Original Beats

The literary group we now call the Beat Generation sparked from the friction of poets and criminals bumping into each other in New York City during the war years of the 1940s while straight society was off fighting the war. The poets became novice criminals, and, more surprisingly, the criminals morphed into something like poets.

Herbert Huncke was there at that dirty Bethlehem, and he died as one of the last surviving original Beats in 1996. By the end of the following year, the other last men standing from the New York years, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, were also gone.

Hilary Holladay’s well-researched and thoughtful biography of Herbert Huncke, available again in a reprint edition from Schaffner Press, acknowledges that Huncke’s contributions to literature are not on the same plane of literary history of those of the other two, nor of Jack Kerouac, final member of the Beat trinity. But Holladay makes a convincing case for Huncke’s place in the Beat firmament, not as a mere specimen of the transgressive, earlier days, but as a literary talent in his own right, gifted with a sensitive and compassionate eye for the soulfulness to be found in the ostracized fringes of urban society, its addicts, hustlers, transsexuals, and queers. If, as Kerouac would later have it, the best synonym for “beat” is “sympathetic,” Huncke’s non-exploitative, perceptive, visual, and unassuming sketches and stories of underground characters have a kind of purity not necessarily seen so well in the more stylized writing of the others. Surprise! Her book says Huncke is worth reading for his own words, not just that he provides street cred for the others.

Sure, Herbert Huncke hardly cut a distinguished figure through a great portion of his life. A life-long heroin addict, in and out of prison for possession and other petty crimes for several decades, his habit was so cavernous that he might top off his clinic-dose methadone with a heroin shot just to settle his nerves for a public appearance. He wore out a great many of his friends. In fact, Huncke’s thieving and pawning of typewriters from the pads of cats he’d crashed with became such a signature that once, when someone claimed to be a good friend of Huncke’s, poet and Huncke-intimate Janine Pommy Vega responded, “How many times did he steal your typewriter?” With characteristically playful charm, Huncke would hand his victims the pawn tickets, so they could rescue what, that morning, had been theirs. Decades earlier, Huncke had shown up at Allen Ginsberg’s apartment with “shoes full of blood.” The image eventually found its way into “Howl.”

Trailing around tales of decrepitude like this, Huncke can be hard to view in terms of his own literary accomplishment. This is not even just Huncke’s audience’s problem—it was often his friends’ as well. In many ways, the Huncke that readers know is the cardboard criminal cutout Burroughs and Ginsberg carried with them to innumerable 1980s and 1990s celebrations of the Beats. Both writers, tanning in the klieg lights of endless hagiographical documentaries and festivals, kept Huncke’s criminal identity alive as a museum piece, a living sign of their own bad-boy pasts, the low-life who elevated their accomplishments as truer artists. This carried over to the forewords and introductions they wrote for Huncke’s books. For The Herbert Huncke Reader (1997), a one-stop-shop volume that should be in any Beat library, the best Burroughs could muster was, “Huncke had extraordinary experiences that were quite genuine. He isn’t a type you find anymore.” Huncke was a type with genuine experiences; words like “writer” and “creator” aren’t mentioned. Burroughs and Ginsberg, like Kerouac had before them, made sure to give the world notice who were the criminals and who were the writers.

Burroughs had known Huncke for fifty years by this point...