Ginsberg on Kerouac – 1 – Spontaneous Composition

Allen Ginsberg’s 1991 Naropa class (originally covering for Tom Pickard on Basil Bunting) continues from here. Following Allen’s classroom comments about Kerouac and spontaneous composition: 

Student: (Randy Roark):  Wouldn’t that also not quite be spontaneous writing because you’d be editing in your head before you put in on the page.

AG:  Yeah.

Student (Randy Roark):  So it’s….

AG:  Well, yeah, that’s true, but I mean, what do we mean by spontaneous then, I guess is the question.  Actually he meant a number of different things, as we’ll get into for those of you who are in the Beat class – [Editorial note – At the time Allen was teaching a class at Naropa called “A Literary History of the Beat Generation.”]  when we get to Visions of Codybecause “spontaneous”, first, meant to him just remembering and putting down everything you could think (of) in a (Marcel) Proust-ian way – that is, all the extensions and sub-divisions and associations of your thought.  Get them all into one giant sentence, even if it meant revising and going over the sentence.  But using the whole of the spontaneous mind, (as distinct from trying to achieve a neat sentence, like (Ernest) Hemingway and (Gustave) Flaubert).  It was more exhibiting the mind, like Thomas Wolfe, or Proust, in extended prose.  That was what Kerouac did in The Town and The City, his first sort of ordinary novel.  Then he extended it.  At the end of On The Road  [(sic – Editorial note, Allen means, The Town and The City here] there’s a long section describing a football game, which gets very excited and has more Melville-ian, Wolfe-ian prose.  I guess his ideals were Melville in Moby Dick – >where there was extended cadenzas, so to speak.  And that goes on into Pierre or The Ambiguities, Melville’s next book, where there’s fantastic little extended cadenzas.  Then Thomas Wolfe for great breath, which would include a lot of melancholy references.  And then Proust, whose sentence structure was such that it could begin talking about the Baron de Charlus and his hair and the pomade on his hair and it would get into an extended description of the gleam of the oil on his hair and would end in a tangle of curls with the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.  I remember that was one sentence that (Neal) Cassady read aloud that really … everybody was high on grass and Kerouac was completely astounded by the curve of the mind of that sentence, because it just began with this guy’s hair and it ended 2000 years ago in Babylon. Just the idea that the mind was capable of such a … what do you call it?  A big cycle.  Curve.  Rainbow of thoughts.

Then when Kerouac wrote On the Road,  what he tried to do (was) capture (it) instanteously.  Well, first he wrote the extended sentence descriptions in Visions of Cody and then he dropped Visions of Cody and wrote On The Road , doing it as one single piece, recalling everything at once that he could.  But I seem to remember he kept… first he made an outline  (this goes back to your question now) of the chronology of the story.  His idea was to do it just chronologically – begin at the beginning (and) go (to) the end, as if you were talking to a friend, telling every trip, trips, across the country, (say ’47 to 1949), total recall, tell everything that you could think of, as if you were talking to a friend.

He made a general outline, and I think he even put it on paper – the different trips and a few mnemonic hints – like “the time in the Black Hawk, the gasoline station outside of Albuquerque, the..” –  you know, a list of subjects to cover, assuming that when he sat down to write more subjects, more recollections would crowd in and he would just put them in, which happened.  That was another way of practicing spontaneous (writing).  A musician has a theme – “Lady Be Good” or “I Can’t Get Started” – and then will blow a chorus, and then blow chorus after chorus with a fixed theme.   So the fixed theme was the trip and then the choruses were the sentences and chapters and recollections.

Then,  I don’t know exactly what … well,  then the next step was he got really interested in speech and what people talked like and so I think he began transcribing a tape that he made with himself and Neal, and (he was) really interested in all the “uh” and the halts and the incompleted sentences, and the disconnectedness of it.  Just beginning to examine the texture of actual communication, including the disconnections and the humorous asides and the farts and belches and “urps” and noises coming in the window that were on the tape – a real crude tape from ’48 or ’49 or ’50.

Then he got the idea of “What would it be like to hear that in heaven, sort of.  If they were talking in heaven, a real angelic babbling on the tape.  And so he made an imitation of that – an imitation of the tape – but angelic characters talking – the same people but up in heaven — unobstructed babble.  But that was also spontaneous mind in the sense it was imagining that theme, what would the babble sound like?

Then a couple of years later he did a thing called “Old Angel Midnight,” which was based on Finnegans Wake  as example of just babble sounds, with a basic theme of shabda or sound of the universe coming in the window of the mind.  And that’s also spontaneous.

Then there’s the method of sitting down, drinking a cup of coffee, blasting a stick of tea (marijuana) and then writing a little poem in a book – the first thing that comes to your mind.  That’s another way of doing it, rather than sitting down with a big typewriter and blowing for three hours.

So there’s all different ways of approaching what you could call a spontaneous method, I think.  Any way is non-spontaneous.  Any way you do it, it’s not spontaneous because you’re writing it down, in a sense.  There’s no single kind of spontaneous (writing) that I know of.  Does that make sense?

Randy Roark:  Sure, yeah.

to be continued

Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately fourteen-and-a- quarter minutes in and concluding at approximately twenty-one minutes in