Beat Video, East Village 1959 by Robert Frank on YouTube
Caleb Carr, a novelist, most famous for The Alienist, was approached years ago by an archivist who found the footage. Carr bought the film footage of his father and his two Beat friends. Without Carr's permission, the video wound up on YouTube.
I interviewed Caleb Carr on his most recent novel Surrender, New York, in the spring of 2016. He told me what he knew about the five-minute film from 1959:
DYLAN FOLEY: Did you find this film of your family?
CALEB CARR: I actually did find it. It was originally sent to me. Some guy in Germany had it. "He wrote me, saying "I have this short film of what I believe is you and your family, hanging out on street corner, outside a bar. Do you want to buy it?"
I thought, what the hell? I bought it and had the film transferred, so I could watch it. I showed it to a few people. The next thing I knew, it was all over YouTube.
DF: Is that you and your brother in the stripped shirts?
CC: I'm the one who is sitting on Kerouac's lap. It's my older brother who is sitting on Kerouac's shoulders, which was kind of how it worked out.
DF: Do you think the film was definitely taken by Robert Frank?
CC: We just have no idea. There has been a lot of speculation on whether Frank shot it. His wife and kids are in it.
I suspect that's what happened, some Robert Frank freak in Germany found this little snippet of film among other stuff. He probably bought an odd-lot of things shot by Frank. It would have been unusual for Frank to let anything get out of his hands. You never know.
The older you get, the more you realize how wasted they were in the scene. They were dead drunk and that's really unfortunate. My older brother was just pounding on my father's head with his fist. We spent half our childhood in bars. They'd stick us in a booth with a bunch of Cokes and tell us to watch television. We were always going, "Can we go home now?" It was not fun.
DF: What were the Beats like in a group?
CC: It's so hard to describe. They could go back and forth from being entertaining, to most of the time being a nightmare. It was screaming and yelling all night long. As a child, you could never understand what it was about, or if anyone was serious. What the hell is going on? Shit's smashing and breaking all the time. You're just trying to figure out what is going on.
Both of my brothers developed this compulsive ability to put themselves to sleep. I could never sleep through it. I would get up in the little house we had on Horatio Street. I would go and sit at a the top of the stairs to figure out what was going. It never made any sense.
At the same time, Kerouac could be very charming. He could be wonderfully charming.
Allen [Ginsberg] was a charter member of NAMBLA. [Editor's note: North American Man-Boy Love Association, a pederast organization] It's scary stuff. When you are a young boy, you sense it. You pick this up. There are people that are okay, and there are people you have to watch out for. Living in New York, you pick these things up very early.
DF: Did you have a particularly difficult relationship with your father Lucian Carr?
CC: I was the one of my brothers that my father singled out for punishment. Very often, and I would include myself in this category, men who grew up as abused boys, don't want to have children because they don't want to perpetuate the cycle. It's always there. People who have genuinely suffered abuse, there is always the lurking sense that you'll fall into the same trap. I decided early in my life that it was going to end with me, that I would not have children.
My father was an abused child, too. So it goes on and on.
I had good mentors. That was a more comfortable role for me than the father-son role. My father and I had an uncomfortable relationship 'til the day he died. It was never really a loving relationship.
DF: In 1995, Daniel Pinchbeck, the son of the novelist Joyce Johnson, wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine called "Children of the Beats." In the article, Christina Mitchell, the daughter of Aline Lee, the Kerouac muse, and an old girlfriend of your father, said that bohemians should not have children due to the high price the children pay.
CC: Yeah, Christine. Aline Lee and my father were actually married, but there was some question of legality. We grew up around Christine.
DF: Was growing up with the Beats a difficult experience?
CC: Absolutely. It followed me around for my whole life. I was an early adolescent in the late 1960's, early 1970's . That's when the revival and the worshipping of the Beats started. People thought that I had this glorious childhood. It followed me forever. People wanted to know, how great was it? You turn to them and you say, it wasn't so great, guys. It really wasn't." They can't believe it, whether I was in school in Ohio or wherever I was. I had people coming from very staid backgrounds, who can't believe that it was the most wonderful, liberating childhood in the world. It really wasn't.
You are surrounded by violence your whole life and the city where I lived was very violent when we were young."
Christina Mitchell weighed in on the dysfunctional Beat world in the 1995 Times piece. "I think the Beats were extremely dysfunctional people who had no business raising children," she said.
Christina and her mother lived with Lucian Carr for 10 years. She recalled a childhood marred by violence. It was "ten years of fighting, screaming, hitting, going to the police station in the middle of the night, going to Bellevue, wandering the streets, watching Mom and Carr beat each other to a pulp." The narcissism was all consuming. "I was a nonperson to them. I don't think they knew I was there."
Carr became an alcoholic editor at United Press International for the next 47 years. Carr died in 2005.
As part of the back story for the video, Robert Frank was then working with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg on a film version of Kerouac's play "The Beat Generation," which was retitled "Pull My Daisy," a line from Allen Ginsberg's first published poem called "Song: Fie My Fum. The poem was published in Neurotica, Volume #6, 1950. When it was published, the poem was considered obscene.
Editor's note:
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