Free When I Was Cool by Sam Kashner Page A

by the post office of Chicago as obscene material.
    However, a year later, a Chicago judge absolved the novel of its obscenity charge, saying that it was “not akin to lustful thoughts.” The judge, incidentally, was Julius J. Hoffman, who ten years later would preside over the trial of the Chicago Seven (Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, et al.), charged with inciting to riot at the Democratic Party Convention of 1968 in Chicago. At that trial, Allen Ginsberg infuriated Judge Hoffman with his testimony and by chanting on behalf of his friends.
    The publisher of the Paris-based Olympia Press (who had published Henry Miller) had originally turned down Naked Lunch, but he changed his mind as a result of the publicity and offered Burroughs a contract for $800, and gave Burroughs ten days to hand in a publishable manuscript. He did.
    Burroughs later said that the pressure of having to pull the manuscript together in ten days was just what he needed, but when the galleys came back to him in no particular order, Burroughs decided to stick with that. It was as if he had thrown the manuscript up into the air, gathered the pages together, and agreed to have it published that way.
    When it finally came out from Olympia Press, in 1959, it didn’t get one review. Burroughs had to make up his own review, with an invented critic: “‘The book grabs you by the throat,’ says L. Marland, distinguished critic, ‘it leaps in bed with you and performs unmentionable acts…this book is a must for anyone who would understand the sick soul, sick unto death, of the atomic age.’”
    In the early sixties, Barney Rosset, the pugilistic publisher of Grove Press and the Evergreen Review, was fighting fourteen censorship trials over Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Once those trials were settled, Rosset was able to republish Naked Lunch, in 1962. Writers like Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, and Henry Miller championed the novel, and it was soon accorded a place in theliterary pantheon as a kind of grotesque masterpiece. The book— a phantasmagoria of cannibalism, homosexual violence, graphic hangings, and ejaculations—was banned one more time, in Boston, and it reached the Massachusetts Superior Court, where a majority of the justices ruled that Naked Lunch was not obscene. It was the last literary work to be suppressed by the U.S. government or any government office.
    As Allen would later tell us in class, describing the effect of Naked Lunch on the world of the 1960s, “the word had been liberated.” For Allen, it was more important than D-Day.
    As for me, I never could read Naked Lunch. I didn’t like reading about ejaculations. It wasn’t that I was a prude, but I preferred Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education ; that was the dirty secret I carried around with me at the Kerouac School. I preferred Flaubert to flagellation. And you know what? So did Bill Burroughs.
    I would soon discover that the book Burroughs slept with under his pillow at night was Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. Burroughs had a streak of gentility, of elegance even, belied by his scorched-earth prose. It was as if Burroughs’s novels simply turned the body inside out, so that the cancer was made visible. But he read Jack London, Stephen Crane, and Booth Tarkington for pleasure.

6. Ginsberg Saves His Beard
    Within a few weeks Allen had regrown his beard. He kept it more closely cropped, but he was beginning to look like a member of the Russian mafia.
    Rinpoche was coming over. He lived in a beautiful Georgian-style mansion that his followers called the Wedding Cake House.
    A gray Mercedes pulled up outside Allen and Peter’s apartment.The Vadjra guards were the first to leave the car. They were the young security officers who protected Rinpoche wherever he went. Dressed in identical-looking black suits and carrying walkie-talkies, the Vadjra guards were students of Rinpoche’s who