the boredom, violence and ugliness of life in New York, a
city where brutal cops casually beat up innocent drunks. I Wish I Were You pulls
no punches: “Manhattan is a death trap, built right over Hell: have you not seen
smoke coming out of holes in its streets? What more proof does one need?”
(The Unknown Kerouac, 336). In sum, Paris is not the Heaven to this American
Hell (or Miller’s 1945 Air-Conditioned Nightmare). Rather, Paris operates here
as shorthand for French culture, and its function as a mirror suggests the larger
self-reflexive strategy of Hippos, half-hidden behind all the Joe College name-
dropping and the Vaudeville farce of the Greenwich village bohemians.
The two key examples of this self-reflexive strategy in I Wish I Were You show
how Kerouac would extensively develop French cultural references from Hippos.
Since the literary is either repressed or treated ironically in Hippos, we might expect
Kerouac writing on his own terms to make I Wish I Were You simply more literary.
What we find, however, is an enhancement of the literary but mediated by works
of visual culture rather than literature, as becomes clear from a close reading of the
two scenes featuring the painting Cache-cache and the film Port of Shadows. On a
narrative level, Kerouac had reasons for expanding these scenes: the first takes place
in an art gallery, the second a cinema, and both locations are rich with dramatic
possibilities. But at the creative level, they show how Kerouac actively incorporated
art and film into his aesthetics of writing, leading towards what he would soon call
“bookmovies.” Significantly, Kerouac made this breakthrough via his engagement
with works of French visual culture, as well as in the context of a highly unusual
act of rewriting. For while many authors rewrite themselves and some adapt and
rewrite works by others, the act of rewriting a jointly composed original can only
have been for Kerouac highly self-conscious. Within the narrative of I Wish I Were
You, especially in these two scenes, Kerouac’s process of creation affirms itself
through the contrast between his narrator’s thoughtful reflections on artistic works
and the other characters’ unreflective process of identification with French culture.
Cache-cache: “America Is My Country and

Paris Is My Home Town”
The first of the two scenes rewritten by Kerouac revolves around a work of art
whose very title points out how in Hippos cultural references are simultaneously
revealed and concealed: Pavlev Tchelitchew’s Cache-cache. In Hippos, the allusion
is easy to miss, but a game of hide and seek is indeed being played through the
reference to Cache-cache, which should invite us to consider both the painting and
the painter himself. For who was Tchelitchew? Born in Russia, he had for a decade
lived and worked in France where he met his lifelong partner, Charles Henri Ford.
And who was Ford? The coauthor, together with Parker Tyler, of The Young and
Evil (1933). And what was The Young and Evil, if not the closest precursor to Hippos
in both setting and composition: a coauthored novel about bohemian artists and
homosexuals in New York. The novel also has a very specific French connection via
Gertrude Stein, whose mark is evident in the style of the text and who was a patron to
both Ford and Tchelitchew.1 How much of this backstory was known by Burroughs
and Kerouac is unsure, but they certainly knew the novel itself, and so Hippos uses
the name Tchelitchew as a wink to those in the know. Given the background and
name of the painter, the title of his artwork also suggests that their definition of
French culture is far from being narrowly national but is often distinctly hybrid.
Once again, Kerouac makes that point even clearer in I Wish I Were You,
when Ryko, Phil and Al visit bars that they didn’t visit in Hippos, and where they
enjoy performances by an Italian man who sings “L’Amour toujours l’amour” and
a German woman who sings “French naughty songs” (The Unknown Kerouac,
409). As noted in the introduction, Kerouac never once referenced Québécois
literary or artistic works, so that in terms of national identity, his Francophone
origins seemingly had little to do with the centrality of French culture for
his rapidly evolving creativity in the mid-1940s. Echoing Stein’s famous quip
“America is my country and Paris is my home town” (“An American and France,”
61), the meaning of French culture for him should therefore be seen as an artistic
sensibility rather than being reduced to a literal linguistic or national identity. In
other words, Kerouac was as French as Ford and Tchelitchew.
This brings us to the second game being played by Cache-cache, which turns
on precisely how well-known the painting itself was in its day. Finished in 1942,
and almost immediately exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,
Cache-cache quickly became the museum’s most popular picture. Even if the
painting is referred to en passant in Hippos, contemporary readers would surely
have known what they were thinking of when, shortly after Phil has stabbed Al
to death, he and Kerouac’s narrator, Ryko, go to the museum to look at it. What
they see in the painting is not said, but we might imagine that they looked at it
just as their contemporaries did, invited by the picture’s title to play the game in
seeking something hidden in it.
Significantly, Hippos uses the French title of the painting, not its Anglicized
form, for the French term mirrors itself by performing the act of hiding: Cache-
cache. The joke here is that Hippos gives us only the title of the painting in
French, whose importance we might well miss, but in I Wish I Were You the
reference is unpacked over several paragraphs and, crucially, names it in both
English and French: Kerouac hence unravels the hide-and-seek game played in
Hippos, which only half-refers to the painting. Even more significantly, he does
so when using the painting as a way to characterize the shallow identification of
the early Beat circle with French language and culture:
It was, as the French say, très formidable! We had, at least,—(this is essential)—a

little collective womb of our own… in which to play hide and seek, cache-cache.
(The Unknown Kerouac, 374)
Dashes and brackets in Kerouac’s rewriting are there to draw our attention to this
moment, as does his resonating use of French. Cache-cache names the strategy
of the text, as well as the lives of the characters represented in it, and Kerouac
makes this mise-en-abîme fully explicit. As for what they see in the picture, this
too is strikingly spelled out in I Wish I Were You, by the addition of a single
key phrase: “Off they rushed, these kids, to see Tchelitchev’s Cache-cache at the
Museum of Modern Art, to see themselves…” (374).
Kerouac’s last ellipsis is again a telling use of punctuation. It invites us to
share his understanding that “these kids,” as he mockingly calls them here fail to
recognize that what they see in the picture is themselves—even though they are
already represented in it as spectators. In other words, only Kerouac in the figure
of the narrator Mike Ryko, a spectator of the spectators, grasps the point. To
underscore the fact that the others miss that point, and to stress the shallowness of
the way in which they relate to French culture, he then adds: “They talked about
it endlessly over their Pernod. None of them had looked at that painting long
enough to learn not to talk about it” (374). The reference to Pernod is perfect,
the French drink par excellence, but here it is a sign of a superficial affectation
of French culture, of talking about it, in contrast to genuinely experiencing it.
That is, Tchelitchew’s canvas acts as a mirror calling for an act of identification—
which happens, but without the spectators being fully conscious of it. This failure
to grasp the process, or to reflect critically upon it, will be answered by Kerouac
with a profound moment of identification achieved through the work of French
culture that he reserves for the climax of I Wish I Were You.
“The Best Picture I Ever Saw”
In this scene, instead of a canvas, it is a cinema screen that functions as a

mirror. Kerouac’s narrator Ryko, Phil and Al are in a Times Square theatre to
see Marcel Carné’s Port of Shadows. I Wish I Were You thus concludes a process
that began in Hippos with projection—via Renoir’s La Grande illusion—and
blind identification—via Tchelitchew’s Cache-cache—with an authentic act of
identification. Through his rewriting, Kerouac indeed completes the cultural
appropriation he had started with Burroughs, in an act of positive incorporation
that asserts his identity as a writer.
In Hippos, Kerouac and Burroughs name two other poetic realist film classics,
but while Pépé le moko is merely mentioned in Burroughs’ chapters, La Grande
illusion is inherently part of the narrative in Kerouac’s chapters that refer to it on
two occasions. Kerouac has Phil express his remorse for the crime he has just
committed by speaking the striking final line of the aristocrat de Boeldieu played
by Pierre Fresnay in La Grande illusion: “I’m weak. The gloves are beginning to
chafe” (Hippos, 179). All three films mentioned also star Jean Gabin, with whom
Kerouac would strongly identify in his journals.2 However, Al’s striking response
to Port of Shadows specifically, in both Hippos and I Wish I Were You, indicates
that this French film for Kerouac is definitely the most significant of the three:
“It’s the best picture I ever saw” (113). In this context, the drab summary of the
film’s plot in Hippos is puzzling:
Port of Shadows is about a French army deserter who is in Le Havre, trying to
skip the country. Everything is set, he has a passport and is on a ship, when he
gets the idea to go back and see his girl once again before he sails. The result is a
gangster shoots him in the back and the ship sails without him. (112)
Were we to rely only on this sketchy summary, we couldn’t possibly grasp why,
for Al, this picture is the best he ever saw, let alone why “his eyes were moist”
after watching it (113). If we turn to I Wish I Were You, however, once again
we find what was only hinted at in Hippos, which yet again has to do with a
projection.
When Kerouac rewrote the scene involving Cache-cache, he made it longer and
also moved it in order to stress its importance: from near the beginning to a half-
way point in the text. Likewise and even more emphatically, when he rewrote this
passage on Port of Shadows, he moved it so that it appears at the very end of his
text, and in rewriting the film synopsis made it four times longer than in Hippos.
In the most radical revision of the text, Kerouac hence closes his text without the
murder, and puts in its place this beautifully written scene in the cinema:
They puffed on their cigarettes and paid rapt attention to the film… Its quality
of shadowy street-ends, the carnival in it, the fog over the bay, the old man
who played Bach and spoke in a whining voice and was lecherous with his
niece, the fatigued little Frenchmen who worked on the waterfront—all this
marvellous welter of human activity and weariness and slow sweet delight had
been filmed for them. No one in the theater that night understood the film
so well as they… and none could project himself into it, but Ramsay Allen.
There are two striking aspects in this passage, both typical of Kerouac’s fine
work of rewriting and of the central role that French culture played in it. First,
the French movie becomes a means for self-understanding: it had all “been
filmed for them.” The three spectators literally recognize themselves in Port of
Shadows that therefore functions just like Cache-cache, in which the young New
Yorkers “see themselves,” as a mise-en-abîme: “No one in the theater that night
understood the film so well as they.” And second, to indicate the intensity of
their identification—chiefly Al’s identification—Kerouac himself uses the term

“projection,” full of the meaning that both film studies and psychoanalysis have
invested it: “None could project himself into it, but Ramsey Allen.” In I Wish I
Were You, Kerouac also introduces the key character that was left out of the brief
plot summary in Hippos: “the old man who played Bach and spoke in a whining
voice and was lecherous with his niece”—in other words, a character like Al in his
predatory pursuit of the young Phil. In Port of Shadows, this is the unattractive yet
tragic character Zabel, played by Michel Simon, who gets killed by Jean.
In enabling us to make this connection, Kerouac allows us to understand why
it should be Al who can best “project himself ” into Port of Shadows as a whole:
quite simply because his fateful situation echoes that of the film’s all three main
characters. First and most obviously, Al can identify himself with Zabel, who
also plays the role of an older mentor and tormented, rejected suitor to the one
he loves; second, with Jean, the morally outcast army deserter, who mirrors his
own pessimism and inevitable fate; and third and most surprisingly, with Nelly,
the film’s young femme fatale, who reflects the peculiar generosity and fatality
of his own grand gesture. Al and Nelly indeed produce the exact same gesture
for the one they love: they try to help him sail away from themselves, an attempt
that engenders death. In sum, Zabel, Jean and Nelly all share with Al the three
hallmarks of French poetic realist characters: a tragic fate that goes hand in hand
with their isolation and establishes their moral superiority.
Now we can better grasp the fundamental difference between Hippos and I
Wish I Were You. Whereas the first appears merely superficial and self-conscious
in its use of French culture, the second is precise and self-reflexive. Equally
evident is the sheer intensity of Kerouac’s dramatization in the final lines of I
Wish I Were You. In Hippos, surely internalizing Burroughs’ preference for
straight dialogue and avoidance of any sentimentalism, Kerouac’s equivalent line
was more restrained: “‘It’s the best picture I ever saw,’ he said, and I noticed his
eyes were moist” (113). Now the final lines of the narrative, the rewritten words
of I Wish I Were You, invite us to feel with the characters as intensely as possible
an empathetic drive whose desired effects on the reader/spectator strongly echo
those of French poetic realist cinema:
“It was the best picture I ever saw,” Al said, and he turned and looked at Ryko
for the first time with any semblance of compassion. It was as though he wanted
Ryko to see the tears that were in his eyes, and to see everything.
So Ryko wrote this.
This is an extraordinary conclusion, both to the scene and to the whole story.
Unlike the spectators before Cache-cache, Al finds himself in Port of Shadows,
and so does Ryko. Here, Al looks to Ryko as the writer, the one who must see
his tears in order to tell his tragic story. And Kerouac accordingly responds
by framing the entire text we have read as an act of writing, inspired by and
dedicated to his dead friend. By adding one final phrase, written in hand on the
original typescript—“So Ryko wrote this”—he completes a triad of self-reflexive
scenes, for the page before us now operates as did both the canvas in the museum
and the screen in the cinema theatre. Through these analogies across media, we
are invited to make our choice: will we respond to Hippos or I Wish I Were You
like the spectators of Cache-cache, talking over our drinks, or like Al and Ryko
after watching Port of Shadows, communicating beyond words?
Kerouac must have particularly appreciated the visual aesthetic of Carné’s
Port of Shadows, and admired in it what Dudley Andrew, in his definitive study of
poetic realist cinema, termed the genre’s fundamentally “autoreflective character”
(Andrew, 226). For his use of French references through elaborate mise-en-abîmes
gives I Wish I Were You the essential autoreflective quality of poetic realist films.
Moreover, like poetic realist films, I Wish I Were You combines realism—the day-
to-day hardboiled dialogue it shares with Hippos—with poetry—the constant
quest of the characters for a “new vision” heightened by the self-reflexivity of
Kerouac’s empathetic prose. In contrast, Hippos is fundamentally Burroughsian
from its title to its style. To borrow Andrew’s terminology, in terms of French
culture, while Hippos’ sensibility is nearer to that promoted by the surrealists—
an “ethnography of violence”—the sensibility promoted by Kerouac couldn’t be
closer to that of poetic realist films—a “phenomenology of pain” (49).
The fact that Kerouac repositioned the scene involving Port of Shadows at the
very end of I Wish I Were You certainly confirms his general admiration for the
French cinema of the 1930s. How could the future author of The Town and
the City (1950) not have been seduced by the genre’s legendary “atmosphere
of mystery and alienation hovering above modern city life”? (Andrew, 27).
The hallmarks of poetic realist cinema are in fact also those of Kerouac. The
very first pages of I Wish I Were You couldn’t be more Kerouackian and poetic
realist in their description of “the phantom of darkness and death” previously
mentioned.That is, the atmospheric quality of poetic realist cinema, itself
inspired by Feuillade’s popular serial Fantômas, undoubtedly participated in
inspiring Kerouac’s creation of the phantom haunting the pages of his rewriting
of Hippos.
The innovative sensibility of I Wish I Were You can also be defined through its
optique, a term coined by Roland Barthes with regard to writing and applied by
Andrew to explain the reception of French poetic realism in general and of Jean
Gabin’s acting in particular: “Arguably the focus of identification for an entire
nation, his roles and his style condense the poetic realist optique into a single figure,
a body, that moves on the screen” (226). Significantly, the eyes of Al in the finale
of I Wish I Were You operate just like Gabin’s in Port of Shadows: as the “spiritual
source of his body, authenticating, if not justifying, his most antisocial acts” (227).3
The new ending given by Kerouac certainly allows the comparison with the star
of French poetic realism: the description of Al’s mute gaze seeking compassion in
Ryko at the end of the story echoes Jean’s terrible gaze staring at Nelly, lying half-
dead on the pavement in the final close-up of Port of Shadows. This final gaze has
the power to redeem the morally reprehensible acts for which both Al and Jean
must die (Al’s homosexual love was indeed as illegal as Jean’s desertion of the army),
if not by the hand of society, then by that of the writer and director of the story.
Dudley Andrew’s study of French poetic realism rests on the premise that
“the films that beckon us are entrances to a different way of being a spectator
[…] different enough to tempt us to construct the spectator to which they are
addressed” (23). Kerouac precisely gives us that spectator in the figure of Al,
“for whom” Port of Shadows “has been filmed,” just as Ryko rewrites Hippos “for
him”: “So Ryko wrote this.” By screening Port of Shadows as the finale of I Wish I
Were You, Kerouac begins to invest in the emotional power of moving pictures,
images that literally move the audience, in order to mirror back to us a logic of
readership. That the film is French and the audience is American is crucial, and
Kerouac may well have had such an optique in mind when, in a letter ten years
later, he shared his wish to make “a vast French movie” entitled “A DAY IN NEW
YORK” (Kerouac, Selected Letters, 121). Here, the term “French movie” is almost
a tautology, since a good movie is for Kerouac definitively French, even if it is
to be set and made in New York. But the point is less that he associates cinema
with France, than that the two together mediate his own definition of literature.
Kerouac wrote what he called bookmovies (“the movie in words”), and while
he declared this “the visual American form,” his definition of the visual, like his
definition of the literary, is distinctly French (Charters, Portable, 59).
The importance of the foreignness of French culture for Kerouac, rather than
the familiarity of American paintings or Hollywood movies, is that it introduces
a difference which creates both emotional identification and self-critical
distance.4 This is the significance of the scene in the cinema that concludes I
Wish I Were You, and it is also the meaning of its title, which has little to do with
the expression of a narcissistic desire on the part of Al (alias Kammerer) for Phil
(alias Carr), as has been assumed.5 Rather, it spells out the writer’s vision and
his mission to write bookmovies: that is, as Kerouac puts it, “to see everything.”
The Writer’s Wish
A third cultural allusion is essential to grasp the fundamental shift of emphasis

established by Kerouac’s work of rewriting: Edmund Wilson’s 1941 essay on
Sophocles’ tragedy Philoctetes, “The Wound and the Bow.” Although it is not
French but Greek, this allusion functions exactly like the French references
previously examined, in making American literature access a culture other than
itself. More specifically, this last reference enlightens the very title of I Wish I Were
You and the singularity of the optique that Kerouac develops in it, especially the
new cinematic dimension he brings to the text through his use of point of view.
When Phil is on the verge of getting his papers to ship with Ryko in I Wish
I Were You, he moves out of his apartment and asks Al to stay away from him.
Al then uses Wilson’s essay as a last resort to keep him: “I’ve got something to
show you, Phil […] It’s amazing how it fits in… with us. Really!” (The Unknown
Kerouac, 387). It “fits” because Sophocles’ tragedy mirrors their fraught
homosexual relationship. Philoctetes, who was given a magic bow by the Gods,
suffers a repulsive wounding and is exiled on an island to suffer alone. Odysseus
convinces the young Neoptolemus to go there, charm Philoctetes and steal the
bow so they can use the magic weapon to defend Athens and defeat Troy. However,
the charm operates inversely, and so the outcome is that the young Neoptolemus
is seduced by the old Philoctetes. As with his use of Port of Shadows, Kerouac’s
introduction of this reference into I Wish I Were You unexpectedly privileges the
point of view of Al: we are invited to understand that Al identifies with the old
Philoctetes, in hope that the essay will seduce Phil into recognizing himself in
the young Neoptolemus. Following Wilson’s conclusion, Al’s hope is that, after
reading the essay on Philoctetes, at last Phil will see his homosexual desire in a
positive light and, like Neoptolemus, “instead of winning over the outlaw,” will
heroically “outlaw himself ” (Wilson, 264).
Homosexual desire has been central to interpretations of the title I Wish I
Were You which, in the absence of a published text until 2016, has been read by
biographers as the expression of Kammerer’s supposedly self-destructive feelings
for the young Carr.6 This biographical reading of the title misrepresents the text
it designates, as well as what distinguishes it from Hippos. The resonant, self-
reflexive title Kerouac chose for his rewriting of Hippos should prompt many other
interpretations, and the following is supported by Wilson’s essay on Philoctetes.
If Kerouac introduces this essay into I Wish I Were You, it is not only because
of the homosexual nature of the relation between its male protagonists, but also
because of their number. For Wilson’s case is that, unlike most Greek tragedies,
Philoctetes has the specificity of involving not two, but three main characters: it
is “a triple affair, which makes more complicated demands on our sympathies”
(245). Wilson’s original thesis marks a crucial difference between Hippos and
I Wish I Were You. Like Philoctetes compared to, say, Antigone (involving two
main characters, Antigone and Créon), and in contrast to Hippos (also involving
two main characters, Phil and Al), I Wish I Were You complicates the unilateral
tragic relationship and turns it into a triangular one between Phil, Al and Ryko.
Confirming this interpretation, the second part of I Wish I Were You constantly
visualizes the trio that Phil, Al and Ryko form:
There walked Phillip, with the perennial cigarette in his mouth, eyes cast down
in painful concentration… and over him, practically, hovering and bounding
along with head cocked to one side, lunged Ramsay Allen solicitously.
It was something to behold. They were both ragged and mad-seeming, and
behind them scuffled the lazy Ryko.
(The Unknown Kerouac, 398–99)
Shortly after, Kerouac refers again to this “picture of the three of them walking down
a street” and calls it “the essential picture to be drawn” (400). What is most striking
in this “picture” is the typically cinematic attention Kerouac pays to all three points
of view in movement, and how they are imbricated in each other to form a much
more complex optique than that of Hippos, which of course privileges the writer’s
point of view. First dimension: Phil looks down and doesn’t care about anybody or
anything else than himself; therefore his point of view is the most limited of the
three. Then comes the second dimension: Al “hovering” “over him,” his point of view
including that of Phil, the object of his affection in front of him. Finally, the third
dimension: the privileged point of view of Ryko intrinsically related to Kerouac’s
identity as the omniscient writer: “it was something to behold.” As Kerouac’s analysis
of the young New Yorkers’ reception of Cache-cache has instructed us, for him, the
writer’s mission is to never cease seeking to see, to see further, to “see everything.”
Schematically:
Figure 2.1 Three characters’ points of view in Jack Kerouac’s I Wish I Were You
In the final scene of his rewriting of Hippos, Kerouac undoes the binary
relationship between Phil and Al, by bringing together the two characters who
have the richest points of view, and the third is the cinema screen that mediates
the intense relay of looks between them: Al turns and looks at Ryko “for the
first time.” This key “look” is prepared for by the many “pictures” of the trio that
Ryko has given us, and retrospectively imbues the whole story we have read with
a totally different color and meaning. It is indeed a radical change: whereas the
climax of Hippos lies in the murder scene where Phil stabs Al, I Wish I Were You
excludes the murder and climaxes with the cinematic scene previously analyzed,
where Al offers compassion and seeks it in return from Ryko. In view of this
striking denouement, it makes sense to reinterpret the wish in the title I Wish I
Were You: rather than representing Al’s narcissistic desire to ‘be’ Phil, it expresses
the empathetic desire of the narrator Ryko, and through him, the compulsive
vision of the writer to understand the other, to ‘see everything.’
From the beginning of I Wish I Were You to its very end, Kerouac appropriates
cinema’s power to multiply points of view and create the three different types
of identifications analyzed: first, the projection of Phil and Ryko through their
plan to ship out to Paris borrowing a scenario from Renoir’s La Grande illusion;
second, the blind identification of the bohemians with the characters represented
in the painting Cache-cache; and third, the fully conscious identification of Al
through Port of Shadows.
Kerouac’s appropriation of cinema’s singular capacity to alternate points
of view is most striking in the final chapter of I Wish I Were You, where this
power becomes literary through his ingenious shifting use of the second person
pronoun “you.” Kerouac uses it so that, to our surprise if not to our horror, we find
ourselves identifying with the homosexual predator Al, the narrative’s definitive
other. Forcing us not only to accept but to embrace his own empathy, the ending
of I Wish I Were You establishes compassion as the type of structural relationship
essential to Kerouac’s grand definition of writing as “seeing everything.” What
was projection finally becomes incorporation: the writer takes the other—Al,
the homosexual predator—inside himself, or rather, by taking the other inside
he becomes the writer: “So Ryko wrote this.” While Kerouac concludes I Wish I
Were You by honoring the memory of his friend, he also honors the identity of
the writer by framing in his own hand the entire text we have read as an act of
writing.
In his afterword to Hippos, James Grauerholz observes that the Carr-
Kammerer story returns throughout Kerouac’s oeuvre, from The Town and the
City in 1950 to Vanity of Duluoz in 1973. Indeed, it literally frames Kerouac’s
Duluoz legend, since it is central to the very first and last novels he published
before his death.7 However, the murder that was the climax of Hippos disappears
from I Wish I Were You and in its place Kerouac asserts his authorship in the most
paradoxical and yet prescient manner: inaugurating the legend of the writer in
a cinema, watching a French poetic realist film. While we might have expected
the Canuck Kerouac to embrace French culture, in I Wish I Were You we see
him define himself against his peers who rush to identify with French culture
simply because it is French. Kerouac has a much more nuanced involvement
with French culture that passes beyond the Frenchness of paintings or films
to creatively inform his aesthetic. Cache-cache and Port of Shadows did much
more than inspire or influence I Wish I Were You; the French painting and film
each crowned half of the story, and so formed its architecture. Port of Shadows
thus gave Kerouac’s rewriting of Hippos an original ending, deeper meaning and
made it the first “bookmovie” of many others to follow.
3
Kerouac’s Humanism:
From Céline and Dostoevsky to Proust
Reading Voyage au bout d'la nuit was to me like seeing the greatest French
movie ever made, a super heavenly Quai des Brumes a thousand times
sadder than Jean Gabin’s bitter lip or Michel Simon’s lugubrious lechery or the
carnival where lovers cry…
—Kerouac, “On Céline,” in Good Blonde & Others, 90
There is a fundamental distinction between the narrator and the author of I

Wish I Were You: their literary aspirations are based on two very different French
stylists. That is, Mike Ryko dreams of writing like the poet of French modernity
(“Rimbaud’s prose is what I’d like to achieve”), but Jack Kerouac affirms in his
diary having modeled his style for I Wish I Were You on another French writer,
Louis-Ferdinand Céline: “Wrote Céline-like version of Carr case”; “Worked on
Tourian novel, in new version (Louis F. Célinist).”1 Kerouac’s unpublished 1945
short diary is indeed saturated with notes on and quotations from Céline, and
that suggests what the epigraph above would later confirm, that Marcel Carné’s
film Port of Shadows (Le Quai des brumes, 1938) and Céline’s novel Journey
to the End of the Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit, 1932) were Kerouac’s two
major sources of inspiration for reworking Hippos into I Wish I Were You.
While the previous section has established the structural role of Carné’s poetic
realist film in Kerouac’s first bookmovie, this one begins by turning to Kerouac’s
appropriation of what he sees as the “super heavenly” literary version of Port of
Shadows: Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night.
In this dark yet humoristic picaresque French novel, Céline’s first person
narrator, Ferdinand Bardamu, recounts his peregrinations in Paris as a doctor
and his travels to Africa and America in the interwar period. Céline was a
noncommissioned officer (“sous-officier”) in the First World War, and came back
from it traumatized and wounded. As a result, Journey to the End of the Night is
ardently antimilitarist, its African episode anticolonialist, and its American episode
anticapitalist. Readers of On the Road will of course recognize in these aspects of

Céline’s novel deep humanist values shared and promoted by Kerouac and the
early Beat circle. But it is in fact the narrative structure and existentialist quality
of Céline’s Journey that Kerouac transposed in On the Road.
In the version of the famous text published in 1957, Kerouac quotes from an
homage Céline had rendered to Zola that had appeared in 1951; the very year
he composed his road-novel.2 The quotation itself—“‘Nine lines of crime, one
of boredom,’ said Louis-Ferdinand Céline” (On the Road, 137)—has a simple
functional purpose, which is to support the sarcastic remarks of his narrator
about the American police fabricating proof when they can’t get any. But the
date and source of this quotation establish just how attentive Kerouac was to any
publication coming from the writer he regarded as his “master.” In an interview
broadcast by Radio-Canada in 1959, he thus affirmed: “If they offer me the Nobel
Prize when I’m 50 and they haven’t yet given it to Louis-Ferdinand Céline […],
I’d say ‘no, not until you give it to my master’” (my translation).3
To understand how Kerouac came to measure the success of his own oeuvre
against the French novelist’s in such an emphatic way, this chapter begins by
retracing his progressive and complex appropriation of Céline in his journals
and correspondence, from reworking Hippos into I Wish I Were You in 1945 to
preparing On the Road between 1947 and 1951. During that period, the Russian
oeuvre of Dostoevsky forms a crucial binary with Céline’s, and close textual
analysis of Kerouac’s journals makes plain that Dostoevsky’s hope for humanity
and Céline’s exasperation with it both fed into the structure and characters of On
the Road. Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism is characterized by a similar tension, and
Kerouac’s recently published “Commentaire sur Louis-Ferdinand Céline” strikingly
suggests that his reading of Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night was informed by
key concepts from Sartre’s philosophy. This evidence for Kerouac’s appropriation
of Sartre turns out to be more apparent than real—the Sartrean notions we find in
Kerouac’s “Commentaire” have almost certainly been introduced in the text by its
French translator—and yet, as we will see, the invitation to read Céline’s work in
Sartrean terms, and by implication Kerouac’s own, is not itself mistaken. In line
with the recent scholarship of Nancy Grace (2006), Tim Hunt (2014) and Hassan
Melehy (2016), this chapter goes against the still widespread view of Kerouac’s
famous road-novel as lacking in literariness, summed up by Truman Capote’s
famous lapidary comment in 1959: “that’s not writing, it’s typing” (qtd. in Melehy,
16), and confirms him as a well-read author who maneuvers and challenges literary
traditions, religions and philosophies with ease, accuracy and imagination.
Kerouac’s Humanism: From Céline and Dostoevsky to Proust 59
Thick with literary allusions and the working through of ideas, Kerouac’s
numerous journals play a crucial role in transforming our sense of his identity
as a writer. Perhaps even more than his letters, they deserve a wide readership
and to be read as vital parts of his oeuvre. As Kerouac himself understood,
“maybe nothing gets done without a great, honest, grave, disciplined journal!”
(The Unknown Kerouac, 123). Although he needed no model for his writer’s
journals, he must have recognized himself in the figure of Edouard in André
Gide’s antinovel The Counterfeiters (Les Faux-monnayeurs, 1925), who keeps a
record of his own novel’s progress, fantasizing:
Just think how interesting such a notebook kept by Dickens or Balzac would
be; if we had the diary of the Education Sentimentale [by Flaubert] or of The
Brothers Karamazov! [by Dostoevsky]—the story of the work—of its gestation!
How thrilling it would be… more interesting than the work itself… (Gide, The
Counterfeiters, 170)
Unlike Kerouac, Burroughs kept little to no record of his writing in progress or

of his literary genealogy, so that a very different Gide features in Chapter 4, and
if Burroughs’ Gide helps measure how distinctly the two Americans read even
the same French author, needless to say their appropriations of Céline are also
worlds apart.
1945: From Seeing to Caring
If we recall the subject of I Wish I Were You (the months preceding the real-life
murder of Burroughs and Kerouac’s friend by another of their friends) and the
date Kerouac completed his manuscript (August 1945, the month that saw the
end of the Second World War), it comes as no surprise to discover his diary of
the time revolves around the notion of morality:
The man who, out of human terror and desperation of the darkness is become
full of quivering awareness, and who may even commit a crime… is more moral
than the froggish man who wallows in his bath of stupid ignorance and half-
realized malice, and is respectable.
The moron is the perfect amoralist.
Morality is no longer, has never been, a matter of virtue and vice, “good and
Evil,” and we all know it.
It is a matter of consciousness.*
All malice is a product of ignorance, all ignorance stems from the frog.4
This passage from Kerouac’s unpublished 1945 diary significantly intertwines

appropriations of Gide and Céline. From Gide, it borrows the “amoral”
vocabulary and way of reasoning of The Counterfeiters, and Kerouac follows
its attack of the traditional binary of “good and Evil” as insufficient to assess
morality. Yet, in style and content, this entry is definitely not Gidean. Rather,
it suggests Kerouac’s dissatisfaction with Gide’s transgressive morals much
discussed and already appropriated by the early Beat circle: “we all know it.”
Before Kerouac rewrote his “literary” version of Hippos, nothing perhaps
distinguished his views of French literature and philosophy from his friends’
own views. But the next remarks in his diary suggest that reading Céline’s
Journey to the End of the Night while composing I Wish I Were You contributed
greatly to change that. For the reflection on “amorality” above is followed by a
long quotation from the penultimate passage of Céline’s Journey in which Léon
Robinson, the narrator’s recurrent foil, precisely admonishes his lover for being
“ignorant” and embracing the “drivel” that surrounds her without questioning
it. When copying this passage into his diary, Kerouac carefully removes from it
all details concerning the lovers’ quarrel of Robinson to emphasize its shocking
ethical dimension:
And you don’t even guess that you make one sick… It’s enough for you just to
repeat all the drivel people talk… You think that’s quite all right… That’s quite
enough, you think, because other people have told you there’s nothing greater
than love and that it would always work with everyone and that it would last
for ever… Well, as far as I’m concerned you know what they can do with their
love… D’you hear me? It doesn’t catch on with me, my good girl, that stinking
love of theirs!… You’re out of luck! You’re too late! It no longer works with me,
that’s all! And that’s what you go getting into such tempers about. Do you have
to make love in the middle of all that’s going on? And seeing the things one sees?
Or maybe you don’t notice anything? No. I think it’s that you just don’t care.
(Céline, Journey, 430–31)5
Even such harmless notions as “love” deserve to be thought through for Céline’s
Robinson, and it is better to have perverse or violent takes on social “drivel” than
naïve acceptance. Given that brotherhood and love are and would remain the
foundational humanist values of Kerouac’s oeuvre, we can readily grasp why he
would have been taken aback by Céline’s tour de force here, which turns on its
head the very slogan that counterculture would come to popularize in relation
to the Vietnam War: “Make love, not war.” Rather, Robinson is implying that the
aftermath of the war should make us appalled by lovemaking—an antihumanist
argument that cannot be grasped by his romantic lover, who shoots him.
The fact that Kerouac interrupts the brief fragments forming his diary entitled
“Notes on last chapter of Philip Tourian novel” to quote Céline’s Journey at such
length here establishes the importance of this passage for him and his “Tourian
novel” (i.e. I Wish I Were You). If any doubt was left about the actual effect of
Céline’s novel on Kerouac’s writing, the following note in pencil removes it, for
it defines the concept of morality in the very terms laid out by Céline’s narrator’s
conclusion: “*…Morality… The degree of care one has for what’s going on.”6 The
asterisk before Kerouac’s note refers to the other asterisk after “consciousness” in
the initial reflection quoted from his diary entry. This reference system establishes
the crucial function of Journey in Kerouac’s reflection: Céline’s text doesn’t just
allow him to forge his own definition of “morality”; it also enables him to clarify
his own position on the central notion of “consciousness” developed by the
early Beat circle. In short, this passage from Kerouac’s diary confirms the case
made in the previous chapter, that his reworking of I Wish I Were You revolves
around French works of art (Cache-cache and Port of Shadows) that allowed him
to affirm his own point of view in contrast with the New Yorkers’ “drivel” (“they
talked endlessly about it over their Pernod”). But to return to the title for this
diary entry—“Notes on last chapter of Philip Tourian novel”—how exactly did
Kerouac’s appropriation of Céline’s Journey impact upon the last chapter of I
Wish I Were You?
Kerouac’s third and final remark in his diary entry shows what an attentive
reader he is, and once again adopts Céline’s own argument. After agreeing with
the need for everyone to develop their own critical thinking, Kerouac closely
emulates the movement of Robinson’s thought and displaces the focus on the
way Céline’s character proposes to do just that: “seeing all the things one sees.”
What concludes Kerouac’s entry here reinforces the other case made in the
previous chapter, that the very title I Wish I Were You indicates the first and
foremost wish of the writer should indeed be to “see everything”:
Look long enough, as long as you are allowed to look, and you will finally see
something—something that ought to satisfy you, once and for all. There are so
many things to look at and understand, there’s no end to it… this seems to be
the only break we get from the darkness, and from the malicious brotherhood of
man… that we’ve got so much to look at, more than we can ever altogether see.7
That Kerouac’s journal entry features as many reflections on reading Céline

as on rewriting the novella he had composed with Burroughs attests that both
activities truly went together for him. It shows that, behind Kerouac’s claiming
I Wish I Were You as “Louis F. Célinist,” there is much more at stake than
a French name easily brandished. That is, once he had read Céline’s Voyage,
everything would change. I Wish I Were You crucially formulates Kerouac’s
new objective as a writer: seeing everything, but also caring about it. From
now on, what Robinson’s lover couldn’t notice, couldn’t care for, he would
make sure that his readers do. Kerouac’s cinematic eye would give us a break
from the darkness by seeking to see and make us feel “more than we can ever
altogether see.”
1948–1949: From Humanism to Nationalism
Kerouac valued Céline’s writing so much that he would begin to analyze

everything that happened to him in light of it, going so far as to measure his
real friends’ actions and decisions against the behaviors and values of Céline’s
fictional characters. If nowadays, no one would even think to reproach an
author for his mixture of reality and fiction, many would deem the premise
of Kerouac’s judgment unfair, since fictional characters aren’t submitted to the
same desires as humans made of flesh and blood. But in the case we are about
to examine, oddly, it isn’t reality that pales when compared to fiction, quite the
opposite.
In July 1948, Kerouac describes in his journals a scenario in which he is at odds
with his fiancée Edie and his friend Herbert Huncke unexpectedly intervenes on
his behalf. To express the extent of his astonishment, he finds no better way
than to compare Huncke to Céline’s dark character, Robinson. The passage
begins with Kerouac exploring the humanism of his friend (“what makes him
so human”) with his now well-trained encompassing and compassionate vision.
To understand Huncke’s benevolent act, he starts by putting himself in his skin
(“if I were Hunke”). But praising his friend’s generosity by putting himself down
(“and my stupidity…”) is not enough. The human nature of Huncke proves so
mysterious that Kerouac then resorts to Céline’s Robinson:
What a surprise that was!—how strange can Hunkey[sic] get? Hunkey scares me
because he has been the most miserable of men, jailed & beaten and cheated and
starved and sickened and homeless, and still he knows there’s such a thing as
love, and my stupidity… and what else is there in Hunkey’s wisdom? What does
he know that makes him so human after all he has known—it seems to me if I
were Huncke I would be dead now, someone would have killed me long ago. But
he’s still alive, and strange, and wise, and beat, and human, and all blood-and-
flesh and staring as in a benny depression forever. He is truly more remarkable
than Céline’s Leon Robinson, really so. He knows more, suffers more… sort of
American in his wider range of terrors. (Kerouac, Windblown World, 100–1)
The extraordinary wisdom made of ghastliness and flamboyancy of Léon

Robinson turns out to be nothing compared to Herbert Huncke’s. But who was
really Huncke? Was he so mysterious? Ann and Samuel Charters’ description
doesn’t pull punches: “Huncke was a junky who had turned his life into a series
of thefts and robberies to support his habit, sometimes carrying a pistol if armed
robbery seemed like a useful idea. To blur the picture, he was also gentle and
intelligent, a small, diffident, soft-spoken gay man with pleasing manners and
considerable charm” (Charters, Brother-Souls, 100).
On a historical level, we should note with editor Douglas Brinkley that
Kerouac’s depiction of Huncke features the first written use of “beat” as an
adjective (“he’s still alive, and strange, and wise, and beat, and human”). If it is
ultimately Kerouac’s close friend John Clellon Holmes who would publically coin
the term “Beat” in his New York Times 1952 essay “This is the Beat Generation,”
the word indeed first appeared four years earlier, in this very journal entry
dated July 1948. On a philosophical level, however, that Kerouac creates the
word “Beat” to describe Huncke’s surprising virtues is much less significant than
the fact it was forged in opposition to Céline’s character. As Kerouac’s sentence
makes plain here, Robinson is not a simple moral gauge, any more than Huncke
is the Beat archetype. (“He knows more, suffers more… sort of American in
his wider range of terrors.”) In the space of that single sentence, Robinson and
Huncke are suddenly turned into allegories of France and America. That is,
Céline’s writing didn’t merely inspire Kerouac, and Robinson was much more
to him than a handy shorthand. Literary characters are at least as important
as real-life friends in the genesis of Kerouac’s works. In fact, Céline’s character
surpasses Kerouac’s friend in this passage, for Huncke’s extraordinary human
nature can only be grasped when contrasted to Robinson’s. Reading Céline
hence gave Kerouac key material to exercise his famous art of sketching, which
would culminate two years later in the novel that would take his writing beyond
the local settings of The Town and the City (Lowell and New York, Kerouac’s
native town and adoptive city), that is On the Road: his own journey to the
end of the American night, his “great [Town & City] of the nation itself ” (The
Unknown Kerouac, 61).
Night and Day: Céline or Dostoevsky?
Kerouac didn’t write On the Road in three weeks as the myth has it. Scholars
from Tim Hunt (1981) to Howard Cunnell (2007), Isaac Gewirtz (2007) and
Matt Theado (2009) have established that in between 1949 and 1951, he in fact
produced several Roads, including one in French entitled Sur le chemin.8 The
title Kerouac gave to the road-novel he composed in French itself contradicts
any idea we might still have of his book having a linear plot or simple history
of composition. For the meaning of “chemin” specifies just what kind of “road”
Kerouac followed and wrote about: not the highway but the twisted path; a
“crooked road,” to borrow Hunt’s astute book title; or to take a figure out of On
the Road itself, not one straight main road but many wandering paths. For when
researching the maps but lacking in actual experience, Sal first sets out to cross
the continent on Route 6, he thus realizes that he’d had a “stupid hearthside idea
that it would be wonderful to follow one great red line across America instead of
trying various roads and routes” (11). That sensitivity to variety, to multiple paths
and to the complexity of the process of journeying is surely natural for a writer
stimulated by so many literary sources and so self-conscious about his practices
of writing. While conceiving the aesthetic principles of his forthcoming road-
novel, Kerouac often resorts to impressively long lists of authors. Far from being
accessory to his stylistic evolution, these lists are indeed integral to Kerouac’s
contributions to renew our conception of the “novel”:
The great novel of the future is going to have all the virtues of Melville, Dostoevsky,
Celine, Wolfe, Balzac, Dickens and the poets in it (and Twain). The novel is
undeveloped, it probably needs a new name, and certainly needs more work,
more research as it were. A “soulwork” instead of a “novel,” although of course
such a name is too fancy, and laughable, but it does indicate someone’s writing
all-out for the sake of earnestness and salvation. The idea is that such a work must
infold the man like his one undeniable cloak and dream of things… his “vision of
the world and of the proposition of things,” say. (Kerouac, Windblown World, 95)
In such lists, the names of Melville, Wolfe or Fitzgerald, Balzac, Hugo and Zola
come and go, but Céline’s doesn’t. It sticks, and so does the name of Dostoevsky.
They are, as it were, the longest of the paths that make up the road.
In fact, the “visions of the world” of the French and Russian authors form a
diptych that dominates his journals at a crucial moment of his career: between
1947 and 1951, while Kerouac is thinking through the ethics and aesthetics that
are about to become the hallmarks of his writing. That is, the spiritual universe of
Dostoevsky and the anarchist vision of Céline drive the two humanist impulses
in the genesis of On the Road. When it comes to his deepest humanist concerns—
love and hate, brotherhood and solitude, courage and cowardice—the two foreign
authors offer Kerouac contradictory visions that impact the way he looks at his
own writing, both past (The Town and the City) and future (On the Road). One
journal entry is particularly telling of Dostoevsky and Céline’s privileged functions
for Kerouac’s writing at the most material or phonological level. For in it, Balzac’s
“sound” is only “guessed,” whereas Dostoevsky and Céline’s are most definite:
Incidentally everybody in Dostoevsky says “H’m” all the time, interiorly… that
is the key to his vision of man—“H’m.” (what mysteries?) (What’s he mean by
that?)—I wonder if my own “sound” in T&C was not “Hah?” The key to my
visions—“Hah?” As though to say, “I know perfectly what’s going on, but I’ll
pretend I don’t even hear.” To which Dusty replies, “H’m.”—What is the sound in
Balzac? Later I’ll guess it. Maybe it’s “Hup! Hup!”—everybody rushing through
passions and fortunes, crazily. […] In Céline it’s “Wah! Wah!”—or “Hoik! hoik!”
(Windblown World, 266)
Kerouac’s interest in Dostoevsky and Céline’s “sounds” signals that he intends

to follow their footsteps in reinvigorating literature with the orality of his own
writing. Their sounds also symbolize their opposed “visions of the world” from
which Kerouac’s own is progressively emerging: Dostoevsky’s elliptical “H’m”
embodies a spiritual mystery, which is challenged by the anarchic vitality
in Céline’s double “Wah! Wah!” or “Hoik! hoik!” This looks like an amusing
synthesis, but Kerouac’s analysis in fact shows deep understanding of these two
great stylists, and rivals the best literary readings of a Deleuze. The importance
of Céline and Dostoevsky’s works for his oeuvre went well beyond aesthetic
preoccupations; they informed Kerouac’s own philosophical “vision of the world
and proposition of things.”
To take but one example, by 1949, Céline has become such a crucial measure
of all things for Kerouac that he not only resorts to him to meditate the mores of
his friends, but of his closest family members and of wider society. Here, “Céline’s
people” help Kerouac rationalize the traumatic event that would famously come
to open On the Road, the death of his father:
The fact is, my father’s death was not serious at all. You don’t even die any more,
you just slip away past the last streetlamp like Céline’s people do. It’s not even
a mockery of anything. An accident. Who cares about naturalism? […] I want
a soul. I want a soul. I want a soul. […] I insist that life is holy, and that we must
be reverent one for another, always. This is the only truth: it has been said so, a
thousand million times. (Windblown World, 205)
Kerouac clearly associates his individual sorrow with Céline’s universe, and his
insistence on life being “holy” not only shows how hard he is trying to work
through his loss, but also how powerfully Céline’s nihilism has invested his
thoughts, for better or worse. That is, even if they have been “said a thousand
million times,” Dostoevskyan truths are beginning to pale in comparison’s with
Céline’s palpable ones (“who cares about naturalism?”) Dostoevsky, who was all
but blind to the passions threatening the morals of mankind, still has the upper
hand, for his novels obstinately convey the hopeful spirituality that is cruelly
absent from Céline’s writing and that Kerouac is longing for (“I want a soul. I
want a soul. I want a soul”). But for how long?
In 1950, Kerouac continues to praise and favor the Russian author:
“Dostoevsky is really an ambassador of Christ, and for me the modern Gospel.
[…] The vision of Dostoevsky is the vision of Christ translated in modern terms”
(Windblown World, 273–74). In view of the crucial spiritual role that the works
of the Russian author played for him, Jessee Menefee is right to elevate his
admiration of Dostoevsky to the status of a “Karamazov religion” (“Dostoevsky
and the Diamond Sutra,” 431). But I would argue that Kerouac hails Dostoevsky’s
modernity all the harder here, for he very well knows his works belong to another
century, and that his own syncretism consists less in a mixture of two religions
(Christianity and Buddhism) than of two diametrically opposed philosophical
stances (Dostoevsky’s romantic spirituality and Céline’s postwar nihilism), a
most curious combination that explains both the richness and the pitfalls of the
plot and characters of On the Road.
Kerouac often ends his sentences with the expression “in the night”—most
famously in On the Road’s rhetorical question “Whither goest thou, America,
in thy shiny car in the night?” (119)—a stylistic trait that suggests constant
appropriation of Céline’s novel title, Journey to the End of the Night. But since the
night belongs to everyone, there would be no case for reading Kerouac’s stylistic
habit as a form of appropriation, if it weren’t once again for Kerouac’s journals.
His “odd notes” from March 1950 published in Windblown World (2004) and
expanded in The Unknown Kerouac (2016) reveal the importance of Céline’s
“night” for Kerouac’s gestation of On the Road in relation to Dostoevsky’s “day.”
The very beginning of these “odd notes” makes plain that Kerouac’s
conceptualization of the night in On the Road is indeed an appropriation of Céline:
“The night is atonement for the sins of the day—in America. That is why they
want ‘the end of the night’—complete purgation from sloppy decadent pursuits
of noon” (The Unknown Kerouac, 44). The quotation marks surrounding “the end
of the night” signal that Kerouac borrows the title of Céline’s famous novel. But
as the larger national context suggests here, this credit stands for a much more
complex structural debt to Céline. When reading “The night is atonement for the
sins of the day—in America,” are we to believe that this statement only applies
in America or that it also applies in America? And who are “they”? Who wants
“the end of the night”? What follows clarifies how these statements should be
transposed into On the Road, as Kerouac makes a note to himself to have his
protagonist “wake up in middle of night” (44).9 In other words, Kerouac’s two
dashes in the above passage visualize on the page his desire to adapt what applies
in Céline’s French Journey to the End of the Night in his own American road-novel.
But what meaning should we give “the end of the night,” exactly?
Kerouac’s journals indicate that he read Céline’s “end of the night” as “death”:
Gone on the Road: that’s what Dean says, when, after his green-tea visions,
someone leans over the couch and asks how he is. “Gone on the road…” Life is
a road-journey, from the womb to the end of the night, ever stretching the silver
cord till it snaps somewhere along the way… maybe near the end, maybe not
till the end; maybe early in the journey. Where are we all? Gone on the road…
What’s at the end? Night… whatever Celine meant by giving death that name,
whatever kind of death he meant. (Windblown World, 366)
However, nothing in Céline’s novel explicitly concurs with Kerouac’s reading.

The only occurrence of the expression arises in the American episode of Journey
to the End of the Night, which enigmatically defines it as geographical. “The end
of the night” is given as the far location of an uncanny “it” that frightens people:
If you go on being pushed out like that into the night, you end up somewhere,
I supposed, all the same. That’s the consolation. “Cheer up, Ferdinand,” I told
myself several times just to keep going. “Through being thrown out of every
place, you’ll surely finish up by finding out what it is that frightens all these bloody
people so, and it’s probably somewhere at the farther end of the night… That
must be why they don’t go into the depths of the night themselves!” (Journey,
192; my emphasis)
Céline’s stylistic obscurity here is precisely what Kerouac is going to appropriate

for On the Road: nothing less than what would become his protagonists’
famous quest for “IT.” What gives Kerouac’s appropriation of Céline’s structural
obscurantism away in his journals, then, is this double movement: although he

is drawn to attributing a meaning to Céline’s “end of the night,” although he falls
into the trap by associating it with “death,” his repetition of the term “whatever”
(“whatever Céline meant by giving death that name, whatever kind of death he
meant”) shows he saw the potential of Céline’s trick, and that he got the point.
Here, Kerouac succumbs to the temptation of giving Céline’s “end of the night”
a fixed meaning, but not without leaving for the readers of his own novel a
similar McGuffin, to borrow Hitchcock’s term for a red herring. That is, all the
euphoric experiences we and the protagonists of On the Road might be tempted
to associate with their quest for “IT”—musical revelation, sexual orgasm, drug
kick, travel urge, sensation of controlling or of being indifferent to the passage of
time, death drive—could also characterize Céline’s “end of the night.” If it takes
unambiguously specific evidence to pin down Kerouac’s “night” as coming from
Céline, nothing is ever likely to prove the provenance of his “IT.”10 Yet, a trace
of this unattainable but motivating object of desire, the goal of all the restless
movement in On the Road, might be glimpsed in the opening sentence of I Wish
I Were You, Kerouac’s “Célinist” rewriting of Hippos, which combines the elusive
pronoun with the key ethical issue Kerouac took from Céline: “We are all the
possessors of a certain courage, that’s it” (The Unknown Kerouac, 335).
Whatever “IT” is, it’s tricky and terribly exhausting to attain for Kerouac’s Sal
and Dean, just like it’s “probably somewhere at the farther end of the night” for
Céline’s Ferdinand and Robinson. And so, both pairs of men are as intrigued as
we are hooked, and as they live on we read on to find out what “IT” is. Kerouac
thus spells out the goal or “end” of his road-novel almost identically to Céline’s
(“you’ll surely finish up by finding out what it is […] it’s probably somewhere
at the farther end of the night”; Journey, 192): “All I wanted to do is sneak out
into the night and disappear somewhere, and go and find out what everybody
was doing all over the country” (On the Road, 67). But what Ferdinand sees as
a mere “consolation to keep on going” becomes an interesting project for Sal:
whereas in Céline’s novel the former is reluctantly “pushed out into the night”
and “thrown out of every place,” in Kerouac’s novel the latter voluntarily “wants”
to “go,” “sneak out and disappear into the night.” That is, Kerouac expresses the
very desire at the source of On the Road with the uncanny structural device
he borrowed from Journey, but the active verbs that characterize his narrator
differentiate his Sal from Céline’s Ferdinand.
We could read into this difference the trace of Dostoevsky’s optimism. For
if Kerouac’s 1950 “odd notes” begin with Céline’s “end of the night,” we then
find the pendulum movement in which the French novelist so often comes with
Dostoevsky. The statements previously quoted (“That is why they want ‘the end
of the night’—complete purgation from sloppy decadent pursuits of noon. And
there is love”) are indeed followed by a long reflection on the Russian author
clearly establishing the counterpart of Céline’s apocalyptic “end of the night”:
Dostoevsky’s vision is that which we all dream at night, and sense in the day, and
it is the Truth… merely that we love one another whether we like it or not, i.e.,
we recognize the other’s existence—and the Christ in us is the premium mobile
of that recognition. Christ is at our shoulders, and is “our conscious in God’s
university” as Cleo says… he is the recognizer in us. His “idea” is. (The Unknown
Kerouac, 44; Kerouac’s emphasis)
Through the stress Kerouac twice puts on is, he presents “Christ in us” as one
more meaning for “IT,” in fact as an incarnation of IT (“is”). The rigidity and
constant return of the Dostoevsky/Céline binary certainly explains why Kerouac
took so long to prepare his road-novel and made so many versions of it. Both
Dostoevsky’s hopeful vision and Céline’s desperation of mankind fed into the
picaresque plot and complex personalities of the characters in On the Road. But
at this point, the binary becomes untenable, and Kerouac attempts to choose a
dominant side.
The following anecdote in Kerouac’s journals recounts his meeting with
someone for whom he feels the “recognition” and the “love” he just described in
relation to Dostoevsky, and again seems to favor the Russian author, for his “day”
(love) now incorporates Céline’s “night” (fear):
Lou is only an intensification of this feeling which I have for everyone; he is
a dramatic example of mankind. Nevertheless I could not bear seeing him
everyday, for fear of boredom, or the fear of boredom—perhaps fear of losing
the fear & trembling which is a dramatization of my being alive. When I left
I sighed… “It’s always the same… My position with one like that will never
change… A relationship is established for eternity… This world we walk in
is only the scene, the temporal scene, of eternal realities; this sidewalk only
exists for souls to walk on.” Further than a “dramatization of my being alive” is
that such a recognition of fear and love—or the fear and love itself—simply the
love—is our existence, and mine too, and yours, and we try to avoid it more
than anything else in the world. Thus, tonight, reading my new books, I find
that Kafka avoids it in a dream of himself; Lawrence avoids it by masturbating
(same thing); and Scott Fitzgerald […] only wrote his story to make money
and omitted certain things […]. Then I read Dusty [i.e. Dostoevsky] and it
was all there. There is no truth like the truth of the earthly prophet. I want
to become, and pray to be, an earthly prophet. (The Unknown Kerouac, 45;
my emphasis)
Taken as a whole, Kerouac’s journals certainly show how hard he “wants” and
“prays” to become an earthly prophet like Dostoevsky, for they contain more
entries on him than on Céline, and these entries are also longer. But the very
intensity of his desire to emulate his Russian idol betrays how strong Céline’s
effect on the young American author really is. Kerouac wants and prays for
the triumph of “Dusty,” he even decrees it here, but this entry gives away the
reason for which he will in the end model his road-novel on Céline’s: the “fear of
boredom” that goes with any system or religion. That is, the terms that Kerouac
uses to establish “the recognition of fear and love” as “our existence” in this entry
might be associated with Dostoevsky, and Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling
(1843). However, the application of these existentialist terms to literature—
the way “it” is here successively “avoided” by the German Kafka, the English
Lawrence and the American Fitzgerald—brings us back to Kerouac’s Franco-
American genealogy and into the territory, crucially mediated by Céline, of
Jean-Paul Sartre.11
Céline’s Existentialism Is a Humanism: “That’s It”
The desire characterizing both the characters and the plot of On the Road is
expressed in Kerouac’s novel in terms that reveal his appropriation of Céline’s
Journey to the End of the Night. But equally, if not more significant, is the
particular narrative context in which this desire that is the goal of On the Road
(“but all I wanted to do…”) is formulated, that is when Kerouac’s narrator finds
himself in a classical Sartrean situation: Sal has applied for and got a job as a
security guard but is not sure he likes or even wants it. When doing his job
and knocking on a noisy door to ask men to be quiet, he thus faces an eloquent
“What do you want?” (65, Kerouac’s emphasis), before being reminded by
another representative of the law: “Now you got to make up your mind one way
or the other, or you’ll never get anywhere. It’s your duty. You’re sworn in. You
can’t compromise with things like this” (67). It is significantly when he is faced
with no alternative but to make a choice that Sal confesses his desire of the road
in picaresque Célinian terms: “I didn’t know what to say; he was right, but all
I wanted to do is sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere, and go
and find out what everybody was doing all over the country” (67). In context,
the active verbs differentiating Kerouac’s active “project” from Céline’s passive
“consolation” suddenly appear in another light: the hope they convey resonates
less with Dostoevsky’s idealist existentialism than with Sartre’s pragmatic urge
to stop avoiding our human condition, measure our responsibilities against our
desires and make consistent choices.
By 1950, Kerouac has gone past “‘the beyond-good-and-evil’ nonsense of
Nietzsche, Rimbaud and Gide—NUTS EACH ONE” (Windblown World, 151)
and aspires to write “soulworks.” But for his road-novel to attain this noble
status, its protagonists need to be granted freewill and be tortured by moral
dilemmas, faced with ethical responsibilities, be they professional (Sal’s job
here) or familial (Dean’s struggling love life) and escaped or taken on (Sal and
Dean’s responsibilities towards each other’s friendship is successively one and
the other; Dean will in fact escape his moral responsibility towards his friend
Sal, in order to fulfill his familial responsibility towards his wife and child). That
is why the great French naturalist novels that Kerouac so admired no longer help
him: Zola, Balzac or Hugo’s characters cannot change their minds and make
contradictory choices or the whole structure of their novels would collapse, for
each of their characters generally personify a moral stance. But with Céline and
Dostoevsky, desires and passions triumph over social determinism, and bring
about a totally different story. Their characters truly seem to have psychologies
and lives of their own. In moral doubt, they inevitably opt for the least likely
option, as if their creators were making a point to never cease surprising us or
never cease surprising themselves, like in Kerouac’s journal page about Huncke:
“What a surprise that was!—how strange can Hunkey [sic]get? […] What does
he know that makes him so human?” (Windblown World, 100).
The literary ability to surprise finds its philosophical corollary in Sartre’s
existentialism. With Sartre, what was in the nineteenth century considered
one’s fate or destiny becomes one’s responsibility: man can decide for himself
and is defined as the sum of his choices and actions, be they consistent or
inconsistent. While Walter Kaufmann sees “no reason for calling Dostoevsky
an existentialist,” Sartre would certainly have agreed with his judgment of
Notes from Underground as “the best overture for existentialism ever written”
(Kaufmann, 14). For Sartre gives Dostoevsky’s works as the very starting point of
existentialism. Scholars have rightly pointed out that Dostoevsky never actually
wrote the words Sartre attributes to him in Existentialism Is a Humanism: “If
God didn’t exist, everything would be permitted. That is the point of departure of
Existentialism” (Sartre, L’Existentialisme est un humanisme, 39; my translation).12

True, Sartre paraphrases the thoughts of Dostoevsky’s character Yvan from
Brothers Karamazov here, and so shouldn’t have used speech marks,13 but that he
chose to base his philosophy on the works of the Russian author remains highly
significant. As is the quotation from Céline that Sartre used for the epigraph
of Nausea (1938): “He is a fellow without any collective significance, barely an
individual” (7). That the epigraph opening Sartre’s famous existentialist novel
borrows the words of Céline is meaningful, but the text from which he borrowed
those words is even more significant for understanding Kerouac’s own use of
Céline’s works: that is Céline’s satirical play entitled The Church (1933). In effect,
Sartre grounded his philosophy in the works of the two authors—Dostoevsky
and Céline—that Kerouac himself constantly opposes in his journals, and chose
Céline over Dostoevsky for the very reason that governs Kerouac’s aesthetic
binary: religion. Kerouac was raised Christian and faith was important to him
and his writing, which explains the distinction he makes between “novels” and
“soulworks”. But all his wishes and longings for a soul in his journals (“I want
a soul, I want a soul, I want a soul”) indicate that his faith is more fragile than
he would like it to be, and that he is in fact beset by the modern anxiety par
excellence, the “death of God”. Sowed by Dostoevsky himself, this anxiety is put
to rest by Sartre’s existentialism.
Sartre postulates that if our essence isn’t created by God, then it doesn’t
precede our existence: we have no other fate than the one we make for ourselves,
and so everything is indeed permitted. In Sartre’s liberating optic, therefore, life
should no longer be experienced passively but actively: rather than accepting
and discovering our fate as it concretizes before our eyes, we all have the power
to make choices and create ourselves. In short, there is nothing in existentialism
to be pessimistic about! Yet, like many Americans both at the time and today,
this would be the main reproach that Kerouac and the Beats would address
to his philosophy. Holmes thus famously defined “The Philosophy of the Beat
Generation” in contrast to Sartre’s: “To be beat is to be at the bottom of your
personality, looking up; to be existential in the Kierkegaard, rather than the
Jean-Paul Sartre, sense” (qtd. in Charters, “John Clellon Holmes,” 141). Just as
Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac would be appalled by the fate of the “Beat”
label, so Sartre lamented the reception of his philosophy in America, which was
rapidly absorbed and reduced to the fashionable urge to be individually depressed
and politically engaged. “Ironically,” writes Erik Mortenson, “existentialism
came to signify what the term ‘Beatnik’ would signify a decade later: a black-
sweatered bohemian smoking a cigarette at a cafe table” (Mortenson, 23). In

order to analyze not only Kerouac’s repudiation but appropriation of Sartre’s
existentialism, we need to follow Mortenson (20–27) in putting such misguided
critiques back into their original context and realize this fundamental distinction:
Kerouac had contempt for the New York School and American readers of Sartre,
but respected the work of the French philosopher.
Kerouac showed enough interest in Sartre’s existentialism to periodically
debate it with his friend Holmes, but there seems no evidence in his letters,
journals, notebooks or interviews of any close engagement with it, no visible
sign he read Nausea (translated from the French in 1949), for example, let alone
his major philosophical works. This surprising absence of reference to Sartre,
which implies Kerouac did not work through his oeuvre as he did Dostoyevksy
or Céline’s, makes all the more remarkable the appearance of Sartre’s complex
concept of “pour-soi” (being-for-itself) in his relatively little-known text “On
Céline”; or to be more precise, in its recently published French version, the
“Commentaire sur Louis-Ferdinand Céline”:
Il m’a toujours semblé que le Robinson de “Voyage” était continuellement poursuivi

par Javert fantomatique, et que ce Javert était CELINE en personne, et que
CELINE lui-même était Robinson, et qu’ainsi le “Voyage” est l’histoire du fantôme
du “pour-soi” [being-for-itself] de CELINE à la poursuite du fantôme du “non-soi”
de CELINE, Robinson. (La Vie est d’hommage, 338)14
What we have here is probably the most complex appropriation examined in

this book, for it involves the works of three French writers, plus Kerouac’s own.
It uses the philosophical concepts of Sartre (the notions of “being-for-itself ” and
“being-in-itself ” theorized in Being and Nothingness) and the fictional character
of Victor Hugo (the villain Inspector Javert from Les Misérables) to analyze the
existentialist plot of Céline’s novel (Voyage or Journey to the End of the Night),
and suggests that Kerouac actually found in Sartre’s existentialist ontology just
the modern optimism he needed to complement Céline’s nihilist vision.
However, if so, Kerouac would have found it long afterwriting On the Road
because, as editor Cloutier reasonably proposes, his undated “Commentaire”
must have been written at least a decade later, after Céline’s death in 1961.
But the problem, it turns out, is not just one of chronology—of when Kerouac
would have had access to concepts that Sartre elaborated in L’Être et le
néant (1943), a forbiddingly difficult work of over 700 pages that was only
translated into English as Being and Nothingness in 1956. The main issue of
this triangulation of Kerouac with Céline via Sartre has to do with what is
gained as well as lost in translation.
The “Commentaire” not only implies that Kerouac appropriated key Sartrean
concepts, but invites us to see that these informed Kerouac’s own reading of
Céline’s oeuvre, specifically Journey to the End of the Night, which tempts a
re-reading of On the Road in that light. But the French text is edited without
awareness of the existence of its relatively obscure English original (“On
Céline”), published in 1964 in the Paris Review and later reprinted in Good
Blonde, in which there is nothing explicitly Sartrean (the terms Kerouac uses in
English are “self ” and “non-self,” not “being-in-itself ” and “being-for-itself ”). In
short, the “Commentaire” is the result of a creative act of translation—and yet,
while it introduces a specific notion absent from the original and so is indeed an
error, the irony is that the French version is not inappropriate. Or to put it more
positively, Kerouac’s appropriation of Sartre may be imaginary, but it does make
sense. We can put this otherwise unfortunate lapse in scholarship, this evidence
of the continuing divide between French and American academic cultures, to
good use, by advancing a Sartrean reading of Céline’s Journey to shed light on
Kerouac’s On the Road.
If Kerouac read Sartre’s philosophical work at the time he composed his
famous road-novel, what was then available in America would, again with a
rather neat irony, have been problematic precisely because of its translation. For
what he might have known then would have been the talk Sartre published as
L’Existentialisme est un humanisme, translated as Existentialism & Humanism
in 1948. But we should be wary of the quality of that translation, as its very
title problematically translates the verb “is,” which clearly identify existentialism
with humanism, into the symbol for “and” (“&”), which can also divide them.
This unfortunate translation was only recently corrected when the text was
republished by Yale University Press in 2007. It is just a detail, but a telling one
in terms of Kerouac’s Dostoevsky and Céline binary, as well as of the larger
misunderstanding of Sartre’s philosophy in America, for Sartre himself was
unhappy with the vulgarization of his ontology in Existentialism & Humanism,
and had Kerouac and his fellow Americans had access to Being and Nothingness
in the 1940s, their views of Sartre’s existentialist philosophy might have been
quite different.
Whether we appreciate the creativity of the translator of Kerouac’s
commentary “On Céline” or not, the high level of subjectivity we find in phrases
like “it always seemed to me that Robinson was pursued by Shroudy Javert, and
that Javert was Céline himself, and Céline himself was Robinson, and therefore
Voyage is the story of the Shroud of Céline’s self pursuing the Shroud of Céline’s
non-self, Robinson” (Good Blonde & Others, 90; my emphasis) invites us to read
it as a reflection on his own work. This fascinating text indeed draws the same
parallel between Céline’s pair of adventurers (Ferdinand and Robinson) and his
own (Sal and Dean) as the Scroll Version of On the Road:
We got on a trolley and rode to downtown Detroit, and suddenly I remembered

that Louis Ferdinand Celine had once rode on the same trolley with his friend
Robinson, whoever Robinson was if not likely Celine himself; and Neal was like
myself, for I’d had a dream of Neal the night before in the hotel, and Neal was
me. In any case he was my brother and we stuck together. (On the Road, 345)
Clearly, in comparison to the passing quotation from Céline that appeared in

the 1957 edition of On the Road (‘Nine lines of crime, one of boredom’), this
sustained and complex association with Céline in the Scroll version is much
more significant, if also highly confusing. And yet, it is the very confusion in
these lines—in which Kerouac not only identifies his characters with those of
Céline but blurs the ontological disctintions between life and literature, author
and character, self and other by identifying Céline with Robinson and himself
with Neal Cassady—that invites us to read one novel through the other. What
these confusions actually signify may be left obscure at this point, but when we
look back at it from the vantage of his commentary “On Céline,” and recognize
how closely it echoes the Scroll in its equally striking and very similar conflation
of identities, it becomes obvious that, in both texts, Kerouac is trying to make
sense not only of Céline’s work but of his own.
The convoluted ontological “pursuit” narrated in Kerouac’s commentary—
“the story of the Shroud of Céline’s self pursuing the Shroud of Céline’s non-
self, Robinson” (“On Céline”)—can indeed be transposed onto Kerouac’s famous
novel, using the Sartrean terms introduced in the text’s French translation. Sal
Paradise would then embody Sartre’s concept of being-for-itself (which can be
simplified as the mental state of someone who doesn’t admit who he is, who
doesn’t coincide with oneself) and Dean Moriarity the being-in-itself (the
mental state of those lucky or wise ones who do coincide with themselves, like
plants, animals, children, madmen or God). If Dean is depicted in such terms,
they are emphatically Dostoevskian: he is, in block capitals, “the HOLY GOOF,”
an identity that brings together a trinity of labels—“the Idiot, the Imbecile, the
Saint of the Lot”—conflating Dostoevsky’s Prince Mnychkine with his Dean, and
making him the saint archetype of On the Road (194). But just as the structure
and vocabulary of Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night are used to describe the
desire at the source of On the Road, Céline’s anarchic “delirium”15 eventually gets
the upper hand in the design of Dean’s personality, for it carries what Kerouac
termed in his March 1950 “odd notes” a stronger “dramatization of Being alive”
(The Unknown Kerouac, 44). That is, the wisdom of the Dostoevskian Saint in On
the Road ultimately hands over to the madness of the Célinian anarchic Goof.
Since On the Road, initially subtitled “A modern novel,” was to describe the
brand new realities of America, it needed to be in phase with its postwar era,
but also with its language. This is the aesthetic reason for which Kerouac would
ultimately brush off Balzac and Dostoevsky’s works as models, for “these were
19th century absorptions & hangups no longer genuinely possible, the thing
now, as Céline, Proust, Wolfe, Genet & Joyce have shown, being no longer
fictions, imaginings of reality, but the great interior monologue of the modern
tongue written either in exile, jail or sickbed” (The Unknown Kerouac, 164).
True, other writers than Céline feature in this new list, but this journal entry
makes clear that he is indeed Kerouac’s main reference for the monologue: “Add
Henry Miller to the list—an imitator of Céline” (164). The main reason Céline
ultimately wins over Dostoevsky is, however, ontological: that’s “IT.”
In November 1949, Kerouac initiates the dismissal of his Russian idol when,
significantly “censoring his weak-kneed apologetic optimism,” he states his
road-novel will borrow its obscure device—“the thing”16 as he calls “IT” for
now—from Céline “most of all”:
The thing is… ??? To me, “this thing” is that Shrouded Stranger I dreamt once.
It is ever-present and ever-pursuing. […] The thing is central to our existence,
and alone is our everlasting companion after parents and wives and children
and friends may fade away. Wolfe’s “brother Loneliness,” Melville’s “inscrutable
thing,” Blake’s “gate of Wrath,” Emily Dickinson’s “third event,” Shakespeare’s
“nature”?—God? One can almost point with the finger. It’s also every man’s
“mystery” and deepest being.—I would also find it most of all in L.-F. Celine’s
climatic visions of “death” as he pushes it through for both Leon Robinson and
de Pereires… What’s left after everything else has collapsed. It’s really one’s
“Fate.” For Fate is never a man’s wish so much as the center of his life’s circle.
(Windblown World, 249-51)
Kerouac’s description of “the thing” as “ever-present and ever-pursuing” here

clearly parallels Sartre’s ontological concepts and anticipates his own account
of Journey to the End of the Night in his commentary “On Céline” a decade
later (“Voyage is the story of the Shroud of Céline’s self pursuing the Shroud
of Céline’s non-self, Robinson”). In this 1949 entry, Céline’s triumph is also
paradoxically stressed by Dostoevsky’s glaring absence from the authors listed,
as well as by “most of all,” and Kerouac’s definite identifications of the “circle of
life” as “a circle of despair” beforehand: “It is a circle; it is really despair” (249).
Kerouac drew that circle in his journals, which he accompanied with a legend:
“the experience of life is a regular series of deflections that finally result in a
circle of despair” (250). The Sartrean word here is not “despair”—that belongs
to Céline’s vocabulary—but “deflections”. For Sartre’s descriptions of the many
forms of “bad faith” that man uses to “avoid” recognizing, or indeed to “deflect”
from his condition and responsibilities, is at the center of his philosophy.
In sum, while the appearance of Sartre’s terminology in Kerouac’s
“Commentaire” was the result of a translator imposing a French cultural frame
of reference, On the Road can certainly be read as the story of its author’s quest
to coincide with himself, which, if fully developed into a Sartrean reading, would
make it as existentialist a novel as Céline’s. For it does follow the structure of
Journey: Just as Céline’s Ferdinand pursues his flamboyant companion Robinson,
Kerouac’s Sal pursues the holy goof Dean, in the hope of catching up with
himself—until he realizes like Ferdinand, in typical Sartrean fashion, that being
Dean or Robinson comes at an ontological price he is not ready to pay: mental
sanity. Meanwhile, Sal accumulates experiences that give him the maturity to see
himself and his desires for what they are and makes his own choices accordingly.
On a philosophical level, that Sartrean reading would be straightforward, but on a
literary one, there is an oddity, which at first resists but in the end only reinforces
the transposition of Kerouac’s existentialist reading of Journey onto his own
road-novel. We would expect Kerouac to conflate “Céline himself ” with Céline’s
narrator here, but his commentary “On Céline” makes no mention of Ferdinand,
only of Robinson. Kerouac’s text goes even further in its exclusion of Céline’s
narrator, concluding: “I only remember Robinson” (Good Blonde & Others, 91).
Why is that so? And why is there in fact no mention of Ferdinand but dozens of
allusions to Robinson in Kerouac’s journals? For the same exact reason that, of On
the Road, we remember not its narrator, Sal Paradise, but the ghastly counterpart
of Robinson: Dean Moriarty. That is to say, as well as its picaresque genre and
McGuffin “IT,” On the Road borrows from Céline’s Journey its very particular
narrative structure. Both novels have not one but two antiheroes, and the real
one is not the one we would expect (the moralist narrator), but the mad and bad
conscience who haunts him (his immoral, if not criminal road companion).
Of course, there are many more couples of antiheroes in modern literature

on which the relation of Sal and Dean could have been modeled, to begin with
Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, but the brothers are four and they are not all
antiheroes: Alyósha has a good nature that is idealized and the stárets Zósima
is a Saint. “There are no ‘villains’ in Dostoevsky,” according to Kerouac; “That
is why he is ‘the truest of the true’” (Windblown World, 272). The same goes for
Céline, but he has over the Russian author the advantage of having no heroes
either. Among his numerous lists of modern literary works, Kerouac oddly
never mentions the classical picaresque novel, Cervantes’ Don Quixote. The
only other novels presenting such an odd couple that he evokes in his journals
are Melville’s Moby-Dick (Ishmael and Ahab) and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
(Nick and Gatsby). But as previously noted, Kerouac dismisses Fitzgerald for
having written for fame and money and “omitted certain things” (The Unknown
Kerouac, 45). And although the Ishmael-Ahab model is indeed present in
On the Road—Ishmael in the ‘Scroll” version (115); Ahab in the 1957 edition
(235)17—“Céline towers above Melville” in most definite terms: “Celine is not the
artist, not the poet that Melville is—but he swamps him under from sheer weight
and tragic fury. There’s no getting around this, not at all. Every beautiful sentence
in The Encantadas is but a pale pearl drenching in the tempests of Celine […]
It’s not the words that count, but the rush of what is said” (Windblown World,
248; Kerouac’s emphasis). The “rush” that places Céline’s writing above that of
Melville or Fitzgerald in Kerouac’s pantheon of great stylists doesn’t materialize
through Céline and Kerouac’s narrators, but through the real antiheroes of
their novels, Robinson and Dean, their monomaniac characters. On the Road
attenuates the somber fate that Céline reserves for Robinson, but doesn’t pull his
punches either: while the antihumanist morals of Robinson get him shot, Dean’s
hysterical desire and logorrhea simply turn into a madness that leaves him no
other choice than to shut up.
The speech regression characterizing Dean over the course of On the Road
indeed reproduces the dialogical structure of Journey to the End of the Night,
which opens with a discussion (“It all began just like that. I hadn’t said anything.
I hadn’t said a word. It was Arthur Ganate who started me off ”; 7) and ends with
silence (“let’s hear no more of all of this”; 441). For by the end of On the Road,
Dean’s delirium becomes such that it makes him stammer, be incoherent (“Ah—
ah—you must listen to hear.” “We listened, all ears. But he forgot what he wanted
to say”; 304), and ultimately makes him fail altogether to communicate with
Sal, who can only suggest they remain silent (“no need to talk. Absolutely, now,
yes?” “All right, we won’t talk”; 305). At least a while, since what On the Road
represses in Dean, Visions of Cody will unleash. As if appropriating Céline’s “end
of the night” and turning “it” into the focal trick of On the Road wasn’t enough,
Kerouac will then also give it a twist or a “trickle,” and invert the order of the
words in Céline’s title to give the “essentials” of his very own style:
follow roughly outlines in outfanning movement over subject, as river rock,
so mindflow over jewel-center need (run your mind over it, once) arriving at
a pivot, where what was dim-formed “beginning” becomes sharp-necessitating
“ending” and language shortens in race to wire of time-race of work. Following
laws of Deep Form, to conclusion, last words, last trickle—Night is The End.
(“Essentials of Spontaneous prose,” 58)
“Night Is the End”
Already in 1948, Kerouac was announcing his intention to discover “a way of

preserving the big rushing tremendousness in [him] and in all poets” (Windblown
World, 95). Among the poets he then proceeded to name were Balzac, Céline
and, of course, Dostoevsky. For all their stylistic differences, Balzac and Céline
shared with Zola and Dickens, among other naturalists Kerouac praised in this
journal entry, a natural talent for sketching almost anything, from decors and
landscapes to sounds, tastes, visions, feelings, people and nations. Nothing was
to escape Balzac and Céline’s comédies humaines. Kerouac likewise aspired to
build more than an oeuvre, a universe: the Duluoz legend. That is, the mission
that he set himself in I Wish I Were You, to see everything, proceeds from the
outrageous wish of attaining an omniscient vision. Omniscience, of course, is
first and foremost God’s attribute, and this is just what Kerouac’s ambition to
write a legend was to make of him: the creator of an entire universe.
We find a strikingly similar impulse in Céline’s hysterical desire to embark
everyone and everything into his writing. In a little known but excruciatingly
funny text entitled Conversations with Professor Y (1955), the modern French
writer provides a fictional interviewer with nothing less than the key to his
genius, which he refers to as his “emotive metro” or “subway.” “You take
everything along?,” asks his interviewer:
“Yes, Colonel… everything! eight-story buildings!… ferocious rumbling buses!
I leave nothing on the surface! I leave nothing there! No kiosques, no badgering
spinsters, no bridge bums! No! I take everything along!”
“Bridges too?”
“Bridges too!”
“Nothing gets in your way?”
“No, Colonel!… powered with emotion, Colonel!… nothing but emotion! …
breathless emotion!”
“Yes, but… yes, but…”
“No ‘buts’ about it!… all aboard!… I stash everything on my metro cars!…
and I repeat! every emotion on my metro cars! with me! my emotive metro takes
everything along, my books take everything along!” (Céline, Conversations with
Professor Y, 97)
The energy, the rhythm, the outrageous scope of Céline’s vision, everything here
concurs to link the “rush” of Céline’s craftwork to Kerouac’s, up to the modern
choice of a speedy subway for stylistic metaphor. Burroughs, Ginsberg and
Kerouac would have loved this text, but composed in 1955 it was only translated
in 1986, and so was probably not known to them. Still, it is particularly
enlightening to compare Kerouac’s “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” and “Belief
& Technique for Modern Prose: List of Essentials” to Céline’s own “poetics”:
everything is film, you’re a film… transformed! become a film! and a film is

nothing but snags, end to end!… hitches!… lost time!… shambles!… mix-
ups!… cops, bikes, intersections, detours, this way, that way! bottlenecks!…
grief! Boileau still enjoying the streets… be crushed nowadays… to hell with
his rhymes!… old Pascal, in a jalopy, I’d like to see him make out, Place de
la Concorde at rush hour!… more than his abyss’d give him a scare!… even
twenty abysses! the Surface is hardly livable!… it’s true! so I don’t hesitate, not
me!… my genius in action! No formalities!… I ship all my friends off on the
metro, correction! I take everybody, willy-nilly, with me!… charge along!… the
emotive subway, mine in a dream! no drawbacks, nor congestion!… never a
stop, nowhere!… straight through! destination! in emotion!… powered with
emotion! Only the goal in sight: full emotion… start to finish! (93)
Céline renders immediately visible his aesthetics through his writing’s excesses
of punctuation—all the excited exclamation marks and impatient ellipses—
and Kerouac will likewise use, and valorize the use of, punctuation to drive
emotional expression in writing, getting rid of “false colons and timid usually
needless commas” in favor of “the vigorous space dash” (“Essentials,” 57);
or as he puts it in “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose”: “Remove literary,
grammatical and syntactical inhibition” (“Belief & Technique,” 59). But while
selective quotation can easily serve to compare Kerouac’s two major aesthetic
statements with those implied by Céline’s writing, his two short manifestos—the
one initially composed in 1953 and the other written in 1955 and revised in
1959—are in crucial ways that have always been overlooked very different from
one another. Taken together, they suggest Kerouac’s awareness of the dangers in
“spontaneous” or “modern” prose.18
In “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” the “vigorous” dash seems full only of
vitality, a sign to enable the free flow of energy, but Kerouac’s slippery segueing of
metaphors makes the jazz-like organic flowing of the “mind into limitless blow-
on-subject seas of thought” lead to an unexpectedly violent simile: “like a fist
coming down on a table with each complete utterance, bang! (the space dash)—”
(“Essentials,” 57). The image is surprising, even shocking, with a suggestion in
it of the bumps and crashes of the Célinian anarchy let loose in “Place de la
Concorde at rush hour!…” This disturbing movement or dangerous logic within
the spontaneous overflow of the writing itself is repeated towards the end of
Kerouac’s text in the equally unexpected, dark and downbeat Célinian terminus
to the “time-race of work,” which leads to “last words, last trickle—Night is The
End” (58). After this invocation of Céline, Kerouac names Yeats and Reich in the
closing section of “Essentials,” and so appears to confirm the association he is
making between poetry and biology on the ground of vitalism. As Omri Moses
observes in his recent study of vitalism and modernism, “Vitalist philosophies
focus on emergent processes that develop in unpredictable ways and sustain
themselves by means of their own internal logic” (3). Moses’ book draws heavily
on the work of William James, Friedrich Nietzsche and, above all, Henri Bergson
(19). Bergson would also be a key figure for Kerouac, given how closely he was
associated with Proust both personally (the two men were related by marriage)
and philosophically (in their central preoccupation with time). Although
Kerouac would cut out all the authors named in “Essentials of Spontaneous
Prose” (William Carlos Williams and Shakespeare, as well as Yeats and Reich),
it is significant that he would include only one name in “Belief & Technique
for Modern Prose,” Proust’s: “Like Proust be an old teahead of time” (“Belief &
Technique,” 59). What makes the naming of Proust meaningful here is not only
thematic—time is in fact much more heavily emphasized in Kerouac’s earlier
aesthetic statement—but also formal, as a comparison of the poetics advanced
and performed in “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” and in “Belief & Technique
for Modern Prose” reveals.
At a strictly aesthetic level, comparing the two statements suggests that
Kerouac himself recognized the dash as a formal device—which he used no less
than seventeen times in the first text and not once in the second—that goes
together with the rush of writing away from inhibitions and censorship, but also
towards no other end than death. In contrast to the overflowing writing in the
titled but unnumbered categories of “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” running
from “SET-UP” to “MENTAL STATE”; in “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose”
Kerouac forces his aesthetics into thirty brief numbered points, as if to limit and
fix the very flow of spontaneity and energy he celebrates. In other small but
symbolic changes, the “Essentials” are no longer the same when that very word
is displaced from the beginning of the first text’s title (“Essentials of Spontaneous
Prose”) to the end of a subtitle for the second text (“Belief & Technique for
Modern Prose: List of Essentials”). Equally telling, the essentials are turned into
a list that makes them look like a business-like agenda.19 Limiting the meaning
of Proust to just eight words—“Like Proust be an old teahead of time”—Kerouac
makes ironic use of a phrase he first applied to Proust in a journal entry from
November 1951, a month into the writing of Visions of Cody: “my God that old
teahead of time!” (The Unknown Kerouac, 162) since teaheads are notoriously
known for their rambling digressions rather than succinct articulation, a
point brilliantly demonstrated through Jack and Cody’s stoned conversations
in Visions of Cody. Overall, in the shift from “Spontaneous” to “Modern” to
describe his prose, we see Kerouac still championing “wild typewritten pages,”
“crazier the better” (“Belief & Technique,” 59), and yet applying the breaks,
backtracking through the title and very form of his manifesto on where and how
fast he was going. The example of Céline suggests one reason why that might
be, why the formidable rush hour of his poetics went together with a troubling
ethical dimension, in which the crazier was not necessarily the better.
Most readers of Journey to the End of the Night are puzzled to learn Céline
published vitriolic anti-Semitic pamphlets during the Second World War.20
A fervent admirer of Céline, Sartre was certainly taken aback. The French
philosopher wrote an article in which he bluntly affirmed: “If Céline supported
the socialist theses of the Nazis, it is because he was paid” (Sartre, “Portrait”;
my translation).21 Infuriated by Sartre’s article when he got out of prison, Céline
replied with the violent, scatalogical pamphlet À l’agité du bocal, to which Sartre
did not respond.22 This typical French quarrel aside, how could the zealous anti-
militarist discourse of Céline’s Journey possibly give way to vehemently anti-
Semitic pamphlets? The definition of anti-Semitism given by Sartre in Réflexions
sur la question juive (1946) enlightens this paradox. For him, anti-Semitism is
not an idea nor an opinion or even a feeling; it is fuelled by a passion, quite
often an obsession. In light of Sartre’s definition, the very intensity with which
Céline displayed his anti-militarist discourse in Journey can thus be interpreted
as a breeding ground for another passion, the anti-Semitic discourse that Céline
would develop in his pamphlets. In other words, passion breeds passion, or as
the classic French pacifist adage has it: “la violence engendre la violence.”
In stark contrast to Ginsberg, who put his “queer shoulder to the wheel” of many
causes (Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 148), and Burroughs, whose cut-up project
was launched against Henry Luce’s media machine and the American century,
Kerouac was fiercely opposed to making political use of literature. Like most of
his novels, On the Road wants little to do with politics, and war only appears
as the historical background for the protagonists’ experiences of the majestic
American landscape. Yet, the speed, the intensity, the aesthetic vitality that
Kerouac appropriated from Céline’s Journey for On the Road came at a price. For
Kerouac’s most famous novel is increasingly taught and studied in similar ways to
Céline’s. The postcolonialist discourses of On the Road and Journey, for example,
seem more and more dubious in retrospect. The onward rush of each narrative
maintains the picaresque pace at the expense of leaving in the protagonists’ wake
a trail of unresolved moral encounters. In On the Road, these often involve issues
of race and gender, such as Sal’s abandonment of the Chicana Terry, the result of
his “white ambitions” (On the Road, 180), which prompts Sal’s notorious “lilac
evening” walk through the Denver colored section and his regret that he doesn’t
have “enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night” (180). Sal’s desire
for more darkness, more night, has made it easy to read in Kerouac’s text not a
courageous compassion for the other, but a political naivety in his appropriations
of non-white culture and an ethical recklessness in his romances with the other.
Taking the “darkness” of which he wants more to denote literal skin color, we
might logically deride Kerouac’s progression from the Chicana Terry in On the
Road to the African-American Mardou in The Subterraneans. Then again, these
are Kerouac’s romances with the racial other only if we ignore the material and
textual identities of Sal and Leo, the books’ narrators, and the internal difference
between characters and narrator-writers, distinctions that often get lost in
critiques of Kerouac on grounds of race and gender.23 Addressing Kerouac’s
poetics rather than history and sociology, Hrebeniak forcefully argues that “the
concentration on the phenomenology of writing confers an independence upon
the texts, something that consistently eludes his biographers” (Hrebeniak, 80).
While we might agree or disagree with Sartre’s definition of “anti-Semitism”
as a passion or about the dangers of Kerouac’s apolitical politics, we cannot fail
to wonder: was Kerouac not aware of Céline’s collaboration during the war? He
certainly was, for his commentary defends Céline, and defends him to the end by
ignoring politics to the profit of literature; in fact by asserting Céline’s humanism
as just as literary as his own:
I can’t see how people could accuse Céline of vitriolic malice if they’d ever read
the chapter on the young whore in Detroit, or the agonized priest climbing in
through the window in Mort à crédit, or that marvelous inventor in the same
story. I say he is a writer of great, supremely great charm and intelligence and
no one compares to him. […] I only remember Robinson… I only remember
the Doctor micturating in the Seine at dawn… Myself I’m only an ex-sailor,
I have no politics, I don’t even vote. Adieu, pauvre suffrant [sic], mon docteur.
(“On Céline,” in Good Blonde & Others, 91)
Contrarily to most readers of Céline and despite his propensity to periodically

submit his literary muses to the harshest judgment, especially as he turned
sour towards the end of his life, Kerouac’s admiration for the oeuvre of
Céline therefore remained untouched by his anti-Semitic pamphlets, and if
anything even grew. “Adieu, pauvre suffrant [sic], mon docteur:” “My doctor”
are indeed Kerouac’s curious last words of farewell. Did Céline “cure” him
of something? His anxious Christian faith exacerbated by Dostoevsky, and
against which Sartre developed his existentialist ontology, perhaps? Perhaps,
but the possessive pronoun “my” used by Kerouac in his commentary “On
Céline” is also if not more significant. For it is a most definite mark of
affection that acknowledges the extent of his appropriation of Céline’s work.
Yet, to celebrate Céline’s humanism in his writing by seizing on sentimental
anecdotes about young whores and anxious priests, he disregards the satirical
dimension of Céline’s humor and the political power of literature altogether.
That is, Kerouac does not defend Céline on Céline’s terms but on his own,
through his absolute commitment to literature over life or politics. Or rather,
when he calls Céline his literary master “my doctor,” Kerouac conflates his
two identities, so that the writer doesn’t even redeem but simply supersedes
the man who practiced medicine (and was anti-Semitic). This commitment
to literature as life, as the only real life to be lived and valued, is a faith that
cannot be found in Céline and that reveals the rise of Kerouac’s other French
master: Marcel Proust. Kerouac’s commentary “On Céline” gives the measure
of his literary appropriations—of how dialectically they kept feeding into
his “view of all things”—for his defense of Céline indeed turns out to be
Proustian.
“A Running Proust”
In light of what amounts to a veritable habit of listing authors by pairs or groups

in order to situate or formulate his own poetics across his correspondence and
journals, we should appreciate the unique prominence Kerouac gave Marcel
Proust by making him the sole writer to appear in “Belief & Technique for
Modern Prose: List of Essentials.” Compared to his long and thorny appropriation
of Céline, Kerouac’s relation to Proust also appears fairly straightforward. While
by the end of two decades he could recognize in Céline “his doctor,” Kerouac’s
history with Proust began in the exact opposite way. In October 1951, after
having been hospitalized for an attack of thrombophlebitis and while anxiously
approaching the round number of thirty years, Kerouac prescribes himself the
reading of Proust:
Deciding once for all on the next six, crucial months—O dark thing… Reading
old mad Proust; eating good food, taking long walks, getting hung up on
sentences… This I’ve got to do for 6 months… then I’ll be 30, and twice an
author. Worth it? (The Unknown Kerouac, 151; Kerouac’s emphasis)
Since what would emerge from his reading of Proust over the next six months
is the discovery of spontaneous prose and the composition of Visions of Cody, a
text which scholars increasingly regard as his masterpiece, Kerouac’s prescription
definitely paid off and was indeed “worth it.”
Proust, of course, doesn’t first appear in Kerouac’s journals in 1951, for Swann’s
Way was part of the literary works he discussed with Burroughs and Ginsberg
in the mid-1940s. Kerouac mentions him twice in 1948, and twice to put him
down as lacking “life” in contrast with Céline and Dostoevsky: “Real intellectual
concentration in a work of art is after all only a thing in itself—an analysis, an
‘insight’ like Proust(?)—it is not life itself, as in Dostoevsky and Shakespeare and
sometimes even Céline” (Windblown World, 170; my emphasis). The question
mark that Kerouac inserts after Proust’s name here underlines his typical honesty
and suggests that he postpones his definitive judgment and for now gives Proust
the benefit of the doubt. The most plausible explanation for Kerouac’s hesitation,
his delay, is that he hadn’t yet finished reading Remembrance of Things Past. That
would be understandable, since Proust’s cycle contains seven huge volumes, and
it would certainly make sense of the prescription Kerouac gives himself three
years later. Associating Proust with “petty details” and the failure of “straight
naturalism” to “express life,” his second put-down, in 1949, offers further evidence
that Kerouac was still engaged in reading Proust: “Who wants Dos Passos’ old
camera eye?—or Proust’s subtleties? Everybody wants to GO!” (252). For Proust’s
first volumes are full of brilliant psychological insights (“details” and “subtleties”),
but his famous take on literature as creating “life itself,” for producing rather than
re-producing it, only appears in the seventh and final volume of Remembrance of
Things Past, that is, in Finding Time Again: “Real life, life finally uncovered and
clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this
sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as in the artist” (Proust, 204).
Real life is literature: Proust’s conclusion will become Kerouac’s own.
In contrast to his remarks of 1948, Proust is evoked in glowing terms in 1951.
Kerouac’s recently published 1951 journal is relatively short, and yet, over its
sixty-two handwritten pages, Proust appears no fewer than nineteen times (one
page out of three). Needless to say, no other author enjoys such a prominence.
Still, Proust unsurprisingly makes his first appearance in opposition with another
author, Thomas Wolfe, and in a most striking way. For the names of Wolfe and
Proust appear in a schema dividing the page in two columns, representing
Kerouac’s divided identity as a writer: from his two languages (Wolfe on the
English side, Proust the “Canuck”) to the opinions of the people who matter for
him (Wolfe with his family, Proust with his friends) and the types of personalities
that appeal to him (Wolfe with Hal Chase, Proust with Neal Cassady) (The
Unknown Kerouac, 112). If this seems like an unsolvable binary, and Kerouac
often suffered from feeling “divided”—“it’s a terrible enough world without
having to be divided in yr. own fucking soul. Divided—divided—divided—
divided” (163)—there is one category in his schema that suggests Kerouac’s
literary inclination. In light of the time and energy he put into the genesis of
On the Road’s enigmatic “IT,” the column featuring Wolfe’s name contains “‘Best
seller lists’—popularity,” which evidently pales in comparison with the opposing
terms in Proust’s column that has “‘—’ —mystery” (112).
Drawing this binary schema gives way to a positive verdict in which, deftly
affirming the advantages of a bicultural identity, Kerouac refuses to privilege one
side over the other: “If I hadn’t been split in the cradle I wouldn’t know half as much”
(The Unknown Kerouac, 113). Kerouac’s language here is quantitative—speaking of
how much he knows—and indeed has the advantage of overcoming the need to
take sides. Kerouac goes on to clarify that by quantity he also means intensity:
The only criteria to use for fiction is natural interest… how much to talk about
gray days in the beginning is how much it interests you, and the intervening
events in Frisco likewise and as memorable […] To tell a story with all your
heart, is that grammar?—to explain yourself completely, in full truth, is that
grammar? (113; my emphasis)
The insistence on “grammar” and “completeness” through the last two questions
oddly sounds like a plea for what beforehand he disregarded as “petty details” or
dismissed as “Proust’s subtleties”; that is, a defense of the very characteristic that
made him in 1945 rewrite the story he had composed with Burroughs: his own
excess of literariness. It is significantly through this defense that Proust comes in
at the very core of his two poetic statements, “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose”
and “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose.” The “core” position of Proust was
absolutely literal in Kerouac’s original, May 1955 draft of “Belief & Technique
for Modern Prose,” which located the injunction “Like Proust, be an old teahead
of time” at its dead center: point 14 in a list of 27 (Kerouac, Letters, 487). In
another sign of how deliberately Kerouac constructed the statement of his
poetics and how conscientiously he made Proust the nucleus of its genealogy,
the points on either side of number 14 in both his draft and final versions of the
text clearly relate above all to Proust and Céline. The explicit naming of Proust
actually interrupts the continuity that runs from point 13—“Remove literary
grammatical and syntactical inhibition”—to point 15—“Telling the true story of
the world in interior monolog” (“Belief & Technique,” 59). The “true story” that
must emerge by escaping the grids of conventional grammar and the Oedipal
straitjackets of syntax evoke the label Kerouac gave his work after The Town and
the City: “true-story novels” (Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler, vi). It also recalls the
passage in his journal from November 1951 where he identified the genealogy of
such novels, starting from Céline and Proust:
the thing now, as Céline, Proust, Wolfe, Genet & Joyce have shown, being no
longer fictions, imaginings of reality, but the great interior monologue of the
modern tongue written either in exile, jail or sickbed… what I’d call THE TRU
STORY OF THE WORLD— (The Unknown Kerouac, 164)
While it is tempting to isolate Proust in his sickbed as the one most crucial model
for Kerouac, his list starts with Céline and is a reminder of how often Kerouac
alternates between the two writers. Nevertheless, when writing to Malcolm
Cowley in September 1955 as they discussed plans to publish On the Road,
Kerouac made the strongest possible genealogical identification: “The Duluoz
Legend now numbers seven volumes; when I’m done, in about 10, 15 years, it
will cover all the years of my life, like Proust, but done on the run, a Running
Proust” (Kerouac, Letters, 515).
Kerouac’s final phrase—“a Running Proust”—points, I believe, to the decisive
factor in understanding not only the importance of Proust to the creation of his
work, but to our reading of it. Or to get at this idea another way, the phrase he
uses for Cowley in 1955 reveals how Kerouac reread Proust, how he appropriated
Remembrance of Things Past. It also confirms that this “running” came to him in
November 1951 as he worked on Visions of Cody: “Goddamit,” he insists in his
journal, “I want to use the Proustian method of recollection and amazement but
as I go along in life, not after” (The Unknown Kerouac, 168; Kerouac’s emphasis).
What he is insisting upon here, with his idea of being a “Running Proust” who
recollects his life at the time “not after,” sounds paradoxical or even contradictory,
but we can grasp it by turning to the reading of Remembrance made by Deleuze
in Proust and Signs (Proust et les signes, 1964).
To be clear: what follows here is no more a Deleuzian reading of Kerouac than
the preceding section was a Sartrean reading. Deleuze himself refers to Kerouac
on several occasions,24 and critics such as Marks, Abel, Hrebeniak and Melehy
have all drawn briefly but insightfully on key terms like rhizome or nomadic
thought in their analyses of his style. However, a sustained Deleuzian reading
that would build on such work is not necessary to, and in fact runs the risk
of obscuring, the chance to grasp the great value of a rapprochement between
Kerouac and Proust’s works. Rather than reading Kerouac through Deleuze here,
in a more comparative approach, I would like to show that Deleuze’s reading of
Proust follows and thereby illuminates Kerouac’s own reading of Proust. This, in
turn, enables us to read Kerouac in a new light, and to recognize in his writing
the results of being a remarkable reader.
Deleuze’s analysis reorients our understanding of Proust by insisting from the
outset that his genius has much less to do with involuntary memory (the famous
episode of the madeleine) than with the deciphering of signs (the glistening
steeples of Martinville and Vinteuil’s musical phrase). It is the proliferation of
signs like hieroglyphs that matters and makes us Egyptologists: “Truth depends
upon an encounter with something which forces us to think and to seek the
truth. The accident of encounters, the pressure of constraints are Proust’s two
fundamental themes” (Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 16). This distinction is itself
anticipated by Kerouac, who evokes “Proust’s Combray Cathedral, where
the stone moved in eccentric waves” in Visions of Cody (37), and who was
inspired to declare Proust an “old teahead of time” when recollecting Combray
(The Unknown Kerouac, 162), but who also significantly cut the Proustian
concept of involuntary memory when deleting the original first point of “Belief
& Technique for Modern Prose”: “Write on, cant change or go back, involuntary,
unrevised, spontaneous, subconscious, pure” (Kerouac, Letters, 487; my
emphasis). Why is this distinction so important? Because associating Kerouac
with the Proust of the madeleine contributes to establish him as the “Great
Rememberer,” a myth promoted by Ginsberg in his preface to Visions of Cody
that does not do full justice either to Kerouac’s reading of Proust or to his own
poetics. His “Running Proust” is not turned to the past but to the present and the
future. Or as Deleuze puts it, Proust’s works are “not oriented to the past and the
discoveries of memory, but to the future and the progress of an apprenticeship”
(Proust and Signs, 26)—and the same can be said of Kerouac’s works, too.
The impact of a backward-looking Proust on how we read Kerouac governs
one of his recently published texts, Tics, since editor Todd Tietchen identifies it
as “an exercise reminiscent of Proust’s exploration […] of involuntary memory”
and notes a concrete parallel between the madeleine in Combray and Kerouac’s
memory of eating bread and butter dusted with sugar in his mother’s kitchen (The
Unknown Kerouac, 240). While understandable, I would say that this parallel
points us in the wrong direction, and that the conclusion to which it leads—
“Each entry in Tics serves as a verbal snapshot taking its place in a literary photo
album”—freezes time past, brings it to a standstill, whereas, however doomed
to failure, Kerouac commits to running along with time, to the rush of it, to the
process of writing and to what Deleuze refers to as “the future and the progress
of an apprenticeship.”
What Deleuze means by identifying Proust as a reader of signs committed
to the future is in fact clear from the progress of Kerouac’s own reflections on
Proust in his journals, which are themselves a kind of huge apprenticeship, a
process of learning to write by learning to read. To begin with, they are a series
of disillusions, and (probably just before his reading of Finding Time Again)
Kerouac thus finds Proust wanting in a comparison with Wolfe precisely because
he sees him focusing on the past, for his “plan to rescue the past” (The Unknown
Kerouac, 112). These moments of disillusion are actually vital for Kerouac, who
with great excitement repeatedly believes he has found “IT”—the way to capture
the rush of life in writing—only to experience the crash a few days or weeks
later: “Oh what turmoils!” he laments in his journal in mid-November 1951; “It’s
taken me all this time since Oct. 25th to really realize why I couldn’t sleep that
night and why my ‘IT WORKED’ of 2 days ago wasn’t enthusiastic at all” (163).
And yet, he cannot help but in the heat of the moment declare, as if definitively,
in the same entry, “Now I’m REALLY a ‘writer’—no more stultifying artifice…”
(165) Through a series of revelations and disillusions, Kerouac’s journals
themselves perform the intensity of the present as it rushes and roars through
him that he finds so precious in Proust. In the very next entry, for November
16, 1951, he records a striking commitment to the poetics of Visions of Cody:
Made important decision about the Neal book—no false action, just visions of
what I know he did, NO TIME, NO CHRONOLOGY, composing willy-nilly,
as Holmes says, a book surpassing the problem of time by itself being full of
the roar of Time (not his words). […] I’m about to be 30. I’ve finally solved the
lifework. What remains is intensities only. Intense writing, intense drunks, intense
travels, intense responsibilities, intense laughter.—(The Unknown Kerouac, 166;
Kerouac’s emphasis)
Kerouac’s insistence on intensities emerges from his recognition, as we

saw, that the only criterion for fiction is “how much it interests you” (113), an
insistence that Deleuze consistently made—“Everything must be interpreted in
intensity” (Deleuze and Guattari, 173)—and recognized in Proust. In Proust and
Signs, Deleuze argues that writing is less about the goal of constructing meaning
than about the process of deciphering the signs that force themselves upon us.
Involuntary memory is indeed intense, but the point is that the process continues,
passes from the past through the present to a future. It’s a process that cannot
be completed, of course, and when Kerouac identifies himself as a “Running
Proust,” he significantly embraces for his Duluoz legend Proust’s great metaphor
for his own work: “I see now the whole Cathedral of Form which this is […] the
eventual LEGEND will run into millions of words” (Kerouac, Letters, 515). The
echo here is of a passage in Finding Time Again, which Deleuze also seizes upon,
where Proust describes great books, parts of which can only be “sketched in” and
that “will probably never be finished because of the very extent of the architect’s
plan. Think how many great cathedrals have been left unfinished!” (Proust, 342).
Of course, one of the grounds on which Kerouac’s work was attacked, above all
Visions of Cody, was its appearance of being sketched rather than completed,
by critics who refused to accept the validity of his aesthetics or its proximity to
Proust’s. Kerouac appropriates Proust—sometimes to the extent of speaking for
him: “as Proust says, or might have said” (The Unknown Kerouac, 160)—in the
same way Deleuze reads him, seeking forms that will allow him to adapt Proust’s
conception of writing to his desire for a writing that is running into millions of
words with the roar of time.
Kerouac narrates such genealogical intensities in Visions of Cody in a particular

passage that not only names and quotes Proust and is itself absolutely Proustian,
almost a pastiche, but that theorizes Kerouac’s entire book through the reference
(Kerouac, Visions of Cody, 44). The passage describes a series of father figures
evoked by the “unforgettable inexpressively rich” smell of their pipe smoke
(43). Although such passages might easily be read as just “illustrating” Proust’s
involuntary memory in the manner of the madeleine or frozen moments in a
“literary photo album,” I would argue that they are more valuably identified as the
essential ingredient of Kerouac’s “apprenticeship.” That is, in its preoccupation
with fathers, as well as memories, Visions of Cody performs the genealogy and
dynamic process of learning and teaching through writing into which, thanks
to Proust, in November 1951 Kerouac inserts his own work in a key rhapsodic
journal entry:
And my teachings, as Proust’s teachings through Neal, earlier Wolfe’s teachings

through Sammy, and Joyce’s teachings thru the young man who called himself
Duluoz & was myself, will reach somebody through somebody and something
else strange and living will happen, the purpose of which will always be a mystery
[…] the world that ever proceeds towards a light, a thing, won’t be able to talk
about it till it happens and it always happens, that is to say, it’s already happened,
is happening in fact now and every single moment, and the name of it is Life.
While it might seem grandiose and overblown, this passage has a Biblical
rhythm to it that is inflected with a certain humor, as Kerouac replaces the
genealogical “who begat whom” with who “will reach somebody through
somebody.” It is certainly a ringing affirmation of the power of the writer
to create and to communicate life, to pass it on, as he inherited it from his
teachers, here named as Joyce and Wolfe as well as Proust—although it might
just as well have been Céline and Dostoevsky, as well as Proust. The power of
literature is expressed as a hope, almost a prayer, in anticipation that one day
his work “will mean a lot,” in the epilogue to Kerouac’s 1951 journal that is
no longer addressed to himself but directly to the reader, to the future, to the
genealogies to come, “whether my children, historians, or that ancient-history
worm reads this”:
I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them
life, and not only life but that great consciousness of life that made cathedrals
rise from the smoke. (172)
What rises from the smoke are cathedrals of literary form, like his own, like
Proust’s, but again the grand rhetoric gives way to a humbler one, and Kerouac
ends his 1951 journal with an appeal to a shared vision—“crying, till all eyes
see”—that echoes very precisely the ending of I Wish I Were You—“to see the
tears that were in his eyes, and to see everything” (419). Making the connection
between the breakthrough he was achieving in 1951 with Visions of Cody and
the first breakthrough he had made in 1945 with I Wish I Were You, Kerouac
was perhaps reconsidering whether the “Céline-like version” of the novel he had
coauthored with Burroughs was so Céline-like after all. Perhaps in retrospect he
sensed that his vision had always been Proustian, long before he knew it himself.
So which is the true “master” for Kerouac? In this one great epiphany signaling
his maturity as a writer, the very idea of “mastery” vanishes in the grand chain
of genealogies that runs through the writer, from text to reader and from reader
to text, without end.25
4
Burroughs’ Queer Aesthetics:

From Gide to Cocteau
Burroughs’ Céline: “Wouldn’t You?”
Proust was important for Burroughs too, but after “Kerouac’s Céline” it is
especially tempting to identify his own Céline as a counterpoint. For where
Kerouac sought the compassionate humanism in Céline, Burroughs clearly
found and relished his cynical humor. Indeed, it is entirely possible to see a
Célinian dark energy and trenchant political satire driving all the narratives of
his first decade as a writer, through the ratcheting up of the tempo and cynicism
of his picaresque alter ego, William Lee, from Junky via Queer and The Yage
Letters to Naked Lunch. Far from reading Céline against the grain, as Kerouac
needs at times to do, Burroughs presses him to the limit, cuts up the compassion
to leave only the passion, the brutal force—the “fury” and “tempests,” to recall
Kerouac’s own terms. The catchphrase of Naked Lunch—“Wouldn’t you?” (Naked
Lunch, 208)—radicalizes the challenge posed in Journey to the End of the Night
by such provocations in complicity as Ferdinand’s “I don’t care a hoot about
human morality myself—just like everyone else” (Journey to the End of the Night,
273). Far from thinking to excuse or defend Céline, and far from keeping anti-
Semitism out of his texts, Burroughs identifies with him insofar as his narrator
doesn’t balk from making Jew jokes in Queer or Naked Lunch. While in the first
text Lee openly anticipates the accusation—“I must be careful not to lay myself
open to a charge of anti-Semitism” (Queer, 44)—in the second, he gleefully
invites it: “you know yourself all a Jew wants to do is doodle a Christian girl…
One of these days we’ll cut the rest of it off ” (Naked Lunch, 148).
If for Kerouac the frenetic pace of Céline’s prose—“Place de la Concorde
at rush hour!” (Céline, Conversations with Professor Y, 93)—matched the
passionate spontaneity he desired for his own, throwing off the shackles of
novelistic form; for Burroughs, it is the unchecked violence of Céline’s satire that
models a shattering of the novel’s traditional humanism, leading him towards

an aesthetic of fragmentation and excess to match his posthuman ethics. One
of Burroughs’ earliest routines, “Roosevelt after Inauguration” written in May
1953, is the purest Céline in its cultivation of an outrage beyond liberal humanist
limits: “Roosevelt was convulsed with such hate for the human species as it is,
that he wished to degrade it beyond recognition […] ‘I’ll make the cocksuckers
glad to mutate’, he would say, looking off into space as if seeking new frontiers
of depravity” (Burroughs, Yage Letters, 44). Although supposedly about the
American political scene of the 1930s, Burroughs’ routine was written on his
travels in South America and, in a displaced fashion, shares Céline’s coruscating
vision of colonial Africa in Journey to the End of the Night, where “the white
man’s revolting nature” (103) truly comes out into the open. For Burroughs,
revolting leads to mutating.
That is, unlike Kerouac’s Céline, Burroughs’ embraces a problematic relation
between aesthetics and ethics. Burroughs savors complicity rather than moral
clarity, and this is why he shares with Céline the grotesque cynicism that reflects
back the even more grotesque bad faith of a cynical readership: readers who
are anything other than disgusted by what they see in the mirror. This is also
precisely why Burroughs’ own moral position, his authorial distance from his
alter ego, is often so hard to pin down: Are his anti-Semitic jokes meant to be
funny, or are they not meant to be anti-Semitic?
One thing we can be sure of is that, in interviews over a thirty-year period,
Burroughs consistently repeated that Céline’s unsettling mood and humor
confused readers and prompted the same kind of misunderstandings as his own:
“When I read Céline he immediately struck me as being very funny. But the
critics talked about his cry of despair. They seemed to have missed the point
entirely”; “I find the same critical misconceptions put forth by critics with
regard to his work are put forth to mine”; “The good critics have pointed out the
humor, whereas bad critics say flatly there is none. They said this about Céline”
(Lotringer, Burroughs Live, 53, 273, 579). Of no other writer did Burroughs
make such strong statements of aesthetic identification, and it would clearly
be possible to develop a case that is textual—comparatively analyzing, say,
Journey to the End of the Night with The Yage Letters or episodes from Naked
Lunch—while also addressing issues of authorial identity, political purpose and
critical reception. Such a reading would illuminate not only how different are
Burroughs’ and Kerouac’s appropriations of Céline, but also how differently
they wrote about their major predecessors. Kerouac’s journals are fascinating
Burroughs’ Queer Aesthetics: From Gide to Cocteau 95
resources for scholars and critics in this respect, and are crucial measure of
how differently Burroughs worked as a writer. That is to say, there are almost no
journals of Burroughs’ works in progress where he engaged with source-texts,
authors and ideas as he redrafted his novels, an absence barely made up for by
contemporaneous letters or later interviews.1 As a result, we have simply far
less information about what Burroughs was reading as he wrote than we have
for Kerouac, or, with the monthly book lists he compiled for his own journals,
Ginsberg. In this context, the clarity of Burroughs’ identifications with Céline in
interviews dating from the 1960s to the 1980s is significant but unsatisfactory
if the goal is to understand the genealogy of his writing of the 1950s through
his own writing. For these chronological and material reasons, rather than
taking further the invitation to read Burroughs through Céline, the following
two sections pursue the seemingly less promising cases of André Gide and Jean
Cocteau, who each have a small but pregnant textual presence in Burroughs’
early work.
Always just name-checked in the biographies, Gide and Cocteau have
remained two of the most overlooked writers in the critical field, so that their
fundamental importance for the evolution of Burroughs’ writing in the early
1950s has passed unnoticed. This may seem understandable, since in the
Burroughs oeuvre there are only two direct references to Gide—one in his
preface to Junky and another, which reworks the first, in a mid-1950s routine.2
As for Cocteau, Burroughs only makes a single, if more extended reference to
his film Orpheus (Orphée, 1950) in Queer. However, this is to misunderstand the
act of naming in Burroughs’ work, which is so rare—in the absolute, but also
especially in comparison to Ginsberg or Kerouac—that his explicit allusions are
never mere name-checking and always function on several levels of meaning at
once. That Burroughs should have referenced Gide and Cocteau in Junky and
Queer, his first two texts, each completed in summer 1952, is striking in that
context, and a close reading reveals that each reference operates with the same
odd economy to condense similar fields of significance.
Cocteau’s textual presence has been ignored or briskly dismissed, and while
Gide’s even more limited presence has been analyzed in relation to Junky and
Queer by Oliver Harris,3 it has not been framed in connection to Gide’s own
work or to broader parallels between his oeuvre and that of Burroughs, so that
its larger textual importance has not yet been grasped. The allusions to Gide
and Cocteau made in 1952 reveal crucial points of intersection for the author of
Junky and Queer, as he struggled with the aesthetic and ethical terms of making
fiction out of his identities as a heroin addict and a homosexual, while keeping at
bay the guilt and trauma of shooting his wife, Joan Vollmer, in September 1951.
This infamous event took place as Burroughs was working on his early semi-
autobiographical novels, but was of course not represented in either of them.
That is to say, at the threshold of his oeuvre, Gide and Cocteau mediated for
Burroughs a deeply problematic relation of life to literature, in which the issue
of where his writing belonged, its genealogy, was emotionally charged by the
question of what did and did not belong in it.
“A First-Rate Fabricator of Gidean Romances”
The textual presence of Gide in Burroughs’ work was preceded, and to an extent
shaped, by both Kerouac and Ginsberg. Long before Ginsberg’s photographic
caption describing “Burroughs camping as an André Gidean sophisticate
lecturing the earnest Thomas Wolfean All-American youth Jack Kerouac” (see
Fig. I.3; page 23), Ginsberg and Kerouac had indeed made persistent associations
between Burroughs and Gide throughout the mid-1940s and early 1950s. In
March 1945, Kerouac hence wrote in his journal:
Seeing a lot of Burroughs. He is responsible for the education of Lucien

[Carr], whom I had found, in lieu of his anarchy (rather than in spite of it), an
extremely important person: “I lean with a fearful attraction over the depths
of each creature’s possibilities and weep for all that lies atrophied under the
heavy lid of custom and morality”—and—“The bastard alone has the right to be
natural.” (Gide) These lines elicit a picture of the Burroughs thought. However,
the psychoanalytical probing has upset me prodigiously. (Kerouac, Orpheus
Emerged, 159–60)
Leaving aside for a moment the “education of Lucien,” the quotations that come
after the colon in Kerouac’s journal entry appear at first to be citing Burroughs, and
this impression is reinforced by Kerouac’s following comment: “These lines elicit
a picture of the Burroughs thought.” The only thing separating Burroughs from
the quotations apparently attributed to him here is the single word in parenthesis
giving their true provenance: “(Gide).” Kerouac’s association of Burroughs with
Gide is thus made all the more striking by the format of his journal entry, whose
punctuation and construction insinuate their virtual identification.4 Whether or
not Gide was the source of “the Burroughs thought,” the larger aim of both their
works was certainly to overthrow oppressive social and familial structures to

escape the death-in-life of “custom and morality.” In his journal, Kerouac makes
a more exact connection between Burroughs and Gide via the young Lucien
Carr, whose “education” casts Burroughs as a tutor, anticipating Ginsberg’s
photographic captions in implying that the relation of student to tutor combines
pedagogy with pederasty. The specific source of Kerouac’s quotations from Gide
strengthens that significance, since he was copying into his own journal one of
Gide’s fictional journal entries from The Counterfeiters (1925), a novel whose
combination of literary and sexual awakening exercised a “fearful attraction”
within the early Beat circle.
The closing line of Kerouac’s journal entry—“However, the psychoanalytical
probing has upset me prodigiously” (Orpheus Emerged, 160)—also suggests
that he made the Burroughs-Gide connection out of his own anxieties about his
sexual identity, stirred up by Burroughs in his capacity as his master. Kerouac’s
disquiet here hints at the wider historical context that will govern the significance
of Burroughs’ own references to Gide; that is to say, the pejorative moralistic
and moralizing dominant view of Gide, according to mid-century American
values. This view is revealed with great force and clarity in a letter concerning
both Kerouac and Burroughs written just a month before Kerouac’s entry in his
journal. In February 1945, Louis Ginsberg invoked Gide in a letter to his son’s
professor at Columbia, Lionel Trilling, worried that young Allen had “fallen
in with some undesirable friends,” certainly thinking above all of Burroughs
and Kerouac (Ginsberg, Family Business, 6). What makes Ginsberg’s friends
“undesirable” is their seduction of his son into “making clever but false verbal
rationalizations that the immoralist way of life (à la Gide, I think) is a valid one
[…] He seeks to philosophise abnormality into normality” (5). In his father’s
eyes, Ginsberg as a reader of The Counterfeiters had in effect himself become a
counterfeit (“clever but false”) and had become immoral by imitating the author
of The Immoralist (Gide’s L’Immoraliste, 1902).
Louis Ginsberg’s values look back at Kerouac’s from the other end of the
telescope, as it were, but the apparently opposite point of view of Gide held
by Kerouac in his 1945 journal gives way to one astonishingly similar to that
of Ginsberg’s father in his first published novel, where The Counterfeiters is
discussed at length as precisely “a novel about the falsity of people” (Kerouac, The
Town and the City, 153). What makes this inversion so significant is that once
again Kerouac associates Gide with Burroughs to the point of identification. In
The Town and the City, “the notorious Monsieur Gide,” “noted for his monstrous
perversity of character” and as an “unnatural corrupter of youth” (154), is indeed

linked to Burroughs via the character of Dennison, a thinly disguised portrait,
who, with an affected sarcasm, is accused of being a “first-rate fabricator of
Gidean romances, my dear” (393). Through a chain of associations in Kerouac’s
novel, the name of Gide therefore stands for both literary and sexual corruption,
spelling out what Louis Ginsberg’s letter had left to be understood between the
lines: for “abnormality,” read “homosexuality.”
When two years later, in April 1952, Allen Ginsberg himself asserted the
Burroughs-Gide connection, it would unsurprisingly be on the same ground
of sexual identity. What makes Ginsberg’s triangulation of Burroughs, Gide and
homosexuality particularly notable is its context: an “Appreciation” he penned
for Ace Books in his capacity as Burroughs’ amateur literary agent to promote
and preface his first novel, Junky. In a very material way, therefore, Ginsberg was
bringing into Burroughs’ first published work the use of Gide as a marker of the
identity established two years earlier by Kerouac’s own first published novel, as
well as seven years earlier in his private journal.
In his “Appreciation,” Ginsberg filled in the missing past of Junky’s narrator,
William Lee:
His next move, in true American style, was the Grand Tour of Europe. He spent
a year in Paris in the early thirties, went on through Germany and Austria (as
did his English contemporaries in the Isherwood-Auden group), and ended
up in Cairo, looking at the pyramids with the practiced eye of an archaeology
student. He spent some time in the cities of the north coast of Africa, earlier
and later popularized by Gide and Paul Bowles, and returned then to America.
(Ginsberg, “An Appreciation,” in Burroughs, Junky, 147)
The overseas trips taken in “true American style” ironically feature scenes of
un-American sexual tourism, starting in Europe by parenthetically invoking
two of the most well-known English homosexual writers, Isherwood and Auden
(in Berlin), and culminating in North Africa with Gide (Algeria) and Bowles
(Morocco). This much was historically accurate, since in summer 1934 Burroughs
had indeed visited Biskra and Touggourt with his friend Rex Weisenberger
(Miles, Burroughs: A Life, 55). The real significance of these specific locations,
however, is to identify his journey as a literary pilgrimage, since Burroughs was
following in the footsteps of Gide’s own North African travels as documented
in his journals, Amyntas. Mopsus. Feuilles de route. De Biskra à Touggourt. Le
Renoncement au voyage (1906) and, more importantly, his novel set partly in
Biskra, L’Immoraliste (1902).
The (Im)moralist
Although Ginsberg imitated a mid-century moral tone in his 1952 “Appreciation”

by referring to “subterranean vices” (Ginsberg, “An Appreciation,” in Burroughs,
Junky, 148), what is striking in retrospect is that, to help promote Junky, a
novel supposedly focused on Burroughs’ identity as a drug addict, he should
think to invoke by association Burroughs’ sexual identity at all. There was no
need to reference Gide here, let alone to imply the particular relevance of The
Immoralist. This is what makes even more surprising and meaningful the use
to which Burroughs himself then put Ginsberg’s text. For later that same year,
he took it as a kind of template for the preface that his publishers now required
him to write for Junky and, while cutting out the names of Auden, Isherwood
and Bowles, he left in Gide’s. If Ginsberg’s evocation of Gide was gratuitous,
the fact that Burroughs erased it only to then reinscribe the name within his
preface makes plain how very odd its appearance there really is. While redacting
the “Grand Tour” described by Ginsberg and omitting all reference to North
Africa, Burroughs introduced into his preface to Junky instead a list of authors
as symptoms of his sense of difference from others at an early age: “I read more
than was usual for an American boy of that time and place: Oscar Wilde, Anatole
France, Baudelaire, even Gide” (Burroughs, Junky, xxxvi).5
From Wilde to Gide by way of France and Baudelaire, the list of what the
young Lee read is marked by three features: most obviously, it is emphatically
French (three out of four names); it is framed by writers well-known for their
homosexuality; and it gives special emphasis to the writer named last: “even
Gide.” Why even Gide? As shorthand, “Gide” is highly suggestive but wide open to
interpretation, standing for both the homosexual author and his literary oeuvre
without pointing to any specific elements of either or both. Burroughs’ allusion
to Gide is as puzzling as it is significant and therefore requires unpacking. Oliver
Harris has persuasively argued for an aesthetic explanation, in which Gide’s name
stands for a “suspect sophistication” (The Secret of Fascination, 71). However,
this applies to the author of the modernist antinovel The Counterfeiters. That is,
in a sense, the “obvious” meaning behind the name of Gide: because of the text’s
fame in its own right; because we know how important it was for Burroughs,
Kerouac and the original Beat circle of the mid-1940s; and because it features
so prominently in The Town and the City. But an aesthetic case doesn’t work for
Gide’s earlier realist work such as The Immoralist, and it is surely this text that
lies behind Burroughs’ evocative phrasing, “even Gide.” Why? Because when
Burroughs references Gide in his preface to Junky, he is echoing Ginsberg’s own

reference to Gide in his “Appreciation” to Junky (written just a couple of months
earlier), and from his allusion to the “north coast of Africa” we know Ginsberg
meant—and Burroughs knew he meant—The Immoralist.
Two or three years later, Burroughs then reworked this passage from his preface
to Junky into a short routine, a satirical skit about the reminiscences of youthful
homoerotic encounters, and retained Gide’s name in another but different list of
four writers: “I had read Oscar Wilde and Gide and Proust and Havelock Ellis”
(Burroughs, Interzone, 122). Proust and Havelock Ellis here replace Anatole
France and Baudelaire, bringing out into the open the construction of a canon
of homosexual literature, into which Burroughs ambivalently inserts himself.
Revising the preface to Junky in order to create an homosexual genealogy in
this routine, Burroughs now brings to the fore the crucial pairing, which is of
the writers named first and last in the preface but now placed together: Wilde
and Gide.
“Wilde and Gide”: the repeated sequence of the names is important not only
in terms of chronology (Gide had died in February 1951, just eighteen months
before Burroughs wrote the preface to Junky, whereas Wilde died a half-century
earlier in 1900), but in terms of causality and literary genealogy: Wilde leads to
Gide. As Burroughs knew, Gide’s novel The Immoralist featured a fictionalization
of Wilde in the figure of Ménalque, a non-too-subtle marker of Wilde’s own
enormous personal and aesthetic impact on Gide. Having made his Gidean
pilgrimage to Biskra in 1934, Burroughs was surely familiar with the famous
encounter that had taken place there between Gide and Wilde forty years earlier,
when Wilde had forced Gide to fully embrace his homosexuality, a scene of
sexual awakening also fictionalized in The Immoralist.
The biographical relationship between Wilde and Gide as discussed, for
example, by Jonathan Dollimore in the “Wilde and Gide in Algiers” chapter of
his classic study Sexual Dissidence (1991), falls outside the textual scope of this
reading, but Burroughs’ repeated association of their names does enable us to
see what lies behind his initial tantalizing reference to “even Gide.” Dollimore
describes how Wilde set out to shatter the young Frenchman’s “self-identity, rooted
as it was in a Protestant ethic and high bourgeois moral rigour and repression,
which generated a kind of conformity which Wilde scorned” (Dollimore, 3). In
other words, Wilde wanted Gide to become the author of the very lines from
The Counterfeiters quoted by Kerouac, lamenting, and aiming to liberate “all
that lies atrophied under the heavy lid of custom and morality”—lines which
themselves reworked The Immoralist, whose narrator attains “consciousness

of untouched treasures somewhere lying covered up, hidden, smothered by
culture and decency and morality” (Gide, The Immoralist, 137). However, the
point here is not only the shift in values that required Gide to embrace what he
first saw as “evil,” namely his latent homosexual desire, but the actual process
by which Wilde communicated those values. Richard Ellmann describes this
process as “psychic possession”; “in effect, Wilde spiritually seduced Gide” (qtd.
in Dollimore, 3, 5). These terms are uncannily similar to those used by Louis
Ginsberg in his 1945 letter and by Kerouac in The Town and the City, and if we
return to Burroughs’ preface to Junky, we find a further twist to this Gidean tale
of seduction and corruption.
Rather than invoking Gide’s name in a physical journey undertaken overseas,
as had Ginsberg in his “Appreciation,” Burroughs in his preface to Junky locates
Gide in a list of authors read at home by a young boy, a backdating that alters
the name’s significance. His reading of Gide is no longer connected with his
future destiny—as the writer of Junky—but with his past and present behavior,
as is implied by the sentence that immediately follows the words “even Gide”: “I
formed a romantic attachment for another boy” (Burroughs, Junky, xxxvi). The
causality is all the more striking for being left in the form of a mere juxtaposition:
after reading Gide, Lee became homosexual. Burroughs thus goes one better
than Kerouac in The Town and the City, where Gide is “regarded as an unnatural
corrupter of French youth” (154), since in the preface to his own first published
novel, the queer French writer now proves able to reach into the Midwest and
corrupt the morals of a wholesome American boy. Or to put it in terms of the
Burroughs–Gide–Wilde triangular relation, as Gide had been sexually awakened
by Wilde, so Burroughs claims he had been by Gide.
The implicit gay literary genealogical tradition that runs from Wilde to Gide
to Burroughs invites us to ask to what extent did the aesthetic transformation
of Gide, that went together with his ethical transformation, go for Burroughs
too. To answer this, we need to recognize that Burroughs’ invocation of Gide
did not properly belong in Junky at all, but in Queer, which he wrote at the
same time he completed the preface to Junky in summer 1952. Critics have
perhaps understandably overlooked the importance of Gide for Queer because
Burroughs’ act of naming oddly occurs in Junky, and even the one full-length
critical study to focus on Burroughs’ sexuality, Jamie Russell’s Queer Burroughs,
makes references to Wilde but none to Gide.6 Had Gide’s name appeared in
Queer, it might have prompted us to recognize in Burroughs’ text another, doubly
displaced allusion to Gide. For in his novel characterized by an almost complete

absence of cultural reference, the solitary literary name of Frank Harris—the
Irish writer and Wilde’s biographer—stands out and invites speculation. It
is quite possible that Burroughs’ allusion to Frank Harris is not only a coded
invocation of Wilde, but also, through Wilde, of Gide. An encrypted reference
within the text of Queer is certainly plausible, since the narrative is constantly
evoking hidden meaning and a broader sense of enigmatic or heavily coded
communication: “When Lee talked, he seemed to mean more than what he said”
(Burroughs, Queer, 21). It would also confirm the ambivalence that underlies
Burroughs’ seemingly gratuitous naming of Gide in the “wrong” text: in Junky,
rather than where it belonged, in Queer.
In the ethical and aesthetic senses implied by Kerouac in The Town and the
City, Queer is the obviously “Gidean” novel, a text of “monstrous perversity”
because of the predatory behavior of its narrator, William Lee, and the obscene
routines that pour out of his mouth. It is entirely fitting that this was Kerouac’s
own immediate verdict in the manuscript of Doctor Sax, which he wrote while
staying with Burroughs in Mexico City the summer Burroughs composed
Queer. The manuscript identifies Burroughs and his novel in terms of Gide
through a series of allusions7 and comparisons between “Bull Hubbard” (based
on Burroughs) and Sax himself. While framed in a fictional context, the “secret,
malevolent leer” concealed under Sax’s slouch hat in particular points to an
image of Burroughs truly beyond the human pale, beyond even Gide: “He knew
something that no other man knew; a something reptilian; pray, was he a man?”
(Kerouac, Doctor Sax, 127, 129).
The humanist terms of Kerouac’s question here would resonate throughout
Burroughs’ reception; think of Edmund White’s 1981 interview titled “This
is not a mammal.” But more immediately, they lead us into Gide’s novel The
Immoralist, published fifty years before Burroughs wrote Queer, in which the
latent homosexual narrator, Michel, is directly challenged by his wife, Marceline:
“You like what is inhuman” (Gide, The Immoralist, 152). Marceline is actually
referring to the desert on the way to Touggourt, and there is no desert in
Burroughs’ Queer to test what “human” means for a Western couple in an alien
land. In this vein, Ginsberg’s pairing of Gide with Paul Bowles gestures towards
The Sheltering Sky (1949) much more naturally than to Queer. But the obvious
differences in plot and setting between Queer and The Immoralist indicate what
Burroughs couldn’t possibly take from Gide, which turns out to be as important
as what he did.
“A fearful attraction”
Gide’s short, highly accomplished novel of psychological realism differs in key

respects from the fragmentary novella that Burroughs abandoned incomplete
and left unpublished for thirty years. Most obviously, while Gide’s narrating
protagonist, Michel, undergoes a journey of sexual self-discovery, William Lee
begins his narrative fully conscious of his sexuality. Both writers drew heavily
on personal experience here; Burroughs was not following Gide’s narrative
trajectory but his own. However, there are points of textual intersection, both
general and precise, which imply the relevance of The Immoralist for Queer. At
the most formal level, Gide makes constant use of the ellipsis—the narrative
even ends with one—as does Burroughs in Queer. These ellipses are highly
unusual for the French author, as well as for Burroughs at this time, and give
to the sexual ambivalence described in their novels a formal corollary, a way
to speak the unspeakable. To put it another way, in each case, the punctuation
dramatizes and visualizes the resistance to meaning or explanation of what
most concerns them. Gide prefaces his narrative with an account of his method,
which is to refuse to “take sides,” to pass moral judgment, because—making
use of a notable ellipsis—he is “very loath to… conclude” (The Immoralist, 7-8).
Gide’s only conclusion—“I have not tried to prove anything” (8)—is echoed
precisely by Burroughs’ narrator, William Lee, who has no interest “to prove
anything to anybody” (Queer, 43), and more generally by Burroughs’ text, whose
incompleteness is itself the sign of a refusal or inability to conclude.
Above all, the central drama of Gide’s story, which coincides with the story of
sexual awakening, is the discovery of a hidden dimension, a secret world behind
and beyond that of mundane appearances and tedious limitations. Can a man,
wonders Michel, do “nothing but repeat himself?”:
It seemed to me then that I had been born to make discoveries of a kind

hitherto undreamed of; and I grew strangely and passionately eager in
the pursuit of my dark and mysterious researches, for the sake of which, I
well knew, the searcher must abjure and repudiate culture and decency and
morality. (The Immoralist, 137)
In Queer, Lee’s contempt for “middle-class morality” and for “the stupid, ordinary,
disapproving people who kept him from doing what he wanted to do” (Queer, 35,
86–87) is phrased negatively. It is only his quest for yagé, and with it the possibility
of telepathic communication, that confirms an accompanying commitment to
“dark and mysterious researches,” which might lead to “undreamed of ” radical

change rather than repetition. That is to say, Burroughs, in contrast to Gide, and
against the expectations raised by the text’s title, signally fails to make sexuality the
central issue of Queer: the retrospective introduction he penned on its publication
in 1985 even makes the narrative more about the effects of drug-withdrawal
than desire. When Burroughs does spell out the nature of his “researches” in his
early work, he will indeed identify it not with desire but with drugs, as in “The
Conspiracy,” the short story where Lee claims to have been “searching for some
secret, some key”: “The addict has glimpsed the formula, the bare bones of life,
and this knowledge has destroyed for him the ordinary sources of satisfaction
that make life endurable” (Interzone, 110). When Burroughs addresses his sexual
identity, as in the second list he made of his youthful readings featuring the name
of Gide, it is emphatically a routine, a “second-rate novel kick” mocking his own
identity and ambitions, and belittling the very idea of a gay literary genealogy:
“After all, so many great writers had been like that” (Interzone, 122).
However, Queer closely follows The Immoralist by representing sexual desire
for the other as a sensation of physical projection. Focusing on one boy in a
group of six or seven in Ecuador, Lee “could feel himself in the body of the boy,”
a scenario that extends an earlier scene when he strains “to enter the other’s
body, to breathe with his lungs, see with his eyes, learn the feel of his viscera
and genitals” (Queer, 85, 33). In The Immoralist, Michel experiences a very
similar kind of physical “sympathy” with Arab boys whose bodies he desires,
so that “their alien sensations immediately awoke the echo of [his] own—no
vague echo, but a sharp and precise one” such that he “seemed to feel things
with their senses rather than with [his] own” (114). But once again, it is the
difference between Gide and Burroughs’ novels that is much more crucial than
what they have in common. To begin with, Lee experiences the pull of desire not
as an awakening to a world of suppressed sensations, but as a physical torment,
an agony; whereas Michel experiences a “recrudescence of life, the influx of a
richer, warmer blood” (The Immoralist, 52), Lee “felt the tearing ache of limitless
desire” (Queer, 85). Metaphorically feeding on the warm blood of their young
bodies, Michel eulogizes the racial and class of the “others” that he desires and
vampiristically possesses. In contrast, Lee subjects his own desire for such bodies
to grotesque exaggeration, as when drooling over a Mexican boy: “Taint as if
it was being queer, Allerton. After all, they’s only Mexicans” (66). In this way,
Queer brings the colonialist sexual exploitation of Gide’s text out into the open
and presses it to a point of satirical excess.
Lee’s behavior and Burroughs’ ethical values are nevertheless left

uncomfortably open to judgment. To recall the terms of Gide’s preface to The
Immoralist, Burroughs too fails to make his moral position clear. In Queer we
sometimes know when Lee is being parodic; for example, when fabricating the
moment he recognized his sexuality: “I thought of the painted, simpering female
impersonators I had seen in a Baltimore night club. Could it be possible that I
was one of those subhuman things?” (Queer, 35). But elsewhere, Lee’s routines
run away with him, to the extent of “coming like dictation” and carrying on
when nobody is listening, and it becomes increasingly clear that he fails to
coincide with his speech every bit as much as he fails to coincide with his body:
“I’m disembodied. I can’t use my own body for some reason” (57, 88). In this
sense, while not “subhuman,” Lee shockingly lacks the faculties we normally take
to define the human (agency, language, body). Far from discovering his true self,
as Gide’s Michel does, Burroughs’ Lee appears to be losing it altogether. Lee’s
psychic collapse in Queer exposes an inner void in subjectivity that Burroughs
would press further in Naked Lunch: “‘Possession’ they call it… […] As if I was
usually there but subject to goof now and then… Wrong! I am never here…”
(184-85; Burroughs’ emphasis).
This brief comparative analysis of Burroughs and Gide’s novels helps us to
realize that, in Queer, the ontological status of William Lee as both a character
and as an autobiographical stand-in for Burroughs is precisely a matter of
whether or not “I” am here. For in writing Queer, Burroughs retained Lee as a
character and nom-de-plume, while making a dramatic shift to the third-person
narration from the first-person narration of Lee in Junky. Burroughs therefore
seems to have followed the request that Wilde famously made of Gide, whose
preference for confessional writing he disliked: to “never write “I” again… In
art, you see, there is no first person” (qtd. in Dollimore, 74).8 Looking back at
the writing of Queer on its publication thirty years later, Burroughs crucially
interpreted his own shift of narrating person in terms of his motivation as a
writer, or rather his inability in 1952 to lay claim to it: “While it was I who wrote
Junky, I feel that I was being written in Queer” (128). Although critics have been
rightly suspicious of his retrospective introduction to Queer, it is unarguable that
when he claims that “Lee is being inexorably pressed into the world of fiction,”
Burroughs utterly blurs the distinction between himself and his fictionalized
self, “Lee.” It is no coincidence that the context for this blurring of textual insides
and outsides is Burroughs’ notorious “appalling conclusion”: that Queer was
“motivated and formed by an event which is never mentioned”—the shooting of
his wife, Joan Vollmer—and that he “would never have become a writer but for
Joan’s death” (Queer, 131, 134–35).9
The terrible event external to his text suggests one reason why Burroughs
should have been so ambivalent about Gide’s name. To echo the phrase from
The Counterfeiters that had caught Kerouac’s attention, Burroughs surely felt a
“fearful attraction” for The Immoralist because Michel achieves his sexual self-
discovery only at the expense of the death of his wife, Marceline, an outcome
that is the occasion for remorse, as well as mourning, admitting in effect his
culpability. In the light of that fateful evening in September 1951 in Mexico City
when Burroughs accidentally shot his wife, the narrative trajectory of Gide’s
novel must have taken on a completely new meaning for him. For it could only
mirror back to him his own life. Is this why, prompted by Ginsberg’s invocation
of The Immoralist, and writing barely six months after his wife’s death, Burroughs
was ambivalently but ineluctably drawn to thinking of “even Gide”? It would
certainly explain why the allusion Burroughs made to Jean Cocteau at the
very same period, only now inside the text of Queer—where a reference to The
Immoralist might properly have appeared—shares the same enigmatic structure
and almost the same encrypted content.
Cocteau: A Double Take
Burroughs generally made disparaging comments about Cocteau on the few

occasions he spoke about him in interviews. But if his textual presence in the
Burroughs oeuvre has been either ignored or dismissed, it is probably because
it’s not the expected one. That is to say, from biographical accounts and Beat
cultural histories, we know that Cocteau’s Opium: The Diary of a Cure (Opium:
Journal d’une désintoxication, 1930) featured on the shelves of Burroughs’ library
that impressed Ginsberg and Kerouac in the mid-1940s. But Burroughs does
not name Cocteau’s Opium in his preface to Junky, even though he would
later make clear its relevance: “I always had a romantic literary relationship to
drugs, like you find in De Quincey or in Cocteau’s Opium” (Lotringer, 388). The
absence of Opium from Junky is all the more significant because, in his 1952
“Appreciation” that functioned as a template for Burroughs’ preface, Ginsberg
once again made the expected allusion, inserting Cocteau’s name and book title
in between Spengler and Baudelaire in his recollection of Burroughs’ famous
library (Junky, 147). Instead of the literary reference we would expect—to
Opium in Junky—Burroughs invokes a quite different Cocteau in Queer, when

his central characters visit the cinema: “Lee and Allerton went to see Cocteau’s
Orpheus” (32).
As with Burroughs’ reference to Gide, so too with Cocteau: we must begin
by recognizing that the allusion to his film in Queer cannot be understood like
any other cultural reference featuring in a modern or postmodern novel. For
one thing, it stands out as unique in the text: Queer makes no mention of any
other film or book or artwork (except, as noted above, to Frank Harris, legible as
a displaced reference to Gide via Wilde). The significance of naming Cocteau’s
Orpheus (Orphée, 1950) is further enhanced by being far more than a passing
allusion: on the contrary, Burroughs makes an entire scene out of it and has
his characters enter into a discussion of Cocteau’s film. While such passages
are common in the work of a writer like Kerouac, or other novelists drawn to
staging cultural discussions that can operate as a mise-en-abîme of their fictional
text, it is hard to think of anything remotely like this happening in any other
Burroughs text.10 Its singular significance has also to be understood in terms of
Queer’s openly autobiographical basis; far from thinking the reference has been
made up, the reader assumes that if Lee and Allerton “see Cocteau’s Orpheus,”
it is because Burroughs and Lewis Marker went to see it in real life. As with
Burroughs’ reference to Gide, so too here, the extratextual dimension has to
be considered in order to understand the significance of the reference’s very
existence in the text.
The critical history of Cocteau’s presence in Queer comprises a single
parenthetical remark about his film—“a classic exploration of narcissism,”
according to Jamie Russell (21)—that conforms to the widely held view of
Cocteau’s lack of depth, his self-promoting and superficial brilliance. But in the
context of Queer, the question of surfaces and depths, of what is visible and
invisible, real and fantasy, is central to a narrative whose realism is so fragile that
it finally collapses altogether. In part, this fragility is to do with the ostentatious
artifice of Lee’s performances—‘“A hard day at the studio’, he said, in affected
theatrical accents” (Queer, 27)—and, as his routines turn increasingly excessive,
a sense of the menacing unconscious forces driving them. But more broadly, the
atmosphere of Burroughs’ novel resembles Orpheus insofar as it echoes Cocteau’s
film’s disturbing mix of the seemingly real and the apparently symbolic, actual
locations (the bourgeois home of Orpheus and Eurydice, the café where the poets
hang out, street scenes in Paris) and otherworldly mythic spaces (“la Zone”). In
this general sense, the reference to Cocteau’s film functions as an allegory for
Burroughs’ narrative whose central character himself appears at times “curiously

spectral, as though you could see through his face” (10). To press the point and
claim that Orpheus governs the eerie mood and ontological status of Queer may
be to go too far, but Burroughs’ text does make evocations of Cocteau beyond
the single scene in the cinema that suggest a larger appropriation.
Thus in the Bar Cuba, where Lee and Allerton dine out after watching
Cocteau’s film, Burroughs describes murals depicting mermaids, mermen and
“androgynous beings”: the bar has “an interior like the set for a surrealist ballet’,
whose “effect was disquieting” (Queer, 38). We are not told which “surrealist
ballet” Burroughs has in mind, but it might plausibly be Le Boeuf sur le toit
(1920), with music by Darius Milhaud, that is also set in a South American bar
(in Brazil), and whose scenario was written by none other than Cocteau. While
it is in keeping with the spirit of Burroughs’ text that the enigmatic quality of the
surrealist décor itself functions enigmatically, in its “disquieting” effect, as well
as in its disturbing sexuality, we can also recognize in it issues raised when “Lee
and Allerton went to see Cocteau’s Orpheus.”
To begin with, the scene in the cinema has a crucial and entirely pragmatic
place within the plot, where it functions as part of Lee’s strategy of coming out to
Allerton. Indeed, in the very next scene Lee regales him with the routine where
he first makes his sexual identity and intentions fully explicit. Like the phrasing
“even Gide” in the preface to Junky, taking Allerton to see Cocteau’s Orpheus
might be read as a sign of homosexual seduction, a prelude to forming “a
romantic attachment.” However, while the “narcissism” of Cocteau’s film might
be obvious to a knowing spectator, Orpheus could certainly pass as straight to
someone who (like Allerton) has little to no experience of gay culture or codes
of communication. We might assume he lacks the necessary extra-diegetic
knowledge, either about the Greek myth—of “Orpheus the founder of pederasty,”
according to Ovid (Pollard, 444)—or about the French director—whose lovers
featured in the film (Jean Marais playing Orpheus, Edouard Dermit playing
Cégeste). Young Allerton might well not know what “Greek love” means either,
and nothing in his dialogue with Lee about the film indicates he grasps why Lee
has taken him to see it.
If Cocteau’s film therefore functions within the narrative as the sign of a
failed attempt to use a work of art to communicate, and as a sign of Allerton’s
unsuitability as the object of Lee’s desire, it nevertheless suggests Burroughs’
precise understanding of Cocteau’s film, in which the urge to explain is itself
constantly rebuked. As Heurtebise insists to Orpheus, while the poet stands
before the mirror through which he must pass to enter the underworld: “It is
not necessary to understand, but to believe!” [“Il ne s’agit pas de comprendre,
il s’agit de croire!”]. Burroughs would also have savored the crucial scene that
represents the poet’s muse as a mechanical mystery, when Orpheus takes
dictation from his car radio; he may have recalled from his reading of Opium
that Apollinaire was the source of one of the most cryptic phrases Orpheus
writes down: “the bird sings with its fingers” [“l’oiseau chante avec ses doigts”].
There are suggestive parallels here with the routines that come to Lee “like
dictation,” as well as with the pervasive haunting of both Lee as a character and
Queer as a narrative by “some undercurrent of life that was hidden” (Queer,
84). And finally, although Burroughs’ fantasy space “Interzone” in Queer drew
directly from the International Zone of Tangier, it surely also echoes “la Zone”
in Orpheus, a ghostly netherworld that exists parallel to the conscious world
of the living: “Far side of the world’s mirror,” to borrow a phrase from Naked
Lunch (181).
In view of such resonant echoes, which confirm how precisely relevant
Cocteau’s film was to Burroughs, what Lee actually says after seeing Orpheus
is vague and seemingly superficial: “He always gets some innaresting effects,”
and; “The innaresting thing about Cocteau is his ability to bring the myth
alive in modern terms” (Queer, 33). What we immediately notice in fact is not
what Lee says but his repeated use of the idiomatic “innaresting.” The word
sounds flippant, insincere; responding perhaps to Cocteau as a director of
mere superficial cinematic “effects”, a master of trickery rather than substance.
However, the opposite is equally possible, if not indicated given Lee’s habitual
irony and the sense that he “seemed to mean more than what he said” (21):
Lee is not merely “interested” by Cocteau’s effects or by his appropriation of the
Orpheus myth; he is (in)arrested by them. What invites such a reading is the
specific nature of the effects that feature in Cocteau’s film, indeed in all Cocteau’s
films; since Lee notes that he always gets “innaresting effects,” we know he is a
connoisseur of Cocteau’s cinema.
While in Orpheus the standout “effect” is the way characters pass through
mirrors, a trick performed using liquid mercury in one scene, the most
recurrent of Cocteau’s trademark special effects is to run film in reverse. The
trick is used several times in Orpheus, cleverly disguised so that, for example,
a pair of gloves seem magically to put themselves on Orpheus’ hands. It is also
used entirely openly at the end of the film, when Cocteau plays the entire scene
of Orpheus’ descent into the underworld backwards, reversing time in order
to undo the central tragic event of the film and rewrite the myth. The effect
would have been “interesting” for most people, but for William Burroughs it
would have been “innaresting” because of course the central event of Orpheus
is the death of Orpheus’ wife, Eurydice. Orpheus kills Eurydice twice, once by
neglect (he is too busy trying to improve his poetry by taking dictation from
the car radio) and again, by careless accident, after he has taken her back from
the underworld (glancing at her in the rearview mirror of the car, breaking
the terms of her resurrection, that he must not look at her). Cocteau’s effects
enable him to rewind time and end his film by giving the poet and his wife a
second chance. In this way, Cocteau’s Orpheus, even more precisely than Gide’s
The Immoralist, comes unbearably close to the death of Burroughs’ wife that
remains a ghostly extratextual presence in Queer. Had he not killed Joan by
neglect (abandoning her in order to romance Marker on the Central American
journey fictionalized in Queer), and by carelessness (playing a shooting game
with her when drunk)? Had Burroughs, stupidly performing a William Tell act,
not tried to bring a “myth alive,” with deadly consequences that could not be
undone or rewritten?
To be clear, this is not to argue that the “real” significance of Cocteau or
Gide for Burroughs is biographical. Rather, it is to establish that his allusions
to the two French writers not only signal Burroughs’ literary genealogy and not
only function as signs of seduction within the contexts of their use, but share a
multilevel specificity: The Immoralist and Orpheus are narratives of homosexual
desire that both feature the death of the protagonist’s wife in ways that can only
have resonated uniquely for Burroughs. The references to Gide and Cocteau are
there in his writing of mid-1952, linking the first two works of his oeuvre, both
because of and despite mirroring Burroughs’ personal trauma and guilt.
In fact, what Queer’s reference to Orpheus makes plain is the need to read
Burroughs’ text twice. First, we read the narrative as a fictionalized chronology
of events that actually happened: Burroughs, as we surmise, took Marker to
see Orpheus in spring 1951, perhaps indeed hoping Cocteau’s film would help
him seduce the young man he desired. Second, we read the text in terms of
its chronology of composition a full year later, in spring 1952, and recognize
that, by then, the film’s meaning has changed utterly; instead of the promise of
desire, it was the fact of death. Writing the scene six months after killing his
wife, Burroughs must now have found Orpheus the most appallingly ominous
choice of film imaginable. Its importance and function as a cultural reference
within his fiction is thus, retrospectively, imbued with another dimension of
meaning precisely because it has become a factual reference in light of what

happened, and Burroughs let it stand. In other words, what we have here is,
far from coincidentally, precisely the bizarre double temporal structure of
Burroughs’ notorious retrospective introduction to Queer. His intuition of
Joan’s impending death is put there in terms of his having “precognitive” dreams
and a “portentous second sight,” leading him to speak in terms of his character
Lee “knowing and yet not knowing” what would happen, as if existing in two
time zones and realities (Queer, 134, 132). Cocteau’s film haunts Burroughs’
introduction of 1985, just as it must have done his writing of Queer in 1952.
Finally, while it is true that Cocteau appears only once in Burroughs’
published oeuvre, he makes a kind of ghostly second appearance if we take
into account lines canceled on a draft manuscript. This is especially interesting
because it doesn’t merely repeat the reference to Cocteau but, in a double
movement, Burroughs uses Cocteau’s retrospective backward glance to look
back at his own work in Queer. The canceled lines appear in a draft Burroughs
made for the 1968 British edition of The Soft Machine, the final revision of his
cut-up trilogy of novels, as part of new material concerning the “visiting” of
beings in other people’s bodies, a kind of psychic haunting:
His dreams were written by Francoise Sagan with musical accompaniment by

Edith Piaf. I was not surprised to meet my old friend Cocteau but he was very
surprised to meet me and did a double take from his last movie. (Burroughs, The
Soft Machine, 271)
The references to Sagan and Piaf make these lines already unusual, since
women are named even more rarely than men in Burroughs’ writing, and
of course we note the emphatically French cultural context. We might also
observe the unspoken connection between Cocteau and Piaf, who were not
only friends but who died within hours of each other in October 1963. And
although Sagan was alive and well at this time, just before these canceled lines,
Burroughs introduced another rare reference to another dead French writer:
“I am Anatole France le vieux cadavre de France. Your assignment resuscitate
me!” (202; Burroughs’ emphasis). In a sign of how densely Burroughs is
working here, how his text condenses intertextual references very much
according to the logic of the “dreams” being invoked, the allusion to Anatole
France not only takes us back to the preface to Junky, where, as we have seen,
his name appears in an emphatically French list of authors in Burroughs/Lee’s
early readings; it also anticipates the allusion Burroughs makes in this passage to
his “old friend Cocteau.”
By Cocteau’s “last movie” in these canceled lines, Burroughs meant The
Testament of Orpheus (Le Testament d’Orphée, 1960) where Cocteau played
himself as the poet. The idea of resuscitation has a very prominent role in the
film because, in the somewhat obscure logic of its narrative, Cocteau must die
and come back from the dead in order to escape being stuck in space-time. This
curiously exact connection between Jean Cocteau and Anatole France does not,
however, seem sufficient to explain their pairing here.11 Was Burroughs thinking
back to the last time he referred in his texts to Cocteau and Anatole France, spring
and summer 1952, in Queer and the preface to Junky respectively? Or should we
read the “corpse” in question as not only a mortal physical body but also a body
of work, an oeuvre? Both possibilities seem affirmed by Burroughs’ very precise
allusion to the “double take” in Cocteau’s film. There are in fact numerous
double takes in The Testament of Orpheus, including one when Cocteau passes
his own “double” in the street and turns back to see him/himself; but the entire
film is quite explicitly a “double take,” a retrospective on the Cocteau oeuvre. The
Testament of Orpheus looks back above all at Orpheus, to the extent that most
of its original cast members return (Edouard Dermit as Cégeste, Maria Casares
as The Princess, Francois Périer as Heurtebise). The structure implied by the
reference now becomes clear: as Cocteau used The Testament of Orpheus to look
back at Orpheus, so too Burroughs’ evocation of Cocteau in The Soft Machine
look backs at Queer.
The Testament of Orpheus replays Orpheus at a formal level by employing
its trick of reverse filming, which now functions even more openly as a way of
travelling back in time in order to change the future. This theme was central
to Burroughs’ work from the 1960s onwards, and features most explicitly in
“The Mayan Caper” section of The Soft Machine. Here, the narrator travels
back in time by learning “to talk and think backward on all levels—This was
done by running film and sound track backward” (80). Clearly, Burroughs’
goal of rewriting history by reversing the film closely parallels the methods of
Cocteau’s cinema, and these formal connections are themselves connected to
highly specific actions. In a revision of Orpheus that must have resonated for
Burroughs, in order to undo the past in The Testament of Orpheus, Cocteau
requires someone to shoot him (with special bullets that travel faster than light).
Although rightly considered a poor sequel to Orpheus and finale to his cinematic
oeuvre, Cocteau’s Testament is thus referenced by Burroughs in order to connect

his experimental cut-up methods of the 1960s back to the significance of his
allusion to Orpheus in Queer: a shared vision of desire and death, genealogy and
guilt, the predestined future and the doomed dream of rewriting the past. Had
Burroughs not canceled this passage for the 1968 edition of The Soft Machine,
his two evocations of Cocteau would thus have framed the first decades of his
literary oeuvre, and allowed Cocteau’s backward glance at his cinematic oeuvre
to stand in for his own retrospective double take.
5
Looking Back on Ginsberg’s “Howl”

from “Apollinaire’s Grave”
Whitman: A Mountain Too Vast
In May 1956, Allen Ginsberg sent Lionel Trilling a prepublication mimeo copy
of “Howl,” along with a letter that implied the literary lineage in which he hoped
to inscribe his new poem: “Though my tastes at school were not so, I’m reading
a lot of Lorca, Apollinaire, Crane, Thomas—and Whitman” (Ginsberg, Howl,
176). A decade earlier, as a sophomore at Columbia, Ginsberg had lectured
his professor on the need to take Rimbaud seriously. Now, on the verge of his
sudden and spectacular rise to fame, he dismissed his former professor’s High
Modernists (“Eliot & Pound are like Dryden & Pope”) in the name above all of
Walt Whitman, still marginal to the university curriculum in the 1950s, famously
declaring to Trilling: “He is a mountain too vast to be seen.”1
Since the publication of Howl and Other Poems in 1956, however, Whitman
has loomed so large over Ginsberg and his most celebrated poem that it has been
very difficult to see anything else. The nineteenth-century American poet has
indeed eclipsed the much broader modernist genealogies tirelessly promoted by
Ginsberg, most materially in the variorum edition of Howl published to mark
the poem’s thirtieth anniversary, where his letter to Trilling is reprinted. Howl,
Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript, and Variant Versions, Fully Annotated by
Author (1986) both documented Ginsberg’s efforts to produce his own reception
and in itself constituted a major text in that effort, one that might have taken
studies of “Howl” in particular and Ginsberg’s poetry more broadly in a French
direction—had Whitman, that vast literary mountain, not cast such a long
shadow. Thirty years on, it is timely to pick up the trail hinted at by Ginsberg’s
reference to Apollinaire in his letter to Trilling and, analyzing “Howl” through
its variorum incarnation, to reassess the place of French literature in his
breakthrough as a poet.
A landmark in Beat Studies scholarship, which had not previously been known
for its attention to manuscripts, Ginsberg’s variorum edition of “Howl” brought
together an impressive array of primary materials, as its full subtitle spelled out at
almost comic length: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript, and Variant Versions,
Fully Annotated by Author, with Contemporaneous Correspondence, Account of
First Public Reading, Legal Skirmishes, Precursor Texts, and Bibliography. But the
book should not be taken at face value, for it is both more and other than the
valuable documentary resource it appears to be. The edition has a sophistication
and an agenda that has been missed even by Ginsberg’s most astute critics, such
as Timothy Yu who reads its annotations as “testimony to the poem’s biographical
grounding” (Yu, 25).2 What Yu has in mind are Ginsberg’s clarifications of private
allusions in the vein of his famously cryptic reference to “N.C. secret hero of
these poems,” that is Neal Cassady (Howl, 4). But the variorum edition in fact
problematizes the poem’s grounding in biography, and focuses on quite different
heroes: those poets whose texts constitute the literary lineage of “Howl,” which
Ginsberg presents with varying degrees of secrecy, very much in the manner of
“Howl” itself. This unsuspected parallel is not coincidental: the variorum edition
can be understood as a response dictated by the cryptic strategy of Ginsberg’s
original poem. What it reveals above all are secrets about the formal affiliations
of “Howl,” and this chapter establishes in the genealogy of Ginsberg’s poem the
central place of those French poets long hidden in Whitman’s shadow, from the
least secret—Apollinaire and Artaud—to the most hidden and most significant,
shadowed behind them, St.-John Perse. As the following analysis reveals,
Ginsberg constructed the genealogy of his poetics through a threefold strategy
of quotation, translation and encryption, and once this complex strategy is
understood, it becomes clear that it was largely through his engagement with
French literature that Ginsberg developed the very aesthetic and hermeneutic
method of his poetry.
To recognize the key role that French poetry played in the genesis of “Howl,”
it is necessary to grasp not only the poem’s prehistory but, crucially, how and
why its reception has overlooked or obscured that role. If the poem’s reception
has consistently entailed retelling the same national narratives at the expense of
others, there are several obvious reasons for it, ranging from the Americanist
expertise of Ginsberg’s critics to the fact that the 1956 original publication
of Howl and Other Poems appeared to have nothing whatsoever to do with a
Franco-American literary history. The titles of both Jonah Raskin’s study,
American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the Making of the Beat Generation
Looking Back on Ginsberg’s “Howl” 117
(2004), and Jason Shinder’s anniversary volume, The Poem That Changed
America: “Howl” Fifty Years Later (2006), sum up the emphatically nationalistic
historical context in which “Howl” has almost always been read. And indeed,
Ginsberg’s first volume of poetry seems to fit perfectly the trajectory of his poetic
apprenticeship in the standard American-centric accounts. Such accounts limit
the role of French literature to the young poet’s “New Vision” infatuation with
Rimbaud in the mid-1940s; then, passing quickly over the phase of sonnet writing
modeled on his curriculum at Columbia (“college imitations of Marlowe, Marvell
and Donne” [Collected Poems, 749]), narrate his famous 1948 vision of William
Blake, before proceeding to stress his first breakthrough inspired by William
Carlos Williams; and end by declaring that Ginsberg achieves in “Howl” the
Beat equivalent to Whitman’s “barbaric yawp.” According to this now familiar
story, from the Francophilia of youthful fascination, via deferential copying of
the English canon, in the 1950s Ginsberg in two stages realizes his destiny as a
radical American poet. In terms of content, “Howl” stands with Whitmanian
candor against the mass conformity, materialism, red and lavender scares of
Cold War America; while, formally, the poem adopts Whitman’s democratically
open verse with its long catalogs and lists to celebrate the self and refuse all
hierarchies. This specifically American frame of reference is upheld by Howl and
Other Poems as a whole, which has an introduction by Williams and is graced by
a personal appearance from Whitman himself in “A Supermarket in California.”
True, Lorca is in Ginsberg’s supermarket too, but since he is the “fairy son of
Whitman” (Collected Poems, 167),3 the Spaniard’s presence might be read as an
act of literary Americanization rather than a gesture of internationalism. As for
“Howl” itself, the only writers it names are Poe and Blake, while its geographical
references are as insistently local as the Brooklyn Bridge (mentioned twice). The
addition in the “Footnote” to “Howl” of “Holy Paris!” as part of a list blessing
New York, San Francisco, Peoria, Seattle, Tangiers, Moscow and Istanbul hardly
points the reader towards France and away from San Francisco and Berkeley, the
locations given for the text’s composition (Howl, 8).
Leaving aside the youthful “New Vision” phase that Ginsberg shared with
Burroughs and Kerouac, and that Chapter 1 has discussed in relation to
Rimbaud, the logical place to look for his relationship with French literature
has been those poems written after “Howl” and in France. While “Howl” was
going on trial in San Francisco, Ginsberg had relocated to Paris by fall 1957,
a move that had been on the horizon so long that he mocked its inevitability
throughout the decade. “I don’t want to go so much to Europe and play the
Whitman character,” he admitted in 1952; “I don’t want to go to Paris so I can

write: How strange I am in Paris;” and he continued the self-parody two years
later: “Paris! City of Light! Ici mouru Racine! Here Proust sipped his delicate
tea” (Kerouac and Ginsberg, 155). When he finally arrived, however, Ginsberg
seemed to abandon his irony: “I am all hung up on French poetry,” he told
Kerouac that November, specifying he had been “reading book on Apollinaire
and learning more French” (210). Going on to describe finding fellow poet
Gregory Corso “like an Apollinaire, prolific and golden period for him,” in
this letter, Ginsberg gives away the hopes he had for his own writing in Paris
(367). As the biographers and cultural historians of the Beats have noted, in
Paris Ginsberg wrote several important poems, two of whose titles associated
him with French poets: “At Apollinaire’s Grave” and “Death to Van Gogh’s
Ear!” (that evokes Artaud via his infamous text “Van Gogh, the Man Suicided
by Society”). But although the first of these two poems in particular rewards
close analysis, it would be a fundamental error to associate either of them with
the geographic and cultural location of their writing. Here it is necessary to
contest the argument made by Richard Swope, the only critic to have made
a sustained reading of “At Apollinaire’s Grave,” one that takes the poem as
evidence of Ginsberg’s engagement with “literary Paris” (188).4 Rather than
reading it as a homage demonstrating what “Ginsberg produced during and
from his experience in Paris” in 1957, we should identify a more subtle strategic
logic at work in this poem that Ginsberg himself acknowledged three decades
later. Asked about the significance of Apollinaire for him, in 1989 he replied:
Yes, when I lived in Paris I wrote a homage at his tomb. And it was supposed
to be a signal to the American academics where I was coming from, but I don’t
think they picked up on it. (Spontaneous Mind, 504)
To speak of where he “was coming from” makes clear the backward glance in
Ginsberg’s “signal”—that it was aimed at an American audience before he left
for Paris—and we might add that academics have still not picked up on his
signal, continuing either to neglect or misread the importance for “Howl” of
those French poets hidden in Whitman’s shadow. Ginsberg’s precision that “At
Apollinaire’s Grave” was intended as a signal to “American academics” certainly
registers how acutely he felt in 1956 that he was not being taken seriously, which,
to a significant extent, meant not being read as a poet working within the French,
as well as within the American, tradition.
Prophecy at “Apollinaire’s Grave”
To take “At Apollinaire’s Grave” seriously means going beyond the biographical
narrative that begins with the first lines’ simple factual statements of location
and purpose:
I visited Père Lachaise to look for the remains of Apollinaire

the day the U.S. President appeared in France for the grand conference of
heads of state
so let it be the airport at blue Orly a springtime clarity in the air over Paris
Eisenhower winging in from his American graveyard.
(Collected Poems, 180)
It means going beyond the political irony that Ginsberg implies by the parallel
he draws between his visit to the Paris cemetery and Eisenhower’s arrival at Orly
airport. For while the president’s coming to Paris for the first summit meeting
of NATO was of course politically significant, Ginsberg’s planes and airports are
also allusions to the aerial vision and references of Apollinaire’s Zone some forty
years earlier (“The airplane lands at last without folding its wings”) (in Howl,
180). Equally, while Ginsberg’s attention to “that fantastic cranial bandage” points
to Apollinaire’s head wound from the First World War and, as he notes, “the
West is at war again,” the poem does not—unlike “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!” or
“America”—maintain such political rhetoric (Collected Poems, 180). Rather, it uses
the presence of the poet at a site that marks another poet’s absence to construct
a hermeneutic procedure precisely based on degrees of presence and absence, on
what can be recognized and what remains encrypted, there but hidden in plain
sight.
Ginsberg begins by describing his walk through the cemetery with Peter
Orlovsky to look “for the lost address of a notable Frenchman of the Void” and pay
their “tender crime of homage to his helpless menhir” (Collected Poems, 180). The
“crime of homage” is such a puzzling phrase that it immediately invites speculative
biographical readings. Since “an illusory mist as thick as marijuana smoke” floats
above the “foggy graves” of the poem, did Ginsberg and Orlovsky pay their homage
by inhaling inspirational drugs in the cemetery? Or, since his menhir is “a piece of
thin granite like an unfinished phallus,” was their “tender crime” an illegal sexual
act they committed on Apollinaire’s gravestone? If textual evidence supports the
latter and evidence from Ginsberg’s journals the former,5 neither possibility should
distract us from the real crime here, which is literary, something Ginsberg insists
upon in the ironic act at the center of the poem’s first part:
and lay my temporary American Howl on top of his silent Calligramme
for him to read between the lines with Xray eyes of Poet
as he by miracle had read his own death lyric in the Seine
I hope some wild kidmonk lays his pamphlet on my grave for God to read me
on cold winter nights in heaven
The act of homage is multilayered and carefully judged tonally: the poet-narrator
offers his “Howl” as “temporary”—of its moment in time, not yet in eternity
like Apollinaire’s “Calligrammes”—while by opposing “American” to “silent,” he
admits to a noisy vulgarity in “Howl.” There is an element of Ginsberg’s typical
self-mockery here: what nerve, to fantasize at Apollinaire’s graveside future
acts of homage paid to him! Such a rudimentary reading misses, however, that
Ginsberg combines being loud and open with also being silent and subtle, and
that beyond the homage brashly announced in the poem’s title, there lies an
affiliation that works through the quietest of hints.
To recognize the hints or “signals” Ginsberg was giving in “At Apollinaire’s
Grave,” and to see in them a hermeneutic strategy, a code for inscribing his
literary lineage through concealment and revelation, we have to reread the
opening of the poem. More precisely, we have to pay attention to the epigraph
that comes between the poem’s title and its first line. Before Ginsberg makes his
search for Apollinaire’s physical remains, a search that can only be biographical,
he gives us what will always “remain” of the poet, his actual words:6
…voici le temps
Où l’on connaîtra l’avenir
Sans mourir de connaissance
Even readers untutored in French would identify these words as those of

Apollinaire, given the very title of Ginsberg’s poem; but why not name their
source? Visibly quoting from and yet failing to indicate the provenance of these
lines as Apollinaire’s “Les collines” (“The Hills”), at the very outset of his text
Ginsberg addresses the aesthetic and hermeneutic issue of naming names,
of when to do it and when not. What makes the reticence of the epigraph so
striking is that “At Apollinaire’s Grave” is otherwise so explicit in its naming of
literary heroes, giving us not only Apollinaire but also Artaud, Jacob, Picasso,
Rousseau, Tzara, Breton, Cendrars, Vaché, Cocteau, Rigaut and Gide. In this
respect, Ginsberg’s text strongly resembles the other major poem he wrote at this
time, “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!,” which gives us Artaud, Genet, Lorca, Crane,
Whitman, Mayakovsky, Lindsay, Blok, Pound and Poe. Such long lists draw
attention to themselves, as well as to the poetic lineage Ginsberg desired for his
poetry. But the most significant connection between these two poems and the
most telling gesture weaving “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!” into the French tradition
is again as subtle as subtle can be. In “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!,” Ginsberg quotes
the very same verse from “Les collines” that forms the epigraph of “At Apollinaire’s
Grave,” but this time in the body of the poem, in English, and without quotation
marks: “Now is the time for prophecy without death as a consequence” (Collected
Poems, 168). Although the presence of Apollinaire in “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!”
has not quite passed unnoticed, its complex significance has.
The first draft of “At Apollinaire’s Grave” figures in Ginsberg’s journals under
the heading “Now time for Prophecy,” and editor Gordon Ball’s footnote rightly
notices the return of Apollinaire’s verse in “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!” (Journals,
404). However, Ball overlooks the originality of the recurrent quotation. That
is, we would naturally assume Ginsberg was quoting Apollinaire in translation,
but in fact, no translation of “Les collines” was available at the time he composed
“Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!” and “At Apollinaire’s Grave,” between November
1957 and spring 1958. The first translation of Apollinaire’s Calligrammes by
Roger Shattuck was not printed until 1971; “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!” was
written and indeed published in Kaddish and Other Poems more than a decade
earlier: its composition therefore implied an unprecedented act of translation,
and a very revealing one of Ginsberg’s engagement with French poetry and of its
role in the development of his aesthetics and hermeneutics.
Comparing Ginsberg’s translation to Shattuck’s clarifies both the nature and
the depth of the poet’s relationship to Apollinaire’s works. Shattuck translates
“voici le temps/Où l’on connaîtra l’avenir/Sans mourir de sa connaissance” as “The
time is here/In which the future can be known/Without death as a consequence”
(Apollinaire, Selected Writings, 147). This translation has five words where
Ginsberg has a single one—a word so fundamental to his poetry that it would
become a landmark of its criticism: “prophecy.” In Ginsberg’s translation,
“prophecy” boldly replaces the impersonal pronoun “on” in “où l’on connaîtra
l’avenir” and becomes the heart of the verse: “Now is the time for prophecy
without death as a consequence” (Collected Poems, 168). Not only is “prophecy”
central under Ginsberg’s pen, it also clearly stands for “poetry.” Bearing in mind
the trial “Howl” was undergoing at the time Ginsberg translated Apollinaire’s
verse in “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!,” the line can logically be interpreted as
“Now is the time for poetry without death as consequence,” “death” standing
for the cumulative effect on the poet of censorship and social exclusion. Does
Ginsberg’s audacious translation drag Apollinaire too far into his own territory?
Or does it quite simply reflect the result of his finding himself so much at
home in Apollinaire’s universe that he felt he had the necessary authority to re-
create—rather than literally translate—his poetry? I would argue for the latter.
Ginsberg’s bold insertion of “prophecy” inviting its equation with “poetry” is not
far removed from Apollinaire’s own vision of the poet and his faculties, for “Les
collines” does portray poets as prophets:
Certain men stand out like hills

Rising above their fellow men
To see the future from afar
Better than they see today
Clearer than if it were the past.
(Apollinaire, Selected Writings, 145)
It was an ambitious solution on Ginsberg’s part to condense what Apollinaire

expressed in six words (“où l’on connaîtra l’avenir”) into a single one (“prophecy”),
but we should admire his economical translation that turns three lines into
perfect octameters. In comparison, Shattuck’s passive structure heavy with
prepositions (“in which the future can be known”) stands closer to the original
line, but is far less elegant. Ginsberg’s version is the distinctive work of a writer-
translator. Every good translation of course includes the “becoming-writer”
of its translator, but his or her name remains in the shadow of the authors’
name. Ginsberg’s translation is doubly transgressive in this sense: not only is it
“unfaithful” to the original verse, it also furtively silences its author’s name. The
epigraph of “At Apollinaire’s Grave” didn’t identify Apollinaire as its author, but
its predominant position (outside the text) and its foreign language (French), its
formatting (italics) and its placement within quotation marks guaranteed that
readers wouldn’t take Ginsberg as its author either. In “Death to Van Gogh’s
Ear!” the poet’s relationship to French literature deepens as he goes several
steps further: from quoting Apollinaire’s words to translating them without
acknowledging their source, so that they are passed off as his own. In short, the
“tender crime of homage” evoked in “At Apollinaire’s Grave” is fully materialized
by Ginsberg’s secret act of translation in “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!”
Primed by knowledge of the importance of Apollinaire’s “Les collines” and

by Ginsberg’s repeated quotations of the poem’s passage dealing with death and
prophecy, from “At Apollinaire’s Grave” to “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!,” we can,
finally, identify in “Europe! Europe!” written a few months later a remarkably
condensed series of allusions: “Apollonic radiance in hillsides/littered with
empty tombs” (Collected Poems, 173). Here we have encryptions of the poet’s
name (“Apollonic”) and of his poem “The Hills” (“hillsides”), as well as of
Ginsberg’s graveyard “search” in Père Lachaise (“empty tombs”). The extreme
density and obliqueness of these three allusions echo the imagistic method
Ginsberg had developed in “Howl” and crucially implies his method’s affinity
with the works of the French poet. Recognizing Ginsberg’s use of Apollinaire’s
verse from “Les collines” both in French and English allows us to confirm its
importance for him, while it also stresses how, thirty years before the variorum
edition of “Howl,” the poet was already trying to inscribe his works in a nexus
of textual allusions formally relating it to Apollinaire’s. The point, then, is not
simply the recurrence of allusions to Apollinaire across several poems composed
in Paris during the late fifties, but that Ginsberg manifestly meant them as a
trail of clues or “signals” to be deciphered. To borrow a phrase he would later
apply to “Howl,” from quoting to translating Apollinaire, Ginsberg developed
a multilayered hermeneutic strategy of “open secrecy” (Ginsberg, “Notes,” 80).
In the case of “At Apollinaire’s Grave,” it is not so much the epigraph itself as
the words missing from it that matter, which are represented by the enigma of an
ellipsis. What does the ellipsis omit? Thematically, what Ginsberg cut turns out
to be the key phrase from “Les collines,” that is “Jeunesse adieu” (“Farewell, my
youth”; Apollinaire, Calligrammes, 32).7 We are now in a position to appreciate
Ginsberg’s complex play of revelation and concealment across several levels of
reference: from openly naming Apollinaire in his poem’s title, to quoting from a
poem that has precise significance for him without identifying it, to omitting one
of its phrases and leaving three dots for the reader to join up. Ginsberg’s “reader,”
here, designates readerships with different levels of prior knowledge, attention
to detail and curiosity. As a sign, the ellipsis is especially easy to overlook and
yet of particular interest, as it presents an enigma, an invitation to go back to
Apollinaire’s original to find what in the poem was left out; that is to say, the
thirty-one-year-old Ginsberg’s anxiety at the loss of youth: “Adieu jeunesse…”
At first sight, this subject appears mortifying, and seems to support readings
such as Tony Trigilio’s, which sees Ginsberg as “trapped in a graveyard” and
his poem as therefore a dead-end: “the speaker of ‘At Apollinaire’s Grave’ never
leaves the Père Lachaise Cemetery itself […], never leaves the place of the dead”
(Trigilio, 210). But the finality of Ginsberg’s final line—“I am buried here and
sit by my grave beneath a tree”—is more apparent than real, or at least more
complicated (Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 182), for it doubles the poem’s narrator,
implicitly into a body that lies in the grave and the self or soul that sits nearby
under a symbol of life (“beneath a tree”). “At Apollinaire’s Grave” also transcends
the inevitable closure of death by projecting Ginsberg beyond the cemetery and
writing a “future poem”:
[I] will walk down the streets of New York in the black cloak of French poetry
improvising our conversation in Paris at Père Lachaise
and the future poem that takes its inspiration from the light bleeding into
your grave.
Following Apollinaire’s own innovative practice of spatial projection—which

Ginsberg would later coin “jump cut”8—the American in Paris can imaginatively
switch places, finding himself back in New York dressed as a French poet. This
switch mirrors Ginsberg’s surprising Anglicization of Guillaume Apollinaire,
whom he initially addresses as “William,” and the “envy” he claims to feel for
his fame and “accomplishment for American letters” (180). The image of the
“cloak” is dramatic, melodramatic even, and that it is “black” might suggest
death; but it also implies disguise, anonymity, concealment. The “black cloak
of French poetry” is a central figure in the poem because it combines the
opaque with that which is made explicit. It is a reminder that the ellipsis at
the start of the epigraph, which stands in for the words of French poetry that
Ginsberg leaves out, calls attention to the many French poets named explicitly
in his poem. As we will see, the question of naming names, of how explicit
Ginsberg needed to be about identifying his poetic genealogy, was a key
issue in “Howl.” The difference between the implicit and explicit strategies of
the two poems in fact suggests that Ginsberg wrote “At Apollinaire’s Grave”
looking back at “Howl” with some regret, perhaps thinking he had veiled
himself too well in that “black cloak of French poetry.” This regret is hinted
at in the extraordinary line that identifies Apollinaire as his own ideal reader:
when Ginsberg lays a copy of “Howl” on the Frenchman’s grave, it is “for him
to read between the lines with Xray eyes of Poet” (180; my emphasis).
Since Apollinaire is dead and cannot fulfill Ginsberg’s wish to be “read

between the lines,” who is this wish really addressed to—if not us, unknown yet
ideal readers of today? This line reveals the most cryptic manner in which “At
Apollinaire’s Grave” operates as an act of homage and demonstrates how subtly
Ginsberg contrived its hermeneutic procedure. For the phrase invites an acute
“Xray” reading that looks for meaning not where we expect it—in the words
printed on the page—but in their “negativity,” in the gaps and spaces between
them. In “At Apollinaire’s Grave,” Ginsberg artificially introduced such spaces
through the ellipsis he inserted in place of Apollinaire’s own words in the poem’s
epigraph. This elision invites a thematic interpretation focused on the missing
words “Adieu jeunesse,” which requires the reader to know “Les collines.” However,
the three dots also invite a strictly formal poetic interpretation that demands
technical awareness and knowledge. That is, we can only grasp the significance
of the ellipsis if we notice the otherwise total absence of punctuation marks in
Ginsberg’s poem—not a comma, not a period—and identify this absence as
itself the purest form of homage to Apollinaire, famous as a modernist poet for
his refusal of punctuation. Inserting the ellipsis was in short the most secret sign
of Ginsberg’s “tender homage.” But how exactly was it also a “crime” (180)?
There is perhaps no better way to understand a crime than to repeat it: take
Apollinaire out of the poem’s line referring to “Howl” and you get the true nature
and dedicatee of Ginsberg’s wish: “read between the lines.” Rather than a fantasy
to honor Apollinaire, Ginsberg’s poem is an imperative destined to us: this is the
true crime perpetrated “At Apollinaire’s Grave.” By partly quoting Apollinaire and
retrospectively identifying him as the ideal reader of “Howl,” Ginsberg does more
than inscribe his poetry in a French modernist tradition (for if that was a crime,
it wouldn’t be very original and most writers would be criminals); he is using
Apollinaire’s very name, words and tomb to win over a new readership. If one of
Ginsberg’s aims in writing this poem was to honor Apollinaire, another was to
re-launch his own image as a poet, to “signal” himself as an author preoccupied
with hermeneutics and to present his poetry as full of secrets to decipher. Like
“Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!” and “Europe! Europe!,” “At Apollinaire’s Grave”
challenges our way of reading. In these poems, Ginsberg constantly prompts
us to work out what names, what filiations lie behind his literary catalogs and
creative juxtapositions, while his furtive acts of quotation and translation reveal
in the democratic author of all the exigent poet of a happy few—those who can
read “with Xray eyes of poets” what even lies behind an ellipsis.
“Howl”: “Cryptic Picture Postcards”
“At Apollinaire’s Grave” establishes that the poems Ginsberg wrote in Paris in
late 1957 and early 1958 were informed by a complex strategy of genealogical
reference. Focused specifically, if not exclusively, on his engagement with French
poetry, this strategy ranged beyond open acts of homage—naming Apollinaire
in the poem’s title and a dozen more writers in its text—to subtle citations and
signs that communicate in English, French, and even marks of punctuation.
Since the only poets named in “Howl” were Blake and Poe, and in the absence
of any French signposts, it might seem that Ginsberg had no such strategy in fall
1955, presumably because the poem he wrote then lacked the genealogy that
demanded it. But the very existence of the variorum edition proves otherwise,
and although this has gone unremarked, its main task was precisely to make
visible the literary genealogy of “Howl” and, by documenting its revised drafts,
the poem’s original inscription of that genealogy. Looking back on “Howl”
through the rearview mirror of “At Apollinaire’s Grave” therefore enables us to
see that, in key respects, the later poem restored a general strategy of genealogical
reference that Ginsberg had already worked out in and for “Howl” but that he
had concealed in revision.
The drafts of “Howl” demonstrate how self-conscious and conflicted Ginsberg
was about communicating his genealogy, in the course of writing and rewriting
the poem. This ambivalence is captured by an image that seems to serve as a
mise-en-abîme of the poem, figured as “leaving a trail of ambiguous postcards,”
or, as the first draft had it, as “posting cryptic picture postcards” (Howl, 3, 13).
Ginsberg’s revision of this very line—shifting from the hermetic secrecy of
encryption to the teasing equivocation of ambiguity—exposes his wrestling with
the hermeneutical problem: Was it better to be cryptically closed or ambiguously
open? The very question is internalized within “Howl,” a sign of how blurred
the distinction was already becoming for Ginsberg between primary and
secondary text, between poem and commentary. The answer Ginsberg arrived
at seems to be that it was better to say as little as possible, which is why thirty
years later for the variorum edition of “Howl” he needed to say so much. He
felt obliged to spell out what was missing from or hidden in “Howl” because so
few readers, including so few “American academics” to recall his 1989 interview,
had acknowledged its formal affiliations with European—especially French—
modernist poetry. Indeed, it remains the case that Apollinaire and Artaud are
absent from many standard critical works or are merely name-checked, while
St.-John Perse, whose impact on Ginsberg I analyze in the next chapter, is never
mentioned.9
Putting a copy of the 194-page large format hardcover Harper and Row
Howl, Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript, and Variant Versions, Fully Annotated
by Author next to the 57-page Pocket Poets City Lights paperback edition of
Howl and Other Poems makes physically visible the ambition of the variorum
edition to situate “Howl” in Ginsberg’s desired context. There is nothing new
about authorized biographies and Estate-sponsored scholarship, but as Ginsberg
himself notes, “Few poets have enjoyed the opportunity to expound their
celebrated texts,” the chance to do for themselves what is normally “the lamplit
study of an academic scholar” (Howl, xi). Already in his “Authors’ Preface,”
we thus begin to discern the subtle play of signs and the self-contradictions in
Ginsberg taking on the role of exegesis. On the one hand, it is his fortune to play
the role of the scholar; on the other, it is an indictment of academia’s shortcomings
that he has had “the liberty to annotate each verse regarding appropriate cultural
references which few critics have examined.” What we see at work here, and
what contextualizes the edition’s rich but often cryptic construction of a French
literary genealogy, is the well-known biographical binary according to which
Ginsberg typically invites contrary responses: either the very model of personal
generosity and poetic candor, telling us the uncensored truth and revealing all,
or the self-promoting narcissist with a relentless desire to control the historical
record.10 Does the text “fully annotated” by its author not overdress a poem that
Ginsberg infamously read stark naked on occasion? Are his 1980s notes and
commentaries in or against the grain of the “Footnote” he added to complete the
poem in 1955?
Given the ambiguity of Ginsberg’s role as his own scholar, it might seem
inevitable that the genealogy he constructed for “Howl” sends mixed messages
to academics about his poem’s literary and national identity. It is as if he
acknowledged that the aim to demystify the genesis of “Howl”—“dissolving
mystery’s veil of private allusion,” as he puts it in his “Author’s Preface” (Howl,
xii)—did risk contradicting the spirit of the poem. This contradiction is generally
seen in relation to personal biography, to revealing the “private allusion” behind
the text, as when Ginsberg prefaces his “Author’s Annotations” by promising
“images traced to personal anecdote” and “testimony & clarifications by persons
obliquely modelled in the poem” (Howl, 123). But the tension between what is
clear and what is oblique also applies to literary allusions, both in the variorum
edition and the text of “Howl,” in the manner signaled in “At Apollinaire’s Grave.”
And so, if Ginsberg’s famous reference to “N.C. secret hero of these poems” is,
as Timothy Yu says, a “study in contradiction” whose effect is to divide readers
“into the initiated and the uninitiated” (29), I would argue that the same goes
aesthetically, that “Howl” encodes formal secrets that also produce insiders
and outsiders. The poem’s manuscript revisions suggest why Ginsberg initially
embraced and then retracted a strategy that anticipates “At Apollinaire’s Grave,”
and that originally included a direct allusion to Apollinaire.
The appearance and then disappearance of Apollinaire’s name in “Howl”
has a curious genetic history. The first draft for Part III had named two poets
in a line canceled for the final version: “I am with you in Rockland/where you
play pingpong with Malcolm Chazal and Christopher Smart” (Howl, 89). In the
variorum edition, one of Ginsberg’s annotations for a different line identifies
the relevance of Chazal, the Mauritian writer and painter, as someone to whom
he and Carl Solomon wrote a joint letter in 1949 while they were in the same
psychiatric institution represented in “Howl” as Rockland. Since Smart famously
wrote his Jubilate Agno while incarcerated in St. Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics, the
obvious connection between poets is biographical. In autograph, Ginsberg then
made cancellations and insertions that changed the line so that it read: “where
you play pingpong with Apollinaire and Smart.” Pairing the English eighteenth-
century poet with the French modernist makes little sense in terms of biography,
but Ginsberg repeated it in his third draft, this time in type and more strikingly:
“where you play pingpong with William Apollinaire and Christopher Smart”
(Howl, 91). Most immediately, we see how, in fall 1955, Ginsberg anticipated the
Anglicization of the French poet’s name that would stand out in “At Apollinaire’s
Grave” two years later: “Ah William what grit in the brain you had what’s death”
(Collected Poems, 180). In “Howl,” however, the substitution of “William” for
“Guillaume” seems only to compound the already-obscure connection of
Apollinaire with Smart. Before he abandoned the attempt, what was Ginsberg
trying to communicate about Apollinaire’s meaning for “Howl”?
Prior to anthologizing Apollinaire’s “Zone” and some of Smart’s Jubilate Agno
(along with texts by Shelley, Schwitters, Mayakovsky, Artaud, Lorca, Crane and
Williams) in the variorum edition, Ginsberg hints at his reason for naming
together the French modernist with the English eighteenth-century poet by
connecting them in a very precise way: “In Apollinaire’s “Zone” we have the
variable breath-stop line of Smart with the superimposition of the Modern”
(Howl, 175). The exactness here of the technical poetic grounds for identifying
Apollinaire and Smart as precursors of “Howl” contrasts absolutely with the

implicitly biographical grounds of his original line naming Chazal with Smart.
In short, what the variorum edition clarifies is not only the importance of
Apollinaire to Ginsberg at the time of writing “Howl,” but that it was formal in
character, a matter of technique. From this note, we can deduce that his desire
to avoid a biographical reading is in fact what probably led Ginsberg to change
his mind and cut the line.
Ginsberg’s comments on the relevance of Apollinaire’s versification went
further, to embrace the larger aesthetic of “Zone”: “montage of time & space,
surrealist juxtaposition of opposites, compression of images, mind gaps or
dissociations, ‘hydrogen jukeboxes’” (Howl, 175). Here the poet is effectively
glossing the lines of “Howl” that openly spell out his poem’s aesthetic technique
(“who made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed”) and
the exemplary image from the poem he never tired of repeating (“hydrogen
jukebox”), attributing both of them to Apollinaire (Howl, 6, 3). The inference
that the poetics and trademark image of Ginsberg’s most famous poem derive
from the French poet is so startling that we have to wonder why it has been
overlooked. Ironically enough, one answer is that the famous “hydrogen
jukebox” is almost always cited by his critics as in debt to the aesthetics of
another Frenchman, Paul Cézanne. Ginsberg’s often-repeated claim was that, as
the painter juxtaposed planes within his pictures to create gaps that the viewer
had to imaginatively bridge, so too wild juxtapositions in verbal language could
achieve an equivalent stimulus. In his first draft for Part I of “Howl” Ginsberg
had openly named Cézanne (Howl, 25), to make explicit the connection between
his own use of “variable measure” and the painter’s “vibrating plane,” but he left
the relationship implicit by cutting the name in revision.11 What has been missed
here is the link between Ginsberg’s aesthetic technique—whether derived from
Apollinaire or Cézanne—and its representation in “Howl.” That is, Ginsberg’s
very desire to name names within his poem, to clarify its relationship to the
work of Apollinaire and Cézanne and so guide its reception, had to be revised
because it contradicted what was essential to the aesthetic they shared. As he put
it in his annotation:
This stanza concerns itself with aesthetic technique, the mechanisms of surrealist
or ideogrammatic method, the juxtaposition of disparate images to create a
gap of understanding which the mind fills in with a flash of recognition of the
unstated relationship (as “hydrogen jukebox”). (Howl, 130)
To create “a gap of understanding” and let the reader work out the association,
it was necessary for the poet to leave his essential relationship to Apollinaire or
Cézanne’s practice “unstated” in “Howl.” In the variorum edition thirty years
later, however, Ginsberg found himself in the uncomfortable position of filling in
the very gaps that were essential to his poem’s aesthetics. He also found himself
once again needing to separate the biographical from the formal, in order to
establish the technical level of his engagement with poets like Apollinaire.
Ginsberg promoted the genealogy of “Howl” in the 1980s in ways that therefore
responded to and even reproduced the very ambivalences out of which he had
originally created the poem.
Ginsberg’s Artaud: “Most of All a Madman”?
A glance at the variorum’s index shows that Walt Whitman and William Carlos
Williams dominate the edition’s many paratexts, and that they are closely
followed by references to Apollinaire, Artaud and Rimbaud. The balance is
inverted, however, by the half dozen texts that immediately follow the facsimile
drafts of “Howl,” collected under the heading “Carl Solomon Speaks,” a section
that places the poem within an exclusively French context: from Solomon’s
opening “Statement” that begins by recalling his “immature romantic” youthful
“dreams of Paris” and then names as “laying the groundwork” for “Howl” nine
French writers (Rolland, Sartre, Prévert, Michaux, Artaud, Mallarmé, Genet,
Lautréamont, Isou), to “Report from the Asylum” (his 1950 article in Neurotica
magazine that quotes at length from Artaud), to an excerpt from his 1966 book
Mishaps, Perhaps simply titled “Artaud,” mentioning another five French writers
(Rimbaud, Gide, Jean-Louis Barrault, Anatole France, Baudelaire) (Howl,
112).12 Solomon’s texts guide the reader, to borrow Ginsberg’s own terms, by
grounding the poem in their friendship—announced in the full title: “Howl
for Carl Solomon”—and by documenting how insistently that relationship
was mediated not only by the New York Psychiatric Institute where they met
and that gives the poem its narrative center, but also by the French literature
Solomon introduced Ginsberg to there. One result of this insistence is to
reconsider the story of Ginsberg’s encounter with Solomon in 1949, which, in
terms of national accent is ironically often reduced to their Russian exchange
on first meeting, via Dostoevsky (Ginsberg: “I’m Prince Myshkin”; Solomon:
“I’m Kirilov”).13
Writing to Jack Kerouac on July 13, 1949, two weeks after entering the Columbia
Psychiatric Institute, Ginsberg described his encounter with Solomon in a letter
whose opening and closing frames (“Comprenez”; “Adieu ancien ami”) signal
just how emphatically French culture was central to the occasion (Kerouac and
Ginsberg, 98, 106). What is striking in Ginsberg’s account, and often forgotten in
its frequent retelling, is that when Solomon produced books and magazines that
introduced Ginsberg to the “latest Frenchmen,” he was giving him three major
writers simultaneously: “One is named Jean Genet […] Also a man named Henri
Michaux […] Most of all, a madman lately died named Antonin Artaud” (104).
Ginsberg had been especially impressed by Solomon’s claim to have encountered
Artaud in person, reporting to Kerouac: “Solomon was wandering around Paris
and suddenly he heard barbaric, electrifying cries on the street”: “this madman
dancing down the street repeating be-bop phrases—in such a voice—the body
rigid, like a bolt of lightening ‘radiating’ energy.”
If “Howl” echoes this report of Artaud’s “barbaric” “be-bop,” as well as
Whitman’s “barbaric yawp,” there is considerable debate among scholars about
precisely which Artaud texts Ginsberg had access to and when, and in what
language or medium, with disagreements specifically about The Theatre and Its
Double in the 1950s (Le Théâtre et son Double, 1938, published in translation
by Grove Press in 1958) and the legendary banned recording of To Have Done
with the Judgment of God (1947) in the 1960s.14 Questions of chronology are
essential to determining whether Ginsberg appropriated Artaud’s ideas only
retrospectively or at the time of composing “Howl,” and indeed when performing
its opening section at the Six Gallery in October 1955. More often documented
as a landmark in American literary history (the West Coast Beat scene, the
San Francisco Poetry Renaissance) than as a key event in the valorization of
Artaud by the American avant-garde, the Six Gallery reading was very much
imbued with the spirit of Artaud’s conception of theatre. In Appendix II
of the variorum edition of “Howl,” this is first attested to by Ginsberg’s 1957
invocation of Artaud’s presence at the gallery, when placing the poem in a
tradition “till now neglected in the U.S., of Apollinaire, Whitman, Artaud,
Lorca, Mayakovsky” (Howl, 165). And second, it is attested to most strongly in
Michael McClure’s claim that the inspiration for the poem he himself read at the
gallery (“Point Lobos: Animism”) was that Artaud “fascinated” him (the word
is repeated three times for emphasis) (168). Was Ginsberg’s intense interest in
the spoken rhythm of poetry consciously matched that night with Artaud’s goal
to achieve a visceral impact on the audience’s nerves through voice? Certainly,
Anaïs Nin, who witnessed him reading the poem shortly after the Six Gallery
event, confirmed that its “savage power” was reminiscent of Artaud, specifying
his “mad conference at the Sorbonne” in 1933, when he had performed “The
Theatre and the Plague” (“Le Théâtre et la peste”) later published in The Theatre
and Its Double (Nin, 64).15 But what her often-cited remarks really confirm was
that it took someone raised in France and familiar with the European avant-
garde to appreciate what few contemporary Americans could about the lineage
of Ginsberg’s poem. So the question remains: was the performance of “Howl
for Carl Solomon” in 1955 a direct tribute to Artaud, whose work Solomon had
introduced Ginsberg to six years before?
We know from his journals that as early as December 1955 Ginsberg was
reading Artaud’s To Have Done with the Judgment of God, translated by Guy
Wernham who was then his neighbor in Berkeley (Ginsberg, Journals: Mid-
Fifties, 215). Since he had helped him translate Genet’s poetry that August—the
very time Ginsberg began to write “Howl”—it is entirely plausible that Wernham
also discussed with him The Theatre and Its Double. It is indeed more plausible
that Ginsberg did know it in some detail than that he did not know it at all. On
the other hand, without a fully translated edition, could Ginsberg have grasped
the distinctive properties of Artaud’s unclassifiable work (usually misdescribed
as a “manifesto”)? He hints as much when claiming, in the “Model Texts” section
of the variorum edition, that “Artaud’s holy despair breaks all old verse forms”
(Howl, 175). Breaking forms may give permission to experiment, but it hardly
offers technical direction, and when Ginsberg adds that “Artaud’s physical breath
has inevitable propulsion toward specific inviolable insight on ‘Moloch whose
name is the Mind!’” it is significant that the result is a philosophical “insight,”
not a poetic innovation.
Ginsberg’s comments in interviews also suggest a rather limited grasp of
Artaud and that he shared common misperceptions about his “theatre of
cruelty.” For example, with Tom Clark in 1965, he discusses the effects of sonic
rhythm on the body in extremely loose terms (“or something like that… and
whatnot”) with reference to “a statement by Artaud” (Ginsberg, Spontaneous
Mind, 33), when what he was surely thinking of was “No More Masterpieces”
(“En finir avec les chefs-d’oeuvre”) in The Theatre and Its Double. There, wryly
comparing theatre audiences to snakes, Artaud argues for the use of expressive
vibrations in his theatre of cruelty, and affirms that the “risks” of his radical
aesthetics are “in present-day conditions worth running”: “I do not believe we
have succeeded in reanimating the world we live in […] I propose something
to get us out of the slump, instead of continuing to moan about it, about the
boredom, dullness and stupidity of everything” (Artaud, The Theatre and Its
Double, 59). In general terms, it is easy to imagine Ginsberg agreeing completely
with Artaud; but more narrowly, the question of his technical understanding
of Artaud’s art is the difference between seeing “Howl” as a “moan” or as doing
something to reanimate the world.
Two answers to the question of Artaud’s impact on “Howl” are inscribed
within its draft manuscripts presented in the variorum edition and in the curious
use Ginsberg makes there of texts by Carl Solomon. Solomon’s texts in the
variorum edition evoke a strangely ambiguous context: emphatically French in
literary reference, but just as emphatically biographical. By fixing the connection
between Solomon and Ginsberg mediated by Artaud in biocentric terms,
readers are asked to see “Howl” as the product of encounters between three men
who belonged in an asylum—echoing the connection Ginsberg originally made
with Malcolm de Chazal and Christopher Smart—rather than to figure out any
affinity between American and French experimental poetics. In his line-by-line
annotations of the poem, however, Ginsberg then uses Solomon’s own words
in a most remarkable way: to discredit this very biographical narrative. That is,
he repeatedly cites Solomon disputing the events he mythologized in “Howl”
and denouncing the interpretation given to them: from “This section of the
poem garbles history completely” to “Thus he [Ginsberg] enshrined falsehood
as truth and raving as common sense for future generations to ponder over and
be misled” (Howl, 131).16 It is tempting to view such annotations as evidence
of Ginsberg’s commitment to the uncensored truth, however unflattering,
or as perversely masochistic indulgences, but there is a third possibility: to
problematize the biographical approach itself, to undermine its relevance to
the poem, not only in regard to Solomon but more importantly in relation to
Artaud. Did Ginsberg identify with Artaud the man, fellow asylum inmate and
self-proclaimed scapegoat of a merciless society? Of course he did, often very
exactly: “He wrote a big poem—article about Van Gogh (translated in Tiger’s
Eye),” Ginsberg enthused to Kerouac in his July 1949 letter from the Psychiatric
Institute, clearly referencing Artaud’s “Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society,”
“saying the same things about the U.S. that I said about Cézanne” (Kerouac and
Ginsberg, Letters, 54). Ginsberg would in fact reiterate his political identification
with Artaud a decade later in “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!” (1957) and again, in his
journal for 1961: “Artaud alone made accusation / against America, / Before me”
(Ginsberg, Journals, Early Fifties, Early Sixties, 195). But what mattered above all
to him was their kinship as avant-garde artists: “Antonin Artaud’s holy despair
breaks all old verse forms” (Howl, 175). The variorum’s many invocations of
Artaud should, then, be read as ways to subvert the biographical dimension
from within, pressing it to a point of excess, enabling Ginsberg to restore for the
reader the aesthetic nature of his “unstated relationship” to Artaud.
In terms of which Artaud texts Ginsberg read, when he read them, and
therefore which Artaud he knew at the time of composing “Howl,” Douglas Kahn
has traced both the textual and circumstantial evidence and come to similar but
not identical conclusions. That is, the opening line of “Howl” (“I saw the best
minds of my generation destroyed by madness”) for Kahn echoes the proposition
that there is “in every lunatic a misunderstood genius” that appears in “Van
Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society,” and for him it is this anti-psychiatric Artaud
that Ginsberg communicates most strongly in “Howl,” since it was “unlikely that
Ginsberg had a working knowledge of To Have Done with the Judgment of God.
(Kahn, 333). Or rather, while Ginsberg may have seen the script, he had surely not
heard a recording of the radio broadcast. This is a crucial distinction, if the issue
is whether Ginsberg’s “Howl” takes after Artaud’s screams and so whether his
poem, rather than later readings of it, learned from Artaud’s performance. Kahn
cites to this effect a significant yet rarely quoted passage from the journals of Anais
Nin, in which she describes Artaud’s performance at the Sorbonne, and Artaud’s
own enlightening comment on the audience’s response afterwards: “They always
want to hear about; they want to hear an objective conference on ‘The Theatre
and the Plague’, and I want to give them the experience itself, the plague itself, so
they will be terrified, and awaken. I want to awaken them. They do not realize
they are dead” (Nin qtd. in Kahn, 349). Again, Ginsberg would have agreed with
Artaud in his goal to awaken a slumbering society, but the harmonium-playing
poet of later years would not try to terrify anyone into awareness.
As Kahn argues, fellow Six Gallery performer Michael McClure would recall
years later that he “heard Artaud in Howl,” but this was “because, more than
any other Beat, he had an ear out for Artaud, experiencing such kinship that
he felt he could have been Artaud’s younger brother” (334). Kahn’s case is well
supported by his own detailed reading of McClure’s poetry, and the upshot
confirms how relatively limited is Ginsberg’s genealogical debt to Artaud in
“Howl.” Yet, the manuscript history of “Howl” offers evidence for how deeply
conflicted Ginsberg himself was about that debt.
Artaud featured very prominently in the most revealing of all the many
revisions that Ginsberg made to “Howl” through successive manuscript drafts.
Appearing in the first draft of Part I, corresponding to roughly half way through
the opening section of the published text, and showing numerous cancellations
and retyping, the passage in question is a reading list in the form of a catalog
of names. In retrospect, it seems like a trial run for the rosters of names that
appear in “At Apollinaire’s Grave” and “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!” If we set aside
those in Ginsberg’s circle (Kerouac, Burroughs, Cassady and Carr) and Buddha,
we are left with eleven writers of whom four are European (Marx, Spengler,
Gurdjieff, Dostoevsky), two are American (Wolfe, Whitman), and five—
almost half the total—are French: Artaud, Genet, Rimbaud, Céline and Proust.
Uniquely, Artaud’s name is given in full (Antonin Artaud) not once but twice,
and is then canceled twice. Echoing the emphasis in his July 1949 letter from
the Psychiatric Institute (“Most of all […] Antonin Artaud”), this distinctive
act of double naming, double inscription and double erasure, certainly suggests
the special place of Artaud in and for the composition of “Howl.” The intensity
of his hesitation, however, implies the conflict in Ginsberg’s desire to name
Artaud. Was he aware that, in the end, much though he wanted to claim for
his poem a genealogical relation to Artaud’s works he admired, on artistic
grounds it didn’t fully merit it? Or was Ginsberg conscious of how inevitably
his poem would be read biographically, if his own name was to be associated
with that of the “madman”? Thirty years later in the variorum edition of “Howl,”
Ginsberg makes no comment about this standout erasure in his manuscript and
chooses to incorporate Artaud’s “Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society” in
his list of “Model Texts” for “Howl.” That choice certainly implies he no longer
had anxieties about being associated with the biographical Artaud, but in the
“Commentary” presenting his “Model Texts” Ginsberg makes sure to redress
the usual interpretation of the role played by Artaud’s works in the genesis of his
poem by reframing it in terms of poetic form and technique (Howl, 175).
“This Ponderous Lineage”:

From Quoting to Translating Genet
More broadly, we should recognize that the list of authors’ names Ginsberg
canceled in the first draft of “Howl” is both the longest section of deleted material
and the most eye-catching from the point of view of the poem’s genealogical
identity. And yet, Ginsberg’s annotation of this passage is remarkably disparaging,
as well as laconic: “Next drafts eliminate this ponderous lineage” (Howl, 136).17
Since the variorum edition sets out to resurrect and indeed expand upon the
very lineage Ginsberg cut from the poem, there is here a curious contradiction;
to dismiss his original lines as too awkwardly weighty in a book that, weighing
two pounds because of its aim to recover the poem’s manuscript history and
name names, is quite literally ponderous.
If we might read Ginsberg’s original inscription of this literary and intellectual
lineage, with its heavy French accent, as a sign of passionate identification, we
might see its subsequent deletion in contrary ways: as a sign of anxiety, removing
what on reflection could have seemed like naive name-dropping; or as a sign of
maturity, realizing he did not need to pay homage to his masters. Since the catalog
of names appears immediately after the phrase “who investigated the FBI” (Howl,
22), we might also read it politically in terms of national identities at the height of
the Cold War, when naming names meant betraying un-American conspirators:
Marx and Dostoevsky, most obviously, but in fact everyone else in the poem
besides Whitman and Wolfe. However, there is another way of understanding
Ginsberg’s withdrawal of testimony, which is hinted at in an earlier note where he
glosses a shorter and less literary list of names also redacted in revision (changed
from “Gurdjieff, Reich, Fludd and Vico” to “Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross”):
Overt intention of this mystical name-dropping was to connect younger readers,
Whitman’s children, already familiar with Poe and Bop, to older Gnostic
tradition. Whitman dropped such hints to his fancied readers. (126)
The “fancied” younger readers Ginsberg inherits from Whitman are, as the low
pun implies, erotically imagined, but they are also a model of Ginsberg’s desired
readership, one able to pick up on his vocabulary of open motivation (“overt
intention”) that turns name-dropping into hint-dropping. This clandestine
communication was clearly a conscious strategy on Ginsberg’s part, since the
variorum edition of “Howl” also offers “bibliographic hints for inquisitive
readers” (Howl, 123) and the “Author’s Preface, Reader’s Manual” to his Collected
Poems announces “mini-essays” that “hint further reading for innocent-eyed
youths” (Collected Poems, xx–xxi ). Rather than dismissing the sexual dimension
of such commentaries as unwelcome biographical distractions, we might
appreciate Ginsberg’s awareness of the seductive, quasi-erotic relation with the
reader formed by texts that communicate through coded hints and secret signs.
Indeed, if Ginsberg was “a name-dropper on an epic scale,” it is surely because he
saw in the practice a way to intensify his relationship with his readers, because
it enticed them to follow his path, to “investigate his names, ingest his tradition”
as John Muckle has compellingly argued (Muckle, 10, 30). The manuscript of
“Howl” nevertheless shows how fraught naming names was for Ginsberg, since
his decision to cut the “ponderous lineage” featuring his French literary masters
(Artaud, Genet, Rimbaud, Céline and Proust) was the sign of a larger indecision
throughout the poem involving the names of Apollinaire and Cézanne (as well
as Chazal, Smart and Catullus). The process of inserting and cutting names
across drafts in several parts of “Howl” was in fact part of a larger and more
complex effort to communicate his poem’s genealogy. What the drafts reveal is
that in “Howl” Ginsberg tried out a variety of other strategies of literary allusion,
including some that would feature in later poems. For example, where “Death
to Van Gogh’s Ear!” references Apollinaire by silently incorporating a line from
one of his poems, in “Howl” Ginsberg originally did something very similar with
Jean Genet.
After giving his “ponderous” list of authors, the first draft of the opening
section of “Howl” continues with a line that surreptitiously translates Genet:
“who didn’t have time to speak among themselves of love” [“Nous n’avions pas
fini de nous parler d’amour”] (Howl, 23; Genet, “Le Condamné à mort,” Oeuvres
complètes, vol. II, 215). Few if any contemporary readers would have recognized
this line’s provenance as the long poem that Genet composed in prison to honor
his friend Maurice Pilorge sentenced to death, since “Le Condamné à mort”
(Man in Death Cell in Ginsberg’s version) had not yet been translated into
English. Another long poem by Genet, “Un Chant d’amour” (“A Love Song”),
had been translated in The Window in 1954, and Ginsberg might have had access
to it before composing “Howl” in 1955, but there would be no translation of “Le
Condamné à mort” until City Lights published Lola Pozo’s in 1960.
Ginsberg’s involvement with “Le Condamné à mort” rivals his longstanding
engagement with “Les collines” by Apollinaire as it goes back three years before
he started composing “Howl.” “I am translating a poem called ‘Le Condamné
à mort’ (‘Man in Death cell’),” he told Kerouac as early as in February 1952,
declaring it as “great” as Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau ivre,” before transcribing no fewer
than six lines of the formidable task he had set himself (Kerouac and Ginsberg,
Letters, 141). His translation of Genet’s stanza in 1952 was just as audacious as
his translation of Apollinaire’s line would be in 1957: Genet’s “Gamin d’or sois
plutôt princesse d’une tour,” for instance, implies a classic passive comparison
(“plutôt”/“rather”) that Ginsberg’s “Golden boy, go be a Princess in a tower,”
brilliantly transforms into an active poetic projection (“go be”). Considering the
sophisticated vocabulary and thorny syntax of Genet’s “Le Condamné à mort,”
let alone its length—264 lines or “65 huge Dakar Doldrums” as Ginsberg put
it to Kerouac—we shouldn’t take the amount of time and energy necessary to
such a translation lightly (Ginsberg, Letters, 141). In fact, we have every reason
to believe that Ginsberg was still translating Genet’s long poem three years
later when he began to compose “Howl,” since in mid-August 1955 he wrote
to Kerouac he was now having help translating “Genet poetry,” surely meaning
“Le Condammé à mort,” from his neighbor in Berkeley, “Guy Wernham the
translator of Lautréamont” (Ginsberg, Letters, 317).
In the 1950s, modern French literature for New Yorkers was almost exclusively
to be found in little magazines, the editors of which privileged short stories and
poems for obvious reasons of format. In that context, the translators played a
crucial role, and critics who could read but not quite write in French also had
to improvise themselves as translators, if only to give a taste of the texts they
were asked to review. Such was apparently the case for the reviewer of Genet’s
novel Miracle de la rose in Partisan Review, who translated the first excerpt of
Genet’s works that Ginsberg commented on, in 1949: “I read a 3 page excerpt
on the mysteries of shoplifting ending (as I remember) ‘and so it is that at the
judgement of the apocalypse God will call me to the dolmen realms with my own
tender voice, crying, ‘Jean, Hean’ (Dolmen realms is my own phrase)” (Kerouac
and Ginsberg, Letters, 104). In this letter to Kerouac, Ginsberg’s parentheses are
highly significant. The first parenthesis, “(as I remember),” reveals an extremely
complex act of appropriation: the recollection of a translation of Genet’s novel,
which the second parenthesis contradicts, “(Dolmen realms is my own phrase).”
How could Ginsberg be certain that “dolmen realms” was his “own phrase” if
he wrote the excerpt relying on a vague memory (“as I remember”)? If only out
of pride, would he not have double-checked the version given in the Partisan
article to be sure that this was indeed his own translation? Certainly, the need to
insist to Kerouac that “dolmen realms” are his words sets the tone and intensity
of Ginsberg’s relationship to Genet: the poet is so struck by Genet’s style that he
cannot resist stealing the translator’s place and inventing a phrase of his own.
Ginsberg pushed his involvement with Genet’s works even further by thus
turning translation into creation. “Howl” may no longer feature his draft line
translating “Le Condamné à mort”—“who didn’t have time to speak among
themselves of love” (Howl, 23)—but Ginsberg’s famous poem still bears the
mark of his even earlier translation of Genet’s Miracle de la rose: “rocking
and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love” (Howl, 6).
“Dolmen-realms” here has an interesting status, for it is neither a quotation
nor a translation per se, but a form of creative adaptation that André Lefevere
has termed “refraction” (Lefevere, 233–49). That the phrase Ginsberg derived
from Genet and claimed so insistently as his own in 1949 remains in “Howl”
symbolizes his intense appropriation of Genet’s oeuvre before, as well as while
composing, “Howl.” It also suggests that Genet’s writing played a very similar
role to Apollinaire’s in the development of his poetics. And yet, the provenance
and significance of this phrase are allowed to pass without notice, both in the
poem and in its variorum edition thirty years later.
The drafts of “Howl” show how conflicted Ginsberg had, in fact, always been
about communicating his poem’s genealogy. His ambivalence is captured not
only by lines such as the “ponderous lineage” or the translation of Genet’s “Le
Condamné à mort” he cut in revision (who didn’t have enough time to speak
among themselves of love), but also by images such as “hydrogen jukebox”
(derived from Apollinaire) and “dolmen-realms” (derived from Genet) that
would remain in the text. His translation of Genet’s verse from “Le Condamné
à mort” was cut outright, but the textual presence of Rimbaud’s poetry survives
through Ginsberg’s covert strategy of hinting. Towards the end of Part II of
“Howl” there appears the line “Heaven which exists, and is everywhere about
us!” that Ginsberg annotates: “See Arthur Rimbaud, ‘Morning’ […] Christmas
on the earth.’ Season in Hell, trans. Louise Varese (New York: New Directions,
1945)” (Howl, 7, 142). The fullness of this bibliographical entry contrasts with
the minimalism of the connection we assume Ginsberg implies between the
line in “Howl” and Rimbaud’s Season in Hell via the terse injunction “See.”
The note seems not so much cryptic as gratuitous. It therefore calls attention
to other annotations that invoke French literary allusions, and that also appear
unwarranted at first sight: from his brief but wanton gloss of the phrase
“Cocksucker in Moloch”—“Ref. also Jean Genet, another literary cocksucker”—
to the excessively long note giving the source of “Lamma lamma sabacthani”
(in Aramaic, the last words of Christ), which Ginsberg traces not merely to
the Bible (“Matthew 27:46”) but to its use in a poem by Tristan Corbière, “Cris
d’aveugle” (Howl, 142, 134–35). This latter case appears especially arbitrary,
since Ginsberg cites the Corbière poem at length in French and in English, until,
however, we notice that seemingly unnecessary lines turn out in translation to
include the very title of Ginsberg’s poem: “I have howled for my turn too long.”
Behind Ginsberg’s kinship with the nineteenth-century poète maudit, whom he
had been reading in May 1955, here we are invited to discover a precise textual
relation, an unacknowledged source of great significance for “Howl” (Kerouac
and Ginsberg, Letters, 287). In short, Ginsberg’s explication of literary allusions

in the variorum edition of his poem do not conform to our expectations of
scholarly annotations, but work through subtle hints and displacements, as does
his annotation that invokes Rimbaud seemingly without reason.
If the note that invokes A Season in Hell is gratuitous in the sense that nothing
in the line from “Howl” warrants it, through it Ginsberg actually hints at the
very next lines in his poem—lines for which he gives no annotation—where we
recognize what can only be an inscription of Rimbaud:
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American
river! Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of
sensitive bullshit! (Howl, 7)
As Jeffrey Meyers notes, that “whole boatload” is a telling phrase in conjunction

with “illuminations,” alluding to Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau ivre,” as well as to Les
Illuminations (Meyers, 89). Ginsberg’s strategy in the variorum edition seems,
here, to mimic in specific ways the very process of inscription and encryption,
inclusion and omission at work in his original poem, operating as much by
hints, gaps and juxtapositions as by the standard clarifications expected of
scholarly apparatus. In this sense, Rimbaud has for Ginsberg “gone down the
American river” twice; first politically, in the nation’s loss of vision, its crushing
of spiritual or sexual desire in the name of Cold War capitalism (no more
“miracles! ecstasies!”); and second hermeneutically, in the longstanding inability
of American readers of his poem to see the traces of Rimbaud’s vision in front
of their eyes. No wonder, looking back from Apollinaire’s grave two years later,
Ginsberg fantasized a French reader able to read “Howl” “between the lines with
Xray eyes of Poet.”
Appropriately enough, Ginsberg’s strategy of hinting is itself only hinted at in
the variorum edition, but there is compelling contemporary evidence that this
ambivalent approach to communication was in Ginsberg’s mind in the months
leading up to the composition of “Howl.” In early 1955, he had been encouraged
by Kerouac to follow his own enthusiastic embrace of Buddhist teaching and,
returning from the library in San Francisco with an armful of texts, he quickly
connected them to the key aesthetic and philosophical issues that would inform
the writing of “Howl,” above all how to achieve the “breakthrough of eternity
into time”:
I begin with a basic X which is “unspeakable,” “unknowable” and “unthinkable.”
Believe this X can however be experienced. I image [sic] it can also be
communicated, or hinted at, pointed to (with finger, image, X, poem, word, etc.)
(letter too). Communications on the subject are limited.
(Kerouac and Ginsberg, Letters, 263)
While a discussion of the poet’s philosophical aims does not belong here, we
should now recognize that, as he worked towards “Howl,” Ginsberg was indeed
evolving a strategy of “limited” communication—of what can only be “hinted at,
pointed to”—and that if thirty years later he returns to it for the variorum edition,
it is because the question of his poem’s literary genealogy and the question of its
aesthetics were always one and the same.
Ginsberg’s strategy of “open secrecy” itself has a literary genealogy to
which he characteristically pointed only cryptically. To see this in action, let
us return finally to the case of Corbière, a major influence on both Pound and
Eliot, whose importance for Ginsberg has long been neglected. Behind the
biographical figure of the poète maudit, we are invited to discover an overlooked
source for the title of “Howl.” However, the more revealing relationship between
Ginsberg and Corbière, one that hints at the strategic lesson the American poet
inherited from his French predecessor, is hinted at in his use of “Deaf Man’s
Rhapsody” to make an epigraph for “The Lion for Real” (“Soyez muette pour
moi, Idole Contemplative...”; Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 174). Echoing the
contemporaneously written “At Apollinaire’s Grave,” we immediately notice that
this epigraph too features an ellipsis. What is more, this ellipsis stands in for lines
in Corbière’s poem that are precisely expressing… a strategy of open secrecy:
Meditative Idol, for me be dumb,
Both, the one through the other, forgetting phraseology,
You won’t say a word: I’ll keep mum...
And then nothing will be able to tarnish our colloquy.
(Corbière, 51)
Ginsberg quite literally took the hint, so that his French genealogy in his major
Parisian poems is both more explicit than it was in the published version of
“Howl” and even more cryptic.
6
The Pitfalls of Open Secrecy:

“Has Nobody Noticed” St.-John Perse?
The variorum edition of “Howl” represented a concerted effort on Ginsberg’s part

to fully establish his poem’s literary credentials. Howl, Original Draft Facsimile,
Transcript and Variant Versions, Fully Annotated by Author, with Contemporaneous
Correspondence, Account of First Public Reading, Legal Skirmishes, Precursor
Texts, and Bibliography aimed to put an end to the emphasis on the biographical
and historical content of “Howl” and to counter both the positive-but-shallow
readings hailing its “spontaneity” and the attacks of critics mocking it for the
same supposed freedom from formal artifice. Ginsberg wanted to be read as a
poet who had immersed himself in European modernist traditions at odds with
the American orthodoxies of his day but whose experimental forms were as,
if not more, subtle and sophisticated. It is for this very reason that the role of
French poetry was so crucial to “Howl,” both at the time of its composition in
the 1950s and thirty years later when Ginsberg documented its creative lineage
and history of reception. Two texts in particular, included in redacted form in
the variorum edition of the poem, reveal how emphatically Ginsberg associated
“Howl” with French literary forms and how that association worked through his
aesthetic strategy of hinting rather than stating: his lengthy letter of May 1956 to
Richard Eberhart (who reviewed “Howl” favorably for the New York Times later
that year) and his even longer letter of September 1958 to John Hollander (who
had savaged his poem in the pages of Partisan Review in spring 1957).
At the time of writing “Howl,” Ginsberg’s letters and journals were thick with
references to the poem’s broader cultural background that ranged from Catullus
in the Latin to Blues ballads (Ginsberg, Letters, 120-21). Even before the poem
was published, Ginsberg had shared the aesthetic ambitions he had in “Howl,”
or promoted the reading he desired, to friends, family and fellow-writers. In
December 1955, he stressed to his brother both his reading of Whitman (“a great
personal Colossus of American poetry”) and of “translations of XX Century
French poetry, Apollinaire, Cendrars (Blaise), Cocteau” (127). This letter is

probably where Ginsberg makes his most characteristic effort to situate “Howl,”
setting it emphatically against the “mealy-mouthed, meaningless, abstract, tight,
controlled, tight-assed, scared, academic” poetry of his day, while at the same time
refuting the Cold War university establishment’s claims to authority in poetics:
Tight formal poetry seems to me result of basic lack of technical understanding
and not subtlety, mastery, control etc. which academic poets like to think of
themselves as “exhibiting.” Like trained dogs. (127)
Here, Ginsberg challenges the binary terms in which “Howl” would generally be
read—equating the antiacademic and political stance of his poem with its refusal
of poetic technique—and this challenge, passionately made, was the context for
his correspondence with Eberhart in advance of his review for the Times.
Ginsberg’s May 1956 letter to Eberhart names Crane, Blake, Dostoevsky,
Williams, Wordsworth, Yeats, Lorca, Baudelaire, Apollinaire and Pound, as well
as broader aesthetic movements or categories (haiku, surrealism, imagism),
but most emphatically Whitman (mentioned nine times) and “my master who
is Cezanne” (Howl, 152). If we read the letter closely, however, more subtle
implications of Ginsberg’s genealogical agenda appear, for example his detailed
attention to one of the three essential formal features of “Howl”; its “long line.” In
the standard critical accounts and works of Beat reference, this feature has been
unambiguously glossed: “The long lines looked to be straight out of Whitman”
(Schumacher, 123).1 But to Eberhart, Ginsberg spells out the place of Whitman’s
long line as only a chronological starting point, the source of a lineage, and does
so spatially on the page:
Whitman
--Apollinaire
Lorca
(Howl, 153)
Preceded by two dashes, it is the middle term, the French poet Apollinaire,
who is visually privileged here. In Ginsberg’s genealogy of the long line, the
American and Spanish poets are indeed using a form that is essentially French,
as are the other two key formal features of “Howl”: “The long line, the prose
poem, the spontaneous sketch are XX century French forms which Academic
versifiers […] have completely ignored.” (Howl, 153). So too, we might add, has
this stunning statement defining “Howl” in terms of French forms been ignored
by academic critics.
The Pitfalls of Open Secrecy 145
Instead, it is common to find repeated the comparisons Ginsberg made

between “Howl” and Kerouac’s “rhythmic style of prose” (Ginsberg, Letters, 121).
In the midst of composing “Howl,” Ginsberg writes to Kerouac: it is “nearer in
your style than anything” (Kerouac and Ginsberg, Letters, 315). That statement
was bound to identify “Howl” as American.2 Then again, this nationalist binary
does not hold since, for Ginsberg, Kerouac was a distinctly French American
writer, not so much due to his Franco-American biographical roots as to
Kerouac’s own literary genealogy. Ginsberg gladly reported to him just such an
identification three months earlier, in May 1955, after Kenneth Rexroth on his
San Francisco FM radio book program had praised Kerouac, who “wrote like
Céline and Genet” (Kerouac and Ginsberg, Letters, 286). Certainly, Ginsberg’s
letter to Eberhart could not be more emphatic about the national identity of
his poem, its closing summary specifying that its standout formal feature was
French: “Howl’s 3 parts consist of 3 different approaches to the use of the long
line (longer than Whitman’s, more French)” (Howl, 154). If the longer the line,
the more French it is, then “Howl” is very French indeed.
Aiming to make his poetics understood, Ginsberg’s letter to Eberhart was
also prompted by his anxiety about being misunderstood by the mass media: “It
occurred to me with alarm how really horrible generalisations might be if they are
off-the-point as in newspapers,” he had begun, before didactically insisting “let me
have my say” (Howl, 151). His conflicts with the media only magnified Ginsberg’s
dispute with the academy, which went back to his Columbia days, and as early as
“Howl” he saw his poetry as a form of counter-pedagogy. Writing to Trilling in
the same month as his letter to Eberhart, it is in provocative terms that Ginsberg
reports to his former professor his experience at San Francisco State College:
I am a really good teacher, naked half the time with big blue flashes of
communication. I read them Whitman aloud. If you read him aloud with
understanding and some personal passion he comes on what he’s supposed to,
near saint. Anybody can understand. (Howl, 156)
Here Ginsberg is in fact less describing Whitman’s poetry than his own vision
of “Howl” (“big blue flashes of communication”), of himself (“near saint”),
and how he desires to be read (“aloud with understanding and some personal
passion”). The letter also lays bare the basic contradiction between Ginsberg’s
hopes for his work to reach out to all (“Anybody can understand”) and the need
for an “understanding” that necessarily entailed the kind of literary and aesthetic
knowledge he labored to provide Eberhart and then Hollander.
“I went out of my head last week and rapped out twelve page single-space
heap of complaints,” was how Ginsberg described his letter to Hollander,
a former classmate at Columbia under Trilling and, by 1958, an already
respected poet and professor (Kerouac and Ginsberg, Letters, 411).3 A
passionate, sometimes bitter attack on the academy—“this horde of half
educated deathly academicians”—the letter is again and above all an appeal
to be taken seriously,4 and defines “Howl” in terms of its formal qualities:
“the whole poem is an experiment in what you can do with the long line”
(Ginsberg, Letters, 205). But what makes this second letter so significant is
the central contradiction it reveals in how Ginsberg wanted the lineage of
his poem to be understood. For Hollander’s review, while contemptuous of
Ginsberg’s “dreadful little volume,” had identified many of his key points
of literary reference, both American and French. In addition to “some
dismal pastiches of William Carlos Williams,” Hollander observed “avowed
post-Poundian pacts with Walt Whitman and Apollinaire and perhaps an
unacknowledged one with Lautréamont. I don’t know” (Howl, 161). The
dismissive final phrase might translate as “and I don’t care,” but the review
actually drew a very insightful distinction between poetic affiliations that are
“avowed” and those “perhaps unacknowledged.” Hollander recognized that
“Howl” operated on at least two levels, and that Ginsberg’s poem was overtly
written for one audience—those who would understand by reading it aloud
and with passion—while secretly addressing another—who could intuit, for
example, an homage to Lautréamont that was no longer there (Les Chants de
Maldoror he cut from the original draft).
One reason for the length and anger of Ginsberg’s response to Hollander may
therefore be that it drew his aesthetic strategy out into the open but without
appreciating its magnitude. Ginsberg’s response is indeed fascinatingly self-
contradictory. For it is peppered with recurrent formulations of the same
phrase attacking the ignorance of the poem’s reviewers: “and anybody who
doesn’t understand…”; “anybody can’t hear…”; “Anyone noticing…”; “has
nobody noticed…”; “nor has anybody noticed…” (Ginsberg, Letters, 205–7).
Ginsberg’s exasperation at what the reviewers had missed continually admits
the problematic division of his readers into insiders and outsiders, and comes
surprisingly close to limiting the proper audience of his poem to poets with
X-ray eyes. In fact, Ginsberg’s letter to Hollander invokes Apollinaire in relation
to “Howl” quite specifically, although this is when speaking on behalf of not just
himself but of a whole new generation of American poets—Corso, McClure,
Creeley, Kerouac, Snyder, Whalen, Olson—to denounce the broader failure of

American academics and professors:
What a Columbia instructor can recognize in Pound he can’t see in Olson’s
method, what he can see in Lorca or Apollinaire, he can’t see in “Howl”—it’s
fantastic. You call this education? (Ginsberg, Letters, 216)
The parallel, the equation, between Apollinaire and himself, could hardly be
clearer. Ginsberg claimed his hope in sending “Howl” to Hollander in the first
place was that he had “the technical knowledge” to see this, to “fuck the whole
sociological-tone-revolut[ion] whatever bullshit that everyone else comes on
with,” but the binary between form and content reveals another fundamental
one between those who have the training to decode the poem’s deep lineage and
those constrained to its surface (212, 214). Ginsberg wanted recognition, not
just as a poet and by the academy that had never accepted him, but also more
precisely for the sophistication of his poetics:
I read 50 reviews of Howl and not one of them written by anyone with enough
technical interests to notice the fucking obvious construction of the poem, all
the details besides (to say nothing of the various esoteric classical allusions built
in like references to Cézanne’s theory of composition). (205)
The example he gives of the poem’s “esoteric classical allusions” is painterly, but of
course also French, and it is to French language that Ginsberg turns most tellingly
at the climax of his despair with the reception of “Howl”: “anybody henceforth
comes up to me with a silly look in his eye & begins bullshitting about morals
and sociology & tradition and technique & Juvenile Delinquency—I mean Je ne
sais plus parler” (205). Left speechless by the failure of critics to understand the
formal lineage of “Howl,” Ginsberg uses French in order to embody the literary
context in which he should be understood. But this is far more than a simple
linguistic gesture. In the variorum edition, there is a helpful footnote for the
phrase “Je ne sais plus parler,” not in order to translate it but to identify its literary
source: “Arthur Rimbaud, ‘Matin,’ in A Season in Hell, trans. Louise Varese (New
York: New Directions, 1961), p. 80” (Howl, 163). The reader of the variorum
edition of “Howl” is assumed to know a little French, but not to identify this as
a quotation from Rimbaud (unlike Hollander, for whom Ginsberg did not need
to explain the reference).
It is entirely typical of the contrariness in Ginsberg’s approach to promoting
himself as a particular kind of poet by the company he keeps that, while he adds
a note to make the reader notice one French poet, here Rimbaud, he redacts his
letter to Hollander to leave out another—cutting a rare reference to one of the

most crucial “esoteric classical” allusions to the French literature behind “Howl”:
Anyone noticing the constructions and the series of poems in Howl would then
notice that the next task I set myself to was adapting that kind of open long line
to tender lyric feelings and short form, so next is Supermarket in California,
where I pay homage to Whitman in realistic terms (eyeing the grocery boys) and
it’s a little lyric, and since it’s almost prose it’s cast in form of prose paragraphs
like St. Perse—and has nobody noticed that I was aware enough of that to make
that shift there. (Ginsberg, Letters, 206)
Indeed, to answer Ginsberg’s rhetorical question, nobody has noticed that,

behind his homage to Whitman, there lay St.-John Perse.
Perse’s Line: “Longer Than Whitman”
Ginsberg’s complaints in 1958 that critics of “Howl” had failed to “notice the
fucking obvious,” let alone detect its “esoteric classical allusions” or his debt
to St.-John Perse, reveal an acute concern with literary genealogy and its
communication, so much so that we might conclude he suffered from a kind
of inverted anxiety of influence, to use Harold Bloom’s classic diagnostic term,
and that his obsessive desire to be identified in relation to specific poets was
compounded by psychological, cultural and sexual factors (as the poet son of a
poet father, as a Jew, and as a gay man desiring to perpetuate himself creatively
rather than biologically).5 And yet, whether in his poetry or in his comments
about it, the demands that Ginsberg placed on the reader to recognize his
kinship with French poetry were as we have seen often subtle to the point of
being cryptic, from using an ellipsis in the epigraph of “At Apollinaire’s Grave,”
to letting Rimbaud speak for his exasperation at being misunderstood in his
letter to Hollander. Ginsberg’s ambivalent desires not only leave their traces in
the manuscript genealogy of “Howl”—naming names only to retract them as he
wrote and rewrote the poem—but also marked the genealogies he promoted in
the decades that followed.
In the case of St.-John Perse, the evidence for his place within the literary
genealogy of Ginsberg’s works is problematic to such an extent that it is difficult
to say he has been “neglected” or “overlooked,” since he has not been noticed in
the first place. In general terms, this is because few scholars working in the field
are at all familiar with Perse and because Ginsberg, seemingly so fulsome about
declaring his influences, made few invitations to consider Perse’s significance
for his poetry. However, my aim here is not merely to make good the oversight
of a particular literary source for “Howl,” any more than it is to rectify the
imbalance in critical readings of Ginsberg by promoting French poets over
American. Rather, it is to establish for the first time the precise and significant
role that Perse played in the development of Ginsberg’s poetics, a role that can
be traced back to the very beginnings of his career in 1945, a full decade before
“Howl.” It also is to show how Perse uniquely triangulated a series of crucial
binary contradictions within the genealogy of Ginsberg’s practice and identity
as a poet. These binaries are both broadly cultural—the French and American
poetic lineages of his poetry—and specific to individual poets—the opposition
between Whitman and T.S. Eliot Ginsberg had set up in his letter to Trilling.
But in order to establish Perse’s textual and mediating significance, we have
first to see why his presence, and indeed his absence, has not been noticed, which
brings us back to Ginsberg’s complaint to Hollander that “nobody noticed” “A
Supermarket in California” was “cast in form of prose paragraphs like St. Perse.”
Ginsberg’s lament is astonishing for two reasons. Most obviously, because “A
Supermarket” is an emphatic marker not of St.-John Perse but of Walt Whitman’s
presence in Howl and Other Poems. However we judge the Whitmanian qualities
of “Howl,” here Whitman is not just named (three times) but appears on the page,
fantasized as both the subject of the narrator’s address (“What thoughts I have
of you tonight, Walt Whitman”) and as a character (“I saw you, Walt Whitman,
childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing
the grocery boys”) (Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 136). Whitman does not need to
be “noticed”: he is impossible to miss. We immediately grasp the spirit of kinship
one poet projects onto the other, and intuit Ginsberg’s faith that poetry transcends
time and death. But what Ginsberg is saying to Hollander is that St.-John Perse
is also in “A Supermarket” if you can recognize him. Perse is hidden in plain sight
because he is not represented in the content of the poem; he is embodied formally
(“cast in the form of prose paragraphs like St. Perse”). It’s an astonishing claim that
has consequences far beyond the interpretation of “A Supermarket in California.”
It implies for Ginsberg’s poetry that behind Whitman—that “mountain too vast
to be seen”—there stands Perse. Or to put it another way, when Ginsberg speaks
of Whitman he may actually be talking about Perse.
It would be hard to imagine a bolder rewriting of Ginsberg’s literary
genealogy. Few readers familiar with the work of both Perse and Ginsberg
would be likely to make the connection between “A Supermarket in California”

and Perse’s poetry. That is not to say there are no similarities. Perse wrote lyric
poetry and the central formal characteristic of his oeuvre, its combination of
verse with prose, is certainly evident in “A Supermarket.” Ginsberg’s absurdist
comic voice also finds a rough equivalent in Perse’s sharp humor. The editors of
Saint-John Perse sans masque establish a distinction to this effect that is crucial to
understanding how surprisingly close Ginsberg and Perse are in tone: “Lucidity,
when it doesn’t want to lapse into sentimentalism or academism, has humor
for a corollary, a transgressive laughter. Anabase refrains from lingering in a
noble register” (Camelin and Gardes Tamine, 24; my translation). If the formal
connection that Ginsberg establishes between “A Supermarket” and Perse’s
poetry is astonishing, it is because it displaces the most distinctive and indeed
obvious point of comparison between their work, which is that both are writers
of epic-scale long-lined poetry, if not actual “epics” in the classical sense.6 That
is to say, the impact Perse had on Ginsberg’s poetry is far less to be found in the
lyric “Supermarket” than in the epic “Howl,” a poem that shares with Perse’s
major works—the very long prose poems Anabasis (Anabase, 1924) and Winds
(Vents, 1945)—a direct line of descent from Whitman.
When Ginsberg implies to Hollander that, in “A Supermarket,” behind
Whitman we find Perse, what he really means is that behind Perse we find
Whitman. Of course, Whitman was a major influence on almost all French
symbolist poetry, including that of Rimbaud, and his literary reputation in France
was second only to Poe’s.7 However, thanks to the open access to Perse’s personal
library granted by the Fondation Saint-John Perse, we can see just how central
his engagement with Whitman was: his two volume translation of Whitman’s
complete works, for example, are the most annotated of all Perse’s books (Rigolot,
145). The connection between the French and the American poets was in fact
noted in the very first critical article on Perse, by Valery Larbaud in December
1911 (Patterson, 32), and is self-evident in Winds, which Carol Rigolot astutely
termed Perse’s “American Epic of Leaves and Grass” (Rigolot, 144). Rigolot’s
forceful study has established that Perse not only took Whitman as a paradigm
for both his lyric and epic poetry; he also embraced academic recognition of their
connection, underlining in his copy of Alain Bosquet’s Anthologie de la poésie
américaine (1956) the passage specifically linking his poetry with Whitman’s
(144, 153). Their works also share many distinctive stylistic traits, as Betsy Erkkila
has pointed out, from the use of exclamations and parentheses to a penchant
for scientific terms and highly specialized vocabularies (Erkkila, 215–25). More
broadly, both poets saw themselves as explorers making inventories of the world
and invested the figure of the poet with healing, sacred and messianic qualities.
Perse was, however, “careful to highlight” their differences including the distance
between Whitman’s vers libre and his own “stricter metrics” (Rigolot, 147). The
question of genealogy was Perse’s central poetic preoccupation, rarely simple,
and the relation of Vents to Leaves of Grass was one of “kinship and rivalry”;
“homage and fronde, tribute and struggle” (153). In contrast, when Ginsberg
claims to “pay homage to Whitman” in “A Supermarket in California,” we believe
him without reservation, and the jokey tone—“childless, lonely old grubber”—
does not imply struggle or rivalry but the mockery of self-deprecation: Ginsberg
identifies with Whitman.
Did Ginsberg identify with Perse? In biographical terms, it would seem
hard to imagine two poets less alike: behind the already-imposing pseudonym
St.-John Perse stood Alexis Leger-Leger, born in Guadeloupe, who until 1940
had been a high ranking and internationally respected diplomat in the French
government. While Ginsberg was morphing from Beat rebel into a bearded icon
of the counterculture, 1960 saw Perse being honored with the Nobel Prize for
literature. More to the point, no two poets could be further apart in terms of
the relationship of biography to their work, Ginsberg’s oeuvre being as centered
around his life as Perse’s is cordoned off from it, a split he formalized by forging
the pseudonym St.-John Perse. One of the more obvious reasons why the St.-
John Persian quality of Ginsberg’s poetry has been missed is that, taken at face
value, the two poets and their work seem worlds apart. Perse’s model of the poet
was lofty and noble, “The Prince”; Ginsberg’s “the madman bum and angel” in
the street (Howl, 6). Differences in tone and idiom seem equally irreconcilable: in
a poem like Anabase the esoteric quality of Perse’s vocabulary and the universal
sweep of Biblical rhythms from the opening line onwards—“I have built myself,
with honour and dignity have I built myself on three great seasons, and it promises
well, the soil whereon I have established my Law” (Anabasis, 25)—do not invite
comparison with a narrator wandering “the negro streets at dawn looking for
an angry fix” or being “fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists” (Howl, 3).
And yet, a closer reading of Perse’s Vents reveals a series of surprisingly precise
stylistic parallels with Ginsberg’s “Howl” that in turn warrant considering how
Ginsberg found in Perse a foundation for his own idea of the poet.
Putting the texts side-by-side makes visible how similar to Winds are
some of the phrasings and rhythms that seem most peculiar to “Howl.”
Dense and imaginative formulations as Ginsberg’s “the lamb stew of the
imagination,” “the lava and ash of poetry” or “the total animal soup of
time” (Howl, 4–6) elaborate on what Ginsberg called the “hypertrophic
metaphors” of St. Perse (Book of Martyrdom, 430), such as “the alcoves of
love,” “the coaches of dream” or “the octopus of knowledge” in Vents (Perse,
Winds, 186, 211, 153). The alliterations in “w” and “s” giving its rhythm
to Ginsberg’s poem also give away its relation to Winds. Rhythmically, as
well as metaphorically, the heroes of “Howl” “who burned cigarette holes
in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism” and “who
wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering
where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts” (Ginsberg, Howl, 4, 3)
indeed evoke Vent’s protagonists “who wandered at peace under assumed
names in the great Titles of Absence” when “it is Noon on the chessboard of
the sciences, in the pure maze of error illuminated like a sanctuary” (Perse,
Winds, 176, 179); while syntactically, the distinctive use of “whose” in Part
II of “Howl” (“Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood
is running money!” [Howl, 6]) also has precursors in Vents (“And Anhinga,
the bird, fabled water-turkey whose existence is no fable, whose presence is
my delight, my rapture”) (Winds, 159; my emphasis).
The strongest link between “Howl” and Winds is, however, structural. The
violent refrain of exclamations that characterizes part II of Ginsberg’s poem
(“Moloch! Moloch!”) and the long benediction that constitutes the “Footnote to
Howl” (“Holy! Holy! Holy!”) closely reflect the elementary structure of Vents. In
Perse’s universe, only after everything is destroyed by the forces of poetry—as by
fire, wind or water—can the poet re-create and celebrate the world:
Let the rivers in their risings multiply! […] And in the same movement, to all
this movement joined, my poem, continuing in the wind, from city to city and
river to river, flows onward with the highest waves of the earth, themselves wives
and daughters of other waves.
(Perse, Winds, 150)
In Ginsberg’s poem, it is likewise only once destruction has happened that true
communication can be restored between men. This is Part III of “Howl” with its
refrain addressing Carl Solomon “I’m with you in Rockland,” following Part II
in which Ginsberg orchestrates a violent flood—“over the river!,” “gone down
the flood!,” “down to the river!” (Howl, 7)—that is as joyfully St.-John Persian as
the blessing of the “Footnote to Howl.” The steps necessary for such destruction,
re-creation and celebration are economically spelled out in the very last prose
paragraph of Vents, whose lexicon and concern with filiation clearly bear the
mark of Perse’s kinship with Whitman’s Leaves of Grass:
When violence had remade the bed of men on the earth,
A very old tree, barren of leaves, resumed the thread of its maxims…
And another tree of high degree was already rising from the great
subterranean Indies,
With its magnetic leaf and its burden of fruits.
(Perse, Winds, 220)
If Ginsberg made significant stylistic borrowings from Perse, they

nevertheless remain minor in comparison to the larger allure of prose poetry
that he put in service of his own messianic conception of the poet. Perse’s
mythic figure of the poet, evident in both Anabase and Vents, could only appeal
to Ginsberg’s mystic and political visions.8 Although at first sight “Howl” and
Vents appear antithetical images of one another—the former speaking directly
to Cold War America, the latter ahistorically universal—the contrast does not
hold. Ginsberg objected to readings of “Howl” as a “protest poem” because, like
Perse, he was aiming beyond the immediate terrors and injustices of his times.
The invocation of Moloch declares the poem apocalyptic in Biblical terms that
echo the winds that blast the old and bring closer the new world in Vents.
While the grandeur of Perse’s rhetoric does give the impression of speaking
in abstractions from a great height, on closer inspection we see that Vents is
itself rooted in exact historical allusions, most importantly to the atomic bomb
(from “the Exterminator” to “Ballistic engineers”) (Perse, Winds, 180, 183).9
Constantly invoking “the century” and “new men” on “new shores,” a “new
dawn” and even “a new vision of the sky,” Perse offers his poem as a rehearsal
for new futures to be fulfilled by the reader: “And the Poet is with us. His
thoughts amongst you like watchtowers […] And you will turn into acts the
dreams he has dared” (Perse, Winds, 156, 218, 216). Those “watchtowers” are
corollaries to the hills of Apollinaire from which the poet can see the future,
and anticipate Ginsberg’s declaration in “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!” of his
function as a poet: “I am the defense early warning radar system” (Ginsberg,
Collected Poems, 168). Although it was meant negatively, the reviewer who
said of “Howl” that “Ginsberg’s poem had the effect of a natural disaster” was
therefore correct.10 That was the idea. For Ginsberg, as for Perse, the disaster is
cleansing, a prophetic source of joy: “Down on the rocks of Time! / Real holy
laughter in the river!” (Howl, 7).
The “American epic” Perse wrote in exile following the fall of France in 1940,
Vents is a surprisingly upbeat poem in historical context, which has always
scandalized French critics. The cheerful affront of Perse’s poem made it very
much in the vein of Whitman and a suitably inspiring source for Ginsberg.
When, in May 1955, he wrote in his journal that “here in America we are
gathered independently of one soil’s history and begin anew with the dreamlike
arrival of strangers gathering and propagating on a continent newly created,”
in rhetorical tone and spirit he was thus following Perse from a decade earlier
(Ginsberg, Journals: Mid-Fifties, 133).
Not only did Ginsberg share Perse’s conceptions of the Poet, he also had a
very similar ideal Reader. At first sight this again seems unlikely: Perse appears
forbiddingly difficult, esoteric, enigmatic, his work that of “a poet’s poet” rather
than a populist like Ginsberg. But if we generalize what Muckle says of Ginsberg’s
readers, that they are led to “investigate his names, ingest his tradition,” we have
precisely the goal set by Perse from the beginning of his career, which was, as
Rigolot indicates, coded into the title of his most famous poem: “For Perse the
word anabasis denoted the journey not only of writers but also of critics. His ideal
reader, imagined in a 1910 letter to Jacques Rivière, is a person who recreates a
work of art by restoring its framework and context” (Rigolot, 63). So long as
we think of Ginsberg in sociological terms of addressing the Beat Generation,
and later the counterculture, we miss this much more literary goal to establish
a community of readers in his own image. Ginsberg shared with Whitman the
desire to create a new lineage, a new America, and, for all their differences in
biography and in the relationship of their work to biography, he also shared it
with Perse. The ending of Vents’ penultimate section stresses that the future will
be bred from such cross-fertilization of poetry, in lines that mix the collective
pronoun (“our poems”) and the personal (“my cry”) to suggest common cause:
And our poems will go forth again on the roadway of men, bearing seed and
fruit in the lineage of men of another age—
[…] and my cry of a living being on the causeway of men, from place to place,
and from man to man,
Unto the distant shores where death deserts!
(Perse, Winds, 219)
Perhaps, then, we should take quite literally Ginsberg’s claim that in “A

Supermarket in California” behind Whitman we find Perse; which is to say that,
behind the biographical figure of the poet (his “homage to Whitman in realistic
terms”) we find the poetic technician (“Perse in form of prose paragraphs”).

Of course, it is standing the received wisdom on its head to argue that, instead
of directly laying claim to a definitively American lineage (“I Allen Ginsberg
Bard out of New Jersey take up the laurel tree cudgel from Whitman”), in fact
Ginsberg was drawn to Whitman by way of a French poet (Ginsberg, Journals:
Mid-Fifties, 207).11 But it could be argued that Ginsberg read Whitman like a
Frenchman, in the sense that much of what appealed to him about Whitman
also appealed to Perse, from the open and onward rush of the vers libre line to
the grand, sacred vision of the poet’s mission. Then again, such a reading is only
truly surprising if we forget just how reciprocal were the connections between
Whitman and French poetry, since it had shaped him almost as much as he
would shape it.12
Is it an overstatement to say that Ginsberg’s Perse is “hidden”? Certainly,
his presence is often implied where it might easily have been stated. But once
we formulate the triangulation Ginsberg-Whitman-Perse, what Ginsberg did
not specify in his letter to Eberhart about the formal construction of “Howl”
becomes clear. To say that each part of “Howl” takes a different approach to
“the use of the long line (longer than Whitman’s, more French)” sounds like a
crossword clue whose answer must be: St.-John Perse. It is impossible to think
Ginsberg could mean anyone else, just as it is when he explained to Hollander
that “Howl” “experiments with the possibilities of an expressive long line, and
perhaps carries on from where Whitman in U.S. left off ” (Ginsberg, Letters, 208).
One reason for the absence of Perse’s name where it might be expected is
suggested by Ginsberg’s decision to name and address another poet—Lorca—
alongside Whitman in “A Supermarket in California.” For Ginsberg’s encounters
with Whitman and Lorca (his “fairy son”) are clearly coded terms that imply a
shared homo-social poetics, “the vision of poetic influence as a scene of same-
sex erotic and intellectual exchange,” as Aidan Wasley puts it in his comment
on the poem (56). In other words—and ironically enough, in context of the
lavender scares of the 1950s—Ginsberg’s need to affirm his literary identity
through a technical lineage was trumped by his desire to establish an openly gay
poetic tradition. As a poet, Perse was definitely one of “Whitman’s children,” to
borrow Ginsberg’s own expression; but, unlike Ginsberg or Lorca, Perse was not
one of Whitman’s Queer Children, to borrow the title of Catherine Davies’ recent
study. To put it less polemically, St.-John Perse’s name was not “talismanic,” in
Muckle’s terms; it lacked the right symbolic or “star” qualities (Muckle, 11). And
so, if we ask why Perse is left hidden behind Ginsberg’s homage to Whitman in
“A Supermarket in California,” why he did not make more of what he took from
him at the time of “Howl” in the variorum edition, here is one possible answer:
his desire to make that mountain too vast to be seen visible.
Such a reading is suggested by the way in which Perse’s name appears in
the variorum edition of “Howl.” On the one hand, the reference is strikingly
affirmative about Perse’s importance for the poem. On the other, it’s not
surprising it has been overlooked since Ginsberg gives Perse’s name only to take
it back again, pairing it with another that was bound to completely overshadow
it: Rimbaud. In notes about a line that is both lexically and thematically evocative
of Perse (“Dolmens mark a vanished civilization”), Ginsberg observes:
At this point, with an unusually extended line, the triadic form of William Carlos
Williams definitely broke down and author realised it couldn’t be restored as
measure for the verse. The only option was to expand the verse beyond that of
Christopher Smart, as on occasion Whitman did, and the modernist Kenneth
Fearing, more loosely. Paragraphic prose poetry by Rimbaud and St.-John Perse
provided more electric model. (Howl, 130)
While on reflection we might wonder what Ginsberg meant by an “electric

model” of prose poetry, what he is stating here is striking: that from “this point” in
“Howl” onwards—less than half way through its first part—he modeled his poem
formally on Rimbaud and St.-John Perse. It is a major statement about the form
of “Howl,” made briefly and with no further clarification: Ginsberg says nothing
about which works by Rimbaud he had in mind or who St.-John Perse was.
In his 1949 preface to Anabasis, T.S. Eliot decreed St.-John Perse “a name
known to everyone, I think, who is seriously concerned with contemporary
poetry in America,” a claim that hedges its bets twice (with the qualifiers “I think”
and “seriously”) (Eliot, Preface to Anabasis, 13). In those pre-Internet days, it
is worth observing, it was not easy to find out more about poets known only
by the cognoscenti. Ginsberg understood this, and as early as 1984 stated that
the annotations in his Collected Poems aimed to “transmit cultural archetypes
to electronic laser TV generations that don’t read Dostoyevsky Buddha bibles”
(“Author’s Preface,” Collected Poems, xx). And yet the variorum edition of “Howl”
adds nothing about a name Ginsberg knew was obscure, in total contrast to the
other with which he pairs it. What the claim for Perse’s importance as a “model”
for “Howl” therefore gave, his pairing of Perse with Rimbaud took back. Just as
Perse was hidden formally behind the figure of Whitman in “A Supermarket in
California,” so is he here behind Rimbaud, the most famous of French modern
poets, the poster boy for radicalism in life and poetics beneath whose portrait
Ginsberg famously posed in the Beat Hotel (Figure I.1; see p. 18).
“Burroughs Amusing Himself with Perse”
Pairing Perse with Rimbaud is not in itself unusual. It was, for example, made
prominently at the time of “Howl” by Henry Miller, whose 1955 preface to a new
edition of his study of Rimbaud, The Time of the Assassins, described Perse as the
“only living poet who is able to give me anything approaching the pleasure and
excitement of Rimbaud” (Miller, xv). Wallace Fowlie also made the comparison
in Mid-Century French Poetry, an edited volume that Ginsberg was reading in
August 1955 (Journals: Mid-Fifties, 215).13 Perse and Rimbaud were therefore
on his mind the very month Ginsberg started writing “Howl.” In fact, Ginsberg
himself would regularly pair Perse with Rimbaud in the 1950s and 1960s.
However, he consistently made this combination not in order to characterize
his own work, but that of Burroughs: “Burroughs is a poet too, really. In the
sense that a page of his prose is as dense with imagery as anything in St. Perse or
Rimbaud” (Spontaneous Mind, 52; Ginsberg’s emphasis). Here, Ginsberg affirms
Perse and Rimbaud’s comparability, even though it means identifying Burroughs
as a poet, without giving any hint that the connection might also apply to his
own work, and the same goes for the numerous letters Ginsberg wrote in the
1950s to promote Burroughs’ writing.
In September 1953, the month he photographed Burroughs posing with a
copy of Winds in his Lower East Side apartment (Figure I.2; see p. 21), Ginsberg
thus invokes the name of Perse to persuade Malcolm Cowley to read what would
become Burroughs’ “In Search of Yage”: “Writing gets to a kind of laconism and
compression so that in parts the description resembles the anthropological-
eastern deep psychic intensity of St. J-Perse’s poetry” (qtd. in Burroughs and
Ginsberg, The Yage Letters Redux, xxxv). Later in the decade, Ginsberg routinely
compared the manuscript of Naked Lunch to either Perse alone or to Perse
with Rimbaud, and in 1960, for testimony in support of Big Table magazine,
he asserted that Burroughs’ novel “approaches a kind of prose poetry which
is found in 20th century French writing—notably St. John Perse” (Ginsberg,
Deliberate Prose, 175).14 To compare Burroughs with Perse already implies not
only Ginsberg’s familiarity with the French poet, but also his desire to make
a connection that nobody else ever made. Was Ginsberg describing Burroughs’
work or his own? Thematically, that “anthropological-eastern deep psychic

intensity” gives an accurate description of a strain in Ginsberg’s poetry, as does
the emphasis he puts on “density,” “laconism and compression” formally, and
when we recall the terms in which he defined “Howl” in 1956—“The long line,
the prose poem, the spontaneous sketch are XX century French forms”—the
imprint of St.-John Perse becomes unmistakable.
Ginsberg’s consistent effort to associate Rimbaud and Perse with Burroughs’
writing enacts the same kind of displaced allusion we find in the captions he
wrote in the late 1980s to add to his 1953 photograph of Burroughs holding St.-
John Perse’s Winds (Figure I.2 ; see p. 21). That is to say, just as we shouldn’t take
at face value the apparently objective scholarly function of the variorum edition
of “Howl,” so too we should see past the seemingly documentary function of
Ginsberg’s captions. Formally, because they are handwritten, they invite us to
reconsider Burroughs’ relationship with the book he holds by implying that
the man behind the camera is not a disinterested observer. Indeed, we might
speculate that the copy of Winds Burroughs is “amusing himself with” actually
belongs to Ginsberg, and that, as well as or maybe even more than Burroughs,
Ginsberg had an investment in posing Burroughs with Perse for the snapshot. In
fact, the photograph had a previous caption and its subject was not Burroughs at
all: “St. Perse’s new book just published 1953; Bill had given me his 1945 Anabase.
206 E. 7st.”15 In this draft caption, Ginsberg’s focus falls on Winds independently
of Burroughs, and on Anabase as a gift, one we can presume was precious to him.
That this is the only photograph capturing any of the Beat writers from this
era in the act of reading makes the interpretation of the picture all the more
significant. While the connection between Perse and Burroughs may not be
widely known outside scholarly circles, it is still the case that Ginsberg helped
to make and publicize it, hence overshadowing, deliberately or not, his own
rapport to Perse. There is a precise textual relationship between the two poets
that is important both in itself and for our general approach to Ginsberg and
his poetic lineage. For if we are to take him seriously as a poet, then we must be
able to recognize his relation to Perse, a French poet whose significance is not
connected to an iconic biography—as is so manifestly the case with Rimbaud
or most of the other names Ginsberg names. The popularized equation of
French poetry with the trope of the poète maudit has always made it easy
to take Ginsberg’s affiliations lightly. St.-John Perse short-circuits any such
readings, because his poetry, which is as demanding as Rimbaud’s, cannot
be reduced to sound-bites (“the derangement of all the senses”) or subsumed
into the identity of a radical icon. Perhaps this is why Ginsberg dropped so few
hints, why he left Perse hidden for the reader to discover, even if that meant,
as Eliot puts it, only those readers “seriously concerned with contemporary
poetry in America.”
“A Romantic Period” or “Being Hard-Up and Classical”?
If Ginsberg was conscious of writing for a divided readership from the time
of composing “Howl” onwards, then he must have been aware that, like his
letters to critics, his later annotations were necessarily problematic. Not to
name names risked failing to pass on the message, failing to disseminate his
genealogy, while adding them paradoxically positioned the reader as a passive
outsider in the very act of being invited to become an active initiate. In the
“Author’s Preface, Reader’s Manual” to his 1984 Collected Poems, Ginsberg
offered precedents for his scholarship: “Mary Wollstonecraft wrote extensive
commentaries for Percy Shelley’s posthumous collections. Wordsworth and
Eliot favored readers by composing their own notes” (Ginsberg, Collected
Poems, xxi). The comment is particularly significant in relation to both Perse
and the bigger picture of Ginsberg’s ambivalent relation to his own poetry’s
genealogy. For his 1986 variorum edition of “Howl” was meticulously
modeled on Valerie Eliot’s The Waste Land: Facsimile and Transcript of the
Original Drafts (1971). And yet, while critics have duly noted the obvious,
they have overlooked the remarkable irony that in the “fully annotated”
variorum edition itself, a scholarly project to establish the comparable
seriousness of Ginsberg’s great poem through its genealogy, there is no
acknowledgement of its own singular genealogical model. Its origins remain
a kind of open secret, visible in its form yet never mentioned. This curious
treatment of Eliot is, I would argue, both more evidence of how ambiguously
Ginsberg related to his own literary identity, and specifically relevant to his
treatment of Perse.
The Whitman-Eliot binary that Ginsberg made to Trilling in 1956 could not
have been more emphatic:
I think what is coming is a romantic period (strangely tho everybody thinks that
by being hard-up and classical they are going to make it like Eliot which is silly)
[…] Perhaps Whitman will be seen to have set the example and been bypassed
for half a century. (Howl, 156)
However, as we know from his contemporaneous journals—and as the silent

homage thirty years later of the variorum edition of “Howl” suggests—Ginsberg
was in 1955 as immersed in Eliot as he was in Whitman, whether quoting The
Waste Land (“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”) or that July, just
a month before he started to write “Howl,” recording a dream fantasy of meeting
Eliot in his London flat: “Eliot sees me & says ‘and may I see your work,’ and I
am weeping with loneliness and grief & love unexpressed that chokes my breath,
gratitude for his desire to read me” (Ginsberg, Journals: Mid-Fifties, 118, 145).
Although much has and could still be said about his conflicted relationship with
Eliot, the point here is that the binary Ginsberg set up for Trilling was false: he
knew that, despite their obvious differences in outlook, “Howl” was related to
as well as comparable to The Waste Land. And as Ginsberg also knew, there was
only one poet who bridged the Whitman-Eliot binary: St.-John Perse.
While Perse’s poetics owed much to Whitman, he was enormously indebted
to T.S. Eliot, who translated his Anabase in 1936 and later updated both his
translation and prefaces, for his introduction into American letters and to a
wider Anglo-readership. It was the Eliot translation of Anabase that Burroughs
gave to Ginsberg in 1945, and since Burroughs never tired of repeating the
association between Perse and Eliot, it was surely one he made for Ginsberg
from the start.16 The Perse-Eliot relationship was a very particular instance
of the dense and reciprocal literary exchanges linking French and American
modernist poetry—Eliot’s work was of course hugely and visibly shaped by
French symbolist poetry, from Laforgue to Corbière—and Ginsberg may also
have known that Perse returned the interest by translating Eliot. In any event,
Ginsberg surely recognized the aesthetic parallels, as well as the common
difficulty of their work and, no doubt, agreed with Eliot’s 1930 preface to
Anabase, which argued that the obscurity of Perse was “due to the suppression of
links in the chain of explanatory and connecting matter, and not to incoherence,
or to the love of cryptogram” (Eliot, Preface, Anabasis, 10). While it’s obvious
that Eliot might have been describing his own Waste Land here as much as
Perse’s Anabase, it’s also true, to an unrecognized extent, that the same could be
said of “Howl,” whose aesthetic of cryptic juxtapositions and gaps was mistaken
for incoherence too.
As Anita Patterson notes, there were “many striking similarities between
Eliot and Perse that would help explain the ease, and force, of their reciprocal,
formative influence” (Patterson, 32). But what’s most fascinating from the
viewpoint of Ginsberg’s poetics leading up to “Howl,” and the way it is marked
by the seemingly contradictory pulls of Eliot on one side and Whitman on

the other, is that one element that drew Eliot and Perse together was in fact
Whitman. “One reason Eliot may have been especially drawn to Perse’s frontier
setting in Anabase,” Patterson judiciously notes, “is that it lays bare Perse’s
ambivalent affinity with Whitman and, in so doing, brings Eliot one step closer
to a rapprochement with a poet who represented all that Eliot had tried hardest
to avoid in his American past” (32). Here we see how the modernist collage-
like poetry of Eliot and Perse, so dense and apparently culturally elitist, could
yet be related to the loud free verse and democratic vistas of Whitman and
Ginsberg. Just as Perse triangulated Eliot’s relationship with Whitman, so too he
triangulated Ginsberg’s opposition between Eliot and Whitman.
“What Do You Want—To Be a Neo-Rimbaud—a la St. Perse?”
If Perse modeled for Ginsberg ways to reconcile antithetical affiliations between

poets in the mid-1950s, he had played the same role for him at the very start of
his career in the mid-1940s. The month he began writing “Howl,” in August 1955,
Ginsberg’s reading list included Wallace Fowlies’ recently published Mid-Century
French Poetry, as well as A Mirror for French Poetry, an anthology featuring a
selection from Anabase in Eliot’s translation. Ginsberg’s comment in his journal
about the book is telling: “read book read already in N.Y.” (Journals: Mid-Fifties,
215). In rereading Eliot’s translation of Perse as he began working on “Howl,”
Ginsberg was indeed completing a full decade of engaging with Perse’s poetry
and, in a sure sign of how seriously he read him, with his critical reception.
That Ginsberg was one of Perse’s ideal readers, defined by Eliot as those
“seriously concerned with contemporary poetry in America,” was already clear
from his first recorded mention of the French poet, an unusually detailed and
informed journal entry for May 1946: “Perse, Saint-Jean. Anabasis, a poem; essay
by S.A. Rhodes / Éloges (translated by Louise Varèse); Exile (limped thru); also
his Pluies (translated by Denis Devlin) Bibliography” (Ginsberg, The Book of
Martyrdom, 132). Rhodes’ essay would have significantly situated Ginsberg’s
encounter with Perse philosophically (“Perse begins with the rationalism of
the West, and ends—like so many poets before him—with the wisdom of the
East”) and poetically (“Outside of France, the poet the closest to Perse, I think, is
Walt Whitman. Perse has the same sweeping inspiration as the American bard”)
(Rhodes, 42, 48). Early traces of Ginsberg’s engagement with Perse also appear
in his very first effort at writing a major poem, “The Last Voyage,” from 1945,
and its creative fruits are signaled, for once openly, in his even more ambitious
early poem written the following year, “The Character of the Happy Warrior.”
Ginsberg wrote “The Last Voyage” (and rewrote it; there were at least four
versions) in early 1945, and in 2006 the poem was finally published in The
Book of Martyrdom and Artifice, an important collection of his juvenilia and
early journals. As has been noted, “The Last Voyage” shows the heavy influence
of Rimbaud and to a lesser extent Baudelaire, and the two French poets are
explicitly named in the poem. However, “The Last Voyage” also openly alludes to
other sources, including Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelstrom.”17 Editor Morgan’s
assumption that Ginsberg was writing after Rimbaud, specifically in the wake of
“Le Bateau ivre,” likewise needs to be revisited in order to fully grasp the role of
French poetry in Ginsberg’s attempted debut as a serious poet.
In terms of versification and length, Ginsberg’s poem actually departs from
Rimbaud: his use of octosyllables contrasts with the classical Alexandrines of
“Le Bateau ivre,” while, at some 250 lines, “The Last Voyage” is more than double
the length of Rimbaud’s supposed model text. Although Ginsberg’s poem shows
no formal connection to Anabase either, its central thematic preoccupation
with voyaging and exploration quite clearly does. It could be argued that to find
Perse here is only to recognize Perse’s own debts to Rimbaud, but there is strong
circumstantial evidence for identifying the Perse-like qualities of “The Last
Voyage” in the long letter acclaiming Rimbaud that Ginsberg wrote to Trilling in
September 1945. At first sight, the letter seems to argue against any connection
to Perse, since Ginsberg’s passionate advocacy of Rimbaud was a direct
response to the feedback his professor had given him about “the poem with the
portentous title,” namely “The Last Voyage” (Ginsberg, Letters, 10). But while
there are no references to Perse in Ginsberg’s letter to Trilling, his description
of Rimbaud does seem to invoke him, as when claiming to admire him “not as
the poet maudit, the decadent, but the representative hero, the socio-politically
concerned, and in the highest manner politically minded poet” (14). That final
phrasing in particular sounds like Ginsberg is talking about St.-John Perse/
Alexis Léger, the mature poet and senior diplomat in one, rather than Rimbaud,
the young communard who then abandoned literature for commerce. While it
would seem wholly implausible to claim that Ginsberg suppressed references to
Perse in this letter, appearances do in fact turn out to be deceptive, as he admitted
almost immediately: “I wrote Trilling an 8-page letter explaining (my version)
the Rimbaud Weltschauung,” he told Kerouac; “It was mostly an exegesis of Bill’s
Spenglerian and anthropological ideas. I feel sort of foolish now” (Kerouac and
Ginsberg, Letters, 27). Ginsberg’s confession that the Weltanschauung (“world
view”) he attributed to Rimbaud was actually plagiarized from Burroughs should
make us rethink not only his letter to Trilling, but also “The Last Voyage” itself.
For while Ginsberg specifies Spengler and refers to anthropology, there are
obvious parallels between these references and the work of Perse, especially
Anabase that explores vast historical structures and conveys a global vision of
mankind. Or to put it otherwise, if Ginsberg’s defense of “The Last Voyage” in
terms of Rimbaud really came from Burroughs, then it would be surprising
not to find such parallels. It would be an oversimplification to say that, just
as Burroughs was behind Ginsberg, so Perse was behind Rimbaud, but the
connection between the two French poets had recently been made by Burroughs
in person, during the visit Ginsberg and Kerouac paid him in late 1944 to inspect
his library. This is one of the most retold anecdotes in Beat biography, and one of
the few places where Perse’s name sometimes appears, as in Miles’ account: “He
told them he read Rimbaud for his description of the derangement of the senses,
and both Rimbaud and St. John Perse for ‘the foreign perfume, the juxtaposition
of strange experience and the images of cities glittering in the distance’” (Miles,
Ginsberg, 54).18 Although Ginsberg himself never mentioned seeing Perse on
Burroughs’ bookshelves, we know from one of the captions of his photograph
of Burroughs reading Perse that he was given his copy of Anabase, and so even
if this did not happen in time to make an impression on him while writing “The
Last Voyage,” it would surely have done so in retrospect. Certainly, by the time
he made the significant gesture of lending Anabase to Trilling, in December
1946, Ginsberg had creatively embraced the book that Burroughs gave him.
Between January and March 1946, Ginsberg completed a poem several times
longer than “The Last Voyage”: “The Character of the Happy Warrior.” Who is
the Happy Warrior? Most literally, the title of a poem by William Wordsworth.
But it would also be an apt description of St.-John Perse’s ideal of the poet,
and the fact that Ginsberg dedicated the poem to Burroughs and gave it a
Burroughsian subtitle (“Death in Violence”) affirms the way in which Burroughs
mediated Ginsberg’s early engagement with Perse.19 Written in a series of cantos
marked by roman numerals (up to IX), “The Character of the Happy Warrior”
echoes Anabase structurally (numbered up to X). Moreover, Ginsberg’s poem
quotes from Anabase Canto III as an epigraph to its own Canto VII. Hence,
Perse figures in Ginsberg’s first pantheon of writers, following epigraphs that cite
Auden, Huncke (clearly, the odd one out), Rimbaud, Mahler, Rilke and Kafka,
and preceding Eliot and Yeats. More precisely, Ginsberg’s citation of Anabase
Canto III, which is about killing the “rhetorician” in yourself and letting go of
your personal anguish, acknowledges that the Happy Warrior was in fact the
poet he wanted to become. Through this poem and through Perse, Ginsberg
gave himself the courage to get through his apprenticeship in order to “leave
your youths, your youthful cities, to attain the strength of voyage” (Ginsberg,
Book of Martyrdom, 448). Although written a year afterwards, “The Character
of the Happy Warrior” seems to retrospectively validate “The Last Voyage” both
thematically (the adventure of travel and exploration) and formally (the canto
structure) in terms that are distinctly St.-John Persian.
Just how central Perse was to Ginsberg’s writing at this period is most fully
visible in a “Critical Introduction” he wrote immediately after completing “The
Character of the Happy Warrior.” The text establishes that in the mid-1940s
Perse played for Ginsberg the same vital roles he would play a decade later in the
run-up to “Howl”; that is, both in the development of his poetics and in uniquely
triangulating apparently binary contradictions within his practice and identity
as a poet. Ginsberg felt his long poem was a failure, “an artificial fiction” that
invalidated its goal to achieve “objectivity” and “unity of being”:
Therefore, this poem is a white elephant, as I imagine most poetry is now; a
parade of sentimentalities, an “indecent exposure.” It is this knowledge, I believe,
which turned Rimbaud against poetry. It is the attainment of this knowledge, and
the mastery of self which lends grandeur, power, nobility, and authenticity to the
poetry of St. Perse, also the Vision of Yeats and his last poems […] (Ginsberg,
Book of Martyrdom, 431–32)
It is hard to imagine a more powerful statement of Ginsberg’s admiration for a

poet than his description of Perse’s poetry in terms of “grandeur, power, nobility,
and authenticity,” and it is equally striking that he sees Perse triumphing where
Rimbaud failed: Perse attains “mastery of self ” where Rimbaud could only
overexpose himself. However, while the opposition of Perse and Rimbaud in the
genealogy of “The Character of the Happy Warrior” aligns Perse as Classical and
Rimbaud as Romantic, Ginsberg cannot maintain the binary even when trying
to make it:
I had recourse to the various anti-romantic devices developed for poetry by
T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden. I have made use, on one hand of the elegiac style
of Rilke, and the hypertrophic metaphors of St. Perse and Rimbaud. (Book of
Martyrdom, 430)
Once again Ginsberg ends up pairing Perse and Rimbaud, in terms of their
“hypertrophic metaphors,” while his invocation of Eliot and Auden clearly
sets them against Rimbaud and on the side of Perse. In terms of Ginsberg’s
aesthetics, Perse and Rimbaud belong together. But in terms of Ginsberg’s
aim to master the self and avoid “indecent exposure”—to attain Eliot’s famous
separation of man from his art—Perse belongs with Eliot against Rimbaud.
Sharing qualities of both Rimbaud and Eliot, Perse therefore triangulates the
binary of Romantic and Classical for Ginsberg in 1946, just as he would ten
years later when triangulating the binary of Whitman and Eliot. In sum, over
the course of the decade, however much Ginsberg changed his ideas about
poetry, Perse remained the constant point of reference because his poetry
had the unique ability to contain the contradictory tensions within Ginsberg’s
identity and poetics.
Finally, the role that Perse played for Ginsberg in the mid-1940s was central
to the broader philosophical underpinnings of the early Beat circle, as he tried to
“illustrate” when lending Trilling his copy of Anabase in December 1946. After
an hour-long discussion about “The Character of the Happy Warrior,” which
convinced the young poet that his professor had missed “the whole point of the
poem” (“to purge self and rhetoric of self-pity”), he noted in his journal:
I keep wavering now between absolute dislike of writing, and a desire to write
well and “in extension” as he calls it, or “objectively” or as part of unity of being
à la St. Perse. I gave Trilling a copy of the “Anabasis” to look over to illustrate the
point. (Book of Martyrdom, 155)
What makes Perse’s name so significant here is not only that Ginsberg uses
it to express his “desire to write well,” or in fact his desire to write at all (by
implication, for Ginsberg it’s Perse or nothing), but that it also characterizes
“unity of being,” an expression Ginsberg used repeatedly to describe the aim of
“The Character of the Happy Warrior.” As Miles notes, Ginsberg and Kerouac
had “spent the early months of 1945 attempting to define their idea of the New
Vision, a notion of the unity of being, taken mostly from William Butler Yeats’
A Vision” (Miles, Ginsberg, 58). Ginsberg’s “à la St. Perse” therefore forces us to
revise the standard account of the early Beat circle, since the central ideal of the
New Vision, the desire to achieve eternity through poetry, may have come from
Yeats and may have been most famously embodied by the ubiquitously cited
Rimbaud, but for Ginsberg it was actually “illustrated” by St.-John Perse, a name
absent from all accounts.20
“A Flash of Recognition”
By the time Ginsberg reread Perse as he started to compose “Howl” in August

1955, he had been reading him for a decade, and while the exact place of Perse in
the genealogy of his poem is difficult to fix, that he had an important one ought
by now to be clear. Reconstructing a poem’s genealogy is all the more necessary
when the poet himself has invested so much effort in doing so, and this was the
case not only for Ginsberg but also for Perse. It has become a commonplace
in the French criticism of Perse to note that his preference for anonymity and
for separating biography from poetry through the use of his pseudonym was
only one part of a wide-ranging manipulation of his identity. There is no better
symbol of Perse’s desire to conceal as much as to reveal than the Pléiade edition
of his complete works—the definitive annotated texts of major French authors
produced posthumously—which was, uniquely, edited by Perse himself, and
on whose cover appears, instead of the author’s photograph, the image of a
bronze mask of his face. As this chapter has demonstrated, the manipulations in
Ginsberg’s variorum edition of “Howl” should likewise revise our views of the
American poet, the famous exhibitionist who bared his naked body and mind,
to see that he was more a follower of Perse than his mirror-opposite.
The face mask that St.-John Perse chose as an epitaph to visualize the
artifice of the poet’s identity is a striking correlative for “this fiction named
Allen Ginsberg,” to use the potent phrase from a letter he wrote in Paris,
after “Howl” had suddenly made its author famous: “So finally it even begins
dawning on me to stop thinking of myself as an American. And often in the
dead of night I wonder who this fiction named Allen Ginsberg is—it certainly
isn’t me” (qtd. in Raskin, 191). The irony is that when it comes to separating
the public identity from the private self, Ginsberg largely failed where Perse
largely succeeded precisely because fame and popular success brought him an
unexpected and unprecedentedly wide public readership. “Howl” alone has sold
an astonishing million copies, and confirmed the impression that he was writing
for a mass audience. But his despair at being misread, so evident in the letters
to Trilling, Eberhart and Hollander, makes plain that Ginsberg had a poetically
sophisticated reader in mind, one who would never take his texts at face value or
confuse author with first person narrator. That Ginsberg’s life eclipsed his work,
effectively became his work, is all the more ironic for someone who from the
start was drawn so strongly to St.-John Perse, the very model of promoting the
poetry not the poet.
The oeuvres of Ginsberg and Perse differ in nearly as many respects as their
lives, and Ginsberg admired and learned from many other writers, but it is hard
to think of any one poet who brought together so much of poetic significance
for the author of “Howl,” not Williams or Whitman, or Apollinaire, Artaud,
Lorca, Mayakovsky, Smart, Shelley, Crane, Pound or Eliot. It is not just that, if
the long line was vital to his creative breakthrough, then no line was longer—and
“more French”—than that of Perse, or that if the long epic was a model, then no
modern epic was longer than Vents. It’s that Perse combined the long line with
the prose poem, and epic scale with a mode of condensed juxtaposition, and
that these features of his poetics served definitions of both the ideal poet and the
ideal reader that matched Ginsberg’s own. To recognize the Perse in Ginsberg is
therefore not only to acknowledge shared formal properties in their work, but
also to identify common visions of authorship and readership. It is to appreciate
Ginsberg as a more technically serious poet, and his poems as more subtle and
demanding. It is, finally, to see what Ginsberg wanted to show his readers, rather
than what he wanted to tell them.
That Ginsberg and Perse had so much in common despite appearances—
including those appearances created by Ginsberg as the genealogist of his own
work—suggests, finally, that in “Howl” he paid secret homage to Perse through
an even more subtle encryption of a French literary lineage than the inscription
of Rimbaud through his boatload of illuminations or than the ellipsis in “At
Apollinaire’s Grave.” We can find Perse’s name in “Howl” by recalling that,
after Ginsberg redacted its “ponderous lineage,” the only two poets left named
in the text are Poe and Blake. Poe was a major influence on Perse and, among
many other things, the master of cryptograms, while Blake was the focal point
for Ginsberg’s seminal mystical experience in summer 1948. Blake’s name was
there from the start but Ginsberg inserted Poe into “Howl” only at a very late
draft stage, when completely revising the line that originally referenced Gurdjieff
and Reich and then Vico and Fludd, his so-called “mystical name-dropping,”
in order to insert three new names: “who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the
Cross” (Howl, 4).
Is there not, in the alliteration of “p” in Plotinus and Poe and the consonance
of “s” in Plotinus and Cross, the subtlest of subliminal hints that the name
coming after Poe is going to be St.-John… Perse? We have to wonder whether
this is Ginsberg’s most secret stratagem of hinting, ironically naming names in
order to hint at another name that is left tantalizingly incomplete, or the sign of
either the poet’s creative unconscious at work or that of his reader. Barry Miles
provides what looks like compelling circumstantial evidence for detecting and
solving this crossword puzzle in “Howl” when he notes that, in the immediate
aftermath of his Blake vision, Ginsberg looked at other texts in order to stimulate
the same state of ecstatic illumination: “He found amazing images of horses in
Plato’s Phaedrus, dipped into St. John Perse, picked up Plotinus” (Miles, Ginsberg,
100–1). The alliteration in “Howl” that points from Poe and Plotinus to St.-John
Perse thus appears rooted in an historical connection of profound significance.
Verifying the source of Ginsberg’s comments (his 1965 interview for the Paris
Review), however, it turns out that Miles’ account is mistaken, and that what
Ginsberg “dipped into” in 1948 was not St.-John Perse but indeed St. John of the
Cross (Ginsberg, Spontaneous Mind, 40). Then again, this is no simple mistake,
since Miles is the editor of the variorum edition of “Howl,” as well as Ginsberg’s
biographer, deeply knowledgeable about his work and the culture that informed
it, and as such the embodiment of Ginsberg’s ideal reader. And so when Miles
appears to make a slip, his very familiarity with “Howl” and its background
is enabling him to read between the lines, and fulfill the associative logic of
alliteration to turn St. John into St.-John Perse. To intuit Ginsberg’s evocation
of the French poet in “Howl” is an imaginative “flash of recognition” of the kind
Ginsberg’s visionary poetics of juxtaposition invited (Howl, 130).21 Certainly, if
Perse is in “A Supermarket in California,” hidden in plain view in the poem’s
form, then the cumulative historical and textual evidence establishes that he
is very much in “Howl.” Perhaps Ginsberg was thinking of what was left in or
had been cut out of the poem, of what was plainly visible and what remained
encrypted, when, in June 1956, just weeks after sending Lionel Trilling his
prepublication mimeo copy of “Howl,” he made this brief report in his journal:
“Dream of extremely polite & courteous meeting with St.-Jean Perse over MS of
Howl” (Ginsberg, Journals: Mid-Fifties, 265). This rare and tantalizing reference
invites us to wonder whether, in his unconscious, Ginsberg wanted Perse to
recognize himself in his poem. It certainly and rightly identifies the author of
Anabasis as a reader, like Apollinaire, with the X-ray eyes to see through “Howl”
its true genealogy.
7
Burroughs’ (Anti)humanism:
Saint Genet and the Last Lifeboat
Cut Rimbaud but imitate Genet
In the middle of May 1952, when Burroughs wrote from Mexico City to tell
Allen Ginsberg he had just airmailed him “60 pages of Queer,” his letter makes
a reference to Jean Genet (Burroughs, Letters, 124). This reference is significant
both in and of itself, given how infrequently in his correspondence Burroughs
mentions other writers, and for its specific timing and content. “Would like to
hear all details on Genet. I think we should organize an international rescue
brigade to liberate his talented ass by force of arms” (124). Burroughs was
responding to news that Ginsberg had passed on to Kerouac the previous
month; that “Genet is in jail now in France on a murder charge” (Kerouac
and Ginsberg, Letters, 162). In fact, Ginsberg was completely mistaken, since,
following his pardon by French president Vincent Auriol in August 1949,
Genet had not been in jail and was never charged with murder. However, while
Ginsberg’s information about Genet was wrong, it must have struck a chord
with Burroughs. That is, when he wrote him in May 1952, Burroughs had
just documented his experience of prisons in Junky, was currently out on bail
charged with a killing and in the midst of composing his second novel Queer:
in that context, how could he not identify with the infamous French queer
criminal writer?
The biographical bond between Burroughs and Genet is precise and resonant
at this key early point in his career as a writer. However, it is unclear what, at
this time, he knew of Genet’s actual writing, and so whether or not it might
have had any impact on the writing of Queer. According to Miles, Burroughs
was only introduced to the work of Genet in fall 1953, when Alan Ansen lent
him his copy of Our Lady of the Flowers (Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, 1943). This
limited edition of Genet’s debut novel, published in 1949 by Morihien Press and
featuring a profile of Genet drawn by Cocteau on the front cover, had come
indirectly from the novel’s translator, Bernard Frechtman (Miles, Burroughs,
243). In fact, it is possible Burroughs already knew the book in this edition, since
Carl Solomon leant Ginsberg a copy after their rendezvous in the Columbia
Psychiatric Institute; “It had a tremendous affect on us,” Ginsberg later recalled
(Lotringer, 337). At that time, again thanks to Solomon, Ginsberg also knew The
Miracle of the Rose (Miracle de la rose, 1946), which prompted his declaration
in July 1949 that Genet was “greater than Céline, perhaps, but similar. Huge
apocalyptic novels by homosexual hipster” (Kerouac and Ginsberg, Letters,
104). The issue of what texts Burroughs might have known, when, and in what
editions or translations, matters not only to rule in or out the possible impact of
Genet’s work on his own emerging writing, but in terms of how he would come
to identify with Genet in, as we will see, the intense but paradoxical way that he
did. Was it initially only biographical, or was Burroughs’ relationship with Genet
also from the start textual?
Since Burroughs’ reference to Genet in May 1952 comes just as he is completing
his manuscript of Queer, it is tempting to see Genet’s presence in the novel in one
particular passage at least. When Burroughs’ narrator, William Lee, has forced
himself to recognize that his desire for Allerton is impossible, he finds himself at
a point of no return: “He was ready to take any risk, to proceed to any extreme
of action. Like a saint or a wanted criminal with nothing to lose, Lee had stepped
beyond the claims of his nagging, cautious, aging, frightened flesh” (Burroughs,
Queer, 55). The perversity of Lee’s sexual attraction and the pairing of “saint”
with “criminal” are certainly strongly suggestive of Genet’s works. In Burroughs’
plans for his Queer manuscript, we also find a strong connection with Genet.
May 1952 was a turning point in Burroughs’ literary career, coming just weeks
after he could finally identify himself as a soon-to-be-published writer thanks
to a contract with Ace Books, negotiated through Solomon and Ginsberg. The
publication plans for Junky and—even though they did not materialize—for
Queer, not only changed radically how Burroughs saw himself, but suddenly
opened up the prospect of associating his work’s publication with no other than
Genet’s.
The very same day Burroughs wrote to Ginsberg mentioning Genet, May 15,
1952, Ginsberg wrote to Kerouac to repeat the tantalizing prospect he had raised
a month or two earlier, of Ace Books publishing Genet “in pocket-book in
drugstores all over America” (Kerouac and Ginsberg, Letters, 171). Although in
1953 it would only be Junky that appeared in American drugstores thanks to Ace
Burroughs’ Saint Genet 171
Books, by the end of the decade Burroughs would indeed be sharing publishers
with Genet, courtesy of Olympia Press: Naked Lunch was number 76 in Maurice
Girodias’ famous Traveller’s Companion series, Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers
number 36, and The Thief ’s Journal number 78. In 1960, Grove Press considered
formalizing the connection, as it were, by floating the idea of packaging Naked
Lunch in America as a single volume with Our Lady of the Flowers.1 Kenneth
Allsop, who that same year dressed up Burroughs as “Rimbaud in a raincoat,”
was therefore not alone in finding “his nearest modern equivalent in Jean Genet”
(Allsop, 8).
The association of Burroughs with Genet at the start and end of his first
decade as a writer is a reminder that, from the outset, contextualizing Burroughs’
works posed problems for critics and publishers. The Beat Generation label
would never really fit him and his writing could not be pigeonholed within
American literary traditions; therefore, he “belonged” with others who “did
not belong.” Burroughs himself always insisted on being the alien: the junky
outcast, the queer outsider, even the Beat who was not a Beat. If he could avoid
comparing himself with other writers, he did, and when he couldn’t, faced with
the insatiable demands of interviewers and publishers, the name he most often
gave them was Genet. His special admiration for Genet’s oeuvre is evident from
the index of Sylvère Lotringer’s enormous Collected Interviews, where Genet’s
name has by far the longest entry. Often evasive about what he specifically
knew of this or that writer’s work, when it came to Genet, Burroughs was clear
that he had read “all of his books,” and that “All of Genet’s books are great”
(Hibbard, 102). In 1996, the year before he died, Burroughs also recalled his
famous first meeting with Genet, at the Chicago Democratic Convention
in 1968, in quite remarkable terms: “you could just see right away this is
somebody extraordinary, just as if they had a halo” (Lotringer, 774). Burroughs
here seems to mirror back Genet’s own desire in The Thief ’s Journal—where his
narrator hopes to be “guided by a will to saintliness until I am so luminous that
people will say, ‘He is a saint’” (186)—and indeed to be taking the “Saint” title
famously bestowed on Genet by Sartre, in his 1952 monumental book Saint
Genet, absolutely literally.
While it is well known that he admired Genet in the strongest terms, and
while it is obvious that the thief, the queer, the prisoner, the traitor appealed to
Burroughs biographically, at a more material and textual level of engagement,
the relationship of their oeuvres has been very little explored. This is especially
important because the high praise in his references to Genet do not disguise
Burroughs’ fundamental problem with any form of identification. Was this

problematic for him in the 1950s, as he worked on Naked Lunch? It doesn’t seem
necessarily so in October 1955, for example, when telling Ginsberg he had been
reading and rereading The Thief ’s Journal “many times” (Burroughs, Letters, 289).
Entering into a detailed discussion of the Frechtman translation of the novel—
which would have interested Ginsberg, then working on his own translations
of Genet2—Burroughs finally declared him unambiguously the “greatest living
writer of prose.” His interest in the challenge of translating Genet’s “French
argot” confirms how very closely he was reading his works and his unsuspected
mastery of the French language, while also suggesting a particular sense of
kinship through their shared attention to underworld and outsider idioms. But
it is not obvious that Genet meant more to Burroughs while he was working on
Naked Lunch beyond a landmark in defying literary censorship.
Genet’s presumed impact on Burroughs is in fact often claimed in the case of
The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (1969), perhaps his most bluntly homosexual
book, which has a chapter titled after Genet’s Miracle of the Rose. Since The
Wild Boys was published in the wake of their 1968 encounter in Chicago,
when Burroughs and Genet marched alongside Ginsberg to form a trio of
politicized queer writers, the association in the novel has been taken by critics
for a clear act of homage.3 However, far more revealing, I believe, are unknown
and overlooked textual connections that arise in the unpublished cut-ups that
Burroughs made of Genet in the mid-1960s and in the last book published in
his lifetime, My Education (1996)—a book of fragments that took as its model
and point of departure Genet’s own last book of fragments, Prisoner of Love (Un
Captif amoureux, 1986), published shortly after Genet’s death.4
Throughout the 1960s, Burroughs cut up the work of many writers, more
often for research than for publication. His use of Genet in his cut-ups is so
brief that it may seem insignificant in comparison to his substantial engagement
with texts by Rimbaud, St.-John Perse, or T.S. Eliot. But cut-up methods are not
just collage-based technical procedures of appropriation; inherent to cutting up
another writer’s words is a problematic of identification, and viewed in this light,
Burroughs’ minor engagement with Genet is revealing. As Chapter 1 established,
Burroughs had no problem identifying with Rimbaud: living a century apart and
writing in different genres kept a safe distance between them. The method also
allowed him to adjust where he stood within the process of appropriation, and
he signaled as much in the titles of several Rimbaud cut-ups through his choice
of prepositions: “Cut-Ups With Rimbaud 1960”; “CUT UPS FROM ARTHUR

RIMBAUD POEMES THRU W.S.B.”5 These shifting prepositions—with,
from, thru—reveal Burroughs tried out different ways to verbalize his creative
identification: with implies collaboration, poets in partnership; from prioritizes
the source text, the origins of the words; whereas thru has to do with possession,
ventriloquism. This variety of prepositions stresses how meticulously Burroughs
thought through his methods and how extensively he did that thinking through
Rimbaud.
With Genet, however, we find the very inverse, not a creative process
mediated by his writing but an impasse, visible in a typescript that Burroughs
most probably composed in the mid-1960s: “Cut ups with Jean Genet and
writing in his style” (Burroughs, The Travel Agency Is on Fire, 40–43). “With”
again suggests collaboration, a partnership of equals. But “In His Style” clearly
means something else: imitating Genet. While Burroughs had no problem
cutting up other novelists, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Paul Bowles, in the case
of Genet he could not resist the temptation to “write in his style.” Was it an act
of deference, a sign of his unlimited admiration for “the greatest living writer
of prose,” as he had labeled him in 1955? If so, perhaps the cut-up as a mode
of identification turned out to be far more problematic in this case precisely
because of Burroughs and Genet’s many similarities: novelists born just four
years apart, fellow queer outsiders, and above all prose stylists with shared tastes
(an unusual combination of graphic homosexual fantasy, poetic imagery and
criminal argot). The results of this cut-up experiment, and the fact that it is the
sole attempt Burroughs seems to have made to cut up Genet, certainly suggest
a dead end.
“Cut ups with Jean Genet and writing in his style” is less a cut-up than a rather
unconvincing, incoherent pastiche:
This ventriloquist dummy made from a bleeding rib will now create itself from
the manure the bone meal the rich intestines and the pubic hairs of Adam. The
baneful flower has stolen its colors from the small souls of hoodlums and fairies
from the virginal cruelties of children, from the hardness we feel in the presence
of some one who bears the brand of misfortune and despair lest we be infected
by his misery. (Burroughs, The Travel Agency Is on Fire, 40)
Burroughs openly attempts to appropriate the vocabulary of Genet’s novels,

from combining religious and sexual material to using the term “hoodlums” that
appears in all the Bernard Frechtman translations. However, even in a paragraph
that does not mix in quite different material, the effect is unsuccessful, if what
Burroughs also sought to capture was the convoluted syntax and distinctive
rhythm of Genet’s prose. It is this stylistic feature that completely escaped the
possibility of cut-up methods. Genet’s style evidently eluded the creative poetics
that dominated Burroughs’ work of the 1960s, but if we rephrase the issue we
see that something else is at stake here. Where Burroughs “failed” in cutting up
Genet—to such an extent he does not seem to have repeated the experiment—in
what sense had he “succeeded” when cutting up Rimbaud? As the discussion
in Chapter 1 demonstrated, Burroughs understood Rimbaud well enough to
appropriate his poetry with a necessary perversity; hence the outrageous claim
to “be” Rimbaud just by cutting up his words. The preposition “with” in the title
of Burroughs’ cut-up of Genet implies mutual respect as fellow-writers and the
addition of “in his style” comes close to the ventriloquism or act of possession
implied by the preposition “thru” he used for Rimbaud. And yet, the terms in
which Burroughs presents Rimbaud and Genet are not reversible: he did not try
to write “in Rimbaud’s style” and he did not claim that “anybody can be Genet”
by cutting up his prose. Why could anybody with a pair of scissors be Rimbaud,6
but only he could be Genet?
Did Burroughs desire to “be” Genet by imitating his style? Although it took
place several decades later, there is in fact a compelling if quite bizarre scene
dramatizing such a desire that follows a brief discussion of Genet’s Prisoner of
Love during the middle of an interview in Burroughs’ house in Lawrence, Kansas,
with Victor Bockris and James Grauerholz. Burroughs, “glowing, gliding across
the room” on his way back from the toilet, suddenly declares himself possessed
by Genet’s spirit:
WB: I just had a tremendous feeling of Genet coming in as I walked into the
toilet to take a piss. Genet, Genet, Genet. Oh, my God, it was overwhelming!
VB: He was right there in the room?
WB: No, right in me. He’s not just wandering around—he was in me. Genet,
Genet, Genet. Oh! (Lotringer, 801)
And to top this extraordinary moment, Burroughs then proceeds to be interviewed

“as Genet” by Grauerholz (801). It is hard to imagine a more spectacular act of
imitation or indeed identification. And yet, when we turn to Burroughs’ textual
commentary on Genet’s Prisoner of Love in My Education, composed about the
same time as this 1991 interview, we do not find the passionate eulogy or total
empathy we might have expected, but something entirely different.
The Last Lifeboat
It is hard to know whether it was because his own oeuvre was coming to an
end or despite it that, right from the opening pages of My Education (1996),
Burroughs’ engagement with Genet is so complex, unexpected and revealing.
The first of four substantial passages centered on Genet begins: “Thoughts that
arise palpable as a haze from the pages of Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love” (My
Education, 6). Burroughs’ initial thoughts are to do with belonging: “I have
never felt close to any cause or people” (6). He then claims to envy those who
can say “my people,” which suggests that Burroughs was misreading Genet
here, falling into the biographical trap of taking at face value his support for
the Palestinian people in Prisoner of Love. The implication that he envies Genet
is ambiguous, but far more so is the highly distinctive metaphor with which
Burroughs describes the way his thoughts “arise palpable as a haze” from
Genet’s pages. For this particular phrase has an ominous history in Burroughs’
writing, echoing his 1985 introduction to Queer, where “palpable as a haze”
visualizes the traumatic “ugly menace” that “rises from the pages” of his own
novel as he reads its 1952 manuscript (“Appendix,” Queer, 132).7 By repeating
the phrase in the context of reading Prisoner of Love, Burroughs seems to imply
the most devastating parallel possible between the menace of reading Genet
and the trauma he claimed underwrote Queer: the accidental shooting of his
wife. As forty years earlier with Gide and Cocteau, so too now here, the name
of Genet is associated by Burroughs with the death of Joan, suggesting a kind of
ineluctable logic whereby the French writers are called upon to mediate the most
terrible and haunting event of Burroughs’ life, an event he described explicitly
in terms of his being possessed. The issue here is not the psychological validity of
Burroughs’ claims about what happened one night in Mexico City in September
1951, but the way in which he so consistently associates it with those French
authors whose works are closest to his own. While the invocations of Gide and
Cocteau in 1952 were made at the very beginning of his oeuvre, just as he was
completing Junky and Queer, Burroughs’ engagement with Genet here comes
at the very end of his writing career. In fact, it becomes increasingly clear that
what Burroughs is doing in My Education is to review his life’s work through
the eyes of Genet. The mediating role and retrospective “double take” he had
considered but rejected for Cocteau in the late 1960s, he now gives to Genet
but with an even more intense ambivalence.8 If the initial thoughts inspired by
reading Genet are subtly but evidently sinister, what follows is indeed a display
of increasingly overt hostility.
Twice, Burroughs proceeds to brush off what is the central moral concern of
Genet’s oeuvre, snapping: “Genet is concerned with betrayal, to me a meaningless
concept, like patriotism […] Genet is concerned with betrayal. I have nothing
and nobody to betray, moi” (Burroughs, My Education, 6, 8). Moi! Paradoxically,
perversely even, Burroughs uses the language of Genet and the very word that
means “me,” to put Genet down and deny their affinity. That he should devote
such a special place to Genet in the first pages of his last book, only in order to
take back what he seems to give is clearly the sign of a profound internal conflict.
Burroughs’ conflicted response to reading Genet returns when quoting a key
passage of Prisoner of Love based on the parable about the medieval Spanish
leader El Cid kissing a leper. Mocking the heroic act admired by Genet, he quips:
“Bring me a leper and I will kiss it” (12). As if to knock the halo off Genet’s head,
Burroughs then completes the put-down by going outside the realm of literature
to call on detailed scientific evidence that proves Genet wrong, beginning: “Now
leprosy is one of the least contagious of diseases, so the Saintly Cid was in no
danger of infection” (12). Burroughs’ reference to “the Saintly Cid” may well
be an echo of Sartre’s humor in titling his study Saint Genet, but if so, the joke
here is at Genet’s expense. Once again, we are led to wonder why Burroughs
goes so far to invoke, only to demean, the writer he perhaps most admired, if
not because his admiration for Genet’s oeuvre revealed to him an ambivalence
about his own.
What is most significant about Burroughs’ curious put-down of Genet via
El Cid is its real subject matter, not betrayal but heroism, which features in the
longest passage from Prisoner of Love that he quotes:
“If you’re a hero you are as good as dead. So we render to you a funeral tribute.
We’ve got springs under our feet and as soon as a hero comes in we are ejected
into mourning.” What a writer and what a meaning sensitive observer. “I
grovel in admiration.” This phrase I lift from a book where some behind-the-
lines Scotch-drinking PLO speaks of a girl who will ride a donkey loaded with
explosives into Israeli lines. It occurred to me that prostrate groveling would be
a wise procedure for anyone in the vicinity of this admirable act. (Burroughs,
My Education, 11–12).
After citing Genet, Burroughs comments on his writing approvingly here,

and then, most oddly, cites Genet a second time. What is so odd comes in
between Burroughs’ speech marks: he grovels in admiration before Genet, but

by quoting Genet himself groveling in admiration before the PLO girl in his
own book. That Burroughs also omits to name Genet or Prisoner of Love here
is equally strange: to say of the phrase he applauds that he “lifted” it from “a
book,” as if he had stolen the phrase or fallen on Genet’s Prisoner of love by
chance, or as if it were any book to him, seems almost contemptuous. What is
normally a simple gesture of admiration, to quote and praise a fellow writer,
thus reveals a complicated act of identification tainted with a stain of rejection.
The convoluted ways in which Burroughs expresses his admiration for Genet—
via the honorable action of his character—and omits to mention his name or
even the title of his book when he does so in this fragment, is astonishing: with
no other writer, in his entire works, does Burroughs identify so deeply that he
feels impelled to insist on distance.
The clue to understanding the extreme ambivalence in Burroughs’
comparison of his work and ethics with Genet’s is a section that interrupts his
musings about Prisoner of Love and at first sight has nothing to do with them.
Right in between his two references to Genet and betrayal, Burroughs retells one
of his favorite satirical anecdotes, that of the officer who abandons a sinking ship
by dressing up in women’s clothing and rushes into the first lifeboat. In fact, this
outrageous image, first seen in “Twilight’s Last Gleaming,” the skit from 1938
that featured the debut of Dr Benway, was for Burroughs the foundational story
of his oeuvre, which is why he invoked it in so many texts (from “Roosevelt
after Inauguration” in the 1950s to Last Words in the 1990s via The Third Mind,
where he offers it as an ethical precedent for his cut-up project, an illustration
that the “first step in re-creation is to cut the old lines that hold you right where
you are sitting now”; Burroughs and Gysin, The Third Mind, 28).9 In previous
versions, Burroughs found in such “anti-heroes a purity of motive, a halo of
dazzling shameless innocence,” and imagined joining their ranks: “I have a deep
reverence for life. And I’d like to see any sinking passengers beat me into the first
lifeboat” (“Roosevelt after Inauguration,” 334). But in My Education, describing
how the old class elites went down with the Titanic “like gentlemen,” Burroughs
admits that he would do just the same, that, “in an actual emergency,” he “would
probably react with exemplary selflessness” (My Education, 8). Bound finally by
his class and by respectable human morality, he doesn’t consider what Genet
would have done in such a situation, but we already know; he would have beaten
Burroughs into that first lifeboat. Genet is the glittering shameless anti-hero that
Burroughs could never be.
In a hypothetical contest, an imaginary competition between writers for

which is the least human, or therefore the most alien, we can only admit—and
reading Prisoner of Love Burroughs himself seems to fear—that Genet would
win. In fact, Burroughs in effect had staged this very competition in 1955,
when contemplating a posthumanist plan to commit “some excess of feeling or
behavior that will shatter the human pattern” (Burroughs, Interzone, 128). Back
then, Burroughs quoted a sentence from The Thief ’s Journal before commenting:
Genet says he chose the life of a French thief for the sake of depth. By the fact of
this depth, which is his greatness, he is more humanly involved than I am. He
carries more excess baggage. I only have one “creature” to be concerned with:
myself. (128-29; Burroughs’ emphasis)10
Forty years later, however, the unredeemed junky author who once declared that
in the face of absolute need “You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal,
do anything”—“Wouldn’t you?” (Naked Lunch, 201; Burroughs’ emphasis)—
again measures himself against Genet, but now finds himself the shorter man
because the more human.
“We are the cats inside”
Burroughs’ 1955 competition for who should wear the halo of shamelessness
is, it needs to be stressed, not a joke or a casual, passing idea on his part. On
the contrary, both the context and content of this imaginary contest reveal
how crucially important measuring the ethics of his own oeuvre to Genet’s
was for him. The context was an entry in “Lee’s Letters and Journals,” a forty-
page typescript drawn from his own letters, that in October 1955 Burroughs
assembled as “Chapter II of Interzone novel” (Burroughs, Letters, 288). In
other words, his reflections on Genet in this “epistolary-diaristic format” were
originally intended to be part of what became Naked Lunch (Harris, The Secret
of Fascination, 206).11 This is a vital distinction: Burroughs’ comments on Genet
and his citation of The Thief ’s Journal were not extra-textual but integrated
within the novel he was writing. And in terms of timing, this competition for
which of them was the more “humanly involved” was composed at exactly the
same moment (the third week of October 1955) that Burroughs hailed Genet
as “the greatest living writer of prose.” So, far from being untroubled by Genet’s
“greatness” at the time of Naked Lunch, an anxiety about it and a competitive
attitude towards his work’s ethics was already inseparable from Burroughs’ sense
of his own identity and writing.
The extent of Burroughs’ anxiety was such that he claimed for himself the
ascetic ground of Genet’s work (“I only have one ‘creature’ to be concerned with:
myself ”), in a move that was part of a larger consideration of his own ethics as
well as aesthetics:
My thoughts turn to crime, incredible journeys of exploration, expression in

terms of an extreme act, some excess of feeling or behavior that will shatter the
human pattern. (Interzone, 128; Burroughs’ emphasis)
While Burroughs’ idea of an “extreme act” to “shatter the human pattern” comes
at the end of a sentence whose beginning evokes Genet (“My thoughts turn
to crime”), the very next phrase (“incredible journeys of exploration”) even
more clearly evokes St.-John Perse, specifically his Anabasis. Far from being a
digression or an irrelevance, the pairing of the two French writers here not only
implies how Burroughs read Perse through Genet but how he was reading and
appropriating Genet’s own works.
Burroughs incorporated fragments of Perse’s Anabasis in many texts, and cut
it up with Rimbaud’s Illuminations over and over again in the early phase of his
cut-up work, but he very rarely made explicit its significance through context or
commentary. The major exception is a key passage in The Place of Dead Roads
(1983), an impassioned lyrical address to:
Those who are ready to leave the whole human comedy behind and walk into the
unknown with no commitments. Those who have not from birth sniffed such
embers, what have they to do with us? Only those who are ready to leave behind
everything they have ever known need apply. (202)
To identify this as an “explicit” interpretation of St.-John Perse’s meaning for

Burroughs depends, it has to be said, on recognizing the question that interrupts
his appeal to discover a posthuman future—“Those who have not from birth
sniffed such embers, what have they to do with us?”—as a line from Anabasis
in T.S. Eliot’s translation. But once we have identified it as coming from Perse,
we can see how Burroughs looks from The Place of Dead Roads in the early
1980s back to his evocation of Perse’s “incredible journeys of exploration” in
1955. Framed in this context, not only does Burroughs clarify his reading of
Perse, but also of Genet. Genet’s “excess baggage” on journeys of exploration is
to be concerned with more than one “creature” than himself, insists Burroughs,
in contrast to the need to have “no commitments” at all in order to walk out
into the unknown (Interzone, 128); and by definition a posthuman future is
unknown, as we will see in more detail in Chapter 8. The point, however, is not
so much that Burroughs puts Genet down in 1955, but that he does so on the
exact terms of Genet’s own work.
This passage from “Lee’s Letters and Journals” naming Genet and Perse (and
Klee) is highly unusual in reflecting so directly on writers or painters, but it
forms part of a bigger picture where Burroughs combined reflections on art,
politics, philosophy and, most pertinently, morality and ethics. The validity of
these last two terms, Burroughs rejects in the most categorical terms: “Morality
(at this point an unqualified evil)” (Interzone, 123). The term “evil” here is bluntly
paradoxical, since Burroughs appropriates its definition within morality in
order to denounce moral thinking itself. In so doing, he employs the very same
strategy that Genet devised in the concept of betrayal that features in The Thief ’s
Journal and was the central ethical issue of his oeuvre. Indeed, Burroughs could
hardly have failed to notice that in Genet’s novel, the narrator makes repeated
associations between betrayal and the very city that Burroughs had made his
home since 1954 and where he was now writing “Lee’s Letters and Journals” in
1955: “I would have liked to embark for Tangiers,” Genet’s narrator observes; “It
was the very symbol of treason […] this city represented Treason so accurately,
so magnificently that I felt I was bound to land there” (Genet, The Thief ’s Journal,
74, 75). That Burroughs was now reading these words from The Thief ’s Journal
in the city named in it as the symbol of treason explains, surely, the urgency
of his determination to best the “greatest living writer of prose,” as if to escape
the uncanny sensation of finding himself scripted inside Genet’s novel. And yet,
both despite the tension he feels with Genet and because of it, when speaking of
morality as “evil,” Burroughs takes for himself Genet’s own strategy of linguistic
subversion. Genet embraced “betrayal” as his ethics precisely in order to short-
circuit and ruin the very language of the moral paradigm from which the term
derives. That is, rather than attacking morality through perversion, Genet works
through subversion—attacking from the inside, from within.
What Burroughs’ ethics have in common with Genet’s—and with Artaud’s,
whose “theatre of cruelty” also short-circuits ethical norms—is his challenge
to think beyond and outside the given language.12 Having declared morality an
“unqualified evil,” what can be the basis for ethical behavior? For Burroughs,
ethics “can no longer maintain an existence separate from the facts of physiology,
bodily chemistry, LSD, electronics, physics” (Interzone, 123). The question
of how human conduct might be directed when electronics replaces ethics is

perhaps less nettlesome for Burroughs because he has already actively embraced
the dangerous consequences of shattering the human pattern for himself. But
this was already Artaud’s point, insisting that “a ‘theatre of cruelty’ means theatre
that is difficult and cruel for myself first of all” (Artaud, The Theatre and Its
Double, 57); and Genet’s own move, since for him “betrayal” was also above all
an issue of shame and therefore solitude; of how to live with oneself first of all,
before thinking of living in society. In other words, Burroughs’ problem with
Genet is that he finds himself—or rather his desired self—already there too well
in Genet’s writing.
We can see Genet’s ethics at work in a key passage from his novel Funeral Rites
(Pompes funèbres, 1945) that has such extraordinary similarities to a passage in
Junky that it would seem likely Burroughs wrote his own novel with Genet’s
example before him—were this not effectively impossible. For Junky was written
between 1950 and 1952, and Funeral Rites was not translated until 1969, and
even in French, the text was not widely available until 1953.13 The similarities are
not, however, as we will see, entirely coincidental and confirm both how close
Burroughs and Genet are in specific ethical and aesthetic ways, and why, looking
back on his own oeuvre in the 1990s in My Education, Burroughs found himself
so conflicted about Genet.
The passage from Funeral Rites concerns the character Riton, who, close to
starving for lack of food in war-torn France, finds a cat that he has to kill in order
to eat. The description is “ghastly” beyond the point of farce, as Riton beats the
cat with a hammer while the cat tries to scratch him back: “He kept whacking
wildly and missing. ‘The bastard.’ […] The cat was a big gray tom that he would
have liked to stroke” (Genet, Funeral Rites, 85-86). Riton attempts to strangle the
poor beast and, later, we learn that he hung it on a wall and “cut it up” before
eating the “mutilated remains” (161). Filled now by a sensation of “terrible
emptiness,” of feeling “alone with his solitude,” Riton speculates; “Maybe it’s the
cat that made me like that” (225). For “ever since that day [of killing the cat]
Riton had been aware of the presence” of “the cat he carried within him” (162).
Burroughs’ Junky does not involve eating a cat, but does feature an “ugly-looking
gray cat” that scratches Lee, so that he begins “slapping it back and forth” while
the cat “screamed and clawed” at him; “‘Now I’ll finish the bastard off,’ I said,
picking up a heavy painted cane” (Burroughs, Junky, 102-3). The scene ends with
the intervention of Lee’s wife, who saves the cat and admonishes him: “Aren’t you
ashamed of yourself?” (103).
While certain shared details—the gray color of the cat, calling it “Bastard”—
seem incidental, and Genet’s scene is more complicated in its narration (like
Funeral Rites as a whole), these scenes are similar not only in their significance,
but materially because of their common intertextual origins, their shared literary
source. That is, as a series of other details demonstrate, both Genet in Funeral
Rites and Burroughs in Junky are rewriting the same tale by Edgar Allan Poe:
“The Black Cat.”14 Burroughs’ passage has already been convincingly interpreted
by Kelly Anspaugh as a complex act of literary appropriation that, in 1952,
offered Burroughs “a means of representing an event otherwise unrepresentable
for the author”—the act of violence that killed his wife (Anspaugh, 127).15 That
is not our interest here, however, and while Genet’s own work is as inextricably
bound up with biography as is Burroughs’—Funeral Rites is dedicated to a dead
Genet had loved16—the issue is less Burroughs’ conscious or unconscious use of
allusion in Junky than his literary reference to Poe’s black cat to allegorize a real-
life one here, which coincides so closely with Genet’s own wider autobiographical
practice. If Burroughs did not read Pompes funèbres by 1952, whenever he did
read it, he would surely have recognized in the novel not just the close but the
uncanny resemblance of Genet’s work to his own.17
After all, Burroughs was not only a lover of the writing of Genet and Poe but
of real cats, and he might well have been translating Genet’s resonant phrasing
from Funeral Rites (“the cat he carried within him”) for his title, The Cat Inside
(1986), a book that at one point openly reflects on the scene of cat torture
represented in Junky.18 The Cat Inside indeed features another highly specific
reference to torturing cats, which relates it to Genet’s Funeral Rites. One of the
most contentious issues with Genet’s novel in French criticism is the way it
represents the Nazis in occupied France. Not only is Riton himself a traitor who
joins the Vichy militia, and so a perverse object of the narrator’s sexual desire,
but, far more controversially, through his first person narrator Genet assumes
the point of view of Hitler. Ann Douglas thus observed that for “Burroughs, as
for Jean Genet, one of his literary heroes, Hitler became a seminal figure” (in
Burroughs, Word Virus, xvi). Her remark is particularly insightful, insofar as it
stresses the affinity of Burroughs and Genet’s writing via their literary rapport
for Hitler. That is, accusations of anti-Semitism have been made against both
authors, the accuracy of which remains to be determined biographically.19 But
when Burroughs and Genet’s texts stage Hitler, they do it so ironically that a case
against their detractors as poor readers becomes easy to make. Albert Dichy’s
response to Ivan Jablonka’s study of Genet’s “anti-Semitism” (2004) illustrates
the problem of political readings that don’t engage with the humor so crucial
to grasping such texts as Genet and Burroughs’: “Genet would have been a
worshipper of Hitler, ‘blindly’ adhering to the Nazi model. Let’s read in Funeral
Rites the evocation of his idol: ‘Could it be that a simple mustache composed
of stiff black hair—and dyed with L’Oréal perhaps—meant: cruelty, despotism,
violence, rage, foam, asps, strangulation, death, forced marches, ostentation,
prison, daggers?’” (Dichy, “La Part d’ombre de Genet”; my translation).20
This satirical treatment of Hitler in Genet’s Funeral Rights resonates with a
multitude of routines in Burroughs’ oeuvre that mock political power and its
reliance on the media. But The Cat Inside is Burroughs’ text that invites the most
specific parallel. One of the most disturbing scenes of his text thus describes an
S.S. initiation rite, “an exercise designed to eliminate all traces of pity-poison
and mold a full Ubermensch”: “to gouge out the eye of a pet cat” (Burroughs, The
Cat Inside, 33). Here we see most forcibly Burroughs’ combination of cats with
ethics, or rather, posthuman ethics. This unexpected relation sheds new light on
Lee’s behavior in Junky and Queer in the terms of Genet.
Implicit in Burroughs’ novel and explicit in Genet’s, the cat is for Lee and
Riton not only an other but also themselves. In Junky, this identification is
implied through the precise echoing of numerous key words from the episode
of cat torture in a following one where Lee’s attempt to quit junk through
alcohol brings about his total collapse. After a delirium in which he witnesses
a terrifying vision of “the final place where the human road ends,” Lee is left
“panting and whimpering” in a direct echo of the “groaning and whimpering”
cat (Burroughs, Junky, 111–12).21 That Lee is the cat confirms the act of violence
as self-directed—a point Burroughs himself recognized when looking back on
the scene from The Cat Inside: “I was literally hurting myself and I didn’t know it”
(Burroughs, The Cat Inside, 48). What happens to Riton in Funeral Rites invites
a comparison with the posthuman possibility raised in Junky by Lee’s vision
of “where the human road ends.” For Riton’s upshot is to have freed himself
through his extreme act of cruelty, as Mairéad Hanrahan acutely points out:
The death of the cat confronted Riton to his solitude, the solitude that comes from
one’s feeling of an otherness located, sheltered inside oneself. Having made his
choice, having committed the irredeemable, Riton now finds himself “alone with
his solitude in the midst of himself.” Freeing him from unthinking obedience
to social convention, it embarks him on a path that leads, via destruction, to
the solitude of those brooking no constraints on their freedom (“Une écriture
retorse: la réponse de Genet à ses juges,” 520; my translation).22
Hanrahan’s powerful analysis of Riton’s behavior very closely parallels the

moment in Queer when Lee identifies himself with “a saint or a wanted criminal”
at the point of being able “to proceed to any extreme of action” (a phrase echoed
by the “extreme act” that will “shatter the human pattern” previously noted in
Burroughs’ 1955 journal). That collapsing of distinctions between saint and
criminal, and with it of the language of moral distinctions, now appears all
the more connected to Genet. Indeed, although Lee’s breakthrough occurs in
Queer rather than in Junky, the manuscript history of the two texts reveals that
this material overlapped (Harris, The Secret of Fascination, 253). To be precise,
Burroughs almost certainly wrote the passage where Lee attacks the cat in May
1952, probably a few days after he sent Ginsberg the manuscript of Queer. And
so, while in Junky the act of violence ends with another person mirroring back
Lee’s shame—his wife’s challenge, “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”—followed
by his own identification with the brutalized animal, through Queer we can see
it leads to Lee’s identification with a saint or criminal who has “nothing to lose,”
who has “stepped beyond” (Burroughs, Queer, 55).
If Lee’s freedom resembles Riton’s, the larger point is that Burroughs’ ethics
strongly resonate with Genet’s. Hanrahan’s philosophical reading of Riton’s
solitude after having eaten the cat is all the more relevant for it is reinforced
by Genet’s own ethical stance: “I stand with all solitary men” [“Je suis avec tout
homme seul”] (Genet, The Declared Enemy, 15). Would Burroughs stand together
with Genet? The last words of The Cat Inside take Burroughs’ own statement
of solitude—“I am the cat who walks alone. And to me all supermarkets are
alike”—and reworks it into a stance that might indeed be directly addressed to
Genet: “We are the cats inside. We are the cats who cannot walk alone, and for us
there is only one place” (The Cat Inside, 94; Burroughs’ emphasis). That “place,” of
course, can only be the space “beyond.”
Why, then, did reading Prisoner of Love cause Burroughs so much grief and
lead to such intense ambivalence in My Education? Let us formulate a hypothesis:
it was Genet’s most political book and Burroughs, like so many readers, couldn’t
bear the political consequences of his ethical stance. Genet’s idea of standing
together with those who are alone turned out to mean abandoning those who
are no longer alone. He made no secret that he paradoxically showed no loyalty
to those whose cause he joined, often claiming his love for revolution was self-
interestedly aesthetic: “You can see how beautiful the fedayeen are. Certainly,
their revolt is gratifying to me, as is that of the Black Panthers, but I don’t know
whether I could have stayed so long with them if physically they had been less
attractive” (Genet, The Declared Enemy, 191). Genet even went so far as to state
that if the Palestinians’ revolution ever did succeed, he would lose interest in
it, because fundamentally he couldn’t help but remain in the position of the
outsider.23 Asked to give his vision of a political revolution, he again made a
reply that couldn’t be more alienated and alienating:
I’m not all that eager for there to be a revolution. If I’m really sincere, I have to
say that I don’t particularly want it. […] If there were a real revolution, I might
not be able to be against it. There would be adherence, and I am not that kind of
man; I am not a man of adherence, but a man of revolt. My point of view is very
egotistic. I would like for the world—now pay close attention to the way I say
this—I would like for the world not to change so that I can be against the world.
(Genet, The Declared Enemy, 132)
In contrast, the political dimension of Burroughs’ works cannot conceal, for

all the black Célinian relish of their rhetoric, the deeply moral values at their
heart. Burroughs’ interest in revolution was not aesthetic, as Genet insisted
his was, which is surely why My Education openly mocks Genet’s attachment
to physical appearances. “In Prisoner of Love, a perceptive black officer from
Sudan named Mubarak says to Genet’s narrator: ‘The Israeli soldiers are young.
Would you be glad to be with them? I expect they would be very nice to you’”
(Burroughs, My Education, 8). If Burroughs’ political support is unoriginally
ethical, it nevertheless emerges after the display of a characteristic cynicism in
My Education: “As for moi it would make no difference to me which side I was
with. (With, not on.) I can see value in both. But when it comes to the situation
in South Africa there is for me only one side possible” (9). Here, Burroughs
once again carefully thinks through his prepositions in order to differentiate
himself from Genet, to avoid any insinuation of an erotic or aesthetic self-
interest, and to unambiguously take an ethical stance on the apartheid regime.
Then again, this regime was of course routinely compared with Israel’s treatment
of the Palestinians in the 1980s, so that Burroughs’ very effort to draw a clear
distinction between himself and Genet, when it comes to taking political sides,
forces him to acknowledge that his own notorious cynicism was a false front.
There are indeed uncanny parallels between his mockery of Genet’s conflation
of the ethical with the aesthetic/erotic in My Education, and Burroughs’ own
political posture during his first decade as a writer, at the time of Queer in
1952 and, even more so, The Yage Letters in 1953. Finding himself caught up in
the Colombian Civil war, Burroughs sounds remarkably like Genet, opposing
Spanish colonialism and supporting the indigenous people on aesthetic grounds

tainted by shameless self-interest. Writing to Ginsberg, he too couldn’t resist
equating his political sympathies with his erotic desires: “The Conservatives are
not only a bunch of shits they are all ugly […] I literally only saw one I would
consider eligible […] The best people in S.A. are the Indians. Certainly the best-
looking people” (Letters, 159: Burroughs’ emphasis). But for all his hardboiled
cynicism—“Always was a pushover for a just cause and a pretty face” (160)—
Burroughs couldn’t help himself: “However it is impossible to remain neutral […]
Wouldn’t surprise me if I end up with the Liberal guerrillas” (159; Burroughs’
emphasis). That is, Burroughs and Genet were for the guerrillas—“with” (if not
“on”) the same side of Justice—but Burroughs’ stance is unambiguously ethical,
which is why in the end, unlike Genet, he must refuse “the last lifeboat.”
The intensity of Burroughs’ ambivalence towards Genet, especially towards
his central concept of betrayal, stresses just how seriously, in retrospect and on
reflection, he used Genet’s oeuvre to re-evaluate his own ethics. Measuring his
works against Genet’s revealed his own humanism to Burroughs, which confirms
the audacious case argued by Hadrien Laroche for Genet as the man who gave
birth to humanism.24 However, as the next chapter shows, while Burroughs
ultimately fails in the contest he had set Genet and himself for which would be
the most alien or inhuman, there was a point in his oeuvre—its zenith or nadir,
depending on the view taken of his most experimental cut-up work—when he
did seem “ready to leave the whole human comedy behind and walk into the
unknown.”
8
Burroughs’ Mugwumps, Michaux’s Meidosems

and the Future of Literature
“I spit on my life. I want nothing to do with it.

Who can do no better than his life?”
—Henri Michaux, Life in the Folds
“No writer has any secrets. It’s all in his work.”

—William Burroughs
“A life of its own”
In fall 1961, Ginsberg visited Burroughs in Tangier and was “horrified at how
inhuman” he had become (Miles, Beat Hotel, 255). To be more precise, Ginsberg’s
horror was to encounter in person the same otherness he had encountered
on paper earlier that year in Burroughs’ first cut-up novel, The Soft Machine
(1961). Writing in early October to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg hailed it
as an “astounding idea, the book. The point is, to mutate consciousness, get it
outside of language” (Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg, Letters, 126–27). However, the
“point” left Ginsberg feeling physically nauseated (“I was vomiting”), because
of “big arguments about future of universe” they had in Tangier: “Burroughs
wanted it to be unknown Artaud mutation out of bodies.”1 Summing up fear
of an otherness too extreme, the prospect of a Burroughsian future seemed “to
have killed ‘Hope’ in any known form” (Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg, Letters, 127).
Ginsberg’s way to explain the “astounding” quality of The Soft Machine by
invoking the name of Artaud indicates that Burroughs’ appropriation of Artaud’s
works was far more extreme than his own. Paraphrasing “a statement by Artaud”
in a 1965 interview, Ginsberg readily embraced the idea that art might physically
effect the body, that sound “changes the molecular composition of the nerve
cells or something like that, it permanently alters the being that has experience
of this” (Ginsberg, Spontaneous Mind, 32). While his unusual and frustrating
vagueness (“or something like that”) admits Ginsberg’s own uncertain grasp
of Artaud, as discussed in Chapter 6, his emphasis here in 1961 on “mutation”
establishes his acute anxiety at the radical shift in consciousness and the body
that Burroughs was proposing, from “any known form” to the “unknown.” What
made Ginsberg physically sick in Tangier is, I believe, rather too easily lost or
forgotten in most accounts of Burroughs’ cut-up work. Readers and critics
sometimes wonder if Burroughs is serious, but this is the wrong way around; his
work, just like Artaud’s works, should make us question whether we are serious.2
Do we really want literature to change us?
Vomiting up, Ginsberg certainly took his friend seriously in 1961, and he
may well have felt Burroughs was now winning the wager he had made five years
earlier when comparing himself with Genet for which of them was the least
“humanly involved” (Burroughs, Interzone, 128). For Burroughs’ experimental
commitment to the “unknown” in The Soft Machine was both ethical and aesthetic,
just as it had been in 1955 when his goal to “shatter the human pattern” through
some “extreme act” went together with his aim to “create something that will have
a life of its own, that can put me in real danger” (128; Burroughs’ emphasis). The
life Burroughs spoke of wanting to create and the danger he sought out in 1955
were the very antithesis of the “human pattern” in the traditional novel form,
which he felt was now dead: “This novel,” he declares of what was then becoming
Naked Lunch, “is not posthumous” (128). To which, with The Soft Machine in
mind, we might add: not posthumous but posthuman.
Taking its critical terminology from posthuman studies, what follows here
and provides the finale of this book is an attempt to recover the stakes for the
future of literature of the radical transition in Burroughs’ work from Naked
Lunch to The Soft Machine. We might usefully locate Burroughs in relation to
Kerouac and Ginsberg by taking as shorthand the terminology of Rosi Braidotti
(2013), according to which Kerouac’s vision would be post-human (life beyond
the self); Ginsberg’s poetry post-anthropocentric (life beyond the species); and,
borrowing the title of Lyotard’s 1988 book, Burroughs’ writing the inhuman
(life beyond death).3 The value of these large critical terms—to help situate
work within a bigger picture—however, once again needs to be balanced with
concrete texts and particular readings. That is, I will read Burroughs’ “inhuman”
work leading up to The Soft Machine with and through the work of the Belgian
poet and painter Henri Michaux, which offers a specific comparative optic that
Burroughs’ Mugwumps and Michaux’s Meidosems 189
transcends the literary by combining the verbal with the visual. While this
chapter therefore falls within the tradition of comparative literature to a greater
extent than previous ones, it also transcends the literary through a distinctively
material specificity. But more immediately, having emphasized how in 1961
Burroughs and his cut-up texts left Ginsberg stunned, we must, as it were,
compare Burroughs with himself and acknowledge that his radical experimental
commitment to the “unknown” remained in tension with far more conventional
ambitions.
Take, for example, the claim Burroughs made in the mid-1980s for his literary
identity and legacy: “I am concerned with the creation of character. In fact I can
say that this is my principal preoccupation. If I am remembered for anything, it
will be for my characters.” (Burroughs, Adding Machine, 217). We are tempted
to ask, what on earth was Burroughs thinking? Remembered for the creation
of character? In the sense “character” has in the classical tradition of the realist
novel, the claim is obviously nonsense, and when Burroughs offers a list of
seventeen names as evidence, it is noticeable that most are colorful monikers
(“the Heavy Metal Kid,” “Hamburger Mary,” “the Beagle,” “Daddy Long Legs”)
for bit-parts no reader could possibly visualize; did he ever describe them? We
can’t remember. But we can understand and situate Burroughs’ claim within both
the bigger picture of his oeuvre and larger debates about cultural history when
we consider the specific context in which he made it: his essay “Beckett and
Proust.” If we imagine that, in a comparison of the two writers, Burroughs would
naturally side with Beckett, as an experimental artist and near-contemporary,
rather than with Proust, the novelist who died just eight years after he was
born, we would be mistaken. In the line preceding his claim to be concerned
with creating character, Burroughs states categorically that his affinity is for the
Frenchman: “I am very much closer to Proust than to Beckett” (217). Burroughs’
grounds for distancing himself from Beckett are revealing because, in asserting
his own Proustian interest in character, time, memory, place and history, he
rejects precisely the features of Beckett’s work that seem most Burroughsian:
from “Beckett violates all the rules and conventions of the novelist,” and “There
is no suspense in Beckett” to “There are no characters as such, and certainly
no character development,” and “Beckett is quite literally inhuman” (218-20).
Burroughs’ unexpected identification of his writing with that of Proust over
Beckett could hardly go any further than this final remark, and we might wonder
if he is not protesting too much. But in broader terms, what he is doing here in
this 1985 essay, by identifying so strongly with the modernist French novelist,
amounts to a precise rejection of the label that would shortly come to dominate
discussion and analysis of literature and culture in the late twentieth century:
postmodernism.
Burroughs always appeared the most postmodern of those writers labeled
“Beat,” and it is unsurprising that the field of criticism which emerged in the
1980s, especially the landmark books by Jennie Skerl (1985) and Robin Lydenberg
(1987), pointed in that direction.4 As the term “postmodern” began to be more
precisely defined aesthetically (enumerating features such as collage, pastiche,
and fragmentation) and philosophically (focusing on relativism, the loss of the
“real,” and a decentering of subjectivity and agency), the fit with Burroughs
made increasing sense, and he became widely acknowledged as a postmodernist
avant la lettre. And yet, within just a decade, Timothy Murphy’s Wising Up the
Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs (1997) would actively resist Burroughs’
identification as postmodern. While Murphy’s “amodern” thesis deserves
consideration on its own terms—arguing that Burroughs’ work is too politically
engaged to be subsumed within “reflexive” postmodern aesthetics (2)—his
book can also be taken as evidence of critical reluctance to accept that any label
fits Burroughs. The contradiction staged above, between Proust’s “creation of
character” on one side and Artaud’s “mutation out of bodies” on the other, is
exemplary of how difficult it is to reconcile the radical internal contradictions that
mark Burroughs’ work, and why critics inevitably denature it by choosing sides
(as, ironically enough, Burroughs himself does by recognizing himself in Proust
but not in Beckett). And so if we return to what he claimed was his “principal
preoccupation,” we should not simply dismiss as self-deluded Burroughs’ claim
to be creating character. Instead, we should rethink the mutation of the “human”
and the “known” beyond the novel form, taking the journey Burroughs made
from Naked Lunch to The Soft Machine. That experimental journey transcended
genres and indeed media, as did the oeuvre of Henri Michaux, and a comparative
reading of their work enables us to rethink the transition from “creating character”
to creating something with “a life of its own.”
Burroughs’ list of supposedly memorable characters in “Beckett and Proust”
concludes with the distinctly minor figure of “the Rube,” who makes only a
brief appearance early on in Naked Lunch, but begins predictably with his most
famous, Dr. Benway. Missing from his list is where, I would argue, Burroughs
placed his paradoxical last best hope for literature: Mugwumps. Of course, these
creatures are emphatically not characters, in the sense that they are not named
individuals but a species, and an alien species at that. They are, however, certainly
memorable, and although, for better or worse, when thinking of Mugwumps the
image that immediately comes to mind is from David Cronenberg’s film Naked
Lunch (1991), they were so distinctive and their name was so catchy that within
a year of Burroughs’ book appearing in America, in 1963 they had already
inspired the name of a folk rock band. That other artists gave Mugwumps first a
sound and then an image might seem inconsequential or entirely distinct from
their appearance in Naked Lunch. But if we understand Burroughs’ “principal
preoccupation” as aiming to “create something that will have a life of its own,”
and if we take Burroughs seriously—or as he always demanded, literally—then
the independent musical and cinematic existence of the Mugwump is simply
evidence of what he meant. Mugwumps are memorable characters, perhaps, but
to understand their place in the development of Burroughs’ work, from Naked
Lunch to The Soft Machine, a comparative analysis with the characters of another
novelist will not do. And the work of another writer will not do either, which
is why, instead, I propose to read the Mugwumps of Burroughs through alien
creatures that exist in two media: the “Meidosems” of Henri Michaux.
“Who can do no better than his life?”
Michaux’s Meidosems exist in two forms at once: as a book of seventy enigmatic

poetic fragments, published a decade before Naked Lunch, entitled “Portrait of
the Meidosems” within the larger text Life in the Folds (La Vie dans les plis, 1949);
and as a series of twelve lithographs published with the poems in a deluxe edition
the previous year, simply entitled Meidosems. While Mugwumps and Meidosems
share some uncanny similarities, the aim is not to compare how these creatures
are represented, but to see how they point beyond representation itself. The work
of Michaux is especially illuminating in this regard, since the hybrid biological
properties of his Meidosems and the verbal and visual media in which he
represents them, enable us to better grasp where Burroughs was going with his
Mugwumps. Michaux goes beyond representation by making visible the signs’
autonomy and undermining their referential function. Rethinking Burroughs in
these terms makes the move from analyzing posthuman creatures represented
within the “cyborgian” text—examining its hybrid fantasy creatures—to
recognizing the text itself as cyborg, as indeed a “soft machine.” This dimension
of Burroughs’ work has been relatively little examined and when it has, the
emphasis has been placed on “machine” rather than “soft,” whereas it is vital to
stress both. And so, while Brent Wood rightly deconstructs the terms “science”
and “fiction” that make up the literary genre “science fiction” in order to argue
that Burroughs’ experimental work is not merely metaphoric but has a “self-
consciously operational inspiration” (Wood, 12), we might go one step further.
For the work of Burroughs envisions the future of literature as the creation
of life beyond representation and beyond the human. That is, the “unknown
Artaud mutation” Ginsberg feared appears, momentarily but materially, in the
transition from Naked Lunch to The Soft Machine, when Burroughs produced
what, to adapt the term Evelyne Grossman coined in her analysis of Michaux, we
could call inhuman “insect writing.”
Reading Burroughs through Michaux doesn’t respond to a line of causal
influence: unlike previous chapters, there is no claim to genealogy as such here.
Rather, there are specific contiguities and coincidences that not only sustain
a comparative reading but are highly apposite given the nature of both their
oeuvres, especially Burroughs’, which always embraced the revelatory power
of hazard through curious points of intersection and chance encounters. The
oeuvres of Burroughs and Michaux indeed come together at a very precise
moment through a chain of timely coincidences. Although it is well known that
the two men met briefly in Paris in the late 1950s when Burroughs was living in
the Beat Hotel, what matters most here is not their encounter but their textual
rendezvous generated by events taking place in Paris just a couple of months
after the publication of Naked Lunch by Olympia Press. To be precise: in October
1959, a month that began when Brion Gysin momentously introduced Burroughs
to cut-up methods and that ended with the opening of a major exhibition of
Michaux’s inks, gouaches and drawings at the Galerie Daniel Cordier on rue
Miromesnil, a mile or so north and west of the Beat Hotel.
The literary oeuvres of Burroughs and Michaux already had much in
common, of course. Both authors had written about their experiments with a
range of drugs: Michaux wrote no fewer than four books on the subject of his
experiences with drugs including mescaline, marijuana, ether, LSD, cocaine,
hashish and even caffeine and love. Both also made scientific research a central
part of their artistic projects, in Michaux’s case ranging from human biology to
zoology, with a special interest in entomology. Indeed, both authors saw their
oeuvres as scientific research, and admired De Quincey’s foundational work
of drug writing as “medical and poetic at the same time.”5 Burroughs was not
just as interested in science as in science fiction but, through his multi-media
cut-up experimentations, combined the traditional literary writer’s desk with
technical equipment and methods more at home in a laboratory. The two

authors also wrote about their major geographical journeys, including trips to
Latin America. Michaux’s Ecuador (1929) would have appealed to Burroughs
not only in general but for the attention it gives to details that are both bizarre
and yet accurate, such as the description of pernicious, invisible water-borne
parasites that anticipate the silent Anopheles mosquitos of Naked Lunch and
Dr. Benway’s claim to have been ship’s doctor on the S.S. Filariasis, named after
a parasitic roundworm disease spread by mosquitos (Burroughs, Naked Lunch,
39, 28). There are also striking parallels in their personal lives, and in any other
context it would be remarkable to note the most uncanny parallel of all between
the lives of Burroughs and Michaux; but having witnessed how Burroughs’
invocations of Gide, Cocteau and Genet all conflated questions of literary
genealogy with private trauma, it is perhaps less shocking to observe that, like
Burroughs’ wife, Michaux’s wife also suffered a tragic and traumatizing death.
In 1948, Michaux visited her in hospital for a month before she succumbed to
the appalling burns she suffered after accidentally setting her nightgown on
fire. What might otherwise be an entirely extra-textual matter, best left to the
biographers, turns out in fact to connect Michaux with his Meidosems and
Burroughs with Michaux in precisely textual ways.
The key evidence for how Burroughs engaged textually with Michaux by
associating genealogy with trauma is an unpublished, 500-word cut-up text
produced in December 1959, entitled “GALLERY DESTROYED ON EVE OF
VERNISSAGE.”6 Presented as a report in the Paris Herald Tribune, it describes
a fire gutting the Galerie Daniel Cordier—where, it notes, Michaux’s canvasses
had just been exhibited. The very existence of this text demonstrates how closely
Burroughs thought about Michaux’s work at this early stage in his development
of cut-up methods, and how interested he was in the visual as well as the verbal.
Burroughs’ cut-up situates Michaux’s work in two specific ways that mirror
back his own main concerns. First, in relation to the identity and genealogy
of Michaux’s oeuvre, the text invokes French cultural history by several times
naming André Breton, the “Pope of the Surrealist Movement.” Michaux is
then introduced as “painter and poet of no movement,” pointedly insisting on
his independence from Surrealism as well as from any one form of creativity
(painting or poetry). At this point, the text becomes a scrambled cut-up alluding
to: mescaline (Michaux’s drug—although Burroughs was also taking it at this
time), yagé (Burroughs’ drug), Dr Marc Schlumberger (the French psychoanalyst
who had been treating Burroughs in Paris), Jean Genet and, quite strikingly via
a phrase mixing English with French (“cet attempt to resuscitate un cadaver”),

Anatole France. Genet returns at the end of Burroughs’ cut-up, as if being quoted
in a newspaper interview, to pronounce explicitly on the issue of literary history
and genealogy: “Apollinaire was not a surrealist.” By this point, it is clear that
Burroughs’ text is less about Surrealism than about the cut-up project he was
launching with Brion Gysin, or rather, about the genealogical relation between
the two: they were not Surrealists! The conclusion of this already remarkable
text then suddenly shifts the ground from art historical disputes to biographical
trauma, as Burroughs compares the fire in the art gallery to the death of
Michaux’s wife. This he describes with a mixture of factual accuracy (adding by
hand the correct date, “Feb 1948”) and strangely detailed fantasy in which the
blame is placed on the husband. Although Michaux was not in fact present at
the time, the cut-up text describes his tragic attempt “to extinguish the fire with
a rug upon which turpentine had been inadvertently spilled by a disgruntled
former maid.” Burroughs’ text ends by declaring that “Michaux had been in ill
health recently […] depressed since the recent death of his wife.”
Even on such a quick summary, it is evident that at this momentous period
in the development of Burroughs’ oeuvre, he was using the relationship between
Michaux’s creative work and personal tragedy to think through his own: why
else insert the name of his own previous psychoanalyst, Marc Schlumberger, in
the mix of fires destroying artwork and life that he was cutting up? And if he
did not know it, then Burroughs intuited Michaux’s own meditations on this
very relationship that informed Life in the Folds (La Vie dans les plis, 1949), the
text in which he published “Portrait of the Meidosems” the year after his wife
died. It is now a commonplace to read the text and its lithographs as Michaux’s
response to the trauma: in the Preface to the English translation of Meidosems
(1992), Elizabeth Jackson speculates that her death “may explain the nature of the
aesthetic intensity” with which Michaux depicted “the poignant drama of these
ectoplasmic life-forms” (Michaux, Meidosems, x); while Raymond Bellour goes so
far as to present the Meidosems’ metamorphic variety of forms as directly linked
to “a burnt, disfigured woman lying on a hospital bed” (328; my translation). As
we will see, metamorphosis and suffering are indeed qualities associated with
Michaux’s Meidosems, but it is clearly perverse, as well as reductive, to search
for biographical origins when Michaux actually begins La Vie dans les plis with
an epigraph violently refuting the conflation of life and art: “I spit on my life. I
want nothing to do with it. Who can do no better than his life?” (Michaux, La Vie
dans les plis, 9; my translation).7 It is not hard to imagine Burroughs agreeing with
Michaux, and his claim that a writer has no secrets because they are “all in
his work” (Lotringer, 302) amounts to the same position. And so if I evoke
biographical parallels between Michaux and Burroughs, these include above all
the way each attacked biography, spitting on it, cutting it up. Used as epigraphs
for this chapter, their statements direct us both into the text and beyond life—“in
any known form,” as Ginsberg would have said, with great anxiety.
Hieroglyphs of Mockery
Michaux’s epigraph takes us directly to his Meidosems since it honors one

of their main attributes: they are not individuals with a singular life, but an
imaginary species of thousands who constantly change form. In this respect,
their existence in two media is crucial, since Michaux simultaneously wrote
them into existence and created them visually in the dozen simple but beautiful
lithographs he produced for the first edition of his book, Meidosems (1948).
Burroughs, of course, left us no portraits of Mugwumps other than brief verbal
accounts in Naked Lunch, where the creatures appear in paradoxical but almost
identically described terms in four sections. Significantly, on the proofs of his
text for “Portrait of Meidosems,” Michaux crossed out the title several times,
indicating how important but problematic it was. Indeed, although he also
hesitated over how to gender his creatures—whether to call them Meidosems
or Meidosemmes—most revealing is his hesitation over the term portrait, which
usually indicates the representation of individuals at their most individual, their
face. Canceling the original phrasing “Portraits & façons,”8 and replacing it by
the singular “Portrait” reveals Michaux’s intention to make “representation”—in
the political as well as aesthetic sense—problematic, since the Meidosems not
only move all the time, and so cannot sit still for a portrait, but also constantly
change shape and form. There is a tension here in the language that embodies
the very material process by which the lithographs were produced, the stone and
the ink physically bringing together the hard with the soft, the fixed with the
fluid. Visually and verbally, Michaux’s creatures are nothing if not enigmatic, as
confirmed by the astonishing number of questions in the poems, such as What’s
happening? What’s the matter? Was it yesterday? Will it finally hold him up? But
his eyes? Whoever, strangled, doesn’t talk one day of breaking loose? But the
roofs? But the houses? (Michaux, Meidosems, 31, 43, 45, 58, 87).
Figure 8.1 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate I

(1948) © Gallimard
Figure 8.2 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate IX

(1948) © Gallimard
The question “what are Meidosems?” has, then, to give way to the mystery
of how they are described. We are told that they have viscous insides and are
accordingly unctuous, translucent and elastic, and have no armature: “their
vertebral columns (really vertebral?) showing through beneath the ectoplasm
of their being” (Michaux, Meidosems, 46). They are so elastic, in fact, that they
struggle to stay put and are helped or tortured by dozens of tutors or “spears,”
up to 34 of them (9). Above all, these creatures are paradoxical, such that their
strengths and weaknesses are one and the same: “Extraordinary elasticity;
that’s the source of the Meidosems’ pleasure. Of their misfortune too” (11). The
key characteristic of Michaux’s creatures is their physical vulnerability, which
is not how we generally think of Burroughs’ Mugwumps, but if Meidosems
are made of “ectoplasm” and subject to “losing their very substance” (27), they
are at risk of the liquefaction that dominates bodily matter in Naked Lunch.
Like Michaux’s Meidosems, Burroughs’ Mugwumps experience substance
loss on a daily basis. Burroughs has them produce a longevity serum of which
they are “milked” by the Reptiles who are addicted to it. After a violent sexual act,
one Mugwump thus “falls with a fluid, sated plop” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 65).
Figure 8.3 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate II

(1948) © Gallimard
Figure 8.4 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate VII

(1948) © Gallimard
In Naked Lunch, liquefaction is not merely a risk of particular fantasy creatures

but the aim of an entire political strategy: “the Liquefaction Program involves
the eventual merging of everyone into One Man by a process of protoplasmic
absorption” (123). Across the text, Burroughs satirizes liquefaction as the extreme
degeneration of matter to its lowest and most primitive level of organization;
and yet, the danger of this extreme is inherent in the desire of avoiding the
other extreme of rigid, fixed, unchanging identity. “We must not,” according to
Burroughs’ Factualist Bulletin, “reject or deny our protoplasmic core, striving at
all times to maintain a maximum of flexibility without falling into the morass of
liquefaction…” (140; Burroughs’ ellipsis). Burroughs’ vision of biology as caught
in between viscid jelly and brittle bone has long been interpreted in political
terms, going back to Tony Tanner, who in 1970 inferred “you cannot be free;
instead you must continually be freeing yourself ” (Tanner, 123). As is hinted by
the characteristic ellipsis in Burroughs’ Bulletin, and as a detailed comparative
analysis of Mugwumps and Meidosems shows, Tanner’s broad ethics of
“freedom” also apply at a precise aesthetic and formal level. For Mugwumps and
Meidosems both raise the biological-literary question of species-genre, that is to
say, of classification.
Figure 8.5 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate X

(1948) © Gallimard
Figure 8.6 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate XII

(1948) © Gallimard
Are Meidosems closer to the human or to the animal (the human on the
right or the bird on the left of Plate X)? Likewise, from Burroughs’ description,
we do not know whether to situate Mugwumps with birds of prey or mammals,
since they have “purple-blue lips [that] cover a razor-sharp beak of black bone
with which they frequently tear each other to shreds,” but also “erect penises”
(Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 46). The hybridity of the Mugwump is not unique
in Naked Lunch. Bradley the Buyer, for example, is in consecutive sentences
compared to physically incompatible predators— “Like a vampire bat” and “like
a gorged boa constrictor” (17)—but Mugwumps give such similes a biological
form. Michaux’s lithographs visualize how bafflingly his Meidosems also swerve
in scale and nature, from representing them as tiny aerial organisms falling
as a delicate and graceful spectacle, likened to a room filled with dust shining
in the afternoon sunlight (Plate XII), to images where some appear like long
goofy insects or Mandrill monkeys (Plate III) and others like giant spiders (Plate
VI). “Contracted spherule, insect’s head, like the head of a dragonfly,” affirms
Michaux’s text at one point (Meidosems, 59). Likewise, despite their mammalian
penises and avian beaks, Mugwumps have eyes that are “blank with insect calm”
(Naked Lunch, 63).
Figure 8.7 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate III

(1948) © Gallimard
Figure 8.8 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate VI (1948)

© Gallimard
Burroughs’ jumbled up biology is no more haphazard than Michaux’s.

Indeed, they are not simply a flight of fantasy, as these same terms are repeated
verbatim throughout Naked Lunch. These terms are also consistent with the
Mugwump’s textual origins in Junky, and so establish, as it were, the stability
of their genetic DNA make-up across Burroughs’ oeuvre. In Junky, when Lee
reaches Mexico City, he enters one of the “ambiguous or transitional districts”
adjacent to those where he can find drugs, and it is here that he encounters the
obscene of the Mugwump (Burroughs, Junky, 93). In a short account, whose
key details are reprised in Naked Lunch, this creature’s “place of origin is the
Near East, probably Egypt,” his “lips are thin and purple-blue like the lips of a
penis,” he is “milked” for a longevity substance, and his eyes have “an insect’s
unseeing calm”: “He is as specialized as an insect, for the performance of some
inconceivably vile function” (93). While identified as a “man,” Burroughs
emphasizes the creature’s ambiguity and hybridity, and the “transitional” urban
geography surrounding them suggest some evolutionary throwback or possible
future mutation for them.
Indeed, the Mugwump’s function is to take one evolutionary stage further
Burroughs’ association of narcotic addiction with biological degeneration,
to the dehumanizing collapse of the “human form” into “protoplasm” and
“ectoplasm,” terms that appear often interchangeably two dozen times in Naked
Lunch. Junky confirms that the inhumanity of Mugwumps is associated with
narcotic addiction, but its sequel, Queer, also asserts a parallel association
with sexual desire; only this time, it is not some alien creature but the narrator
himself who demonstrates it. Sitting in the cinema—watching Orpheus—Lee

feels “an amoeboid protoplasmic projection, straining with a blind worm
hunger to enter the other’s body” (Burroughs, Queer, 33). These points of origin
in Burroughs’ earlier, seemingly realist works, indicate the conclusion that the
“worm” or the insect do not represent in his writing some disgusting other,
utterly inhuman, but the alien within, emerging when “the human form can
no longer contain the crustacean horror that has grown inside it” (Burroughs,
Junky, 111). To discover here “a horrific other inside the self,” in the terms of
Chris Beard’s insightful reading of Burroughs and Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch
(Beard, 837), is convincing but does not address the importance of form in his
writings, which is the essential lesson arising from comparing Mugwumps and
Meidosems.
Just like Michaux’s Meidosems that “reappear, disappear” in chimneys and
cracks and “from between the slats” in a room (Michaux, Meidosems, 83),
Burroughs’ Mugwumps “take refuge in the deepest wall crevices” where they
“seal themselves” and remain for weeks “in biostasis” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch,
46). If biostasis further identifies Mugwumps with insects, who behave likewise
according to the seasons, this scientific term more broadly designates their ability
Figure 8.9 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate VIII

(1948) © Gallimard
Figure 8.10 Henri Michaux, Meidosems, Plate V

(1948) © Gallimard
to tolerate environmental changes without their metabolism needing to adapt to

them. They may secrete a fluid that prolongs life “by slowing metabolism” (46),
but their own organisms need to be slowed down by seasonal rebooting.
Meidosems are also constantly described as waiting, surviving, holding on for
the right moment to emerge from their biostasis. Then again, they have “more
arms than an octopus” and “heads studded with suckers” (Michaux, Meidosems,
38). One of them could even be mistaken for a Mugwump (Plate V), who is
equipped with what does look like an erect penis, to be milked of serum, or a long
black tongue in search of warm honey (Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 63). In other
words, these hypersensitive metabolisms keep changing and the descriptions of
them are wildly incompatible, from the miniscule to the gigantic, the delicate
to the monstrous. What is at stake with Burroughs and Michaux’s creatures is
less a matter of external appearances or insides or of species categories than
of some irreducible resistance to being itself, a resistance that is fundamentally
aesthetic. That is, the title “Portrait of the Meidosems” is, in Michaux’s typically
dry humor, a mockery, a joke against us.
Burroughs’ Mugwumps appear more singularly repulsive and static, but of
course their very name combines opposites in conflict, as played out in the
“Talking Asshole” routine, which is precisely a story of the “wump” (the ass)
taking over the “mug” (the face). Burroughs also knew the political etymology
of the term (Mugwump designated Republicans who switched sides to the
Democrats in the late nineteenth century), but turns it into a joke about a bigger
binary than political parties, as indicated by A.J., who addresses his guests in
Naked Lunch as “Cunts, pricks, fence straddlers” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 74);
unable to make up their minds, Mugwumps want it both ways. At one point,
Michaux also humoristically mentions the Meidosems’ inability to decide,
noting they are “more distracted” than monkeys and “always daydreaming
about something else” (Michaux, Meidosems, 82), while at another point, we are
told the highly Burroughsian anecdote of a Meidosem tragi-comically divided
between his left and right hemispheres:
Danger! Run for safety: it’s urgent. Quick. He won’t run away. His right
dominator won’t let him do it. But it’s urgent. His right dominator won’t let him.
His left terrifier thrases, twists around, in agony, shrieking. It’s no use, his right
dominator won’t let him. And so dies the Meidosem who, undivided, could have
escaped. (Meidosems, 33)
Burroughs’ own assault on the contradictory demands of binary logic is

not only apparent in the paradoxical hybridity of his Mugwumps, but more
generally in the incompatible biology that characterizes creatures in Naked
Lunch. Michaux’s Meidosems help us to rethink the Mugwumps place within
the confusion about corporeal insides and outsides and species identity. They
clarify that, while memorable within Naked Lunch—and Cronenberg’s film—
they are in fact a dead-end. That Burroughs’ description of them barely changed
from Junky and that they quickly vanished from his work (making only a passing
reappearance in The Ticket That Exploded), confirms that these monstrous
hybrids are not themselves in evolutionary terms going anywhere, not in
process. No wonder the longevity serum they produce “prolongs life by slowing
metabolism” (Naked Lunch, 46), implying their resemblance to Burroughs’
thermodynamically-defined terminal addict: “his metabolism approaching
Absolute ZERO” (208). When Chris Breu argues that, within the biopolitical
economy of Naked Lunch, Mugwumps are Burroughs’ “science-fiction figuration
of a posthuman being” and his “most striking metaphor” for the emergence of
posthuman bodies (Breu, 212, 214), the limitations in his critical terminology
of figures and metaphors indicates the precise limitations of the Mugwumps
themselves: they exist frozen within representation.
The importance of what can and cannot be figured will return in a discussion
of Burroughs and Michaux’s “insect writing,” but for now we should observe
that Michaux’s Meidosems enable us to grasp not only the limitations of
Mugwumps but also their overlooked material and philosophical dimension,
taking the judicious invitation Grossman makes in La Défiguration: Artaud,
Beckett, Michaux to read Meidosems in terms of the language of representation
itself:
The Meidosem is as malleable as a brush stroke, a paint stain, a scarcely traced

sign, still unfixed, balancing between writing and drawing, between shape
and shapelessness. Pre-signs forever in suspense, they are at one and the same
time the poetical syntax of a writing (“On her long, slim curvaceous legs, a tall
and graceful Meidosemme”) and the paradoxical figuration of the unfigurable
movement of thought. (Grossman, La Défiguration, 100; my translation)
There are likewise signs that Mugwumps had for Burroughs a specific relation
to writing. The “Near East Mugwump” that appears in “Hassan’s Rumpus Room”
gives orders to the boy he is about to rape “in telepathic pictographs” and then
caresses him “in hieroglyphs of mockery” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 63, 64).
In case we miss it, Burroughs repeats the key word—which appears nowhere
else in the text—by referring to the Mugwump’s “stylized hieroglyph hands”
(64). Through the over-determined lexis of “style” and “hand” here, Burroughs
connects the alien creature’s body to his own writing at a physical level as well
as to the language of Ancient Egypt, hieroglyphs (“sacred writing” or “sacred
engraving”) in which ideas are represented visually by images.9
The protean and provisional form of Michaux’s Meidosems point to where
Burroughs will take writing after Naked Lunch, which resembles the “washing
away the human lines” that overtakes the Vigilante, when “no organ is constant
as regards either function or position… sex organs sprout anywhere… rectums
open, deface and close… the entire organism changes color and consistency in
split-second adjustments…” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 9). It should come as no
surprise that this passage is quoted by Deleuze and Guattari to illustrate the
“body without organs” that they appropriated from Artaud. This is not the place
to address in detail the intersection of Burroughs with French critical theory,
but we might observe how the repeated ellipses in his textual body here do
their best to visualize the chaotic pace and logic of constant physical change—
“energy transformation and kinetic movements,” in the terms of Deleuze and
Guattari (Anti-Oedipus, 170)—and that these ellipses nevertheless hint at what
is limiting Burroughs’ attempt to imagine a posthuman biology: language itself,

the presumed hallmark of the human.
Although Paul Sheehan is absolutely right to say that Naked Lunch “explores
posthuman aesthetics at the level of form,” in the sense that the text is “assembled
from disparate parts, like Frankenstein’s monster or Moreau’s hybrids”
(Sheehan, 249), here again the case remains too narrowly defined and limited
within literature.10 Combining words with images, Michaux’s work offers us,
as it might have offered Burroughs, an exemplary way to simultaneously mock
representation and go beyond the human.
Living Organisms
Although they met in 1958, it remains unclear how well Burroughs knew
Michaux’s work: whether, for example, he had read Miserable Miracle (Misérable
miracle, 1956), which was not translated into English until 1963.11 Had he done
so, Burroughs would have recognized not only the general compatibility of their
research into drugs, their equal fascination for what Michaux called “l’espace du
dedans,” but a number of very precise convergences that might have fostered a deep
sense of creative affinity.12 Michaux’s observation that when under the influence
“everything is vibrant and teeming with reality” (Michaux, Miserable Miracle, 40)
would indeed have resonated for Burroughs who described the impact of yagé in
summer 1953: “Everything stirs with a peculiar furtive writing life like a Van Gogh
painting” (Burroughs, Letters, 180). And had Burroughs recalled his own aside at
that time—“If I could only paint I could convey it all”—it would have taken on
new meaning in the context of the fifty drawings featured in Miserable Miracle.
He might have especially admired and appreciated the dry visual joke signaling
the impossible task Michaux set himself—to write what can only be felt—with
which Miserable Miracle begins, that is a drawing of the chemical formula for
mescaline: C11 H17 NO3 (4). Following on from Michaux’s opening epigraph that
speaks of the mescaline experience as being “in a situation that nothing less than
fifty different, simultaneous, contradictory onomatopoeias, changing every half
second, could adequately convey” (3), the empty abstraction of the simple, singular
and static molecular formula on the page is, just like the lithographs depicting his
Meidosems, a mockery that visualizes the central issue of representation.
The point that Michaux labors in Miserable Miracle, both through his text and
its images, is not simply the difficulty of representing experience or the need for
an experimental format: this is an attack on representation. That is why Michaux

stresses his published book hits a “typographical wall,” because it could be no
more than a pale copy of an original manuscript that was “more tangible than
legible, drawn rather than written” (Miserable Miracle, 5), but that would itself
also have been inadequate. Michaux’s reproduced images are primary insofar
as they formally register the vibrations of the mescaline experience but they
cannot “convey it all,” as Burroughs imagined either. The lesson he might have
taken from Miserable Miracle, from Meidosems or from much of Michaux’s
verbal-visual work, Burroughs effectively learned from Brion Gysin. Of course,
Gysin’s painting, art-historical knowledge, and polemical pitch (“writing is fifty
years behind painting”) has long been recognized as the crucible for the cut-
up experiments Burroughs began after publication of Naked Lunch in summer
1959. Some of Gysin’s calligraphic work also bears an astonishing similarity to
Michaux’s. However, neither the preceding analysis of Miserable Miracle nor the
comparison of Burroughs’ purely verbal Mugwumps with Michaux’s verbal and
visual Meidosems should obscure an essential fact that has long gone unnoticed:
it was not after Naked Lunch that Burroughs became a visual artist, nor for
that matter during or before it. Pointing the way forward, the way beyond, the
convergence of the verbal and visual took place within Naked Lunch.
The one, already reasonably well-known visual dimension of Naked Lunch is
the front cover of the Olympia Press original edition, which featured a design by
Burroughs himself: six rows of glyphs almost always interpreted as his versions
of Gysin’s calligraphic drawings. Although not untrue, this account is lacking in
two essential respects that conceal a fundamental proximity between the work
of Burroughs and Michaux and that should transform our understanding of the
relation between the verbal and the visual in Burroughs’ attempt to give writing
a new future.13
The first of these two missing elements is the vital genesis of Burroughs’ cover
design for Naked Lunch. While self-evidently Gysin-like, the calligraphic figures
on the book’s cover emerged from an intense series of graphic experiments
Burroughs made at the start of 1959. The context for these works was a sense of
danger—precisely the kind of danger Burroughs had demanded back in 1955
(when aiming to “create something that will have a life of its own, that can put
me in real danger”): “I know that I am in a very dangerous place, but point of no
return is way back yonder,” he types on his January 2, 1959 letter to Ginsberg,
on a page that is then filled by seven rows of glyphs similar to, if slightly more
complex than, those that would appear six months later on the Olympia Press
front cover of Naked Lunch (Burroughs, Letters, 406). At the foot of the page
he adds, in hand: “Above to be read upside down and backward. They are alive,
these forms like living organisms” (Burroughs’ emphasis). The meaning of
these “living organisms” is completely lost if we see them as mere copies of
Gysin’s glyphs or as made in his style, for Burroughs’ point is that they created
themselves: “I suddenly began writing in word forms, of which enclose samples,”
he comments, as if taken by surprise (405). The autonomy of this writing-that-
is-not-writing goes together with the forms’ identity as living creatures, in the
Figure 8.11 Facsimile, page of glyphs from William Burroughs’ letter to Allen
Ginsberg (January 2, 1959) © The Estate of William S. Burroughs, courtesy of the
Allen Ginsberg Papers at Columbia University, used by permission of The Wylie
Agency LLC
biological sense, and with their spatial transcendence of the left-right and top-
down linearity of conventional English writing direction. Rather than dead
symbols, abstract signs that stand in for some other reality that is not present,
and rather than operating representationally and obeying arbitrary principles
of formal organization, Burroughs’ word forms present themselves and move
freely. They are not metaphorically alive, any more than they are metaphors.
The experience of giving birth to these graphic “living organisms” in 1959
had a precedent in the yagé-inspired “asemic” writing Burroughs drew in his
notebook during summer 1953 in Mexico. Inspired by the effects of the drug,
those swirling glyphs were then connected to St.-John Perse’s Anabasis, which
Burroughs identified as “yagé poetry” (Burroughs, Everything Lost, 41). He
would find painterly points of reference for his yagé experience not only in Van
Gogh, but especially in Paul Klee whose pictures he also felt “are literally alive”
(Burroughs, Letters, 180, 289, 290). However, what Burroughs discovered at the
beginning and end of the decade is also highly similar to the work Michaux was
doing throughout the 1950s, specifically to his Indian ink series in Mouvements
(1951). Although the book combined part of a longer poem with sixty-four
images, Michaux covered over a thousand pages with his thin ink lines and stains;
elementary life forms, “moving creatures” as much as signs (Michaux, Catalogue,
69). Anticipating Burroughs’ experience, Michaux observes that these lines and
blobs of ink, far from representing or imitating anything else, seemed to be released
by the technique itself. He wrote in the book’s preface that “their movements came
buoyantly to me […] I see in them a new language, spurning the verbal, and so I
see them as liberators” (qtd. in Catalogue, 71; Michaux’s emphasis).
Michaux is clear that his graphic forms “freed [him] of words,” and that “the
words, the words came afterwards, afterwards, always afterwards” (Catalogue,
71). In her acute analysis, Grossman likewise argues that what is taking place
across Michaux’s oeuvre is, in evolutionary terms, a regression: a movement back
to a pre-verbal, pre-corporeal, pre-subjective state, a movement that precedes
thinking (Grossman, La Défiguration, 84-85). So too, Burroughs’ emphasis on
reading in reverse, instructing Ginsberg in his letter to work from right to left
and bottom to top (“upside down and backward”), describes an inversion of
our habitual Western organization of chronology and space as well as writing.
But a case could of course be made for the opposite, that the evolutionary
direction implied by Burroughs and Michaux’s works is not pre- but post-
verbal. Or we might call into question the teleology inherent to the language
of linear thinking itself, following the lead of Burroughs and Michaux: “causal
thinking never yields accurate description of metabolic process—limitations of

existing language” (Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 23). Those “limitations of existing
language” were inscribed on the very front cover of the original Naked Lunch,
where, however, they could not be recognized because its cover design appears
just that: a cover design, a piece of artwork, mere decorative illustration, and
therefore secondary and contingent, not a part of the text itself.
The second crucial factor to understanding Naked Lunch’s intrinsic relation to
the visual is thus the historical fact that Burroughs had previously incorporated
the visual within the verbal in the “Ten Episodes from Naked Lunch” published
in Big Table Magazine (Spring 1959). Although its significance has not been
noticed, the ninth out of these “Ten Episodes” should revise quite radically our
understanding of Naked Lunch and where Burroughs’ work was going before
he made his cut-up breakthrough. To be clear, what is included in Big Table
(see Figure 8.12) was not offered as an “illustration” of anything else in the text
but constituted in itself an “episode” of it. And what we see identified as Episode
9, opposite a facing page of print (the start of the tenth episode, the “Joselito”
section) are rows of what start out looking like hand-written characters becoming
less and less written and more and more drawn.
Figure 8.12 Facsimile, William Burroughs, Episode 9 of “Ten Episodes from Naked
Lunch,” originally published in Big Table, no. 1 (Spring 1959) © The Estate of William
S. Burroughs, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC
One result of being unable to read these mute forms, these silent shapes, is to
remind us of the strangeness of writing and the materiality lost in the abstraction
of standardized typeface. But the larger significance of what we might call this
“lost episode” of Naked Lunch is to clarify Burroughs’ move against and beyond
verbal representation. Whether by calculated design or lucky accident—a
distinction Burroughs’ work of course subverted—the facing page from the
“Joselito” section includes his allusion to the silent Anopheles mosquito, and
with it Burroughs’ parenthetical insistence: “(Footnote: this is not a figure.
Anopheles mosquitos are silent)” (“Ten Episodes,” 133; Naked Lunch, 39). With
this prompt, refusing figurative language and asserting silence, we recognize in
Episode 9 the seeds of the “terminal writing” that closed his cut-up trilogy, the
lines of calligraphy that in 1962 Gysin added after the book’s last words: “Silence
to say good bye” (Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded, 230).
The lost episode of Naked Lunch makes clear that by depicting impossible
creatures such as Mugwumps, Burroughs subverted representation within realism,
but fell short of turning the means of representation, the medium of language,
against itself. There was, however, a problem with these “word forms” that were
not words, for Burroughs now found himself, as he wrote Gysin in January 1959,
“seemingly at the end of verbal communication…” (Burroughs, Letters, 407).
Although there would be three more decades of writing to come, at this point in
time Burroughs saw no way forward: whereas Michaux recognized his ink forms
as “liberators,” Burroughs’ glyphs left him at an impasse. The situation enables
us to see not only why he so urgently embraced cut-up methods when Gysin
demonstrated them, but how the application of painterly techniques to writing in
October 1959 responded to the mutation of the verbal into the visual with which,
nine months earlier, Burroughs had produced the living organisms of Naked
Lunch’s Episode 9. Although far from identical, Burroughs’ self-generating graphic
“word forms” anticipated the extraordinary productivity of cut-up methods,
mechanical and material practices with an autonomously organic fertility.
Insect Writing
By juxtaposing a page of typed text with a page of drawn non-signifying signs,

with Episode 9 of Naked Lunch Burroughs invited the reader to see through
the devious transparency of language: to see, that is, the alien within. This alien
language might quite accurately be called “insect writing,” adapting Grossman’s
“insectuous writing” (“langue insectueuse” [86]) to describe Michaux’s work, a

term fusing his own fascination with the insect, as the creatures that most viscerally
challenge our human identity, and incest, as the fundamental psychoanalytical
drama for humans within Oedipal organization.14 Grossman’s expression implies
a psychoanalytical reading that is not as helpful to grasp Burroughs’ movement
from writing to pre-verbal signs, but her claim that Michaux’s “mixing of human
and non human, pulling man into the swarm of signs, is at the very core of
his poetics” helpfully applies to Burroughs’ trilogy of cut-up novels: The Soft
Machine, The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express (87; my translation).15
Saturated with insect imagery, hybrid figures (fish-boys, vegetable people) and
human-mechanical composites, the textual bodies of Burroughs’ cut-up trilogy
are themselves “soft machines,” pulling both his characters and readers into a
fusion of flesh with wiring, technology with biology.
Why then call this “insect writing” instead of, for example, “cyborgian
writing” as does David Punday, taking up the term from Donna Harraway’s
famous “Cyborg Manifesto”? Because what makes Burroughs radical is not his
approach to “narrative” or “style,” as Punday claims, but his material attention
to media and processes, and these are not necessarily “post-evolutionary”
(Punday, 50). On the contrary, Burroughs’ point about language as the alien
within, like the posthumanist argument about the inhuman inside, is that the
most supposedly “natural” is simply the best disguised alien, a parasite that has
achieved symbiosis with its host, in the language of his virology. And so, to see
his textual bodies as unnatural Frankenstein assemblages, outside the norms of
evolution, presumes a bogus normal model of genetic origins and misses the
point that cut-up methods make explicit what is always happening. That is,
Burroughs’ commitment to evolution is the very definition of the human and
what’s inhuman for him is a static conception of humanity, to recall Roosevelt
in his 1953 routine, who abhors “the human species as it is” (Burroughs and
Ginsberg, The Yage Letters, 44). Ironically, this is surely why the cyborg was of
less interest to Burroughs than the insects he loathed so much: the more alien
the point of view, the more valuable for mutating human language, body and
thought, and reaching what Ginsberg called the “Artaud unknown.”
Burroughs’ “insect writing” was not a sustainable form, of course, but an
experiment, like all his work. And the experiment was not only aesthetic but also
ethical. When in a 1961 text related to The Soft Machine we are told—seemingly
in Burroughs’ authorial voice—“I find it a useful literary exercise to think and feel
in terms of micro-organism” (Burroughs, The Soft Machine, 193–94)—we realize
that the attempt to think beyond the human, to shatter the anthropocentrism of
thought, to inhabit an alien point of view is not a “literary exercise” at all. It is
an ethical commitment to serving the goal of evolution, to mutating in order to
survive. Given the dire urgency of our condition “as it is,” it is up to the artists to
force the pace of change, in order to escape the impasse dramatized by Michaux
in his tragicomic tale of the Meidosem who dies unable to flee dangers to the
left or to the right, or, even more darkly, the Meidosems who are falling “calmly,
calmly” towards imminent death: “Why worry yet?” asks Michaux with quiet
but bitter irony, as they head towards the scrapheap; “They’ve still got a few more
seconds before the crash” (Meidsosems, 57).16 Michaux’s apocalyptic point and
black humor are not so far from Burroughs’ own here, best caught in an old New
Yorker cartoon from the 1930s that he savored, depicting a small airplane about
to crash into the side of a mountain in which one passenger turns to another and
says: “My God, we’re out of gin!”17
In the mid-1950s, Burroughs expressed his conviction that what “distinguished
Man from all other species is that he can not become static […] ‘He must continue
to develop or perish’” (Burroughs, Letters, 226–27). And so, in his final novel thirty
years later he was still declaring “a biological revolution, fought with new species
and new ways of thinking and feeling”: “At the end of the human line everything
is permitted” (Burroughs, Western Lands, 34). Although that promised “end”
horrified Ginsberg in 1961, and although we yearn for truth as well as for change,
Burroughs’ vision was human precisely insofar as it was committed to producing
work that is posthuman. It was a commitment to creativity and hope that truly
answered Michaux’s challenge: “Who can do no better than his life?”
Conclusion:
A Purloined Genealogy
The case made in the last chapter of this book for reading Burroughs through
Michaux, while intended to be innovative, also aimed to demonstrate the rich
potential for making critical interpretations within the traditions of comparative
literature. That is, it stands out methodologically from the rest of this study,
which approached the writings of Burroughs, Kerouac and Ginsberg through
genealogy, through their traceable appropriations of past works. It is hard to think
of any other grouping of writers for whom it would be possible to undertake a
similar study, such is the remarkable consistency and coherence of their oeuvres’
engagement with French modern literature and culture. French culture did not
merely inspire or engage the so-called founders of the Beat Generation; it shaped
their works. That is, Marcel Carné’s Port of Shadows cannot be taken out of
Kerouac’s I Wish I Were You, any more than Jean Cocteau’s Orphée can be taken
out of Burroughs’ Queer, or Apollinaire and Genet’s verses out of Ginsberg’s
poems, for that would affect their meaning, structure or aesthetic. Burroughs,
Ginsberg and Kerouac’s French genealogy is inextricable from their works, an
integral part of their oeuvres. Hence, when Ginsberg succumbed to removing
the “ponderous lineage” from his most famous poem “Howl,” it was only to
regret it and reinsert the lineage in the poems that followed.
The major Beat writers were all great appropriators, and what they took
from their predecessors and near contemporaries was both precise and part of
their creative process. This is quite different from speaking of influences, which
are bound to be broad and vague, rather than textually specific. Throughout
their oeuvres, all three writers developed a relationship to French literature
that is therefore much deeper and more textually important than it has long
appeared. Like Edgar Allen Poe’s “purloined letter,” the role and meaning of
their French genealogy always seemed at our fingertips, thanks to the diligent
work of the biographers of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac who rightly took
care to name-check their French modern forebears; but I hope to have shown
that unveiling the multiple significance of that genealogy takes meticulous

textual readings. For Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac made extensive and
sophisticated use of French modern literature and culture, both to distinguish
their works from that of their contemporaries and from the works of each other.
Indeed, the names of their French predecessors had different connotations for
all three writers so that, as we have seen through their use of Rimbaud and
Céline, Kerouac and Burroughs defined their identities as writers against one
another by affirming their respective works along a spectrum of aesthetic and
ethical values: from literary to non-literary, humanist to post-humanist. In the
1940s and 1950s, they set out to write not just to emulate, but also to challenge
or surpass their French literary predecessors. Far from being simple acts of
homage or evidence of a general influence, the work of Burroughs, Ginsberg
and Kerouac was typically precise and problematic in its engagement with
specific source texts. Burroughs’ cut-up practice is exemplary of the violence
inherent to—if not always visible in—the process of appropriation that is at
stake in the development of their complex French filiations. In this sense, it
is no surprise at all that poems by Rimbaud, the poet of French Modernity,
should be among the first and most prominent material sliced up by Burroughs’
scissors.
Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s French references were also “purloined”
insofar as they were more often unacknowledged than acknowledged, more
characteristically encrypted within their texts than openly displayed. Here, we
see both sides of their ambivalence, with regard to past genealogy and future
reception: that is, an anxiety in relation to their French predecessors and an
uncertainty in relation to their own American readers. The poems by Ginsberg
that have thus been read in terms of his deference to Apollinaire and Genet,
on closer inspection turn out to proceed from thorny practices bordering on
theft and self-promotion. Quoting, but also translating and adapting lines
from Apollinaire and Genet’s poems, Ginsberg furtively sowed them across
his own poetry to signal and promote his modernity. Ironically, his French
“signals” have remained largely overlooked, not just because of the Americanist
expertise of Ginsberg’s critics but for the very reason they were so inherent
to his larger poetic strategy of “open secrecy.” All too often, Burroughs and
Kerouac’s critics have likewise taken the meaning of their French references for
granted, rather than tried to discern in the way they made these references their
very process of writing at work. The close examination of Kerouac’s journals
A Purloined Genealogy 217
and of his long appropriation of Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night and
Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, for example, reward us not only with new
readings of On the Road and Visions of Cody, but also with better understanding
of how Kerouac came to formulate his aesthetics in “Essentials of Spontaneous
Prose.” Likewise, the discovery of the bilingual edition that Burroughs used
to produce his early cut-ups of Rimbaud allows us to establish how directly
he engaged with his sources (by cutting Rimbaud’s original French text to
produce new words that work in English), while it more generally prompts us
to rethink our conception of the cut-up method itself (since Burroughs used
his scissors to cut Rimbaud’s poems with astonishing care, he must have done
so with the other texts he produced). In short, the sophistication in Burroughs’
use of Rimbaud that passes undetected because hidden in plain sight, and not
expected from his supposedly random methods, might stand as an exemplar of
all three writers’ purloined genealogy.
While French modern literature was loved by Burroughs, Ginsberg and
Kerouac, when categorized as “Beat literature” their own work was and is still
relatively hated within the American literary academy. That is, French literature
played the same role and impacted the works of Burroughs, Ginsberg and
Kerouac in the same way as their own literature impacted the American literary
canon: as the alien within. This is not to say that my intention with this book
was to advocate that their works should be integrated into the American literary
canon or the vast corpus of world literature—they already have been—but rather,
to invite us to read or re-read the works of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac
for what they were and should remain: literary oeuvres that sought and fulfilled
the posthumanist task undertaken by Rimbaud, Proust, Gide, Apollinaire,
St.-John Perse, Artaud, Céline, Cocteau, Genet and Michaux. For Burroughs,
Ginsberg and Kerouac were committed to the same experiment as their French
modernist predecessors, and did nothing less than contribute to transforming
our conception of “man,” destitute it from its bourgeois humanist throne, and put
it, not on top of everything like a postmodern artist or god, “a magician, an angel,
free from all moral constraint,” but “back to the soil to seek some obligation, to
wrap gnarled reality” in his arms (Rimbaud, “Farewell”). They return us back to
the street with centipedes and weeds and drugs and cyborgs (Burroughs), to the
graveyards and kindergartens with ants and plants and children and madmen
(Ginsberg), to the rivers that flow through towns and the seas that border cities,
with the fishes and the whales and the waves, from the womb to the end of the
night, ever stretching the silver cord (Kerouac), to see how we get along and
what happens. Whatever the result of this experiment might be for literature and
mankind—its celebration and rejuvenation or self-destruction and extinction;
Rimbaud’s “Christmas on earth” or Michaux’s “Meidosems”—it cannot happen if
the appropriations of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac are not recognized and
their works not read for the deeply informed and innovative oeuvres they are.
Notes
Introduction
1 Burroughs’ famous library not only inspired Ginsberg and Kerouac in 1944, but
has also exercised a fascination for scholars and readers ever since; in part because
Ginsberg and Kerouac discovering it appears as a fundational moment of the Beat
Generation, and in part because accounts of its precise contents vary so greatly. For
a close reading of its mythologization, see Thom Robinson, “Burroughs’ Library.”
However, what French authors Burroughs did or did not have on his bookshelves,
which Ginsberg and Kerouac admired, matters far less for this study than how
French texts manifest in their works.
2 “Canuck”: Kerouac’s preferred term to designate his hybrid language and
national identity over “French-Canadian” or “Québécois.” French was Kerouac’s
native language, but since he had to give it up at school age, writing in it for him
was bound to remain a struggle, as editor Jean-Christophe Cloutier clarifies in
his insightful introduction to Kerouac’s French writings, La Vie est d’hommage
(2016).
3 The original letter contains grammatical errors that have been corrected here, but
I would argue that Burroughs’ juxtaposition of formulas from two incompatible
registers, the rigidly formal and the highly personal, is too striking to be caused by
linguistic clumsiness. Calculated coming-out or Freudian slip? Burroughs’ use of
French slyly leaves the decision up to his reader.
4 For the Beats’ broader connections with Surrealism, see Fazzino’s World Beats and
Harris’ “Cutting-up the Corpse,” and with Situationism, see Murphy and Hussey.
The French volume Contre-Cultures! recently edited by Bourseiller and Penot-
Lacassagne also features essays that study the Beats’ larger connections to both
movements with refreshing nuance.
5 On Philip Lamantia, see Fazzino’s excellent account of the importance for his
poetry of such sources as Apollinaire, Artaud and Breton (95–127). On Bob
Kaufman as “the black Rimbaud,” see Starer.
6 For a list of modernist sources that evidence “the larger scope of Beat ancestries
and intersections conjoining the men and women,” see Grace (70, 71). On the
importance of Genet for Brenda Frazer, see Grace and Johnson (115, 116).
7 See Miles’ The Beat Hotel (2000) and Campbell’s This Is the Beat Generation
(2001).
220 Notes
8 “J’écris pour les analphabètes” (Artaud, Oeuvres, 21); “l’interprète du déchet humain”
(Genet, in Poulet, Aveux spontanés, 34); “aux faibles, aux malades et maladifs, aux
enfants, aux opprimés et inadaptés de toute sorte” (Michaux, Oeuvres complètes,
vol. I, 512).
9 On the role that Victor-Lévy Beaulieu played in the reception of Kerouac’s
works in Quebec and for a survey of Canadian “historical revisions” of On the
Road, see Skinazi (31–59); for a brief but compelling reading of Québécois
author Jacques Poulin’s appropriations of Kerouac, see Melehy (178-79); and
for a well-documented panorama of the complex history of Quebec’s own
counterculture, see Labelle-Hogue’s article in Bourseiller and Penot-Lacassagne
(145–53).
10 Parallels can certainly be found between the works of Québécois authors and his
own, but whether from lack of interest or repression, Kerouac himself, who so
tirelessly claimed his literary models, never once mentioned Québécois literature as
a source of inspiration.
11 “L’ouvrage de ma vie serait écrit dans la langue que j’ai commencez [sic] avec—
Français, Canuck, ou Cajun.”
12 On the importance of Rabelais for Kerouac, see Melehy (163–77).
13 See Dichy and Fouché (420–31).
14 In this sense, the “Transnational Beat Generation” may be a contradiction in terms,
since the Beat Generation began to lose its identity at the very moment national
literatures began to pass into history.
15 “C’est de l’incontinence graphique.”
16 Yet, critics continue to find “surreal impressions” in Ginsberg’s writing, to quote
one recent essay title (Jackson, “Modernist Looking: Surreal Impressions in the
Poetry of Allen Ginsberg,” 2010), and to find in phrases like his “hydrogen jukebox”
from “Howl” “a surrealising aftertaste” [“un arrière-goût surréalisant”] (Lebel,
“Dadaistes, surréalistes, clochards célestes et compagnie,” 2016).
17 “La préface de Jouffroy, je l’avais beaucoup lue. Elle m’a fortement influencé, pour lire
Ginsberg, même s’il tire trop les ‘Beats,’ vers le Surréalisme, comme une transposition
aux USA du surréalisme—ce qui n’est pas exact et noie la différence ‘Beat.’”
18 “Ce qui m’a retenu et bouleversé, dans l’anthologie Lebel/Jouffroy de 65, […] c’est la
puissance de ce nouveau lyrisme […]. Son mode d’apparition sonore: mélopée exaltée,
chant sauvage, raucité, provocation obscène. Et côté écriture, sa crudité politico-
sexuelle […]—le contraire de la sublimation surréaliste et, en général, de la mièvrerie
et du côté pisse-trois-gouttes de la poésie contemporaine. Un… ‘effet de réel,’ en
somme (le réel comme ‘ce sur quoi on se cogne.’)”
19 See Georges Bataille, “La ‘vieille taupe’ et le préfixe sur dans les mots surhomme et
surréalisme,” in Oeuvres complètes, vol. II. Paris: Gallimard, 1970 (93–109).
Notes 221
20 “This association of the Beats with Surrealism is problematic insofar as we have

seen […] just how much Beat poetry had helped [Prigent] to ‘get out of surrealism
[…] where he was floundering’” (Gorrillot in Bourseiller and Penot-Lacassagne,
118; my translation).
21 Apart from memoirs and biographies, there have been very few French scholarly
contributions to the field, and they remain traditionally centered on the poetics of
single authors, such as Victor-Lévy Beaulieu’s Jack Kerouac (1972), Jacques Darras’
Allen Ginsberg: la voix, le souffle (2002) and Clémentine Hougue’s Le Cut-up de
William S. Burroughs: Histoire d’une révolution du langage (2014). When they do
take a comparative approach, they are generally bound by a theme, so their scope is
limited to depictions of Tangier or Mexico analyzed from a postcolonial angle (see
Caraës and Fernandez, 2003; Legros Chapuis, 2011).
22 For the history of both terms, see “Beat and Beatnik” (Lawlor, 12–13).
23 For a compelling analysis of the current status of Critical Theory within academia
see Patrick Ffrench, “The Fetishization of ‘Theory.’”
24 “Both Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs discovered late in life that making
works of art is the way to get money” (White, “The Beats: Pictures of a Legend”).
25 A sign of its importance to him, Ginsberg produced at least a dozen different
versions of this caption “ranging from 21 to 695 words in length,” as Oliver Harris
notes in his politically focused article on these photographs “Minute Particulars of
the Counter-Culture” (26).
Chapter 1
1 For the most analytical accounts of the long and complex history of Burroughs
and Kerouac’s And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, see James Grauerholz’s
afterword (185–214); and Joyce Johnson’s biography, The Voice Is All (155–84).
2 According to Grauerholz, Ginsberg’s fictionalization of the Carr-Kammerer story
was biographically the most accurate (Hippos, 193). “The Bloodsong” features in
Ginsberg, The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice (88–116).
3 Although there has long been confusion in biographical and scholarly accounts
as to which version came first, getting the chronology right is therefore crucial for
understanding the relation between Hippos and I Wish I Were You.
4 I Wish I Were You, in The Unknown Kerouac (335–419). Unless specified, all further
references to I Wish I Were You are to this published version. Kerouac’s rewriting
of Hippos into I Wish I Were You was entirely his, although he let stand the name of
Burroughs on the title page of his typescript (Jack Kerouac Papers, Berg Collection,
New York Public Library, 15.19), a detail not included in The Unknown Kerouac.
222 Notes
As well as curator Isaac Gewirtz, I would like to thank James Grauerholz, executor
of the Burroughs Estate, for assisting in and supporting my archival research in the
William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac papers kept in the Henry W. and Albert A.
Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the NYPL for this chapter.
5 Since the opening of the Kerouac archives in 2006, I Wish I Were You has barely
been discussed, let alone analyzed. In fact, most attention has focused on its title
(see Chapter 2, note 5).
6 In his early journals, Kerouac refers to Balzac a dozen times and theorizes his
writing technique through French naturalism (see Windblown World, 268–69).
7 Burroughs’ cultural references in Hippos are to Briffault’s Europa (124), Duvivier’s
Pépé le moko (100), T.S. Eliot (124), The Mills Brothers’ “You Always Hurt the
One You Love” (31), Claude Rains’ interpretation of Capitaine Louis Renault
(163), Renoir’s La Grande illusion (152), Rimbaud (120, 153) and Tchaikovsky’s
Swan Lake (84).
8 In the 1960s, Burroughs produced a hundred literary cut-ups, some of which
(made from Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Byron, Rimbaud, Perse, Fitzgerald, Joyce,
Genet, Salinger, Kerouac and Burgess) have recently been edited by Alex Wermer-
Colan and published in the “Lost and Found” series of the Graduate Center of
CUNY (see Burroughs, The Travel Agency Is on Fire).
9 Elsewhere in The Third Mind, Burroughs makes very similar claims in “The Cut-Up
Method of Brion Gysin”: “cut up Rimbaud and you are in Rimbaud’s place” (31).
10 Strangely, Burroughs never specifically refers to Le Spleen de Paris, Baudelaire’s
most vitriolic—and so most Burroughsian—collection of poems.
11 Gregory Corso, “Note for my contribution to the Cut-up System” in Minutes to Go (63).
12 For Oliver Harris’ interpretation of this line, on which I have built, see “Burroughs
is a poet too, really.”
13 The refrain “Shift lingual” first appears in Minutes to Go (20).
14 My take on Rimbaud’s preference for the indefinite article here concurs with
the analyses of French scholars Daniel Leuwers (“to the reassuring shelters of
Reason, Rimbaud substitutes the mirages of an elusive poetic Reason, dazzling
and shattered”) and Daniel Huguenin (“Reason of the imagination that abolishes
our social sense of time and moves freely in another, poetic, temporality”), both
quoted by Pierre Brunel, who concludes: “That Reason can only be a Reason, for it
is attached, like antique Genius, to each individual” (Brunel, 223; my translations).
15 Rimbaud’s second letter of May 15, 1871 to Paul Demeny rather than to Georges
Izambard, May 13, 1871, two days earlier.
16 The four collages feature in Taking Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs,
edited by Patricia Allmer and John Sears.
17 I am grateful to John Sears and Patricia Allmer for confirming the provenance of
Rimbaud’s image in Burroughs’ 1964 collage.
Notes 223
Chapter 2
1 See Tyler, The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew.

2 “Someday I’ll go to France, to Paris, that’s what… where, like Jean Gabin, you can
find a pretty love at the carnival in the night” (Kerouac, Windblown World, 93).
3 Here, Andrew is summarizing the argument developed by Vincendeau and Gauteur
in Jean Gabin: anatomie d’un mythe (1993).
4 Typical of the text, in both Hippos and I Wish I Were You, no American films are
mentioned. The only one that is not French is a British production from the same
era: Korda’s The Four Feathers (1939), in which one of the central characters is
coincidentally a “General Burroughs.”
5 Readings of the title in terms of homosexual desire include, for example, Bill
Morgan’s case that I Wish I Were You was chosen as a title “in homage to the fact
that Kammerer worshipped Carr” (The Typewriter Is Holy, 17).
6 See note 5 above.
7 Characters based on Lucien Carr feature in two other texts by Kerouac: a novel he
also completed in 1945, Orpheus Emerged (2002), and the unpublished draft story
“Claude.” In that story, Claude sings the words of Baudelaire—tellingly misattributed
by Kerouac to Rimbaud—as a fateful nursery rhyme anticipating his crime: “Just
before he murdered his frustrated lover […] he had developed the habit of chanting
Rimbaud’s words from A Season in Hell: ‘Plonger au fond du gouffre… ciel ou enfer,
qu’importe?’” (Berg, 43.14).
Chapter 3
1 Jack Kerouac Papers, Berg Collection, New York Public Library, 15.2; 43.5.
2 The provenance of Kerouac’s quotation of Céline was established by Douglas
Brinkley as “Homage to Emile Zola,” in New Directions in Prose & Poetry, vol. 13,
1951 (Kerouac: Road Novels 1957–1960, 852).
3 Kerouac’s interview with Pierre Nadeau was broadcast by Radio-Canada in 1959
and is available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xePzjd7_JGE.
4 Jack Kerouac Papers, 15.2.
5 I am quoting from the John H.P. Marks translation, which was published by
Chatto & Windus in 1934, and that Kerouac must have used since his journal
entry reproduces it word for word, up to the translator’s choice to italicize the word
“have” that isn’t stressed in Céline’s original text.
224 Notes
8 To read Sur le chemin and for more information about the history of its
composition, see La Vie est d’hommage (2016).
9 “Have Champa Gavin wake up in middle of night, much like the Elizur-preacher,
wanting ‘out’ from his sins which he cannot name—and talks (confesses he feels
like a slob). And there is love.” The odd name Kerouac first gave his protagonist
(Champa Gavin) might even have come from Journey to the End of the Night, for
the hotel where Céline’s narrator lives in New York is the “Gay Calvin” (in French,
the Laugh Calvin).
10 While not staking a claim as such, Hrebeniak cites D.H. Lawrence’s emphatic use of
“IT” from “The Spirit of Place” (Hrebeniak, 35).
11 Jean-Pierre Richard’s brilliant phenomenological reading of Céline’s writing in
Nausée de Céline establishes a clear relation between Céline’s works and Sartre’s.
12 “Si Dieu n’existait pas, tout serait permis. C’est là le point de depart de
l’existentialisme.’ (Sartre, L’Existentialisme est un humanisme, 39). Although
attributed to Hassan i Sabbah, from 1960 onwards Burroughs famously recited the
very similar phrasing “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.”
13 Sartre pushes his imprudent use of Dostoevsky even further in Qu’est-ce que la
littérature, where his quip is no longer expressed through the conditional but
the present mode: “The famous ‘If God doesn’t exist, everything is permitted,
of Dostoevsky” (165; my translation of “Le fameux ‘Si Dieu n’existe pas’ de
Dostoïevski”).
14 “It always seemed to me that Robinson of Voyage was being pursued by Shroudy
Javert, and that Javert was Céline himself, and Céline himself was Robinson, and
therefore Voyage is the story of the Shroud of Céline’s self pursuing the Shroud of
Céline’s non-self, Robinson.” (“On Céline,” in Good Blonde & Others, 91).
15 “Delirium,” the term Céline favored to refer to his own writing.
16 For a study of Céline’s own use of “things,” see my article “Artaud et Céline: les
choses à leur paroxysme.”
17 For a detailed analysis of Kerouac’s revisions of the textual presence of Ishmael and
Ahab, see Hunt, The Textuality of Soulwork (85–89).
18 The shift in titles is itself quite telling.
19 Hrebeniak makes insightful use of Kerouac’s two texts but fails, significantly, to
distinguish between them in terms of how, through their own form, each dissolves
the “classical dialectic of form and content” in very different ways. To argue that
they both oppose “predictive rationalism” may be true on the level of content, but
not on the level of form, since the text presented as a numbered list is clearly not
one “charged with […] intuition.” (Hrebeniak, 151)
20 For an objective account of Céline’s collaborations, and to read his anti-Semitic
pamphlets, see François Gibault’s Céline (1985).
21 “Si Céline a pu soutenir les thèses socialistes des nazis, c’est qu’il était payé.”
Notes 225
22 See Cahiers de L’Herne, “Céline,” 36–38. The expression “agité du bocal” could be
translated as “nutcase.”
23 For criticism of Kerouac on gender or racial grounds, see Corber and Malcolm, and for
defenses of Kerouac’s appropriations of black culture, see Abel (245) and Melehy (90).
24 See, for example, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (144, 305).
25 Such is the power of literary genealogies that Kerouac’s commentary “On Céline”
accomplishes what Sal and Dean only dream of in On the Road: it transcends time.
For in this text, it’s “really” the Proustian lesson that Kerouac has acquired a decade
earlier—it’s Proust from a century earlier—that comes to defend Céline.
Chapter 4
1 Burroughs occasionally refers in his letters to keeping notebooks during the 1950s,
but only the mid-1950s material published as “Lee’s Journals” and “Ginsberg Notes”
in the Interzone collection suggests any extended or self-conscious use of a writer’s
diary.
2 There is also a passing reference to Gide in Burroughs’ Last Words (21).
3 See Harris, William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination (34-35 and 71-72).
4 So much so, in fact, that we may well wonder whether the specific source of
Kerouac’s quotations here, Gide’s The Counterfeiters, was not also the source of the
most telling instance of “the Burroughs thought” expressed in Hippos: “I’m the later
bourgeois Rimbaud” (120). For, as Kerouac and Burroughs knew, one of the most
provocative moments in Gide’s antinovel is the claim that “writing prevents one
from living,” an idea that prompts Bernard to declare: “That’s what I admire most
of all in Rimbaud—to have preferred life” (240). The quips are certainly unusual
and similar, suggesting that the equation Kerouac makes between Burroughs and
Gide took a step further Burroughs’ own acts of identification with Rimbaud.
Biographical accounts also record that Burroughs and Kerouac acted out scenes
from The Counterfeiters, and these are supplemented by photographic evidence,
such as the image of Kerouac “imitating a character from André Gide’s novel The
Counterfeiters” reproduced in Bill Morgan’s The Typewriter Is Holy (between pages
200 and 201), and an entire series of unpublished images held in the Ted Morgan
William Burroughs Papers at Arizona State University entitled “Acted Out Scenes
from André Gide’s The Counterfeiters on Morningside Heights” (Ted Morgan
Papers, 1983–1988).
5 Clearly, much could be said about Burroughs’ naming of Baudelaire, especially
since he appears in lieu of the more predictable Rimbaud. However, the reference
to Anatole France is the most surprising, since he was a pillar of the French literary
establishment. See note 11 on France in this section.
226 Notes
6 In keeping with the Anglocentric frame of reference typical of Burroughs criticism,

Jamie Russell’s Queer Burroughs also briefly references Baldwin and Vidal.
7 Kerouac notably introduces an “evil Gidean” character who recounts what sounds
like the “Slave Trader” routine from Queer, which makes Burroughs a “fabricator of
Gidean romances,” to recall The Town and the City (see Queer, xvii).
8 Scott Branson, on the other hand, has convincingly argued that “Gide goes further
than Wilde in his dismantling of identity precisely in his commitment to the first
person narration which blurs the boundaries of life and art” (1236).
9 Burroughs had referred to Lee’s wife a few times in Junky, but in Queer she has a
curious absence-presence that seems to have gone unnoticed in criticism. Lee tells
Moor about an argument with a Mexican doctor, which he cuts short: “Besides, I
had to go home to my wife in any case. So he says, ‘You don’t have any wife, you are
just as queer as I am’” (Queer, 4).
10 As argued in Chapter 2, the difference is precisely what prompted Kerouac to
restructure Hippos, the text he coauthored with Burroughs, by using the painting
Cache-cache and the film Port of Shadows as mise-en-abîmes for I Wish I Were You.
11 Burroughs also seems to make a connection between Anatole France and Cocteau
via the surrealists; his allusion to the “corpse” references the notorious attack
by Breton, Aragon and others on France at his funeral, a scandal Burroughs
mentioned several times in letters and interviews (see Morgan, Rub Out the Words,
132; or Lotringer, 749). For the significant return of Anatole France’s corpse in an
unpublished cut-up Burroughs created in 1959, see Chapter 8.
Chapter 5
1 Ginsberg would emphasize the status of Whitman (“a mountain too vast to be
seen”) by repeating the line from his letter to Trilling in the appendix of the
variorum edition of his poem in 1986 (Howl, 176), and he would still use the
phrase four decades later, as in the title of his 1992 essay, “Whitman’s Influence: A
Mountain Too Vast to Be Seen” (reprinted in Deliberate Prose).
2 Raskin likewise describes the variorum edition as “providing information about the
biographical and autobiographical roots of ‘Howl’” (Raskin, 169).
3 According to “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!”
4 Setting out to redress the lack of “detailed explication” of “At Apollinaire’s Grave,”
Swope insists on the importance to Ginsberg of actually being in Paris (“he had read
Apollinaire some years before, but, again, living in Paris offered him a more direct
experience of these writers”) and stresses its legacy (referring to the “lineage he
would continue to display in his work well after his time abroad”) (Swope, 193, 203).
Notes 227
While plausible, the argument conceals the vital impact of Ginsberg’s engagement
with French poetry on his pre-Paris work, including “Howl.” A comparison of his
letters to Richard Eberhart in 1956 and John Hollander in 1958, discussed in the
following chapter, also shows no shift of balance in Ginsberg’s references between
American and French poets: the stress on French poetry appears just as strongly
before as after Ginsberg’s years in Paris.
5 In Journals: Mid-Fifties (1995), a draft of the poem’s Part I is immediately followed
by “Images of Junk,” a text in which Apollinaire is invoked three times and whose
refrain abuses alliterations linked to “At Apollinaire’s Grave”: “Green walks on
graveyard/Grass lives by graves”; “green” and “grass” suggest marijuana (Ginsberg,
Journals: Mid-Fifties, 405).
6 Roger Shattuck translates the French lines: “the time is here/In which the future
can be known/Without death as a consequence” (Selected Writings of Guillaume
Apollinaire, 147).
7 In “Les collines,” “jeunesse” appears five times and “adieu” four, usually in
combination.
8 Ginsberg clearly indicates the relevance of what he calls Apollinaire’s “jump cut” in
the composition of “Howl,” going so far as to point the reader to a specific passage
of “Zone”: “from ‘Coblenz at the Hotel of the Giant’ to ‘Rome sitting under a
Japanese tree’: montage of time & space […]” (Ginsberg, Howl, 175).
9 Brian Jackson’s article is one of the few exceptions that prove the rule. Focusing on
Ginsberg, Artaud, Cézanne, Pound and Williams, it begins by noting that literary
history has not taken seriously Ginsberg’s claims for his poetry “as a continuation
of the French avant-garde, especially the Surrealism of Antonin Artaud” (Jackson,
298). While this conflation of Artaud with surrealism is highly problematic—given
the level of dispute between Artaud and Breton and the looseness with which
Anglophone criticism typically uses the term “Surrealism”—Jackson is surely
right to see the neglect of Ginsberg’s French avant-garde affiliations as the result
of his reception as a “neo-romantic” Beat. In Howl for Now: A Celebration of Allen
Ginsberg’s Epic Protest Poem (Ed. Simon Warner), only Rodosthenous makes any
sustained reference to a French source, although there is no textual analysis in
his comparison of Ginsberg with Rimbaud. Even Raskin makes no mention of
Apollinaire or St.-John Perse.
10 See Jason Arthur’s “Allen Ginsberg’s Biographical Gestures,” which studies his pre-
“Howl” career to reveal how Ginsberg “always exercised an editor’s control of the
public face of his private life” (Arthur, 227).
11 Critics have taken up Ginsberg’s stated indebtedness to Cézanne, at the expense of
recognizing the crucial role of Apollinaire in the genesis of his aesthetics, I would
argue, because the parallels between such different media as painting and poetry
228 Notes
have tended to inhibit further analysis. Jackson’s article is again the exception that
proves a rule.
12 Solomon does refer to non-French writers (Miller and Kafka), but they are strictly
passing references.
13 See Miles, Ginsberg (117).
14 On disputes about the tape recording, see Pawlik. In her well-documented
article on Artaud and Ginsberg, she logically deduces that it “is evident”
Ginsberg had access to The Theatre and Its Double in Richards’ translation before
its publication in 1958, because he quotes from it “in a journal entry dated April
1956” (Pawlik, 11). However, this is more plausibly an editorial confusion in
Ginsberg’s published journals, since the citation is actually demarcated, by an
inserted row of asterisks, from the journal entry in question (see Ginsberg’s
Journals, Early Fifties, Early Sixties, 97). Others have claimed to find precise
traces of Artaud in “Howl,” including Steve Finbow who suggests the poem’s
opening lines echo Artaud’s “Fragmentations”: “I saw Yvonne’s swollen sac, I saw
the sac puffed up with the dregs of Yvonne’s blistered soul […]” (Finbow, 53).
15 Nin noted that Ginsberg’s performance “reached a kind of American surrealism,”
a point she underlined by concluding her diary entry: “I left thinking it was like a
new surrealism born of the Brooklyn gutter and supermarkets” (Nin, 64–65).
16 Solomon dismisses Ginsberg as hopelessly naïve for accepting as fact the
“apocryphal history” he had told him, a history “compounded partly of truth, but
for the most part raving self-justification, crypto-Bohemian boasting a la Rimbaud”
(Ginsberg, Howl, 131); but is it not Solomon who appears naïve for thinking that
Ginsberg’s poem offers historical “facts”?
17 For manuscript facsimile and transcription, see Ginsberg, Howl (22–23).
Chapter 6
1 Yu also refers to the catalog format in “Howl” in unambiguous terms: “Ginsberg’s

model is, of course, Whitman” (Yu, 23).
2 See, for example, Raskin (168) or Gelpi (99).
3 The context of Ginsberg’s letter is also important. Firstly, because it followed his
return to America after his year in Paris, and secondly, because his relationship
with Hollander had been marked by embarrassments about his identity as a poet,
going back at least to 1949 when he was concerned that Mark Van Doren thought
he took himself “too seriously”: “he had an exaggerated idea of my self hood based
on what recently he had been told by Hollander and others about my fancying
myself as Rimbaud” (Ginsberg, Letters, 37).
Notes 229
4 Explaining to Hollander the various formal “tasks” he had set himself in writing the
poem that reviewers had missed (Ginsberg, Letters, 206–8), Ginsberg was asserting
how seriously he had prepared for “Howl,” which his journals bear out: a 1955 entry
details a five-year plan for mastering poetic techniques (Journals: Mid-Fifties, 128).
5 See Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (1973).
6 There is considerable debate over what constitutes an epic in modern poetry. One
of the features Ginsberg and Perse have in common, and that goes against defining
their work as “epic,” is the use of an undercutting humor.
7 See Erkkila’s classic Walt Whitman Among the French: Poet and Myth (1980).
8 Ginsberg’s citations of Canto III from Anabase for his poem “The Character of the
Happy Warrior,” which I go on to discuss, make especially clear the appeal of Perse’s
conception of the poet for Ginsberg.
9 Readings of Vents as a response to the war began early, including Joseph
McMahon’s “A question of man,” in Commonweal, while the aim to reveal the
historical references behind Perse’s most obscure verses is the strategy of such
studies as Camelin and Gardes Tamine’s Saint-John Perse sans masque.
10 Reed Whittemore, “Review of Indian Journals,” The New Republic (July 23, 1970), in
Shinder (142).
11 The line is from an early draft of “America,” composed in fall 1955.
12 Interestingly, in 1958, Rexroth’s “The Influence of French Poetry on American”
was dismissive of Whitman’s French genealogy, insisting that “for all the doctors of
comparative literature try to do with him, [he] is an autochthone, a real original”
(Rexroth, 146).
13 In his “Saint-John Perse,” Poetry 79.1 (October 1951), 31–35, reprinted in the
bilingual anthology Modern French Poets, Fowlie approached Perse in philosophical
and technical terms that would surely have appealed to Ginsberg, finding Perse
“martyred by his visions” and claiming he had “perfected a broad stanza containing
its own beat and pulsion […] His speech is breath and concrete words” (Fowlie,
34).
14 This is the only allusion to Perse in Ginsberg’s selected essays covering forty years,
as if he could only invoke Perse at one remove, by association with Burroughs.
15 Unpublished caption described as a “Working Proof,” courtesy of Peter Hale,
Manager of the Allen Ginsberg Trust.
16 Depicting Ginsberg’s introduction to Burroughs’ library, Miles comments: “Burroughs
particularly liked the T.S. Eliot translation of St. John Perse’s Anabase which had a dry,
St Louis edge to it that he could appreciate” (Miles, Ginsberg, 54).
17 The word “maelstrom” appears in the opening stanza of “The Last Voyage.” For a
more detailed case, see Pollin’s article “Edgar Allan Poe as a major influence upon
Allen Ginsberg.”
230 Notes
18 The juxtaposition of events in Miles’ narrative implies that Ginsberg’s discovery

of Burroughs’ library came after his writing “The Last Voyage,” but the evidence
suggests a different chronology. Since the poem was not in Ginsberg’s list of
completed works for January–February 1945, and was most likely written between
March and May 1945, then it is almost certain he had already paid the visit to
Burroughs, which in most accounts took place between late 1944 and early 1945.
19 Ginsberg’s embarrassment at having written Trilling what was in effect “an exegesis
of Bill’s Spenglerian and anthropological ideas” (Kerouac and Ginsberg, Letters,
27) recalls the situation of Kerouac cowriting with Burroughs And the Hippos Were
Boiled in Their Tanks, which he needed to rewrite in order to find his own voice
(see Chapter 2).
20 Tellingly, while there are ten direct references to St.-John Perse in The Book of
Martyrdom and Artifice, his name is not listed in the index. Raskin, one of the only
critics to use the book for a brief analysis of “The Character of the Happy Warrior,”
notes the appeal of Eliot and Auden for their “anti-romantic devices,” but makes no
mention of Perse either (Raskin, 76).
21 St.-John Perse’s own poetics upheld such “flashes”: “…And everything is
recognition for us” (Winds, 201).
Chapter 7
1 See Allen Ginsberg’s letter to Burroughs, October 29, 1960 (William Burroughs
Papers, Berg Collection, New York Public Library, 82.2.20). We can only wonder
whether Grove would have printed the novels of Burroughs and Genet back-
to-back, like the 1953 Ace Double Book edition of Junkie (printed with Narcotic
Agent by Maurice Helbrandt), “69’d so to speak,” as Ginsberg put it (Burroughs,
“Appendix 7,” Junky, 157).
2 On Ginsberg’s translations of Genet, see Chapter 5.
3 Murphy cites the chapter title as an example of Burroughs’ “hommages to other
writers” (Murphy, Wising Up the Marks, 159; Murphy’s emphasis).
4 Describing Genet’s book as “fascinating,” in an interview Burroughs affirms it as
a mirror of his own: “It’s very much like what I’ve been doing lately—here, in The
Book of Dreams [i.e. My Education]” (Lotringer, 774).
5 William Burroughs Papers, 16.76; 7.42.
6 “Anybody can be Rimbaud if he will cut up Rimbaud’s words and learn Rimbaud
language” (The Third Mind, 71; my emphasis). For an analysis of Burroughs’ cut-
ups of Rimbaud, see Chapter 1.
7 Before appearing in the Introduction to Queer in 1985, Burroughs used the phrase
“palpable as a haze” twice in Cities of the Red Night (77, 168).
Notes 231
8 See section entitled “Cocteau: a double take” in Chapter 4.

9 See “Roosevelt after Inauguration” in The Yage Letters (45) and Last Words,
where Burroughs describes it as one of his “two most outrageous images” (141).
Recognizing its significance, Ginsberg alludes to the skit in his 1952 “Appreciation”
for Junky (146).
10 Although Burroughs is an astute reader of Genet and rightly discerns in his
writing his main ethical concerns, by implying that Genet is deeply concerned by
other creatures than himself here, he seems to be making the common mistake of
associating his philosophical statements in The Thief ’s Journal and his late political
statements with a genuine empathy and a loyal commitment for the people he
wrote about—Black Panthers, Red Army Faction, Palestinians—that Genet might
have never had (in any case, Genet made a point of refuting such interpretations;
see note 23 in this section).
11 I am grateful to Oliver Harris for sharing his knowledge of the manuscript history,
which has not been documented since publication of the Interzone collection.
12 For a detailed comparative study of how Genet’s concept of “betrayal” and Artaud’s
concept of “cruelty” subvert the language of ethics, see Chapter 3 of my PhD thesis
“Tenir l’évanouissement. Entre maîtrise intégrale et abandon anéantissant: Jean Genet
et Antonin Artaud.” Available online: https://papyrus.bib.umontreal.ca/xmlui/
handle/1866/7080 (Accessed May 2, 2012).
13 A clandestine edition of Genet’s Pompes funèbres was published in 1947, but
Burroughs getting hold of one of its 470 copies is highly unlikely.
14 Like any well-read Frenchman, Genet would have known Poe’s work, but there
are also numerous specific echoes of “The Black Cat” in Funeral Rites, from the
hanging of the cat to Riton’s speculation that it is really the devil in disguise.
15 Burroughs didn’t dedicate Junky to the death of Joan, but in his belated
“Introduction” to Queer (his second novel, which he had initially conceived as a
single book with Junky) he couldn’t have associated it with her death more strongly:
“I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would have never have become a
writer but for Joan’s death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has
motivated and formulated my writing”. (Burroughs, Queer, 134).
16 Jean Decarnin: “the death of Jean D., which is the ostensible reason for this book”
(Genet, Funeral Rites, 11).
17 While it does not offer evidence that Burroughs read Funeral Rites, it is fascinating
to note that in his pre-publication copy of Edmund White’s 800-page biography of
Genet, Burroughs made significant annotations on pages focusing on the novel.
On consecutive pages, indeed, his marginal comments insistently identify his
work with Genet’s: below a quotation in which Genet compares Funeral Rites to
fireworks, Burroughs evokes the fireworks at the end of his own short story “Where
he was going,” and then, above Genet’s claim that “the characters in my books all
232 Notes
resemble each other,” Burroughs adds, simply but emphatically “mine too” (White,
Genet, 324–25). My gratitude to Jim Pennington for generously sharing facsimiles
of Burroughs’ annotated copy of the book.
18 The details are a little different—the cat is described as white not gray—but the
slapping and the location in Mexico City make it clear that Burroughs is thinking
of the same incident. The “slapping” is also echoed within Junky to connect the cat
to Lee’s wife, a detail that would further support Anspaugh’s reading. Burroughs’
manuscript was even more explicit about “tormenting and terrorizing cats”
(Burroughs, Junky, 164).
19 David Savran argues the main source of critical “dismay” with Burroughs continues
to be “the absence of clear signals of meaning in a body of fiction that, at first
glance, is so flamboyantly misogynist, racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic”
(Savran, 85).
20 “Genet aurait été un adorateur d’Hitler, adhérant ‘jusqu’à l’égarement’ au modèle
nazi. Lisons dans Pompes funèbres l’évocation de son idole: ‘Se pouvait-il qu’une
simple moustache composée de poils raides, noirs et peut-être teints par L’Oréal,
possédât le sens de: cruauté, despotisme, violence, rage, écume, aspics, strangulation,
mort, marches forcées, parades, prison, poignards?’ ”
21 Likewise, the cat “spraying piss” onto Lee becomes the “shot [of junk that] sprayed”
over him; “sweat was running down my face” becomes “sweat ran down my nose”
(Burroughs, Junky, 102, 103, 112).
22 “La mort du chat aura confronté Riton à sa solitude, mais une solitude qui relève du
sentiment de la présence d’une altérité logée, nichée à l’intérieur de soi. Ayant fait son
choix, ayant accompli l’irrémédiable, Riton est désormais ‘seul avec sa solitude au
milieu de lui.’ Se libérant d’une obéissance irréfléchie et automatique aux lois sociales,
le milicien emprunte le chemin qui le mène, par la destruction, à la solitude de ceux
qui n’acceptent plus aucune contrainte sociale.”
23 “The day the Palestinians become a nation like other nations, I won’t be there
anymore. […] I think that’s where I’m going to betray them. They don’t know it”
(Genet, The Declared Enemy, 244).
24 “To become monstruous, this is perhaps the wish of the man who gave birth to
humanism” (Laroche, The Last Genet, 295).
Chapter 8
1 Allen Ginsberg to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, October 1961 (Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Papers, University of California, Berkeley). In a transcription or printing error,
this line is missing from the version published in Morgan’s edition of Ginsberg’s
letter.
Notes 233
2 Here, I am reworking Cocteau in Opium: “Radiguet said ‘The public asks us if the
author is serious. I ask the public if they are serious’” (Cocteau, Entretiens sur le
cinématographe, 69).
3 Although Kerouac’s autobiographical fiction might seem entirely self-centered, in key
works like On the Road and Visions of Cody, it is very precisely centered beyond the
self by the narrating protoganist/writer’s focus on Dean or Cody. Ginsberg’s critique of
anthropocentrism is apparent in works ranging from “Sunflower Sutra” in the 1950s to
“The Changes” or “Wales Visitation” in the 1960s. Taking Lyotard’s term “the inhuman”
for Burroughs indeed resumes the shift from postmodernism to posthumanism in
Lyotard’s own progression from La Condition postmoderne (1979) to L’Inhumain (1988).
4 In different ways, Skerl (1985) and Lydenberg (1987) eagerly embraced a
postmodern Burroughs. Or to be more exact, Skerl (using the terms “pop-art
novel” and “avant-garde”) and Lydenberg (cross-referencing post-structuralism
and deconstruction) actually anticipated the postmodern turn, since their studies
came before the label had become fully established. Both were, however, very much
in step with it, in large part as a way to promote the case for Burroughs’ relevance
and importance. For a fuller discussion see Harris, “William Burroughs: Beating
Postmodernism,” in Belletto (123–36).
5 See Olivier Gallet’s essay “Écrire une monographie ‘médicale et poétique à la fois’
(Baudelaire, Michaux)” in Grossman, Halpern and Vilar, 149–59.
6 “GALLERY DESTROYED ON EVE OF VERNISSAGE,” William Burroughs Papers,
Berg Collection, 7.49 (1959) © The Estate of William S. Burroughs, courtesy of the
Berg Collection, New York Public Library, used by permission of The Wylie Agency
LLC. The rough two-page typescript discussed here is part of a larger, seven-
page folder that shows Burroughs creating further cut-up variations with many
annotations, each making constant use of Michaux, Genet and Breton’s names.
7 “Je crache sur ma vie. Je m’en désolidarise. Qui ne fait mieux que sa vie?”
8 Michaux, Oeuvres complètes, 1129.
9 It is surely not a coincidence that in specifying “Near East,” Burroughs echoes the
phrasing that introduced the Mugwump in Junky, whose “place of origin is the
Near East, probably Egypt” (Burroughs, Junky, 3). We are reminded of Deleuze’s
insistence that “language is always the language of bodies,” saying of the hysteric:
“He rediscovers a primary language, the true language of symbols and hieroglyphs.
His body is an Egypt” (Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 92, 93).
10 For the same reason, Sean Bolton’s analysis of the Burroughsian subject in “From
Self-Alienation to Posthumanism,” while theoretically cogent, remains formally too
abstract.
11 When directly asked in a 1965 interview “Have you read Henri Michaux’s book on
mescaline?,” Burroughs’ reply was notably critical and evasive: “His idea was to go
into his room and close the door and hold in the experiences” (Lotringer, 62, 63).
234 Notes
12 In the introduction added to later editions of Miserable Miracle, Octavio Paz

not only uses expressions to describe Michaux’s book that might fit Burroughs’
own, but might be using Burroughs’ own phrasing: “Destruction of language.
Mescaline reigns through silence—and it screams, screams without a mouth
[…] Heterogeneity, a continuous eruption of fragments, particles, pieces […]
Gangrenous space, cancerous time” (Paz in Michaux, Miserable Miracle, ix–x).
13 Although she too slights the significance of the “Ten Episodes,” for the closest
attention to Naked Lunch’s variant forms and potential visual content, see Joanna
Harrop’s 2011 PhD thesis “The Yagé Aesthetic of William Burroughs.”
14 Lynn Snowden’s 1992 interview with Burroughs and Cronenberg features this
amusing exchange: “‘William, are you interested in insects?’ says Cronenberg […]
‘Not entirely,’ he finally says. After a few minutes of completely addled discussion,
Burroughs exclaims, ‘Oh, insects! I thought you said incest’ ” (Hibbard, 212).
15 “Cette pensée pulsionnelle où humain et non humain se mêlent, où l’homme se fond
dans la masse du fourmillement des signes, est au coeur même de sa poétique.”
16 Michaux’s term “la casse” (La vie dans les plis, 152) suggests not merely a “crash”
but an ending of life that leaves only its material scrap value.
17 Burroughs refers to the cartoon in a January 12, 1984, letter to Ginsberg (Allen
Ginsberg Papers, Correspondence, Stanford University, 211.34).
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Index
Abel, Marco, 225n23 defined against “influence,” 14

Allmer, Patricia, 222n16, 222n17 and homage, 19–21, 36–37, 40, 118,
Allsop, Kenneth, 2 167, 172, 216
American-centric approaches, to the and misappropriations, 14
Beat Generation, 9, 11–14, 216–17 of the posture of another author, 5
to Burroughs, 171, 226n2 appropriation and Burroughs
to Ginsberg’s “Howl,” 116–18, 126, of Artaud, 187
131–32, 146–47 of Cocteau, 106–13
to Kerouac, 6 cut-up methods as procedure of,
Andrew, Dudley, 51–52, 223n3 172–74
Anspaugh, Kelly, 182, 232n18 of Gide, 99–100
anti-Semitism of Perse, 179
and Burroughs, 93, 182–83, 232n19 of Poe, 182
and Céline, 82–84, 220n20 of Rimbaud, 34
and Genet, 182–83 appropriation and Ginsberg
and Kerouac, 84 of Apollinaire, 7, 119–25
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 3, 15, 24, 131, of Genet, 138–39
219n5 of Rimbaud, 19, 140
and Cocteau, 109 appropriation and Kerouac
and Ginsberg, 115–16, 118, 139–40, of Céline, 6, 16, 57–62, 66–70, 73,
215–17 84–85, 93
and Ginsberg’s aesthetics in “Howl,” of French literature, 7
128–30, 137, 144, 146–47, 167, of Gide, 59–60
227n8, 227n9, 227n11 of Gide and Céline compared to
Ginsberg’s affiliation to merely name- Burroughs’, 59, 94
checked, 126 of Hugo, 73
Ginsberg’s Anglicisation of his name, of non-white cultures, 83
124, 128 of poetic realist film, 48–53, 55, 57
Ginsberg’s homage to in “At of Proust, 6, 15, 85–92
Apollinaire’s Grave,” 19, 118–26, of Sartre, 58, 73–74
128, 227n5 Aragon, Louis, 226n11
Ginsberg’s translation of “Les collines,” Artaud, Antonin, 4, 217, 219n5, 227n9
7, 121–22, 137 and body without organs, 205
Apollinaire, Guillaume, works of Burroughs, compared to, 180–81,
“The Hills” [“Les collines”], 120–23, 187–89, 192, 213
125, 137, 227n7 concept of cruelty, 5, 132
Zone, 119, 128–29, 227n8 concept of cruelty compared to
appropriation, 9, 11, 13–16, 215–18 Genet’s concept of betrayal,
Beat writers and, 215 180–81, 231n12
of Dada and Surrealism by the Beats, drugs and, 13
11 and Ginsberg, 24, 116, 126
248 Index
Ginsberg’s affiliation to merely Ginsberg’s evocation of, 106, 144

name-checked, 126 Ginsberg’s “The Last Voyage” marked
in Ginsberg’s “At Apollinaire’s by, 162
Grave,” 120 and Kerouac, 8, 223n7
in Ginsberg’s “Death to Van Gogh’s Baudelaire, Charles, works of:
Ear!,” 118, 121, 133 “Correspondances,” 36
Ginsberg’s fear of, 187, 192 Le Spleen de Paris, 36, 222n10
and Ginsberg’s “Howl,” 5, 12, 128, Beard, Chris, 202
130–35, 167, 228n14 Beat Generation, Francophilia and
Ginsberg’s identification with, 5, 133 formation of, 3
Ginsberg’s naming of in draft of and French literature, 1–17
“Howl,” 134–35, 137 French reception of, 12–13
Michael McClure’s fascination for, and national identity, 5–6, 9–11, 23, 34
131, 134 and the “New Vision,” 31, 117, 165
and the posthuman, 16, 187–88, and transnationalism, 6, 10–14, 22
217 Beat Hotel, 1, 4, 17–19, 192
and the Six Gallery reading, 131 Beaulieu, Victor-Lévy, 220n9, 221n21
and Solomon, 130–33 Beckett, Samuel, 10
transformative power of, 132–34, Burroughs distancing himself from,
187–88 189–90
Artaud, Antonin, works of: Bergson, Henri, 81
“To Have Done with the Judgment biography, 4, 22, 24, 32, 95, 100, 110, 136,
of God” [“Pour en finir avec le 141, 143, 158, 166, 169–71, 175, 182
jugement de dieu”], 12, 131–32, 134 and Beat literature, 11, 26, 215
The Theatre and Its Double [Le Théâtre and the Beats’ French connection, 11,
et son double], 131–33, 181, 228n14 33
Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society Burroughs’ attitude toward, 33, 41, 187
[Van Gogh le suicidé de la société], Burroughs and Genet linked by, 169
118, 133–35 Burroughs and Michaux linked by,
in variorum edition of Ginsberg’s 187, 192–95
“Howl,” 135 Ginsberg and Perse separated by, 151,
Auden, W.H., 98–99, 163–65, 230n20 166
Auriol, Vincent, 169 Ginsberg’s attitude toward, 129–30,
133–35, 143, 151, 154–55
Ball, Gordon, 121 and Miles as biographer of Ginsberg,
Balzac, Honoré de, 6, 30, 64, 71, 76, 79, 168
222n6 and readings of Burroughs and
Barrault, Jean-Louis, 130 Kerouac’s Hippos, 10–11, 25–26
Barthes, Roland, 52 and readings of Ginsberg’s poetry, 116,
Bataille, Georges, 13, 220n19 118–20, 127, 129, 226n2
Baudelaire, Charles, 130 and readings of Kerouac’s I Wish I
aesthetic goals of inherited by Were You, 53–54
Burroughs via Rimbaud, 36 and readings of Kerouac’s work, 83
and Burroughs, 222n10 Blake, William, Ginsberg and, 144
in Burroughs’ 1940s library, 1, 106 Ginsberg’s naming of in “Howl,” 117,
Burroughs’ naming of in Junky, 2, 126, 167
99–100, 225n5 Ginsberg’s vision of, 117, 167–68
and drugs, 13 Kerouac and, 76
Index 249
Blok, Alexander, 121 Burroughs, William S., 1–5, 8–10, 17, 19,
Bloom, Harold, 148, 229n5 43, 45, 48, 72
Bockris, Victor, 174 and addiction, 96, 99, 104, 106, 201,
Bolton, Sean, 233n10 204
Bosquet, Alain, 150 as alien, 33, 102, 178, 212
Bourseiller, Christophe, 13, 219n4 anti-Semitism, accusations of,
Bowles, Paul, 98–99, 102, 173 compared to Genet’s, 182–83,
The Sheltering Sky, 102 232n19
Braidotti, Rosi, 16, 188 Artaud, appropriation of, 187
Branson, Scott, 226n8 and Beckett, 189–90
Breton, André, 6, 11–12, 120, 193, 219n5, and the body, 104–05, 188, 198, 202,
226n11, 227n9, 233n6 205, 213
Breu, Chris, 204 and cats, 181–84
Briffault, Robert, 30–31, 222n7 and Céline, 94–95
Brinkley, Douglas, 63, 223n2 Célinean quality of satire, 93–94, 185
Brunel, Pierre, 222n14 Céline, relation with compared to
Buddha, Ginsberg’s naming of in draft of Kerouac’s, 59, 93–94
“Howl,” 135 Cocteau, appropriation of, 108–09
Burgess, Anthony, 222n8 Cocteau’s overlooked importance for,
Burroughs, Joan Vollmer, shooting of, 96, 95
105, 231n15 Cocteau referenced in draft of The Soft
Burroughs’ evocation of through Machine by, 111–13, 226n11
Cocteau’s Orpheus [Orphée], Cocteau referenced in Queer by, 95,
110–11 106–13
Burroughs’ evocation of through cut-ups of, 19–20, 26, 34–42, 83, 111,
Genet’s Prisoner of Love [Un Captif 113, 172–74, 177, 179, 186, 187–89,
amoureux], 175 192–94, 210–13, 216–17, 222n8,
Burroughs’ evocation of through Gide’s 222n9
The Immoralist [L’Immoraliste], and cut-up methods as a procedure of
106 appropriation, 172–74
Burroughs, William S., literary cut-ups as literary and anti-literary,
relationships with: 37, 40
Baudelaire, 1–2, 36, 99–100, 106, and drugs, 13, 106, 192, 206
225n5, 222n10 Eliot cut up by, 172
Céline, 8, 59, 80, 93–95, 216 ethics of, 16, 93–95, 101–02, 105,
Cocteau, 24, 43, 95–96, 106–13, 175, 177–86, 188, 198, 213, 216
193, 202, 215, 226n11 ethics of, compared to Genet’s, 180–81,
Genet, 2, 7, 15, 24, 95–96, 169–86, 188, 183–86, 231n10
193–94, 230n1, 230n4, 231n10, and evolution, 201, 204, 209, 212–13
231n13, 231n14, 231n17 and French language, 2, 7, 38–39
Gide, 22–24, 59, 95–108, 110, 175, 193, French literary genealogy of, 2, 59
225n2, 225n4, 226n7 gay literary canon of, 100–01, 104
Perse, 21, 157–58, 160, 162–63, 172, Genet, compared to, 2
179–80, 209, 222n8 Genet, admiration for, 171–72
Proust, 85, 93, 100, 189–90 Genet, ambivalence toward, 15, 33,
Rimbaud, 2, 7–8, 19–20, 24, 32–42, 175–78, 186
157–58, 163, 171–74, 179, 216–17, Genet in Chicago with, 171
225n4, 230n6 Genet, cut-ups of, 172–74, 222n8, 233n6
250 Index
Genet’s Funeral Rights, compared with and language, 38–39, 212

Junky, 181–83 library of in the 1940s, 1, 42, 106, 163,
Genet, identification with, 169–70, 219n1, 229n16, 230n18
173–74 literature, approach to in contrast to
Genet, paired with Perse by, 179 Kerouac’s, 10, 25, 28–30, 42–43
Genet, posthumanist competition literature’s future for, 33, 36, 192, 213
with, 177–78 Michaux in cut-up text by, 193–95,
Genet’s Prisoner of Love discussed in 233n6
My Education by, 172, 175–86 Michaux’s verbal-visual work,
Genet in Queer, 170 compared to, 188–213, 234n12
and Genet, shared publishers, 170–71 Mugwumps of compared to Michaux’s
Genet’s The Thief ’s Journal in early Meidosems, 191, 195–200, 202–04
drafts of Naked Lunch, 15, 178, 180 and Naked Lunch, 207–12
Genet’s writing, knowledge of, 169–71, and the “New Vision,” 117
231n13 in Paris, 11–12, 19, 192
and Gide, compared to, 22, 24, 96–98, and Perse’s Anabasis, 21, 158, 160, 163
102 Perse cut up by, 172, 179
and Gide’s The Counterfeiters, 24, 99 photomontages of, 35, 40–42
and Gide’s overlooked importance for, Poe used by in Queer, compared to
95, 101 Genet’s use in Funeral Rights, 181–83
Gide referenced in Junky and Queer by, on politics of literature, 83
95, 102–08 and posthumanism, 15–16, 94, 178–80,
Gide, relation with compared to 183, 188, 191, 204, 206, 212, 217,
Kerouac’s, 59 233n3, 233n10
Gidean pilgrimage of to North Africa, and postmodernism, 190
98 and Proust, 189–90
Gidean quality of Queer, 102–08 and rarity of naming literary sources, 95
Ginsberg’s comparison of to Perse and representation, writing beyond, 204–10
Rimbaud, 157–58 Rimbaud, cut-ups of, 19–20, 34–42,
Ginsberg’s dedication of “The 172–74, 179
Character of the Happy Warrior” Rimbaud, approach to in Hippos
to, 163 compared to Kerouac’s, 10, 19, 43
and Ginsberg’s engagement with Perse, Rimbaud, ironic identification with, in
160, 163 Hippos, 32–34, 42, 225n4
Ginsberg’s naming of in draft of satire of, 34, 93–94, 100, 104, 177, 198
“Howl,” 135 and shooting of Joan Burroughs
Hippos, co-writing of with Kerouac, 10, mediated by literary allusions, 96,
19, 25–30, 50–51, 61, 87, 92 106, 110–11, 175, 182, 193–94,
and Hippos’ title, 25, 28, 51 232n18 (see also under Burroughs,
Ginsberg’s photographs of, 20–23, 158 Joan Vollmer)
Gysin, as source for Burroughs’ and Spengler, 163
experimental writing, 207 on Surrealism, 12, 194
and homosexuality, 23, 96–110, 172–73 and transnationalism of Naked Lunch,
humor of, compared to Céline’s, 93–94 11–12
humor of, compared to Michaux’s, 213 and the unknown, 179–80, 186–89,
“insect writing” of, 192, 205, 212–13 192, 213
as Kerouac’s master, 97 visionary goals of inherited from
Kerouac’s portrait of in Doctor Sax, 102 Baudelaire and Rimbaud, 36
Index 251
Wilde referenced in Junky and Queer Campbell, James, 4, 219n7

by, 99, 100, 102 Camus, Albert, 35
on writing as soft machine, 37, 191–93, Capote, Truman, 58
212 Carjat, Etienne, 40–41
and yagé (ayahuasca), 103, 193, 206, Carné, Marcel, Port of Shadows[Le Quai
209, 234n13 des brumes], in Burroughs and
Burroughs, William S., works of: Kerouac’s Hippos, 30, 31, 43, 48–50,
The Adding Machine, 189 57
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night
Tanks (with Kerouac), 10, 19, as literary version of for Kerouac,
25–37, 42, 43–56, 58, 60, 68, 221n1, 57
221n3, 221n4, 222n7, 223n4, Gabin in, 48, 52
225n4, 226n10, 230n19 in Kerouac’s I Wish I Were You, 43–45,
The Cat Inside, 182–84 48–51, 53, 55–57, 61, 215,
Cities of the Red Night, 230n7 226n10
The Exterminator, 35–38 as mise-en-abîme in I Wish I Were You,
Interzone, 225n1 49 (see also poetic realist cinema)
Junky, 2, 20, 93, 95, 98–102, 105–08, Carr, Lucien, 25, 97, 223n7
111–12, 169–70, 175, 181–84, Cassady, Neal, 75, 86, 116
201–02, 204, 226n9, 231n9, 231n15, in Ginsberg’s draft of “Howl,” 135
232n18, 232n21, 233n9 Catullus, 137, 143
Last Words, 33, 177, 225n2, 231n9 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 3, 6, 15–17, 185,
Minutes to Go (with Beiles, Corso, 216–17, 224n16, 224n20
Gysin), 8, 20, 35–41, 222n11, Beat writers’ visit to, 11
222n12, 222n13 Burroughs’ identification with, 94–95
My Education, 15, 172, 174–77, 181, and Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, 8
184–85, 230n4 in Burroughs’ 1940s library, 1
Naked Lunch, 8, 10, 15, 93–94, 105, Burroughs’ reading of compared to
109, 157, 171–72, 178, 188, 190–93, Kerouac’s, 93–94
195, 197–98, 200–12, 234n13 Ginsberg’s naming of in draft of
Nova Express, 39, 212 “Howl,” 135, 137
The Place of Dead Roads, 179 Ginsberg’s reading of, 170
Queer, 93, 95, 101–13, 169–70, 175, Journey to the End of the Night as
183–85, 201–02, 215, 226n6, 226n7, source for Kerouac’s I Wish I Were
226n9, 230n7, 231n15 You, 60–61
“Roosevelt After Inauguration,” 94, Journey to the End of the Night as
177, 213, 231n9 source of existentialist quality and
The Soft Machine, 34–35, 111–13, narrative structure of Kerouac’s On
187–88, 190–92, 212–13 the Road, 58, 77
The Third Mind (with Gysin), 36–38, Journey to the End of the Night as
177, 222n9 modelled on Port of Shadows for
The Ticket That Exploded, 204, 210 Kerouac, 57
“Twilight’s Last Gleaming,” 177 Kerouac’s binary of with Dostoevsky,
The Western Lands, 213 58, 64–66, 68–72, 74
The Wild Boys, 172 Kerouac compared to by Rexroth, 145
The Yage Letters (with Ginsberg), 94, Kerouac’s identification with and
185–86, 213, 231n9 reading of, 57–92, 223n2, 224n9,
Byron, Lord, 222n8 224n11, 224n15, 225n25
252 Index
as Kerouac’s “master,” 58 mediating role of for Burroughs,

in Kerouac’s On the Road, 58 95–96, 106, 111, 175, 193 (see also
in Kerouac’s “Scroll” On the Road, 75 Burroughs, Joan Vollmer)
nihilism of, 63, 73 mediating role of for Burroughs
(see also under anti-Semitism; compared to that of Genet, 175, 193
appropriation; Burroughs; mediating role of for Burroughs
ellipses; genealogy; Kerouac) compared to that of Gide, 95–96,
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, works of: 106, 110, 175, 193
The Church [L’Eglise], 72 time travel in cinema of, 109–13
Death on Credit [Mort à credit], 84 (see also Burroughs, literary
Journey to the End of the Night [Voyage relationships; Ginsberg, literary
au bout de la nuit], 1, 57–58, 60–61, relationships; Kerouac, literary
66–70, 73–79, 82, 93–94, 217, relationships)
224n9 Cocteau, Jean, works of:
Cendrars, Blaise, 120, 144 Blood of the Poet [Le Sang d’un poète],
censorship, Genet’s work as 1, 43
landmark against, 172: and Ginsberg’s Opium, 1, 106–07, 109, 233n2
candor, 127, 133 Orpheus [Orphée], 95, 107–10, 112–13,
and trial of Ginsberg’s Howl, 122 202
and Kerouac’s spontaneous prose, The Testament of Orpheus [Le
82 Testament d’Orphée], 112–13
Cervantes, Miguel de, 78 Cold War America, 6, 23, 117, 136, 140,
Cézanne, Paul, 3, 133, 227n9 144, 153
and aesthetics of Ginsberg’s “Howl,” comparative approach, 9, 13, 14, 88, 94,
129–30, 137, 147, 227n11 105, 188–92, 198, 215, 221n21,
as Ginsberg’s master, 20, 144 229n12, 231n12
Chapman, Harold, 17, 18, 20 Conrad, Joseph, 33
Charters, Ann and Samuel, Brother-Souls, Corbière, Tristan, 139, 141, 160
2, 63 Corbière, Tristan, works of:
Chase, Hal, 86 “Blind Man’s Cry” [“Cris d’aveugle”]
Chateaubriand, François-René de, 6 as source for Ginsberg’s “Howl,” 8,
Chazal, Malcolm de, 133, 137 139, 141
in Ginsberg’s draft of “Howl,” 128–29 “Deaf Man’s Rhapsody” [“Rapsodie du
Clark, Tom, 132 sourd”], in Ginsberg’s “The Lion for
Cloutier, Jean-Christophe, 6, 73, 219n2 Real,” 141
Cocteau, Jean, 3, 9, 24, 30, 35, 144, 170, Corso, Gregory, 4, 5, 11–12, 37, 118, 146,
217, 231n8, 233n2 222n8
Burroughs’ failure to reference in on Genet and Michaux, 5
Junky, 106–07 Cowley, Malcolm, 87, 157
in Burroughs’ 1940s library, 1, 106 Crane, Hart, 115, 121, 128, 144, 167
Burroughs’ reference to in draft of The Creeley, Robert, 147
Soft Machine, 111–13, 226n11 Cronenberg, David, 191, 202, 204,
Burroughs’ reference to in Queer, 95, 234n14
106–13, 202, 215 Cunnell, Howard, 64
cinema of, 109–10
and homosexuality in Queer, 106, 110 Dada, 11, 37
importance of for Burroughs Davies, Catherine, 155
overlooked, 95 Deleuze, Gilles, 225n24
Index 253
and Burroughs, 205, 233n9 Eliot, Valerie, as editor of variorum

Deleuzian reading of Kerouac, 16, 88 edition of The Waste Land (T.S. Eliot),
on Proust, 88–90 159
De Quincey, Thomas, 192 ellipses: Burroughs’ use of, 103, 198,
Dichy, Albert, 182–83, 220n13 205–06
Dickens, Charles, 64, 79 Céline’s use of, 80
Dollimore, Jonathan, 100–01 Gide’s use of, 103
Donne, John, 117 Ginsberg’s use of in “At Apollinaire’s
Dos Passos, John, 86 Grave,” 123–25, 141, 148, 167
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 9–10, 59, 78 Kerouac’s use of, 48, 80
existentialism of, 70–72, 224n13 encryption, of French literary references,
and Ginsberg, 130, 135–36, 144, 156 216
Ginsberg’s naming of in “Howl,” 135–36 as strategy in Burroughs’ Queer, 102,
Kerouac’s binary of with Céline, 58, 106
64–66, 68–72, 74 as strategy in Ginsberg’s poetry, 116,
in Kerouac’s On the Road, 64–79, 84–85 119, 123, 126, 140, 167–68
spiritual faith of, 65–66, 71, 75–77, 84 Ellis, Havelock, in Burroughs’ gay literary
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, works of: canon, 100
Brothers Karamazov, 59, 72, 78 Ellmann, Richard, 101
Notes from Underground, 71 Erkkila, Betsy, 150, 229n7
Douglas, Ann, 182 existentialism, 2, 58, 70–74, 77, 84. See
Dryden, John, 115 also Dostoevsky; Sartre
Duchamp, Marcel, 11–12 Fantin-Latour, Henri, 17
Duvivier, Julien, Pépé le moko, 30, 44, 48,
222n7 Fazzino, Jimmy, 6, 11, 219n4, 219n5
Fearing, Kenneth, 156
Eberhart, Richard, Ginsberg’s letter Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 4, 187
to, 143–45, 155, 227n4 Feuillade, Louis, Fantômas, 28, 51
Eliot, T.S., 10, 115, 141, 167; Ffrench, Patrick, 221n23
Burroughs’ cut-ups of, 172 Finbow, Steve, 228n14
in Burroughs and Kerouac’s Hippos, Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 6, 64, 70, 78, 173,
30–31, 222n7 222n8
and French poetry, 160 Flaubert, Gustave, Sentimental Education
Ginsberg’s binary pairing of with [L’Education sentimentale], 59
Whitman, 149, 159–61 Fludd, Robert, 136, 167
in Ginsberg’s “The Character of the Forain, Jean-Louis, 40
Happy Warrior,” 164–65, 230n20 Ford, Charles Henri, The Young and Evil
importance of for Ginsberg’s “Howl,” (with Parker Tyler), 26, 46
160 Fowlie, Wallace, 157, 161, 229n13
modernist poetics of, compared to France, Anatole, 2, 99–100, 111–12, 130,
Perse’s, 160–61 225n5, 226n11
and Perse, 156, 159–61, 164–65 Frazer, Brenda (Bonnie Bremser), 4,
as translator of Perse, 160–61, 179, 219n6
229n16 Frechtman, Bernard, and translations of
variorum edition of The Waste Land Genet, 7, 170, 172–73
as model for variorum edition of
Ginsberg’s “Howl,” 159 Gabin, Jean, 3, 45, 48–49, 52, 57, 223n2
The Waste Land, 159–60 (see also Genealogy
Perse) of Apollinaire in Ginsberg’s work, 116
254 Index
as approach, 1, 3–5, 8–9, 11, 14–15, 17, Burroughs’ unpublished cut-ups of,
20, 59, 215–18 172–74, 222n8, 233n6
of Artaud in Ginsberg’s work, 116, in Burroughs’ The Wild Boys, 172
134–35 ethics of, compared to Artaud’s, 180,
of Céline in Burroughs’ work, 95 231n12
of Cocteau in Burroughs’ work, 110, ethics of, compared to Burroughs’,
113 180–81, 183–86, 231n10
of Gide in Burroughs’ work, 100, 110 Frechtman’s translations of questioned
Ginsberg as genealogist of his own by Burroughs, 7, 172
work, 15, 115, 124, 126, 127, 130, Funeral Rights compared with
135–37, 139, 141, 144, 148, 159, Burroughs’ Junky, 181–83
167 (see also under Ginsberg, Howl, Ginsberg’s admiration for, 170
variorum edition of) in Ginsberg’s draft of “Howl,” 135
and Ginsberg’s aesthetics, 141 Ginsberg’s reference to, 121, 131, 135,
of Ginsberg’s work, 7, 20 137
Kerouac as genealogist of his own Ginsberg’s translations of, 7, 132,
work, 87, 91–92 137–39, 230n2
and Kerouac’s work, 6–7, 70, 145, in Ginsberg’s variorum edition of
225n25 “Howl,” 139
Perse’s place in the genealogy of and homosexuality, 5, 170, 172–73
Ginsberg’s work, 116, 148–49, 164, Kerouac and, 76, 87
166–68 Kerouac compared to by Rexroth,
Whitman’s French genealogy, 229n12 145
Genet, Jean, 3, 4, 5, 9, 16–17, 24, 130, 138, Poe used by in Funeral Rights, 182,
193–94 231n14
anti-Semitism, accusations of, 182–83 posthuman otherness of, for
and betrayal as key concept, 176–77, Burroughs, 15, 178, 186, 217
180–81, 186, 231n12 publication of associated with
Burroughs’ admiration for, 171–72 Burroughs, 170–71, 230n1
Burroughs’ ambivalence toward, 15, role of for Patti Smith and Brenda
33, 175–78 Frazer, 4, 219n6
Burroughs’ biographical bond with, Genet, Jean, works of:
169–70 The Declared Enemy [L’Ennemi
Burroughs compared to, 2 déclaré], 184–85, 232n23
Burroughs’ engagement with Prisoner Funeral Rights [Pompes funèbres],
of Love in My Education, 172, 181–83, 231n14, 231n17
175–86 “The Man Condemned to Death” [“Le
Burroughs’ identification with, 169–70, Condammé à mort”], 137–39
174 The Miracle of the Rose [Miracle de la
Burroughs’ knowledge of his writing, rose], 170, 172
169–71, 231n13 Our Lady of the Flowers [Notre-Dame-
in Burroughs’ My Education, 175, 193 des-Fleurs], 171
Burroughs’ pairing of with Perse, Prisoner of Love [Un Captif amoureux],
179–80 15, 172, 174–78, 184–85
in Burroughs’ Queer, 170 The Thief ’s Journal [Le Journal du
Burroughs’ use of The Thief ’s Journal voleur], 15, 171–72, 178, 180,
in early drafts of Naked Lunch, 15, 231n10
178, 180 Gewirtz, Isaac, 64, 222n4
Index 255
Gibault, François, 224n20 Ginsberg, Allen, 1–24, 85, 89, 95

Gide, André, 2, 5, 59–60, 71, 95–106, American academic response to
120, 175, 193, 217, 225n2, 225n24, “Howl,” criticism of, 143–47
226n7, 226n8 American-centric accounts of poetry
in Burroughs’ gay literary canon, 101 by, 116–17
Burroughs’ paring of with Wilde, Apollinaire’s genetic role for poetry
100–01 by, 15
ellipses, used by, 103 Apollinaire, homage to as hermeneutic
Ginsberg’s identification of Burroughs strategy, 120–25
with, 22–24, 98–99, 106 Artaud, appropriation of, 187
homosexuality and, 5, 23, 97–101, 104 Artaud, knowledge of during writing
importance of for Burroughs of “Howl,” 131–33
overlooked, 95 in Beat Hotel, 1, 18–20
Kerouac’s identification of Burroughs Burroughs identified with Gide by,
with, 24, 96–98 23–24, 96, 98–99, 106
referenced by Burroughs in Junky, 95, Burroughs, first meeting with, 1, 42
102–08 Burroughs’ Junky, “Appreciation”
seduced by Wilde, 100–01 written for, 98–101, 106, 231n9
Gide, André, works of: and Burroughs’ 1940s library, 1, 106
Corydon, 23 and Burroughs’ The Soft Machine, 187
The Counterfeiters [Les Faux- Carr-Kammerer case, fictionalization
monnayeurs], 23–24, 59–60, 97, of, 26–27
99–100, 106, 225n4 Cézanne as master of, 20, 144
The Immoralist [L’Immoraliste], 23, ellipses used by, 123–25, 141, 148, 167
97–106, 110 French language used by, 1–2, 7
Ginsberg, Allen, literary relationships with: French modernist lineage of hidden by
Apollinaire, 7, 15, 24, 115–31, 135, Whitman, 115, 118
137, 139–41, 144, 146–48, 153, French literature, role of in
167, 215–16, 226n4, 227n5, 227n8, breakthrough as poet, 115–16, 126,
227n9, 227n11 143
Artaud, 5, 24, 116, 118, 120–21, 126, genealogical reference as strategy of,
130–35, 137, 167, 187–88, 227n9, 15, 116, 126–28, 136–39
228n14 genealogy of “Howl” cut from draft by,
Baudelaire, 106, 130, 144, 162 135–37
Céline, 135, 137, 170 Gide in photographic captions by,
Cocteau, 120, 144 23–24, 97
Dostoevsky, 130, 135–36, 144 hinting as strategy of, 136, 139–41,
Eliot, 115, 149, 159–61, 164–65, 167 143, 159, 167
Genet, 7, 121, 131–32, 135, 137–39, and homosexuality, 119, 136
170, 215–16, 230n2 ideal reader for, 124–25, 154, 161, 164,
Perse, 5, 17, 20–21, 24, 116, 127, 166–68
148–68 long line in, 144–48, 150, 155, 158, 167
Rimbaud, 17–19, 22, 115, 117, 130, misunderstood, fear of being, 145, 148,
135, 137, 139–40, 147–48, 150, 166
156–58, 161–65, 167 morality of compared to Gide, 97
Whitman, Walt, 115–18, 130–31, naming as strategy of, 120–21, 123–24,
135–36, 143–46, 148–51, 154–56, 126, 128–29, 135–37, 148, 159, 167
159, 165, 167, 226n1, 228n1 and the “New Vision,” 165
256 Index
open secrecy as strategy of, 123, 141, 135, 141, 148, 167, 226n4, 227n5
159, 216, chapter 6 passim “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!”
Perse, biographical difference from, compared to, 119, 121, 125
151, 166 ellipsis in, 123–25
Perse’s genealogical importance for, 5, hermeneutic strategy in, 118–25
148, 168 as homage, 119–20, 125
Perse concealed behind homage to misreading of as Parisian poem,
Whitman by, 148–50, 154–56 118
and Perse’s Winds as overlooked source quotation of Apollinaire in, 118–22
for “Howl,” 21–22, 150–54 as signal to American readers, 118,
in Paris, 11, 19–20, 117 120
Parisian poems of, 19, 117–19, 126 translation of Apollinaire in,
Parisian poems of as sharing 121–25
genealogical strategy of “Howl,” “The Bloodsong,” 26, 221n2
126, 128, 140–41 “The Character of the Happy Warrior,”
and Perse, 149, 155, 160–1, 164–5 162–65, 229n8, 230n20
photographs and captions by, 17, and Burroughs, 163
20–23, 96–97, 158, 163, 221n25 and Perse, 162–65
poet, ideal conception of, 148, 151, and Wordsworth, 163
153–55, 158–59, 162–64, 166, “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!,” 19,
229n8 118–19, 121–23, 125, 133, 135, 137,
and the poète maudit, 139–41, 158, 162 153, 226n3
and politics of poetry, 83 misreading of as Parisian poem,
poetry as prophecy for, 121–23 118
queer poetic tradition of, 155 prophecy as theme in, 121–22
quotation as strategy of, 116, 121–25, translation of Apollinaire in, 121–22
138–39, 147 “Europe! Europe!,” 123, 125
Rimbaud, admiration for, 19, 115, 117, Apollinaire in, 123
228n16, 228n3 “Howl,” 5, 8, 15: aesthetics of, 20, 129,
Romantic and Classical affiliations of, 139
147, 159, 164–65, 227n9, 230n20 aesthetics of described to Eberhart,
as a scholar in the variorum edition of 143–45, 155, 227n4
“Howl,” 127, 159 aesthetics of described to
first encounter of with Solomon, 130–31 Hollander, 143, 145–50, 227n4,
on Surrealism, 12 228n3, 229n4
translations of Apollinaire by, 7, 121–25 Apollinaire in, 116, 128, 129, 137,
translations of Genet by, 7, 137–39 139, 144, 147
translation as strategy of, 116, 121–25, and “At Apollinaire’s Grave,”
137–39 125–28, 140
Trilling, letters to, 19, 115, 145, 149, Artaud in, 116, 131–33
159–60, 162–63, 166, 168, 226n1, Artaud named twice in draft of,
230n19 134–35, 137
variorum edition of “Howl” used by to biographical readings of, 129, 143
project genealogy, 15, 126 (see also Blake named in, 117, 126
Howl Original Draft Facsimile) Buddha named in draft of, 135
Ginsberg, Allen, works of: Burroughs named in draft of, 135
“America,” 119 Carr named in draft of, 135
“At Apollinaire’s Grave,” 19, 118–28, Cassady, named in draft of, 135
Index 257
Céline named in draft of, 135, 137 absence of French literary

Cézanne in, 129, 137, 144 reference in, 116–17
Chazal named in draft of, 128 American frame of reference to, 117
and Cold War America, 117, 136, Howl Original Draft Facsimile
140, 144, 153 (variorum edition of “Howl”), 12,
Corbière as source for, 8, 139, 141 15, 115–16, 123, 139, 147, 156, 168
Dostoevsky named in draft of, American and French references
135–36 in, 130
French modernist poetry, role of in, Artaud’s presence in, 131–35
116, 126, 143 as more than biographical source
Genet in draft of, 137–39 text, 116, 226n2
Genet named in draft of, 135 cryptic strategy of as response to
Gurdjieff named in draft of, 135 “Howl,” 116, 130
“hydrogen jukebox” aesthetic in, T.S. Eliot’s relevance as model for,
129, 139, 220n16 159–60
Kerouac in, 145 genealogical aim of, 15, 115,
Kerouac named in draft of, 135 126–36, 143 (see also under
literary lineage of, 115, 148 genealogy)
long line of as French, 144–46, 158, Genet in, 139
167 as landmark in Beat scholarship,
Lorca in, 144, 167 116
Marx named in draft of, 135–36 Perse in, 156, 159, 166
naming names in, 124, 137 as more than a scholarly edition,
Perse as overlooked model for, 21, 116, 140–41, 158
156 Whitman and William Carlos
Perse in, 116, 168 Williams, references to in, 130
Perse’s Winds [Vents] compared to, Kaddish and Other Poems, 121
151–54 “The Last Voyage,” 162–64, 229n17,
Poe named in, 117, 126 230n18
“ponderous lineage” in draft of, and Baudelaire, 162
135–37, 139, 167, 215 and Perse, 162–64
Proust named in draft of, 135 and Poe
reception in American literary and Rimbaud, 162–63
context, 116–20, 146–47 “The Lion for Real,” Corbière in, 141
read in French literary context, “A Supermarket in California,” 148–51,
116–20 154–56, 168
Rimbaud in, 139–40 Lorca in, 117
Rimbaud named in draft of, 135 Perse in, 148–50, 154–56, 168
Six Gallery reading of, 131, 132, 134 Whitman in, 117, 148
Smart named in draft of, 128 Ginsberg, Louis, 97–98, 101
sources of, 8, 20–21, 115–16 Girodias, Maurice, 171
Spengler named in draft of, 135 Goethe, Johann, Wolfgang, 9–10, 30
strategy of genealogical reference Gogol, Nikolai, 10
in, 126, 128, 136–39 Gorrillot, Bénédecite, 12, 221n20
and Whitman, 115–18, 143–45 Grace, Nancy, 6, 58, 219n6
Whitman named in draft of, 135 Grauerholz, James, 56, 174, 221n1, 221n2,
Wolfe named in draft of, 135 222n4
Howl and Other Poems, 127, 149 Grossman, Evelyne, 192, 205, 209, 212
258 Index
Guattari, Félix, 205, 225n24 intertextuality, 5, 14, 111, 182

Gurdjueff, George, Ginsberg’s Isherwood, Christopher, 98–99
naming of in draft of “Howl,” 135–36, Isou, Isidore, 130
167
Gysin, Brion, 4, 11, 177, 194, 210 Jablonka, Ivan, 182
calligraphy of compared to Michaux’s, Jackson, Brian, 220n16, 227n9
207 Jackson, Elizabeth, 194
as source for Burroughs’ experimental Jacob, Max, 120
writing, 207 James, William, 81
Joans, Ted, 4
Hale, Peter, 229n15 Johnson, Joyce, 28, 221n1
Hanrahan, Mairéad, 183–84 Johnson, Ronna, 219n6
Harraway, Donna, 212 Jones, Leroi, 4
Harris, Frank, 102, 107 Jouffroy, Alain, 12
Harris, Oliver, 95, 99, 184, 219n4, 221n25, Joyce, James, 9–10, 76, 91, 222n8
222n12, 225n3, 231n11, 233n4
Harrop, Joanna, 234n13 Kafka, Franz, 9–10, 70, 163, 228n12
Helbrandt, Maurice, 230n1 Kahn, Douglas, 134
Hitchcock, Alfred, 68 Kammerer, Dave, 25
Hollander, John, letter to Ginsberg, 143, Kaufman, Bob, 4, 219n5
145–50, 227n4, 228n3, 229n4 Kaufmann, Walter, 71
Holmes, John Clellon, “This Is the Beat Kerouac, Jack, literary relationships with:
Generation,” 2, 63, 72–73 Balzac, 6, 59, 64–65, 71, 76, 79, 222n6
homosexuality, 5, 23–24, 31, 46, 52–56, Baudelaire, 8, 223n7
96–110, 119, 136, 148, 155, 170, Céline, 6, 15–16, 24, 57–92
172–73, 182, 201, 223n5 Cocteau, 1, 43
and coming out, 108, 219n3. See also Dostoevsky, 58–59, 64–66, 68–79,
under Burroughs; Cocteau; Genet; 84–85, 91
Gide; Ginsberg Fitzgerald, 6, 64, 69, 78
Hougue, Clementine, 221n21 Gide, 59–60, 97, 100, 106, 225n4
Hrebeniak, Michael, 83, 224n10, 224n19 Proust, 6, 15–16, 24, 76, 81–92
Hugo, Victor, 6, 64, 71, 73 Rimbaud, 19, 31–33, 42, 57, 71
Huncke, Herbert, 62, 71, 163 Wolfe, 22, 64, 96
Hunt, Tim, 6, 58, 64, 224n17 Kerouac, Jack, and American culture,
Hussey, Andrew, 219n4 10–11, 47, 52–53, 67, 97
in American literary tradition, 6,
inhuman, the, 102, 186, 187–89, 192, 22–23, 70, 78
201–02, 212–13 Balzac, admiration for, 30, 64–65, 79,
and Beckett, 189 222n6
Braidotti on, 16, 188 Baudelaire’s structural role in The
and Burroughs, 16, 186–88, 213, Subterraneans, 8
233n3 bilingualism of, 2, 219n2
of Burroughs’ Mugwumps, 201–02 and “bookmovie,” 26, 29, 43, 46, 52–53,
and Genet, 186 56
in Gide, 102 and Buddhism, 66, 140
Lyotard on, 233n3 and Carné’s Port of Shadows in Hippos
and Michaux’s “insect writing,” 192 and I Wish I Were You, 43, 45,
and posthumanism, 212 48–57, 61
Index 259
Céline, appropriation of, 6, 16, 57–62, homosexuality in I Wish I Were You,

66–70, 73, 84–85, 93 52–53
Céline, mistranslation of text about, 8, Hugo, appropriation of, 73
58, 73–74, 77 hybrid Franco-American identity of, 6,
Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night 22, 86, 145
and On the Road, 57–58, 63, 66–72, and I Wish I Were You as first
75–79, 83 “bookmovie,” 43, 46, 56
Céline as model for I Wish I Were You, and I Wish I Were You as literary
57, 60–62, 68 breakthrough, 28, 92
and Céline’s nihilism, 63, 66 and I Wish I Were You, long-delayed
Céline in On the Road, 58 publication of, 6, 10, 27, 43
Céline in the “Scroll” On the Road, 75 I Wish I Were You as rewriting of
and Christianity, 66, 69, 72, 84 Hippos, 10, 27–28, 48–49, 51,
and Cocteau’s Blood of the Poet, 1, 43 55–56, 60, 68
and the coining of the phrase Beat “IT” in On the Road as Célinean,
Generation, 2, 63 67–71, 76
Deleuze on, 88 journals of, 6–7, 15, 49, 58–59, 62, 64,
Deleuze’s reading of Proust compared 66–70, 72–73, 77–78, 85, 89–90,
to Kerouac’s reading, 88–89 94–95
Dostoevsky, binary of with Céline, 58, and literariness, 27–30, 42, 45, 58
64–66, 68–72, 74 literature, approach to compared to
Dostoevsky in On the Road, 64–79, Burroughs’, 10, 25, 28–30, 42–43
84–85 literature, lists of, 64, 76–77, 85
and Dostoevsky’s spiritual faith, 65–6, Melville evoked in journals, 64, 76, 78
71, 75–77, 84 Melville’s Moby Dick referenced in On
Duluoz Legend of as Proustian, 87–88, the Road and the “Scroll” version,
90 78
Francophone writings of, 6 and morality, 59–61, 63, 66, 71
and French culture, 6, 43–44 and national identity, 6–8
French culture, allusions to in Hippos, and the “New Vision,” 117, 165
30–31, 44–48, 50 On the Road, writing of, 15
French culture, allusions to in I Wish I photograph of, 22
Were You, 43–47, 50, 56, 61 and poetic realist cinema, 10, 24,
and French film, 27, 49, 51–52 (see also 28, 30, 43, 45, 50–52, 56 (see also
under poetic realist cinema) Carné; Duvivier; Renoir)
and French language, 1–2, 7–8, 47 and politics of writing, 83–84
French literature, appropriation of, postcolonial readings of, 95, 221n21
6–7, 10, 15–16, 27, 30 and posthumanism, 16, 188, 217
and French naturalism and, 30, 66, 85, process, importance of to writing, 6–7,
222n6 89–90
Gabin, Kerouac’s identification with, 49 projection and identification of poetic
and Gide’s The Counterfeiters, 23–24, realist cinema used in I Wish I Were
59–60, 97, 99–100, 106, 225n4 You by, 44–45, 48–51, 55–56
Ginsberg’s comparison of “Howl” to Proust, appropriation of, 6, 15–16,
prose style of, 145 85–92
Greek references in I Wish I Were You, Proust, binary of with Wolfe, 86, 89
53–54 Proustian quality of I Wish I Were You,
Hippos, co-writing of with Burroughs, 92
10, 19, 25–30, 50–51, 61, 87, 92 Proust, reading of by, 85, 88
260 Index
Québécois identity of, 6, 8, 22, 43, 47, Orpheus Emerged, 27, 223n7 Satori in
219n2, 220n10 Paris, 6–7
and Renoir’s La Grande illusion, 30, The Sea Is My Brother, 27
44–45, 48, 55 The Subterraneans, 8, 83
Rimbaud, approach to in Hippos Sur le chemin, 6, 64, 224n8
compared to Burroughs’, 10, 19, 43 Tics, 89
Rimbaud identified with in Hippos, 32 The Town and the City, 24, 27, 51, 56,
Rimbaud identified with in I Wish I 63, 65, 87, 97, 99, 101–02, 226n7
Were You, 42, 57 Vanity of Duluoz, 28–29, 56
Sartre and Sartrean reading of On the Visions of Cody, 15–16, 79, 82, 85,
Road, 58, 70–77 88–92, 217, 233n3
spontaneous prose and Céline, 80–82, 93 Kierkegaard, Søren, 70
spontaneous prose and Proust, 81–82, Klee, Paul, 180, 209
85, 87–88 Korda, Zoltan, The Four Feathers, 223n4
Stendhal, admiration for, 7, 30 Krokidas, John, Kill Your Darlings, 26
and Tchelitchew’s Cache-cache in
Hippos and I Wish I Were You, 30, Laforgue, Jules, 160
43–51, 54–56, 61, 226n10 Lamantia, Philip, 4, 219n5
Tics as Proustian, 89 Larbaud, Valery, 150
and “true-story novels,” genealogy of, Laroche, Hadrien, 186
87 Lautréamont, Comte de, 130, 138, 146
Visions of Cody as breakthrough, 92 Les Chants de Maldoror, 146
Visions of Cody, and Proust, 85–92 Lawrence, D.H., 70, 224n10
Kerouac, Jack, works of: Leary, Timothy, 36
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Lebel, Jean-Jacques, 11–12, 220n16
Tanks (with Burroughs), 10, 19, Lefevere, André, 139
25–37, 42, 43–56, 58, 60, 68, 221n1, Lindsay, Vachel, 121
221n3, 221n4, 222n7, 223n4, Lorca, Federico Garcia, 9, 115, 117, 121,
225n4, 226n10, 230n19 128, 131, 144, 147, 155, 167
“Belief and Technique for Modern Lotringer, Sylvère, 171
Prose,” 80–82, 85, 87, 89 Luce, Henry, 83
“On Céline” (in Good Blonde) Lydenberg, Robin, 190, 233n4
[“Commentaire sur Louis-Ferdinand Lyotard, Jean-François, 188, 232n3
Céline”], 8, 58, 73–77, 84
Doctor Sax, 102 Mahler, Gustave, 163
“Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” Makay, Polina, 6
79–82, 85, 87, 217 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 35, 130
I Wish I Were You, 6, 10, 27–30, 42, Mann, Thomas, 9
43–56, 57–62, 68, 79, 92, 215, Marks, H.P., 223n5
221n3, 221n4, 222n5, 223n4, Marlowe, Christopher, 117
223n5, 226n10 Marvel, Andrew, 117
La nuit est ma femme, 6 Marx, Karl, Ginsberg’s naming of in draft
La Vie est d’hommage, 8, 73, 219n2, of “Howl,” 135–36
224n8 Mayakovski, Vladimir, 9–10, 121, 128,
On the Road, 6, 15–16, 58, 63–70, 131, 167
73–79, 83, 86–87, 217, 220n9, McCarthy, Mary, 10–11
225n25, 233n3 McClure, Michael, 4, 131, 134, 146
On the Road: The Original Scroll, 75, 78 McMahon, Joseph, 229n8
Index 261
Melehy, Hassan, 6–7, 58, 88, 220n9, Muckle, John, 136, 154–55
220n12, 225n23 Murphy, Timothy, 190, 219n4, 230n5
Melville, Herman, and Kerouac, 6, 64, 76,
78, 224n17 Nadeau, Pierre, 223n3
Menefee, Jessee, 66 Nicosia, Gerald, 44
Meyers, Jeffrey, 140 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 71, 81
Michaux, Henri, 3, 4, 12, 16, 215, 217–18, Nin, Anais, 132, 134, 228n15
234n16 Norse, Harold, 11
Burroughs’ cut-up text about, 193–95,
233n6 Olson, Charles, 147
Corso’s observation of, 5 Orlovsky, Peter, 119
and drugs, 13, 233n11
Ginsberg introduced to by Solomon, Pacini, Peggy, 6–7
130–31 Paris, 1, 4–5, 11, 19, 27, 32, 44–45, 47, 57,
Gysin’s calligraphy compared to, 207 98, 107
“insect writing” of, 192, 205, 212–13 as destination of plot in Burroughs and
Meidosems of compared to Burroughs’ Kerouac’ Hippos, 19, 44–45, 55
Mugwumps, 191, 195–200, 202–04 occupied, 44–45, 182
oeuvre of compared to Burroughs’, Ginsberg and, 117–19, 123–24, 130–
192–93, 234n12 31, 141, 166, 192, 223n2, 226n4
representation subverted by, 206–07, Pascal, Blaise, 6
209 Patterson, Anita, 160
verbal-visual work of compared to Pawlik, Joanna, 228n14
Burroughs, 188–213 Paz, Octavio, 234n12
Michaux, Henri, works of: Pennington, Jim, 232n17
Ecuador, 193 Penot-Lacassagne, Olivier, 13, 219n4
La Vie dans les plis, 191, 194–95 Pérét, Benjamin, 11
Meidosems, 191, 194–204, 207, 213 Perloff, Marjorie, 33
Miserable Miracle [Misérable miracle], Perse, St.-John, 5, 17, 20–22, 24, 116, 127,
206–07, 234n12 148–68, 217, 229n13, 230n21
Mouvements, 209–10 Burroughs’ cut-ups of, 172, 179
Miles, Barry, 4, 43, 163, 165, 167–68, conception of the poet of, as model for
169, 187, 219n7, 228n13, 229n16, Ginsberg, 153–54, 229n8
230n18 differences as poet to Ginsberg, 151,
as Ginsberg’s ideal reader, 168 166–67
Milhaud, Darius, 108 epic poetry of compared to Ginsberg’s
Miller, Henry, 33–34, 45, 76, 157, 228n12 “Howl,” 150, 229n6
Milner, Max, 13 genealogy as central poetic
mise-en-abîme, in Burroughs’ Queer, 107 preoccupation of, 151
in Ginsberg’s “Howl,” 127 in Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in
in Kerouac’s I Wish I Were You, 45, 47, California,” 149–50, 154, 156
49, 51, 226n10 Ginsberg’s cryptic inscription of in
Modernism, 16, 36, 81 “Howl,” 168
Montherlant, Henry de, 6 Ginsberg’s neglected affiliation to, 127,
Morgan, Bill, 162, 223n5, 225n4, 232n1 148–49, 155, 229n14, 230n20
Morgan, Ted, 225n4 and Ginsberg’s “The Character of the
Mortenson, Erik, 72–73 Happy Warrior” and “The Lost
Moses, Omri, 81 Voyage,” 162–66
262 Index
long line of, as model for Ginsberg, postmodernism, 16, 190, 217
150, 155, 156, 158, 167 Burroughs and, 107, 190, 233n3,
prose poetry of compared to 233n4
Burroughs’ by Ginsberg, 157–58 Poulin, Jacques, 220n9
and Rimbaud, 155–58 Pound, Ezra, 115, 121, 144, 146–47, 167,
style of, 151 227n9
and T.S. Eliot, 156, 159–61, 164–65 Prévert, Jacques, 9, 130
as triangulating binaries for Ginsberg, Prigent, Christian, 12–13, 221n20
149, 160–65 Prima di, Diane, 4
and Whitman, 149–51, 153–55, 157 Proust, Marcel, 15–16, 24, 76, 137, 189–90,
Perse, St.-John, works of: 217, 225n25
Anabasis [Anabase], 161, 165, 168 in Burroughs’ gay literary canon, 100
aesthetics of, 160 Ginsberg’s naming of in draft of
Burroughs’ evocation of, 179, 209 “Howl,” 135
as epic, 150 and involuntary memory, 88–92
as gift from Burroughs to Ginsberg, Kerouac’s appropriation of, 6, 15, 85–92
158 Punday, David, 212
source for Burroughs, 21, 150, 156
stylistic difference to “Howl,” 151 Québécois literature and culture, 6, 8, 43,
title’s meaning, 154 47, 219n2, 220n9, 220n10
as “yagé poetry” for Burroughs, 209
Winds [Vents], as an “American epic,” Rabelais, François, 9, 220n12
150, 154, 230n21 Racine, Jean, 118
compared to Whitman’s Leaves of Raskin, Jonah, 116, 226n2, 228n2,
Grass, 150–51, 154 230n20
as epic, 150, 167 Ray, Man, 11
historical as well as mythic, 153, Reich, Wilhelm, 81, 136, 167
229n9 Renoir, Jean, The Grand Illusion [La
as source for “Howl,” 20–21, 150–54 Grande illusion] in Burroughs and
photograph of Burroughs holding Kerouac’s Hippos, 30–31, 43–45, 48,
copy of, 20–22, 158, 163, 229n15 55, 222n7
stylistic parallels with “Howl,” The Lower Depths [Les Bas-fonds], 43.
151–52 See also poetic realist cinema
structural parallels with “Howl,” 152 Rexroth, Kenneth, 145, 229n12
Piaf, Edith, 111 Rhodes, S.A., 161
Picasso, Pablo, 120 Richard, Jean-Pierre, 224n11
Plato, 168 Rigaut, Jacques, 120
Plotinus, 136, 167–68 Rigolot, Carol, 150–51
Poe, Edgar Alan, 117, 121, 126, 136, 150, Rilke, Rainer Maria, 10, 163–64
162, 167, 182, 215, 229n17, 231n14 Rimbaud, Arthur, 1, 3, 5, 30, 44, 147–48,
poetic realist cinema. See also Carné; 216–18, 222n14, 223n7, 225n5,
Duvivier; Kerouac; Renoir 228n16
Pollard, Patrick, 108 and Baudelaire, 36
Pope, Alexander, 115 bilingual edition of used by Burroughs,
posthumanism, 15–16, 217 38–41, 73
and Burroughs, 15, 191, 204, 206, 212, as biographical figure for Beats, 19–20,
233n3 33
and the unknown, 180, 186 Burroughs compared to, 2, 24, 171
Index 263
Burroughs’ cut-ups of, 8, 19–20, 34, 37, Rolland, Romain, 130

172–74, 179, 222n8, 222n9, 222n12, Rousseau, Jacques, 120
230n6 Russell, Jamie, 101, 226n6
in Burroughs’ 1940s library, 1, 42
Burroughs’ perverse identification with Sagan, Françoise, 111
in Burroughs and Kerouac’ Hippos, Salinger, J.D., 222n8
32–34, 42, 225n4 Sanders, Julie, 14
in Burroughs’ photomontages, 40–41 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 130
in Burroughs’ The Exterminator, American reception of, 72–73
35–36 and the Beat Generation, 2, 72
in Burroughs’ The Soft Machine, 35 and Céline, 58, 70, 72, 77, 82–83, 224n11
in Burroughs and Gysin’s The Third and Dostoevsky, 71–72, 224n13
Mind, 36 and Genet, 9, 171
“derangement of the senses” and Sartrean reading of On the Road,
[“dérèglement de tous les sens”] of, 16, 58, 70–77
40, 158 terms of used in translation of
as Ginsberg’s ideal poet, 19, 115, 117, Kerouac’s “On Céline,” 73–74
228n16, 228n3 Sartre, Jean-Paul, works of:
Ginsberg’s naming of in draft of Being and Nothingness [L’Être et le
“Howl,” 135, 137 néant], 73–74
and Ginsberg’s “The Last Voyage,” Existentialism Is A Humanism
162–64 [L’Existentialism est un humanisme],
in Hippos, 10, 19, 26, 31–42, 222n7 71–72
in “Howl,” 139–40, 167 Nausea [La Nausée], 72–73
iconic images of, 1, 17–22, 157–59 Reflections on the Jewish Question
iconicity of compared to Perse, 21–22, [Réflexions sur la question juive],
156–58 82–83
Kerouac’s reading of compared to Saint Genet: comédien et martyr, 171, 176
Burroughs’, 10, 19 Savran, David, 232n19
Kerouac’s view of, 57, 71 Schlumberger, Marc, 193–94
Miller’s identification with, 33–34 Schumacher, Michael, 144
in Minutes to Go (Burroughs et al), Schwitters, Kurt, 128
35–41 Sears, John, 222n16, 222n17
paired with Perse, 156–58, 164–65 sexual identity, 22–24, 31, 140. See also
in variorum edition of “Howl,” 130, homosexuality
139–40, 156 Shakespeare, William, 10, 81, 85, 222n8
and Verlaine in Hippos, 3 Shattuck, Roger, 121–22, 227n6
Whitman as influence on, 150 Sheehan, Paul, 206
Rimbaud, Arthur, works of: Shelley, Percy Byshhe, 10, 128, 159, 167
“The Drunken Boat [“Le Bateau ivre”], Shinder, Jason, 116
137, 140, 162 Situationism, 3, 219n4
Illuminations, 21, 41, 140, 179 Skerl, Jennie, 6, 190, 233n4
A Season in Hell [Une Saison en enfer], Skinazi, Karen, 220n9
42, 139–40, 147 Smart, Christopher, 128–29, 133, 137, 156,
“To a Reason” [“A une Raison”] cut up 167
by Burroughs, 37–41 Ginsberg’s naming of in draft of
Rivière, Jacques, 154 “Howl,” 128
Robinson, Thom, 219n1 Jubilate Agno, 128
264 Index
Smith, Patti, 4 Varèse, Louise, 21, 41, 139 147, 161

Snyder, Gary, 4, 147 Verlaine, Paul, 30–31
Solomon, Carl, 128, 133, 152, 170, 228n12 Vico, Giambattista, 136, 167
Artaud, Genet and Michaux Vidal, Gore, 226n6
introduced to Ginsberg by, 131 Villon, François, 6
and biographical approach to Vincendeau, Ginette, 223n3
Ginsberg’s “Howl,” 130–31, 133, Voltaire, 6
228n16
Sommerville, Ian, 40 Wasley, Aidan, 155
Sophocles, 53–54 Weidner, Chad, 6
Spengler, Oswald, 9, 106, 163, 230n19 Weiss, Ruth, 4
Ginsberg’s naming of in draft of Wermer-Colan, Alex, 222n8
“Howl,” 135 Wernham, Guy, 132, 138
Stein, Gertrude, 46–47 Whalen, Philip, 147
Stendhal, 6 White, Edmund, 22, 102, 231n17
Le Rouge et le noir, 30 Whitman, Walt, 11, 115–19, 121, 130–31
Surrealism, 3, 11–13, 51, 108, 129, 144, and Ginsberg, 136, 143–46, 148–50,
193–94, 219n4, 220n16, 221n20, 159–61, 165, 167, 226n1, 228n1,
226n11, 227n9, 228n15 229n12
Swope, Richard, 118, 226n4 Ginsberg’s naming of in draft of
“Howl,” 135–36
Tanner, Tony, 198 as “mountain” overshadowing “Howl,”
Tchelitchew, Pavlev, Hide and Seek [Cache- 115, 144, 149, 156, 226n1
cache], in Burroughs and Kerouac’s and Perse, 149–51, 154–55, 157 (see
Hippos, 30, 43–49 also under Ginsberg)
in Kerouac’s I Wish I Were You, 9, Whitman, Walt, works of:
43, 51, 54–56, 61, 223n1, 226n10 Leaves of Grass, 151, 153
Theado, Matt, 64 Whittemore, Reed, 229n10
Thomas, Dylan, 115 Wilde, Oscar, 2, 99–102, 105, 107, 226n8
Tietchen, Todd, 6, 89 in Burroughs’ gay literary canon, 100
translation, 7, 13, 20, 38, 73–75, 121–22, Burroughs’ paring of with Gide,
137–39, 160–61, 170, 172–73, 100–01
223n5, 228n14, 229n16 in The Immoralist (Gide), 100
and Lefevere’s “refraction,” 139 (see Williams, William Carlos, 81, 117, 128,
also under Ginsberg) 130, 144, 146, 156, 167, 227n9
Trigilio, Tony, 123 Wilson, Edmund, 53–54
Trilling, Lionel, 19, 97, 115, 145–46, 149, Wolfe, Thomas, 22, 76, 86, 89, 91, 96
159–60, 162–63, 165, 168, 226n1, Ginsberg’s naming of in draft of
230n19 “Howl,” 135–36
Twain, Mark, 6, 64 Wolstonecraft, Mary, 159
Tyler, Parker, 223n1 Wood, Brent, 192
The Young and Evil (with Charles Wordsworth, William, 144, 159, 163,
Henri Ford), 26, 46 222n8
Tytell, John, 11
Tzara, Tristan, 11–12, 120 Yeats, William Butler, 9–10, 30–31, 81,
144, 164–65
Vaché, Jacques, 120 Yu, Timothy, 116, 128, 228n1
Van Doren, Mark, 228n3
Van Gogh, Vincent, 206, 209 Zola, Emile, 30, 58, 64, 71, 79

The French Genealogy of The Beat Generation - Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac's Appropriations of Modern Literature, From Rimbaud To Michaux

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The French Genealogy of The Beat Generation - Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac's Appropriations of Modern Literature, From Rimbaud To Michaux

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The French Genealogy

of the Beat Generation

1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square

First published 2017

© Véronique Lane, 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-2504-5

Cover design: Eleanor Rose

Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

List of Figures viii

Introduction: Beyond “Rimbaud in a Raincoat” 1

1 Burroughs or Kerouac’s Rimbaud: To Be or Not to Be “L I T E R A R Y” 25

Conclusion: A Purloined Genealogy 215

I.1 Allen Ginsberg in Room 25 of the Beat Hotel, 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur,

8.12 Facsimile, William Burroughs, Episode 9 of “Ten Episodes from

I should start by acknowledging the obvious, which is that Burroughs, Ginsberg

Realist Cinema,” in Comparative American Studies 11.3 (2013); “Allen Ginsberg’s

In August 1944, the eighteen-year old Columbia University freshman Allen

necessary prerequisite for future scholarship to explore in detail the fertilizing

American cultural rebels, whether paralleled with nineteenth-century

Hugo, de Montherlant, Pascal, Proust, Stendhal, Villon and Voltaire—indeed

main field of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s appropriations, but it comes

To begin with, the encounters of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac in mid-

What overwhelmed me, in the 65 Lebel/Jouffroy anthology, […] is the power of

Prigent’s eloquent description of Beat poetry doesn’t only distinguish it

brings together with Georges Bataille’s own put-down of Surrealism as overly

tradition has made it almost impossible to understand the very bridging of

fertilization for American literature and literature itself, at times micro-readings

“A Funny Second’s Charade”

Chapter 1 reveals, Burroughs made important creative use of another bilingual

cultural reputations of Perse and Rimbaud—whose works Ginsberg regularly

Ginsberg’s caption presents this scene through a series of binaries that

Figure I.3 William Burroughs “camping as an André Gidean sophisticate lecturing

The opposition constructed through the noun “sophisticate” and adjective

Burroughs or Kerouac’s Rimbaud:

“Hidden Under the Floorboards”

Ramsey Allen (based on David Kammerer). The narrative’s inevitable trajectory

When Kerouac “Got Literary”

“And what did the guy look like?”

and on closer inspection we can discern in Hippos three distinctive patterns of

“I’m the Later Bourgeois Rimbaud”

Half way through Hippos, Kerouac’s narrator references Faulkner, already

In short, Burroughs’ extravagant non-identification with Rimbaud the poet

Burroughs’ one brief identification with Rimbaud in Hippos is therefore highly

“Un règlement de comptes avec la Littérature”

Burroughs’ assertion in his cut-up manifestos that you can be Rimbaud by

However, this fragmented obscurity is balanced by the emphatic way in which

we find a model for Burroughs’ emerging subversion of linguistic usage, time

Figure 1.2 William Burroughs, photomontage, “Untitled” (1964) © The Estate of

French Poetic Realist Film in Kerouac’s

In a scholarly context in which there has been increasing attention paid to

“I want to get out as soon as possible.”

Cache-cache: “America Is My Country and

It was, as the French say, très formidable! We had, at least,—(this is essential)—a

“The Best Picture I Ever Saw”

In this scene, instead of a canvas, it is a cinema screen that functions as a

their identification—chiefly Al’s identification—Kerouac himself uses the term

The Writer’s Wish

A third cultural allusion is essential to grasp the fundamental shift of emphasis

There is a fundamental distinction between the narrator and the author of I

anticapitalist. Readers of On the Road will of course recognize in these aspects of