John Kingsland (1927-1997), student and contemporary of Allen’s at Columbia, had a room in the dorm next to Lucien Carr and was one of the tight group of friends that he made on his arrival there.
He later moved into the apartment shared by Edie Parker and Joan Vollmer (later, Joan Burroughs) on West 119th Street, and for a time (while Jack Kerouac was courting Edie) becoming Joan’s lover.
Allen once described him as “an overdeveloped and worldly-wise sybarite’
Edie, in her riveting memoir, “You’ll Be Ok – My Life With Jack Kerouac”, remembers him as
“a very good looking New Yorker from a wealthy family” who “knew his way around town”… “John was very likable and close to Jack, Joan and Lucien…Although John and Allen were the same age, (16!), it was hard to believe, because John was so much more mature in every way”.
Edie recounts in her book in some detail, and from a first-hand perspective, her experience of being caught up in the infamous Lucian Carr-David Kammerer events. Kingsland was caught up in it too
“We talked about the case”, Edie writes at one point, “and (about) Jack and me getting married. He asked if he could help in any way, but there wasn’t much he could do. There was really no definite plans yet, it was all impromptu and depended upon the police. John was supportive and said he was sorry I was going to marry Jack. “I always hoped we could have a fling together” he said. John had wanted us to be more than friends since we first met when he came over to the apartment with Lucien and Mary Moran, Lucien’s girl at the time.”
John was immortalized by Jack. He was “Charles Bernard” (“Charles Bernard, the vastness of the name in the cosmogony of my brain, a hero of the Proustian past in the scheme as I knew it”) in The Subterraneans, and “John Macy” in Visions of Cody
Jack (and Allen)’s inscribed copy of The Town and The City inscribed to him – see here
Here’s Neal Cassady, writing in 1947 (sic) with, as an intro’, a tongue-in-cheek parody –
“My dear dear Allen, My good and lovely boy, please please forgive and forget my terribly, terribly, badly-done, trite, and illiterate trash, i.e. my last letter. You show yourself to be your old wonderful self in your letter, your criticisms are delicious, simply great, many thanks. The above must be the Kingsland influence in me – I wonder if you know how much love I have for him…”
Ted Morgan in his William Burroughs biography has some lively description of him, “in 1944, a precocious sixteen-year-old”, he”still had baby-baton his face but wore three-piece Brooks Brothers suits and acted like a cross between Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward.He liked to tell stories of how he had put the employees of the department stores he patronized in their place. He looked like a juvenile version of the English actor, Alan Mowbray and one of his idols was Tallulah Bankhead, whose languid delivery he emulated with the emphasis on certain words, saying things like “We’ve just come from the most strikingly putrid picture I’ve ever had the misfortune to see”
How could Joan and Edie and Jack and Allen and Lucien, and William too, not love him
