Blues and Beats, fact and fiction

Jonah Raskin's new novel entangles reality and imagination with the unveiling of Ginsberg's 'Howl' at its heart and music an integral part

JONAH Raskin is one of America’s premier historians of the counterculture with highly-praised books on Allen Ginsberg and Abbie Hoffman to his name. But he is a versatile writer and he turns to fiction almost as much as fact. His latest novel Beat Blues: San Francisco, 1955 reflects his long-standing interest in the Beat Generation.

Speaking about Beat Blues, the Beat Museum’s Jerry’s Cimino comments: ‘Raskin takes us on a wild Cassady-esque ride where fact and fantasy overlap.’ The legendary Ed Sanders, poet and Fug, remarks: ‘…Set in the seething milieu of San Francisco in 1955, Raskin has done his research.’

To quote Bob Kaufman, actual poet and his Allcharacter in the book: ‘I went to San Francisco to organise on the waterfront and had the shit beat out me by cops who tossed me in jail and told the judge I was a criminal anarchist. Ha ha ha. I’m an anarchist, communist, abolitionist, humanist, and I’m as Black as the Earth and as Blue as New Orleans, my birthplace and hometown!’

As August dawned I spoke to Raskin from California about his forthcoming book, available later this autumn…

You've written histories and commentaries, books on literature and the counterculture, reviews, essays and poetry. And now this novel?

I don't mean to toot my own horn, but I think it's true to say that I’m a man of many different mediums, probably befitting someone who taught in the communication studies department of a California university for 30 years. I have already written and published four novels. One of them, about 45 years ago, titled Underground, a road novel and a knock-off of Kerouac’s On the Road. Mine is about two guys on a cross-continental journey. One of them is wanted by the FBI. That character is inspired by Abbie Hoffman. The narrator, Ishmael Messinger, is inspired by me and the plot by a road trip I made across the USA in ’74.

I also have written and published three noir murder mysteries set in California with the same female detective, Tioga Vignetta, a fictional character, though I was helped by my younger brother, Adam Raskin, a real private eye in San Francisco, who tells me he has learned a great deal about the trade from reading Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

Much Beat literature has a strikingly autobiographical element – Kerouac, Holmes, Burroughs, even Ginsberg, draw on their own lives for their art. You have now peopled your new novel Beat Blues with some fictional characters who mingle with real individuals and events from recent history. Why have you done that? And how difficult was it to achieve?

The narrator in Beat Blues, Norman de Haan, is a fictional character, not inspired by and not based on any real person. An ex-New Yorker, Norman works at City Lights, a bookstore I know from the inside out, having written about it and about Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nancy Peters, Lawrence’s partner for many years, and also Elaine Katzenberger who now runs the store and the publishing arm. She’s the hot shot executive director. I have done a couple of book launches with City Lights at City Lights, including one for my book American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and the Making of the Beat Generation. Of course, I have been purchasing books and magazines at City Light for about 50 years. I consider Peter Maravelis, who does all the book events at the store, a friend and fellow cultural warrior.

I have mingled real people with fictional characters because I feel I have more freedom to explore and say things I couldn’t or wouldn’t say in non-fiction. Maybe I have turned to fiction for some of the same reasons Kerouac turned to fiction and Ginsberg to poetry. The challenge for me was to be creative and still be essentially true to the historical record. Having written four novels previously I think I knew what I had to do with Beat Blues. Experience counts with writing as well as life.

Interesting figures such as African American poet Bob Kaufman make an early appearance in your story, so does Natalie Jackson, a famed and tragic flame of Neal Cassady. Kerouac is in there, so is Nelson Algren and Simone De Beauvoir! It's quite a cast.

After I wrote a draft of the novel, I sent it to the publisher, Tej Hazarika at Coolgrove Press in Brooklyn, New York, who knows quite a lot about Kaufman and the Beats and Black Americans. Tej read the manuscript and liked it and suggested that I add Bob Kaufman. I had been thinking of doing that – having Bob as one of the characters – but wasn’t sure how to do it.

Once Tej made the suggestion I ran with it. It makes perfect sense because the novel traces some of the intersections between the Beats and the Civil Rights movement and what was happening in Black America.

I have known for a long time that Emmett Till, the Black teenager, was lynched in Mississippi by white racists the same year, 1955, as the Six Gallery event when Ginsberg read a big chunk of ‘Howl’ for the first time. Writing a novel enabled me to bring together Beats and Blacks. Kaufman is a link between the Black world and the Beat world.

It is almost a kind of metafiction, using an unorthodox fictional form to reflect and commentate on actual happenings. How difficult was it to entwine reality and imagination? Are there other examples of this technique being applied?

Thanks for saying that about Beat Blues being metafiction. I agree with you. John Clellon Holmes wrote a novel titled Go in the early 1950s. It has Ginsberg and Kerouac as characters. Also, in his first published novel, The Town and the City, Kerouac has Ginsberg as a character. So, others have gone before me.

Also, there is Simone de Beauvoir’s brilliant novel The Mandarins, which has characters based on Sartre and Camus. It isn’t as well known a book as Kerouac’s but I had it at the back of my mind as a model of sorts for a fictional literary and cultural history of a time and place. The difference between Beat Blues and The Mandarins is that de Beauvoir doesn’t use real names, whereas I do. Ed Sanders says that when I have Ginsberg, Kerouac and the others speak, what they say and how they say it, is believable.

Why did you choose the setting of San Francisco? Why 1955? And how prominently does music feature in the story and in what ways?

Good question about why San Francisco 1955. Probably because I know a lot about the city in the mid-1950s, having done a ton of research about that time and place at the Green Library at Stanford and at the University of Texas in Austin. My nonfiction book, American Scream, focuses a lot on SF 1955. Music, especially jazz and the blues play big roles in Beat Blues. Charlie Parker is a character. The Blackhawk, a jazz club, is a setting for one of the major scenes. The characters listen to Bessie Smith on record.

I wrote about Kerouac and jazz for the volume Kerouac on Record you masterfully edited with Jim Sampas not long ago, so I also had  a lot of material about music which I drew upon. There is a scene in which Natalie Jackson and Norman de Haan talk about music. She is a big rock‘n’roller and tells him rock will be more popular than jazz, an idea he doesn’t like. In some ways, Natalie is more hip than Norman.

I'm conscious, too, that your 2012 poetry collection Rock'n'Roll Women was a celebration of female contributors to rock history.

I did write about rock‘n’roll and women in my poetry book, but that volume is more about women listeners than women performers, from the 1950s to the present and includes Elvis, Ricky Nelson, the Beatles, Janis, the Doors, Sly Stone, Ry Cooder, Jimmy Cliff, Otis, Dylan, the Stones, the Sex Pistols, the Grateful Dead, Beyonce, Tina Turner and Pat Benatar. Time for volume two of Rock‘n’Roll Women!

I ‘discovered’ the Beats and rock‘n’roll at about the same time, when I was a teenager, about 13, 14 years old. It might be more accurate to say they discovered me: ‘Howl’, On the Road, Leadbelly, Bo Diddley, Carl Perkins and more, all in one fell swoop. I gravitated instinctively to the Beats and rock, like so many others in my generation and the generations that came after me.

Jonah Raskin's Beat Blues, San Francisco, 1955 will be published by Coolgrove Press of New York in November 2021. His chapter on the jazz recordings of Jack Kerouac in the late 1950s appears in Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack (Bloomsbury, 2018). Pictured above: Simon Warner and Jonah Raskin, Leeds, UK, 2007