Death of a Poet: Saying goodbye to Jim Carroll
By Gerald Howard
Jim CarrollI went to Jim Carroll’s wake and then to his funeral. It’s what one Catholic boy does for another. Conventionally described as a “punk poet” (although there was nothing punk in the least about his Frank O’Hara-influenced/Arthur Rimbaud-inflected verse), Jim died this past Friday of a heart attack in his apartment in upper Manhattan. They found him at his desk, and those of us who loved and admired him like to think that he was putting the finishing touches on his long-awaited novel, The Petting Zoo.
If Jim Carroll’s name means anything to you, it is probably as the author of the electrifying memoir of teenaged misadventures and heroin addiction in ’60s New York, The Basketball Diaries. It was made into a mediocre film in 1995, redeemed by a searing performance by Leonardo DiCaprio that was nevertheless deficient in one conspicuous respect: Leo did not have game, and his lame attempt to imitate the graceful All-City ballplayer that was Jim turned out to be an embarrassment. The musically inclined will remember Jim’s terrific 1980 rock album Catholic Boy, which featured that anthem of early and grisly urban demise, “People Who Died.” Cognoscenti of downtown culture knew Jim as a literary prodigy who was publishing his poems and diaries in the Paris Review in his teens. He was a fully paid-up member of New York’s hip aristocracy, Lou Reed’s peer, Patti Smith’s lover, Allen Ginsberg’s acolyte, Robert Smithson’s friend, permanently welcome in the Valhalla of Max’s Kansas City’s back room. And I had the pleasure of publishing most of his work when I was an editor at Penguin in the ’80s.