We’ve drawn a lot, of late, from Barry Miles’ memoirs – see here and here and here, but thought to quote from that text perhaps one last time, today, on the occasion of Carl Solomon‘s birthday. Carl was one of the many visitors to Allen’s proposed upstate sanctuary, Cherry Valley Farm. As Miles recounts:
“In June the summer visitors began to arrive and Carl was among the first. Carl called his mother from Crain’s Drugstore in Cherry Valley as soon as he got there. This was where the Trailways bus deposited its daily load from the big city 250 miles away. Allen then talked for a long time with Carl’s mother, assuring her that Carl would be ok, while Carl and I sat in the fifties drugstore counter and had egg cream, that wonderful New York concoction that contains neither eggs nor cream, in tall glasses. It was like being in a teenage movie. That evening Carl and Allen lounged in the living room, Carl reclining on the settee looking like the famous photograph of the rotund Apollinaire with his head bandaged. Carl’s head the same pear shape.
“We’re not young and pretty any more,” said Allen’
“No, but we can be old and bestial,” replied Carl, and they looked at each other and laughed.
At one point the conversation took a political turn and Carl froze. He quickly said he couldn’t discuss these things because his uncle wouldn’t approve of it and it made him nervous. This was the same uncle, A.A. Wynn, owner of Avon Books, that Carl worked for in 1953 and whom Carl persuaded to publish William Burroughs’ Junkie as a mass-market paperback.
The English poet Nathaniel Tarn was visiting for a night and he and Carl talked at length about French poetry, a subject dear to Nathaniel, who was half French and who worked as an editor and translator of French poetry for the London publishers Jonathan Cape. Carl seemed to enjoy an intellectual discussion, he was obviously extremely well-read and highly intelligent, he just found everyday life very difficult to deal with. He said that when he came out of the mental hospital his mother bought him How To Dress For Success. “She thinks the answer to my problems is to get a better wardrobe”, he cackled.
In the morning Nathaniel bounced down to breakfast, dressed in what would have been appropriate clothes had he been staying the weekend in an English country house – white trousers and tennis shoes. As he stood at the foot of the stairs and looked out the window his face took on an air of disbelief. There in the backyard stood Peter (Orlovsky) naked, facing away from the house, legs astride, bent over, washing his ass with great care while yodeling “The Raspberry Song” – “I see”, said Nathaniel. Then realized everyone at the kitchen table was smiling at him and saw the joke.
Here’s Bob Rosenthal on Carl Solomon
Plenty more on Carl on The Allen Ginsberg Project here here, here and here