ANTHONY: In the scene at the Whitney Museum’s Beat Culture exhibit, Harry, Jay and Zahra meet Allen Ginsberg and see a different side of their Beat Generation heroes. Did you always plan to include that real-life event as a seminal part of the novel?
LARRY: Beatitude is a novel set in the real New York City of 1995, populated by fictional characters who occasionally interact with versions of real people, like the characters in Titanic. The real-life Beat Culture exhibit aligned with Beatitude’s timeline and provided the perfect backdrop for Harry, Jay and Zahra’s encounter with Ginsberg, which didn’t turn out as expected.
There are several moments in Beatitude when the main characters must accept the difference between what they want something to be and what something actually is. When Harry and Jay view the legendary scroll manuscript of On the Road, they realize that Kerouac didn’t produce a perfectly polished and publishable novel in three weeks. When Harry, Jay and Zahra meet Ginsberg at the Beat Culture exhibit, he shatters their image of him as an eternally beneficent dharma bum. When Harry and Jay hit a speed bump in their friendship, Harry is forced to acknowledge his true feelings for Jay.
A reader summed it up very well: “Beatitude captures an experience that is universal to all people—that the greatest source of human suffering comes from our wanting things to be other than what they are.” I like when readers tell me what Beatitude is about!
ANTHONY: You have two previously unpublished Ginsberg poems in the book. How did you get access to those?
LARRY: I had a recording of a Ginsberg poetry reading at MoMA, and when I wrote the scene in which Harry, Jay and Zahra go to see him there, I selected excerpts from a few of the poems he read. After Rebel Satori Press accepted Beatitude for publication, I had to clear the rights to the poems and I contacted Peter Hale at the Allen Ginsberg Estate. In the course of his research, Peter discovered that two of the poems—“Like Other Guys” and “Carl Solomon Dream”—had, surprisingly, never been published (“Like Other Guys” appeared only as a 26-copy broadside).
I initially thought that I would have to rewrite the scene with other poems but Peter put me in touch with Ginsberg’s literary agent at The Wylie Agency and, long story short, I was able to include the two poems—using excerpts in the scene at MoMA and the full text in an Appendix. Needless to say, I was overwhelmed that two previously unpublished poems by Allen Ginsberg would be featured in my first novel. Beatitude, indeed.
ANTHONY: The character of Harry Charity hit particularly close to home for me. Did the characters of Harry and Jay instantly hit the page running, or did they grow and change in unpredictable ways over the course of writing the novel?
LARRY: They definitely grew and changed, and, as a consequence, so did their relationship and their story. I really didn’t realize what the book was about—or what the book could be about—until the fourth or fifth draft. From the beginning, Harry and Jay were friends, united by their shared interest in the Beats. But that’s the surface. What was beneath their interest in the Beats? What part of each other did the Beats stir? What really drew them together?
I set out to write a novel that uncovered truths in everyday experience by blending fact and fiction to create a more epic version of reality. The perfect analogy is Instagram, the popular iPhone photo editing and sharing app. You take photos of real-life people, places and objects, run them through a variety of filters—adjust the color saturation, play with the contrast, convert to black and white, change the crop, blur or focus—and you can achieve something much more evocative than the unvarnished original.
I read an interview with one of my favorite musicians, Tom Waits, and he said, “The truth is overrated. Avoid it at all costs.” He meant that reality can almost always be improved upon. What actually happens is irrelevant if you can make it more interesting while retaining the essence. With each draft of Beatitude, I added more filters, and the story—as well as Harry and Jay—gradually became more apocryphal.
ANTHONY: I especially liked the way you work Harry’s personal history into the narrative—what we assume at first are dream sequences about Jay turn out to be memories of Harry’s most recent relationship, but eventually you have Harry tell the story in more “gory” detail as he recognizes that old patterns are repeating themselves. Developing it this way added a great underlying secondary tension to the main tension between Harry and Jay. How did you decide which tidbits of Harry’s past to reveal when? I guess what I’m asking is a variation on that old standard: are you a detailed outliner or a “see where it goes” type of writer?
LARRY: The structure and pacing were the most challenging aspects of the book for me. How to build tension and reveal just enough information along the way to keep a reader interested in knowing the resolution? Initial drafts were “see where it goes.” Then I created a detailed outline. Then I tossed the outline. In retrospect, I employed something similar to the cut-up method that William S. Burroughs espoused. The difference is that Burroughs believed in randomly reordering chapters or sections of a book to subvert traditional linear storytelling, while the story I wanted to tell was, ultimately, very linear, with a beginning, middle and end. Still, our approaches were the same.
After I had a draft of the book, I experimented with splitting some scenes in two and rearranging others. In a way, it was very mechanical. But it made me realize that what you don’t say is just as important as what you do—and actually more intriguing. Tell the first half of a story at one point and readers will likely stick around for the second. The process also revealed the need for scenes I hadn’t included. There were brief references to why Harry was so damaged at the beginning of the book, but what really happened to him? I needed to know, so I wrote the flashback sequences with Matteo, initially, as one long piece.
Wayne Hoffman, a friend and fellow author (Sweet Like Sugar, Hard), once observed to me that there are scenes authors have to write for themselves that never make it into a finished book. I wasn’t sure the flashbacks were going to make it into Beatitude but I had to write them so I could fully understand Harry. Eventually, they became an essential part of the story, but I reworked and rewrote each of them as self-contained scenes and placed them at pivotal moments in the narrative to mirror Harry’s relationship with Jay.
ANTHONY: In my review in Chelsea Station, I admit to not knowing very much about the Beat Generation other than the names, and yet I never felt like you, or your characters, were talking “over my head” about things only a “true fan” would know. Was there a conscious decision as you were writing to make sure the book stayed accessible to as many readers as possible rather than targeting only folks who were Beat fans?
LARRY: It was essential that Beatitude be a self-contained experience, whatever a reader’s familiarity with the Beats. Having read nearly all books by the Beats as well as a multitude of books about the Beats, I realized I knew a lot more than most. I did assume, however, that some of the more iconic stories were general knowledge—the fact that Kerouac wrote the first draft of On the Road on a 120-foot roll of Teletype paper in three weeks, for instance, or that the publication of Ginsberg’s “Howl” prompted a landmark censorship trial—and so I short-handed them in the book.
As I collected feedback from friends and colleagues on the manuscript-in-progress, however, I discovered that most weren’t as familiar with those stories as I would have thought. So, I employed a technique travel writers often use, providing in-depth background information as asides, although I integrated the information into the narrative. Readers unfamiliar with the Beats will be intrigued, I think—many have told me that Beatitude inspired them to seek out On the Road, “Howl” and Naked Lunch—and will also understand Harry and Jay’s fascination with them.
ANTHONY: So what’s next on the horizon for you, other than continuing to promote Beatitude? Is there another book in the works? And can you give us a tease or two about it?
LARRY: I have a folder on my laptop called New Novel, but that’s all I’ll say. I didn’t tell anyone the title of Beatitude or what it was about until I had a first draft—not even my best friend, who tried every which way imaginable to get something out of me. I like a book to arrive complete and stand on its own, with no preconceptions. Also, my writing process is organic. Beatitude took many unexpected turns as I wrote it and I expect the next book will do the same. What I believe it will be about right now is not necessarily what it will be about when it’s finished.
ANTHONY: And my usual final question: What is your favorite book, and what would you say to convince someone to read it?
LARRY: I have a lot of favorite books and the list changes with every book I read. But, related to this discussion, one of my favorites is On the Road. It will make you young again.
ANTHONY: Thanks, Larry!
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