John Tytell
ACONVERSATION WITH ALLEN GINSBERG
Int:
What was Burroughs's impact on you and Kerouac in the
mid-forties?
Ginsberg:
Kerouac and I went to see Burroughs in his apartment around
Riverside Drive below Columbia, Ninety-second Street. We were curi–
ous. We understood that Burroughs was very intelligent and to us
mysterious because he had been to Europe in the thirties, and had
married a Hungarian countess, we thought, to get her out of Europe.
He showed us pictures he had of Berlin friends in 1936, and told us
about people going around and saying, "Won't you have some uppies,
my dear?" for cocaine, introducing that whole mythology of old
bohemian European use of drugs.
Int:
Had you tried drugs before meeting Burroughs?
Ginsberg:
No.
Int:
So that was a crucial introduction?
Ginsberg:
He didn't immediately introduce drugs at all. It wasn't until
about a year later through Huncke and Vicky Arminger who was in
that auto crash with me.
Int:
The one that Jane Kramer describes?
'Carl Solomon:
Before you went to P. L? [Columbia Psychiatric
Institute]
Ginsberg:
There were a lot of Benzedrine inhalers so the first drug was
speed which was introduced by Vicky rather than Bill, and then
around '45 or '46 through Huncke and Bill Garver and Phil White
there was morphine on the scene. So I took morphine at about the
same time Bill first did, in the same week. He has described that
situation, meeting Huncke, and trying to unload some morphine not
knowing really what it was. Bill had a gun he was trying to get rid of,
and so he traded it for a box of stolen Syrettes of morphine-–
these were war stocks of morphine that soldiers carried around as part
of their first aid. Grass didn't come in until about a year later, in '47 .
