Flak Magazine: Review of When I Was Cool, 3.31.04

It's a rock 'n' roll cliché: You don't play it, you live it. The values of immediacy, authenticity and credibility demand that the spectacle continue even as the audience goes home to bed or leaves for a day job. But as MTV consistently proves, there's nothing inherently musical about rock 'n' roll excess — The Beat Generation packaged the same Dionysian appeal in literary form 50 years ago.

Many of us spent college with the Beat Generation, reading "On the Road," "Naked Lunch" and "Howl." But Sam Kashner went to college with the beats. In 1976, he enrolled at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colo. The faculty included Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Gregory Corso, among other beat luminaries and hangers-on. "When I was Cool" is Kashner's memoir of the experience.

From the beginning, Kashner is more than a student. At first, he's the "summer apprentice," a job that entails typing up Ginsberg's poems and finishing some of them while he's at it. Another chore is to make sure that Gregory Corso finishes his newest volume of poetry. Corso — a distant fourth in terms of Beat Generation name recognition — spends the book dealing with his status as a literary also-ran. At 46, he's the youngest and least governable of the Boulder beats, with the most to prove. He's also a grown man in need of a babysitter.

"When I Was Cool" is strongest as a portrait of the beats in their suburban middle-age. By 1976, Ginsberg is an old man at 50, and Burroughs is immeasurably older at 62. They're still beats, dropping acid and writing poems about blowjobs, but their outrageousness has been tempered by more mundane midlife preoccupations. Bowel complaints, career anxieties and family problems now rank among their top concerns.

And at 19, Sam Kashner is hardly a young Ginsberg. It's telling that Sam is studying with the Beats, not living like one of them. He doesn't even drive to Denver like Dean Moriarty in "On The Road"; he flies. Alluding to a famous line from Kerouac, Kashner summarizes his ambivalence: "I wanted to burn like a roman candle, or at least a Shabbas candle. I wanted to feel myself burning up with life. I wanted the beat experience, but I didn't want to get hurt."

There are some of the usual beat high jinks, of course. Ginsberg seduces various boys (although Kashner resists his advances). Burroughs and his adult son bond by growing pot in the mountains above Boulder. But much of the wildness lacks the imagination of the early beat years. Corso enjoys shocking the squares by picking his nose in crowded restaurants and Ginsberg turns any social gathering into an excuse to doff his clothes. It may have been scandalous, revolutionary even, when he first disrobed on stage at a poetry reading in 1956, but there was enough nudity in the following 20 years for the act's shock value to diminish considerably.

Diehard beat aficionados will find many familiar stories from the early years. By way of introduction, we hear that Burroughs shot his wife accidentally at a drinking party in Mexico City. But Kashner helps to contextualize the beat mythology. The Burroughs that Sam meets 25 years after the incident is still profoundly shaken.

Kashner's prose is often less than compelling. At one point, he mentions that "age and booze started to demolish Kerouac's youth." Similarly, editorial mistakes appear in the text, as when Kashner incorrectly places Stanford in the University of California system: "Allen sold his papers ... to the University of California at Stanford for some real bread."

A more significant fault of the book is that Sam's own coming of age story feels like an afterthought. The dust jacket bills Kashner as a "Holden Caulfield for the postmodern era," but the memoir allots so much space to the beats that there's not much room for anyone else — including the author of the memoir.

We leave Sam almost 20 years later by way of a loose-ends-tying epilogue. By now, he's teaching beat literature at a traditional university, stealing students from his more settled, tenured colleagues. We get the sense that these students are better off meeting Ginsberg, Burroughs and Corso secondhand. Books age better than people do.

— Theo McMullen (emcmullen@falstaffsolutions.com)