The Typewriter is Holy by Bill Morgan

I met Bill Morgan once. In fact, I spent an afternoon with him driving around the lower Rio Grand River Valley, where William S. Burroughs and Kell Elvins believed they could become gentleman farmers by hiring cheap labor, sitting back, and reaping the financial rewards. My mentor, best friend, and author of The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs, Dr. Robert Johnson, built a relationship with Bill as Rob did research on The Lost Years. Bill was coming to the Valley to see where Burroughs was before launching off into the depths of Mexico to study the Mayan Codices. As we sat in a restaurant over steaming piles of hand-tossed tortillas and hand-picked and boiled pinto beans, we discussed the Beat Generation. As Rob and I sat and listened to Bill's stories of his twenty years with Allen as his official bibliographer, and as he dropped the primary and secondary Beat names like so many breadcrumbs on a twisting forest trail, it reminded me Bill is the perfect person to write the history of the Beats. He not only knew most of the Beats in their lifetimes, except for Kerouac and a few minor Beats, he also knew the key scholars starting to research the importance of the Beats on American culture and literature.

The Typewriter is Holy, an homage to Ginsberg's footnote to "Howl," covers the Beats from their early days as students at Columbia to their twisting and criss-crossing of post-WW II America to their jaunts in Mexico, South America, Paris, India, London, and Tangiers to their final acceptance into the academy after years of exclusion. Bill's original Beat work, I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg, weighs heavily into the outline of The Typewriter is Holy, but this is the first book that brings it all together. You simply cannot read the early writings of the Beats-On the Road, Junkie, Queer, Ginsberg's Collected Poems, Naked Lunch, Big Sur, Tristessa, The Subterreans, and the recently released And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks-without reading The Typewriter is Holy.

Morgan captures the events which led to most of the topics the Beats write about. From Lucien Carr's killing of David Kammerer, an event still questionable in motive, to Bill Cannastra's death on a New York subway to Burroughs's accidental shooting of companion, Joan Vollmer Adams, in a wayward game of William Tell, Morgan captures the extreme loss and addictions to seemingly every available drug in the 1940s and 50s which shaped the young Beats. Morgan unabashedly examines the homosexual trysts and relationships which formed Burroughs's philosophical struggles with control and "shlupping." And Morgan even delves into the letter writing of Neal Cassady which ultimately led to the formation of Kerouac's theories on spontaneous prose. The spontaneous method (Read Belief and Technique for Modern Prose and the Essentials of Spontaneous Prose) inspired Kerouac's writing and Ginsberg's alike, and it was not until Kerouac encouraged Ginsberg to let go and just let the words come naturally to Ginsberg's earliest mentor, William Carlos Williams told him to write with "no ideas but in objects" that Ginsberg's writing really took off. Morgan captures it all.

The Typewriter is Holy is not a delving book for the Beat "expert," but it a great refresher for those on the periphery and for the newly indoctrinated. Where the book helps the Beat expert is as a jumping off point for further studies. His bibliography, as one will expect from an expert bibliographer, is as interesting as the text of the story. The bibliography section is a must read list of the best and brightest of Beat scholarship.

If one really wants to understand the cultural change which led to the hippy movement and modern day environmentalism, they must read The Typewriter is Holy. Bill Morgan eruditely explains the cultural and metaphysical shift our nation underwent in the mid-twentieth century. He places the Beats in the context of their influence and place in the shift. The Typewriter is Holy is an essential book, not only for literature scholars, but for scholars of American culture, society, and politics.