However, mankind has always needed something to honor and revere—something that reminds us that there is an abstraction larger than life. And, if our human heroes are always flawed, what do we worship instead? Their ideas. Kerouac’s journey was about “glorifying life, all kinds—blades of grass to people.” This bottomless desire to peel out the intoxication in living, and the way they wove it into their poems and paintings and novels is the sentiment that should be memorialized and remembered.


I asked Carolyn to decipher a few of the main Beat personalities, as she was able to see their genius, but could see their madness even clearer—the faults and the aberrations usually swept aside.


She described Kerouac as “handsome,” but “totally self-absorbed. Read his diaries and his journals and he doesn’t talk about anything but himself,” she scoffed. “He was very interested in life and observed it all, but it was all in relation to himself...”


However, when we began to talk about Neal Cassady, Carolyn’s soft eyes lit up with a peculiar sense of passion that assured me I had not spent four years chasing after empty idols. “Neal’s mind was just,” Carolyn paused in a moment of calm admiration, “well that’s why I couldn’t leave him. He just had this fantastic brilliance and wisdom that he kept covering up…I found it so amazing and I had known him at his best and I just could never let it go. I had never met anybody with that kind of a mind.” She followed this up with a story about Neal running away from a fight saying,“ ‘call me a coward, but I’m not going to stand there and get battered!’” This seemed completely counterintuitive to the virile Neal Cassady expressed in Beat mythology.


When I asked her about Ginsberg, her sanctity subsided and was met with a soup of regret and pity. Ginsberg, who had apparently been turned against her by the grotesque Bill Burroughs himself, was a pristine example that public acclaim means nothing if you don’t first love yourself. “And poor Allen!” she said, “…he had developed this enormous ego, shot over the moon! And yet, he had no self-confidence. He never got any self confidence.” In a wise and disenchanted tone that distanced her from her own generation, she mentioned that she “wrote him once and said, ‘if you don’t believe from all the accolades that you really are worthy, then you will never get enough.’ And he didn’t.”


In the sinking chair in the middle of her cozy living room, it was impossible to feel anything but starry-eyed and naïve, as if


“Through her enlightenment and levelheaded commentary, Carolyn revealed the flaws and misguidance of the Beats.”


I was searching for utopia in a dystopian- destined world. Almost half a century later, the energy of the Beat generation still resonates in the bones of so many people. But through her enlightenment and levelheaded commentary, Carolyn revealed the flaws and misguidance of the Beats. The cult that developed around them fostered unhappiness, “[Jack] felt defeated and useless, worthless, wanted out. He stopped all his positive searching because he’d been so poorly misunderstood. And he felt so badly for all the kids who got him wrong, banging on his door all the time. It broke his heart.”


Nikita Namjoshi recently graduated from Westwood High School with an International Baccalaureate diploma. She will be a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania this fall where she plans to study Politics, Philosophy and Economics and to be an active member of the university’s literary community. She has trained intensively in ballet, contemporary and jazz dance for eleven years, which has fostered a profound interest in yoga and healthy living. Additionally, Nikita has traveled extensively to numerous countries with the intentions of cultivating an open minded world view and a closer connection to her exceedingly diverse cultural heritage.


September/October 2011 OriginMagazine.com 29


There is an apocalyptical glare that stares down on the young, but it is misguided. We will always need youthful idealism; pragmatism is only half of the spectrum. Perhaps the balance between genius and madman, conforming and rebelling, is impossible to walk, and the two sides will forever blend like watercolor. But just because the utopian cannot be found does not mean we should never search. The world is ready for the youth to move into the written world. Now the revolutionary’s handbook says only one thing—Write.


More information about Carolyn Cassady and her magnetic past can be found in her book Off the Road: Twenty Years With Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg.


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