Hal Chase, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S Burroughs, Morningside Heights Winter 1944, enacting their battle between the all-American Wolfeeans (named for Thomas Wolfe) & the European sophisticate Baudelarians, Allen and Burroughs of the latter, all camping it out from an argument the previous night:
“Joyce Johnson describes an extraordinary evening in Ginsberg’s room at Columbia in 1944. Allen sided with William Burroughs, both gay, during an intense debate between them, the non-Wolfeans, and the Thomas Wolfe devotees (Kerouac and a close friend named Hal Chase from Denver who eventually put him in touch with Neal Cassady, prototype for Dean Moriarty).
The battle took place in a room shared by Allen and Hal. Jack and Bill sprawled on one bed, Hal and Allen on the other, all four high on Benzedrine. Quite a scene.
According to Hal, the two heterosexual Wolfeans, he and Jack — Hal was fed up with Allen and Bill trying to convince him that he must be gay — upheld their idealistic love of America (even though at war’s end Jack still considered himself only half-American), whereas the Baudelairean non-Wolfeans looked to European letters for inspiration and tried to corrupt the two macho Americans.” (Michael Kamman, LA Review of Books).
