Late in life, Philip Lamantia drafted fragments of a memoir under the working title

Erotic Poems.”
26
The pair became fast friends, even sharing an apartment 
together in Berkeley for a time, and Lamantia would later describe their relationship 
as “the deepest friendship I’ve ever had with another male in my life.”
27
“John was 
a very religious person,” Lamantia recalled, suggesting their mutual interest in the 
spiritual life was one of the bases of their bond.
28
Beat Generation
The appearance of Hoffman might be considered a sign of Lamantia’s transition into 
the “Beat” phase of his life. For whereas Lamantia’s precocious rise to avant-garde 
prominence in the 1940s meant that his first colleagues had often been considerably 
older, he now began to associate with poets and artists approximately his own age; 
“the best minds of his generation,” as it were, were catching up with him. At the same 
time, the 1950s would prove to be one of the most difficult periods of his life— one he 
often referred to as a period of “eclipse”— marked by poetic restlessness, intense spiri-
tual and physical wandering, and drug addiction.
29
In late 1949, Hoffman went to 
New York City, where Lamantia joined him shortly afterward. By the time Lamantia 
arrived, Hoffman had already begun intravenous use of heroin, and he immediately 
introduced his friend to the drug. Lamantia would struggle with heroin addiction 
throughout the 1950s. In New York they also met Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, 
and other key figures of the Beat Generation. Indeed, according to Kerouac, aspects 
of Lamantia and Hoffman are “condensed” into the generalized portrait of junkie 
squatters in 
The Subterraneans (1958), while Hoffman is mentioned in William Bur-
roughs’s first novel, 
Junky (1953).
30
Lamantia’s travels, drug use, rebellious attitude, interest in jazz and spiritual 
exploration, and friendships with Kerouac, Ginsberg, and others seem to mark him 
as a Beat poet. Certainly his poetry developed a more vernacular diction during this 
period. Yet there were notable differences between Lamantia and the Beats. The 
Beats were in the ascendant, loudly laying claim to their own space within culture, 
confidant of the authenticity of their own voices. Lamantia, in contrast, was at this 
time unsure of his identity and direction as a writer. Moreover, Lamantia’s focus 
on esotericism set him apart from the Beats, who were more interested in immedi-
ate reality. As Nancy Joyce Peters observed in her biographical essay on Lamantia, 
“While much Beat writing was spontaneous reportage and meditation on daily life, 
Lamantia concentrated on hermetic, symbolic, and magical themes.”
31
This obser-
vation is echoed by one of Ginsberg’s biographers, Bill Morgan, who wrote, “Allen 
thought that Lamantia’s writing was too focused on cabalistic themes. Deep down 

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xxxiv high poet
Allen felt Philip was not an ignu (a special honorary term he and Kerouac had coined 
to apply to like-minded people).”
32
In 1950, Lamantia made his first trip to Mexico, accompanied by another friend, 
the poet, avant-garde filmmaker, and editor of 
Contour, Christopher Maclaine. Very 
little is known about this particular trip. According to an unpublished interview 
with John Suiter— used as source material for Suiter’s book 
Poets on the Peaks: Gary 
Snyder, Philip Whalen & Jack Kerouac in the North Cascades (2002)— Lamantia had 
read Antonin Artaud’s 
Voyage to the Land of the Tarahumara (written in 1936, pub-
lished in 1945) “by 1949,” and, though the two poets didn’t visit these remote people, 
it seems likely that Artaud’s account of the psychotropic effects of the peyote cactus 
at least partially motivated their visit.
33
Whether or not they obtained peyote on 
this trip, Lamantia soon learned he could order dried peyote buttons through the 
mail, from various seed catalogs. It’s no exaggeration to claim, as Suiter does, that 
Lamantia introduced peyote into the Bay Area literary scene, over a decade and a half 
before San Francisco’s late ’60s psychedelic heyday.
34
“As early as 1951,” Suiter writes 
in