Transcript Document

Summary:
Major Beat figures:
--Jack Kerouac, novelist, author of On the Road
--Neal Cassady, “life-artist,” model for hero of On the Road
--Allen Ginsberg, poet, author of Howl
--William Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch
Historical context:
Postwar suburbia (Pleasantville)
The age of the Atomic Bomb
Encouraged Romanticism in the form of
Reject rationality for in the form of science it has brought us
The prospect of the annihilation of the human race.
Live for today for tomorrow may literally never come.
Reject reason: The Beat Vision Quest
Integrity & authenticity a la Thoreau
Be a nonconformist
Self-expression
Reject wealth and conventional success
Resist Puritanism: embrace Whitmanian
Sensuality
The World Will Whip you With its Displeasure
Politics
Beatniks
REJECT REASON
The rational world , it seemed to the Beats, had turned on
Itself. The rational world that threatened to extinguish the
Human race.
“The burden of my generation was the knowledge
That something rational had caused all this…and that
Nothing rational could end it.”
--John Clellon Holmes, Leland p. 148
"We had gone beyond a point of no return- and we were
ready for it, for a point of no return...We wanted voice and
we wanted vision."
-Michael McClure. Beat poet
Reject reason & conventional
mythologies
• We all thought experience itself was good. Any
experience. That it could only be good to experience
as much as possible. . . Anything that took us
outside--that gave us the dimensions of the box we
were caught in, an aerial view, as it were---showed us
the exact arrangement of the maze we were walking,
was a blessing. A small satori. Because we knew we
were caught.”
• -Diane Di Prima in Leland p. 149
As early pioneers in the knowing, that when you lose your
reason, you attain highest perfect knowing
--Jack Kerouac, Book Of Blues, 55th Chorus,
-Desolation Blues,
Never deny the voice- no, never forget it, don't get lost
mentally wandering in other spirit worlds or American or
job worlds or advertising worlds or earth worlds."
-Allen Ginsberg's vow to himself
Kerouac is ''a great writer totally devoid of common sense.''
--Kenneth Rexroth
On the Road was written in less than three
weeks and demonstrated a fresh style. This
new writing was spontaneous and seemed to
be at times unedited. It possessed a strange
energy that shocked more established writers
but only brought Kerouac well-deserved
recognition.
D. H. Lawrence: "The most superb mystery we have
hardly recognized: the immediate instant self. The quick of all
time is the instant. The quick of all the universe, of all creation,
is the incarnate, carnal self. Poetry gave us the clue: free verse:
Whitman." Kerouac writes in this tradition.
David Dempsey NY Times Feb 23 1956
poems that happen to appear in their heads for no
reason living without the repressive structures of the
ego, without the oppressive conventions of respectable
life, was mirrored for Kerouac by his writing: it was
stream-of-consciousness, he refused to revise feeling
that revising was to allow the tame proper world to
interfere with his spontaneity. Revising was the home
of rationality...first drafts were the home of his true
spontaneous deep-down self... The writer was not to
revise his original impulses, for revision was a function
of conditioning, a concession to standards of taste and
propriety that belonged to the temporal community,
and not to the universal strains that Kerouac sought to
capture.
--Tytell, Naked Angels 144
ROMANTIC THEME: REJECT REASON, USE YOUR HEART
In one’s art,
1. Don’t plan
2. Don’t edit
3. Open yourself to intuition and imagination
4. Remove the conscious mind from the process
2. Attempt to find ways to go beyond reason as the sole
Method for understanding the world.
Buddhist meditation
Psychotropic drugs
The cut-ups are simply random at one point. That is,
You take up scissors and cut the page, and how random
Is that? What appears to be random may not, in fact, be
Random at all. You have selected what you want to cut up.
After that, you select what you want to use.. . You can’t
Always get the best results. Some cut-ups are interesting
And some of them aren’t. There is the important matter of
Selection to consider. If I were to compose a poem out of
Cut-ups, I would just choose certain segments and parts
That do work, and the rest I’d throw away. Sometimes I
Have cut-up an entire page and only got one sentence from
It.
Burroughs denied that cut-ups resembled Tristan Tzara’s
“automatic writing” because they were controlled and
Without an element of the unconscious. Yet it’s hard to
See how cut-ups are to evade the control of the Word Police
If they aren’t random and evade conscious control.
William Burroughs:
The best writing seems to be done
almost by accident but writers until the
cut-up method was made explicit. . . had
no way to produce the accident of
spontaneity. You cannot will
spontaneity. But you can introduce the
unpredictable spontaneous factor with a
pair of scissors.”
From “The Cut-Up Method of Brian Gysin”
Now listen to William Burroughs on how he
Sees himself as a writer:
“I am a recording instrument . . . I do
Not pretend to impose ‘story’ ‘plot’
‘continuity’ . . . Insofar as I succeed
In Direct recording of certain areas of
Psychic process I may have a limited
Function . . . I am not an entertainer”
Cut-ups are seen as replicating drug states:
Non-linear, non rational, not ordered by any
Clear principle, not under conscious control.
They are a way of “deranging the sense” in
Rimbaud’s sense (without having to actually
do so as one does with psychotropic drugs.)
Empty picture of a haunted ruin he lifted his hands
sadly turned them out some boy just wrote last
goodbye across the sky last goodbye whispering
children on a dead star empty withered cut off
exploded film scraps last awning flaps on the pier
last man here now the youth structure of all your
world broken twisted on electric fence at the barrier i
have done the job here will he hear it a distant hand
lifted 1920 window child fingers tap the glass all the
dream people of past time are saying goodbye
forever mister sad servant shadows of late afternoon
against his back magic
from The Third Mind, with Brion Gysin,1965
for me, one of the guiding sentences of
twenty years of my life, or maybe still,
maybe always--is, "I am certain of nothing
but the holiness of the heart's affections and
the truth of the imagination." That about
says it.
Wisdom comes from within.
Any unconventional person is either following the
lead of some other unconventional person or is
listening to his heart.
Ginsberg eventually: going inside=realizing that there is
No inside, that it’s an illusion
“The Western virtues of rationality and instrumentalism
Were largely suspect to Burroughs. . . He shared the
So-called primitive belief in an animistic universe which
The skeptical West categorically rejected.”
Ann Douglas, “Punching a Hole. . .”
"Americans should know the universe itself
as a road, as many roads, as roads for
traveling souls."
-Walt Whitman
Whitman was the poet of democracy, the
great anti-elitist. Like Emerson and Thoreau,
he believed that all the themes of the past
could be found in the present, all the heroes
of the past had modern counterparts. The
only way to understand was to look within.
The Beats were not rebels but questers, who had
divorced themselves from a society devoted to
making money. Walt Whitman had already warned
that unless there was a spiritual infusion, America
would wind up among the 'fabled damned.'”
--Allen Ginsberg
.Being “on the road”was Kerouac’s way of
symbolizing leaving conventional, normal, proper,
safe, respectable life behind.
an adventure you can still have in America, just like
Neal [Cassady] on the road. You can’t hop the
freights anymore, but you can chase the Grateful
Dead around. You can have all your tires blow out in
some weird town in the Midwest, and you can get
hell from strangers. You can have something that
lasts throughout your life as adventures, the times
you took chances. I think that’s essential to
anybody’s life, and it’s harder and harder to do in
America. --Jerry Garcia
But it’s more than that too:
It’s the central Beat metaphor for attempting to find
Out the truth about life.
It’s the Vision Quest: leaving behind normal frames
Of reference, including and especially reason, which
Confine one’s reality, to travel to places one had never
Been before: either inside oneself, or to alternate realities.
“What differentiated the characters in
On the Road from the slum-bred petty
Criminals. . .which have been something
of a staple in modern American fiction-what made them Beat. . . Was Kerouac’s
insistence that actually they were on a
quest and that the specific object of their
quest was spiritual. . . If they seemed to
Trespass most boundaries, legal and moral,
it was only in the hope of finding a belief
on the other side.”
--John Clellon Holmes
Kerouac’s approach to the journey is much closer to
Whitman...Whitman’s persona travels just to learn that
he doesn’t need to:
“Henceforth I ask not for good fortune/I myself am
good fortune.’Song of the Open Road” The road
simply reflects back the self and it is a finer mirror
than even the poet;s own language: you express me
better than I can express myself. What the traveler
learns about himself is the greatest marvel he
encounters; I am larger, better, than I thought/I did not
know I held so much goodness.
The “spiritual quest” Cassady refers to reminds us of
Emerson’s belief that human beings needed to journey
Inside to discover their true natures before embarking
On the search for authenticity.
With the discovery by the Beats (and others) of psychotropic
Drugs, this quest was aided chemically. Ginsberg, and later
Timothy Leary, explicitly saw peyote, LSD, and other such
Drugs as ways for people to shortcircuit the long arduous
Process of self-discovery.
Accompanying this is a reiteration of the Romantic rejection
Of the supremacy of wisdom and conventional views of the
World. Psychotropic drugs could help one break through into
Visions of a genuine alternative reality. There were, it was held,
More worlds than just the ordinary everyday one.
William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:
"If the doors of perception were cleansed every
thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man
has closed himself up, till he sees all things through'
narrow chinks of his cavern."
To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be
shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world,
not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or
to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but
as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by
Mind at Large— this is an experience of inestimable value
to everyone and especially to the intellectual.
[T]he man who comes back through the Door in the Wall
will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He
will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less selfsatisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet
better equipped to understand the relationship of words to
things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable
Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.
---Huxley, The Doors of Perception
“I didn’t have an experience with opiates until
I was 30 years old.. . What interested me was
What interests anyone who takes drugs--altered
Consciousness. Altered consciousness, of course,
Is a writer’s stock in trade. If my consciousness was just completely conventional, no one
Would be interested enough to read it, right?
So there’s that aspect. . . But of course,
Altering the consciousness need not be drugRelated either. We alter our consciousness all
The time, from minute to minute. Altered
Consciousness is a basic fact of life.”
--Miles Davis
There are a lot of different themes that were either catalyzed,
adapted, inaugurated, transformed or initiated by the literary
movement of the fifties and a community of friends from the
forties. The central theme was a transformation of consciousness
and as time unrolled, experiences that Kerouac, Burroughs and
I had, related to this notion - at least to "widening the arena of
consciousness." For example, this world is absolutely real and
final and ultimate and at the same time, absolutely unreal and
transitory and of the nature of dream-stuff, without contradiction.
I think Kerouac had the most insightful grasp of that already by
1958. So that one spiritual insight - which is permanently
universal - led to the exploration of mind or consciousness in
any way shape or form.
“I am a cosmonaut of inner space.” --Wm. Burroughs
Many traditions, especially in the East,
stress shutting up that interior monologue or see reason
as unidimensional.
•Zen e.g. in search of Empty Mind
All ways to keep that Heavy, Reason , from tromping in and
Taking control, kicking all the more evasive and elusive and
Irrational sprites out of the head.
[His] purpose was served better than he could have
imagined by his access to a steady supply of
marijuana. He smoked it constantly, bringing to light
a stream of subconscious subjects. As one
example, he became obsessed with the image of a
rose, on a rainy night, traveling down the river to the
sea. That image would later fit centrally into the
symbolism of On the Road....[he was trying to] find
some way to communicate the
incommunicable...he wanted to work in revelations,
not just spin silly tales for money. “I want to fish as
deep as possible into my own subconscious in the
belief that once that far down, everyone will
understand because they are the same that far
down.” [Nicosia 324]
AUTHENTICITY &
INTEGRITY
BE A NONCONFORMIST
.Being “on the road”was Kerouac’s way of
symbolizing leaving conventional, normal, proper,
safe, respectable life behind.
an adventure you can still have in America, just like
Neal [Cassady] on the road. You can’t hop the
freights anymore, but you can chase the Grateful
Dead around. You can have all your tires blow out in
some weird town in the Midwest, and you can get
hell from strangers. You can have something that
lasts throughout your life as adventures, the times
you took chances. I think that’s essential to
anybody’s life, and it’s harder and harder to do in
America. --Jerry Garcia
“Standardization and mechanization and control of the
Individual psyche seems now a fait accompli here.
Spiritual activity or Art a strictly sideline deal and not
A centrally important goal.
Things run on a routine of unspiritualized mediocrity
And when anyone with any special insight tries to
Become a part it is a torture.”
Allen Ginsberg, journal entry, fall 1954
Common sense of the fifties was that
normal=right
The Beats insisted that this was not so, that there were
many ways to live that were equally right, that it depended
on the individual and that this idea was repressive
of individuality: nothing was right period, only right for me
and perhaps wrong for you.
All of the Beats exemplify the Romantic belief
that
One should lead a life of authenticity.
“the problem as [Kerouac] saw it was that while
[his publishers] were on the “straight narrow easy
roads” of business, he was on [the] “crooked
road of prophecy.”
Nicosia, Memory Babe, p. 353
‘I think the poet is the last person who is still
speaking the truth when no one else dares to. I
think the poet is the first person to
begin the shaping and visioning of the new
forms and the new consciousness when no one
else has begun to sense it;
I think these are two of the most essential
human functions’
-Diane Di Prima
I had my choice when I commenced. I bid neither for
soft eulogies, big money returns, nor the approbation
of existing schools and conventions...I have had my say
entirely my own way and put it unerringly on recordthe value thereof to be decided by time.”
Walt Whitman quoted in Justin Kaplan,
Walt Whitman, p. 23
• What's inspiring here is her ongoing commitment
to her work, despite the fact that she was often
excluded from male literary circles--from poetry
readings and poetry anthologies. "I was a poet,"
she writes. "I had work to do. It has carried me all
these years."
Burroughs had deliberately set out to live a
certain way, and he would not be swayed from
his purpose. He approached life with a sense of
mission...He had great personal courage,
bordering on foolhardiness ... He had those
very Emersonian qualities of self-reliance and
a personal point of view, as if following
Emerson's advice to the scholars at Dartmouth
College: "Be content with a little light, so it be
your own. Explore and explore. Be neither
chided nor flattered out of your position of
perpetual inquiry."
The affluent post-Korean war society was settling down to a
grimmer, more long term ugliness. At that moment, there really
seemed to be no way out. As far as we knew, there was only a small
handful of us-perhaps forty or fifty in the city-who knew what we
knew: who raced about in Levis and work shirts, made art, smoked
dope, dug the new jazz, and spoke a bastardization of the black
argot. We surmised that there might be another fifty living in San
Francisco and perhaps a hundred more scattered throughout the
country: Chicago, New Orleans, etc. but our isolation was total and
impenetrable, and we did not try to communicate with even this
small handful of our confreres. Our chief concern was to keep our
integrity (much time and energy went into defining the concept of
the “sellout”) and to keep our cool: a hard clean edge of definition in
the midst of the terrifying indifference and sentimentality around us”media mush.” We looked to each other for comfort, for praise, for
love, and shut out the rest of the world.
Diane di Prima, Memoir of a Beatnik
colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class
non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the
outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with
lawns and television sets is each living room with everybody
looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the
same time---- Jack Kerouac
"Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to
trends and fads and popular opinion.”--Kerouac
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud
was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
--Anais Nin
EXPRESS YOURSELF
“I think one should write, as
nearly as possible, as if he
were the first person on earth
and was humbly and sincerely
putting on paper that which he
saw and experienced and loved
and lost; what his passing
thoughts were and his sorrows
and desires."
-Neal Cassady to Jack Kerouac
Growing up in the fifties, you
had to figure it out for yourself—
which she did, and stayed
open—as a woman, uninterested
in any possibility of static
investment or solution. Her
search for human center is
among the most moving I
have witnessed.’
-Robert Creeley, 1973
AG: “It’s the ability to commit to write the same way that
You . . . Are! You have many writers who have preconceived
Ideas about what literature is supposed to be and their ideas
Seem to exclude that which makes them most charming in
Private conversation. Their faggishness or their campiness,
Or their neurasthenia, or their solitude, or their goofiness,or
Their--even masculinity--at times. Because they think that
They’re gonna write something that sounds like something
Else that they’ve read before, instead of sounds like them,
Or comes from their own life.
interview in Paris Review, 1966
This is now told to young writers in every writing program
In the country I’d guess --find your own voice-but it wasn’t so in the 50’s. The underground finds its way
to the mainstream
• It's her [di Prima’s] poetry all over again: gritty,
surreal, heartbreaking, fluid, and ever returning
to her theme of what it means to be a woman
and how she sought to find that meaning. This
is especially gripping in terms of being a
bisexual street poet (and later a single mother)
in 1950s America. In an era when "gray was the
color and vanilla the flavor" -- when any
deviation in hemline or hair length labeled you a
communist, her differences were painful. Even
the New York beats had a male chauvinist
hierarchy that considered themselves far too
good for Diane's realism, street language,
slang.
Ginsberg insisted that if he were to be able to
Depict an authentic flow of life of real people, he
Must be able to use the words that real people
Use, including words that may offend people.
He denied that there should be one kind of formal
Polite language for use in literature and another kind
Of ordinary language to be used in every day life.
This is exactly what Whitman did in the 19th century.
AG: “In other words, if I use. . .fornication words in
Poetry or fellatio words in poetry…it might be like
An ordinary human activity which everybody
Recognizes as being their own.
William F. Buckley: “Well, speak for yourself.”
Firing Line Sept. 24, 1968
I'm simply trying to write according to the directions of Walt
Whitman, who said he hoped the poets of the future would
specialize in CANDOR. I'm trying to record my experiences
candidly, and that right must be protected, because my
experiences are more or less parallel with other people's
--Ginsberg, interview 1996
http://gloria-brame.com/glory/ginsberg.htm.
the entire society was decadent, that bourgeois
“normalcy” was diseased. To disapprove of a
novel because its characters are irresponsible
or eccentric...was to avoid an aesthetic
judgment. His intention was not to “prettify” the
community of free spirits he was trying to
depict. Like Kerouac and Burroughs, he would
employ no euphemism, nor would he censor any
crucial language or detail to make his work
more palatable. At least his characters were
aware of their imperfections while the rest of
society was ‘unconscious that it exhibited its
repression in social sadism.’
--Ginsberg to his father who had criticized
the “barbarous “eccentricities” of the characters in
his work.
Further Notice
I can’t live in this world
And I refuse to kill myself
Or let you kill me
The dill plant lives, the airplane
My alarm clock, this ink
I won’t go away
I shall be myself—
Free, a genius, an embarrassment
Like the Indian, the buffalo
Like Yellowstone National Park
-Philip Whalen
“Keroauc was liable to sadly but gently bemoan the loss of
The wild and free frontier where earlier Americans could
Get lost and escape daily confrontation with cops and
Bureaucrats. Thus, his idealization of Neal Cassady.
REJECT CONVENTIONAL
SUCCESS
"I never wrote for money. . . ," she says.
"I've always written for the joy of it, and
one of the joys has been to talk about
taboo topics and make it possible for
others to write about them, too."
but I really would like to stop working forever-never work again, never do anything like the kind of work
I'm doing now--and do nothing but write poetry and have
leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and
see friends. And I'd like to keep living with someone -maybe even a man -- and explore relationships that way.
And cultivate my perceptions, cultivate the visionary thing
in me. Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence.
Then he said "Well, why don't you?”
I asked him what the American Psychoanalytic Association
would say about that, and he said . . . if that is what you really
feel would please you, what in the world is stopping you from
doing it?
Ginsberg seeing a shrink in SF in 1954, after having tried a straight life with a job
and a girlfriend.
You kill yourself to get to the grave. Especially
you kill yourself to get to the grave before you
even die, and the name of that grave is “success,”. .
.
I realized either I was crazy or the world was
crazy; and I picked on the world. . . And of
course I was right -Jack
Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz,
he means that’s the attitude for the Bard, the Zen
lunacy bard of old desert paths, see the whole
thing is a world of rucksack wanderers, Dharma
Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand
that they consume production and
therefore have to go to work for the privilege of
consuming, all that crap they didn’t really want
anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at
least new fancy cars, hair oils and deodorants
and general junk you finally always see a week
later in the garbage anyway, all of them
imprisoned in a system of work, produce,
consume, work, produce, consume,
-Kerouac, Dharma Bums
In the consumer society of the fifties, man's attention was focused on
trivialities such as gadgets as a source of fulfillment in life. In Naked
Lunch, Dr Benway tells us "Western man is externalising himself in
the form of gadgets.” Benway's voice is echoed by Herbert Marcuse,
of the Frankfurt School, who asserts that "People recognise themselves
in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set,
split-level home, kitchen equipment." Consumer culture thus alienates
man from his true identity. In Naked Lunch, "an American Housewife”
complains that her kitchen gadgets are malfunctioning and attempting
to get "physical" with her. The housewife seems confused and
disorientated, whilst the gadgets are a dark and sinister force: far
from creating a situation of domestic bliss and happiness, the kitchen
gadgetry has left the woman isolated, detached from reality, and
threatened by hideous physical attacks.
Recall Thoreau’s idea that we lose sight of
our true selves in commercial culture.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time
Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner
candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen
are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody's
serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.
--Ginsberg, “America” 1956
AFTER LALON
It’s true I got caught in
the world
When I was young Blake
tipped me off
Other teachers followed:
Better prepare for Death
Don’t get entangled with
possessions
That was when I was young
I was warned
Now I’m a Senior Citizen
and stuck with a million
books
A million thoughts a million
dollars a million
loves
How’ll I ever leave my body?
Allen Ginsberg says, I’m
really up shits creek. . .
--Allen Ginsberg
[Bob] Kaufman lived his life "much like the stereotypical jazz
musician of the time: addicted to nightlife, to drugs, and to the
avowedly non-academic, non-self-promoting world of the arts".
In the preface to his collection The Ancient Rain: Poems, 1956-1978,
he wrote, "I want to be anonymous. I don't know how you get involved
with uninvolvement, but I don't want to be involved. My ambition is to
be completely forgotten" . He therefore chose to turn his back on
literary accolades and financial gain in order to create a body of work
that was unconventional and transcended the staid standards of
conventional verse.
ANTIPURITANISM: SEX
& SENSUALITY
Sexual liberation is a large part of every counterculture:
Freedom to express one’s sexuality in whatever form it
Takes
Enjoyment and appreciation of the body; Anti Puritanism
Fifties conventional sexual morality: no masturbation, no
Extra- or premarital sex
Missionary position, (women on top might give women ideas
That it was okay for them to be in charge elsewhere)
Sexual double standard
no oral sex, no anal sex. . .
And no homosexuality
Sex was the one holy thing in Cassady's life. Here Cassady
symbolized sexual freedom, and the promotion of sexual freedom,
furthered in the 1960's, would be a major contribution of the Beats
to the late 20th Century culture. Cassady, as naked angel,
demonstrates the Beats eagerness to shed all hang-ups and
defense mechanisms between like-minded individuals and to
get to the heart of a person through love and open communication.
He epitomized the Romantic reaction against Puritanical views
Of sex, the body, and sensuality in general.
"I thought of myself as [LeRoi] Jones' mistress in the European
bohemian tradition," di Prima tells me during our interview.
"I had lovers before him, but I didn't fall in love until I met him,
and after him I didn't fall in love for a long, long time. He had
political commitment and passion. The relationship was creative
and inspiring for both of us."
THE WORLD WILL WHIP
YOU WITH ITS
DISPLEASURE
There was only a handful of real hip swinging cats and
what there was vanished mighty swiftly during the
Korean War when (and after) a sinister new kind of
efficiency appeared in America, maybe it was the result
of the universalization of television and nothing else (the
Polite Total Police Control of Dragnet’s “peace” officers,
but the beat characters after 1950 vanished into jails
and madhouses, or were shamed into silent conformity,
the generation itself was shortlived and small in number.
--Jack Kerouac
In August 1956, City Lights Books issued HOWL AND OTHER
POEMS as Number 4 of its Pocket Book series. On May 21, 1957,
Capt. William Hanrahan of the San Francisco Juvenile Bureau ordered
the arrest of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and bookstore manager Shigeyoshi
Murao for obscenity. The HOWL trial was the first event to give the
Beats nationwide exposure. With the publication of ON THE ROAD
in September, the year 1957-1958 would be the year of the Beat
Generation. The American public likes nothing more than a controversial
trial, and the HOWL trial was the first in a long line of obscenity trials
throughout the late 1950's and early 1960's involving the Beats. Grove
Press defended Henry Miller's TROPIC OF CANCER in courts all
across the country. Little magazines, like BIG TABLE and FLOATING
BEAR, engaged in trials to get pieces of NAKED LUNCH in print.
NAKED LUNCH later fought obscenity trials in Boston and Los
Angeles. Lenny Bruce fought similar battles for the spoken word.
Howl contains many references to illicit drugs and sexual practices,
both heterosexual and homosexual. On the basis of one line in particular
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists,
and screamed with joy
officials seized 520 copies of the poem on March 25, 1957.
A subsequent obscenity trial was brought against Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
who ran City Lights Bookstore, the poem's publisher. Nine literary
experts testified on the poem's behalf. Supported by the American
Civil Liberties Union, Ferlinghetti won the case, the court deciding that
the poem was of 'redeeming social importance'
While these trials would put the Beats in the national spotlight, more
importantly the trials would be a major battle for free expression of
The written and spoken word. By the late 1950's, conservatives saw the
obscenity laws as a way to censor expression of alternative lifestyles.
Obscenity laws could be used as a means to protect what they perceived
to be "American" values. The HOWL trial centered not so much on the
poem's use of dirty language, as on the frank depiction of homosexuality
and open sexuality as lifestyle. On October 3, 1957, Judge Clayton
Horn ruled that the poem was not obscene.The decision furthered a
process that would protect free print and challenge censorship of the
written word. It would take the Boston trial of NAKED LUNCH to
effectively end censorship of fiction in the United States.
Romantic Theme: Integrity: the dominant culture will not make
it easy for one to be a nonconformist; it will try to punish you or
prevent you.
While these trials would put the Beats in the national spotlight, more
importantly the trials would be a major battle for free expression of
The written and spoken word. By the late 1950's, conservatives saw the
obscenity laws as a way to censor expression of alternative lifestyles.
Obscenity laws could be used as a means to protect what they perceived
to be "American" values. The HOWL trial centered not so much on the
poem's use of dirty language, as on the frank depiction of homosexuality
and open sexuality as lifestyle. On October 3, 1957, Judge Clayton
Horn ruled that the poem was not obscene.The decision furthered a
process that would protect free print and challenge censorship of the
written word. It would take the Boston trial of NAKED LUNCH to
effectively end censorship of fiction in the United States.
.
Why were there so few women among the Beat writers?'
and [Gregory] Corso, suddenly utterly serious, leans forward
and says: "There were women, they were there, I knew them,
their families put them in institutions, they were given electric
shock. In the '50s if you were male you could be a rebel, but
if you were female your families had you locked up. There
were cases, I knew them, someday someone will write about
them."
--from Stephen Scobie's account of the Naropa Institute
tribute to Ginsberg, July 1994
POLITICS
ANTINOMIANISM
ANTIAUTHORITARIANISM
Speaking of Cassady, Kerouac even sees his
prison term as a virtue because his car theft was not
done for money:
his “criminality” was not something that sulked
and sneered; it was a wild yea-saying overburst
of American joy; it was Western, the west wind,
an ode from the Plains, something new,
long prophesied, long a-coming, (he only stole
cars for joy rides)...
They encouraged a break from traditional values,
supporting drug-use as a means of enlightenment. To
many, their shabby dress and "hip" language seemed
irresponsible, but in their actions could be found the
seeds of a revolution that was meant to cast off the
shackles of the calm and boring social life of the postwar era. While a nation tried desperately to keep from
rocking the boat, Allen Ginsberg and the Beats saw the
need for a more vibrant and daring society.
One of the primary first works of the Beats was
Ginsberg’s long poem "Howl." In an age plagued by
intolerance, "Howl" (1956) was both a desperate plea
for humanity and a song of liberation from that intolerant
society.
Ginsberg would angrily identify big authority and
Its weapons--presidents and atomic bombs--with
Daily dehumanizations suffered at the hands of
Cruel conservatism, before wishing love and happiness
On the oppressors.
Burroughs would adopt the dominator’s voice and
Gleefully use it to expose the hideous barbarism
Behind the dignified façade of democratic power holders.”
-Goffman, p. 241
“In the 18th century, America’s first revolutionary counterculture
Challenged undemocratic political authority. The counterculture
of the Transcendentalists primarily protested the hold religious
Dogma had over individual thought and
spiritual experience.But the freedoms
gained by these movements were only
Partially realized and were consistently
endangered due to the perserverance of
authoritarian characteristics in both those
Who would rule and those who would
follow. The next project on the road to
Emancipation would have to be the
Destruction of the authoritarian
personality
Itself. -Goffman, p. 243
Overthrow tyrannies both large and small, and overcome misery
-producing mental programs while sharing the methods and
results freely with the public. .. They were anti-authoritarian by
Nature. And they shared information above and beyond the call
Of duty--if anything, many discomfited readers still find them,
Ginsberg particularly, too intimate.”
-Goffman, p. 243
The danger is not that loyalties are divided today
but that they may be undivided tomorrow. . . . I
would urge each individual to avoid total involvement in any organization; to seek to whatever
extent lies within his power to limit each group to
the minimum control necessary for performance
of essential functions; to struggle against the effort
to absorb; to lend his energies to many
organizations and give himself completely to none;
to teach children,in the home and in the school,
"to be laws unto themselves and to depend on
themselves," as Walt Whitman urged us many
years ago--for that is the well source of the
Independent spirit.
--Clark Kerr, creator and chancellor of the UC
system.
WHITMAN DEMOCRACY:
IDENTIFICATION WITH THE
COMMON MAN
“Their main task was to loosen up and explore the creative
And humanistic potentialities of doing whatever the hell they
Wanted. But that wouldn’t have worked if these were shallow,
Selfish men. As it happens, what they wanted to do was explore
and expand human awareness, express and enact
Greater sympathy for the downtrodden and the outcasts,”
Kerouac was always drawn to the nation's
underground life -- to Times Square with its drug
addicts,prostitutes and con artists, to the remnants of
Depression America that persisted beneath the
surface affluence of the late 40's and 50's. In the
underclass, Kerouac believed he had discovered the
repository of the spiritual values mainstream America
had apparently forgotten.
--Ann Douglas, NY Times, April 9, 1995,
“there were moments when "On the Road" had a sharp
edge of social comment, for instance when Sal
Paradise (the name the novelist assigned himself)
wanders through the black section of Denver "wishing
I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had
offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life,
joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough life."
Eldridge Cleaver, the black writer, later cited this
passage as a cultural turning point for white America.
the streets of that mighty active district [Harlem] were swinging then,
also it was not dangerous. Thus Jack Kerouac and other white hipsters
who sought first hand knowledge of true Blues people (read Leroi
Jones’ book) could pay some dues in the night and day classes of
Harlem with a certain amount of impunity. There were black cats on
the scene then that should have been given Ph.D.’s in Hipsterism.
These men (and women) knew more about the
how/who/what/where/why and when of the human condition than all
the four square walled university professors on earth. Babs Gonzales
should have been so awarded and rewarded, plus seriously listened to
and published. Cats like Babs taught me and many others.
-Ted Joans, “Bird and the Beats”
the Beats, as part of their “outlaw” existence
violated racial taboos -fraternized with, married, had
sex with, blacks and chicanos.....Poet Robt. Creeley
said that he was deeply affected by the reality Jack
gave to previously ignored segments of American
society. It was astonishing to Creeley that anyone
could write about people so commonly condemned
and scorned-without moralizing at all, and yet
investing them unsentimentally with worth. Kerouac
seemed to have the rare quality of respecting the
capacity for virtue and idealism in anyone,
regardless of the degraded circumstances in which
they lived.
"The most important kind of freedom is to be what
you really are. You trade in your reality for a role.
You trade in your sense for an act. You give
up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a
mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution
until there's a personal revolution,on an individual
level. It's got to happen inside first. You can take
away a man's political freedom and you won't hurt
him- unless you take away his freedom to feel.
That can destroy him. That kind of freedom can't
be granted. Nobody can win it for you."
--Jim Morrison, lead singer of the Doors
Morrison is a Sixties figure, but he illustrates both
The continuities between the Beats and the
Counterculture and their common Romantic roots.
beatniks
Herb Caen, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, cut
Them down to “beatniks.” Beat became a catchall for
anything vaguely black-turtleneck. . . . After Life magazine
ran a sensationalistic look at beatniks and their lifestyle,
[poet Kenneth] Rexroth dismissed the Beat phenomenon as
an invention of the Luce magazine empire.
And to some extent the idea of a “Beat generation” was a
Media myth. As diPrima pointed out, the true Beats could
have all fit in her living room.
“There was little in Ginsberg and Orlovsky’s outward
appearance to indicate that here were two notorious
members of the Beat Generation. Unlike the weekend
beatniks wandering the streets of Greenwich Village
in goatees and sandals, carrying a pair of bongos in
one hand and Howl in the other, Allen and Peter
looked like the thousands of other young people who
were then [1957] roaming across Europe with rucksacks.
Their hair was a little long by the standards of the time
in that it nearly reached their collars, but they were
clean-shaven and, though not wearing ties, wore
perfectly normal hard-wearing work clothing.”
Barry Miles, The Beat Hotel, p. 34
The transition from beat idea to beatnik myth
distorted the original almost beyond recognition.
The “beat” became …a cartoon character…Today,
many people’s concept of what is “beat” is based
entirely on Maynard G. Krebs,bongos, turtleneck
sweaters,and berets.
Grant & Chuck T.Allen
As far as we can tell, neither Kerouac, Ginsberg,or
Burroughs ever played the bongos or wore a beret. Dizzy
Gillespie, though, did all three.
Maynard G. Krebs, TV beatnik
Maynard G. Krebs,
“beatnik”
"We've been beatniks for
30 years and nobody thought
we were anything special."
The consumer culture saw possibilities:. . . If they rejected
the old way of living, why not sell them a new one, with
accessories to match? Like bebop, the Beats suggested a
whole range of product lines. Playboy. . . Ran an ad offering
swell goods: “Join the beat generation! Buy a beat
generation tieclasp! A beat generation sweatshirt! A beat
generation ring!
--Leland p. 154
Never mind that materialism and consumption were central
features of what the Beats were rebelling against. Never
mind that tie clasps went on ties which Beats wouldn’t wear,
they being the preferred dress of the Man in the Gray
Flannel Suit.
Beatnik
vs.
Beat
Angel,
“Miss
Beat
1959”
San Francisco columnist Herb Caen coined the word (which by
sarcastically punning on the recently launched Russian Sputnik
was apparently intended to cast doubt on the beatnik’s red-whiteand-blue-blooded all-American-ness . And the mass media
popularized the concept. . .[reducing] Beat-ness to a set of
superficial, silly externals that have stayed with us ever since:
goatees, sunglasses, poetry readings, coffeehouses, slouches, and
“cool, man, cool” jargon. The only problem is that there never
were any beatniks in this sense (except perhaps for the mediainfluenced imitators who came along late in the history of the
movement). Beat culture was a state of mind, not a matter of how
you dressed or talked or where you lived.. In fact Beat culture was
from from monolithic. It was many different, conflicting, shifting
states of mind.
Carney, “Escape Velocity” p. 191
Beatniks are important because they illustrate one of the ways
The dominant culture has of defending itself.
Very very few people in the Fifties had any direct experience of
The Beats. The only national exposure they had was one
Appearance on NBC on the Steve Allen Show by Kerouac.
Their works were not easily available either. One had to live in a
Fairly large city with good bookstores to be able to buy any Beat
Literature. Even On the Road which was a best-seller would not
Have been available in small towns or rural America. Nor was
Beat literature present in public or school libraries: it was much
too controversial for those conventional institutions.
(And there was no internet, no Amazon.com, to allow access to
the Beats.). The Beats were effectively censored.
It was thus easy for the media to create a caricature, a
Cartoon--the Beatnik--was was painted in such disreputable
Colors that no reasonable person would be sympathetic to them
Unwashed slackers playing bongo drums, wearing black,
Without makeup and probably without the proper girdles and
Brassieres either, dope smokers, jazz lovers, hangers-out in
Unhealthy urban night clubs.
Having created this caricature it was easy to perpetrate a
Sleight of hand on the vast majority of the American public.
By giving them an easy hook for disapproval the media gave
People an easy way not to have to think for themselves, to
Really consider the messages of the Beats.
Since almost no one had any independent way to check
On the accuracy of the Beatnik caricature almost everyone
Assumed it to be accurate, assumed that Beats were
Beatniks and had a low opinion of the Beats as a result.
(Perhaps most people would not have had a good opinion
Of the Beats in any case, but they were never given the
Chance to make up their own minds.)
And since most people are somewhat intellectually lazy,
They were glad to be spared the burden of having to decide
For themselves what they thought of the Beats.
Having been exposed to the Beatnik, caricatures, They knew
what they thought of the Beats and would never have to
Reconsider that view. They had a handy hook for disapproval.
The mechanism works like this:
1. Create a negative stereotype, a caricature of a group
2. Get people to equate the stereotype with the reality
(easy to do since almost no one had any way to check the
accuracy of the stereotype and most people had little or no
inclination to do so anyway).
3. Censor the works of the group so that people have no
way to judge for themselves. (Much easier to do when there
were only 3 tv Networks, no cable, no internet, and a handful
of middle-of-the-road to conservative magazines such as
Time from which almost everyone got their news and opinions.)
This same mechanism was used in the Sixties as well with
the media creation of the “hippie.”
Assessment
The Beats, and their bebop peers, in their echoes of Whitman
and Thoreau, represent an enduring constant in the American
fabric; not newer than the Eisenhower empire, but older. It is
always current. Every generation needs its Whitman; each
Whitman redeems his peers by allowing them to forgive him.
Hip’s revolutions begin each time in the humanizing promise
with which Sal Paradise begins On the Road: “And this was
really the way my whole road experience began, and the
things that were to come are too fantastic not to tell.” And
they remain bound to Sal’s flash of enlightenment and
absolution: “Somewhere along the line, I knew there’d be
girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl
would be handed to me.”
--Leland p. 160
The Six Gallery reading did for poetry what the Beatles' first shows at
the Cavern in Liverpool did for rock and roll: the respective media
Would never sound the same after these performances. Furthermore,
with the Beats, 20th Century poetry and music became linked. By 1955,
poetry readings were linked to jazz sessions and to the newest form of
rebellion and youth expression in America: Rock n' Roll. Rock icons
for the next forty years would pay homage to the Beats. Ginsberg
pairing with Bob Dylan and the Clash; Burroughs hobnobbing with
Patti Smith, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, the punks and later Nirvana
could be seen as inevitable from the Six Gallery performance.
DEFINING BEAT MOMENTS by James Birmingham
The Beats more than any other group in the late 20th Century furthered
the boundaries of freedom of expression. For better or worse, the Beats
made dirty words part of the everyday vocabulary. Lenny Bruce,
George Carlin, and Richard Pryor, among others, subsequently
pushed the boundaries of what is acceptable to say on television, stage,
Radio and films. They follow a direct line of descent from the Beats.
More importantly, Judge Horn's decision declared HOWL Art.
HOWL made homosexuality, criminality, madness, promiscuity,
drug use part of the poetic enterprise and opened a whole new field for
poetry to explore. Soon all the other media would follow. Freedom of
speech, more than sexual freedom, would affect the most
Americans and would be the Beats' most enduring legacy.
DEFINING BEAT MOMENTS by James Birmingham
Kerouac had foreseen the political impact of art
as early as 1948 when he predicted that through
the writing of the Beats America would be
picking up, changing. becoming sweeter, no
more wars, sweet presidents.
Gary Snyder put it this way:
Anybody who really captures the essential
thisness of a time and place has changed
things. To revoke a reality, and to make a [new]
reality, is to make something political happen-because what do people act in terms of except
what they take to be real?
“The Beat movement continues even today. . .
Attracting new members--those for whom the respectable
Is synonymous with boredom and terror, if not crime, who
Regard the ongoing social order as suffocating, unjust,
And unreal, who believe that honesty can still be
Reinvented in a world of lies and that the answers,
If there are any, lie not in the political realm but in the quest
For new forms of self-expression and creative collaboration
Across all traditional class, race, and ethnic boundaries,
In fresh recuperative imaginings of ourselves and our
Country, in physical, spiritual, and metaphysical
Explorations of roads still left to try.”
Ann Douglas, “Punching a Hole. . .”
On the other hand, Ann Douglas says
“In the age that coined the word ‘togetherness,’ as
a synonym for family values, the Beats, each in his
own style, mounted the first open, sustained,
assault in American history on the masculine role
of heterosexual spouse, father, and grown-up
provider. In the midst of the Cold War crusade
against all deviations from the masculine norm,
they openly addressed homosexuality [and] bisexuality. . .
making sexuality as complex as individual identity.”
In other words they were among the first to see gender
and sexual identities as “social constructions,” rather than
biological givens.
We broke out of America’s squareness just as Bird had done. We as
an unorganized movement of individuals freed ourselves of the sickness
of mass consumerism and pop culture conformity.
We were a bit luckier than the Woodstock hippies (who followed one
decade later) for the mass media was ready and waiting for them, this
evil international business steered them into a fashionable vogue, and
have controlled every direction that youth has turned ever since, with
few exceptions. An international conspiracy was pulled on the hippies’
ears musically. They all got cheated aesthetically (excluding the Beatles
and Bob Dylan) and they have yet to recover. Jazz is the only music
(in its pure unadulterated form, therefore no Con-fusion) that can save
them from violent stress-filled future, and jazz could restore their audio
senses. Bird was a bringer of beautiful music . . . “Bird Lives,” we wrote
on the walls of New York City wayback when we learned that he had
gone-on/flown on. But he had turned an entire generation of poets and
hipsters all over the earth ON to SOMETHING OF GREAT VALUE:
To freedom!!
Kerouac and his cohorts were indeed "cultural pioneers." More
than just a nostalgic figure in the carpet of the 50's, Kerouac is
an uncanny archetype for a whole generation of Americans who
trekked through the 60's and 70's. He went through, as the rock
song says, "all our changes," and, as "Heartbeat" says, he went
through them 10 years ahead of everybody else. His sympathy
and mingling with blacks and Chicanos in the 40's and 50's
anticipated the civil-rights movement, Cesar Chavez and, in
general, the discovery of the "other America"; his communing
with poet Gary Snyder in the mountains, their enthusiasm for Zen
and other forms of Buddhism, their meditational "highs," broke
ground for Ravi Shankar, the Beatles, Carlos Castaneda, the
Whole Earth Catalog Weltanschauung, and all manner of Eastern
and ecological gambits; his flirtation with drugs previewed the
"tripping" of the next decade; the sexual ménages he shared with
Neal Cassady, and his occasional homosexual episodes,
modulated into the free-love movement, the 1960's "Age of
Androgyny," perhaps even the advent of homosexual rights.