Last May I wrote a piece on Beat poet Gregory Corso (1930-2001) titled Hard in Every Way Imaginable: The Education of a Poet—Corso in Stripes.
Since then, I have come across a letter that has convinced me that his life was harder than anything imaginable.
Born in 1930 of teenage parents, he was baptized Catholic with the name Nuncio (he took Gregory as his confirmation name). His care was soon entrusted to agencies of charity. He spent many years in foster homes until age ten when he lived briefly with his father and stepmother before spending his pre-teen and early teen years living on the streets of New York City. Several arrests followed and imprisonment for three years beginning at age seventeen.
In a lengthy 1958 letter to Jack Kerouac,1 Corso described in heartbreaking detail the loss of childhood innocence and great suffering he endured in the formative years prior to imprisonment at seventeen.
It’s a hard letter to read, more than sad; however, written at age 28, he maintained a healthy, mature perspective on his past, surprisingly short on resentment, though many of his memories are just plain gut wrenching.
But a few of his stories tug at the heart, especially when he reminisces on what was important to him—such as a Quarter coin one of his foster mothers gave him at age five, a coin he played with, rolled on the floor, balanced on end, put paper over and traced Washington’s head, wrapped it in tinfoil, spat on and shined it with his sock. Age five, a Quarter for a toy.
Fast forward a decade later, what might be important to a homeless teen living on the streets of America’s largest city during the 1940s? During the Second World War?
Would you ever guess a baptismal certificate?
The certificate and what it meant was important to Nuncio Gregory Corso. In his letter to Kerouac he explained.
I remember when I lost my baptismal certificate, I was sixteen, and I always kept it in my back pocket, it was soiled and worn and its folds were torn, that was because I slept on rooftops and in cellars and had dirty pants, I was really scared when I realized I lost it. I ran back to that backyard to find it. It was very dark, so I used up a packet of matches to find it. Then all of a sudden, some lady screams, ‘‘The milk thief! The milk thief!” Lights went on, shades went up, undoubtedly somebody was stealing their milk. I was a very likely suspect being I unknowingly slept in the back yard and had no money. I could still hear that lady yelling “Milk thief! Milk thief!” Anyway, for a long time I always felt bad about losing my baptismal certificate, it was the only thing that really meant something to me I guess.”
What Gregory Corso survived is just astounding. The more I learn about his challenges and life experience, the more I believe he did his best to live out the call to be priest, prophet, and king, the call that was in his back pocket all those years.
The letter is found in An Accidental Autobiography: The Selected Letters of Gregory Corso (Ed., Bill Morgan, New Directions, 2003).