Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 3
The Three Wise Men of Dope:
Herbert Huncke, Gregory Corso, and Marty Matz
“…they were slinking criminals, like Elmer Hassel, with that hip sneer…”
— JACK KEROUAC,
On the Road
It was the winter of 2002, in the tiny Delta town of Sumner, Mississippi when Robert
Campbell, my brother-in-law and ex-Chelsea dweller, turned to me:
“Hey, y'ever heard of Herbert Huncke? I used to live next to that guy.”
I had never heard of Herbert Huncke, and I was a writer with a Ph.D. in literature.
Robert maintained that Huncke (rhymes with
funky)
was the first Beat poet. I countered
that I had read
On the Road
several times and never heard of Huncke. I had also read the
works of the less lionized Beats: Orlovsky, Ferlinghetti, Corso, and Cassady. I had been to
my fair share of Allen Ginsberg's poetry readings and a lecture he shared with William Bur-
roughs. I had lived in San Francisco, Denver, and Boulder—all Beat cities—where I drank
beer at bars where the Beats drank beer. I talked with Diane DiPrima about her dabblings in
the occult. I once ran into Peter Orlovsky in a crosswalk.
Yet, I had never heard of Herbert Huncke.
The very next Sunday morning—no joke—I was reading the newspaper and my eyes
landedonabookreviewof—whatelse—
The Herbert Huncke Reader,
hotoffthepresses.It
characterizedHerbertHunckeaspartlowlifeconman,partbrilliantstorytellerandpartguid-
ing light to the Beats. Not only a Beat writer, but the
first
Beat writer, exactly as Robert had
claimed. In fact Huncke was the man who gave the word
beat
to the Beat Generation.
I did more research and found that, indeed, the aging, withered Herbert Huncke whom
Robert had befriended was a dark luminary, a Baudelaire of 42nd Street. Huncke was the
Beats' urban psychopomp, who guided the young Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Wil-
liam Burroughs through New York's mean streets, its seamy side, the underworld of petty
conmen, drug addicts, winos and prostitutes that was 42nd Street in the 1940s. When they
metHuncke,thisswarthylittleguywhowasabrilliantconversationalist,KerouacandGins-
berg were just two antsy, middle class Columbia students, and Burroughs just out of Har-
vard. They found more reality in Huncke's gritty, close-to-the-bone New York milieu than
in the rarified oxygen of Professor Lionel Trilling's office.
Search WWH ::
Custom Search