The phrase “beat generation” rose out of a specific conversation with Jack Kerouac and John Clellon Holmes around ’50-’51 when, discussing the nature of generations recollecting the glamour of the lost generation, Kerouac said, Ah, this is nothing but a beat generation. They discussed whether it was a “Found” generation, which Kerouac sometimes referred to, or “Angelic” generation, and/or various other epithets. But, Kerouac waved away the question and said, “beat generation” not meaning to name the generation but to un-name it.
John Clellon Holmes’ celebrated article in late ’52 in the New York Times magazine section carried the headline title “This is the Beat Generation”; that caught public eye. Then Kerouac published anonymously a fragment of On the Road in New American Writing, a paperback anthology of the 50s, called “Jazz of the Beat Generation”, and that reinforced the curiously poetic phrase. So that’s the early history of the term “Beat Generation” itself.
Herbert Huncke, author of The Evening Sun Turned Crimson and friend of Kerouac, Burroughs and others of that literary circle from the 40s, introduced them to what was then known as “hip language.” In that context the word “beat” is a carnival “subterranean” (subcultural) term, a term much used in Times Square in the ’40s. “Man, I’m beat . . . “meaning without money and without a place to stay. Could also refer to those “who walked all night with shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam heat and opium” (Howl). Or, as in a conversation, “Would you like to go to the Bronx Zoo?” “Nah, man, I’m too beat, I was up all night.” So, the original street usage meant exhausted, at the bottom of the world, looking up or out, sleepless, wide-eyed, perceptive, rejected by society, on your own, streetwise. Or, as it was once implied, finished, undone, completed, in the dark night of the soul or in the cloud of unknowing. “Open,” as in Whitmanic sense of “openness,” equivalent to humility, and so it was interpreted in various circles to mean emptied out, exhausted, and at the same time wide-open—perceptive and receptive to a vision.
A third meaning of the term beatific was articulated in 1959 by Kerouac, counteracting abuse of the term in media (the term being interpreted as being beaten completely, a “loser” without the aspect of humble intelligence, or “Beat” as “the beat of the drums” and “the beat goes on”: varying mistakes of interpretation or etymology). Kerouac did try to indicate the correct sense of the word by pointing out the root—beat—as in beatitude, or beatific, (various interviews and lectures). In his essay, Origins of the Beat Generation, Kerouac defined it so. This is a definition made early within the popular culture, (circa late-fifties) though it was already a basic understanding of the subculture (circa mid-forties): he clarified his intention, ‘beat’ as beatific, the necessary beatness or darkness that precedes opening up to the light, egolessness, giving room for religious illumination.
A fourth meaning accumulated, that of the “beat generation literary movement.” This was a group of friends who had worked together on poetry, prose and cultural conscience from the mid-forties until the term became popular nationally in the late fifties. The group consisting of Kerouac and his prototype hero of On the Road—Neal Cassady, William Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch and other books, Herbert Huncke, John Clellon Holmes, author of Go, The Horn, and other books, Allen Ginsberg, myself; we met Carl Solomon and Philip Lamantia in ’48: encountered Gregory Corso in 1950, and we first saw Peter Orlovsky in 1954.
By the mid-fifties this smaller circle, through natural affinity of modes of thought or literary style or planetary perspective, was augmented in friendship and literary endeavor by a number of writers in San Francisco, including Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and a number of other powerful but lesser-known poets such as Jack Micheline, Ray Bremser, or the better-known black poet LeRoi Jones—all of whom accepted the term at one time or another, humorously or seriously, but sympathetically, and were included in a survey of beat general manners, morals, and literature by Life magazine in a lead article in the late 50s by one Paul O’Neill, and by the journalist Alfred Aronowitz in a large series on the Beat Generation in the New York Post. Neal Cassady, who was interviewed in both surveys, was writing at the time: his works were published posthumously.
By the mid-fifties a sense of some mutual trust and interest was developed with Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, as well as with Robert Creeley and other alumni of Black Mountain. Of that literary circle, Kerouac, Whalen, Snyder, poet Lew Welch, Orlovsky as well as Ginsberg and others were interested in meditation and Buddhism. Relationship between Buddhism and its friends in the “beat generation” can be found in a recent scholarly survey of the evolution of Buddhism in America, How the Swans Came to the Lake, by Rick Fields.
The fifth meaning of the phrase “Beat Generation” is the influence of the literary and artistic activities of poets, filmmakers, painters, writers and novelists who were working in concert in anthologies, publishing houses, independent filmmaking, and other media. Some effects of the aforementioned groups refreshed the bohemian culture which was already a long tradition (in film and still photography, Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie; in music, David Amram; in painting, Larry Rivers; in poetry publishing, Don Allen, Barney Rosset, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti) extended to fellow artists, such as Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer, and to the youth movement of that day, which was also growing; and was absorbed by the mass and middle class culture of the late 50s and early 60s. These effects can be characterized in the following terms;
• Spiritual Liberation; Sexual “Revolution” or “Liberation,” i.e. Gay Liberation, Black Liberation, Women’s Liberation, Grey Panther activism, etc.,
• Liberation of the Word from censorship,
• Demystification and/or decriminalization of some laws against marijuana and other drugs,
• The evolution of rhythm and blues into rock ’n’ roll into high art form, as evidenced by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and other popular musicians influenced in the late 1950s and 60s by beat generation poets’ and writers’ works,
• The spread of ecological consciousness, emphasized early by Gary Snyder and Michael McClure; notion of a “Fresh Planet,”
• Opposition to the military-industrial machine civilization, as emphasized in the works of Burroughs, Huncke, Ginsberg, and Kerouac,
• Attention to what Kerouac called, after Spengler, “Second Religiousness” developing within an advanced civilization,
• Return to appreciation of idiosyncrasy as against state regimentation, and
• 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.”
The essence of the phrase “beat generation” can be found in On the Road in another celebrated phrase, “Everything belongs to me because I am poor.”
1981