The Tower of Babel

by Jack Spicer, Kevin Killian, Lew Ellingham

Fiction. An established writer from an Eastern college returning to his former San Francisco haunts becomes entangled in a labyrinthine series of events that culminate in the sudden violent death of a respected poet. Described by Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian as "a satiric look at the private world of poetry gone public in the wake of the Six Gallery HOWL reading of October, 1955," THE TOWER OF BABEL includes finely detailed sketches of the San Francisco poetry world and gay life as they existed then.

Genres: Fiction

170 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Jack Spicer (January 30, 1925 - August 17, 1965) was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. In 2009, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer won the American Book Award for poetry.

Spicer was born in Los Angeles, where he later graduated from Fairfax High School in 1942, and attended the University of Redlands from 1943-45. He spent most of his writing-life in San Francisco and spent the years 1945 to 1950 and 1952 to 1955 at the University of California, Berkeley, where he began writing, doing work as a research-linguist, and publishing some poetry (though he disdained publishing). During this time he searched out fellow poets, but it was through his alliance with Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser that Spicer forged a new kind of poetry, and together they referred to their common work as the Berkeley Renaissance. The three, who were all gay, also educated younger poets in their circle about their "queer genealogy", Rimbaud, Lorca, and other gay writers.[1] Spicer's poetry of this period is collected in One Night Stand and Other Poems (1980). His Imaginary Elegies, later collected in Donald Allen's The New American Poetry 1945-1960 anthology, were written around this time.

In 1954, he co-founded the Six Gallery in San Francisco, which soon became famous as the scene of the October 1955 Six Gallery reading that launched the West Coast Beat movement.

Reviews

[Holly Raymond · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spicer's attempt at a novel is, appropriately, cryptic, furious, and bitchy. His prose is actually pretty great-- he learned a lot from the stacks of pulp novels he kept around, I guess, and its a bizarrely elegant incorporation of all of his metaphysical fixations into a kind of sort of detective story (nobody really commits a crime until about 80% of the way through).

[Kiof]

Wildly uneven. There are some great parts, particularly the first dinner scene and stuff about dreams. The letters in the book are good too. Spicer does a pretty great job of recreating and deflating the shop talk of writers. But a lot this book is a little too meticulous, a little detailed. I think it probably could have just as easily been a long story, and not much would have been lost.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

It started slow and tediously and got better and better as it went along, somewhere around where explain that Beowulf is a late 18th century literary hoax. When Madeline and Ralston Sausalito to look for witnesses, it really took off and I enjoyed it tremendously. It ended too abruptly and in the middle of the action (is that also in media res at the ending?) so that there is no ending... Sort of like Völund's story in the Eddas, come to think of it!