Coming of age with the Beats

Near the start of Sam Kashner’s affectionate but clear-eyed memoir “When I Was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School,” there’s a moment that captures the double-edged lure of the Beat world with an almost perfect grace.

It’s 1976, and Kashner has just arrived in Boulder, Colo., where he will spend the next two years as Allen Ginsberg’s apprentice, as well as the first (and often only) poetry student at the Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. The Kerouac School is a classic Ginsberg inspiration, with its mix-and-match amalgam of sales pitch and spirituality, the way it trades on both Kerouac’s name and the idea of poetry as an out-of-body experience. Cementing the image, though, is what Kashner finds when he reaches Naropa, which is, he informs us, the only Buddhist university in the United States:

“To get to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, you had to get to the mall on Pearl Street in downtown Boulder, and then climb the stairs next to the New York Delicatessen, a deli, by the way, started by two hippies from Brooklyn who missed their grandmother’s babka and matzoh ball soup. I knew I’d come to the right place when I saw three Buddhist monks in saffron robes sitting at a table outside the New York Deli, scrutinizing their matzoh balls.”

A deli opened by hippies from Brooklyn? Buddhist monks eating matzo ball soup? Such dichotomies have always stood at the heart of Beat culture, which, from its first flowering at Columbia University in the 1940s, had one foot in the avant-garde and the other firmly in the middle class. Certainly, this is true of Kashner; a nice Jewish boy from suburban Long Island, he went to the Kerouac School to meet his heroes, even as the prospect terrified him. “I wasn’t a beatnik,” he acknowledges. “I wasn’t even a hippie. But I wanted to write poetry and have cool friends and thumb my nose at the establishment; at the same time I wanted to make my parents proud of me.”

The irony is that the same might be said of many of his role models, from the long-dead Kerouac, who lived with his mother, to Ginsberg, who called home every Sunday like the dutiful son he could not help but be. For Kashner, then, attending Naropa was less about poetry than about demystification, a sentiment expressed by the institute’s founder, former Buddhist monk Trungpa Rinpoche: “He said the real reason I had come to the Jack Kerouac School was to be released from my heroes -- to find out the truth about them and be free of them, to be able to live my own life.”

On the most basic level, this makes “When I Was Cool” a coming-of-age story, although most people don’t get to interact with the heroes they’re trying to move beyond. At the Kerouac School, however, Kashner found himself in the nexus of the Beat world, as his avatars became his peers. His first assignment was to complete a Ginsberg poem about a tryst with Neal Cassady, a request that confounded him on all sorts of levels, not least his sexual naivete. Shortly thereafter, he was asked to keep an eye on William S. Burroughs, who had a penchant for using heroin when not teaching the cartography of imaginary places or playing tapes of what he claimed were the voices of Hitler and Jesus Christ.

Some of the book’s most surreal moments involve the notoriously deadpan Burroughs, “a midwestern Maurice Chevalier on junk” who could weep drunkenly over Jack London while neglecting his own son, a barely functional alcoholic with a liver that no longer worked. Then, of course, there’s Ginsberg, who spent as much time worrying about his legacy as he did writing poems. “By the time I was Allen’s apprentice,” Kashner tells us, “he had finally managed to come into the personality he had always had: the soul of an actuary, not a wild man. He loved keeping lists and files and filling notebooks as if they were ledgers, his dreams charted and monitored like they were stocks. He rarely if ever cursed. He could be the most polite of men. He often wore a bathing suit in the hot tub.... He was a whiner who howled.”

Still, there remained something profound about Ginsberg, something larger than life. As Kashner explains: “After an hour or so in Allen’s presence, I didn’t have a sense of who I was dealing with, except that it was really him, that he had really lived this life that I did know something about, and that by putting himself in a kind of lineage with Walt Whitman, I felt Walt Whitman’s breath passing over me.”

That sense of poetic heritage, of a creative line that stems from Whitman, was an essential aspect of the Beats’ appeal and influence, the idea that writers like Kerouac, Burroughs and Ginsberg were part of a larger bohemian ethos, one that extended back and forth in time. In retrospect, this seems equally true and not true -- as much a matter of the movement’s narcissism, its tendency toward self-mythology, as any aesthetic affinity -- but what’s important is the sensibility, which Kashner recognizes at the core. By turns insider and outsider, he was perfectly positioned to see his teachers not just as who they were but also as who they wished to be and to sympathize with each of them.

Of all the people in “When I Was Cool,” perhaps none evokes this response as much as Gregory Corso, the New York street kid turned ecstatic poet, whom his contemporaries likened to Rimbaud. More than Burroughs even, Corso was a dangerous character, a drug addict and scam artist who let his girlfriend turn tricks to support him and at one point attempted a half-hearted kidnapping to extort money from Kashner’s parents. At the same time, he could be wise, insightful, what Kashner calls his “courage teacher,” the very image of the charming rogue.

As “When I Was Cool” progresses, Corso’s protean nature, his ability to balance heartfelt philosophical riffs (“You have to hurry -- death is chasing you and it’s closer than you think. There’s a lot to do in a short time.”) with the most self-serving behavior, begins to seem like a metaphor for the entire Beat experience, with its three-dimensional sense of both transcendence and degradation, of a universe where the sacred and profane go hand in hand. “The Beats are no example,” Corso once insisted. “They forsook certain habits, a certain way of being, but acquired their own habits. They’re as lost as the main flow.”

What makes all this so valuable is not the acuity of Kashner’s portraits so much as the idea that he is capturing a lost moment, a bit of literary history that has passed us by. After all, with the exception of Anne Waldman -- who comes off terribly in these pages as the Isadora Duncan of the poetry world -- virtually every major player in “When I Was Cool” is now dead and gone. In that regard, Kashner’s memoir functions as a reclamation project, the twilight of the demigods. Occasionally, the book runs into problems, mostly with chronology; a release party for Ginsberg’s punk rock single “Birdbrain” couldn’t have taken place in early 1977, as Kashner remembers, because “Birdbrain” didn’t come out until 1981.

More important, though, is the image “When I Was Cool” offers of a time when the author’s heroes were not set in stone. “Kerouac,” Burroughs later wrote, “opened a million coffee bars and sold a million Levis ... [but] Kerouac and I are not real at all. The only real thing about a writer is what he’s written, and not his life.” Yet if Kashner’s experience suggests anything, it’s that there is more to the picture, that to appreciate the Beats as writers, we must see them as they really were. *