Beat Meetings #2: Steve Turner & Herbert Huncke
In the second of our recently-launched feature, a London music journalist heads to Manhattan to connect with a legend of the neon New York night
Steve Turner is an author and journalist who published the illustrated biography Jack Kerouac: Angelheaded Hipster in 1996. He wrote for Melody Maker, New Musical Express and Rolling Stone in their heyday. Herbert Huncke (1915-1996) was part of the vibrant Times Square scene of the 1940s, later a published writer and often credited with sharing the slang term ‘beat’ with the poets and novelists who adopted that description.
Who did you meet?
Herbert Huncke
Where did you meet him?
Room 828, Chelsea Hotel, 222 W 23 St, New York
When did you meet him?
June 26th, 1995
How did this meeting come about?
I was researching my Kerouac biography Angelheaded Hipster. A girl called Suzanne Hines who worked for a company called Neptune Music in Amsterdam had put out recordings of him reading and she put me in touch with him. I went to New York and also up to Lowell on that research trip.
What did you discuss/talk about?
I hadn’t got very far with the interview when he said: ‘Before we go any further I would like to know exactly what this situation is. Do I realise any financial benefit from this?’ I explained to him that I never paid interviewees, partly on ethical grounds, and partly because it’s impractical when interviewing so many people for a biography. He couldn’t be persuaded. However, before wrapping up I managed to get his story of how he first met Kerouac in Washington Square and how Kerouac loved his ear for street language. ‘Jack had never met anyone like me before,’ he said.
Pictured above: Journalist Steve Turner
What were your impressions of the Beat you met?
It was amazing to me that he was still alive. When he was a hustler and heroin addict in the 1940s no one would have predicted that he’d still be alive in 1995. He was now living alone in a small room that I believe was paid for by the Grateful Dead and every available surface was full of silver foil, cigarette lighters and teaspoons. There were wind chimes in the open window that played its music
In the years since, has that meeting left you with any particular memories?
My abiding memory is of seeing him a few days later when he arranged to meet me on the corner of 23rd Street and 2nd Avenue where he had to be to collect a morphine prescription. He’d told me I could buy a second-hand copy of his autobiography Guilty of Everything from Academy Books at 10 W 18th Street. He was going to sign it for me, along with my copy of On the Road. After I left him, I turned around and he was still standing on the corner, a frail figure resting his hand on the post of a traffic light. He died a year later.
Are there any other thoughts you would like to share?
He was a sharp thinker with a good memory, but he was very prickly to talk to. It seemed like he was ready to pounce on me at any moment for a wrongly worded question or an incorrect assumption. His starting position was if I was a Kerouac expert how come I didn’t know everything already? Why did I need to speak to him? There was a tremendous air of sadness about him. Kerouac’s description of Elmo Hassel in On the Road hardly needed updating: ‘…his expression always weary, indifferent, yet somehow astonished too, aware of everything. He had the look of a man who is sincerely miserable in the world.’
See also: ‘Beat Soundtrack #18: Steve Turner’, May 19th, 2022
I’ve always been a great fan, Paul, of Steve Turner‘s 1996 biography of Kerouac. Apart from the fact that it is a clearly stated and concisely reported portrait of the man, the image hoard he also managed to draw upon was fabulous and the overall design very appealing on the eye. Bloomsbury in fact created a series of such titles on the three principal Beats: Graham Caveney offered a life of Ginsberg and also Burroughs and, again, the publishers excelled in producing visually striking editions to support the valuable text. I wonder if any of those beauts are still available...
I stumbled upon 'Angelheaded Hipster'in a bookstore in Blackburn in 1997 and I still have it. Thanks for that and catching Huncke.