Beat generation

Avant-garde literary community that rebelled against the social and political mores of the Cold War era

Forging the way for the counterculture of the 1960’s, the Beat writers rejected middle-class values, advocated a bohemian lifestyle, and flouted literary convention to create a new age in American letters.

The term “Beat generation” was originally coined by Jack Kerouac during a conversation in 1948 with fellow writer John Clellon Holmes. The term encapsulated the feelings of disillusionment and alienation many young people were experiencing during the postwar years. During the early 1950’s, “Beat” took on a different meaning as the members of the new literary movement fused their feelings of despair with a mythic quest for transcendence. The word “beat” became associated with the “beatific” quality of blessedness, whereby an individual experiences illumination after being “beaten” down to the point where he or she is psychologically desolate.

After the history-making flight of the Russian satellite Sputnik in 1957, the suffix “nik” was added to “beat” by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen to describe a cultural phenomenon whose “far out” adherents wore black berets, sported goatees, smoked marijuana, banged on bongo drums, and used words such as “cool” and “crazy.” The popular image of a beatnik was epitomized by Maynard G. Krebs, a character in the television program The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959-1963). Although the beatnik fad faded during the early 1960’s, Beat prose and poetry continued to have a significant impact on popular culture and eventually became recognized as a major development in modern American literature.

Beat Beginnings

Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg , and William Burroughs formed the nucleus of the Beat generation. Former Columbia University students, Ginsberg and Kerouac crossed paths in 1944 in New York City. Later the same year, they met Burroughs. For several months, Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs lived communally in the apartment of Joan Vollmer, who would become Burroughs’s common-law wife and the mother of his son. The men formed a lifelong emotional and professional bond despite their very different backgrounds: Kerouac was raised in blue-collar Lowell, Massachusetts; Ginsberg, whose mother was schizophrenic, grew up in a leftist household in Paterson, New Jersey; and Harvard-educated Burroughs lived a privileged early life in St. Louis, Missouri.

Central to the relationship among Beat writers was a shared “New Vision.” The term implied a dynamic, avant-garde worldview that ran counter to the conformist outlook of the 1950’s. Although sometimes portrayed as anti-intellectual, these writers were well read in modern Western literature, including works by William Butler Yeats , W. H. Auden, Franz Kafka , James Joyce , and German philosopher Oswald Spengler . Spengler’s dark view of the end of culture in Decline of the West (1918-1920) particularly fueled the New Vision and reinforced the idea that because the dominant culture was moribund, only art could deliver it from social and political corruption. The Beat writers continued to refine their New Vision until four characteristics emerged that would drive the movement’s future: unfettered self-expression, sensory derangement as a means of perceiving truth, sexual experimentation, and the idea that art transcends conventional morality.

The alternative lifestyle of the Beat writers mirrored these characteristics of the New Vision. They believed that the use of drugs and alcohol would free them spiritually, psychologically, and artistically. By exploring homosexuality and bisexuality, they defied prevailing sexual norms of the day. In their writings, they experimented with open-verse forms, spontaneous composition, and vernacular language. Geographical boundaries were no more inhibiting to them than social conventions or literary traditions. After leaving Vollmer’s apartment, the three men went their own ways. However, even when they were living in different parts of the country or the world, they remained close friends, acting as agents, editors, typists, readers, and promoters of one another’s work.

Beat Literature

Three men influenced the work and lives of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs. Raised in flophouses and reform schools, Neal Cassady was the son of an alcoholic and an accomplished thief. A child prodigy, Carl Solomon was a communist, schizophrenic, and mental patient. Herbert Huncke ran away from home at the age of twelve and became a drifter, drug dealer, addict, and convict. Each man embodied the archetypal antihero, whom the Beat writers transformed into beatific literary icons.

Kerouac’s semiautobiographical novel, On the Road (1957), is based on a 1948 cross-country trip he undertook with Cassady, who was the model for the story’s main character, free-spirited Dean Moriarty. The picaresque novel chronicles the experiences of a group of aimless wanderers who drive and hitchhike across the United States, seeking spiritual enlightenment through fast living, sex, and drugs. At first, Kerouac was unsure how to structure the story. He repeatedly shelved the manuscript but went back to it whenever he corresponded with Cassady. Finally, in the spring of 1951, fueled by Benzedrine, he taped together sheets of paper, forming a scroll, and began a marathon writing session that lasted three weeks. This new method of composition—Kerouac called it “bop prosody” or “spontaneous prose”—was related to the automatic-writing practices of the Surrealists and was rooted in the rhythms of jazz.

Ginsberg’s celebrated poem, “Howl,” also reflected jazz influences and the works of poets Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams, as well as Kerouac and the Old Testament. Prophetic in tone, the poem consists of three parts. The first, which is reminiscent of Kerouac’s On the Road, describes the community of artists, addicts, hustlers, psychotics, and sexual deviants of which Ginsberg was a part. He included references to Cassady, Huncke, and Burroughs, “the best minds of my generation,” who were wounded by drugs, despair, and alienation.

The second part of Ginsberg’s poem launches into a diatribe against Moloch, an Old Testament Canaanite god to whom children were sacrificed. Moloch represents the false values, spiritual and social bankruptcy, and technological menace of the 1950’s that threatened to swallow America’s youth whole. Carl Solomon, to whom the poem is dedicated, was named as one of the victims of Moloch. The third section addressed Solomon directly and included the refrain, “I am with you in Rockland,” the mental hospital to which Solomon had been committed. The poet’s identification with Solomon reflected his preoccupation with his mother’s insanity, as well as his own bout with mental illness. Because of his use of vulgar images and words, Ginsberg believed the poem would never be published.

Huncke introduced Burroughs to the underworld of drug pushers and petty thieves, and Burroughs became a drug addict himself. His book, Naked Lunch (published in France in 1959 and the United States in 1962), reflected his experience with drugs and crime. The main character is addicted to opiates and is subsequently cured through apomorphine treatments. The novel consists of disjointed images and hallucinations, contains objectionable language, and portrays frankly the amoral existence of addicts, criminal, and sexual deviants. The somewhat incoherent structure of the book was due in part to the way it was composed. Burroughs worked on the manuscript while living in an apartment in Tangier, Morocco. When he finished typing a page, he would throw it on the floor and begin another. In 1957, he finally asked for help from his friends, and Ginsberg, his partner Peter Orlovsky, and Kerouac arrived in Tangier to help Burroughs organize his chaotic work. Like Ginsberg’s “Howl,” Naked Lunch was deemed pornographic and would not be published in the United States for another five years.

“Howl”

In October, 1955, an event occurred that would bring the Beat generation international fame. Ginsberg performed “Howl” at a poetry reading organized by Kenneth Rexroth at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, which marked the beginning of the San Francisco Renaissance . Fellow poet and publisher of City Lights Books Lawrence Ferlinghetti was so impressed that he asked Ginsberg for the manuscript. Ferlinghetti published Howl and Other Poems in August, 1956, and he was arrested subsequently on obscenity charges in May, 1957, after selling the book to plainsclothes police officers. Amid the glare of the media, the case went to trial during the summer of 1957. Lawyers hired by the American Civil Liberties Union defended Ferlinghetti on the grounds that his freedom of speech had been violated. The judge agreed and, in a precedent-setting verdict, acquitted him.

Burroughs’s Naked Lunch underwent a similar trial. In 1959, a nine-page excerpt was printed in The Chicago Review, the publishing arm of Chicago University. The piece was immediately denounced as “filth” and subsequent publication of excerpts was prohibited. Subsequently, the book was published in Europe by Olympia Press, a publisher of pornography. Finally in 1962, the novel appeared in the United States and was banned in Boston. The presiding judge ruled it obscene. The case was appealed to the Massachusetts Supreme Court in 1966, and the previous judgment was overturned. This landmark ruling ended literary censorship in the United States.

Fellow Travelers on the Road

Although Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs are considered the pioneers of the Beat generation, other writers made significant contributions to Beat literature. During the early 1950’s, while drinking in a bar in New York, ex-convict Gregory Corso shared some of his poems with Ginsberg, who became his mentor. Self-educated, Corso was well read in classic poetry, especially the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Corso’s poetry was unpretentious, humorous, and anarchic. “Bomb,” one of his best-known pieces, was written in the shape of a mushroom cloud and satirized the government’s love of atomic weaponry.

Gary Snyder met Kerouac in San Francisco in the fall of 1955. Snyder was a student of Zen Buddhism, Asian languages, and Native American culture. At the time he and Kerouac met, he lived a simple, self-sufficient lifestyle based on his Buddhist beliefs. The main character in Kerouac’s novel The Dharma Bums (1958) was modeled on Snyder. Snyder’s poetry reflected his interest in Zen, pacifism, and environmental concerns and encouraged some Beat writers in their Buddhist faith, notably Kerouac and Ginsberg.

Philip Whalen was also a Zen Buddhist and was Snyder’s roommate at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He attended the Six Gallery reading at Snyder’s invitation and was inspired to follow a career as a poet after hearing Ginsberg read “Howl.” His work was characterized by humor, by a focus on the commonplace, and unlike Snyder’s work, by its lack of political content. Whalen also appeared in Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums as Warren Coughlin.

Michael McClure’s literary career was launched at the October, 1955, Six Gallery event. When he was young, he wanted to become a naturalist, and his interest in the natural world, animal consciousness, and Zen Buddhism was reflected in his work. He appears as Pat McLear in Kerouac’s Big Sur (1962) and went on to become a leader during the 1960’s hippie movement.

Impact

Because of the notoriety surrounding the Beats’ work and lifestyles, their cultural and literary influence did not begin to be fully appreciated until the late 1960’s and 1970’s. The Beat generation revived the power of the spoken word through readings in coffeehouses and bookstores, which set the stage for the emergence of contemporary performance poetry. The Beats’ unconventional writing style, infused with jazz rhythms, not only influenced the postwar youth culture but also shaped the work of subsequent generations of counterculture artists and musicians, from psychedelic hippies to punk rockers and hip-hop performers. For example, legendary blues singer Janis Joplin , Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia , and folksinger Bob Dylan were heirs of the Beat generation. One of Joplin’s hits, “Lord, Won’t You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz,” was written by McClure. As members of author Ken Kesey’s antiestablishment group the Merry Pranksters, Garcia and Cassady traveled across the country together. Dylan, regarded as a poet as well as a composer and performer, was a close friend of Ginsberg.

The philosophy of the Beats significantly influenced the social and political climate of the 1960’s. Following their Buddhist beliefs, Ginsberg, Snyder, and McClure all protested against the Vietnam War. McClure and Snyder were also leaders in the ecology movement, which in turn spawned the formation of other socially conscious groups such as the Green parties of the 1970’s and the antiglobalization movement of the 1990’s. Ginsberg in particular became a major force within the Love Generation of the 1960’s and championed a variety of causes. In addition to protesting against the Vietnam War, he spoke in favor of gay liberation, religious freedom, civil rights, legalization of marijuana, and the right to free expression. Many of these issues remain controversial and continue to spark public debate.

Bibliography

Campbell, James. This Is the Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. An accessible introduction to the Beat generation, this book draws extensively on Beat literature, personal letters, and contemporary newspaper articles.

Warren, Holly George. Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and American Culture. New York: Hyperion, 2000. Essays, book reviews, memoirs, interviews, and photographs reveal the impact of the Beat generation on American culture.

Watson, Steven. The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944-1960. New York: Pantheon Books, 1995. A well-organized overview that chronicles the rise to fame of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs. Includes information on the San Francisco Renaissance and the Black Mountain poets.