David Sterritt
In the two decades after World War II, the poets and novelists of the Beat Generation challenged long‐accepted tenets of American literature with an iconoclastic approach to language and a hostile attitude toward what they perceived as the conformity, conservatism, superficiality, and materialism of their time. Their opposition to an array of social and cultural norms catalyzed a search for innovative ways of thinking, living, and creating that embraced rootlessness, rebellion, spontaneity, and introspection. The group’s best‐known figures acquired fame for works that were provocative if not scandalous by the standards of their day. Chief among them were Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road, begun in 1948, published in 1957; William S. Burroughs’s novel Naked Lunch, begun in 1950, published in 1959; and Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl,” begun in 1954, published in 1956. Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs were the core members of the Beat circle, but numerous others joined them at various times, including the poets Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima, Gary Snyder, and Anne Waldman, the poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and the unclassifiable Neal Cassady and Carolyn Cassady, all‐around hipsters whose correspondence and biographical writings chronicle the scene. These writers had interests and styles that differed in important ways, but all were motivated by contempt for the hypocrisy and taboos surrounding sex, race, and class in modern American society.
The most direct antecedents of the Beats were the writers of the 1920s known as the Lost Generation, many of whom – Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Djuna Barnes, Hart Crane, and others – were expatriate Americans who found Paris more congenial than their native country by virtue of its openness to avant‐garde culture and relative freedom from Victorian values. Like them, the Beats flourished in the wake of a world war and saw art and literature as antidotes to the nightmares of the past and the anxieties of the present. Also like their predecessors, the Beats were in love with a foreign land – not sophisticated Paris but wild Mexico, a country rich in history, steeped in mythology, and less than vigilant about drugs. There were differences between the groups as well, including the fact that although some Beats traveled to Mexico, Europe, and elsewhere, they built their reputations mainly in their own country. In literary style, moreover, few of them shared the partiality for fragmentation and complexity that such 1920s luminaries as James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Ford Madox Ford cultivated in their work. On the deeper level of spiritual concerns, the novelist, poet, and Beat chronicler John Clellon Holmes perceptively observed that the Lost Generation was “occupied with the loss of faith,” whereas the Beats were “more and more occupied with the need for it” (Holmes 1952: 10). Kerouac made the point in more passionate language, saying that the Lost Generation valued “ironic romantic negation” while the Beats were “sweating for affirmation” and seeking “absolute belief in a Divinity of Rapture” (Kerouac 1958: 18).
On both sides of the Atlantic, the Roaring Twenties crashed along with stock market prices in 1929, ushering in the Great Depression, which marked the childhoods or young adulthoods of the major Beat figures. Economic hardships eased when World War II put Americans back to work, and the Allied victory gave morale another vital boost. America was now the strongest power in the world, energized by a booming economy, advances in technology, and new consumer goods that made life more comfortable and enjoyable, at least for the middle class. Yet the nation’s psychological and spiritual health did not keep pace with its material well‐being. In both popular and academic discourse, terms like “rat race,” “lonely crowd,” and “organization man” bespoke growing uneasiness about problems that the postwar boom was not alleviating, such as inequality of wealth and opportunity, the blandness and uniformity of the rapidly growing suburbs, escalating fears of communist aggression and nuclear vulnerability, and the manifold ills of bigotry and racism, de facto in the southern states and de jure in many northern regions. Conformity also posed insidious dangers, according to sociologist William H. Whyte, Jr., who coined the word “groupthink” to designate patterns of consensus that are “guided almost totally by the whims and prejudices of the group” (Whyte 1952: 114).
This was the socioeconomic environment in which the Beats came of age as writers and thinkers, intrigued by the possibility that a counterculture with a fresh, unprejudiced outlook on drugs, music, sexuality, and spirituality might somehow rise above the false promises and failed hopes that chronically ensnared the modern world. They hoped that their refusal of regimentation and materialism would inspire others to purify their lives and souls in similar ways, but unlike political activists, they urged the remaking of consciousness on a profoundly inward‐looking basis, eschewing collective protest in favor of the unspeakable visions of the individual. The goal was to revolutionize society by revolutionizing thought, not the other way around – hence their determination to pit radical ideas and experimental aesthetics against received wisdom and tradition, using sex, drugs, and metaphysics as tools of resistance against a mainstream culture that bored and disgusted them. The word “beat” has connoted states of disaffection, poverty, and weariness at least since the World War II era, and Kerouac used it often, giving it an array of meanings ranging from poor, sad, and homeless to streetwise, beatific, and cool. The neologism “beatnik” was devised by a journalist who combined Beat Generation with sputnik, the artificial satellite launched by the Soviet Union in 1957. The Beats disdained the latter term, but it took on instant popularity, and Kerouac spoke it himself in his improvised narration for the film Pull My Daisy (1959).
The Beats had diverse literary tastes. William Blake had great importance for all of them and especially for Ginsberg, who reported having visions of the towering English poet while reading his work in the late 1940s. Ginsberg’s other favorites included the English poets Christopher Smart, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley; the American poets Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams; and also William Shakespeare, William Butler Yeats, Charles Baudelaire, Federico García Lorca, Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the writings of Mohandas K. Gandhi, much classical Greek and Roman verse, and the long novels of James Joyce, which Kerouac equally admired. Kerouac came from a French‐Canadian background that predisposed him toward such French poets as Baudelaire, Comte de Lautréamont, and Guillaume Apollinaire, but he also looked up to Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, Rainer Maria Rilke, Emily Dickinson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918–1922), various works by Thomas Wolfe and Henry David Thoreau, and Dashiell Hammett’s private‐eye novels. Burroughs was more partial to prose than to poetry, taking particular interest in Franz Kafka, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Proust, Samuel Beckett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, various historians, and science‐fiction and detective‐story writers who influenced his exotic subject matter and punchy style. All of the Beats shared the French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s belief that a systematic derangement of the senses, facilitated by drugs and extreme behaviors, could produce the revolutionary insights they were eager to find.
The founders of the nascent Beat circle met one another in the middle 1940s at Columbia University, where Kerouac and Ginsberg were studying literature and the somewhat older Burroughs was a graduate student in anthropology and psychology. Each of them fit the Oxford English Dictionary definition of a bohemian: “one who either cuts himself off, or is by his habits cut off, from society for which he is otherwise fitted; especially an artist, literary man, or actor, who leads a free, vagabond, or irregular life […] and [despises] conventionalities generally.” Borrowing a term suggested by a friend, the group began pursuing a so‐called New Vision, accessible only through new forms of art, literature, and experience. Although its meaning was vague, the phrase implied some original and spiritualized way of perceiving the world, perhaps via the kind of transcendence to which William Blake alluded in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790): “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite” (Blake 1994: plate 14). The term “New Vision” fell out of the Beat vocabulary before long, but others arose – “spontaneous bop prosody,” “eyeball kicks” – to express their enthusiasm for novelty and experimentation. The Beats were always a loosely connected group with interests, agendas, and careers that increasingly diverged as time went on; but the central members remained loyal to the project of challenging sociocultural norms by carrying spontaneity, intensity, and eccentricity to heights unprecedented in American literature.
Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, to French‐Canadian‐American parents; until age six he spoke Joual, a French‐Canadian dialect for which he had a lifelong fondness. Lowell was a factory town on the decline and the Kerouac family had health and financial problems, but Kerouac loved them and wrote about them frequently. Parlaying his high school football stardom into a Columbia scholarship, he moved to New York City in 1940, but found the university to be a spiritual trap rather than an intellectual haven. He dropped out in 1941, and the following year he joined the military – first the Merchant Marine, then the Navy – motivated not by the war effort but by romantic notions of the sea that were quickly dispelled when he actually got there.
Returning to New York after receiving an early discharge from military service, Kerouac befriended Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Herbert Huncke, a small‐time hustler, heroin addict, and storyteller who appears (as do Kerouac’s other companions) under different names in a number of his novels and poems. Kerouac married his first wife, Edie Parker, in 1944, and not long thereafter he met Neal Cassady, an aspiring writer from Denver whose mental and physical energy made a strong impression on Kerouac and his circle. A bus trip to visit Cassady in Denver helped inaugurate the period of compulsive traveling that indelibly marked Kerouac’s life and work. Between 1947 and 1957 he drove, hitchhiked, or went by bus or ship to Denver, California, Mexico City, North Carolina, the Pacific Northwest, Morocco, France, and England, which is a remarkable record considering that he hated driving and bemoaned “the essential shame of hitchhiking” even as he practiced it.
Harcourt Brace published Kerouac’s first novel, The Town and the City, in 1950, the year when he and his second wife, Joan Haverty, started their short‐lived marriage. An earnest and conventional work, heavily influenced by Thomas Wolfe, The Town and the City brought Kerouac a modest amount of critical praise that soon died away. His next novel, provisionally titled On the Road, was evolving along similar lines. This was dismaying, since he now wanted to emulate the exuberant “kickwriting” style of the long letters Cassady was sending him. Inspiration struck as he listened to the alto saxophonist Lee Konitz spin out freewheeling improvisations one night in 1951. Realizing that spontaneity and on‐the‐spot inventiveness were the secret behind exhilarating jazz, he concluded that his writing would be more urgently alive if he grounded it in the same principles. To extend the analogy with music, he exchanged the concert‐orchestra model, where a piece follows a predetermined plan, for a jazz‐combo model, where creativity is bounded by nothing but the artist’s intuitive choices from one moment to the next. Starting the new novel over from the beginning, he taped sheets of paper into a single scroll that could move through his typewriter without pause, and he adopted a new approach to literary structure, regarding words less as links in a syntactic chain than as notes in a seamlessly progressing melodic flow. In about three weeks he produced a scroll of single‐spaced text almost 120 feet long – an auspicious debut for spontaneous bop prosody, as Ginsberg called the process.
On the Road is innovative in content as well as style and method. Instead of telling a linear cause‐and‐effect story, it sets forth thinly fictionalized accounts of Kerouac’s travels with Cassady to New Orleans, San Francisco, Mexico City, and elsewhere, eschewing dramatic occurrences in favor of breathlessly narrated situations, descriptions, and impressions as witnessed by two vigorous, youthful men whose primary goals are simply staying on the move and experiencing the motley sprawl of the American scene as vividly and feelingly as possible. Kerouac’s prose is similarly mercurial and fleet. In keeping with his scorn for bourgeois manners, propriety, and comportment, he idealizes commonplace people, depicting them as a species of fellaheen, a term used by Spengler to identify those who seek to improve and pacify the world, although when Kerouac hails them as “the source of mankind and the fathers of it” (Kerouac 1991: 280–281) he contradicts Spengler’s pessimistic conclusions about the Hobbesian outcomes to which utopian ventures are prone. Kerouac is especially obtuse when he romanticizes African American life, strolling through “the Denver colored section” and “wishing [he] could exchange worlds with the happy, true‐hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America” (Kerouac 1991: 180) as if the nation were not riddled with appalling racial bigotry, inequity, injustice, and violence. These shortcomings noted, it bears remembering that On the Road is a novel, not a sociological study, and that its flaws are those of an author whose Weltanschauung was naive and suggestible in some respects but nuanced and insightful in others.
Viking Press published On the Road in 1957 to mixed reviews. The New York Times saluted it as a “major novel” and an “authentic work of art” (Millstein 1957: n.p.) while Truman Capote grumbled, “That’s not writing, it’s typing” (Grobel 2000: 32). Kerouac regarded his new method as a great success that clearly validated the underlying philosophy that the first thought is invariably the best thought. Convinced that revision is the enemy of art, he saw himself as the verbal counterpart of both a jazz musician and a free‐style painter, using bop‐trance composition to sketch his mental visions in all their psychological immediacy, free of the received ideas and conventions that diminish the existential authenticity of ordinary writing.
Kerouac’s work was, however, less radically spontaneous and individualistic than he supposed. He drew his subjects and characters from his experiences and recollections, stockpiled in a memory so prodigious that he once described his mission in life as “trying desperately to be a great rememberer redeeming light from darkness” (Kerouac 1993: 103). More broadly, pure improvisation is very rare in any field; it does not commonly take place even in progressive jazz, where musicians assimilate and practice their melodic riffs, harmonic ideas, rhythmic patterns, and structural precedents before presenting them publicly in quasi‐extemporaneous garb. In a preface to Kerouac’s novella The Subterraneans (1958/1989), the novelist Henry Miller accurately described his ostensibly spontaneous technique: “He ‘invented it,’ people will say. What they should say is: ‘He got it.’ He got it, he dug it, he put it down” (Tytell 1976: 200). In sum, it is less accurate to say that Kerouac imagined or invented his material than to say that he recalled, recorded, and chronicled the tenor of the midcentury American scene. Although revision was his enemy, prevision was his friend.
On the Road established Kerouac’s reputation as a rising American writer, but wanderlust played a diminished role in his next novels. The Subterraneans takes place in San Francisco, where the character representing Kerouac has an ill‐starred affair with a young black woman. Doctor Sax: Faust Part Three (1959) weaves early memories and daydreams into a nostalgic fantasy. Maggie Cassidy (1959) is a relatively conventional romance with a setting that resembles Kerouac’s hometown, while Tristessa (1960) is a romance in a Mexican locale. Visions of Gerard (1963) grew from reminiscences of an idealized older brother whose death at age nine left Kerouac with the lifelong conviction that the boy was now a saint watching over him in heaven.
Travel returned as a major concern in The Dharma Bums (1958/1976), which follows a Kerouac surrogate named Ray Smith as he searches for fellow wayfarers who pursue spiritual wisdom (dharma) while appearing downtrodden and beaten (like bums) to unenlightened eyes. Like nearly all Kerouac novels, The Dharma Bums is populated by stand‐ins for the author’s Beat friends; among them are Alvah Goldbrook, a seeker after kicks who represents Ginsberg, and Japhy Ryder, a serene Zen Buddhist representing the poet Gary Snyder, for whom Kerouac had especially high regard. The Dharma Bums gives the most thorough reflection of the Beat engagement with Buddhism, even though Kerouac’s own spiritual interests fluctuated over the years, beginning with the Roman Catholicism of his childhood, turning into a synthesis of Buddhism and Christianity, and culminating in a Catholicism inflected by Buddhist teachings.
The novel Big Sur (1962) finds the Kerouac surrogate Jack Duluoz suddenly famous as an author, shuttling between the city and the woods before a final bout of depression, despair, and delirium tremens in a northern California cabin. The title Desolation Angels (1965) refers to an isolated mountain where Duluoz takes a fire‐lookout job that lets him live in monkish isolation. Visions of Cody (1972), written soon after On the Road, again recounts Kerouac’s adventures with Cassady in somewhat fictionalized form. Kerouac also wrote novellas – Satori in Paris (1966), Pic (1971) – and poetry ranging from the epic landscape of Mexico City Blues (1955) to the miniatures in Book of Haikus (2003).
Kerouac ultimately intended to unify his major novels into an autobiographical cycle called “Legend of Duluoz,” ordering it chronologically and restoring real names to the characters drawn from life. Such a saga would have foregrounded travel in more than one sense: peripatetic journeys through the world, as in On the Road and The Dharma Bums; reflective journeys into the self, as in Doctor Sax and Visions of Gerard; and journeys to both inner and outer domains, as in Town and the City and the late novel Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935–46, published in 1968. The project was unrealized when Kerouac died in 1969, at age 47, of causes related to alcoholism.
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) summarized his early life on the back cover of a reprint of Howl and Other Poems (1956):
High school in Paterson till 17, Columbia College, merchant marine, Texas and Denver, copyboy, Times Square, amigos in jail, dishwashing, book reviews, Mexico City, market research, Satori in Harlem, Yucatan and Chiapas 1954, West Coast 3 years. Later Arctic Sea trip, Tangier, Venice, Amsterdam, Paris, read at Oxford Harvard Columbia Chicago, quit, wrote Kaddish 1959, made tape to leave behind & fade in Orient awhile.
Those facts are accurate, but they leave unstated the personal complexities and leaps of artistic growth that underlie them.
Intellectually inclined since childhood, Ginsberg was more interested in public affairs and political issues than any of his Beat friends. He enrolled at Columbia with plans of becoming a labor lawyer and perhaps a politician, but before long he changed his focus to literature. He wrote a great deal of poetry at Columbia, usually employing rhyme, meter, and stanzaic structure; in this he was evidently influenced by the example of his father, Louis Ginsberg, a New Jersey high‐school teacher and talented poet who regarded time‐honored conventions as essential means for giving aesthetic order to the unruly universe of words. Ginsberg felt a special kinship with the eighteenth‐century poet Christopher Smart, who like him spent time in a mental institution, and the nineteenth‐century poet Walt Whitman, who like Ginsberg was gay.
Unlike most homosexuals in the 1940s, when same‐sex relationships were heavily proscribed, Ginsberg was candid about his gay identity. After being suspended by Columbia for vandalism and (probably) engaging in gay sex on campus, he followed in Kerouac’s footsteps and joined the United States Maritime Service, where the unromantic reality of mindless routines and feckless companions made him physically and psychologically sick. He spent considerable time on medical leave and left the service as soon as his enlistment time expired.
Back in civilian life, Ginsberg faced an alarming family problem that permanently affected his future. His mother suffered from schizophrenia, and by 1947 it had grown so severe that the psychiatric staff at Long Island’s Pilgrim State Hospital concluded that only a lobotomy could provide relief. Ginsberg approved the surgery with grave feelings of guilt and sorrow, exacerbated by his powerful sympathy with his mother’s mental illness. He too suffered from psychological instability, and in the aftermath of a personal crisis – he was arrested when items stolen by friends were found in his residence – he became a patient at the Columbia Psychiatric Institute, remaining there for almost a year. It was during his first day of hospitalization that he met Carl Solomon, the fellow patient to whom he eventually dedicated “Howl,” his most celebrated poem. After leaving the facility in the winter of 1950, Ginsberg took a regular job, went into psychoanalysis, and made an effort (soon abandoned) to shed his homosexuality. He also sought out various poets he admired – including Kenneth Rexroth, whom he met during a visit to San Francisco, and William Carlos Williams, who shared his New Jersey pedigree – and returned to full‐time writing before long.
Ginsberg made his initial mark when he recited the first portion of “Howl” in a 1955 event at the 6 Gallery in San Francisco, a culturally sophisticated venue in a city where numerous Beat‐friendly poets – Kenneth Patchen, James Broughton, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer – had been based for years. Approximately 150 people gathered at the gallery to hear poems read by Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, and Ginsberg, who had hesitated to participate for fear of bewildering the audience with his profoundly introspective free verse. His worries were groundless. The day after the reading, the poet and literary entrepreneur Lawrence Ferlinghetti sent a telegram praising him and requesting the manuscript for publication. Howl and Other Poems appeared in the City Lights Pocket Poets series within a year. Its success established Ginsberg’s career, and he used his newfound prominence to launch a lifelong practice of supporting and assisting the careers of friends and colleagues.
Howl and Other Poems gained added celebrity in 1957, when the San Francisco Police Department deemed it obscene and arrested Ferlinghetti for publishing and selling it. At the non‐jury trial, Ferlinghetti’s defense counsel elicited testimony from editors, critics, and academics who declared the book to be honest, significant, and timely, persuading Judge Clayton W. Horn of the San Francisco Municipal Court that its redeeming social importance entitled it to First Amendment protection. As often happens in censorship cases, publicity surrounding the trial boosted the book’s popularity, and the opening lines of “Howl” became an enduring emblem of the Beat sensibility:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night …
(Ginsberg 1956: 9)
Ginsberg wrote much of “Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg (1894–1956)” in two strenuous days of non‐stop writing fueled by grief over his mother’s death. He was on the West Coast when she died and unable to reach New York in time for the funeral, at which Kaddish, a Jewish prayer for the dead, had not been read because the required number of men was not present. Mindful of his family’s Jewish heritage, Ginsberg spent hours chanting the prayer with a friend, and this experience was fresh in memory when he started to write. The finished work, published in Kaddish and Other Poems 1958–1960 (1961), is second in reputation only to “Howl.”
In addition to writing prolifically and traveling widely, Ginsberg cultivated a deep knowledge of Buddhist teachings and took formal Buddhist vows under the guidance of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, his Tibetan Buddhist teacher. During the tumultuous 1960s he experimented with psychedelic drugs, became a political activist, spoke forcefully on behalf of free speech and non‐violence, and shifted successfully from Beat to hippie culture. Ginsberg joined the Beat poet Anne Waldman to establish the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, a Buddhist‐inspired institution in Boulder, Colorado, founded by Trungpa in 1974. In that year Ginsberg won a National Book Award for The Fall of America: Poems of These States, 1965–1971, and in 1986 he won the Frost Medal for distinguished poetic achievement. In the 1980s he also emerged as an important American photographer. He was a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College from 1986 until his death from liver cancer at age 70.
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) was the oldest member of the Beat contingent. He came from a well‐do‐do family but took pleasure in flaunting eccentricity from an early age. While attending Harvard he traveled frequently to New York City, visiting places in Greenwich Village and Harlem where his homosexuality and interest in drugs were accepted. He also had an abiding affection for guns and weaponry. At 25 he began his first monogamous gay relationship, and when it ended he sheared off part of his left little finger, a conspicuously romantic and masochistic expression of displeasure. After a brief army stint in 1942, which ended with a discharge for reasons of psychological instability, he moved to Chicago and took a series of unglamorous jobs, including several months as an insect‐control worker that provided material for the title story of his Exterminator! (1973). He relocated to New York in 1943 and set up housekeeping with his common‐law wife, Joan Vollmer, in an apartment shared with Kerouac and his girlfriend. Burroughs became addicted to morphine during this period, and later he developed a heroin addiction.
Burroughs’s first serious literary project was “Twilight’s Last Gleamings,” a 1938 story written with a friend and inspired by a shipwreck that had piqued their curiosity. In addition to introducing Dr. Benway, one of Burroughs’s most popular characters, the story sets forth surreal imagery and violent humor that foreshadow future characteristics of his style. Another early effort was a collaboration with Kerouac titled “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks,” begun in 1945 but abandoned before completion.
Another of Burroughs’s attributes was a talent for entertaining friends with “routines,” his term for humorous performances and impressions. This influenced his decision to pursue a writing career, as did two developments in the early 1950s, when he and Vollmer were residing in Mexico City to dodge the consequences of a Louisiana drug‐dealing charge. The first development was his realization that his experiences as a drug addict could serve as dramatic narrative material. This insight bore fruit in his first novel, Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict, published under the pseudonym William Lee in 1953, and drug‐related themes remained a staple in his work for years to come.
The second pivotal development was a trauma brought about by Burroughs’s own recklessness. One night in September 1951, he and Vollmer were visiting a friend. Always a joker and a gun enthusiast, Burroughs took out a pistol and said to his wife that they should do a William Tell act. She balanced a glass on her head and Burroughs aimed at it but fired too low, hitting her and killing her. This horrifying event can be interpreted in more than one way: it could have come about by accident, or it could have originated in Burroughs’s troubled unconscious – he later recalled feeling a sense of “loss and sadness” (Burroughs 1987: xxi) throughout the preceding day – and Vollmer’s own self‐destructive urges could have played a part, as Ginsberg concluded after speaking with those present. Whatever the cause of the tragedy, Burroughs’s remorse unleashed his passion for writing. He wrote in the introduction to his novel Queer (1985):
I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession […] So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.
(Burroughs 1987: xxii)
After the tragedy Burroughs returned to the United States, receiving a two‐year suspended sentence (in absentia) for manslaughter. He then traveled, first to South America and later to Morocco, where he decided to stay, writing stories, articles, and letters all the while. Along the way he jettisoned the linear prose of Junkie and the still‐unpublished Queer, writing the manuscript that became Naked Lunch in an irregular, spasmodic style that lurches between reality and fantasy, conveying gleefully obscene conglomerations of sex, violence, death, addiction, science fiction, farce, eschatology, and corrosive social satire aimed at the innumerable institutions and individuals seeking mental or physical control over others. The only constants in Naked Lunch are the presence of protagonist William Lee, who stands in for Burroughs, and the pervasiveness of homosexuality and addiction, treated as propulsive human impulses and also as metaphors for the boundless greed, callousness, intellectual torpor, and emotional nullity fostered by the dehumanizing forces of modernity. Olympia Press published Naked Lunch in 1959, and like “Howl” it triggered controversy and censorship. Boston made an effort to ban it in 1962, which put it in the company of Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre (1933) and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934), and it went on trial for obscenity in Los Angeles, where a judge cleared it of the charge. As always, the controversy spurred sales.
Burroughs’s next stop was Paris, where he joined Ginsberg and other friends at the so‐called Beat Hotel, a dilapidated rooming house. There he met the British artist and writer Brion Gysin, deviser of the “cut‐up” methodology, whereby preexisting materials (texts, images, recordings) are sliced, torn, or folded into segments that are then recombined in new configurations. Dadaists and Surrealists had experimented with comparable practices, creating poems with words pulled out of hats and making pictures by connecting disparate fragments, but Burroughs saw endless possibilities in the technique, welcoming aleatory procedures as a means of bypassing ego‐driven rationality and tapping directly into the vast unconscious. He used cut‐up and fold‐in methods to create collages, photomontages, tape recordings, and extensively revised editions of his 1961 novel The Soft Machine and its 1962 sequel The Ticket That Exploded, the first two books of the Nova trilogy. (Nova Express, the 1964 novel that concludes the trilogy, was already so unconventional that Burroughs saw no need for changes.)
Residing in London during the 1960s, Burroughs collaborated further with Gysin and became closely involved with Scientology, the religious movement founded by L. Ron Hubbard, in which Burroughs detected echoes of his unshakeable conviction that the deadliest dangers to the human spirit are mechanisms of control wielded by outside forces – governments, capitalists, schools, churches, media – or generated from within by one’s own appetites and desires. He subsequently reversed his position on Scientology, deciding that it was simply the controlling enemy in disguise, and he expressed his view in a story titled “Ali’s Smile,” later published in the book Ali’s Smile: Naked Scientology (1971) along with articles he had written on the subject. Moving back to New York in 1974, Burroughs became a Beat celebrity, reading from his books in various cities, writing for the pop‐culture magazine Crawdaddy, and working on a film adaptation of Junky that never materialized. He also reverted to heroin addiction, which stayed with him until his death.
Burroughs moved to Lawrence, Kansas, in 1981, the year Viking published Cities of the Red Night, the first volume in the Red Night trilogy, which continued with The Place of Dead Roads (1983) and The Western Lands (1987). During this decade Burroughs ventured farther into visual art, making “shotgun paintings” by firing at paint cans in front of canvases, and engaged in collaborative projects with such diverse artists as stage director Robert Wilson, musician Tom Waits, artist Keith Haring, and the Sonic Youth rock band. He also oversaw the publication of his journals and other hitherto elusive texts. His long drug history notwithstanding, Burroughs lived to be 83 years old.
Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs are the most widely read and celebrated Beats, but others also made important contributions to the group’s project of challenging sociocultural norms through art and literature. Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1919) was born in a suburb of New York and had a complicated childhood, spent first with a relative in France, then in an American orphanage, and finally in the home of an affluent foster family. After college he served as a Navy officer in World War II, earned a master’s degree at Columbia and a doctorate at the Sorbonne, and set down roots in San Francisco, where he cofounded the City Lights bookstore in 1953 – the first American bookstore to deal exclusively in paperback editions – and inaugurated its publishing activities in 1955. He launched the Pocket Poets Series with his own collection Pictures of the Gone World (1955), followed by a book of Spanish poems translated by Kenneth Rexroth, a collection by Kenneth Patchen, and Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems.
A Coney Island of the Mind, the 1958 collection for which Ferlinghetti is most famous, brings poems from Pictures of the Gone World together with newer works, some of which are “Oral Messages” designed for oral recitation accompanied by jazz, a format he heartily advocated. His style is at once freewheeling and down to earth, as exemplified by a lyric in A Coney Island of the Mind that reads in part:
Jellybeans glowed in the semi‐gloom
of that september afternoon
A cat upon the counter moved among
the licorice sticks
and tootsie rolls
and Oh Boy Gum
Outside the leaves were falling as they died
A wind had blown away the sun
(Ferlinghetti 1958: 35)
Similar qualities gleam throughout “I Am Waiting,” also in A Coney Island of the Mind and perhaps the most memorable of all his works. A characteristic passage reads:
I am waiting for the Great Divide to be crossed
and I am anxiously waiting
for the secret of eternal life to be discovered
by an obscure general practitioner
and I am waiting
for the storms of life
to be over
and I am waiting
to set sail for happiness
(Ferlinghetti 1958: 51)
Here and elsewhere Ferlinghetti demonstrates his gifts for clarity, accessibility, and concision. These have directly characterized his poetry and indirectly nourished his enterprises as a novelist, a journalist, a painter, an entrepreneur, an anarchist in his politics, and a Zen Buddhist in his spirituality.
The Beat Generation was a mostly male phenomenon, dominated by men whose backgrounds and worldviews were rarely oriented toward issues that stood at the political forefront when second‐wave feminism arose in the 1960s. This notwithstanding, a few exceptionally strong, imaginative, and courageous women have figured importantly in the Beat movement. None is more central to its achievements than the poet and educator Anne Waldman (b. 1945), whose Kill or Cure (1994) contains a “Feminafesto” in which she describes herself as an “outrider,” by which she means a “practitioner [who] wishes to explore and dance with everything in the culture which is unsung, mute, and controversial so that she may subvert the existing systems that repress and misunderstand feminine ‘difference.’ […] She’ll challenge her fathers, her husband, male companions, spiritual teachers. Turn the language body upside down” (Waldman 1994: 115).
Waldman was raised in Greenwich Village but didn’t discover the Beat scene until the mid‐1960s, when she developed close relationships with Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Michael McClure, Lew Welsh, and others. Later in the decade she combined her interests in poetry and theater by heading the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church‐in‐the‐Bowery, and in the early 1970s she became a follower of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, bringing Buddhist breathing and chanting techniques into her verse. In 1974 she joined Ginsberg in founding the Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute.
As a performer, Waldman is not disembodied at all; she chants, cries, and dances her verse with ecstatic passion. As a poet, she epitomizes the virtues of immediacy, clarity, and intensity, able to make lightning‐swift movements from personal insights and emotions to vivid evocations of the larger world, as in “Over Asia,” which reads in part:
All the lights in the world in New York City!
All the books
People
Every day something new happening
The mind reaches forward
gets hooked on the horizon
and just hangs there
watching, studying out the situation with a crazy interest
(and Asia rages miserably below)
(Waldman 1970: 28)
Waldman considers herself to be a kind of shaman who “travels to […] edges of madness and death and comes back to tell the stories.” Her cultural and political militancy interacts with her Buddhist mindfulness in fascinating ways. Among her most widely hailed books are the collection Fast Speaking Woman (1974), reissued by City Lights in 1996, and Iovis: All Is Full of Jove, an epic poem completed in 1997. She stands with the most eloquent voices ever produced by the Beat movement.
Gregory Corso (1930–2001), the youngest of the early Beats, was born in Greenwich Village and raised largely in foster homes and institutions. He was convicted of theft at age 12 and had served three years in prison by his twentieth birthday; otherwise he lived from hand to mouth, wandering from place to place and job to job – selling real estate, writing for a newspaper, shipping out to sea – before settling down in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and publishing his first book of poems, The Vestal Lady on Brattle, in 1955. In the next few years he became the best‐known Beat apart from Kerouac and Ginsberg, thanks to his engaging poems, popular readings, and personal charm, which made him a favorite with publications as different as Time and Mademoiselle.
Corso reached a high point in 1958, when City Lights published his major book Gasoline, but in the same year he started a downward slide, acquiring a drug addiction that significantly impaired his activities. This did not diminish the affection of his Beat comrades, including Ginsberg, who called him “Captain Poetry” and saluted him as a “political philosophe.” Corso was more politically inclined than most of the Beats, as his important poem “Bomb” powerfully attests. Published as a broadside in 1958 and in his book The Happy Birthday of Death (1960), it is printed in lines of different lengths that collectively take the shape of a bomb. By leaping among a variety of modes and moods – somber, funny, frightening, vivacious, irreverent, visionary – the poem managed to offend readers across the political spectrum while delighting those who shared Corso’s agenda of sabotaging conventions and categories. Even a brief excerpt conveys its mischievous yet serious spirit:
BOMB O havoc antiphony molten cleft BOOM
Bomb mark infinity a sudden furnace
spread thy multitudinous encompassed Sweep
set forth awful agenda
Carrion stars charnel planets carcass elements
Corpse the universe tee‐hee finger‐in‐the‐mouth hop
(Corso 1989: 67)
Poetry of this nature carried a strong punch in an era when Cold War paranoia was rampant and American power brokers were investing huge public and private resources into the burgeoning nuclear industry.
Corso’s other iconic poem, “Marriage,” appeared in The Happy Birthday of Death and was republished (with “Bomb” and other works) in Mindfield (1989). In its ingenious verses the poet both confesses to his middle‐class romanticism and friskily deconstructs it:
I never wanted to marry a girl who was like my mother
And Ingrid Bergman was always impossible
And there’s maybe a girl now but she’s already married
And I don’t like men and –
but there’s got to be somebody!
Because what if I’m 60 years old and not married,
all alone in furnished room with pee stains on my underwear
and everybody else is married! All in the universe married but me!
(Corso 1989: 64)
In this high‐spirited work Corso again weaves a complex emotional fabric that captures darkness and light in terms that are simultaneously sardonic, ironic, hopeful, and wittily self‐aware.
Diane di Prima (b. 1934) became active in the literary scene in the 1950s, when she corresponded with Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg and then met Kerouac, Corso, and others just as their star was beginning to rise. Her first poetry collection, This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards (1958), was published by Totem Press, run by the Beat‐friendly activists LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka) and Hettie Jones, who counted Philip Whalen, Michael McClure, and Ed Dorn among their many clients; through most of the next decade di Prima and Jones edited a literary newsletter called The Floating Bear as well. In succeeding years di Prima founded the Poets Press, cofounded the New York Poets Theatre, fought off charges of publishing obscene material, and joined Timothy Leary’s experiment with psychedelic communal living in Millbrook, New York, publishing Leary’s book of hermeneutic poetry, Psychedelic Prayers after the Tao Te Ching, through the Poets Press in 1966.
After relocating to San Francisco in the late 1960s, di Prima worked with the Diggers, joined with David Meltzer and Robert Duncan to establish a program in poetics at New College of California, helped to found the San Francisco Institute of Magical and Healing Arts, taught at assorted institutions, advocated for progressive causes, raised five children, and continued to write, producing scores of books comprising poetry, prose, plays, and memoirs. Her career as author, artist, feminist, performer, photographer, and public figure – she became the Poet Laureate of San Francisco in 2009 – bears witness to her protean spirit and to her forceful, graceful role in expanding, diversifying, and illuminating the largely male precincts of traditional Beat culture.
Gary Snyder (b. 1930), the pseudonymous main character of Kerouac’s novel The Dharma Bums, was born in San Francisco and raised in the Pacific Northwest, where he developed a love of literature, nature, and Native American culture that remained as constants in his life and work. He met Kerouac, Ginsberg, and other Beats in the early 1950s, and in 1955 he read his poem “The Berry Feast” in the momentous 6 Gallery event. His friendship with the Beat poet Philip Whalen encouraged him to forge a deep commitment to Zen Buddhism and to Asian culture; from 1956 until the late 1960s he lived mostly in Japan, where he studied Zen and refined his skills as a translator. During this period, American presses published two of his most respected poetry collections: Riprap (1959) and Myths & Texts (1960). After returning to the United States in 1968 he built a house in the Sierra Nevada and made it his permanent residence.
Riprap has a spare and introspective tone, finding poetic dimensions in everyday experience, whereas Myths & Texts is a cycle of narrative verse treating myths and texts as allusive reflections of unconscious intuition, conscious meditation, and the ongoing quest for metaphysical harmony. Snyder is an active environmentalist, and he became the only Beat writer to win a Pulitzer Prize when his book of poems on ecological themes, Turtle Island, was published in 1974. He won both the Bollingen Prize for Poetry and the John Hay Award for Nature Writing in 1997, and he was the first American to receive the Buddhism Transmission Award, presented by the Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai Foundation in 1998. In the preface to his collection Left Out in the Rain (1986), Snyder acknowledged his efforts to write unadorned poems “that have absolutely no outstanding qualities” and also “adorned” poetry that “plays around with form, wit, and complexity” (Snyder 2005: ix). He is widely regarded as a successful traveler in both directions.
Writers, painters, and radicals too numerous to mention have been closely or loosely associated with the Beat movement. Among them are the poets Kenneth Rexroth and Michael McClure; the scholar, chronicler, and anthologist Ann Charters; the poet, editor, rock musician, and political activist Ed Sanders; and the Black Mountain poets, including Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley, all substantial figures in modern poetry. Disciples of the Beat spirit range from novelists and essayists (Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis) to musicians (Bob Dylan, Philip Glass) to photographers and filmmakers (Bruce Conner, Robert Frank, David Cronenberg), and the Beat influence lives on in Europe and Asia, where Beat conclaves and conferences can be found.
Ginsberg (1982) once observed that the essence of the term “Beat Generation” is crystallized in a sentence that Kerouac wrote in the 1950s: “Everything belongs to me because I am poor” (Kerouac 1993: 33). At their best, the Beats embraced a poverty of wealth and possessions, not of spiritual values and visionary insights. Sometimes successfully and sometimes not, they sought the jolts of otherworldly energy that separate the mundane from the transcendent. In so doing they created an enduring legacy.
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 9 (THE LOST GENERATION AND AMERICAN EXPATRIATISM); CHAPTER 14 (THE LITERATURE AND FILM OF WORLD WAR II).