[It’s] a story of many restless travelings and at the same time an imaginative survey of a new generation known as the “Hip” (The Knowing), with emphasis on their problems in the mid-century 50s and their historical relationship with preceding generations…. This new generation has a conviction that it alone has known everything, or been “hip,” in the history of the world.
—JACK KEROUAC
The critic Richard Meltzer lined up the affinities of postwar hip this way: Kerouac was Charlie Parker—the meteoric alpha soloist, a fuckup and ingrate, blowing chorus after chorus of his personal asymmetries into art that was neither happy nor sad, but contained excesses of both. Ginsberg was Dizzy Gillespie—the articulator of principles, self-promoter, persevering while his peers flamed out, deceptively brilliant underneath the showman’s spiel. William Burroughs was the sphinxlike Thelonious Monk, deconstructing paragraphs rather than chords—opaque and uncompromising, wary of all group identity, cult or mass. Coming together in the same years as the bop musicians, the writers formed a parallel subculture that was just as self-mythologizing, exploratory and defiantly young, refusing the era’s most insistent demand: that they grow up and out of such curiosities. Both groups made exile a lifestyle choice. These six writers and musicians are all gone now, many at an early age, but their life-affirming refusal has held sway ever since.
For the purposes of this book I’ve tried to distinguish hip from simple trendiness or consumer choice. Though the latter are often part of the bargain, hip and hepi preceded them, and tell us more about who we are or want to be. When people talk about “hip” hotels or restaurants, or how demolition derby or Mexican wrestling have become hip, this usage signals currency but not necessarily meaning. This currency is a boon to marketers and lifestyle magazines, which bathe it in the narcotic pleasures of buying and flaunting. But currency by itself can be exhausting, and produces mainly a lot of future trivia. Aficionados of the Von Dutch trucker hat or amateur burlesque, which were in vogue at the time of writing, should bear in mind that we know such quaint expressions as pet rock or dookie rope because somewhere, somehow, enough people once thought these were hip. Today’s Red Bull cocktails are tomorrow’s Rob Roys or sidecars.
For the bop and Beat generations, who have endured periodic bouts of trendiness, speed and transience served a more liberating function. Beyond its trend value, speed protects behavior or ideas from the public eye. It is a license to ill. For example, the language developed by antebellum slaves protected the speakers’ meaning from nosy whites. The bohemians of Greenwich Village or the hipsters of the Harlem Renaissance used the speed of innovation to keep their critics a step behind. This protection, or grace, is a kind of forgiveness claimed in advance. Under its umbrella, hip becomes not sumptuary correctness—the right shoes or the right flip of the lip—but a state of forgiveness for being incorrect. The hipster, who is by nature out of step with the society that would judge him, lives within this grace; we admire him not for his perfection but for the blamelessness of his flaws. We should all have his or her capacity for error.
This connection between meaning and transience involves a perpetual reinvention of the now. It lives in the present. For the Wolof slaves who brought the word hip to America, the past provided sustenance but little autonomy. The future, in turn, was simply contingent. Instead of looking back in longing or forward to the justice of the next world, hip offered a way of rationing time into microfine slices of the present. Subsequent hipsters, from the major writers of the 1850s to the existentialists manqué of pulp, sought grace in the imperfections of the present. Walt Whitman, patron saint of the chapter at hand, saw this quest as an inevitable turn inward, opening the self to absorb the flaws and contradictions of the society around him. To live wholly in the present, he understood, was to be as bad as it was. Being better than your times is for saints and prisses, who live for future rewards. “I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also,” he wrote, adding, “Great is Wickedness—I find I often admire it, just as much as I admire goodness / Do you call that a paradox? It certainly is a great paradox.” Though the paradox is always the same, at any instant hip requires that its terms be written anew.
From different angles, the musicians and writers of hip’s golden age shared each other’s isolation and intent. Not since the 1920s did a group of white writers and their peers identify the best of themselves in such specifically African-American terms. “It’s all bop,” Ginsberg wrote in a 1956 letter to his mentor, the Columbia professor Mark Van Doren, describing his recent work and that of his peers. “Unworried wild poetry, full of perception, that’s the lillipop.” For both groups, the Great Depression of their childhood crimped their use of the past tense, and the atomic bomb made burlesque of the future. If the future could be erased at the turn of a key, it didn’t make sense to sacrifice the present for its rewards. For the white hipsters of the Beat generation, no one seemed to live more wholly in the present, with less regard for the past or future, than their African-American counterparts. The pursuit of the present, as Kerouac envisioned it in On the Road (1957), looked explicitly across the gulf of race: “At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Whelton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.”
In an era that saw the reasoned devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the bebop musicians and Beat writers produced art that was unreasonable. Instead of rendering polished works, they celebrated the jagged moment of experience, which is intuitive rather than rational; it moves on as soon as reason catches up. This was the virtue of improvisation, distinct from the perfections of composition. Following the lead of the musicians, who rejected swing’s tight arrangements, the writers put themselves in the same tense as their audience, working things out on the fly—“wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better,” as Kerouac put it, releasing “unspeakable visions of the individual.” Spitting their words or notes headlong, they perfected an aesthetic of imperfection. For this they earned a mixture of public condemnation and discipleship. The word bebopper became a code word for juvenile delinquent, and Herbert Hoover declared the Beat generation one of the three most dangerous groups in America, along with communists and “eggheads.” Within his lifetime, the six generational avatars named above each saw his legacy reduced to a caricature and a commercial imitation; all but Parker lived to see it expand to massive social upheaval, by which I mean the extension of the now.
Encounters between the two groups were rarely substantive, but there are at least two worth mentioning. In 1958, after a gig at the Five Spot on St. Mark’s Place, Ginsberg gave Monk a copy of Howl, the book that thrust the Beats’ raw prolixity on the public (“Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!”). The taciturn Monk nodded: “Makes sense.” Two years later, after scoring psilocybin from Timothy Leary, Ginsberg passed some to Gillespie and Monk, hoping to start a revolution of the mind. Monk was unimpressed. “Got anything stronger?” he asked.
Of these six innovators, all born between 1914 and 1926, none survived to the new century. Parker never saw 35, and Kerouac never saw 50, and in truth both men had diligently corroded their talents well before their early deaths. Just 12 years after the publication of On the Road made Kerouac an emblem for a generation, granting him a celebrity he found unbearable, fewer than 300 people came to his funeral. Many of their peers also raced toward early deaths. Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), who splashed bop rhythms across his enormous canvases, silenced his demons in a car accident on Long Island before he turned 45; James Dean (1931–1955), bearer of the Beat shrug, lost control of his racing car at 24; Lenny Bruce (1925–1966) OD’d at 41; Neal Cassady (1926–1968), Kerouac’s tour guide to the American night, surrendered to the elements at age 41. (Early death, as a public romance, is the ultimate renunciation of the future tense.) Had they lived, what turns they might have seen. Within a generation of their deaths, their transgressions had fallen to greater outrage, perpetrated not in back alleys but in big-money ad campaigns. Burroughs in his lifetime made a commercial for Nike, while Kerouac and James Dean, like Miles Davis and Chet Baker, appeared posthumously in ads for the Gap. No longer controversial quasi-criminals, they became hip avatars of casual Fridays. Except for Gillespie, all lived with depression, addiction or other psychiatric disturbance, and this emotional weather—this overbearing now—figured prominently in both their work and their public image.
What the two groups left, besides their music and writing, were the sands of their own erasure. Bebop marked the transitional spasm of jazz as a popular music, replaced by the more elemental, marketable sounds of rhythm and blues. The Beats, similarly, marked the last fling of poetry as the chief delivery system for the poetic. When future bards wanted a vehicle for sentiments like “Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb,” an icebreaker from Ginsberg’s poem “America,” they could turn to the more elemental, marketable medium of rock and roll. Rock made absurdism easy. A verbal non sequitur like Ginsberg’s “hydrogen jukebox,” which begged heavy lifting on the page, simply kept the beat in a rock song, and provided material for late-night stoned discussion. (The aspiring poets who called themselves the Beatles, spelled I-think-you-know-why, were just one example.) It is impossible now to imagine an America enthralled and threatened by the habits of, say, Wynton Marsalis and the recent poet laureate Billy Collins, and not just because these two men go light on thrall and threat. As jazz and poetry have receded into publicly funded respectability, the lasting impact of bop and Beat now plays on a bigger, louder stage.
Ginsberg, who had a remarkable gift for embracing and blessing future movements, saw his generation’s legacy as the invention of a new baseline. “[I]t went beyond anything we ‘planned,’” he told the writer Bruce Cook. “It was a visionary experience in 1948, when we started. Now everybody sees and understands these things.” The generations bop and Beat stood at the precipice of this 1960s counterculture, shaping its foundations and then falling back as the media phenomenon moved on without them. Though they were called the Beat generation, as Hettie Cohen once said, they could have all fit in her living room. They were radical individualists overtaken by a narrative of the collective. Their truest heirs—let’s say Muhammad Ali for Parker, Bob Dylan for Ginsberg—were those who could persuade the public that their narcissism was an instrument of generational catharsis, not private need.
Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs converged at Columbia University in 1944, arriving by different paths. Jean-Louis Kerouac (1922–1969), a football star from the French-Canadian part of Lowell, Massachusetts, came to New York on an athletic scholarship to attend Horace Mann high school and then Columbia. English was his second language. He arrived in love with jazz and the movies, passions that even in his bitter years never deserted him. Kerouac was constitutionally the most conservative of the group, imprinted by his Catholic upbringing and blue-collar roots. He married early and enlisted in the Navy, but lacked the capacity for subordination that makes for success in war or marriage. After a series of petty rebellions, he told a Navy shrink that the only thing he believed in was “absolute personal freedom at all times.” The service deemed him a schizoid personality with “angel tendencies” and granted an honorable discharge for indifferent character. Neither of his two marriages lasted much longer than his military career. The son of a printer, Kerouac returned to New York from the Navy with the intention he had expressed since the age of 10, to become a writer. By the time he met his future comrades, he had a novel under his belt (the still-unpublished “The Sea Is My Brother,” about his maritime adventures) and the seeds of a lasting and little-remarked friendship with a fellow Horace Mann alum named William F. Buckley, on whose television program he later renounced much of what the Beats held dear.
Irwin Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), four years younger than Kerouac, arrived at Columbia from Paterson, New Jersey, in 1943, aided by a $200 scholarship from the union offices of the CIO in New Jersey. His father, Louis, was a modestly successful poet and high school English teacher. His mother, Naomi, a Russian immigrant, spent most of her adult life in and out of mental institutions, where she received insulin shock and other ungentle therapies. As a child, Allen often stayed home to read to her, seeking a bond that would offset the painful impressions of his mother, naked and raving. When she was in the hospital, he said later, he sometimes sought comfort beside his sleeping father, rubbing his erect penis against Louis in the night. Ginsberg went to Columbia with the idea of becoming a lawyer, not a poet. He met Kerouac in the spring of 1944 through a handsome mutual friend named Lucien Carr (later the father of Caleb Carr). Within a few hours, he was in love. The school expelled him the following year after he was discovered in his dorm bed with Kerouac (not sexually, as it happened) and for smudging an obscenity on his grimy window (a lovely metaphor for the career to come).
William Seward Burroughs II (1914–1997), the oldest of the group, carried the burden of two prominent American bloodlines. His mother descended from Robert E. Lee; his paternal grandfather built and perfected the modern adding machine, starting the company that still bears the family name. By the time of Bill’s delinquent youth, both family lines had diminished to middle class respectability in suburban St. Louis. At Columbia, he played literary mentor to his younger friends, encouraging them to devour the moderns and pushing them to read Oswald Spengler’s withering The Decline of the West (1926–1928), which described a culture in its last days, mirroring the fall of classical Greece. Amiri Baraka, one of the few African Americans among the Beats, saw Spengler’s vision of decadence, in which artists no longer catered to mainstream society, as a unifying model for the generation. “Burroughs’s addicts, Kerouac’s mobile young voyeurs, my own Negroes, are literally not included in the mainstream of American life,” wrote Baraka, who published many of the Beats in the zines Yugen and the Floating Bear. “These characters are people whom Spengler called Fellaheen, people living on the ruins of a civilization. They are Americans no character in a John Updike novel would be happy to meet, but they are nonetheless Americans, formed out of the conspicuously tragic evolution of modern American life.”
Burroughs introduced the others to the criminal and queer byways of Times Square. His guide was the thief and raconteur Herbert Huncke (1915–1996), who had a complexion “the spectralized color of blue cheese” and an untutored literary voice that Ginsberg heard as the “sensitive vehicle for a veritable new consciousness.” Huncke initially helped Burroughs fence a stolen gun and some morphine styrettes. These two species of contraband, drugs and guns, became twin obsessions in Burroughs’s life and fiction, the former exerting totalitarian control over individuals, the latter a last defense against it. Burroughs was the bridge between the Ivy League and this other world, with a cold eye for either. He had a zoological detachment from the specimens that wandered through his writing: “Subway Mike had a large, pale face and long teeth. He looked like some specialized kind of underground animal that preys on the animals of the surface.” Where his friends were drunk with words, Burroughs understood language also as an instrument of state ideology, and eventually began cutting up and reassembling his manuscripts to interrupt any unbidden agenda sneaking into the lines.
Neal Cassady, a reformatory kid from Denver’s skid row, arrived in December 1946 after exchanging letters with Kerouac’s friend Hal Chase. Cassady, immortalized in On the Road as Dean Moriarty and as the title character of Kerouac’s more experimental Visions of Cody, was the straw that stirred the drink, all fast talk, hyperactive energy and cowboy myth—“a wild yea-saying overburst of American joy,” as the narrator, Sal Paradise, describes Dean in On the Road. By the time he turned 21, Neal said he had stolen 500 cars and spent 15 months in reform schools. He came to New York asking Kerouac to teach him to write. Prolifically unfaithful and irresponsible, unburdened by guilt, Cassady entranced his new friends. Ginsberg had an affair with Cassady; Kerouac had an open affair with Neal’s wife, Carolyn Cassady. “What got Kerouac and Ginsberg about Cassady was the energy of the archetypal West, the energy of the frontier, still coming down,” said the West Coast poet Gary Snyder, who appears as Japhy Ryder in Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. “Cassady is the cowboy crashing.”
But more than that, Kerouac saw Cassady as the untamed primitive in a body that looked uncannily like his own. To the orderly Kerouac, who lived with his mother between adventures, Cassady stood for the freedom and failure that whirled just beyond his own capacity for disorder. He admired Neal and joined in his holy goofs, but always returned to “Memere” to write. Cassady wrote voluminous, hilarious, profane, stream-of-consciousness letters. In December 1950, Kerouac was struggling with a novel when he received a rambling 40-page letter from Cassady, stuffed with philosophical musings and erotic adventure. It was as if a mind had disgorged its contents all at once, uninhibited by propriety or the cavils of form and grammar. For Kerouac, it was a light. “I have renounced fiction and fear,” he wrote Cassady in response. “There is nothing to do but write the truth.” Hooking his typewriter to a 120-foot roll of teletype paper, he banged out On the Road—one paragraph, single spaced—in three flurried weeks.
The assembled writers looked on an America in the throes of sweeping change. “The Cold War,” as Ginsberg diagnosed it, “is the imposition of a vast mental barrier on everybody, a vast antinatural psyche. A hardening, a shutting off of the perception of desire and tenderness…. So let’s say shyness. Fear. Fear of total feeling, really, total being is what it is.” For all the gauzy nostalgia that engulfs it now, World War II sent men home complicit in a new level of civilized barbarity. “What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought, anyway?” asked the war correspondent Edgar Jones in the Atlantic Monthly. “We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers.” American firebomb raids killed as many as 100,000 civilians in a night. The atomic bomb, dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, gave human beings the destructive power of gods, which in turn elevated the rebellions of individuals to serious threats. The Cold War redefined the enemy not as a country but as a belief system, which could replicate anywhere. The reaction was Ginsberg’s “vast mental barrier,” a vigilant intolerance to new or different ideas.
The rational world, it seemed to the Beats, had turned on itself. As John Clellon Holmes, a Columbia peer who published the first recognized Beat novel, Go, in 1952, noted, “The burden of my generation was the knowledge that something rational had caused all this (the feeling that something had gotten dreadfully, dangerously out of hand…) and that nothing rational could end it.” At the same time, the prosperity that shaped the nation at peace was equally sweeping, providing unprecedented pleasures even as it made unprecedented demands. It defied perspective. Thanks to the industrial buildup before the country entered the war, America at the end had half the world’s manufacturing capacity, two-thirds of its gold stocks and half its money. It produced twice as much oil as the rest of the world combined. This dynamism was less a respite from the war mentality than an extension of it. Examined in books like David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) and William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956), the corporate bonanza locked its winners in cycles of earning and spending that negated the liberties it was supposed to provide. For a small but growing part of the population, the antidote was radical individualism, a luxury afforded by the same economic forces that channeled most Americans the other way. The country’s growth product was the middle class, which by 1960 included two-thirds of all Americans. The refugees from this class, stepping out on comforts they didn’t have to earn, became the nodding multitudes of hip.
The adjective beat, used to describe a human condition, goes back more than a century. Ann Charters, quoting an 1888 book called Hardtack and Coffee, traces it back at least to the Civil War, when it denoted “a lazy man or a shirk who would by hook or by crook get rid of all military or fatigue duty that he could.” Herbert Huncke, who introduced the word to the group, used it in the sense of the drug underworld, as in beat down, ragged, whipped, outside the game. In the fall of 1948, Kerouac and John Clellon Holmes were comparing their postwar circle with the Lost Generation, which had come together out of similar dissatisfaction after the previous war. Gertrude Stein had christened the Lost Generation after watching the directionless men at an auto shop. As Holmes remembered, Kerouac saw as emblematic the wary hipsters in Times Square:
“It’s a sort of furtiveness,” [Kerouac] said. “Like we were a generation of furtives. You know, with an inner knowledge there’s no use flaunting on that level, the level of the ‘public,’ a kind of beatness—I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we are—and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world…. It’s something like that. So I guess you might say we’re a beat generation,” and he laughed a conspiratorial, the-Shadow-knows kind of laugh at his own words and at the look on my face.
For a group of intellectuals who considered themselves a despised minority, or fellaheen, “beat” had many of the original connotations of hepi or hip. It was the light at the bottom of the tunnel. Kerouac later said that the word’s signifiance came to him in the church of Ste. Jeanne d’Arc in Lowell, where he prayed before a statue of the Virgin Mary and was answered with a vision of beat as beatific. Especially after Norman Mailer’s “White Negro” essay connected the hipster with violent pathologies, Kerouac went out of his way to stress the gentle, pacifist leanings in beat. In The Dharma Bums, he quotes Japhy Ryder, the Gary Snyder character, climbing high on the granola mountaintop to declaim “a vision of a great rucksack revolution, thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad….”(The rest of the book is not this fatuous, I promise.) After publishing Go in 1952, John Holmes wrote an essay for the New York Times titled “This Is the Beat Generation” that explained beat as a spiritual quest, a “will to believe,” despite “the valueless abyss of modern life.” Michael McClure, the San Francisco poet, placed the Beats in equally uncontroversial light, as the “literary wing of the environmental movement.”
It didn’t matter. One indisputable fact about the Beats is that they were a divisive force, and however benign or inoffensive the language they wrapped around themselves, the truth—“Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb”—was more exciting, more threatening and more commercially viable. Through their writings, often about themselves, they promulgated the hip promise that society’s margins held more of its life than the mainstream. They were the circus that some children ran away to join, others wished they had the nerve, and even more parents feared lest their children run next. Dislodging themselves from the complacency of the Eisenhower era, the Beats indulged the horror, sadism, sexuality or unbridled irresponsibility that lay just outside the average Joe’s grasp. “Ever see a hot shot hit, kid?” a doper raconteur asks a post–Ivy League patsy in Burroughs’s 1959 novel Naked Lunch. “I saw the Gimp catch one in Philly. We rigged his room with a one-way whorehouse mirror and charged a sawski to watch it. He never got the needle out of his arm. They don’t if the shot is right. That’s the way they find them, dropper full of clotted blood hanging out of a blue arm. The look in his eyes when it hit—Kid, it was tasty….”
In the Republican decorum of the 1950s the writers talked about cocks and drugs and negroes—negro cocks, even—in language that intimated that they knew whereof they spoke. How awful; how liberating. Drugs helped. The Beat poet Diane di Prima, one of the few women who held her own with the men, later explained to her daughter: “‘Honey, you see, we all thought experience itself was good. Any experience. That it could only be good to experience as much as possible.’…[A]nything that took us outside—that gave us the dimensions of the box we were caught in, an aerial view, as it were—showed us the exact arrangement of the maze we were walking, was a blessing. A small satori. Because we knew we were caught….” Processing this experience, the Beats broadcast their intimate secrets, defying an era that suspected secrets and intimacy more than anything. Though as a movement they were not overtly political, they combined what the feminist writer Barbara Ehrenreich identified as two deeper currents of American rebellion. In the Beats, she noted, “the two strands of male protest—one directed against the white-collar work world and the other against the suburbanized family life that work was supposed to support—come together into the first all-out critique of American consumer culture.” In place of work and family, which link to the past and future, they chose the immediacy of pleasure and motion.
Their enlightenment, which they often saw in Buddhist terms, was not gentle. In the summer of 1948, Ginsberg had what he called “the only really genuine experience I feel I’ve had,” shortly after the traumatic experience of authorizing a lobotomy of his mother (since his parents were divorced, Allen or his brother Eugene had to sign the papers). He was reading William Blake and masturbating in his apartment in Spanish Harlem when the voice of Blake entered the room, telling him to “cultivate the terror, get right into it.” The following year, after being arrested in connection with one of Huncke’s robbery schemes, he was committed to Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute for eight months. The two experiences enabled the breakthrough of “Howl” in 1955, a poem that had the long lines and messianic ambitions of Whitman, wearing all its emotional raw spots on the surface. When Ginsberg performed it for the first time at the Six Gallery in San Francisco that October, at a legendary reading that united the East Coast Beats with their West Coast counterparts, McClure recognized that “a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America.” The poem’s dedication, “For Carl Solomon,” referred to a patient Ginsberg had befriended in the institution, and the poem equated the oppressive therapies inside the hospital with those on the outside. He assured his friend, “I’m with you in Rockland where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body.” (Solomon, a mercurial Beat figure, later worked at the publisher Ace Books, where he signed the manuscript to Burroughs’s Junky but rejected On the Road.)
The Beat circus, as followed by the public, also included an aura of violence. In the summer of 1944, shortly after the principal characters met at Columbia, Lucien Carr fatally stabbed a former teacher named David Kammerer who had stalked him around the country. Burroughs advised Carr to turn himself in; Carr turned instead to Kerouac, who helped him dispose of the knife and was eventually arrested as a material witness. Because Carr belonged to a prominent St. Louis family, the killing was front-page news. The headline in the New York Times ran: “Columbia Student Kills Friend and Sinks Body in Hudson River.” Seven years later, in the Mexico apartment of a friend named John Healy, Burroughs fatally shot his wife, Joan, in a wasted game of William Tell using a champagne glass and a .45. Charged with criminal imprudence, he jumped bail on the advice of his lawyer and went into mobile exile, eventually settling in a male whorehouse in Tangier.
Amid this personal chaos, the Beats found direction in the rhythmic bleat of jazz, and by extension in a romance of black identity. Three decades after Carl Van Vechten and the Negrotarians of the 1920s sought release in the nightclubs of Harlem, the Beats updated the romance of the primitive. Instead of admiring black culture from the spectator box, they saw themselves as one with it. Where the Negrotarians had engaged black culture as third-party consumers, the Beats wanted to be active participants, blowing their own jazz and living their own marginal existence, as alienated from white America’s attentions as the narrator of Ellison’s Invisible Man. Their role models were the studious iconoclasts of bop. “[We] felt like blacks caught in a square world that wasn’t enough for us,” John Holmes wrote. They were pursuing the same questions of America, and were equally dissatisfied with the official answers. Ginsberg described “Howl” as a “jazz mass” and likened its effulgent syntax to “the myth of Lester Young, as described by Kerouac, blowing eighty-nine choruses of ‘Lady Be Good.’” Kerouac had similar aspirations: “I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday.”
Kerouac’s interest in jazz was long-standing and intimate. At Horace Mann high school, he hit the Harlem nightclubs with a classmate named Seymour Wyse, and started a jazz column in the school paper. Having lost his virginity to a midtown hooker, he took his teen pleasures with the prostitutes who worked the uptown jazz circuit. He saw himself as a soloist careering between these bandstands, improvising phrases on end: “Yes, jazz and bop,” he told the poet Ted Berrigan, who interviewed him in 1968 for the Paris Review, “in a sense of a, say, a tenor man drawing a breath and blowing a phrase on his saxophone, till he runs out of breath, and when he does, his sentence, his statement’s been made…. That’s how I therefore separate my sentences, as breath separations of the mind…. Then there’s the raciness and freedom and humor of jazz instead of all that dreary analysis….” His speed-writing aspired to bop improvisation, which he saw, naïvely, as an unfiltered gush of the musical subconscious.
Where the white intellectuals and hipsters of the Harlem Renaissance looked to blacks to regenerate the center of American culture, the Beats romanticized black life at the margins, imagining it as spontaneous and uncorrupted, liberated from both the war legacy and the economy. It was their ticket away from the center. To be beat in the full scope of the word, beat down and beatified, was to approach a primitive state of grace. In his Mexico City Blues, written shortly after Charlie Parker’s death, Kerouac beseeched Bird’s spirit to “lay the bane, / off me, and everybody,” as if Parker’s marginal status was worth whatever hardships came with it. Needless to say, this is a distinctly white romance. As the Supreme Court struck down formal segregation in 1954, easing some of the barriers to black access, the Beats made a fetish of black disenfranchisement. The white negro, whether in Kerouac’s sense or Mailer’s, aspired to a life unburdened by aspiration—to be, as Sal Paradise dreams, “anything but what I was so drearily, a ‘white man’ disillusioned…wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted Negroes of America.” Those African Americans who would have exchanged their “happy” poverty for the opportunities the Beats were so eager to renounce were unrecognized in Kerouac’s cosmos.
The Beats’ racial romance served the writers’ needs better than their subjects’. Like bronzing a child’s shoes, it exalted them but also treated them as trophies. Except for Mardou, the crush-his-soul love interest of The Subterraneans, black characters in Kerouac’s work appear mainly as footmen to the white protagonists’ liberation. They remain white fantasies of blackness. Kerouac’s fancies of improvisation, similarly, ignored the discipline that underlies the freest blowing. The poet Kenneth Rexroth, detecting the aroma of minstrelsy, said that Kerouac “has exactly the attitude toward the American Negro that any redneck gallus-snapping Southern chauvinist has…. The Beat novelist just likes them that way. Mailer was right when he said that the hipster was a white Negro—but he neglected to point out that the Negro model the hipster imitates is the product of white imaginations.”
But at their least patronizing, the writers invoked the lacunae of jazz to suggest something beyond articulation, a momentary window of empathy:
Bird Parker who is only 18 year old has a crew cut of Africa looks impossible has perfect eyes and composures of a king when suddenly you stop and look at him in the subway and you can’t believe that bop is here to stay—that it is real, Negroes in America are just like us, we must look at them understanding the exact racial counterpart of what the man is—and figure it with histories and lost kings of immemorial tribes in jungle and Fellaheen town and otherwise…. And educated judges in horn-rimmed glasses reading the Amsterdam News.
Carl Hancock Rux, writing more recently about Eminem, notes that in the 21st century, “the new White Negro has not arrived at black culture…he was born into it. He has arrived at white culture with an authentic performance of whiteness.” For Kerouac and company, this patrimony was still beyond reach. They were peering through cigarette haze across a racial divide, looking for equivalencies and deliverance—seduced by the spectacle, as Robert Farris Thompson says, of people singing a sad song happy where some whites might sing it sad.
Response to the Beats followed in predictable symmetry. Government officials seized copies of Howl and Naked Lunch, unsuccessfully prosecuting their authors or distributors for obscenity—the nearest thing to a surefire marketing campaign, especially for such difficult, noncommercial texts. As if in counterpoint, tribes of correctly dressed bohemians began to appear in San Francisco and New York. Some were there before the Beats; others learned the way from their writing. The critic Robert Brustein pinned them as “conformists masquerading as rebels,” but it was Herb Caen, cranky columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, who cut them down to “beatniks.” Beat became a catchall for anything vaguely black-turtleneck. Rexroth, who had championed the Beats at the Six Gallery reading, grew disaffected, in part because he believed Kerouac had brokered an affair between Rexroth’s wife, Marthe, and the poet Robert Creeley. After Life magazine ran a sensationalistic look at beatniks and their lifestyles, Rexroth dismissed the Beat phenomenon as an invention of the Luce magazine empire.
One of hip’s paradoxes is that even as it professes antipathy to the market, it takes the shape the economy needs it to. For all their critique of American consumer culture, the Beats filled a Darwinian market niche. Their popularity complemented the postwar buildup in production capacity. American industry was turning out new stuff; the Beats prescribed an ethos of lifestyle change. Malcolm Cowley, who championed and eventually edited On the Road, against Kerouac’s wishes, had observed this phenomenon among his own Lost Generation. Bohemianism, he remarked wryly, serves late capitalism by promoting a “consumption ethic.” Writing about an earlier bohemian moment, he noted that all of its individualist or anti-establishment tendencies were also grounds for spending: “[S]elf-expression and paganism encouraged a demand for all sorts of products—modern furniture, beach pajamas, cosmetics, colored bathrooms with toilet paper to match. Living for the moment meant buying an automobile, radio or house, using it now and paying for it tomorrow. Female equality”—not exactly a major Beat concern, but still—“was capable of doubling the consumption of products—cigarettes, for example—that had formerly been used by men alone.”
The consumer culture saw possibilities in the new huddled masses. If they rejected the old way of living, why not sell them a new one, with accessories to match? Like bebop, the Beats suggested a whole range of product lines. Playboy, which launched in 1953 with its own version of the revolution, ran an ad offering swell goods: “Join the beat generation! Buy a beat generation tieclasp! A beat generation sweatshirt! A beat generation ring!” After the September 1957 publication of On the Road, Atlantic Records placed an ad in the Village Voice trumpeting, “Atlantic is the label in tune with the BEAT generation. We produce the music with the BEAT for you. Write for free catalogue.” You might notice the absence of references to spiritual revelation in these ads (to say nothing of the delirium of black cocks). This is how hip moves from the inner circle to the masses, losing something of itself at each step.
The new tribes gathered in forsaken joints like the San Remo in Greenwich Village, which had a long boho history. Ronald Sukenick, who landed there from Midwood, Brooklyn, in 1948, wrote that for refugees of his generation, even those who only traveled by subway, “You were headed for the Remo, where you’d try to look old enough to be in an actual Village-Bohemian-literary-artistic-underground-mafioso-pinko-revolutionary-subversive-intellectual-existentialist-anti-bourgeois café. Real life at last.” The bar mixed cheap drinks and interesting people: writers and artists, gays, interracial couples, hoodlums, Italian toughs, wannabes, voyeurs. Among the patrons were Miles Davis, James Agee, Tennessee Williams, John Cage, Gore Vidal, Bob Dylan, Gregory Corso, James Baldwin, Kerouac and Maxwell Bodenheim. Judith Malina, cofounder of the Living Theatre, called the bar the Sans Remorse in her diaries. Kerouac fictionalized it in The Subterraneans, and Chandler Brossard wrote about it in his semi-Beat, pretty hip roman à clef Who Walk in Darkness (1952). Mary McCarthy memorialized it in the New York Post, attracting the attention of curiosity seekers and tourists. Until her 1950 article, according to Anatole Broyard, a regular, the place didn’t have so much as a dirty word on the men’s room walls; the gawkers who came subsequently to see picturesque squalor, he noted, did what regulars would not, decorating its surfaces with “the images of their disappointment.”
For Kerouac, success and its handmaiden, fame, spoiled everything. He wrote 10 books in the time it took to get On the Road published, and by his lights they were all after the fall. Embittered by both celebrity and its limits—specifically the failed efforts to make a movie of On the Road—he vented his inner conservative on the unwashed tribes who claimed him as their tour guide. “In actuality,” he wrote,
there was only a handful of real hip swinging cats and what there was vanished mighty swiftly during the Korean War when (and after) a sinister new kind of efficiency appeared in America, maybe it was the result of the universalization of Television and nothing else (the Polite Total Police Control of Dragnet’s “peace” officers) but the beat characters after 1950 vanished into jails and madhouses, or were shamed into silent conformity, the generation itself was shortlived and small in number.
By 1959, America’s premier beatnik was the protagonist of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, played with goatee and bongos by Bob Denver.
The heretical truth is that in the broader public imagination, it was Maynard G. Krebs, not the by-then vanishing Kerouac, who led the revolution. Kerouac and Ginsberg made Krebs possible, but it was Krebs whose televised presence connected the isolated dissenters or grumblers, enabling the broad rebellions of the next decade.
Hip entails an acceptance of the imperfect—the low-fi, uncombed or unpolished. Such is the license of living in the present tense: you don’t have to worry about mistakes, because their consequences are off in the future. At its most problematic, this devolves into hip’s fetish for failure and self-destruction. Hip is imperfect in the sense of being incomplete, transitional. More than any movement in this history so far, the Beats trumpeted their imperfections, trying to redeem America’s flaws after its virtues had led it so disastrously astray.
The enlightenment sought by the Beats—and this applies to their relationship with squares, each other, the economy and their mothers—involved an assumption of forgiveness. By this I mean not absolution but a hard acceptance of themselves as unacceptable. This is the innocence that Whitman claimed, more multitudinous than being without sin. Their unfiltered writings about themselves served both to validate their existence and to reconcile its flaws with the broad, ugly sweep of the culture. Against the perfections of the nuclear bomb, the Nazi death camps and the corporate matrix, the Beats wore their flaws on the outside, offering them as strengths rather than weaknesses. They followed the improvisational license of bop. “Make a mistake,” Monk advised his peers. “Play what you want and let the public pick up.”
It is significant that the best minds of Ginsberg’s generation, though famously “destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked / Dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,” remained nonetheless just that to the author—the best minds of all. “Howl” portrays a new priesthood educated by its injuries, not debilitated by them. The damage that overruns the next 126 long lines is part of their collective resumé. Its violence—“the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years”—is the beginning of enlightenment.
The embrace of unpolished, spontaneous writing meant that there were no best or wrong words, just what Kerouac called a “jewel center of interest in subject of image at moment of writing.” He had his own version of Monk’s advice: “no revisions.” (This commandment was somewhat disingenuous: he filled his notebooks with drafts of scenes for On the Road long before his three-week typing spree, and he continued to revise thereafter.) The Beats were prolifically inconsistent, leaving it up to readers to sort the stinkers. In their lives and work they related in detail their unsuitability to polite society. Kerouac envied Cassady the freedom of his unsupervised id, only hinting at the inner life that most readers missed altogether. As Carolyn Cassady said, readers took away a self-serving portrait of her husband: “[W]hatever it is that Neal represented for them, like freedom and fearlessness, Neal was fearless but he wasn’t free. Neal wanted to die. So he was utterly fearless as far as chances went because he was asking for it all the time. I kept thinking that the imitators never knew and don’t know how miserable these men were, they think they were having marvelous times—joy, joy, joy—and they weren’t at all.” In February 1968, Cassady lay down beside a railroad track in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and froze to death. He was a few days shy of 42. Kerouac finished drinking a hole through himself the following year. He was 47.
The writers were as openly flawed in their personal lives as in their art, placing themselves not above criticism but beneath its pretensions. Ginsberg followed his mother into psychiatric confinement—“always trying to justify ma’s madness,” as Kerouac put it, “against the logical, sober but hateful society.” Both Kerouac and Burroughs abandoned their children. Burroughs vandalized his own texts, wielding scissors against his intentions; this from a man—a writer—who once lopped off the end joint of one finger with chicken shears. (He landed in a psychiatric hospital for a month.) His gun accident and junk addiction were always a part of his reptilian allure. Like Miles Davis, he embraced his persona as prince of darkness, asking only that others see themselves in the same unsparing light. In a mock review of Naked Lunch, he promised readers an engagement with their worst: “This book is a must for anyone who would understand the sick soul, sick unto death, of the atomic age.”
Buddhism provided a useful framework for both righteousness and imperfection. Ginsberg, Kerouac and Gary Snyder, among others, conceived their journeys as quests for satori, or awakening. Their acceptance of all experience or insight sometimes made for dopey literature—writers, after all, have to sort and filter and draw conclusions. But it also brought the writers into harmony with the flawed mainstream of Cold War America, not above it but of it. Alan Watts, in an influential 1958 essay titled “Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen,” quoted a saying from the Taoist scholar Chuang-tzu: “Those who would have good government without its correlative misrule, and right without its correlative wrong, do not understand the principles of the universe.” The Beats took this wisdom to heart, living it out in the public eye. As much as their literary accomplishments, their acceptance of misrule as a constructive force stands as their lasting contribution to the culture.
This creative misrule echoed Whitman’s paradoxical claim of being “not the poet of goodness only,” but “the poet of wickedness also.” Ginsberg invoked Whitman as “the first great American poet to take action in recognizing his individuality, forgiving and accepting Him Self, and automatically extending that recognition and acceptance to all—and defining his Democracy as that…. Without this truth there is only the impersonal Moloch and self-hatred of others.” The challenge for the Beats and their peers was not to disengage from the impersonal Moloch, but to implicate themselves in it—to make it personal. In the same way, Whitman had taken upon himself the worst of America before the Civil War:
I am the poet of slaves, and of the masters of slaves….
I am the poet of sin,
For I do not believe in sin.
When Whitman sang of containing multitudes, he did not mean they were all admirable.
Yet they were all implicitly forgiven. To live in the present tense is to claim forgiveness as you go, making peace with your flaws even as you erupt in new ones. It is to live outside of judgment—and to allow others the same grace. There are no wounds left by one’s flaws, only new flaws to replace the old ones. In this forgiveness hip can be both noble and ennobling. This is a difference between hip and simple outlaw nihilism. The outlaw is a romantic figure because his violence puts him on the outside of society. He is cathartic but ultimately illusory: you can’t get rid of evil so easily. The hipster as romantic figure—the angelheaded, yea-saying overburst of American joy—opens society’s eyes, or hips it, to the violence within. Though hip is often belittled as adolescent rebellion, it is bigger than what critics like Robert Brustein say it opposes, and more free than rebellion. Hip works more broadly than simple opposition to someone else’s agenda. It surrounds and envelops. Even if you never read past “Howl” and maybe “Kaddish,” Allen Ginsberg probably shapes your life more than Dwight D. Eisenhower.
There is another way to look at the Beat avatars and their prototypes. As much as Kerouac was Charlie Parker, he was also Herman Melville, the restless seafarer who traded static clarity for the blur of the quest. The car was his ship, and Cassady his captain. Like Melville, he wrote the gospels in this century and died, if not in the gutter, in self-destructive bitterness, no longer speaking, as he once claimed, for the “solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization.” When these Bartlebies did not thank him for showing them the road, Kerouac marinated in his disappointment. He wrote to Ginsberg: “I discovered a new Beat Generation a long time ago, I hitchhiked and starved, for art, and that makes me the Fool of the Beatniks with a crown of shit. Thanks, America.”
Ginsberg was Walt Whitman, a curious patriot who endeavored to heal a ruptured society through the gape of his own vanity. “It occurs to me that I am America,” Ginsberg wrote, and but for the disingenuousness of the first four words—It occurs to me—the line might have belonged to Whitman. And in his vigilance toward all systems of control, chemical and otherwise, Burroughs was a coruscating heir to Thoreau, living in voluntary exile, echoing Thoreau’s sense of life as civil disobedience: “I quietly declare war with the State, after my fashion, though I will still make what use and get what advantage of her I can, as is usual in such cases.” (That’s Thoreau, by the way, not Burroughs.)
The critic George W. S. Trow has argued that the retrospective inevitability of the post-Beat counterculture, which is recounted as meeting only cardboard resistance, hides the full magnitude of the Beats’ disruption. The 1960s, Trow wrote,
are presented as mostly motivated by an urge to get Rosa Parks to the front of the bus, on the one hand, and to stop the Vietnam War, on the other. Missing from the story, primarily because the story’s never been told from the top down, because that mode of storytelling had simply fallen into disrepute, was that death to the Eisenhower empire. This had been prefigured in Howl by Ginsberg: “America, fuck you and your atom bomb [sic].” That effort was now taken to the streets, and this caesura was, first of all, very remarkable in that the Eisenhower empire was the empire. It was the control system that produced our money, our dominance, our unique position in the world, and it was remarkable how little it took to kill it.
By these lights the Beats and their bebop peers, in their echoes of Whitman and Thoreau, represent an enduring constant in the American fabric, not newer than the Eisenhower empire but older. It is always current. Each generation needs its Whitman; each Whitman redeems his peers by allowing them to forgive him. Hip’s revolutions begin each time in the humanizing promise with which Sal Paradise begins On the Road: “And this was really the way that my whole road experience began, and the things that were to come are too fantastic not to tell.” And they remain bound to Sal’s flash of enlightenment and absolution: “Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.”