JOHN TYTELL
WHEN THE ANGELS SING: INTERVIEW BY MICHAEL LIMNIOS
John Tytell is an American writer and academic, whose works on
such literary figures as Jack Kerouac, Ezra Pound, Allen
Ginsberg, Henry Miller, and William S. Burroughs, have made him both
a leading scholar of the Beat Generation, and a respected name in
literature in general. He was born in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1939, shortly before
the Nazi invasion forced his family to flee the country. He grew up in New York
City, studied at the City College of New York, and worked as a graduate reader
at New York. He also began teaching at Queens College in 1963 and has been
professor of English there since 1977. The impetus for the first book, Naked Angels, was a paper that Tytell presented at
"The Last Lecture Series" held by Queens College, entitled: The
Beat Generation and the Continuing American Revolution. Tytell's
book, Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano earned him a
nomination for the Pulitzer Prize in 1987, and established him as a
major chronicler of America's most important Men of Letters, and has never gone
out of print. This career-making book was quickly followed by Passionate
Lives,
a study of both English and American writers, and the relationships that
helped form their creative visions. The Living Theatre: Art, Exile and Outrage saw Tytell casting his eye from literature to the stage, where
he saw the same rebellious spirit typified in The Beat culture and
the Living Theatre. Tytell next teamed up with
his wife, Mellon Tytell, whose photographic
study of many Beat literary figures mirrored his own writing, to produce the
book, Paradise Outlaws. The book is an overarching picture of
both the major and minor figures of the Beat Generation. The book can be seen
as a follow up to Naked Angels, but with the
added advantage of a twenty-five year removed perspective, to the lasting
importance of the now widely recognized literary movement--a movement he first
brought into the realm of legitimacy. Reading New York, published in 2003 is Tytell's most recent work, and can be seen as a hybrid of
memoir, biography of American writers, history of New York, as well as literary
criticism.
Michael Limnios: When did you become involved in the literature?
John Tytell: I grew up
in Manhattan during the fifties, a story I’ve told in a memoir called Reading New York. I read the accounts of
the San Francisco Howl trial and New York Post reporter Al Aronowitz’ series on the Beats. I read Howl in 1956 as an undergraduate (but not as course requirement)
and recognized immediately that it was an epic announcement, that no previously
composed American poem was as overwhelming, and that it had the potential to
open American literature to new dimensions. When On The Road came out and Naked
Lunch, I read them also and saw the extent to which those novels were
transformative.
A decade later, in 1969, I reviewed Kerouac’s
final novel, Vanity of Dulouz, for The
Catholic World and then a very thin survey of the Beats by Bruce Cook for Commonweal. Though Cook’s book was
half-baked, the interviews he included were intriguing .I realized that much of the angry dismissal of the Beats by
American literary critics was based on the most shallow misunderstanding, that
the Beats were fuel for the culture wars that were emerging as a divisive
factor in American life.
I attempted to correct such views with Naked Angels, but prior to its
publication in 1976 I had written a long defense of the Beats called “The Beat
Generation and the Continuing American Revolution” which appeared in The American Scholar, and I reviewed
Kerouac’s Visions Of Cody, and called it
his masterpiece, for Partisan Review. The
American Scholar and Partisan Review were both
highly influential magazines. I interviewed Ginsberg at his farm in
Cherry Valley for Partisan Review,
interviewed Burroughs when he returned to New York in 1973, and interviewed
Lucien Carr, Carl Solomon, Herbert Huncke and other
members of the Beat circle. When I was asked by filmmaker John Antonelli to write a screenplay on Kerouac, I conducted
more interviews.
ML: What is the line that connects the legacy of
Romanticism, Ezra Pound and Henry Miller with the Beats?
JT: I taught a graduate seminar at N.Y.U. in
2011 to answer this question and it is complex. Whitman and the
Transcendentalists were the original spokespersons for progressive change. They
were the heirs to Ben Franklin and his older brother James who first
successfully challenged American Puritanism. Pound was admired because he stood
up to the war system with fundamental questions that were irritating enough to
get him locked up for over a decade in St. Elizabeth’s, a mental prison in
Washington, D.C. Miller was the spiritual Granddaddy of the Beats because he
joyfully crashed through all the Victorian taboos (that became established
convention until after the Howl
trial) that obligated writers to focus on polite superficialities of existence
as subject matter. Sometimes, as cultural priorities become frozen and
static, we need a few antinomians to shake things up and cause change.
ML: Why do
you think that the Beat Generation continues to generate such a devoted
following?
JT: While that following has been encouraging,
and ten million copies of On The Road
have been printed in the U.S. alone, there is still considerable resistance and
a sort of elitist yet Philistine snobbery that still considers the Beat writers
as too raw, as insufficiently educated and outrageously transgressive.
The critics of the Beats are still intent on maintaining that it is all a
matter of decorum but that’s because they are still restrained by the Victorian
corset. That’s why, in my recent essay in The
Chronicle of Higher Education, I began with a colleague’s smarmy advice
that Kerouac was only suitable for adolescents.
ML: How
have the Beats affected culture?
JT: While they have had a much broader affect on
culture than writers usually have, It would take me
too long to account for this. I would recommend the concluding essay, “The
Opening Divide,” in my book, Paradise
Outlaws that began as a talk I gave at the Venice Film Festival in 1996 on
the cultural legacy of the Beats.
ML: What
is the relation between Words and Music?
JT: I think Orpheus and the ancient Greeks
picked up on this. When they were still nomadic wanderers worshipping a panoply of deities, when the poet sang the tribal history,
he accompanied himself with the lyre, which is how we get the word “lyric”.
ML: Who
among the Beats had the most passion for Music?
JT: David Bowie, Lou Reed or Patti Smith might
claim Burroughs as the godfather of Punk, but both Ginsberg and Kerouac were
profoundly affected by music. Ginsberg told me his mother played Ma Rainey and
Bessie Smith recordings in Paterson, New Jersey when he was a child. He used to
accompany himself with a harmonium in the early days; later he
would be backed by musicians like Steve Taylor though John Lennon and
Bob Dylan played behind him as well. At his last public appearances, the
Carnegie Hall benefit for the Tibetans in 1997, he chanted his poem “Ballad of
the Skeletons” and was backed by Billy Corgan of The
Smashing Pumpkins. It was an unforgettable performance.
Kerouac set a record for cutting classes when he
was an undergraduate at Columbia University because he spent too many nights at
Minton’s Playhouse, a jazz joint in Harlem. At
Minton’s, a group of artists, Charley Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young, Thelonius Monk, the young Miles Davis, were creating Bop--a new variant, a dissonant departure
from the harmonies of big band Swing dance music. Lester Young used to take
Kerouac to jam sessions where the music continued till dawn. It is hard to make
your 9am class under such circumstances. But Kerouac was a listener and what he heard would be reflected in the way he would
write. Kerouac would later eulogize Young in a marvelous passage comparing him
to the Mississippi River in Visions of
Cody, and would write two poems about Charley Parker in Mexico City Blues.
ML: Do you
have any amusing tales from the bohemian Greenwich Village era?
JT: Yes. Some like my initial meeting with
Lucien Carr will appear in a new book called Writing Beat. Some I’ve told already like the basement flat
down the street from where I’ve lived for forty years where Henry Miller and
his second wife, June, ran an illegal speakeasy during Prohibition. In 1929,
June gave him a one-way steamship ticket to France.
ML: What
was the best moment of your career and what was the worst?
JT: I’ve had numerous lows in my career, mostly Lucky Jim slurs or denigrations by
envious academic types, but I consider myself to have been privileged to have
taught at Queens College (C.U.N.Y.) for over half a century.
I have had too many highpoints but I’ll list a
few: when Leon Edel, James’ biographer, chose me to
assist him at N.Y.U. from 1963-68; when Ginsberg
thanked me for writing a six page spread on the Beats for Vanity Fair; when Barney Rossett told me
his final act at Grove Press was reprinting Naked Angels where it remained for
two decades until the recent incarnation with Ivan Dee. So Naked Angels has never gone out of print here and translated into a
number of languages.
ML: What
would you like to ask the "Colossus of Maroussi”
Katsimbalis?
JT: I suspect The Colossus of Maroussi may be the best
book ever written by an American on Greek culture. The portrait Miller
draws of Kamsimbalis is so vital, so generous, so
animating, so larger than life. I would ask Katsimbalis how much of Miller himself is reflected in that
portrait.
[“John
Tytell: When the Angels Sing,” an interview by
Michael Limnios, was originally published at Blues
GR: Keep the Blues Alive, 2013,
http://blues.gr/profiles/blogs/writer-academic-john-tytell-talks-about-the-beats-greenwich.
Used by permission.]