“The belief that your brain is your rocket ship and that simply as a matter of course you are going to climb inside and blast off.” “The same expectation shaping his life was shaping mine,” Rosen writes of Laudor. Doctorow, Norman Rockwell, Don McLean and Cynthia Ozick, the author’s mother’s best friend.
The two men were raised Jewish and bookish in the suburb of New Rochelle, N.Y., advertised on train platforms as “Forty-five minutes from Broadway.” It was an incubator to a surprising number of cultural big shots, including E.L. “I grew up surrounded by people who wrote things down,” he notes with understatement, “and wrote things down myself.” Now Rosen gives us the exquisitely fine print, drawing from clips, court and police records, legal and medical studies, interviews, diaries and some of Laudor’s own feverish compositions, as he examines the porous line between brilliance and insanity and the complicated policy questions posed by deinstitutionalization. The New York Post, as only The New York Post can, branded Laudor a “PSYCHO” in typeface more jumbo than the one it had used for the Son of Sam. “From Poster Child to Wanted Poster,” Psychiatric Times blared.
It’s an inch-by-inch, pin-you-to-the-sofa reconstruction of his long friendship with Michael Laudor, who made headlines a decade after the Ginsberg reading: first in The New York Times, as a Yale Law School graduate destigmatizing schizophrenia then pretty much everywhere, after stabbing his pregnant girlfriend, Caroline Costello, to death with a kitchen knife, confusing her with a windup doll. But Rosen’s own memoir is the opposite of ruinous. …”) Years later, Rosen would read that Ginsberg’s longtime lover Peter Orlovsky, who was there accompanying the poetry on finger cymbals, had once tried to attack Ginsberg’s assistant in the crotch with a pair of scissors.īehind most performances, in other words - most lives - lies some measure of mess and violence, and exposing this can be uncomfortable. (“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness. He’s recalling a Berkeley auditorium in the late 1980s, where he was hoping to hear Allen Ginsberg recite his epic poem “Howl,” from which this book takes its title. “Memoirs have a way of ruining things,” Jonathan Rosen writes in his remarkable new one, “The Best Minds.” THE BEST MINDS: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions, by Jonathan Rosen
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