Fifties (48 page)

Pincus became the driving figure of the team that made the assault, the leader who kept everyone aligned and whose vision guided the search from the start. His friend Chang thought that his brain had the ability to function on two tracks simultaneously. He could carry on a conversation with a colleague at the very highest level and at the same time be thinking of something else entirely, Chang was certain. A sure sign that this was happening, Chang thought, was when Pincus would begin tugging nervously at his mustache.

Personal politics did not matter to him—only science did. To that end, he could be quite cold-blooded. He was capable of secretly undermining the attempts of a valued assistant to get a better position elsewhere. He could cut loose a staffer he particularly liked and promote another he loathed if he thought it would benefit the project. Once Oscar Hechter asked him about the capacity to make such
hard decisions: “Goody, how did you get to be the way you are?” “I had to learn,” he answered. “I had to learn to be amoral.”

He had the ability to remain focused on the central issue, no matter how complicated the problem. Some scientists have vision but lack the ability to attack the problem analytically. Pincus had vision and analytic ability. He was like a great detective who had envisioned exactly what he was looking for. He envisioned a pill that would prevent conception by mimicking the hormonal condition of pregnancy, when the body blocked ovulation of its own natural instincts. If you could suppress ovulation, he believed, you could suppress fertilization. There were significant earlier studies that suggested progesterone might be an effective inhibitor of ovulation and that it might be taken orally.

Progesterone was then available in large part because of the earlier work of an eccentric maverick scientist named Russell Marker, who in 1940 discovered a cheap and plentiful source in the root of a wild yam that grew in the Mexican desert. Previously, progesterone had been obtained only in minute amounts from animal sources and, as a result, was fabulously expensive—too expensive, in fact, to be wasted on humans; it was used exclusively to improve fertility in world-class racehorses. But with virtually no support or encouragement from others, Marker set up a primitive lab and by 1943 he was able to walk into a small wholesale pharmaceutical company in Mexico City with two pickle jars filled with powder worth about $150,000 on the open market. Did the owners want some progesterone, he asked. The first tests, on the effect of progesterone on rabbit ovulation, were started on April 25, 1951. The actual lab work was carried out by Chang. Chang was still so poorly paid he liked to joke that he lived in the laboratory, giving rise to persistent (and racist) rumors among the neighbors that a Chinaman was kept chained in the basement by the mad scientists.

Both Mrs. Sanger and Mrs. McCormick kept pushing Pincus for quick results; science, he tried to explain, does not necessarily work that way. Even so, the work went surprisingly well. Because of Mrs. McCormick, there was always enough money. Chang was a brilliant lab man, the perfect counterpart to Pincus. He had the patience to endure the seemingly endless lab work required. When Mrs. McCormick told him that she envied him for getting to stay in the lab all day long and have such fun, Chang had to grit his teeth—it was backbreaking work. One day it might lead to a great scientific breakthrough, but from his perspective at the time, it was just one endless series of experiments.

From the start Pincus was optimistic; Chang was, in his own words, equally pessimistic—he was, after all, a man who had had the good fortune to receive his Ph.D. on December 7, 1941. Even when test after test succeeded, he remained dubious. Sometimes when the work was boring, Change remembered, he would ponder the social benefits of what they were doing. In fact, everyone in the group understood the importance of the undertaking in terms of the world population explosion.

TWENTY-TWO

T
HEY WERE THE FIRST
to protest what they considered to be the blandness, conformity, and lack of serious social and cultural purpose in middle-class life in America. If much of the rest of the nation was enthusiastically joining the great migration to the suburbs, they consciously rejected this new life of middle-class affluence and were creating a new, alternative life-style; they were the pioneers of what would eventually become the counterculture. If other young people of their generation gloried in getting married, having children, owning property and cars, and socializing with neighbors much like themselves, these young men and women saw suburbia as a prison. They wanted no future of guaranteed pensions but instead sought freedom—freedom to pick up and go across the country at a moment’s notice, if they so chose. They saw themselves as poets in a land of philistines, men seeking spiritual destinies rather than material ones.

Their protest would have significant political implications, but its content was essentially social and cultural. The politics of the era had little meaning for them, and they saw little difference between the two main parties. If there was one figure who symbolized their discontent, though, it was Dwight Eisenhower. One night during the mid-fifties, the writer Jack Kerouac and a friend got drunk and drafted a message to the President: “Dear Eisenhower, We love you—You’re the great white father. We’d like to fuck you.”

The original group had come together at Columbia University in upper Manhattan. The most successful students at Columbia—those who fit in easily at an elite Ivy League school—regarded them as outcasts. Everything about them was wrong: their clothes, their manners, their backgrounds. In truth, they were a rather unlikely amalgam of friends. Allen Ginsberg was an awkward, shy but enthusiastic seventeen-year-old from New Jersey who couldn’t quite decide whether to be impressed by Columbia or to make fun of it. In December 1943 he met Lucien Carr, who had recently transferred from the University of Chicago. Carr was playing Brahms on a player in his room, and Ginsberg, lonesome and bored, knocked on Carr’s door. “I heard music,” Ginsberg began. “Did you like it?” asked Carr. “I thought it might be the Brahms Clarinet Quartet,” Ginsberg said. “Well, well!” Carr said. “A little oasis in this wasteland.” Carr opened a bottle of wine. Ginsberg was dazzled, not least by Carr’s blond good looks.

Carr, at the grand age of nineteen, must have seemed a man of the world to the innocent and impressionable Ginsberg. He came from an upper-class St. Louis family, his father had walked out on his mother when he was an infant, and he had been in and out of various secondary schools for bright but difficult students. He was smart and cynical, and already there was to him a kind of harsh self-knowledge that the young and observant Ginsberg noted in his journal: “He [Carr] said he could not write, he was a perfectionist. He compared himself not with those around him but with a high imagined self. He feared that he was not creative, that he could not achieve his imagined potential. He rationalized his failure, but adopted the postures and attitudes of the intellectual for recognition. Carr and his scarred ego. He had to be a genius or nothing and since he couldn’t be creative, he turned to bohemianism, eccentricity, social versatility, conquests.”

Carr held the key to the door of the bohemian world Ginsberg so desperately wanted to enter. His conversation was filled with references to Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud. Ginsberg wrote in his journal: “Know these words and you speak the Carr language: fruit, phallus, prurience, clitoris, cacoethes (a bad
habit or itch, as in ‘itch for writing’), feces, foetus, womb, Rimbaud.” Carr seemed to know everyone worth knowing, including a strikingly handsome young man named Jack Kerouac, who had come to Columbia on a football scholarship. Kerouac had injured his knee as a freshman and quit first the football team and then Columbia. Determined to be a writer, he was seen by Carr “in very romantic terms as a seaman who was a novelist or a poet, or a writer, Jack Londonesque in style.” That someone who so easily could have been a jock chose instead to belong to the world of poets and writers was thrilling to Ginsberg, who was instantly smitten. Kerouac’s first impression of the young Ginsberg was of “this spindly Jewish kid with horn-rimmed glasses and tremendous ears sticking out, seventeen years old, burning black eyes ...” Somewhat to the surprise of both, they became friends.

Carr had already done some off-campus exploring in New York City, and he invited Ginsberg to accompany him to Greenwich Village—the epicenter of bohemian life in America since the early part of the century. Ginsberg wrote his older brother: “Saturday I plan to go down to Greenwich Village with a friend of mine who claims to be an ‘intellectual’ (that has a musty flavor, hasn’t it?) and knows queers and interesting people there. I plan to get drunk Saturday evening if I can. I’ll tell you the issue.”

Carr also introduced Ginsberg to William Burroughs, an eccentric friend from St. Louis then living in the Village. Burroughs came from a prominent family—his grandfather had invented the adding machine—and he had graduated from Harvard in 1936. But propelled by his own deep alienation and his homosexuality, he had resorted to a kind of subterranean life of mental hospitals, prison, and a drug habit. The others thought him rich because he received a $200-a-month allowance from his family, on the condition that he go regularly to a psychiatrist. When Ginsberg first met him in 1943, Burroughs was tending bar in the Village, one of a series of marginal jobs he held in search of what he called “experience.”

Burroughs was older than the others and affected a certain snobbism. He usually wore three-piece suits, a costume not exactly
de rigueur
in this new counterculture they were creating. Brilliant and coldly logical, he was more confident than these new young friends of his. Ginsberg was so impressed by his book collection that he took a pencil and wrote down some titles so he could read them himself. Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac decided, was “a big seeker of souls and searcher through cities. I think Kerouac said ‘the last of the Faustian men.’”

It was no surprise that Ginsberg soon ran into problems with
the Columbia administration. In a creative writing class, he chose to novelize an incident within their group about which Columbia was particularly sensitive and which had become something of a cause célèbre. It centered on Lucien Carr. When Carr had come east he had been followed by a man fourteen years older, named Dave Kammerer. Kammerer had run a play group for young boys in St. Louis in which Carr had been enrolled. Infatuated with Carr ever since, Kammerer had followed him, first to Chicago, and then to New York. One night in August 1944, Kammerer pressed his attentions too far, and Carr stabbed him to death. Carr confessed the crime to Kerouac, the two dropped the knife down a subway grating, went to a movie, and then Carr turned himself in to the police. Carr eventually spent two years in the Elmira, New York, reformatory.

Ginsberg’s efforts to fictionalize these sensational events greatly offended his professor, who called his writing “smutty” and told the assistant dean about it. The dean ordered Ginsberg not to write about the incident and also questioned his right to hang out with such friends as Kerouac. That was just the beginning. A few months later, Ginsberg further aggravated the situation with a dumb prank. Suspecting that his maid was anti-Semitic, he wrote “Fuck the Jews” on his window and drew a skull and crossbones. The maid reported the graffiti to the dean, who went by Ginsberg’s room that night and found not just Ginsberg, but Kerouac (no longer a student), sleeping there as well. They were not, it should be added, sleeping together—Ginsberg was still a virgin. Ginsberg was summoned to the dean’s office to discuss the incident. The dean looked at him and said, “Mr. Ginsberg, I hope you realize the
enormity
of what you’ve done!” Columbia charged him $2.35 for housing an overnight guest and suspended him for a year. He could not return until he had seen a psychiatrist. Some of his friends thought that Columbia had acted so harshly because of rumors he was a homosexual and because of his friendship with Kerouac, who was by this time persona non grata. It was a reflection of the time that when Lionel Trilling, the first Jewish member of the English department to gain tenure at Columbia, went to the dean to protest the suspension, the dean was so embarrassed that he could not utter the words of Ginsberg’s offending graffiti but instead chose to write them down.

These young rebels did not so much want to learn, thought Hal Chase, a member of the group, as “they wanted to emote, to soak up the world.” They aspired to become, as Allen Ginsberg put it, “intelligent, Melvillean street wanderers of the night.” Several of them were to become writers: Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, and John
Clellon Holmes, whose first book,
Go,
is often called the first Beat novel. The initial response from straight society was to try to send them to psychiatrists: Burroughs believed that the healthier you were, the more the straight world, which he considered inherently sick, wanted to see you as sick. Therefore it was obvious that psychiatrists were part of the conspiracy. “These jerks,” Burroughs once said, “feel that anyone who is with it at all belongs in a nuthouse. What they want is some beat clerk who feels with some reason that other people don’t like him ...”

There was a great intensity to their lives in those days; they talked endlessly about what life should be, of how they would escape the mundane. They were, even by the usual standard of restless young men, exceptionally self-absorbed: They recorded their thoughts, dreams, and emotions meticulously, as if they were the first who had ever had them. As such, there is a remarkable record of those days. Kerouac was among the most prolix, writing his books in manic all-night sessions on reams of paper borrowed from a wire-service teletype machine. Truman Capote later said of him that he did not so much write as
type.
Writers they might have been, but in the end their lives tended to be more important than their books. They spoke of a New Vision, an idea taken from Yeats, of a society of artist-citizens, in which they would be the leaders.