The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll – Sex and Drugs and … Basketball

The Basketball Diaries (1978) by Jim Carroll is one of those interesting little oddities that you stumble on occasionally.
Jim Carroll was a basketball player, a poet, an author, a musician… just an all around talented guy. He was also a heroin addict supporting his habit through theft and prostitution and any other available means. And the thing is, in this diary of his he describes the way he was living his life as a young tough deeply involved in the drug culture of New York. This is not exactly a bildungsroman because it doesn’t focus on the psychological and moral growth of the young protagonist.
At one point Carroll makes an offhand remark about getting things backwards. He was already smoking pot and started using heroin because he thought that was less addictive. That is certainly not something you should get mixed up, but it just goes to show that when it comes to information you should always consider the source.
What strikes me about the whole diary is the unapologetic narrative voice, the complete and total lack of apologetic excuses. Whatever the influences, whatever the choices, there seems to have been no point at which Carroll felt the need to blame society, his mother, his friends. I have to say I like that. As far as accountability goes, Carroll takes his share and seem to be smart enough to know that he has really very little to gain from telling a woeful tale. There’s a lack of sentimentality to all this that makes it interesting. He talks about the other basketball players that have gone astray in similar ways and wound up dead or in prison, but these are just tales of people he knows, people who made their own choices for whatever reasons.
The other thing about this diary that makes it interesting is the literary quality of it. For someone who scans through a lot of text it is obvious that there is real talent here, displayed at a very young age. I’ve read diaries before, some written by authors as a kind of autobiographical reconstruction of their private history and there is always pretense, a sense that much has been revised and edited, or at least cleaned up for consumption. The diary becomes a device that way, a vehicle for the author, something to perpetuate the image they want to project, constructing a persona. Of course there is no such as objective truth in a diary, either, though it is a popular conceit.
The second an author decides to let others into what should theoretically be private musings and starts thinking of a potential audience the basic premise for the text written alters. It may be self-censorship, it may be fear, but it is still a subtle tweaking of the text that can go either way. Carroll manages to sound sincere and doesn’t try to make himself look better than he is. He tells stories of theft and drug dealing, prostitution and deception as ways and means. He talks about how he and other players rob the locker rooms of the basketball teams they play and – amazingly – he writes about playing, and winning, while high on every drug known to man. That part really confounds me. We’re not talking performance enhancing drugs here, but all sorts. And they still manage to win.
It is actually even more interesting to read something like this in this day of blogging. There’s a an awful lot of private musings spread publicly these days and not a lot of it considers that you should try to entertain, if nothing else.
Carroll is interesting, entertaining and deceptively charming in all his callous revelry. That does not mean you would have wanted to live next to the guy, or that he is in any way a model citizen. The Basketball Diaries is also a document of sorts, of a specific time and a specific place, and as such it is well worth reading.

Mule

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (2008) written by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs was actually written in 1945 before the authors even became famous as Beat Generation writers.
The novel is a dramatization of the events in 1944 when Lucien Carr stabbed David Kammerer twice in the heart with his boy scout knife. The murder is fictionalized and all the characters are given aliases, but at its core that’s what this somewhat peculiarly named novel is about.
The narrative voices alternate chapter by chapter between Will Dennison (Burroughs) and Mike Ryko (Kerouac). The style is mostly descriptive, and it keeps a certain distance to the persons and events in a classic hard-boiled tradition. It is interesting to see that the oddities in both authors individual styles are not all the way developed yet, but the embryos are there.
The two voices dovetail nicely, which means they also describe each other and give variations on the same events from two distinctly different perspectives. Other than that there’s plenty of the Beat Generation staples, drugs and alcohol and promiscuity (sometimes with a twist) and literature, talk of literature, art and philosophy. There’s also the distinct feeling that these young bucks were travelling in packs, moving in a little society their own. Money is always tight and nobody seems to have any kind of stable income.
The complicated relationship between Phillip Tourian and Ramsay Allen is given a lot of play. Tourian (Carr’s alter ego) is described by Dennison like this:
“This Phillip is the kind of boy literary fags write sonnets to, which start out, ‘O raven-haired Grecian lad…’“(p. 3) whereas Allen “is an impressive-looking gray-haired man of forty or so, tall and a little flabby. He looks like a down-at-the-heels actor, or someone who used to be somebody.” (p.3).
The thing is that Tourian is still a young man in his later teens when this takes place, and Allen was his teacher at some point. There’s a weird echo of Rimbaud and Verlaine about them, literary pursuits aside. Tourian is aware of Allen’s attraction and in this narrative he doesn’t return any of Allen’s affections, though in real life they probably had a slightly less PG 13 interaction. Tourian plans on leaving the city and Allen’s increasingly stifling attentions by taking hire on a ship headed for France along with Mike Ryko, who has worked on a ship before.
If you know a little about the Beat Generation you will have come across this story before. It influenced everyone connected to it. Burroughs is rumoured to have drifted into morphine addiction because of it, and Lucien Carr himself did his time (two years for first-degree manslaughter) and then went on to have a successful career as an editor for UPI. Carr was also instrumental in introducing Allen Ginsberg to Burroughs and Kammerer, so he was a force at the nexus of the Beats.
This novel, apart from being an interesting read with a lot of sex, drugs and rock’n'roll, or poetry as the case might be, is also one of those hard-boiled murder stories that get undermined by the fact that there is some kind of reality at the base of it. The bohemian lifestyle of the protagonists in World War II New York is depicted with a surprising lack of sentimentality.
It took sixty years between the writing and the publishing of this novel and that means that in the meanwhile the Beats became famous, infamous and some even posthumous. The modern reader comes to this story knowing them and knowing about their literary production. That adds another layer to this, creating a kind of liquid modernity drop-off point where you can’t help asking what is real in any of this. At the end of the day we have Carr’s description of what happened, the way it was presented at court and then the literary variations of the same event. It’s fascinating for more reasons than just the sensationalism of the murder itself or as a curio involving two writers who were on the verge of becoming seminal voices of their generation.