The Beat Century — post 34 of 100. Herbert Huncke, The Herbert Huncke Reader (1997).
Herbert Huncke gave the Beat Generation its adjective and much of its material, then spent fifty years writing plain, unhurried prose that most of his famous friends could not match.
William Morrow published The Herbert Huncke Reader in September 1997, a year after Huncke’s death, edited by Benjamin G. Schafer with a foreword by William S. Burroughs and an introduction by Raymond Foye. It gathers two long-unavailable books, excerpts from his autobiography, and previously unpublished stories and letters. It is the closest thing to a complete Huncke that exists, and it exists because the people he had influenced were still around to insist on it.
Herbert Huncke (1915–1996) was born in Greenfield, Massachusetts, raised in Chicago, and left home as a teenager. He arrived in New York in 1939 and spent the next decade on 42nd Street, known well enough there to be called the Mayor of Times Square, moving among prostitutes, sailors and musicians including Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker. He was a hustler, a thief and an addict for most of his adult life. He was also, by the testimony of everyone who met him, one of the great talkers of the century.
The Word
Huncke is credited with introducing the word beat to the writers who made it famous. He meant it the way the carnival and street world he came from meant it: exhausted, finished, robbed, worn down to nothing. I’m beat. Not a philosophy — a condition, and specifically the condition of someone at the bottom with no reserves left. It was the vocabulary of people for whom exhaustion was a permanent economic condition rather than a metaphor.
Kerouac later reworked the term toward beatitude, and the reframing is a small piece of literary history worth pausing over. Observers have long noted that the beatific reading functioned as a defence of the writers’ lifestyle against social criticism — a way of converting a description of ruin into a claim of grace. Huncke did not appear to need the upgrade. He had used the word accurately the first time, and the difference between his usage and Kerouac’s is roughly the difference between the man who is beat and the man who is writing about him.
Everybody’s Character
Huncke met Burroughs on 42nd Street and became close to Joan Vollmer. He turns up as Herman in Burroughs’s Junkie, as Elmer Hassel in Kerouac’s On the Road, in John Clellon Holmes’s Go, and as one of the angel-headed hipsters of Ginsberg’s Howl. He is arguably the single most transcribed human being in Beat literature, which put him in the odd position of being simultaneously essential and uncredited.
The most consequential episode came in 1949, when Huncke was storing stolen goods at Ginsberg’s apartment in Bayside, Queens, and a police bust nearly ended the poet’s life before it began. The detail that survives from that day is characteristic: warned by phone to clear the place out, Huncke swept the floor and left the contraband exactly where it was. Every anecdote about him has that shape — an odd, unhurried courtesy operating in total indifference to consequence.
The Prose Itself
The reason to read the Reader rather than read about Huncke is that the writing is genuinely good and genuinely unlike the writing around it. He called his work poetic prose and called himself a storyteller, and the style is deceptively simple and plain-spoken — the experience of reading him is close to sitting across a table during one of the all-night sessions his friends described. He wrote with grace, candour and clarity about people and situations unknown to most readers, and his unaffected manner and insider’s knowledge produced an authenticity his more literary friends recognised and at times tried to reproduce.
Ginsberg pronounced Huncke’s sketches classics and drew the obvious moral, that professionals may have more to learn from amateurs than the reverse. The compliment is precise. Huncke had no programme, no theory of spontaneous prose, no quarrel with the sentence. He simply had nothing to prove and an enormous amount to report, and the absence of literary ambition is exactly what keeps the pages clean.
A Life Assembled from Other People’s Kindness
His books came slowly and late: Huncke’s Journal in 1965, The Evening Sun Turned Crimson in 1980, the autobiography Guilty of Everything in 1990. He taught at Ginsberg’s Naropa Institute. He spent his final years at the Chelsea Hotel, his rent underwritten by Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, a man he never met. He died in New York in 1996 at eighty-one.
The Reader is therefore a corrective and an act of repayment at once. The Beat Generation took its name, several of its best characters and a good deal of its texture from a man who spent his life being written about, and this is the volume in which he does the writing. Read alongside the novels that mined him, it has the disconcerting effect of making the famous books look slightly overwritten.
The Value of the Untrained Witness
What the Reader finally demonstrates is a point about literary authority. The Beat writers were, almost without exception, university men — Columbia, Harvard, the Sorbonne — writing about a demimonde they had entered deliberately and could leave at will. Huncke could not leave. The world they used as material was the only one he had. Nothing in the volume asks the reader to admire the life it describes, which is precisely what distinguishes it from the novels built out of the same events.
That asymmetry produces the difference readable on every page. Huncke has no need to establish that he belongs, no interest in shocking anyone, and no stake in the mythology his friends were assembling. He describes thefts, jails and overdoses in the same even tone he uses for a good meal or a kind stranger, and the flatness is not affectlessness. It is the accuracy of someone with nothing to sell.
I’m beat.
Herbert Huncke’s street usage of the word, meaning worn down to the core — the sense he passed to Kerouac and Ginsberg
Where to go next
Read it beside Burroughs’s Junkie, where Huncke appears as Herman and the same New York looks considerably more literary.
Previous: Joanne Kyger, The Tapestry and the Web. Next: Josephine Miles, Collected Poems. One hundred books from the Beat Generation and the writers around them — the ones who got famous, the ones who got written out, and the ecological writing that grew out of the same soil. A new one every other day.
Sources
- Herbert Huncke — Wikipedia
- Herbert Huncke — Literary Kicks
- Herbert Huncke — The Allen Ginsberg Project
- The Herbert Huncke Reader — William Morrow, 1997, bibliographic record
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
