“JUNKIE: AN APPRECIATION” (1952)
BY ALLEN GINSBERG
The reader, after a cursory glance at this book, will discover that the author is no ordinary junkie. He seems to have taken pains to disguise the fact that he is also a man with a background that might astonish many of his readers.
Born just before the twenties, of a respectable middle-class family in a large Midwestern city—a family the name of which is a household word in America for the inventions and commercial exploits of its nineteenth-century forebears—he received a good education at a private school where he was known as an aloof, and presumably shy aristocrat with phenomenal scholarly aptitudes and a startling penchant for wildness. His first literary venture was a history of Rome, done (in true 19th-century manner) from common Latin sources, at the age of 15. Having set a record for scholarship at this school, he was sent to Harvard, where he studied English literature. Little is known of his experiences there, except that he was supposed to have kept a weasel on a chain in his rooms, and a portrait of his family house on the walls. When questioned about the latter, his invariable remark, with an offhand gesture of the palm, was “Yes isn’t it hideous?” There remains of his undergraduate days only one literary specimen, a 20-page playlet set on a sinking ship in the middle of the Atlantic, with several of his acquaintances cast in varying roles of hysteria, terror, malice, and last-minute turpitude.
On his graduation in the early thirties, considering he had said all he had to say literarily in the aforementioned charade, he studied anthropology, again at Harvard, specializing in Aztec and Mayan archaeology.
Returning to his home city he found no career to his liking and took to drinking, riding around the river sections with his contemporaries on summer drunks, and studying yoga. Presumably he had no formal instruction in the latter discipline, since on being challenged to prove its efficacy, he announced that he was impervious to pain and demonstrated this by cutting off a finger. This exploit led to his incarceration in a private sanitarium nearby, from which he was soon released, as he seemed composed and cognizant of his surroundings.
His next move, in true American style, was the Grand Tour of Europe. He spent a year in Paris in the early thirties, went on through Germany and Austria (as did his English contemporaries in the Isherwood-Auden group), and ended up in Cairo, looking at the pyramids with the practiced eye of an ex-archaeology student. He spent some time in the cities of the north coast of Africa, earlier and later popularized by Gide and Paul Bowles, and returned then to America.
His favorite reading at this time was a dozen or so books, which comprised his whole permanent library, and which he carried around with him in his travels. They included Pareto and Spengler, Cocteau’s Opium, a copy of Baudelaire, a paperbacked volume of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and (later) W. B. Yeats’ A Vision.
Returning to America he brought with him a bride, whom he had met during one year’s abortive career as a medical student in Middle Europe. Bride and groom separated immediately on landing in New York, the purpose of the marriage having been to obtain citizenship for the Jewish lady, supposed also to have been a baroness.
Then followed a tour of U.S. cities, hotel room to hotel room; from New York, through the South and Midwest, with long stops during the early forties in Chicago and New York. This was of course made possible by a small private income from his family.
It was in Chicago that the author first began to explore the underworld within himself and outside of himself, while working as a professional pest exterminator in that city’s slum areas. However, certain other less criminal but nonetheless subterranean vices, treated in the later sections of the book, had already been discovered in his youth in America and travels in North Africa and Europe.
For the latter, and its related emotional causes, the author had long ago sought out psychoanalytic aid. This proved, apparently, to be of no avail. As for the former, association with criminal elements of the population of the cities he visited, and the use of various drugs he encountered: the author’s story picks up at that point.
One other important moment of background may be mentioned: the author’s wife, who appears briefly in the New Orleans section of the book. The common-law marriage, which began in the late forties, ended with her untimely death as the result of a drinking accident in a South American country several years ago. There remains one child born of the union, who lives with his father, now presumably in Venezuela.
This fact has been related last as it will indicate to the reader an important concern of this book: its title is Junk, and its subject is drugs and the drug world; it is not in any sense a complete autobiography, though many personal details relating to the main subject have been included. It is the autobiography of one aspect of the author’s career, and obviously cannot be taken as an account of the whole man, as these last pages of the introduction demonstrate.
In that respect, the author has done what he set out to do: to give a fairly representative and accurate picture of the junk world and all it involves; a true picture, given for the first time in America, of that vast underground life which has recently been so publicized. It is a notable accomplishment; there is no sentimentality here, no attempt at self-exculpation but the most candid, no romanticization of the circumstances, the dreariness, the horror, the mechanical beatness and evil of the junk life as lived. It is a true account of its pleasures, such as they are; a relentless and perspicacious account of the characters that inhabit the junk world, with their likeness and unlikeness to the known average of the culture; a systematic history of the events of a habit, the cravings, the jailings, the night errands, the day boredoms.
We are fortunate that we have a historian, however firmly he has taken his position on the other side of the dark wall of normal gratification, who is able to give us these facts in a manner of writing which shows signs of literary maturity; a style which is direct, personal, very characteristic, very literal, highly selective, intense and economical in its imagery. It would be too great a presumption to compare such a localized world of horror as that of junk, with the universal Inferno of Dante; and yet that comparison, for certain spareness of manner and realistic use of simile, is what may happily arise in the mind of the trained reader.
It remains to be said that the publisher presents this book to the public for its originality of style and content in dealing with a highly controversial subject. Very little real information is obtainable on this subject, and most of it is romanticized and hyped up or distorted for mass commercial purposes. This book has the advantage of being both real and readable. It is an important document; an archive of the underground; a true history of the true horrors of a vice. It makes clear what even the most foolish may understand.