Beat Generation
The beat generation was a group of American writers active during the 1950s. Their most prominent works are Jack1 Kerouac's On the Road , Allen Ginsberg's Howl , and William S. Burrough's Naked Lunch .
Kerouac introduced the phrase beat generation sometime around 1948 to describe his social circle to the novelist John Clellon Holmes . The adjective beat had the connotations of tired or down and out, but Kerouac added the paradoxical connotations of upbeat, beatific3, and the musical association of being on the beat.
Calling this relatively4 small group of struggling writers, students, hustlers, and drug addicts6 a generation was to make the claim that they were representative and importantthe beginnings of a new trend, analogous7 to the influential8 Lost Generation. Whether this claim was accurate when the term was coined might be debated, but as the influence of the Beat writers spread the exaggeration seemed less extreme.
The members of the beat generation were new bohemian libertines10, who engaged in a spontaneous, sometimes messy, creativity. The beat writers produced a body of written work controversial both for its advocacy of non-conformity and for its non-conforming style. Followers11 of Beat literature did not emerge until the late 1950s and early 1960s: Kerouac's On The Road , which heralded12 the beginning of Beat popularity, was not published until 1957.
Echoes of the Beat Generation run throughout all the forms of alternative/counter culture that have existed since then . The Beat Generation can be seen as the first modern subculture. See the Influences on Western Culture section below. Both Howl and Naked Lunch became the focus of obscenity trials in the United States that helped to liberalize what could be legally published.
History
The canonical13 beat generation authors met in New York: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and later Gregory Corso. In the mid-1950s this group expanded to include figures associated with the San Francisco Renaissance14 such as Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Harold Norse, Lew Welch, and Kirby Doyle.
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 subject material: There was Herbert Huncke, a drug addict5 and petty thief met by Burroughs in 1946; and Hal Chase, an anthropologist15 from Denver who in 1947 introduced into the group Neal Cassady.
Also important were the oft-neglected women in the original circle, including Joan Vollmer and Edie Parker. Their apartment in the upper west side of Manhattan often functioned as a salon16 and Joan Vollmer in particular was a serious participant in the marathon discussion sessions.
The Kammerer Stabbing
William 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, presumably an association based on their shared homosexual orientation17 and intellectual tendencies.
As a boys' youth-group leader in the mid-1930s, David Kammerer became infatuated with the young Lucien Carr . Kammerer formed a pattern of following Carr around the country as he attended different colleges. In the fall of 1942, at the University of Chicago, Kammerer introduced 17-year-old Lucien Carr to William S. Burroughs.
Burroughs was a Harvard-graduate who lived off a stipend18 from his relatively wealthy family. His grandfather had invented the Burroughs Adding Machine, though the amount of wealth in the family is often exaggerated .
The three became good friends, whose sprees got Burroughs kicked out of his rooming house and culminated19 in Carr confined in a mental ward20 after an apparent attempted suicide with a gas oven .
In the spring of 1943, Carr's family moved him to Columbia University in New York, where Kammerer, and then Burroughs shortly followed. At Columbia, Carr met the freshman21 Allen Ginsberg, whom he introduced to Burroughs and Kammerer. Edie Parker, another member of the crowd, introduced Carr to her boyfriend Jack Kerouac once he came back from his stint22 as a merchant marine23. In 1944, Carr introduced Kerouac and Burroughs.
Kammerer's fixation was obvious to everyone in the circle, and he became jealous as Carr developed a relationship with a young woman . In mid-August, 1944, Lucien Carr killed him with a boyscout knife in what may have been self-defense after an altercation24 in a park on the Hudson river.
Carr disposed of the body into the river. He first went to Burroughs for advice, who recommended he get a lawyer and turn himself in with a claim of self-defense. Instead, Carr went to Kerouac, who helped him dispose of the weapon.
Carr turned himself in the next morning and Kerouac and Burroughs were both charged as accessories to the crime. Burroughs quickly got the money for bail25, but Kerouac's parents refused to post it for him. Edie Parker and her family came through, with the condition that they be married immediately.
The 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 dealing26 in stolen goods and narcotics27 and developing a decades long addiction28 to 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 supreme29 reality, and somehow felt that Huncke, as a member of the underclass had learned things they were sheltered from in their middle/upper-middle class lives.
Various problems resulted from this association: In 1949 Ginsberg was in trouble with the law . He pleaded insanity30 and was briefly31 committed to 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 Dadaism. 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 insulin shock treatments applied32 at Bellevue, and this is one of the things referred to in Ginsberg's poem Howl . After his release, Solomon became the publishing contact that agreed to publish Burroughs' first novel Junky shortly before another episode resulted in him being committed again.
Neal Cassady
The introduction of Neal Cassady into the scene in 1947 had a number of effects. A number of the beats were enthralled34 with Cassady Ginsberg had an affair with him; 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 babble35 that later became associated with beatniks . 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 . On the Road, written somewhat in this style, transformed Cassady into a cultural icon37: a hyper wildman, frequently broke- going from woman to woman, car to car, town to town; largely amoral, but frantically38 engaged with life.
The time lags involved in the publication of Kerouac's On the Road often creates confusion: It was written in 1952 shortly after John Clellon Holmes published Go, and the article This is the beat generation and it covered events that took 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.
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 scroll39 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 text after it is written though there remains40 some question about how carefully Kerouac observed this rule. Although Kerouac maintained he wrote this particular book in one mad 3-week burst, it is clear from manuscript evidence that he had previously41 written several drafts and had been contemplating42 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 deviation43 from his dictum- although, to be fair, he had written the book before devising this code.
Gregory Corso
In 1950 Gregory Corso met Ginsberg, who was impressed by the poetry Corso had written while incarcerated44 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 waned46. Corso's first book The Vestal Lady on Brattle and Other Poems appeared in 1955.
San Francisco
Some time later there was much cross-pollination with San Francisco area writers . Ferlinghetti became a focus of the scene as well as the older poet Rexroth, whose apartment became a Friday night literary salon. Rexroth organized the famous Six Gallery reading in 1955, the first public appearance of Ginsberg's poem Howl.
An account of the Six Gallery reading forms the second chapter of Jack Kerouac's 1958 novel The Dharma Bums47, a novel about another poet that read at the event: Gary Snyder . Most of the people in the Beat movement had urban backgrounds and they found Snyder to be an almost exotic inpidual, with his backcountry and rural experience, and his education in cultural anthropology48 and Oriental languages. Lawrence Ferlinghetti has referred to him as 'the Thoreau of the Beat Generation. One of the primary subjects of The Dharma Bums is Buddhism49, and the different attitudes that Kerouac and Snyder have towards it. The Dharma Bums undoubtedly50 helped to popularize Buddhism in the West.
Women of the Beat Generation
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 omission51 is largely a reflection of the sexism of the time rather than a reflection of the actual state of affairs.
Joan Vollmer 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 Neal Cassady, no one chose to write a book about her; she has gone down in history as the wife of William Burroughs, killed by him in a shooting incident.
Gregory Corso insisted that there were many female beats, in particular, he claimed that a young woman he met in mid-1955 introduced Kerouac and Ginsberg to subjects such as Li Po and was in fact their original teacher regarding eastern religion .
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 . This is confirmed by Diane di Prima :
I can't say a lot of really great women writers were ignored in my time, but I can say a lot of 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 ...
However, a number of female beats have perservered, notably54 Joyce Johnson ; Carolyn Cassady ; Hettie Jones ; Joanne Kyger ; Harriet Sohmers Zwerling; and the aforementioned Diane di Prima . Later, other women writers emerged who were strongly influenced by the beats, such as Janine Pommy Vega in the 1960s, and Patti Smith in the early 1970s.
The Beatnik stereotype57
The term Beatnik was coined by Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle on April 2, 1958 as a derogatory term, and was probably a reference to the recent Russian satellite Sputnik. Caen's coining of this term appeared to suggest that beatniks were far out of the mainstream58 of society and possibly pro-Communist. Caen's new term stuck and became the popular label associated with a new stereotype of men with goatees and berets playing bongos while women wearing black leotards dance. It should be noted59 that thousands of young people on college campuses and even in high schools came to regard themselves as beats or beatniks in the late 1950s and very early 1960s and many of them behaved in a manner very similar to that of the popular stereotype; indeed they comprised a cultural movement of sorts, apart from the literary beats, and often were proud to be called beatniks.
Influences on Western culture
There are many authors who can claim to be influenced by the beats ; but the Beat Generation phenomenon itself has had a huge influence on Western Culture overall, larger than just the effects of some writers and artists on other writers and artists.
In many ways, the Beats can be taken as the first subculture . 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.
There's no question that Beats produced a great deal of interest in lifestyle experimentation62 ; and they had a large intellectual effect in encouraging the questioning of authority ; and many of them were very active in popularizing interest in Zen Buddhism in the West.
A quotation63 from Allen Ginsberg's A Definition of the Beat Generation as published in Friction64, 1 , revised for Beat Culture and the New America: 1950-1965:
Some essential effects of Beat Generation artistic movement can be characterized in the following terms:
Spiritual liberation, sexual revolution or liberation, i.e., gay liberation, somewhat catalyzing65 women's liberation, black liberation, Gray Panther activism.
Liberation of the word from censorship.
Demystification and/or decriminalization of some laws against marijuana and other drugs.
The evolution of rhythm and blues66 into 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.
The spread of ecological67 consciousness, emphasized early on by Gary Snyder and Michael McClure, the notion of a Fresh Planet.
Opposition68 to the military-industrial machine civilization, as emphasized in writings of Burroughs, Huncke, Ginsberg, and Kerouac.
Attention to what Kerouac called a second religiousness developing within an advanced civilization.
Return to an appreciation69 of idiosyncrasy as against state regimentation70.
Respect for land and indigenous71 peoples and creatures, as proclaimed by Kerouac in his slogan from On the Road: The Earth is an Indian thing.
The essence of the phrase beat generation may be found in On the Road with the celebrated72 phrase: Everything belongs to me because I am poor.
