The Beat Generation

Jamie Russell

• Publisher: Pocket Essentials
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781903047859
• eBook ISBN: 9781842439227
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Were they angel-headed hipsters, dope smoking dropouts or the most exciting group of writers in postwar American literature? Their stories of drugs, sex and the search for an alternative to 'squaresville' have cornered the market in cult literature, remaining hip even while being taught on university courses and in schools. On the Road, Naked Lunch, and Howl have become milestones of underground literature and the key Beats (Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg) are mythic figures of contemporary pop culture. This Pocket Essential provides an introductory essay examining the importance of the writers and their work in American culture. Separate chapters are devoted to the lives and work of Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac. Later chapters discuss the other members of this movement (Neal Cassady, Herbert Huncke, and many more), the Beats on film, and their influence on the counterculture of the 60s.

1. Introduction: Rebirth Of Cool

Never in the history of literature and literary movements has so much been owed to so few. Three men—Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S Burroughs—became the core of a literary and social phenomenon that (to borrow Burroughs’ comments about Kerouac’s most famous novel) ‘sold a trillion pairs of Levis and a million espresso coffee machines, and also sent countless kids on the road.’

The Beat phenomenon transformed American society. Not only was it the first expression of what we would now dub youth culture—paving the way for the hippies, punks, grungers and ravers as well as a thousand and one other styles—but it was also the first moment in Western culture when literature, music and film became cool. In other words, it was totally opposed to the boring adult world of work, money and responsibility.

These days the Beats are part of the establishment. Kerouac, Burroughs and Ginsberg can be found on all kinds of college and school reading lists. (There’s a great photo of American military cadets sitting in class reading Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’—how the world changes!) What’s more, the Beats are big bucks. Reprints of their books, academic critiques, T-shirts, CD recordings and posters are everywhere. The principal characters in the Beat saga (all of them now dead and buried) have become mythical figures whose continuing status as visionaries, rebels and hipsters guarantee their various estates a regular (and very large) income.

Yet in spite of this acceptance into the mainstream, the Beats are still considered cool. What makes the Beat phenomenon unique is the way in which it has remained so popular with each successive generation of young rebels. While 1960s acid culture has generally been disowned and mocked, the Beats and the literature that they spawned remain as much a symbol of youthful rebellion today as they were back in 1957. Reading On The Road, ‘Howl’ or Naked Lunch has become a rite of passage. It doesn’t seem to matter that these books were written almost half a century ago, they’ve still got what it takes, Daddy-O.

Perhaps this isn’t all that surprising. Back in the 1950s, the Beats were obsessed with exploding society’s taboos, from drugs to sex to censorship. At the dawn of this new millennium these issues still seem as relevant today as they did back then. Things may have changed since 1950, but we still seem a long, long way from the kind of open, inclusive society that the Beats dreamt of. Drugs are still demonised, homosexuality is still frowned upon, hetero sex is only permitted if it’s selling something and the censor still guards us like an overbearing nanny.

The Beats are still as relevant today as they were fifty years ago. After all, why else do the American broadcasting authorities still ban readings of ‘Howl’ on the radio before midnight?

Before The Beats

1945. The closing stages of World War Two. As the Third Reich collapsed, American infantrymen withdrew from the battlefields of Europe and returned home to their native soil. Some of them were elated, flushed with the adrenaline of victory. Others were in a state of despair, having witnessed a catalogue of atrocities that neither peacetime nor their military training had prepared them for. Few of them were ready—emotionally or physically—for the shock of returning home.

The social impact of World War Two stretched far beyond the simple realities of warfare. During the years that followed Pearl Harbour an unprecedented mobilisation of human resources took place, and it was in this upheaval that the seeds of the Beat Generation were sown. As men and women from all across the United States were thrown together by the war, the fabric of American society was torn apart. People from different walks of life began to exchange ideas, opinions and lifestyles. Whites suddenly met the country’s minorities first-hand, women were given the opportunity to prove that they could carry out traditionally ‘masculine’ jobs in the absence of America’s men and the draft gave everyone first-hand experience of the power of the state over the individual.

By the time the war was over, America had irrevocably changed. As the veterans returned they added their own experience to the mix, bringing a restless energy back with them, an energy that laid the foundations for the discontented youth movements that soon emerged.

Nelson Algren, one of America’s foremost novelists of the period, summed up the sense of post-war social unrest in his books. Talking about The Man With The Golden Arm (1949), his classic story about heroin addicts in the slums of Chicago, Algren claimed: ‘I was going to write a war novel. But it turned out to be the Golden Arm thing. I mean, the war kind of slipped away, and those people with the hypos came along and that was it.’

Junkies were big news in the late 1940s. Many veterans had returned with drug habits that they’d picked up after being wounded and given shots of morphine. Meanwhile, on the home front, the war had meant that stolen drugs were frequently available on the black market, fuelling a sudden rise in morphine and heroin addiction that continued well into the 1950s (and beyond). The media were obsessed with junkies—their lifestyle, criminal activities and depraved sexual acts.

But it wasn’t just junkies who emerged from the upheaval of the war years. Suddenly, outlaw subcultures were springing up everywhere. Packs of thrill-seeking motorcyclists had begun to prowl the highways of the West Coast, terrorising the patrons of remote bars as they roared up on their Indians and Harley Davidsons. Ex-GIs who hadn’t been able to settle down after returning home, these outlaw motorcyclists (who would eventually become the Hell’s Angels) seemed to herald the coming of a new lawlessness. Meanwhile, in the cities, a new breed of crim-inal—the juvenile delinquent—had appeared. These poor, predominantly working-class children ran riot through the streets, unafraid of their parents or the police.

In the conservative eyes of the media these different gangs were a new threat to the Land of the Free—an enemy within. What was worse, these wild groups seemed to be encouraging America’s other minorities to become equally vocal. African-Americans, immigrants and homosexuals were suddenly demanding rights and freedoms. Was it a Communist plot against American democracy? And where would it end?

Going Underground: Subterranean Adventures

The history of America in the years after World War Two is a history of subcultures. From junkies to bikers, gays to juvenile delinquents, and African-Americans to immigrants, America’s population was split between the normal majority and the deviant minority. Academic sociologists (like the Chicago School of Albert Cohen, Milton M Gordon and others) catalogued these different groups by writing about their habits, language and behaviour. Delving into the subterranean worlds of America’s underbelly, these academics tried to understand the political, economic and social reasons why the members of these groups felt cut off from mainstream society.

This interest in the forbidden underworlds wasn’t just limited to a bunch of academics, though. The men and women who would form the first wave of the Beat Generation were similarly excited by the prospect of experiencing the kicks that could be found in the ghettos and poor neighbourhoods. Living amongst what Herbert Huncke called the ‘dikes, faggots, a certain so-called hip element, the swish places and the she-she places’ of New York, Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs were all obsessed with life on the edges of society. It was a characteristic that, in later years, their critics would mock. As Norman Podhoretz (a fervent hater of the Beats) wrote at the height of Beat fever in 1958: ‘The spirit of … the Beat Generation strikes me as the same spirit which animates the young savages in leather jackets who have been running amok in the last few years with their switchblades and zip guns.’

Yet, by taking bits and pieces of each of these subcultures, the Beats began to create a new lifestyle that rejected mainstream I Love Lucy American culture in favour of the restless energy of the underworld. Experimenting with drugs, crime, sex and jazz, the Beats tried to shatter every taboo that the straight world held.

Hip, Beat Cats

As with most literary movements, there isn’t a birth date for the Beat Generation. No one ever issued a manifesto or printed off a pamphlet announcing the arrival of the Beats, it simply happened. Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs met in New York in 1944. They were introduced through a series of mutual friends, liked one another and began to hang out together. The three of them formed the central hub of the Beats and around them grew a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, the Beat Generation itself.

Legend has it that Jack Kerouac was the first to call himself, Ginsberg, Burroughs and their acquaintances ‘The Beat Generation.’ John Clellon Holmes made a note of the phrase and used it as the title of an essay in the New York Times Magazine in 1952, ‘This Is The Beat Generation.’ But ‘Beat’ was a term that existed long before this casual use by Kerouac. It had a rich heritage with many links to the subcultures that these writers were so enamoured with. The word ‘beat’ had been used in African-American jazz circles for years to mean exhausted or broke. The Times Square world of petty thieves, junkies and prostitutes that William Burroughs worked his way into—after meeting one of its true denizens, Herbert Huncke—also had the word in its vocabulary, with a similar kind of meaning. But on the lips of excited young men like Kerouac, Holmes and Ginsberg, beat came to signify something else—a combination of both exhaustion and empowerment. Kerouac’s vision of beat relied on a definite shift in meaning from earlier usage. If something was beat it wasn’t simply downtrodden by life in post-war America, it also rejected the oppressive world around it, transforming exhaustion into defiance and reaching towards religious transformation (‘beatitude’). As John Clellon Holmes remarked, ‘To be beat is to be at the bottom of your personality, looking up.’ Like the ‘hipster’ who Norman Mailer glamorised (with much offensive racist nonsense) in his famous essay The White Negro, the Beat hero throws himself into the subcultures of American life and tries to find an alternative to the boring realities of the nuclear family. But, unlike the hipster, whose main quality is a knowing coolness, the Beat hero is characterised by desperation in his search for kicks, wearing himself out in his attempt to live life large and experience a spiritual rebirth.

The Ace In The Hole

The one thing that characterises all the Beat writers is their willingness to throw themselves into the underbelly of American society in search of kicks. Being cool meant finding an alternative to the mainstream and, in the 1940s and 1950s, the alternative lifestyles were to be found in the cities’ bars, ghettos and downtown clubs. Rejecting their bourgeois family values (particularly Burroughs, a Harvard graduate whose family had once been heir to the Burroughs Adding Machine fortune), the Beats began to experiment with everything that 1940s and 1950s America classified as illegal: drugs, crime, gay sex, racial integration.

Burroughs felt most comfortable in the hustler world of Times Square and teamed up with authentic petty thief Herbert Huncke to score for drugs while funding his habit through a combination of his family’s $200 a month allowance and ‘working the hole’ (robbing drunks on the subways). Kerouac experimented with a variety of stimulants and eventually became addicted to Benzedrine inhalers (bennies). Ginsberg, with the help of Neal Cassady, discovered the extent of his homosexuality.

Such forays outside of polite society brought their own problems, though. The first bout of serious trouble that struck the group was in 1944 when Lucien Carr, a handsome blond boy who looked like Arthur Rimbaud, murdered Dave Kammerer. Carr had been responsible for introducing the principal Beats to one another and, although he never published anything worthy of his peers, he has remained a key component in the Beat Generation’s history ever since. Dave Kammerer, who knew both Carr and Burroughs from St Louis, had followed the golden-haired, angelic boy up to New York as he attended classes at Columbia. He was obsessed with Carr, even though there was a clear lack of reciprocation. Those who witnessed their strange relationship claimed that Carr often seemed to encourage the older man, enjoying the level of power he held over him while never giving him exactly what he wanted. Eventually, as the obsession became increasingly desperate, Kammerer’s adoration turned into violence.

According to Carr, on the night of 13 August 1944 he had met Kammerer during a drinking bout. In the early hours of the next morning, as they sat on the riverside, Kammerer made ‘an indecent proposal’ to Carr, who rejected it. A fight ensued and the older, heavier Kammerer would have won, but Carr stabbed him twice with his scout pocket knife. Binding Kammerer’s hands and feet together with...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• 1. Introduction: Rebirth Of Cool
• 2. Lonesome Traveller: Jack Kerouac
• 3. The Howling Poet: Allen Ginsberg
• 4. The Third Mind: William S Burroughs
• 5. The Beat Generation Movement
• 6. Beats At The Movies
• 7. Reference Materials
• Copyright