#herbert huncke

[outofeverythingthisnamewasleft]

Herbert Huncke

[litteratured]

ORIGINAL BEATS

GREGORY CORSO and HERBERT HUNCKE Two lions of the Beat Generation filmed by Francois Bernadi

‘Original Beats is a short documentary film by Francois Bernadi on Gregory Corso and Herbert Huncke.

Huncke was the original Beat. He coined the term, lived the life and was on the road long before Kerouac. Here he talks about his life as petty criminal, drug user and Beat writer.

Corso believed the poet and his life are inseparable. It was a belief he held true, otherwise the poet couldn't write like a lion, write truthfully.

This is a fascinating and informative portrait on the eldest and the youngest of the original Beats, filmed shortly before Huncke's death in 1996.

Often overshadowed by the Beat triumvurate of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac, Herbert Huncke and Gregory Corso were nonetheless integral to the Beat family and, on a personal level at least, often the most interesting. Both had been in jail (the same jail though not at the same time), both, in contrast to the Big Three who were all Columbia Grads, were self taught...’

[all--whirlwind--goo]

Allen Ginsberg - Herbert Huncke

[bitter69uk]

“Herbert Huncke was the Jean Genet of the Beat Generation. A homosexual poet-thief, he was once as familiar with Times Square dives and New York prisons as he was later to become with fashionable salons and literary landmarks.”

/ From The Independent’s obituary for Herbert Huncke by James Campbell, 1996 /

“His lifestyle was his art: the drugs, the prostitution, the homelessness, the years spent in jail - it all bled onto the page and created a new kind of poetry. He was the American Genet: a man with one foot firmly in the criminal underworld and one in literature.”

/ From “The man who set the Beats going” by Tony O’Neill, The Guardian, 2007 /

“I never met Huncke. Yet he speaks to me in a voice of gentle desperation and compassionate understanding on the complexity and fragility of the human condition, generously revealing the stamina of his tortured soul …”

/ From the book So Real It Hurts (2015) by Lydia Lunch /

Unlike Lydia Lunch, I did meet literary bad boy and proto-beatnik Herbert Huncke (9 January 1915 - 8 August 1996 – born on this day 109 years ago). Or at least I had a fleeting encounter with him. Like so many twenty-somethings, I went through a Beat literature phase. Huncke (who was on intimate terms with and a primary influence on the likes of William S Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac) gave several readings in London in the early nineties which I worshipfully attended. (I also managed to see Ginsberg). Huncke was a spellbinding raconteur with a worldly-wise WC Fields-style delivery, and so desiccated he suggested an unwrapped, upright ancient Egyptian mummy. After one reading, he autographed my copy of The Evening Sun Turned Crimson (1980). I can pinpoint exactly when because Huncke wrote the date [26 October 1994] above his signature in surprisingly pretty, swirling handwriting. Pictured: photo booth shot of Huncke, Times Square, circa 1940 via Ginsberg Collection.

[yourdailyqueer]

Herbert Huncke (deceased)

Gender: Male

Sexuality: Bisexual

DOB: 9 January 1915

RIP: 8 August 1996

Ethnicity: White

Occupation: Writer, poet, veteran

[ginzyblog]

Herbert Huncke, working on William S Burroughs’ New Waverly, Texas marijuana farm, down from New York for the summer, August 1947.  Allen had travelled there from Denver with Neal Cassady,  expecting Herbert to make sleeping arrangements for them, only to find a single cot in the room for the both of them while Herbert slept on the porch. (photo: Allen Ginsberg, courtesy Stanford University Libraries / Allen Ginsberg Estate / Getty Images) •

[leleaulait]

Legend

[plebeienoblige]

Herbert Huncke