Letter to Allen Ginsberg

Today I wanted to commentate on a letter from Bobby the webmaster of bobbydriscoll.net has been so kind as to share with us during the updates.  It's a letter that makes me super sad, for a number of reasons.

There are a few things that jump out to us right out the gate when reading this letter from Bobby to Allen Ginsberg in February of 1968.  For one, it was February 1968, which means Bobby had roughly a month to live.

You can read it here.

We don't know why he was in jail then, but we can imagine it was probably under charges not dissimilar from those in his past.  However, we can most certainly ascertain that his father was not in jail with him -- Clet, as far as we know, was back home in California, probably pining away for his only son.

Next, we see the names of the other two men Bobby mentions at the bottom of the letter:  Billy Sunday and Arch Obler.  The Billy Sunday I know of was a Presbyterian evangelist who lived the generation prior to Bobby's, but whom he might have had knowledge of given the fact that Bobby most likely grew up in a Presbyterian church (see one of my earliest posts about this).  There's always the chance that there existed another Billy Sunday, but he's mentioned in the same sentence as "Arch Obler," and there is only one of those that I know of, which is the screenwriter/playwright whose work Bobby would have probably been familiar with.  That leads me to believe the "Billy Sunday" Bobby refers to was, in fact, the noteworthy one we think of.

Why would Bobby tell Allen G. that he was in jail with his father, and that Billy Sunday and Arch Obler said to thank him?

My personal theory -- and the cause for my sadness regarding this letter -- is that Bobby's mind was either pretty far gone from his illness, or that he was high when he wrote it.  There are words missing and a couple of misspellings littering the manuscript that indicate that as well.  In Bobby's mind the way it probably was at the time, his dad, Arch Obler, and Billy Sunday could have all accompanied him to jail without question.

There is also, however, the possibility that this was some type of code language and code names for people both Bobby and Allen knew.  They shared the kinship of the Beat generation, which leads me to believe this is a possible explanation as well.

But, again -- I believe the date and the context behind what we know about Bobby's life in early 1968 indicates that the first theory is the one most likely.

I find myself haunted by questions of what Bobby's final months and even years were like.  We lose touch with him, or at least his personal words about his life, after he does the interview in 1961 regarding his great love for Suzanne Stansbury.  We all know what went with that eventually, and then we know Bobby "married" Sharon Morrill, but we never heard him talk about it...

Or his family talk about it....

Or what exactly happened when he got to New York and decided to stay there, apart from his plans to sell pot with Sharon's brother and, according to some sources, try to make it on Broadway.

He essentially became a ghost.

We see him on Andy Warhol's couch in one instance.... posing briefly for a picture in his overcoat, unsmiling on one occasion.... and of course, in his few minutes of "Dirt" where he played a nun for Warhol's short film.  But other than that, what did he spend his time doing?  What was every day life like for him?

Brian Keith O'Hara has said he knows from having gone up and investigated with some people who had encountered Bobby in Manhatten that he spent alot of time at the library.  We know from his poems, namely "For America" that he kept abreast of politics at the time, at least somewhat; and he seemed to have adapted to the fashion of the late 60's as well.  Was it possible for him to have been lost in a total fog of drugs, yet to have been socially conscious at the same time?  Addiction is such a different animal for everyone who encounters it....

Anyway, all that to say, there's so much we don't know about that time in Bobby's life.  But one thing's for sure, if he was being peppered by hallucinations in those last months, I pray they were comforting illusions -- and if he imagined the presence of his father, I like to think they were.