Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 5, 1992 TAG: 9201050262
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by ROBERT RIVENBARK
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
NOTHING NEW ABOUT THE BEATS
GUILTY OF EVERYTHING. By Herbert Huncke. Paragon House. $19.95.There is little justification for Herbert Huncke's autobiography, aside from the fact that Huncke, a drug addict for the past half century, rubbed shoulders with beat generation writers William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg - all of whom experimented with drugs.
Riding the coat tails of these better-known writers, Huncke has put together a rambling account of a life that never added up to much. He was born into a lower middle class family in Chicago around 1920 (Huncke is always fuzzy about dates.) When he landed in New York in the early 1940s, he found a flowering drug culture, which kept him supplied with heroin, morphine, Benzedrine and marijuana.
Huncke's account of life among New York City hookers, petty criminals and Greenwich Village bohemians has minor sociological value, but is too vague and rambling to offer a coherent portrait. The beat writers float in and out of the narrative like apparitions. Their personalities never emerge. They exist, in Huncke's mind, only as emotional attachments, or obstacles, or sources of money for drugs. Huncke has little understanding of what they were attempting as writers.
At times Huncke tries to romanticize the addict's life. At other times, he laments addiction, and attempts to draw moral conclusions about it. Though he accepted his own bisexuality early on, he never maintained a stable relationship, despite numerous affairs. Finally, late in middle age, he succeeded in treating his heroin addiction with methadone. His autobiography works as a commercial against addiction. But, at $19.95, it is an ad most readers will find too costly.
Robert Rivenbark is a Blacksburg-based freelance writer.