Where Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg Saw Through the Smoke
THE WRITERS AND ARTISTS who loitered around Macdougal Street in the 1950s have been called a lot of things: “irresponsible tea heads,” Allen Ginsberg used to say; “subterraneans,” Jack Kerouac called them; and “real bastards,” according to the artist Mary Frank. To most people, though, they are and will forever be the Beats—a group united not so much by artistic style as by proximity and a desire to drink, do drugs, screw around, write, and repeat.
Where, then, did food fit into the equation? Mostly, it didn’t. To them, it was just “something they put in their mouth,” says Frank, who was married to the photographer Robert Frank, himself a part of the Beat crowd, for 19 years. The restaurants, cafés, and bars they frequented throughout their 20s served more as backdrops, places where they could “proselytize and argue,” Frank says. Ginsberg trolled the all-night cafeterias around what he referred to as the “lumpen world” of Times Square, seeking a bit of thrill and sleaze and occasionally picking up guys. He even briefly worked at Bickford’s on Fifth Avenue, busing tables and watching, as he later wrote in Howl, the best minds of his generation sink in its “submarine light.” Places like Caffè Reggio, Minetta Tavern, Cedar Tavern, and the jazz club Five Spot Café became frequent haunts but none more influentially than San Remo Café, on the corner of Bleecker and Macdougal.
In journals and letters, Ginsberg and Kerouac often refer to it simply as “Remo.” Frank, who “barely drinks now and didn’t drink at all then,” remembers it as a “corner filled with people,” though “you couldn’t hardly see anyone because of the smoke.” Wherever they went, she says, Kerouac, Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Lucien Carr, and whoever else happened to be tagging along with them attracted an audience. “They performed in the way they talked,” Frank says. “Especially Ginsberg, who had a voice like a rabbi.” The Living Theatre, Judith Malina and Julian Beck’s avantgarde troupe that was at the center of the early Off Broadway movement, was more or less founded in the San Remo. So were the casual flings the couple’s open marriage allowed.
Remo was where Kerouac embarked on a tryst with Gore Vidal, which the two wrote about separately in later books— Kerouac vaguely denying it happened and Vidal asserting it very much did. Remo was also one of the places Kerouac got into drunken brawls and Ginsberg nursed any number of crushes. “I would have liked to know you that night, wish I could have communicated who I was,” he wrote about seeing Dylan Thomas at the café in 1952. “Ran into Dick Davalos in Remo the other night, and we stared at each other and in low voices exchanged compliments,” he said in a letter to Kerouac. “It was always a drama,” says Frank. “And we were addicted to drama.”