Jim Carroll: Contemporary Authors 2000

“Sidelights”

By the time he was eighteen years old, Jim Carroll had already gained a reputation as one of the most prominent poets in the New York-based beat community. His gritty urban poetry and earnest, near-formless prose was lauded by such giants of the genre as William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac (in an oft-reprinted quotation, Kerouac once claimed: “At thirteen years of age, Jim Carroll writes better prose than eighty-nine percent of the novelists working today”). His writing is mostly autobiographical, describing his childhood in New York, his friends and acquaintances, and the heroin addiction that gradually eroded away his dreams of becoming a basketball star. 

Though he had published two earlier poetry collections, Organic Trains and Four Ups and One Down, and had contributed numerous poems to magazines, Carroll did not receive widespread recognition until the 1973 publication of Living at the Movies. Gerald Malanga, writing in Poetry, called the book “a triumph…. There is not one awkward word or tacky locution disturbing the exquisite poise and flow.” Carroll, pronounces Malanga, is “a genuine poet” who “has worked as only a man of inspiration is capable of working, and [whose] presence has added great dignity to the generation of poets of the seventies to which he belongs.”

Throughout the late 60s and early 70s, as his reputation as a poet was growing, bits of Carroll’s prose began dotting the New York literary landscape, appearing occasionally in journals and poetry magazines. These stories were allegedly written by Carroll between the ages of twelve and fifteen, and described in harsh detail the beginnings of his 10-year heroin addiction. As each story leaked out, it was invariably accompanied by rumors of the imminent publication of a complete collection.

That collection, published in limited edition in 1978 and then with widespread distribution in 1980, was The Basketball Diaries: Age Twelve to Fifteen. In it, the Washington Post‘s Eve Zibart notes, Carroll depicts himself as “a sexually sophisticated, glue-sniffing, purse-snatching dopehead” whose “one untarnished vision is of himself as the basketball hero.” What gives the book real power, though, are the descriptions of the city and its citizens. Zibart continues: “Jim Carroll’s New York is a carnival crazy house, where the drunks and hustlers bobble out of dark doorways like phosphorescent skeletons. Reflected in its twisted mirrors is all the perversion, scum and inadvertent slapstick that flesh is heir to.” Steven Simels, writing in Stereo Review, calls The Basketball Diaries “a scary, mordantly funny odyssey along the dark underbelly of the Sixties, a virtuoso performance that ought to be must reading for those who still tend to romanticize the counterculture.”

The Basketball Diaries is, quite possibly, a unique work, because it views childhood in the present rather than in retrospect. “It is a portrait of the artist not just as a young man but as a child, written by the child, and thus free of the mature artist’s complicated romantic love of himself in pain,” observes Jamie James in the American Book Review. The power behind Carroll’s narrative took many critics by surprise–particularly those who had been following the stories as they had leaked out, one by one, over the years. “It seemed to be the charming but trivial work of a precociously gifted young writer,” explains James. “[However,] seeing it all together bears out one’s ongoing suspicion that there’s more here than the swaggering bravado of a smart kid grown up all wrong.” While James labels The Basketball Diaries “a literary miracle,” he later clarifies: “It is not literature, in the usual sense, at all. It is a great work of storytelling, in the most elemental sense …, the kind of storytelling that happens when two good friends on a cross-country drive find themselves on the interstate in the middle of the night, two hundred miles from nowhere.”

Following the tremendous critical reception of The Basketball Diaries, Carroll was persuaded by an old girlfriend, Patti Smith, to try his hand at music; Smith had successfully made the transition from poetry to music a few years earlier. She offered Carroll the opportunity to play a few gigs with her in San Francisco and New York. “It was incredible fun,” Carroll says in New York, “and it was so intense and beautiful at the same time. It was remarkable.” After just two shows, The Jim Carroll Band was signed to a record deal, and in 1980 released its first album, Catholic Boy.

The songs on Catholic Boy address the same issues as Carroll’s poetry: drugs, sex, religion, and, above all, New York City. “[It is] filled with imagery that is spiritual, sexual, and violent,” writes Barbara Graustark in Newsweek. “His songs of a city morally gone to seed have a raw power.” The album’s single, “People Who Died,” is a disturbing litany of Carroll’s dead friends–victims of murder, suicide, and sheer overindulgence. Audiences were captivated by the dark energy of Carroll’s lyrics, and within weeks “People Who Died” became a runaway hit. Graustark avers: “Not since Lou Reed wrote ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ has a rock singer so vividly evoked the casual brutality of New York City as has Jim Carroll…. [‘People Who Died’] has propelled him from underground status [in literary circles] … to national attention as a contender for the title of rock’s new poet laureate.”

When the popularity of “People Who Died” began to dwindle, however, the critics quickly turned on Carroll. “The rest of the album has its share of lapses,” writes Simels, and New York‘s Chet Flippo says: “There can be little doubt that Carroll the poet is a far subtler and sharper persona than Carroll the rock-‘n’-roll lyricist.” Though The Jim Carroll Band released two more albums (Dry Dreams, in 1982, and I Write Your Name, in 1984), neither approached the initial popularity of Catholic Boy. Bob Pfeiffer, writing in the Washington Post in 1987, summarizes Carroll’s musical career: “Lyrics, sure, but a good band, not simply a podium from which the poet can project, has eluded Carroll. A favorite rock critic put-down is to label him a ‘second-rate Lou Reed.'”

His career as a musician apparently behind him, Carroll went back to writing poetry and prose. His first attempt to reenter the literary world was 1986’s The Book of Nods, a collection of poems. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly found considerable room for improvement here; he calls the collection an example of “serious talent destroyed over the years by negligence and disregard for self-discipline,” and further claims that Carroll’s subject matter–addiction, desperation, and recovery–is “pretty much outworn.”

Such reviews did not discourage Carroll from writing a second collection of memoirs entitled Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries, 1971-1973. It picks up where The Basketball Diaries left off, with Carroll, now twenty, still hooked on heroin and associating with the “in” crowd that frequents Andy Warhol’s Factory. “Entries is more introspective than Diaries, the upfront ingenuousness of the early years replaced by insight and irony,” observes Pfeiffer, though the New York Times ‘ Christopher Lehmann-Haupt insists: “The two diaries remain similar in their quest for extreme sensations and their eagerness to shock the reader.” In Forced Entries, Carroll describes his attempt to kick heroin, his subsequent addiction to methadone, and his eventual flight to a California clinic. “When, ultimately, Carroll finds his redemption in California …, we sense the enormity of the underground experience, as lived, in ways a documentary history can only grope for,” concludes Los Angeles Times Book Review writer William Hochswender.

Whether or not Forced Entries marks Carroll’s successful return to literary circles is debatable: Mark Stevens, writing in the New York Times Book Review, labels Carroll’s memoirs “plenty of diverting tinsel” whose writing “cannot sustain this more serious tone” of redemption. Still, writes Hochswender, Carroll’s “junk- induced dreams and downtown adventures have inspired writings–beautiful ravings, actually–that are ornate and harrowingly stark,” and Lehmann- Haupt proclaims: “Whether or not one believes Jim Carroll’s redemption, his two diaries constitute a remarkable account of New York City’s lower depths.”

PERSONAL INFORMATION

Family: Born August 1, 1951; son of Thomas J. and Agnes (Coyle) Carroll; wife, Rosemary; children: Aaron, Cassandra. Education: Attended Wagner College and Columbia University. Politics: “Peace.” Religion: “God.” Addresses: Agent: c/o Viking Publicity, 375 Hudson, New York, NY 10014-3657.
Random House Young Writers Award, 1970, for excerpt from The Basketball Diaries published in Paris Review.
Poet, writer and musician. Critic, Art News, 1969; teacher at poetry workshops and poetry projects in New York City, 1968-71; has given poetry readings at New York area colleges and churches.

WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:

• • Organic Trains, Penny Press, 1967.
  • Four Ups and One Down, Angel Hail Press, 1970.
  • Living at the Movies, Van Grossman, 1973, Penguin, 1980.
  • The Book of Nods, Penguin, 1986.

• • Another World, edited by Anne Waldman, Bobbs-Merrill, 1972;
  • The Young American Poets, Volume II, edited by Paul Carroll, Random House, 1973;
  • Angel Vision, edited by Jay Gaines, Huntington House, 1992. Also contributor to “The Authors and the Artists” series, 1977.

• The Basketball Diaries: Age Twelve to Fifteen, limited edition, Tombouctou, 1978, Bantam, 1980, Penguin, 1987.
• Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries, 1971-73, Penguin, 1987.

MUSICAL RECORDINGS

• • • (With the Jim Carroll Band) Catholic Boy, ATCO, 1980.
    • Dry Dreams, ATCO, 1982.
    • I Write Your Name, Atlantic, 1983.
    • Praying Mantis (spoken word), Giant/Reprise, 1992.

FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR: