"A world without gravity": the urban pastoral spirituality of Jim Carroll and Kathleen Norris.(Critical Essay)

In his 1956 poem "America," Allen Ginsberg directs a series of questions to his nation, which at the time was consumed by cold war paranoia and impaired by a serious case of cultural myopia. Although Ginsberg's self-proclaimed "holy litany" is most notable for raising political consciousness in the Beat Generation, I want to draw attention to one of the poem's spiritual petitions: "America, when will you become angelic?" (Ginsberg, 146). Students of the 1950s counterculture know that one of the main connotations of the word "beat" was beatitude, and that a host of madcap characters--Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, and Gregory Corso among them--expressed saintly convictions in their writings, even though their freewheeling activities showed that they were hardly burdened by conformist notions of moral rectitude. When Ginsberg, a homosexual Jewish poet, tells America, "You made me want to be a saint" (146), he is situating himself in the camp of Jean Genet, Sartre's existentialist hero, not in a canon of sanctified Christians. Still, despite all the sensational descriptions of sex, drugs, and booze, a sacred aura emanates from the pages of this and other classic Beat texts. Although many regard his "mystical visions and cosmic vibrations" (146) as dilettantish, Ginsberg paved the way for succeeding generations of counterculture intellectuals whose search for spiritual salvation has been fortified by equal measures of purity and danger.

A decade or so after Ginsberg issued his beatific challenge to the nation, a scruffy collection of writers, artists, and musicians holding court in the cold water flats and gritty rock 'n' roll venues of New York City's East Village sought their own version of angelic selfhood, advocating the kind of simplicity found in traditional pastoral idylls, while searching for the kind of purity that religious institutions routinely promised, but often failed to deliver. Curiously, those who have written about the East Village scene have not paid this trend much notice. Rock critics like Robert Christgau, for instance, usually refer to the music that came out of this neighborhood as "noisy," "brutal," and "crude," though also strangely "sophisticated" (189-90, 200). While such evaluations contain more than a few shards of truth, they overlook the vulnerable and wistful lyrics that sometimes lurk beneath dissonant layers of sound. Literary critics like Daniel Kane advance a bit closer. But by focusing on the collaborative energies and angst-ridden "edginess" of East Village writers, they decline to address in sufficient detail the spiritual aspirations of longhaired bohemians who read their poems aloud at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, published their work in Angel Hair magazine, and sat for hauntingly beautiful photographs taken by Gerard Malanga. These New York writers and performers were street-smart and cocksure about their contributions to avant-garde art, to be sure, but they were blessed as well with a surprising capacity for piety and an incessant hunger for transcendent experiences. By 1969, even the musicians in the Velvet Underground, undisputed exemplars of downtown cool, were claiming that they were "set free" and "beginning to see the light," with Lou Reed piling on layers of irony so heavily that they ultimately canceled each other out. The result was a particularly hip way of pursuing beauty and truth. In an era when "Jesus Freaks" inspired Broadway musicals such as Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar--not to mention Top Forty radio favorites such as Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky" and Elton John's "Tiny Dancer"--avant-garde writers on the downtown scene offered a more penetrating analysis of contemporary religious experience and its secret role in bohemian culture. (1) Like their nearly bankrupt city, New York's rebel angels fell upon hard times in the early 1970s, but some were resourceful enough to take flight from the everyday frustrations of urban life while searching for what Jim Carroll, in one of his best known songs, called "a world without gravity."

In this essay, which is part of my ongoing study of an "urban pastoral" motif in the New York School, I argue that Kathleen Norris and Jim Carroll provide us with a unique perspective on the spiritual sensibilities of "second generation" poets. My pairing of Norris, author of inspirational works about contemporary Christianity, with Carroll, a former heroin addict whose reputation rests mainly upon the bad-boy antics contained in his best selling memoir, The Basketball Diaries, will strike many readers as rather odd. Thirty years ago, however, these writers forged a close friendship while living in Manhattan. For a time, they circulated in Andy Warhol's orbit at Max's Kansas City (a legendary downtown bar) and participated in the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church. Eventually, their immersion in the downtown milieu of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll took on a darker cast, prompting each to flee the downtown scene. We can trace their lines of flight in their first volumes of verse, Norris's Falling Off (1971) and Carroll's Living at the Movies (1973). (2) Both poets mix natural imagery with the language of religious salvation, thereby manifesting two intermittently related aspects of pastoral literature: the need to escape the city for rural surroundings, and the need for spiritual guidance. For Norris, surreal visions of farm silos and angels dotting the Manhattan skyline become harbingers of a pilgrimage that spirited her away to her family's South Dakota homestead in 1974. Looking back, Norris has called her decision to leave New York "agonizing," but her move to the Great Plains has been permanent. For Carroll, a growing disaffection with the New York demimonde was registered most affectingly, though somewhat covertly, in seascape meditations he composed in urban pastoral borderlands like Coney Island and Jones Beach. On such occasions, some vaguely defined spiritual undercurrent appears to guide the poet through his junk-saturated dreams of exaltation. In 1973, at the age of twenty-two, Carroll decided to leave his native city for the slower pace of California, where he was able to kick his heroin habit and move "closer to [his] heart" (Forced Entries, 179). Unlike Norris, though, he could not resist the "magnetic impulse to return to New York" (149), and today his name is synonymous with the city's punk rock and spoken word scenes.

As I have labored on this project, I have found sorting through the various definitions of pastoral to be a rather tricky business. Alastair Fowler and Paul Alpers, for their part, prefer to call pastoral a "mode" rather than a genre, thereby highlighting the combinatory indeterminacy on display in most pastoral projects (Fowler, 106-29; Alpers, 44-78). Examples of modal indeterminacy tend to proliferate whenever we talk about "urban pastoral," which can signify either a synthesis of rural and metropolitan traditions, or a division between them, depending on one's perspective. As William Empson has noted, this particular mode probably dates back to The Beggar's Opera, John Gay's rambunctious "Newgate Pastoral" (Empson, 185-240), but it has taken diverse forms since then, many of them emphasizing the unexpected tranquility that exists in places like nineteenth-century London (see William Wordsworth's "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge" and Oscar Wilde's "Impression du Matin") or twentieth-century New York (see Charles Siebert's Wickerby: An Urban Pastoral, as well as experimental films by Rudy Burckhardt, Jonas Mekas, and Peter Hutton). (3) In the 1960s and 1970s, the term "urban pastoral" gained favor with some New York intellectuals, including Susan Sontag, who used it to showcase the naive mannerisms prevalent in gay camp literature and film, and Herbert Leibowitz, who used it to celebrate the arrival of Frank O'Hara's Collected Poems. Unfortunately, not all of the critics invoking this mode have taken pains to define it. (4) In previous articles, I have made my own attempts to analyze an urban pastoral sensibility that existed in postwar New York, focusing upon the unbridled freedom and "useful disguise" that freethinkers in flight from restrictive cold war culture enjoyed in the relatively safe haven of the big city, but also emphasizing moments when the aleatory nature of urban life grew unbearable, causing even the most dedicated metropolitan types to dream of a simpler life in the countryside. On many occasions, it is true, New York School writers and artists trumpeted the pastoral aspects of city life through a series of ironic juxtapositions, such as when O'Hara blithely claimed "I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy" (Collected Poems, 197), or when painter Jane Freilicher placed a vase of irises in the window of her East Village studio to match the purple plumes of smoke emanating from Consolidated Edison smokestacks, which in Early New York Evening (1954) seem bizarrely beautiful. At other times, though, only an unadulterated form of bucolic beauty would suffice, causing nature lovers to seek total escape from the city, such as when Diane di Prima, accompanied by her children and a hippie caravan, gradually wended her way westward in the 1960s, leaving New York for a period of rustic homesteading in the Catskills, temporary teaching employment in Wyoming and Minnesota (in the NEA's Poet-in-the-Schools program), and permanent residence in California. (5) Jim Carroll and Kathleen Norris are familiar with these approaches, and yet their work opens up new dimensions of urban pastoral thought, many of which involve previously neglected religious themes.

My central aim in this essay is to show how spiritual and natural aspects of pastoral overlap, despite the proclivity of many people to compartmentalize their understanding of the mode. To a literary audience, the term "pastoral" usually signifies a tradition of rural nature writing handed down by Theocritus, Virgil, the Wordsworths, Clare, and Frost, among others. On the other hand, a large percentage of the students I teach at the City University of New York are urban Catholic kids for whom the term retains a strictly religious (and religiously strict) connotation. Knowing nothing about the spiritual entreaties embedded in literary works by Petrarch, Mantuan, Spenser, and Milton, many students tell me that pastoral signifies a congregational paternalism characteristic of priests and local parish leaders, a type of spiritual guidance they sometimes resist, but still acknowledge as part of their identity. The idea of pastoral as a place of rustic retreat occupies a secondary place in their collective consciousness. In less guarded moments, they will reveal a longing for tranquility and repose in rural locations: the Poconos, perhaps, or some place upstate. Usually, though, they regard all ventures into the countryside as boring, preferring to take nature where they can get it quickly and conveniently, which is closer to home, in city parks or at nearby beaches. This explains their preference for Carroll, whose unorthodox homages to idyllic retreats within the metropolitan area mesh subtly with the lurid episodes filling his books and albums, over Norris, whose dowdy depictions of church suppers in South Dakota towns and "cloister walks" in Minnesota abbeys they regard as too far removed from their own experiences. They take to Norris's early poetry much more readily, however, for amidst its surreal imagery they perceive the edgy attitude that is the city dweller's governing code. While Norris's accounts of heartland spirituality can seem a bit cloying in their phrasing and passive-aggressive in their proselytizing, the poems in Falling Off remain relevant to young New Yorkers, whose secret dreams of pastoral utopia and religious communion tend to be more circumscribed than those found in traditional genre exercises, though no less powerful when they come true.

Like my students, for whom independence and consistency are crucial to street credibility, I am drawn to writers who pursue salvation on their own terms. I admire Norris and Carroll because they have refused to betray their core system of values, regardless of whether those values have been learned in church, picked up on the street, steadfastly defended at raucous all-night parties, or meditated upon in peaceful spots sufficiently removed from the merry-go-round of New York bohemia. Their separate accounts of time spent among Andy Warhol's entourage prove particularly telling in this regard. Like Carroll, Warhol was born into a Catholic family, and like Norris, he became a devoted churchgoer once he hit middle age (he was known to carry a missal in his pocket). According to visitors, Warhol's Upper East Side townhouse was filled with religious paintings and statuary, and featured a shrine in the basement (Rayns, 84; Watson, 378). Interestingly, many of the artist's assistants (including Gerard Malanga, Paul Morrissey, and Billy Name) and "superstars" (including Ondine, Viva, and Ultra Violet, the first a former altar boy, the latter two convent-educated) were also raised Catholic. Perhaps for this reason, Carroll liked to refer to the Union Square Factory as a "medieval abbey," with Warhol functioning as the "pope in exile," Morrissey as the protective "abbot" doubling as "Grand Inquisitor," and himself as the lowly "monk" or "novitiate" (Forced Entries, 44-46). Over the past four decades, art critics such as David Bourdon, Jack Kroll, Philip Leider, and Barbara Rose have also spoken passionately about the beatific allure of "Saint Andy," with Kroll emphasizing the pop artist's role as sacred thief (in a manner reminiscent of Genet), Bourdon and Leider seizing upon his role as pastoral shepherd for New York's "black sheep," and Rose under scoring his role as "lacerated hero" following Valerie Solanas's 1968 assassination attempt. (6) In each instance, though, I find that there is a will-o'-the-wisp quality to Saint Andy's religious sensibility. After all, Warhol rarely emphasized spirituality in his work, save perhaps when he was contemplating the untimely death of "beautiful" people. Even in these circumstances, irony trumped sincere expressions of faith. If "the Factory was a church," artist Gary Indiana once surmised, it was one in which "the sanctity of the institution and its rituals is what's important, not personal salvation" (quoted in Shaviro, 91). Instead of prayer and contemplation, the primary focus in this "church" was on the maneuverability of saleable images. In such an environment, Carroll has explained by means of a particularly Warholian inversion, "a soup can on canvas is not so very different from a reliquary of precious stones stripped down by the dealers in a marketplace" (Forced Entries, 44). In the public realm of art and celebrity, a realm that subsumed his private life in the 1960s, Warhol came to regard religion as just another production, and ritual as just another happening. Whatever spiritual petitions he made at Saint Mary's Catholic Church of the Byzantine Rite were kept largely separate from the freewheeling world of the Factory, where campy commercialism and insouciant cynicism distorted all religious representations. (7)

Norris and Carroll, by contrast, latched onto the sacred aura of everyday urban life, even when they were paying witness to the more depraved aspects of the American counterculture. In a Warholian milieu characterized by an unbearable lightness of being, these fledgling poets maintained their sense of grounding, thereby avoiding the tragic fate of "superstars" like Freddie Herko and Andrea Feldman, whose suicidal leaps from apartment windows proved that laws of gravity still governed in the dizzy environment of downtown New York. Norris and Carroll joined their compatriots in Warhol's circle in seeking a world without gravity, but over time they perceived the dangers of substituting an ironic version of Catholicism for more sincere expressions of religious faith. Distancing themselves from a postmodern worldview that spelled the death of commitment, these young writers located beauty where others found none, and came to appreciate "purity" in all of its forms. With a quirky but solid reliance on Christian faith, and a secret longing for the kinds of loci amoeni (happy places) described in literary pastoral texts, Norris and Carroll emerged in the 1970s as unlikely spiritual guides. Though they approached the urban pastoral mode with vastly different attitudes, they shared a similar vision as they scanned the city horizon for idyllic retreats promising religious reverie and cosmic communion. Ultimately, both writers suggest that natural locations offer the best refuge for angelic types weary of the artificial "hothouse" atmosphere prevalent in trendy artistic communities.