254
ALLEN GINSBERG
Int:
Was that the first time grass appeared in New York?
Ginsberg:
Well, for me anyway. Burroughs had had some in the heydays,
gaydays of East St. Louis toodleloo.
Solomon:
Ronnie Gold and I used to eat benny inhalers in about '49.
Ginsberg:
That's what Kerouac used a lot for writing at first, too. And
that's what Joan Burroughs took, but she was taking two or three
inhalers a day, finally, when we were all living together a little later.
Int:
In what other ways did Burroughs influence you?
Ginsberg:
With books: Kafka, Korzybski's
Science and Sanity,
Spengler's
Decline of the West
which he gave Kerouac, Blake, Rimbaud, Yeats's
A Vision,
Cocteau's
Opium.
Solomon:
Melville?
Ginsberg:
No, that was Jack's interest. Especially, a little later,
Pierre,
because of the euphuistic, packed poetical Shakespearean quality of
the prose.
Int:
And the Gothicism. Were there other books?
Ginsberg:
Yes. CeIine's
Journey to the End of the Night,
Auden, Hart
Crane, and Eliot which I borrowed.
It
was my first introduction to
modem literature really, and also to modem ideas.
Int:
Would you say there were similarities between Eliot and Burroughs?
Ginsberg:
St. Louis origins, yes. Going to England finally. They also had
the same banker look which Bill always had but which he cultivated
more later on. Bill actually applied to be in the O.S.S. because he
knew Wild Bill Donovan from Harvard, and he was of that elite aris–
tocracy that would have fitted into it, except that he had some early
record of having cut off his little finger with a chicken shears to see
what it was like.
Solomon:
Wasn't that to get out of the service?
Ginsberg:
And Bill's hatred of the American secret-police-bureaucracy
grows from the fact that they wouldn't have him in it. 1 mean he
knows
them, that social type and mind.
Int:
When were you introduced to gnostic ideas?
Ginsberg:
The first time I heard the word
gnostic
mentioned was when
Kerouac and I went to see Raymond Weaver, at Columbia, who had
done the first biography of Melville,
Herman Melville: Mariner and
Mystic,
and had discovered the text of
Billy Budd .
Weaver was this
great scholar who shared an office with Mark Van Doren, and Jack
brought Weaver a novel called
The Sea Is My Brother,
his first poetical
novel, and Weaver gave him a little list of books to read, like the
Egyptian Gnostics
and either the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
or the
Egyptian Book of the Dead,
I can't remember.
Solomon:
Burroughs's first contact with me was when he read my first
