Beat Generation
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| The '''Beat Generation''' was a group of [[countercultural]] [[American writer]]s who came to prominence in the late [[1950s]] and early [[1960s]]. [[Jack Kerouac]]'s ''[[On the Road]]'' (1957), [[Allen Ginsberg]]'s ''[[Howl]]'' (1956), and [[William S. Burroughs]]'s ''[[Naked Lunch]]'' (1959) are considered their most important works. | The '''Beat Generation''' was a group of [[countercultural]] [[American writer]]s who came to prominence in the late [[1950s]] and early [[1960s]]. [[Jack Kerouac]]'s ''[[On the Road]]'' (1957), [[Allen Ginsberg]]'s ''[[Howl]]'' (1956), and [[William S. Burroughs]]'s ''[[Naked Lunch]]'' (1959) are considered their most important works. | ||
| + | ==Cultural context== | ||
| + | The postwar era was a time where the dominant culture was desperate for a reassuring planned order; but there was a strong intellectual undercurrent calling for spontaneity, an end to psychological repression; a [[Romanticism|romantic]] desire for a more chaotic, [[Apollonian_and_Dionysian|Dionysian]] existence. | ||
| + | The Beats were a manifestation of this undercurrent, but they were not the only one. | ||
| - | ==History== | + | Before Jack Kerouac embraced "spontaneous prose," there were other artists pursuing self-expression by abandoning control, notably the improvisational elements in jazz music. The [[Bebop|bop]] form of jazz championed by [[Charlie Parker]] and others was one of the biggest influences on many of the Beats (the horn-rimmed glasses, goatee, and beret sported by the stereotypical beatnik was derived from the fashion of trumpeter [[Dizzy Gillespie]]). |
| - | The members of the narrowly defined "Beat Generation" met in [[New York City|New York]]: [[Jack Kerouac]], [[Allen Ginsberg]], [[William S. Burroughs]], (in the 1940s) and later (in 1950) [[Gregory Corso]] (hence why they were called the "New York Beats" though only Corso was from New York). Though endless travel around the country is part of their romanticized image, most of the central figures (excluding Burroughs) ended up together in San Francisco in the mid-1950s where they met and became friends with figures associated with the [[San Francisco Renaissance]] such as [[Kenneth Rexroth]], [[Gary Snyder]], [[Lawrence Ferlinghetti]], [[Michael McClure]], [[Philip Whalen]], [[Harold Norse]], [[Lew Welch]], and [[Kirby Doyle]]. There they met many other poets who had migrated to San Francisco because it had a reputation as an important new center of creativity. This included [[Bob Kaufman]] who was the first to actually be called a "beatnik." Also of significance were [[Philip Lamantia]], [[Tuli Kupferberg]], and members of the recently dissolved Black Mountain College looking for a new center of communal creativity, poets such as [[Robert Creeley]], [[Edward Dorn]], and [[Robert Duncan]]. | + | There's a close analogy between Kerouac's approach and the action paintings of [[Jackson Pollock]] and the work of other [[Abstract Expressionists]] such as [[Willem de Kooning]] and [[Franz Kline]]. Many members of the [[New York School]] of Abstract Expressionism were friends with many members of the Beat Generation and were closely tied with parallel movements such as the [[New York School]] of poetry and the [[Black Mountain poets|Black Mountain school]]. |
| - | Many writers were inspired by the publication of "Howl" and ''On the Road'' and decided to join the group. The Beats met most of these writers when they returned to New York: [[John Wieners]], [[LeRoi Jones]], [[Diane DiPrima]], [[Anne Waldman]]. The [[New York School]] of poets (including [[Frank O'Hara]], [[Kenneth Koch]], [[John Ashbery]], and [[James Schuyler]], though Ashbery and Schuyler weren’t quite as closely associated with the Beats), which had already been established as a movement in New York, found much in common with this ever-widening circle and consistently promoted one another's work. | + | The Black Mountain school was associated with some other artists who also rejected refined control, though often with the opposite intent of suppressing the ego, and avoiding self-expression; notably, the works of the composer/writer [[John Cage]] and the paintings and "assemblages" of [[Robert Rauschenberg]]. Cage's "chance operations" approach was very similar to the [[Cut-up_technique|"cut-up" technique]] that [[Brion Gysin]] developed and that William Burroughs adopted (<i>after</i> publishing ''Naked Lunch''). For example, in "Minutes to Go," a collaboration of Corso, Gysin and Burroughs, was constructed by clipping phrases from newspapers, mixing them in a bowl, picking them out at random, and pasting them in a poet form. Though an even more direct parallel can be drawn with the 1920s [[Dadaist]]/[[Surrealist]] poets, such as [[Tristan Tzara]], who recommended putting cut-up words in a bag and pulling them out randomly |
| + | to create a poem. | ||
| - | Perhaps equally important were the less obviously creative members of the scene, who helped form their intellectual environment and provided the writers with much of their content: There was [[Herbert Huncke]], a drug-addict and petty thief whom Burroughs had met in 1946, who introduced the word "beat" and a lot more junky-lingo and the junky lifestyle; [[Lucien Carr]], who was key to introducing many of the central figures to one another; and Hal Chase, an anthropologist from [[Denver, Colorado|Denver]], who, in 1947, introduced into the group [[Neal Cassady]], the hero and symbol of the American dream idolized in much Beat literature. | + | [[Robert Lowell]], who is credited with founding [[confessional poetry]] (a school of poetry which later included Lowell's students [[Sylvia Plath]] and [[Anne Sexton]]), was reportedly inspired to become more personal and emotionally vulnerable in his poetry by interactions he had with Beats in San Francisco. This is significant because Lowell was close friends with [[New Critics]] such as [[Allen Tate]]; Lowell's transition away from the traditional forms championed by the New Critics toward the non-traditional poetry of the Beats framed a significant debate in the poetry world during the Beat Generation. |
| - | Also important were the oft-neglected women in the original circle, including [[Joan Vollmer]] and [[Edie Parker]]. Their apartment on the upper west side of Manhattan often functioned as a salon (or as Ted Morgan puts it, a "pre-sixties commune"), and Joan Vollmer, in particular, was a serious participant in the marathon discussion-sessions. | + | === Dadaism/Surrealism === |
| - | === Columbia University and The Kammerer Stabbing === | + | [[Dadaism]] and [[Surrealism]] had a direct impact on many of the Beats: Dadaism with its attack on the elitism of high culture and its celebration of spontaneity; Surrealism with its transformation of the Dadaist rebellion into positive social intentions and its focus on revelations from the subconscious. Both movements, in a sense, developed as a reaction to World War I, just as the Beat Generation was reacting to the environment of post-World War II America. |
| - | The original circle met at [[Columbia University]]; although they were later considered anti-academic artists, the seed for the Beat Generation was planted in a highly academic environment. For example, many of their early ideas were formed during arguments with professors such as [[Lionel Trilling]] and [[Mark Van Doren]]. This was the very same environment in which some of their classmates, such as [[Louis Simpson]] and [[Donald Hall]], became champions of formalism. This is where Carr and Ginsberg discussed the need for a "New Vision" (a term borrowed from [[Arthur Rimbaud]]) to move away from Columbia University's conservative notions of literature. With the introduction of Burroughs, Huncke, and Cassady, the new focus became real life experiences instead of academic intellectualizing. Perhaps the most important early experience that drew most of the members of the Beat Generation together was Lucian Carr's stabbing of David Kammerer. This was one reason why Burroughs maintained his close-but-distant relationship with the rest of the Beats. The stabbing was an incident that Kerouac tried to capture twice, once in his first novel ''The Town and the City'' and then again in one of his last, ''The Vanity of Duluoz''. | + | [[Carl Solomon]] introduced the work of Surrealist [[Antonin Artaud]] to Ginsberg. Artaud had a strong influence on many of the other Beats. The poetry of [[André Breton]] was also a direct influence (see for example Ginsberg's ''Kaddish.'') Since [[Surrealism]] was still in many ways a vital movement in the 1950s, the Beats had interactions with many Surrealists and former Dadaists. Beat associates such as Rexroth, Ferlinghetti, and [[Ron Padgett]] were responsible for translating a lot of the poetry from French and introducing it to English-speaking audiences. |
| - | Burroughs was born in [[St. Louis, Missouri]] in 1914; making him roughly ten years older than most of the other original beats. While still living in St. Louis, Burroughs met [[David Kammerer]], and thus began an association presumably based on their shared [[homosexuality|homosexual]] orientation and intellectual tendencies. | + | Several Beat associates, such as [[Ted Joans]], were actual members of the Surrealist group; another example is [[Philip Lamantia]] who was close with Breton and was responsible for introducing a lot of Surrealist poetry to the other Beats. The poetry of [[Gregory Corso]] and [[Bob Kaufman]] show the clearest influence of Surrealist poetry (the dream-like images, the seemingly random juxtaposition of dissociated images, for example), though this influence can also be seen in more subtle ways in other poetry, Ginsberg's in particular. When in France the Beats met many Surrealists and former Dadaists. As the legend goes, when they met [[Marcel Duchamp]], Ginsberg kissed his shoe and Corso cut off his tie. Many other French writers still active in the 1950s had a tremendous impact on the writing of the Beat Generation, writers such as [[Louis-Ferdinand Celine]] and [[Jean Genet]]. Older French writers rank high on the list of shared Beat influences: [[Apollinaire]], for example. Beats also repeatedly invoke the spirit of Symbolists such as [[Arthur Rimbaud]] and [[Charles Baudelaire]]. |
| - | As a boys' youth-group-leader in the mid-1930s, David Kammerer had become infatuated with the young [[Lucien Carr]] (with what encouragement, if any, it is difficult to say). Kammerer formed a pattern of following Carr around the country as he attended (and was expelled from) different colleges. In the fall of 1942, at the University of Chicago, Kammerer introduced 17-year-old Lucien Carr to William S. Burroughs. | + | === Romantic poets === |
| - | Burroughs was a Harvard-graduate who lived off a stipend from his relatively wealthy family. His grandfather had invented the Burroughs Adding Machine, though the amount of wealth in the family is often exaggerated (Kerouac remarked on "the Burroughs Millions", which didn't actually exist). | + | Specific Romantic writers had a heavy influence on Beats: [[Gregory Corso]], for example, worshiped [[Percy Shelley]] as a hero and was buried at the foot of Shelley's Grave in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. Ginsberg mentions Shelley's ''Adonais'' at the beginning of ''Kaddish,'' and he cites it as a major influence on the composition of one of his most important poems. Michael McClure compared Ginsberg's ''[[Howl]]'' to Shelley's breakthrough poem ''[[Queen Mab]].'' Ginsberg's most important Romantic influence was [[William Blake|Blake]], who was the subject of Ginsberg's self-defining auditory hallucination/revelation in 1948, and Ginsberg subsequently spent much of his life studying Blake. Blake was also a major influence on [[Michael McClure]]. The first conversation between McClure and Ginsberg was about Blake (McClure saw him as a revolutionary; Ginsberg saw him as a prophet). [[John Keats]] was also an influence on many of the Beats. |
| - | The three became good friends, whose sprees got Burroughs kicked out of his rooming-house and culminated with Carr confined in a mental ward after an apparent attempted suicide with a gas oven (one version of the story holds that this was a way of avoiding military service). | + | Of arguably equal importance to the British Romantics was what is often termed American Romanticism. Whether or not this term is accurate, many writers under this umbrella were important to the Beats: [[Henry David Thoreau]], [[Ralph Waldo Emerson]], [[Herman Melville]] and especially [[Walt Whitman]]. [[Edgar Allan Poe]] is occasionally cited as an influence, as in the line from ''[[Howl]]'' "who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kaballah..." And, though the comparison might not seem obvious, Ginsberg even claimed [[Emily Dickinson]] was an influence on Beat poetry. The novel ''You Can't Win'' by [[Jack Black (author)|Jack Black]] had a strong influence on Burroughs, as did the short stories of British author Denton Welch. |
| - | In the spring of 1943, Carr's family moved him to Columbia University in New York, where Kammerer, and then Burroughs shortly followed. | + | === Modernism === |
| - | At Columbia, Carr met the freshman Allen Ginsberg, whom he introduced to Burroughs and Kammerer. Edie Parker, another member of the crowd, introduced Carr to her boyfriend Jack Kerouac when he came back from his stint as a merchant marine. In 1944, Carr introduced Kerouac and Burroughs. | + | Though in ways the Beats were reacting against the tendency toward objective distancing and the focus on craft brought on by literary [[Modernism]], (hence why the Beats are sometimes considered [[postmodern literature|Postmodern]]) many modernist writers were major influences on the Beats: [[Marcel Proust]], [[Ezra Pound]], [[William Carlos Williams]] and [[H.D.]]. Pound was specifically important to poets such as Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, and Robert Creeley. Pound was instrumental in introducing ideas of [[haiku]] and other Japanese and Chinese literary forms into [[Western literature]]. The Beats further adapted these ideas in their own work. William Carlos Williams was an influence on most of the Beats with his encouragement to speak with an American voice instead of imitating the European poetic voice and European forms. He specifically influenced Snyder, Whalen, and Welch when he came to lecture at Reed College. More importantly he personally mentored many important Beat figures: Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, among others. |
| - | Kammerer's fixation was obvious to everyone in the circle, and he became jealous as Carr developed a relationship with a young woman (Celine Young). In mid-August, 1944, Lucien Carr killed him with a boy scout knife in what may have been self-defense after an altercation in a park on the [[Hudson River]]. | + | He published several of Ginsberg's letters to him in his epic poem ''[[Paterson]]'' and wrote an introduction to two of Ginsberg's books. And many of the Beats (Ginsberg specifically) helped promote Williams' poetry and his play ''Many Loves.'' Ferlinghetti's City Lights even published a volume of his poetry. Williams is occasionally classified as both an [[Imagist]] and an [[Objectivist poets|Objectivist]]. [[Kenneth Rexroth]] was also considered a member of the Objectivists. H.D. ([[Hilda Doolittle]]), one of the key Imagists, was another important influence on the Beats. [[Robert Duncan]] wrote a book-length study of her work. [[Gertrude Stein]], another important modernist and a major influence on many of the Beats, was the subject of a book-length study by [[Lew Welch]]. [[Marcel Proust]], specifically in his ''Remembrance of Things Past,'' had an influence on Kerouac's ''Duluoz Legend'' concept: a single epic/personal story in multiple volumes. Other important Kerouac influences (and by extension Beat influences) include: [[Ernest Hemingway]] and [[Thomas Wolfe]]. |
| - | Carr disposed of the body in the river. He then sought advice from Burroughs, who recommended that he get a lawyer and turn himself in with a claim of self defense. Instead, Carr then went to Kerouac, who helped him dispose of the weapon. | + | ====Open-Form vs. Closed-Form Poetry==== |
| + | One way of understanding why the Beat Generation was considered radical, as well as measuring its impact on later writers, is to compare the literary establishment of the 1950s, especially as it involved poetry, with that of the 1960s to see how it had changed. Poetry in the 1950s was under the heavy influence of [[T. S. Eliot]]'s often misinterpreted idea of poetry being an escape from self and the [[Modernist]] focus on objectivity. Similar to this, and perhaps an even more pervasive influence, were the ideas of the [[New Critics]], including their conception of a poem as a perfectible object. In particular, the poetry of [[John Crowe Ransom]] and [[Robert Penn Warren]] was highly influential at this time. The focus of these poets on the formal aspects of poetry and their celebration of the short, ironic lyric led to a rise in formalist poetry and a preference for the short lyric. When the Beat poets came to prominence during this time, they were decried as sloppy libertines, and the Beat movement was characterized as at best only a passing fad which had been largely fueled by media-attention. | ||
| - | On the following morning, Carr turned himself in, and Kerouac and Burroughs were both charged as accessories to the crime. Burroughs quickly got the money for bail, but Kerouac's parents refused to post it for him. Edie Parker and her family came through, with the condition that she and Kerouac be married immediately. | + | This antagonism between literary camps was framed by two rival anthologies. Three champions of formalist poetry, [[Louis Simpson]], [[Donald Hall]], and [[Robert Pack]], were putting together an anthology of young poets called ''New Poets of England and America.'' [[Allen Ginsberg]] - who was a relentless promoter of the work of his friends and the work of those he admired - believing at the time that the Beat poets would be accepted by the literary establishment, brought Simpson, his old Columbia classmate, a packet of poetry including works by [[Gary Snyder]], [[Philip Whalen]], [[Robert Duncan]], [[Ed Dorn]], [[Robert Creeley]], [[Philip Lamantia]], [[Denise Levertov]], [[Michael McClure]], and [[Charles Olsen]] in hopes that these poets would be included in this new anthology. Simpson rejected every one of them. The introduction for the anthology was written by formalist hero [[Robert Frost]]. The anthology included poetry by [[Robert Bly]], [[Donald Justice]], [[James Merrill]], [[W. S. Merwin]], [[Howard Nemerov]], [[Adrienne Rich]], [[Richard Wilbur]], and [[James Wright]] and many others. There is not a strict demarcation here between conservative and avant-garde poetry. |
| - | === The Times Square Underworld === | + | The anthology also included a number of English poets who were associated with a movement that, chronologically at least, ran parallel with the Beat Generation, the "[[Angry Young Men]]." These included poets such as [[Kingsley Amis]], [[Philip Larkin]], and [[Thom Gunn]]. However, the anthology did set a trend for who would become poets acceptable to academia and the literary establishment. For example, [[Robert Lowell]] and [[W. D. Snodgrass]] would be seminal in the creation of what later became known as [[confessional poetry]], which helped finally overturn the strict focus on objectivity (Lowell, according to some accounts, was inspired to write more personal poetry by Ginsberg and the Beats). |
| - | :''[[Times Square]], [[underworld]]'' | + | |
| - | Burroughs had long had an interest in experimenting with criminal behavior, and gradually made contacts in the criminal underground of New York, becoming involved with dealing in stolen goods and narcotics and developing a decades-long addiction to [[opium|opiates]]. Burroughs met Herbert Huncke, a small-time criminal and drug-addict who often hung around the [[Times Square]] area. | + | |
| - | The beats found Huncke a fascinating character. As Ginsberg put it, they were on a quest for "supreme reality", and felt that Huncke, as a member of the [[underclass]], had learned things they were sheltered from them in their middle-class lives. | + | [[Donald Allen]] of [[Grove Press]] accepted many of the manuscripts Ginsberg gave him for his rival anthology ''[[The New American Poetry 1945-1960]]''. Poets in that anthology included [[John Ashbery]], [[Paul Blackburn]], [[Ray Bremser]], [[Gregory Corso]], [[Robert Creeley]], [[Ed Dorn]], [[Kirby Doyle]], [[Robert Duncan]], [[Lawrence Ferlinghetti]], [[Allen Ginsberg]], [[LeRoi Jones]], [[Jack Kerouac]], [[Kenneth Koch]], [[Philip Lamantia]], [[Denise Levertov]], [[Michael McClure]], [[Frank O'Hara]], [[Charles Olson]], [[Joel Oppenheimer]], [[Peter Orlovsky]], [[James Schuyler]], [[Gary Snyder]], [[Jack Spicer]], [[Lew Welch]], [[Philip Whalen]], [[John Wieners]], and [[Jonathan Williams (poet)|Jonathan Williams]]. Don Allen framed the debate as "Open Form" (his anthology) vs. "Closed Form" (the other anthology). Though seeing it as a rivalry is overly simplistic (for example, many poets in ''New Poets of England and America'' were not strict formalists or have since moved away from formalism), the development of U.S. poetry in the later half of the twentieth century is framed in these two anthologies. |
| - | Various troubles arose from this association: In 1949 Ginsberg was in trouble with the law (his apartment was packed with stolen goods; he had been riding in a car full of stolen goods; and so on). He pleaded insanity and was briefly committed to [[Bellevue Hospital|Bellevue]], where he met [[Carl Solomon]]. When committed, Carl Solomon was more eccentric than psychotic. A fan of [[Antonin Artaud]], he indulged in some self-consciously "crazy" behavior, e.g. throwing potato salad at a lecturer on [[Dada]]ism. Ted Morgan also mentions an incident where he stole a peanut-butter sandwich in a cafeteria, and showed it to a security-guard. If not crazy when he was admitted, Solomon was arguably driven mad by the [[shock treatment]]s applied at Bellevue, and this is one of the things referred to in Ginsberg's poem "Howl" (which was dedicated to Carl Solomon). After his release, Solomon became the publishing contact that agreed to publish Burroughs' first novel [[Junky (novel)|Junky]] (1953), shortly before another episode resulted in his being committed again. | + | Arguably, these poets have had equal impact on literature, and it can be said that Beat literature has changed the establishment so that academia is now more open to more radical forms of literature. For example, of the poets listed in this section, ten from ''New Poets of England and America'' and nine from ''The New American Poetry'' have been included in the ''Norton Anthology of American Literature.'' But Jack Kerouac, despite his impact on American culture and his status as an American icon, has only just been included in the 7th Edition of the ''Norton.'' Also, three poets from ''New Poets of England and America'' have served as Poets Laureate of the U.S. No Beat poet has ever served as [[Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress]]. |
| - | === Neal Cassady === | + | ===The "Beatnik" era=== |
| + | The term "[[Beatnik]]" was coined by [[Herb Caen]] of the ''[[San Francisco Chronicle]]'' on 2 April 1958, a play on the name of the recent Russian satellite [[Sputnik]]. Caen's coining of this term appeared to suggest that beatniks were (1) "far out of the mainstream of society" and (2) "possibly pro-[[Communism|Communist]]". His column reads as follows: "...[[Look (American magazine)|Look]] magazine, preparing a picture spread on S.F.'s Beat Generation (oh, no, not AGAIN!), hosted a party in a [[North Beach, San Francisco, California|No. Beach]] house for 50 Beatniks, and by the time word got around the sour grapevine, over 250 bearded cats and kits were on hand, slopping up Mike Cowles' free booze. They're only Beat, y'know, when it comes to work ..." Caen's new term stuck and became the popular label associated with a new stereotype of men with [[goatee]]s and [[beret]]s playing [[Bongo drum|bongo]]s while free-spirited women wearing black leotards dance. | ||
| - | The introduction of [[Neal Cassady]] into the scene in 1947 had a number of effects. A number of the beats were enthralled with Cassady — Ginsberg had an affair with him and became his personal writing-tutor; and Kerouac's road-trips with him in the late 40s became a focus of his second novel, ''[[On the Road]]''. Cassady is one of the sources of "rapping" - the loose spontaneous babble that later became associated with "beatniks" (see below). He was not much of a writer himself, though the core writers of the group were impressed with the free-flowing style of some of his letters, and Kerouac cited this as a key influence on his invention of the spontaneous prose style/technique that he used in his key works (the other obvious influence being the [[improvisation|improvised]] solos of [[jazz]] music). ''On the Road'', written somewhat in this style, transformed Cassady (under the name "Dean Moriarty") into a cultural icon: a hyper wildman, frequently broke, going from woman to woman, car to car, town to town; largely amoral, but frantically engaged with life. | + | An early example of playing up to the "beatnik stereotype" occurred in [[Vesuvio's]] (a bar in North Beach) which employed the artist [[Wally Hedrick]] to sit in the window dressed in full beard, turtleneck, and sandals and create improvisational drawings and paintings; by 1958 tourists to San Francisco could take bus tours to view the North Beach Beat scene. A variety of other small businesses also sprang up exploiting (and/or satirizing) the new craze. In 1959, Fred McDarrah started a "Rent-a-Beatnik" service in New York, taking out ads in ''[[The Village Voice]]'' and sending [[Ted Joans]] and friends out on calls to read poetry. The image of the beatnik appeared in many cartoons, movies, and TV shows of the time, perhaps the most famous being [[Bob Denver]]'s character [[Maynard G. Krebs]] in ''[[The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis]].'' (1959-63) |
| - | The delays involved in the publication of Kerouac's ''On the Road'' often create confusion: The novel was written in 1952 — shortly after John Clellon Holmes published "Go", and the article "This is the Beat Generation" — and it covered events that had taken place much earlier, beginning in the late '40s. Since the book was not published until 1957, many people received the impression that it was describing the late '50s era, though it was actually a document of a time ten years earlier. | + | While some of the original Beats embraced the beatniks, or at least found the parodies humorous (Ginsberg, for example, appreciated the parody in ''[[Pogo (comics)|Pogo]]'') others criticized the beatniks as inauthentic [[poseur (music)|posers]]. Kerouac feared that the spiritual aspect of his message had been lost and that many were using the Beat Generation as an excuse to be senselessly wild. |
| - | The legend of how "On the Road" was written was as influential as the book itself: High on speed, Kerouac typed rapidly on a continuous scroll of telegraph-paper to avoid having to break his chain of thought at the end of each sheet of paper. Kerouac's dictum was that "the first thought is best thought", and insisted that you should never revise a text after it is written — though there remains some question about how carefully Kerouac observed this rule. Although Kerouac maintained that he wrote this particular book in one mad three-week burst, it is clear from manuscript evidence that he had previously written several drafts and had been contemplating the novel for years. Also, the text went through many changes between the final "roll" manuscript and the published version — more evidence to suggest Kerouac's deviation from his dictum — although, to be fair, he had written the book before devising this code. | + | But for many young people, the popular image of the beatnik was their first contact with the subject. As [[Glenn O'Brien]] put it, "Maynard was sloppy, lazy, and did not respond to the mainstream of varsity culture. Maynard was post-romantic, a dreaming realist. I didn't know what a bohemian was, but I knew one when I saw one. As a preteen, I sensed that a beatnik was what I wanted to be. Maynard G. Krebs was a satire on beatniks, but that didn't matter because beatness shone through." Beat literature and the beatnik stereotype both had an influence on high school and college students during the late 1950s and very early 1960s. |
| - | === Gregory Corso === | + | ==="Hippie" era=== |
| + | Some time during the 1960s, the rapidly expanding Beat culture underwent a transformation: the Beat Generation gave way to [[Counterculture of the 1960s|The Sixties Counterculture]], which was accompanied by a shift in public terminology from "[[beatnik]]" to "[[hippie]]." This was in many respects a gradual transition. Many of the original Beats remained active participants, notably Allen Ginsberg, who became a fixture of the anti-war movement - though equally notably, Kerouac did not remain active on the scene: he broke with Ginsberg and criticized the 60s protest movements as "new excuses for spitefulness." According to [[Ed Sanders]] the change in the public label from beatnik to hippie happened after the 1967 [[Human Be-In]] in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park (where Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure were leading the crowd in chanting "Om"). There were certainly some stylistic differences between beatniks and hippies - somber colors, dark shades, and goatees gave way to colorful psychedelic clothing and long hair. The beats were known for "playing it cool" (keeping a low profile) but the hippies became known for "being cool" (displaying their individuality). | ||
| - | In 1950 [[Gregory Corso]] met Ginsberg, who was impressed by the poetry that Corso had written while incarcerated for burglary. Gregory Corso was the young [[d'Artagnan]] added to the original three of the core beat writers, and for decades the four were often spoken of together, though later critical attention for Corso (the least prolific of the four) waned. Corso's first book ''The Vestal Lady on Brattle and Other Poems'' appeared in 1955. | + | In addition to the stylistic changes, there were some changes in substance: the beats tended to be essentially apolitical, but the hippies became actively engaged with the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement. To quote Gary Snyder in a 1974 interview: |
| - | === San Francisco === | + | <blockquote>... the next key point was Castro taking over Cuba. The apolitical quality of Beat thought changed with that. It sparked quite a discussion and quite a dialogue; many people had been basic pacifists with considerable disillusion with Marxian revolutionary rhetoric. At the time of Castro's victory, it had to be rethought again. Here was a revolution that had used violence and that was apparently a good thing. Many people abandoned the pacifist position at that time or at least began to give more thought to it. In any case, many people began to look to politics again as having possibilities. From that follows, at least on some levels, the beginning of civil rights activism, which leads through our one whole chain of events: the Movement.<br><br>We had little confidence in our power to make any long range or significant changes. That ''was'' the 50s, you see. It seemed that bleak. So that our choices seemed entirely personal existential lifetime choices that there was no guarantee that we would have any audience, or anybody would listen to us; but it was a moral decision, a moral poetic decision. Then Castro changed things, then Martin Luther King changed things ...</blockquote> |
| - | Some time later there was much [[cross-pollination]] with [[San Francisco]]-area writers (Ginsberg, Corso, Cassady, and Kerouac each moved there for a time). Ferlinghetti (one of the partners who ran the [[City Lights Bookstore]] and press) became a focus of the scene as well as the older poet Rexroth, whose apartment became a Friday night literary salon. Ginsberg was introduced to Rexroth by an introductory letter from his mentor [[William Carlos Williams]], an old friend of Rexroth's. When Ginsberg organized the famous [[Six Gallery reading]] in 1955, he had Rexroth serve as master of ceremonies; in a sense, Rexroth was bridging two generations. This reading included the first public performance of Ginsberg's poem ''[[Howl]]'' and thus it is considered one of the most important events in the history of the Beat Generation. It brought East Coast and West Coast poets together in public performance for the first time, and the reading quickly sparked a legend and led to many more readings around California by the now locally famous Six Gallery poets. Soon after the Six Gallery reading, Ferlinghetti wrote Ginsberg a letter, saying, "I greet you at the beginning of a brilliant career. When do I get the manuscript?" This was an adaptation of Emerson's comment about Whitman's poetry, a prophecy of sorts that ''Howl'' would bring as much energy to this new movement as Whitman brought to 19th-century poetry. This is also a marker of the beginning of the Beat movement, since the publication of ''Howl'' and the subsequent obscenity-trial brought nationwide attention to many of the other members of this group. | + | |
| - | An account of the Six Gallery reading forms the second chapter of [[Jack Kerouac]]'s 1958 novel ''[[The Dharma Bums]]'', a novel whose chief protagonist is a character based on one of the poets who had read at the event, [[Gary Snyder]] (called "Japhy Ryder" in Kerouac's Roman à clef). Most of the people in the Beat movement had urban backgrounds and they found Snyder to be an almost exotic individual, with his rural and back-country experience, and his education in [[cultural anthropology]] and Oriental languages. Lawrence Ferlinghetti has referred to him as "the [[Henry David Thoreau|Thoreau]] of the Beat Generation". One of the primary subjects of ''The Dharma Bums'' is [[Buddhism]], and the different attitudes that Kerouac and Snyder have towards it. ''The Dharma Bums'' undoubtedly helped to popularize Buddhism in the [[Western world|West]]. | + | ====Connections Between Beats and "Hippies"==== |
| + | The Beats in general were a large influence on members of the new "[[counterculture]]", for example, in the case of [[Bob Dylan]] who became a close friend of Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg as early as 1960 became close friends with 60's icon [[Timothy Leary]] and helped him in distributing LSD to influential people (including [[Robert Lowell]]) in order to demystify drug paranoia. In 1963 Ginsberg lived in San Francisco with [[Neal Cassady]] and [[Charles Plymell]] at 1403 Gough St. Shortly after that Ginsberg connected with [[Ken Kesey]]'s group who was doing LSD testing at Stanford, and Plymell, which publishing the first issue of [[R. Crumb]]'s [[Zap Comix]] on his printing press a few years later then moved to Ginsberg's commune in [[Cherry Valley, NY]] in the early 1970s. (The Plymells never lived at the Farm, just visited there; although they remained in Cherry Valley.) | ||
| - | ===Women of the Beat Generation=== | + | Cassady was the bus driver for an important early Hippie group, Ken Kesey's [[Merry Pranksters]], which included several members of the [[Grateful Dead]]. A sign of Kerouac's break with this new direction in counterculture occurred when the [[Merry Pranksters]], with Cassady's insistence, attempted to recruit Kerouac. Kerouac angrily rejected their invitation and accused them of attempting to destroy the American culture he celebrated. In addition to the "Human Be-In," Ginsberg was also present at another important event in Hippie culture: the protest at the 1968 Democratic Convention, and was friends with [[Abbie Hoffman]] and other members of the "[[Chicago Seven]]." |
| - | There is typically very little mention of women in a history of the early Beat Generation, and a strong argument can be made that this omission is largely a reflection of the [[sexism]] of the time, rather than a reflection of the actual state of affairs. | + | |
| - | [[Joan Vollmer]] (later, Joan Vollmer Adams Burroughs) was clearly there at the beginning of the Beat Generation, and all accounts describe her as a very intelligent and interesting woman. But she did not herself write and publish, and unlike the treatment given to [[Neal Cassady]], no one chose to write a book about her; although, she appears in multiple authors' works, under a variety of character names. Nevertheless, she has gone down in history as the wife of William S. Burroughs, who was killed by him in an accidental shooting-incident that resulted in Burroughs' conviction in Mexico of manslaughter. | + | ===Influences on Western Culture=== |
| + | While many authors claim to be directly influenced by the beats, the Beat Generation phenomenon itself has had a huge influence on [[Western Culture]] more broadly. In many ways, the Beats can be taken as the first subculture (here meaning a cultural subdivision on lifestyle/political grounds, rather than on any obvious difference in ethnic or religious backgrounds). During the very conformist post-World War II era they were one of the forces engaged in a questioning of traditional values which produced a break with the mainstream culture that to this day people react to – or against. The Beats produced a great deal of interest in lifestyle experimentation (notably in regards to sex and drugs); and they had a large intellectual effect in encouraging the questioning of authority (a force behind the anti-war movement); and many of them were very active in popularizing interest in [[Zen Buddhism]] in the West. | ||
| - | Joan is mentioned in ''On the Road'', in the chapters dealing with Kerouac's and Cassady's visits to see "Old Bull Lee" (Burroughs) in New Orleans, where she is referred to as "Jane". She is described paradoxically as a distant woman who was "never more than 10 feet away from Old Bull" at any given time, giving the impression that she was complex and difficult to get to know. | + | In [[Allen Ginsberg]]'s ''A Definition of the Beat Generation:'' he characterized some of the essential effects of Beat Generation artistic movement as including spiritual liberation, sexual "revolution" or "liberation,"(e.g., gay liberation, somewhat catalyzing women's liberation, black liberation, Gray Panther activism); liberation of the word from [[censorship]], and demystification and/or decriminalization of [[cannabis]] and other [[drugs]]. Ginsberg claimed that the Beat Generation began to view rock and roll as a high art form, as evidenced by [[the Beatles]], [[Bob Dylan]], and other popular musicians influenced in the later fifties and sixties by Beat generation poets' and writers' works. It also included the spread of ecological consciousness, emphasized early on by [[Gary Snyder]] and [[Michael McClure]], the notion of a "Fresh Planet" and opposition to the military-industrial machine civilization, as emphasized in writings of Burroughs, Huncke, Ginsberg, and Kerouac. There was increasing respect for land and indigenous peoples and creatures, as proclaimed by Kerouac in his slogan from ''On the Road:'' "The Earth is an Indian thing." As well, Beats paid more attention to what [[Kerouac]] called (after [[Oswald Spengler|Spengler]]) a "second religiousness" developing within an advanced civilization, and there was a return to an appreciation of idiosyncrasy as opposed to state regimentation. |
| - | [[Gregory Corso]] insisted that there were many female beats. In particular, he claimed that a young woman he met in mid 1955 (Hope Savage, also called "Sura") introduced Kerouac and Ginsberg to subjects such as [[Li Po]] and was in fact their original teacher regarding eastern religion (this claim must be an exaggeration, however: a letter from Kerouac to Ginsberg in 1954 recommended a number of works about Buddhism). | + | ====Literary legacy==== |
| + | Many novelists who emerged in the 1960s and 70s, many labeled [[postmodern literature|postmodernists]], were closely connected with older Beats and considered latter day Beats themselves, most notably [[Ken Kesey]] (''[[One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (novel)|One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest]]'') and [[Terry Southern]] (''[[Dr. Strangelove]].'') Other postmodern novelists, [[Thomas Pynchon]] (''[[Gravity's Rainbow]]'') and [[Tom Robbins]] (''[[Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (novel)|Even Cowgirls Get the Blues]]'') for example, considered the Beats to be major influences though they had no direct connection. [[William S. Burroughs]] is considered by some a forefather of postmodern literature; he inspired many later postmodernists and novelists in the [[cyberpunk]] genre. Inspired by the Beat Generation's focus on free speech and egalitarianism, [[Amiri Baraka]] went on to found the [[Black Arts]] movement which focused more specifically on issues in the African American community. Other notable writers associated with this movement include [[Gwendolyn Brooks]], [[Maya Angelou]], and [[Nikki Giovanni]]. | ||
| - | Corso insisted that it was hard for women to get away with a Bohemian existence in that era: they were regarded as crazy, and removed from the scene by force (e.g. by being subjected to [[electroshock]]). This is confirmed by [[Diane DiPrima]] (in a 1978 interview collected in ''The Beat Vision''): | + | Since there was such a heavy focus on live performance among the Beats, many [[poetry slam|Slam]] poets have been influenced by the Beats. [[Saul Williams]], for example, cites [[Allen Ginsberg]], [[Amiri Baraka]], and [[Bob Kaufman]] as major influences. |
| - | :"Potentially great women writers wound up dead or crazy. I think of the women on the Beat-scene with me in the early '50s, where are they now? I know [[Barbara Moraff]] is a potter and does some writing in Vermont, and that's about all I know. I know some of them ODed and some of them got nuts, and one woman that I was running around the Village with in '53 was killed by her parents putting her in a shock-treatment-place in Pennsylvania ..." | + | The [[Postbeat Poets]] are a direct out-growth of the Beat Generation. Their association with or [[tutelage]] under Ginsberg at The Naropa University's [[Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics]] and later at [[Brooklyn College]] not only carried on the activist social justice legacy of the Beats, but also created its own body of experimental and culturally-influencing literature by [[Anne Waldman]], [[Antler (poet)]], Andy Clausen, David Cope, [[Eileen Myles]], Eliot Katz, [[Paul Beatty]], [[Sapphire (author)]], [[Lesléa Newman]], [[Jim Cohn]], Sharon Mesmer, Randy Roark and others. |
| - | However, a number of female beats have persevered, notably [[Joyce Johnson]] (author of ''Minor Characters''); [[Carolyn Cassady]] (author of ''Off the Road''); [[Hettie Jones]] (author of ''How I Became Hettie Jones''); [[Joanne Kyger]] (author of ''As Ever''; ''Going On''; ''Just Space''); [[Harriet Sohmers Zwerling]]; and the aforementioned Diane DiPrima (author of ''This Kind of Bird Flies Backward'', ''Memoirs of a Beatnik'', "Loba", "Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years"). Later, other women writers emerged who were strongly influenced by the beats, such as [[Janine Pommy Vega]] (published by [[City Lights Bookstore|City Lights]]) in the 1960s, and [[Patti Smith]] in the early 1970s. | + | ====Rock and roll connections==== |
| + | The Beats had a large influence on [[rock and roll]] including major figures such as [[the Beatles]], [[Bob Dylan]] and [[Jim Morrison]]. The image of the rebellious rock star is in many ways analogous to the Beat images such as Dean Moriarty in ''On the Road.'' The Beatles spelled their name with an "a" because [[John Lennon]] was a fan of Kerouac. Ginsberg later met and became friends with members of the Beatles. Paul McCartney played guitar on Ginsberg's album ''Ballad of the Skeletons.'' Ginsberg was close friends with Bob Dylan and toured with him on the [[Rolling Thunder Revue]] in 1975. Dylan cites Ginsberg and Kerouac as major influences. Jim Morrison cites Kerouac as one of his biggest influences. He also studied poetry briefly with [[Jack Hirschman]]. [[Michael McClure]] was also friends with members of [[The Doors]], at one point touring with keyboardist [[Ray Manzarek]]. Ginsberg was friends with, and Cassady was a member of, Ken Kesey's [[Merry Pranksters]], a group that also included members of the [[Grateful Dead]]. In the 1970s, Burroughs was friends with [[Mick Jagger]], [[Lou Reed]], and [[Patti Smith]]. Singer-songwriter [[Tom Waits]], a Beat fan, wrote "Jack and Neal" about Kerouac and Cassady, and recorded "On the Road" (a song written by Kerouac after finishing the novel) with [[Primus (band)|Primus]]. He also wrote the dark, ominous music for Burroughs' theatrical work ''[[The Black Rider]]''. | ||
| - | ===Collaborations, Inspirations, and References=== | + | Ginsberg has worked with [[The Clash]]. Burroughs worked with [[Sonic Youth]], [[R.E.M. (band)|R.E.M.]], [[Kurt Cobain]], and [[Ministry (band)|Ministry]], amongst others. [[Bono]] of [[U2]] cites Burroughs as a major influence, and Burroughs appeared briefly in a U2 video. [[Experimental music]]ian and [[performance art]]ist [[Laurie Anderson]] featured Burroughs on her 1984 album ''[[Mister Heartbreak]]'' and in her 1986 concert film, ''[[Home of the Brave (1986 film)|Home of the Brave]].'' The British [[progressive rock]] band [[Soft Machine]] is named after Burroughs' ''[[The Soft Machine]].'' The Beats are referenced in songs by artists such as: [[The Beastie Boys]], [[Rage Against the Machine]], [[10,000 Maniacs]], [[They Might Be Giants]], [[Van Morrison]], [[The Clean]], [[Ani Difranco]], [[Bad Religion]], and [[King Crimson]]. |
| - | Collaboration and mutual inspiration are essential aspects of movements; this is certainly true for the Beat Generation. Here are a few examples of collaborations, mutual promotion and inspiration, and references in works by Beat associates to other writers of the broadly defined Beat Generation. | + | ==Criticism== |
| + | One prominent critic of the Beats was [[Norman Podhoretz]], a fellow student at Columbia who knew Ginsberg and Kerouac (some of his poetry was published by Ginsberg before their falling-out). In 1958, ''Partisan Review'' published his article "The Know-Nothing Bohemians," an attack on The Beats largely based on Kerouac's first two published books, ''On the Road'' and ''The Subterraneans,'' as well as, to a lesser extent, Ginsberg's ''Howl''. The essay also reacts to an unidentified [[Norman Mailer]] piece (possibly "[[The White Negro]]"). | ||
| - | *[[Allen Ginsberg]] was a tireless promoter of the works of other members of the Beat Generation. He considered himself a pro bono literary agent for all of his friends and for those with similar ideas. For example, he was instrumental in getting [[William S. Burroughs]]'s first book, (''[[Junkie (novel)|Junkie]]''), published. Ginsberg had encouraged Burroughs to write in the first place. He did extensive editing on ''Naked Lunch'', with some help from Kerouac and others. Burroughs and Ginsberg also collaborated on the book ''[[The Yage Letters]]''. | + | The main thrust of his attack is that the Beat embrace of spontaneity is bound up in an anti-intellectual worship of the primitive directly opposed to civilization and can easily turn toward mindless violence. |
| - | *[[Jack Kerouac]] and William S. Burroughs collaborated early on a parody of hardboiled detective fiction called ''[[And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks]]''. | + | Podhoretz asserted that there was a link between the beats and the delinquents: |
| - | *[[Jack Kerouac]] incorporates many important Beat figures as characters in his novels. Two of his most important novels, ''On the Road'' and ''The Dharma Bums'', feature characters based on [[Neal Cassady]] and [[Gary Snyder]], respectively, as their chief protagonists. | + | <blockquote>I happen to believe that there is a direct connection between the flabbiness of American middle-class life and the spread of juvenile crime in the 1950s, but I also believe that the juvenile crime can be explained partly in terms of the same resentment against normal feeling and the attempt to cope with the world through intelligence that lies behind Kerouac and Ginsberg. Even the relatively mild ethos of Kerouac's books can spill over easily into brutality, for there is a suppressed cry in those books: Kill the intellectuals who can talk coherently, kill the people who can sit still for five minutes at a time, kill those incomprehensible characters who are capable of getting seriously involved with a woman, a job, a cause.</blockquote> |
| - | *The Beats often provided titles for one another's work. The naming of two important works is the subject of Beat legend. Ginsberg gives Kerouac credit for the name "[[Howl]]", even though the original manuscript Ginsberg sent to Kerouac had already been given the title "Howl for Carl Solomon." It's uncertain why Ginsberg would give Kerouac credit, but it's not surprising, considering the nature of their relationship. Kerouac also provided Burroughs with the title "[[Naked Lunch]]", and, according to legend, when Ginsberg asked what it meant, Kerouac said he didn't know but they'd figure it out. Ginsberg gives some suggestions in a later poem: "On Burroughs' Work." He says, "A naked lunch is natural to us,/we eat reality sandwiches." Ginsberg also supposedly coined the term "the subterraneans" (an early attempt at a name for the Beat Generation), which became the title of an early Kerouac novel that was later made into a movie. | + | Podhoretz echoes the then-current characterization of delinquents as "rebels without a cause.": |
| - | *Members of the Beat Generation provided subject-matter for much of [[Allen Ginsberg]]'s poetry. [[Neal Cassady]] in particular was a favorite subject of Ginsberg. Ginsberg dedicates his most famous poem, ''[[Howl]]'', to [[Carl Solomon]]; Cassady and Solomon are specifically referenced throughout the poem. Other Beat Generation figures referenced in ''Howl'' include: Kerouac, Burroughs, [[Herbert Huncke]], [[Tuli Kupferberg]], and many more. He dedicated his first collection of poems, ''Howl and Other Poems'', to Kerouac, Burroughs, Cassady, and originally [[Lucien Carr]], though his name was taken off later at Carr's request. The dedication included all of their accomplishments including then unpublished ''[[On the Road]]'', ''[[Naked Lunch]]'', and Cassady's ''[[The First Third]]''. Carr requested his name be taken off because he didn't want the attention. He dedicated many of his other poetry collections and some individual to poems to other Beat figures, including: Huncke, Cassady, [[Gregory Corso]], [[Peter Orlovsky]], [[Lawrence Ferlinghetti]], and [[Frank O'Hara]]. Many of them were also subjects of specific poems with in these collections. | + | <blockquote>The hipsters and hipster lovers of the Beat Generation are rebels, all right, but not against anything so sociological and historical as the middle class or capitalism or even respectability. This is the revolt of the spiritually underprivileged and the crippled of soul—young men who can't think straight and so hate anyone who can; [...]<br /> |
| + | <br /> | ||
| + | The Bohemianism of the 1950s is [...] hostile to civilization; it worships primitivism, instinct, energy, "blood." To the extent that it has intellectual interests at all, they run to mystical doctrines, irrationalist philosophies, and left-wing Reichianism. The only art the new Bohemians have any use for is jazz, mainly of the cool variety. Their predilection for bop language is a way of demonstrating solidarity with the primitive vitality and spontaneity they find in jazz and of expressing contempt for coherent, rational discourse which, being a product of the mind, is in their view a form of death.</blockquote> | ||
| - | *Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Cassady collaborated on a poem called "Pull My Daisy." A section from "Pull My Daisy" was one of the first poems Ginsberg published. When Kerouac and Ginsberg later collaborated on a film with photographer [[Robert Frank]] based on a script by Kerouac for a play called "The Beat Generation," they found that the title had already been copyrighted. They called the film "[[Pull My Daisy]]" instead. The actors included Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Corso, and [[Larry Rivers]] (a painter associated with the [[New York School]]), and Kerouac did the narration. | + | According to Podhoretz, Kerouac's anti-intellectualism was shown by his impoverished vocabulary: |
| - | *[[Gary Snyder]] dedicated several poems to [[Lew Welch]] and has mentioned other Beat figures, such as Kerouac and Philip Whalen, in his poetry. | + | <blockquote>Kerouac, however, manages to remain true to the spirit of hipster slang while making forays into enemy territory (i.e., the English language) by his simple inability to express anything in words. The only method he has of describing an object is to summon up the same half-dozen adjectives over and over again: "greatest," "tremendous," "crazy," "mad," "wild," and perhaps one or two others. When it's more than just mad or crazy or wild, it becomes "really mad" or "really crazy" or "really wild." (All quantities in excess of three, incidentally, are subsumed under the rubric "innumerable," a word used innumerable times in ''On the Road'' but not so innumerably in ''The Subterraneans''.)</blockquote> |
| - | *[[Frank O'Hara]] in his conversational poems often talks about eating lunch with "LeRoi" ([[LeRoi Jones]]/[[Amiri Baraka]]) and often alludes to other Beat writers, such as Ginsberg and [[John Wieners]]. | + | Podhoretz also criticizes Kerouac's racial attitudes: |
| - | *[[LeRoi Jones]]/[[Amiri Baraka]] occasionally refers to other Beats in his writing (Snyder and Kerouac, for example). For a time in New York, Baraka and [[Diane DiPrima]] edited a magazine called ''[[Yugen]]'', which published many of the Beat writers. | + | <blockquote>[...] Kerouac's love for Negroes and other dark-skinned groups is tied up with his worship of primitivism, not with any radical social attitudes. Ironically enough, in fact, to see the Negro as more elemental than the white man, as [[Ned Polsky]] has acutely remarked, is "an inverted form of keeping the nigger in his place."</blockquote> |
| - | ===Open-Form vs. Closed-Form Poetry=== | + | Ginsberg responded in a 1958 interview with ''[[The Village Voice]]'' (collected in ''Spontaneous Mind''), specifically addressing the charge that the Beats destroyed "the distinction between life and literature.": |
| - | + | ||
| - | One way of understanding why the Beat Generation was considered radical, as well as measuring its impact on later writers, is to compare the literary establishment of the 1950s, especially as it involved poetry, with that of the 1960s to see how it had changed. Poetry in the 1950s was under the heavy influence of [[T. S. Eliot]]'s often misinterpreted idea of poetry being an escape from self and the [[Modernist]] focus on objectivity. Similar to this, and perhaps an even more pervasive influence, were the ideas of the [[New Critics]], including their conception of a poem as a perfectible object. In particular, the poetry of [[John Crowe Ransom]] and [[Robert Penn Warren]] was highly influential at this time. The focus of these poets on the formal aspects of poetry and their celebration of the short, ironic lyric led to a rise in formalist poetry and a preference for the short lyric. When the Beat poets came to prominence during this time, they were decried as sloppy libertines, and the Beat movement was characterized as at best only a passing fad which had been largely fueled by media-attention. | + | |
| - | This antagonism between literary camps was framed by two rival anthologies. Three champions of formalist poetry, [[Louis Simpson]], [[Donald Hall]], and [[Robert Pack]], were putting together an anthology of young poets called ''New Poets of England and America''. [[Allen Ginsberg]] (who was a relentless promoter of the work of his friends and the work of those he admired), believing at the time that the Beat poets would be accepted by the literary establishment, brought Simpson, his old Columbia classmate, a packet of poetry including works by [[Gary Snyder]], [[Philip Whalen]], [[Robert Duncan]], [[Ed Dorn]], [[Robert Creeley]], [[Philip Lamantia]], [[Denise Levertov]], [[Michael McClure]], and [[Charles Olsen]] in hopes that these poets would be included in this new anthology. Simpson rejected every one of them. The introduction for the anthology was written by formalist hero [[Robert Frost]]. The anthology included poetry by [[Robert Bly]], [[Donald Justice]], [[James Merrill]], [[W. S. Merwin]], [[Howard Nemerov]], [[Adrienne Rich]], [[Richard Wilbur]], and [[James Wright]] and many others. There is not a strict demarcation here between conservative and avant-garde poetry. The anthology also included a number of English poets who were associated with a movement that, chronologically at least, ran parallel with the Beat Generation, [[The Angry Young Men]], These included poets such as [[Kingsley Amis]], [[Philip Larkin]], and [[Thom Gunn]]. However, the anthology did set a trend for who would become poets acceptable to academia and the literary establishment. For example, [[Robert Lowell]] and [[W. D. Snodgrass]] would be seminal in the creation of what later became known as [[confessional poetry]], which helped finally overturn the strict focus on objectivity (Lowell, according to some accounts, was inspired to write more personal poetry by Ginsberg and the Beats). | + | <blockquote>The novel is not an imaginary situation of imaginary truths—it is an expression of what one feels. Podhoretz doesn't write prose, he doesn't know how to write prose, and he isn't interested in the technical problems of prose or poetry. His criticism of Jack's spontaneous bop prosody shows that he can't tell the difference between words as rhythm and words as in diction ... The bit about anti-intellectualism is a piece of vanity, we had the same education, went to the same school, you know there are 'Intellectuals' and there are intellectuals. Podhoretz is just out of touch with twentieth-century literature, he's writing for the eighteenth-century mind. We have a personal literature now—[[Marcel Proust|Proust]], [[Thomas Wolfe|Wolfe]], [[William Faulkner|Faulkner]], [[James Joyce|Joyce]]. |
| + | </blockquote> | ||
| - | [[Donald Allen]] of Grove Press accepted many of the manuscripts Ginsberg gave him for his rival anthology ''[[The New American Poetry 1945-1960]]''. Poets in that anthology included [[John Ashbery]], [[Paul Blackburn]], [[Ray Bremser]], [[Gregory Corso]], [[Robert Creeley]], [[Ed Dorn]], [[Kirby Doyle]], [[Robert Duncan]], [[Lawrence Ferlinghetti]], [[Allen Ginsberg]], [[LeRoi Jones]], [[Jack Kerouac]], [[Kenneth Koch]], [[Philip Lamantia]], [[Denise Levertov]], [[Michael McClure]], [[Frank O'Hara]], [[Charles Olson]], [[Joel Oppenheimer]], [[Peter Orlovsky]], [[James Schuyler]], [[Gary Snyder]], [[Jack Spicer]], [[Lew Welch]], [[Philip Whalen]], [[John Wieners]], and [[Jonathan Williams]]. Don Allen framed the debate as "Open Form" (his anthology) vs. "Closed Form" (the other anthology). Though seeing it as a rivalry is overly simplistic (for example, many poets in ''New Poets of England and America'' were not strict formalists or have since moved away from formalism), the development of U.S. poetry in the later half of the twentieth century is framed in these two anthologies. | + | ===Internal criticism=== |
| + | Gary Snyder in a 1974 interview, comments on the subject of "casualties" of the Beat Generation: | ||
| + | |||
| + | <blockquote>Kerouac was a casualty too. And there were many other casualties that most people have never heard of, but were genuine casualties. Just as, in the 60s, when Allen and I for a period there were almost publicly recommending people to take acid. When I look back on that now I realize there were many casualties, responsibilities to bear.</blockquote> | ||
| + | |||
| + | ===Other critics=== | ||
| + | [[Bruce Conner]] stated: "I don’t know any artist that would call himself a beat artist... If somebody did, you’d consider him a fake, a fraud running a scam." | ||
| + | |||
| + | ==The Beats comment on the Beat Generation== | ||
| + | : "The so-called Beat Generation was a whole bunch of people, of all different nationalities, who came to the conclusion that society sucked." | ||
| + | ::- [[Amiri Baraka]] | ||
| + | |||
| + | :"John Clellon Holmes... and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent existentialism and I said 'You know John, this is really a beat generation'; and he leapt up and said, 'That's it, that's right!'" | ||
| + | ::- [[Jack Kerouac]] | ||
| + | |||
| + | :"But yet, but yet, woe, woe unto those who think that the Beat Generation means crime, delinquency, immorality, amorality ... woe unto those who attack it on the grounds that they simply don’t understand history and the yearning of human souls ... woe in fact unto those who make evil movies about the Beat Generation where innocent housewives are raped by beatniks! ... woe unto those who spit on the Beat Generation, the wind’ll blow it back." | ||
| + | ::- [[Jack Kerouac]] | ||
| + | |||
| + | :"Three writers does not a generation make." | ||
| + | ::- [[Gregory Corso]] (sometimes also attributed to [[Gary Snyder]]). | ||
| + | |||
| + | :"Nobody knows whether we were catalysts or invented something, or just the froth riding on a wave of its own. We were all three, I suppose." | ||
| + | ::- [[Allen Ginsberg]] | ||
| + | |||
| + | ==See also== | ||
| + | *[[Greenwich Village]] | ||
| + | *[[Literary Kicks]] | ||
| + | *[[San Francisco Oracle]] | ||
| + | *[[Beat Scene]] | ||
| + | *[[Postbeat Poets]] | ||
| + | *[[Beatdom]] | ||
| - | Arguably, these poets have had equal impact on literature, and it can be said that Beat literature has changed the establishment so that academia is now more open to more radical forms of literature. For example, of the poets listed in this section, ten from ''New Poets of England and America'' and nine from ''The New American Poetry'' have been included in the ''Norton Anthology of American Literature''. But Jack Kerouac, despite his impact on American culture and his status as an American icon, has never been included in ''Norton''. Also, three poets from ''New Poets of England and America'' have served as Poets Laureate of the U.S. No Beat poet has ever served as [[Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress]]. | ||
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Revision as of 12:14, 31 December 2016
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The Beat Generation was a group of countercultural American writers who came to prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957), Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), and William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959) are considered their most important works.
Contents |
Cultural context
The postwar era was a time where the dominant culture was desperate for a reassuring planned order; but there was a strong intellectual undercurrent calling for spontaneity, an end to psychological repression; a romantic desire for a more chaotic, Dionysian existence. The Beats were a manifestation of this undercurrent, but they were not the only one.
Before Jack Kerouac embraced "spontaneous prose," there were other artists pursuing self-expression by abandoning control, notably the improvisational elements in jazz music. The bop form of jazz championed by Charlie Parker and others was one of the biggest influences on many of the Beats (the horn-rimmed glasses, goatee, and beret sported by the stereotypical beatnik was derived from the fashion of trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie).
There's a close analogy between Kerouac's approach and the action paintings of Jackson Pollock and the work of other Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. Many members of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism were friends with many members of the Beat Generation and were closely tied with parallel movements such as the New York School of poetry and the Black Mountain school.
The Black Mountain school was associated with some other artists who also rejected refined control, though often with the opposite intent of suppressing the ego, and avoiding self-expression; notably, the works of the composer/writer John Cage and the paintings and "assemblages" of Robert Rauschenberg. Cage's "chance operations" approach was very similar to the "cut-up" technique that Brion Gysin developed and that William Burroughs adopted (after publishing Naked Lunch). For example, in "Minutes to Go," a collaboration of Corso, Gysin and Burroughs, was constructed by clipping phrases from newspapers, mixing them in a bowl, picking them out at random, and pasting them in a poet form. Though an even more direct parallel can be drawn with the 1920s Dadaist/Surrealist poets, such as Tristan Tzara, who recommended putting cut-up words in a bag and pulling them out randomly to create a poem.
Robert Lowell, who is credited with founding confessional poetry (a school of poetry which later included Lowell's students Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton), was reportedly inspired to become more personal and emotionally vulnerable in his poetry by interactions he had with Beats in San Francisco. This is significant because Lowell was close friends with New Critics such as Allen Tate; Lowell's transition away from the traditional forms championed by the New Critics toward the non-traditional poetry of the Beats framed a significant debate in the poetry world during the Beat Generation.
Dadaism/Surrealism
Dadaism and Surrealism had a direct impact on many of the Beats: Dadaism with its attack on the elitism of high culture and its celebration of spontaneity; Surrealism with its transformation of the Dadaist rebellion into positive social intentions and its focus on revelations from the subconscious. Both movements, in a sense, developed as a reaction to World War I, just as the Beat Generation was reacting to the environment of post-World War II America.
Carl Solomon introduced the work of Surrealist Antonin Artaud to Ginsberg. Artaud had a strong influence on many of the other Beats. The poetry of André Breton was also a direct influence (see for example Ginsberg's Kaddish.) Since Surrealism was still in many ways a vital movement in the 1950s, the Beats had interactions with many Surrealists and former Dadaists. Beat associates such as Rexroth, Ferlinghetti, and Ron Padgett were responsible for translating a lot of the poetry from French and introducing it to English-speaking audiences.
Several Beat associates, such as Ted Joans, were actual members of the Surrealist group; another example is Philip Lamantia who was close with Breton and was responsible for introducing a lot of Surrealist poetry to the other Beats. The poetry of Gregory Corso and Bob Kaufman show the clearest influence of Surrealist poetry (the dream-like images, the seemingly random juxtaposition of dissociated images, for example), though this influence can also be seen in more subtle ways in other poetry, Ginsberg's in particular. When in France the Beats met many Surrealists and former Dadaists. As the legend goes, when they met Marcel Duchamp, Ginsberg kissed his shoe and Corso cut off his tie. Many other French writers still active in the 1950s had a tremendous impact on the writing of the Beat Generation, writers such as Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Jean Genet. Older French writers rank high on the list of shared Beat influences: Apollinaire, for example. Beats also repeatedly invoke the spirit of Symbolists such as Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire.
Romantic poets
Specific Romantic writers had a heavy influence on Beats: Gregory Corso, for example, worshiped Percy Shelley as a hero and was buried at the foot of Shelley's Grave in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. Ginsberg mentions Shelley's Adonais at the beginning of Kaddish, and he cites it as a major influence on the composition of one of his most important poems. Michael McClure compared Ginsberg's Howl to Shelley's breakthrough poem Queen Mab. Ginsberg's most important Romantic influence was Blake, who was the subject of Ginsberg's self-defining auditory hallucination/revelation in 1948, and Ginsberg subsequently spent much of his life studying Blake. Blake was also a major influence on Michael McClure. The first conversation between McClure and Ginsberg was about Blake (McClure saw him as a revolutionary; Ginsberg saw him as a prophet). John Keats was also an influence on many of the Beats.
Of arguably equal importance to the British Romantics was what is often termed American Romanticism. Whether or not this term is accurate, many writers under this umbrella were important to the Beats: Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville and especially Walt Whitman. Edgar Allan Poe is occasionally cited as an influence, as in the line from Howl "who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kaballah..." And, though the comparison might not seem obvious, Ginsberg even claimed Emily Dickinson was an influence on Beat poetry. The novel You Can't Win by Jack Black had a strong influence on Burroughs, as did the short stories of British author Denton Welch.
Modernism
Though in ways the Beats were reacting against the tendency toward objective distancing and the focus on craft brought on by literary Modernism, (hence why the Beats are sometimes considered Postmodern) many modernist writers were major influences on the Beats: Marcel Proust, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and H.D.. Pound was specifically important to poets such as Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, and Robert Creeley. Pound was instrumental in introducing ideas of haiku and other Japanese and Chinese literary forms into Western literature. The Beats further adapted these ideas in their own work. William Carlos Williams was an influence on most of the Beats with his encouragement to speak with an American voice instead of imitating the European poetic voice and European forms. He specifically influenced Snyder, Whalen, and Welch when he came to lecture at Reed College. More importantly he personally mentored many important Beat figures: Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, among others.
He published several of Ginsberg's letters to him in his epic poem Paterson and wrote an introduction to two of Ginsberg's books. And many of the Beats (Ginsberg specifically) helped promote Williams' poetry and his play Many Loves. Ferlinghetti's City Lights even published a volume of his poetry. Williams is occasionally classified as both an Imagist and an Objectivist. Kenneth Rexroth was also considered a member of the Objectivists. H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), one of the key Imagists, was another important influence on the Beats. Robert Duncan wrote a book-length study of her work. Gertrude Stein, another important modernist and a major influence on many of the Beats, was the subject of a book-length study by Lew Welch. Marcel Proust, specifically in his Remembrance of Things Past, had an influence on Kerouac's Duluoz Legend concept: a single epic/personal story in multiple volumes. Other important Kerouac influences (and by extension Beat influences) include: Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe.
Open-Form vs. Closed-Form Poetry
One way of understanding why the Beat Generation was considered radical, as well as measuring its impact on later writers, is to compare the literary establishment of the 1950s, especially as it involved poetry, with that of the 1960s to see how it had changed. Poetry in the 1950s was under the heavy influence of T. S. Eliot's often misinterpreted idea of poetry being an escape from self and the Modernist focus on objectivity. Similar to this, and perhaps an even more pervasive influence, were the ideas of the New Critics, including their conception of a poem as a perfectible object. In particular, the poetry of John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren was highly influential at this time. The focus of these poets on the formal aspects of poetry and their celebration of the short, ironic lyric led to a rise in formalist poetry and a preference for the short lyric. When the Beat poets came to prominence during this time, they were decried as sloppy libertines, and the Beat movement was characterized as at best only a passing fad which had been largely fueled by media-attention.
This antagonism between literary camps was framed by two rival anthologies. Three champions of formalist poetry, Louis Simpson, Donald Hall, and Robert Pack, were putting together an anthology of young poets called New Poets of England and America. Allen Ginsberg - who was a relentless promoter of the work of his friends and the work of those he admired - believing at the time that the Beat poets would be accepted by the literary establishment, brought Simpson, his old Columbia classmate, a packet of poetry including works by Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Robert Duncan, Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley, Philip Lamantia, Denise Levertov, Michael McClure, and Charles Olsen in hopes that these poets would be included in this new anthology. Simpson rejected every one of them. The introduction for the anthology was written by formalist hero Robert Frost. The anthology included poetry by Robert Bly, Donald Justice, James Merrill, W. S. Merwin, Howard Nemerov, Adrienne Rich, Richard Wilbur, and James Wright and many others. There is not a strict demarcation here between conservative and avant-garde poetry.
The anthology also included a number of English poets who were associated with a movement that, chronologically at least, ran parallel with the Beat Generation, the "Angry Young Men." These included poets such as Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, and Thom Gunn. However, the anthology did set a trend for who would become poets acceptable to academia and the literary establishment. For example, Robert Lowell and W. D. Snodgrass would be seminal in the creation of what later became known as confessional poetry, which helped finally overturn the strict focus on objectivity (Lowell, according to some accounts, was inspired to write more personal poetry by Ginsberg and the Beats).
Donald Allen of Grove Press accepted many of the manuscripts Ginsberg gave him for his rival anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960. Poets in that anthology included John Ashbery, Paul Blackburn, Ray Bremser, Gregory Corso, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Kirby Doyle, Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones, Jack Kerouac, Kenneth Koch, Philip Lamantia, Denise Levertov, Michael McClure, Frank O'Hara, Charles Olson, Joel Oppenheimer, Peter Orlovsky, James Schuyler, Gary Snyder, Jack Spicer, Lew Welch, Philip Whalen, John Wieners, and Jonathan Williams. Don Allen framed the debate as "Open Form" (his anthology) vs. "Closed Form" (the other anthology). Though seeing it as a rivalry is overly simplistic (for example, many poets in New Poets of England and America were not strict formalists or have since moved away from formalism), the development of U.S. poetry in the later half of the twentieth century is framed in these two anthologies.
Arguably, these poets have had equal impact on literature, and it can be said that Beat literature has changed the establishment so that academia is now more open to more radical forms of literature. For example, of the poets listed in this section, ten from New Poets of England and America and nine from The New American Poetry have been included in the Norton Anthology of American Literature. But Jack Kerouac, despite his impact on American culture and his status as an American icon, has only just been included in the 7th Edition of the Norton. Also, three poets from New Poets of England and America have served as Poets Laureate of the U.S. No Beat poet has ever served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.
The "Beatnik" era
The term "Beatnik" was coined by Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle on 2 April 1958, a play on the name of the recent Russian satellite Sputnik. Caen's coining of this term appeared to suggest that beatniks were (1) "far out of the mainstream of society" and (2) "possibly pro-Communist". His column reads as follows: "...Look magazine, preparing a picture spread on S.F.'s Beat Generation (oh, no, not AGAIN!), hosted a party in a No. Beach house for 50 Beatniks, and by the time word got around the sour grapevine, over 250 bearded cats and kits were on hand, slopping up Mike Cowles' free booze. They're only Beat, y'know, when it comes to work ..." Caen's new term stuck and became the popular label associated with a new stereotype of men with goatees and berets playing bongos while free-spirited women wearing black leotards dance.
An early example of playing up to the "beatnik stereotype" occurred in Vesuvio's (a bar in North Beach) which employed the artist Wally Hedrick to sit in the window dressed in full beard, turtleneck, and sandals and create improvisational drawings and paintings; by 1958 tourists to San Francisco could take bus tours to view the North Beach Beat scene. A variety of other small businesses also sprang up exploiting (and/or satirizing) the new craze. In 1959, Fred McDarrah started a "Rent-a-Beatnik" service in New York, taking out ads in The Village Voice and sending Ted Joans and friends out on calls to read poetry. The image of the beatnik appeared in many cartoons, movies, and TV shows of the time, perhaps the most famous being Bob Denver's character Maynard G. Krebs in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. (1959-63)
While some of the original Beats embraced the beatniks, or at least found the parodies humorous (Ginsberg, for example, appreciated the parody in Pogo) others criticized the beatniks as inauthentic posers. Kerouac feared that the spiritual aspect of his message had been lost and that many were using the Beat Generation as an excuse to be senselessly wild.
But for many young people, the popular image of the beatnik was their first contact with the subject. As Glenn O'Brien put it, "Maynard was sloppy, lazy, and did not respond to the mainstream of varsity culture. Maynard was post-romantic, a dreaming realist. I didn't know what a bohemian was, but I knew one when I saw one. As a preteen, I sensed that a beatnik was what I wanted to be. Maynard G. Krebs was a satire on beatniks, but that didn't matter because beatness shone through." Beat literature and the beatnik stereotype both had an influence on high school and college students during the late 1950s and very early 1960s.
"Hippie" era
Some time during the 1960s, the rapidly expanding Beat culture underwent a transformation: the Beat Generation gave way to The Sixties Counterculture, which was accompanied by a shift in public terminology from "beatnik" to "hippie." This was in many respects a gradual transition. Many of the original Beats remained active participants, notably Allen Ginsberg, who became a fixture of the anti-war movement - though equally notably, Kerouac did not remain active on the scene: he broke with Ginsberg and criticized the 60s protest movements as "new excuses for spitefulness." According to Ed Sanders the change in the public label from beatnik to hippie happened after the 1967 Human Be-In in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park (where Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure were leading the crowd in chanting "Om"). There were certainly some stylistic differences between beatniks and hippies - somber colors, dark shades, and goatees gave way to colorful psychedelic clothing and long hair. The beats were known for "playing it cool" (keeping a low profile) but the hippies became known for "being cool" (displaying their individuality).
In addition to the stylistic changes, there were some changes in substance: the beats tended to be essentially apolitical, but the hippies became actively engaged with the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement. To quote Gary Snyder in a 1974 interview:
... the next key point was Castro taking over Cuba. The apolitical quality of Beat thought changed with that. It sparked quite a discussion and quite a dialogue; many people had been basic pacifists with considerable disillusion with Marxian revolutionary rhetoric. At the time of Castro's victory, it had to be rethought again. Here was a revolution that had used violence and that was apparently a good thing. Many people abandoned the pacifist position at that time or at least began to give more thought to it. In any case, many people began to look to politics again as having possibilities. From that follows, at least on some levels, the beginning of civil rights activism, which leads through our one whole chain of events: the Movement.
We had little confidence in our power to make any long range or significant changes. That was the 50s, you see. It seemed that bleak. So that our choices seemed entirely personal existential lifetime choices that there was no guarantee that we would have any audience, or anybody would listen to us; but it was a moral decision, a moral poetic decision. Then Castro changed things, then Martin Luther King changed things ...
Connections Between Beats and "Hippies"
The Beats in general were a large influence on members of the new "counterculture", for example, in the case of Bob Dylan who became a close friend of Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg as early as 1960 became close friends with 60's icon Timothy Leary and helped him in distributing LSD to influential people (including Robert Lowell) in order to demystify drug paranoia. In 1963 Ginsberg lived in San Francisco with Neal Cassady and Charles Plymell at 1403 Gough St. Shortly after that Ginsberg connected with Ken Kesey's group who was doing LSD testing at Stanford, and Plymell, which publishing the first issue of R. Crumb's Zap Comix on his printing press a few years later then moved to Ginsberg's commune in Cherry Valley, NY in the early 1970s. (The Plymells never lived at the Farm, just visited there; although they remained in Cherry Valley.)
Cassady was the bus driver for an important early Hippie group, Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, which included several members of the Grateful Dead. A sign of Kerouac's break with this new direction in counterculture occurred when the Merry Pranksters, with Cassady's insistence, attempted to recruit Kerouac. Kerouac angrily rejected their invitation and accused them of attempting to destroy the American culture he celebrated. In addition to the "Human Be-In," Ginsberg was also present at another important event in Hippie culture: the protest at the 1968 Democratic Convention, and was friends with Abbie Hoffman and other members of the "Chicago Seven."
Influences on Western Culture
While many authors claim to be directly influenced by the beats, the Beat Generation phenomenon itself has had a huge influence on Western Culture more broadly. In many ways, the Beats can be taken as the first subculture (here meaning a cultural subdivision on lifestyle/political grounds, rather than on any obvious difference in ethnic or religious backgrounds). During the very conformist post-World War II era they were one of the forces engaged in a questioning of traditional values which produced a break with the mainstream culture that to this day people react to – or against. The Beats produced a great deal of interest in lifestyle experimentation (notably in regards to sex and drugs); and they had a large intellectual effect in encouraging the questioning of authority (a force behind the anti-war movement); and many of them were very active in popularizing interest in Zen Buddhism in the West.
In Allen Ginsberg's A Definition of the Beat Generation: he characterized some of the essential effects of Beat Generation artistic movement as including spiritual liberation, sexual "revolution" or "liberation,"(e.g., gay liberation, somewhat catalyzing women's liberation, black liberation, Gray Panther activism); liberation of the word from censorship, and demystification and/or decriminalization of cannabis and other drugs. Ginsberg claimed that the Beat Generation began to view rock and roll as a high art form, as evidenced by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and other popular musicians influenced in the later fifties and sixties by Beat generation poets' and writers' works. It also included the spread of ecological consciousness, emphasized early on by Gary Snyder and Michael McClure, the notion of a "Fresh Planet" and opposition to the military-industrial machine civilization, as emphasized in writings of Burroughs, Huncke, Ginsberg, and Kerouac. There was increasing respect for land and indigenous peoples and creatures, as proclaimed by Kerouac in his slogan from On the Road: "The Earth is an Indian thing." As well, Beats paid more attention to what Kerouac called (after Spengler) a "second religiousness" developing within an advanced civilization, and there was a return to an appreciation of idiosyncrasy as opposed to state regimentation.
Literary legacy
Many novelists who emerged in the 1960s and 70s, many labeled postmodernists, were closely connected with older Beats and considered latter day Beats themselves, most notably Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) and Terry Southern (Dr. Strangelove.) Other postmodern novelists, Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow) and Tom Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues) for example, considered the Beats to be major influences though they had no direct connection. William S. Burroughs is considered by some a forefather of postmodern literature; he inspired many later postmodernists and novelists in the cyberpunk genre. Inspired by the Beat Generation's focus on free speech and egalitarianism, Amiri Baraka went on to found the Black Arts movement which focused more specifically on issues in the African American community. Other notable writers associated with this movement include Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou, and Nikki Giovanni.
Since there was such a heavy focus on live performance among the Beats, many Slam poets have been influenced by the Beats. Saul Williams, for example, cites Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, and Bob Kaufman as major influences.
The Postbeat Poets are a direct out-growth of the Beat Generation. Their association with or tutelage under Ginsberg at The Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and later at Brooklyn College not only carried on the activist social justice legacy of the Beats, but also created its own body of experimental and culturally-influencing literature by Anne Waldman, Antler (poet), Andy Clausen, David Cope, Eileen Myles, Eliot Katz, Paul Beatty, Sapphire (author), Lesléa Newman, Jim Cohn, Sharon Mesmer, Randy Roark and others.
Rock and roll connections
The Beats had a large influence on rock and roll including major figures such as the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison. The image of the rebellious rock star is in many ways analogous to the Beat images such as Dean Moriarty in On the Road. The Beatles spelled their name with an "a" because John Lennon was a fan of Kerouac. Ginsberg later met and became friends with members of the Beatles. Paul McCartney played guitar on Ginsberg's album Ballad of the Skeletons. Ginsberg was close friends with Bob Dylan and toured with him on the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975. Dylan cites Ginsberg and Kerouac as major influences. Jim Morrison cites Kerouac as one of his biggest influences. He also studied poetry briefly with Jack Hirschman. Michael McClure was also friends with members of The Doors, at one point touring with keyboardist Ray Manzarek. Ginsberg was friends with, and Cassady was a member of, Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, a group that also included members of the Grateful Dead. In the 1970s, Burroughs was friends with Mick Jagger, Lou Reed, and Patti Smith. Singer-songwriter Tom Waits, a Beat fan, wrote "Jack and Neal" about Kerouac and Cassady, and recorded "On the Road" (a song written by Kerouac after finishing the novel) with Primus. He also wrote the dark, ominous music for Burroughs' theatrical work The Black Rider.
Ginsberg has worked with The Clash. Burroughs worked with Sonic Youth, R.E.M., Kurt Cobain, and Ministry, amongst others. Bono of U2 cites Burroughs as a major influence, and Burroughs appeared briefly in a U2 video. Experimental musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson featured Burroughs on her 1984 album Mister Heartbreak and in her 1986 concert film, Home of the Brave. The British progressive rock band Soft Machine is named after Burroughs' The Soft Machine. The Beats are referenced in songs by artists such as: The Beastie Boys, Rage Against the Machine, 10,000 Maniacs, They Might Be Giants, Van Morrison, The Clean, Ani Difranco, Bad Religion, and King Crimson.
Criticism
One prominent critic of the Beats was Norman Podhoretz, a fellow student at Columbia who knew Ginsberg and Kerouac (some of his poetry was published by Ginsberg before their falling-out). In 1958, Partisan Review published his article "The Know-Nothing Bohemians," an attack on The Beats largely based on Kerouac's first two published books, On the Road and The Subterraneans, as well as, to a lesser extent, Ginsberg's Howl. The essay also reacts to an unidentified Norman Mailer piece (possibly "The White Negro").
The main thrust of his attack is that the Beat embrace of spontaneity is bound up in an anti-intellectual worship of the primitive directly opposed to civilization and can easily turn toward mindless violence.
Podhoretz asserted that there was a link between the beats and the delinquents:
I happen to believe that there is a direct connection between the flabbiness of American middle-class life and the spread of juvenile crime in the 1950s, but I also believe that the juvenile crime can be explained partly in terms of the same resentment against normal feeling and the attempt to cope with the world through intelligence that lies behind Kerouac and Ginsberg. Even the relatively mild ethos of Kerouac's books can spill over easily into brutality, for there is a suppressed cry in those books: Kill the intellectuals who can talk coherently, kill the people who can sit still for five minutes at a time, kill those incomprehensible characters who are capable of getting seriously involved with a woman, a job, a cause.
Podhoretz echoes the then-current characterization of delinquents as "rebels without a cause.":
The hipsters and hipster lovers of the Beat Generation are rebels, all right, but not against anything so sociological and historical as the middle class or capitalism or even respectability. This is the revolt of the spiritually underprivileged and the crippled of soul—young men who can't think straight and so hate anyone who can; [...]
The Bohemianism of the 1950s is [...] hostile to civilization; it worships primitivism, instinct, energy, "blood." To the extent that it has intellectual interests at all, they run to mystical doctrines, irrationalist philosophies, and left-wing Reichianism. The only art the new Bohemians have any use for is jazz, mainly of the cool variety. Their predilection for bop language is a way of demonstrating solidarity with the primitive vitality and spontaneity they find in jazz and of expressing contempt for coherent, rational discourse which, being a product of the mind, is in their view a form of death.
According to Podhoretz, Kerouac's anti-intellectualism was shown by his impoverished vocabulary:
Kerouac, however, manages to remain true to the spirit of hipster slang while making forays into enemy territory (i.e., the English language) by his simple inability to express anything in words. The only method he has of describing an object is to summon up the same half-dozen adjectives over and over again: "greatest," "tremendous," "crazy," "mad," "wild," and perhaps one or two others. When it's more than just mad or crazy or wild, it becomes "really mad" or "really crazy" or "really wild." (All quantities in excess of three, incidentally, are subsumed under the rubric "innumerable," a word used innumerable times in On the Road but not so innumerably in The Subterraneans.)
Podhoretz also criticizes Kerouac's racial attitudes:
[...] Kerouac's love for Negroes and other dark-skinned groups is tied up with his worship of primitivism, not with any radical social attitudes. Ironically enough, in fact, to see the Negro as more elemental than the white man, as Ned Polsky has acutely remarked, is "an inverted form of keeping the nigger in his place."
Ginsberg responded in a 1958 interview with The Village Voice (collected in Spontaneous Mind), specifically addressing the charge that the Beats destroyed "the distinction between life and literature.":
The novel is not an imaginary situation of imaginary truths—it is an expression of what one feels. Podhoretz doesn't write prose, he doesn't know how to write prose, and he isn't interested in the technical problems of prose or poetry. His criticism of Jack's spontaneous bop prosody shows that he can't tell the difference between words as rhythm and words as in diction ... The bit about anti-intellectualism is a piece of vanity, we had the same education, went to the same school, you know there are 'Intellectuals' and there are intellectuals. Podhoretz is just out of touch with twentieth-century literature, he's writing for the eighteenth-century mind. We have a personal literature now—Proust, Wolfe, Faulkner, Joyce.
Internal criticism
Gary Snyder in a 1974 interview, comments on the subject of "casualties" of the Beat Generation:
Kerouac was a casualty too. And there were many other casualties that most people have never heard of, but were genuine casualties. Just as, in the 60s, when Allen and I for a period there were almost publicly recommending people to take acid. When I look back on that now I realize there were many casualties, responsibilities to bear.
Other critics
Bruce Conner stated: "I don’t know any artist that would call himself a beat artist... If somebody did, you’d consider him a fake, a fraud running a scam."
The Beats comment on the Beat Generation
- "The so-called Beat Generation was a whole bunch of people, of all different nationalities, who came to the conclusion that society sucked."
- "John Clellon Holmes... and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent existentialism and I said 'You know John, this is really a beat generation'; and he leapt up and said, 'That's it, that's right!'"
- "But yet, but yet, woe, woe unto those who think that the Beat Generation means crime, delinquency, immorality, amorality ... woe unto those who attack it on the grounds that they simply don’t understand history and the yearning of human souls ... woe in fact unto those who make evil movies about the Beat Generation where innocent housewives are raped by beatniks! ... woe unto those who spit on the Beat Generation, the wind’ll blow it back."
- "Three writers does not a generation make."
- - Gregory Corso (sometimes also attributed to Gary Snyder).
- "Nobody knows whether we were catalysts or invented something, or just the froth riding on a wave of its own. We were all three, I suppose."
See also
