Poet laureate of communism taught Jim Morrison

Ernest Hemingway thought young Jack Hirschman’s writing was so good it was like his, but said he wouldn’t make a living from it.

Beatnik poet Jack Hirschman at San Francisco’s Caffe Trieste, which he attended daily for almost 50 years.

Obituary

Jack Hirschman: Beatnik poet.
Born New York City, December 13, 1933; died San Francisco, August 22, aged 87.

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If Jack Hirschman wanted to meet someone he would toss them a pink ball, even if he was seated in a restaurant. It was mostly because he was fascinated by new and interesting people, but there were times when he’d need his tab seen to. There was never going to be much money in being the poet laureate of communism, certainly not in America.

While studying for an arts degree at City College of New York he scored a job as a copy boy for Associated Press. He was keen to learn how to write and so sent a letter seeking advice from the best writer he could think of: Ernest Hemingway. He received a lengthy response including the lines: “I can’t help you, kid. You write better than I did when I was 19. But the hell of it is, you write like me. That is no sin. But you won’t get anywhere with it.”

Hirschman sold Hemingway’s generous letter to a newspaper and bought a station wagon with the proceeds. And whether he got “anywhere with it” is still open to debate. (On Hemingway’s death in June 1961, originally reported as an accident, but years later confirmed by his wife to have been suicide, the Letter to a Young Writer was published around the world.) “The letter he wrote is quite beautiful. It was such a beautiful, warm and loving letter … It’s very touching that they did that,” Hirsch­man said.

Hirschman was one of the beat generation, a 1950s movement led by the likes of Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg that coalesced around New York’s Columbia University and adopted then-liberal views about sex, materialism, militarism and sometimes Eastern religions, while rejecting what it saw as the authoritarianism of the state. This was later packaged up as “counterculture” and oversaw much of youthful Western thought in the 1960s, arguably culturally defining that decade.

Hirschman moved to the west coast in the late ’50s and taught at the University of California, Los Angeles. It was there he lectured a young Jim Morrison on European literature in 1965. The following year, Morrison approached him with a question. “Another student nearby said: ‘That’s Jim Morrison!’ He had just made the first disc of the Doors, but my music is experimental jazz. So naturally, I said ‘Who’s Jim Morrison?’”

He was sacked when, on learning that A-grade students were exempt from the draft, promised that all students opposed to the draft would be given an A.

Moving to San Francisco, Hirsch­man met the off-centre black, Jewish-Catholic beat poet and fellow progressive jazz nut Bob Kaufman, the man who coined the word beatnik, taking inspiration from Russia’s Sputnik satellite. Kaufman was the original street poet, seldom writing his compositions but walking the streets and reciting them to strangers or to families in cars stopped at red lights until a vow of silence he took on the death of president John Kennedy in 1963 that lasted almost 10 years.

By 1972 Hirschman and Kaufman were doing readings together in the city. “We thought the same things politically and poetically … and we had a mutual respect for one another. He was an extraordinary poet. Bobby would enter a place and you could hear a pin drop, and then (everyone would) burst into applause.”

Hirschman’s first volume of poetry was published in 1960, the forward to which was written by the esteemed Karl Shapiro, who had won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for poetry while still a soldier fighting in New Guinea. Hirschman wrote more than 100 volumes from then on, at one stage learning to speak Russian and writing a poem a day in that language for 11 years. Meanwhile he worked translating books in nine languages, even, as he would say, “American”.

He gained a reputation in Europe and was invited to read in England, but his books sold in small numbers. Nonetheless, the impact of his 1000-page 2006 blockbuster, The Arcanes, was likened by The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry editor Alan Kaufman to the publishing of James Joyce’s Ulysses, as it “traces the progress of an individual consciousness through landscapes teeming with the horrible glory of modern life”. An online review dismissed it as the “inane ramblings of a communist”.

“Poetry is the heart of being,” Hirschman would say. He told a reporter on the release of The Arcanes: “I’ve circulated in the bloodstream of this country in different ways from those with big names and big fames.”