The celebrated decade called “the sixties” didn’t reach full steam until 1964, when—to choose just one of many milestones—the Beatles won their first American fans with the album Meet the Beatles and the single “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” both in January, and paid their first visit to the United States the following month. The times they were indeed a-changin’ at a rapidly accelerating pace.
To compare the Beats with the Hippies is to compare the unspeakable visions of the individual with a burgeoning respect for sociopolitical activism. Both groups had revolutionary aims, but the main thrust of the Beat Generation was toward inner change while the most prominent Hippies wanted outer change, etched on the world at large as well as the fabric of personal consciousness. This said, the Beat Generation and the Love Generation had a lot in common, and in some ways the flower-child agenda was an extension of the Beats’ main interests.
Consider drugs, for example. Beat figures like Kerouac and Ginsberg initially gravitated toward them because many of their culture heroes, from jazz icons to streetwise hipsters, valued the systematic derangement of the senses they could provide. Fashion was more in play as the 1960s proceeded, with celebrities like the Beatles and Bob Dylan promoting a psychedelic mystique that meshed well with growing public interest in astrology, Eastern religion, and other forms of mysticism and esoterica. Yet the freewheeling ethos fostered by drugs had strong political overtones.
Whatever boundary lines society may once have drawn between the personal and the political vanished in the purple haze of sex, drugs, and rock’n’ roll. Kerouac wanted no part of this, retreating ever farther into his private shell. Ginsberg was at the other end of the spectrum, sporting Hippie-style hair and haberdashery as he proselytized for drugs, freedom, and love’s power to change the world. More than any other Beat figure, Ginsberg understood that the unspeakable visions of the individual had become the unstoppable desires of a new, flamboyant generation, and he stood with it gladly, nonviolently but outspokenly protesting war, censorship, bias and prejudice of every kind, and the unearned privileges of the wealthy that sustain the exploitation of the poor. Reaction against the excesses of the 1970s grew as the decade neared its close, and the election of Ronald Reagan as president of the United States in 1980 consolidated a conservative counterrevolution that lasted into the twenty-first century. Perhaps for this very reason, interest in Beat-style spontaneity and experimentation remained lively even after the postwar era.
“Against the undeniable power of tradition,” wrote Thomas Pynchon of himself and his peers in a retrospective essay, “we were attracted by such centrifugal lures as Norman Mailer’s essay ‘The White Negro,’ the wide availability of recorded jazz, and a book I still believe is one of the great American novels, On the Road, by Jack Kerouac.” This remark illustrates the ripple effect of Beat writing, and Pynchon’s own work contains many Beat-like gestures. In his 1963 debut novel, V., one meets the Whole Sick Crew, a gang of social misfits complete with a “catatonic expressionist” artist, and the 1973 masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow presents an expressionistic fantasy written in the spirit of free-associating Beat spontaneity. Looking back at his early work in a 1985 essay, Pynchon described his excitement at learning from the Beats and other innovative writers that “at least two very distinct kinds of English could be allowed in fiction to coexist. Allowed! It was actually OK to write like this! Who knew? The effect was exciting, liberating, strongly positive. It was not a case of either/or, but an expansion of possibilities.”
Several years before Pynchon’s first book, William Gaddis’s 1955 novel The Recognitions devotes many pages to the party scene in downtown Manhattan, where he spent time with Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, and his equally audacious 1975 novel JR, about a precocious child, attacks American materialism with a zesty bitterness worthy of Burroughs. Gaddis appears in Kerouac’s novel The Subterraneans as Harold Sand.
Serious poetry in the 1950s was dominated by Modernist principles, such as the emphasis on allusion and objectivity promoted by T. S. Eliot, and by related ideas of the New Criticism, which saw the ideal poem as a graceful organic form governed by flawless internal logic. A battle line was drawn when the litterateurs Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson created the anthology New Poets of England and America, concentrating on young writers. It appeared in 1957, with later editions in subsequent years. Ginsberg seized the opportunity to submit poems by Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and a few other kindred spirits, but they were rejected in favor of more easily palatable poets, such as Howard Nemerov and Adrienne Rich. In an introduction to the anthology’s American selections, Pack said that American poetry fell into two opposing camps, the Academics and the Beats, and claimed that the Beats were more popular only because gossip has wider appeal than true literature. The public finds a poet interesting “if he drinks himself to death,” Pack polemicized, “if he undresses at a poetry reading, or if he takes part in a presidential inauguration, but not for what his poems say or their quality.”
Not long afterward, however, Grove Press published The New American Poets: 1945–1960, an anthology with a different, more inclusive slant. This book’s editor, Donald Allen, claimed that the other collection represented “closed form” while his championed “open form,” less doctrinaire and formalistic in its approach. Allen’s book was the first to range through the entire spectrum of recent avant-garde poetry and use distinctive labels—Beats, New York School, Black Mountain, and so on—to group and identify the poets. The labels are simplistic, but the book validated Ginsberg’s status as a leader of the freshly minted New American Poetry movement and demonstrated the vitality of novel practices devised and developed by Lamantia, McClure, Creeley, Kerouac, Orlovsky, Corso, Ferlinghetti, and others. Beat literature is now accepted as authentic literature in most places where English is read and taught.
During the 1950s, musicians lined up to provide jazz accompaniments for Beat poetry readings, and Kerouac read or sang on albums featuring such artists as Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, and the piano-playing TV personality Steve Allen. Ginsberg became a musician himself, singing, chanting, and accompanying himself on harmonium in countless concerts and recordings, and working with such pop-music icons as John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and the Clash. Ferlinghetti greatly admired John Cage, a composer (with Black Mountain links) committed to chance techniques and in-the-moment improvisation. The great classical composer Philip Glass, one of the founders of the minimalist school, used Ginsberg’s poetry as the texts for two major works: Hydrogen Jukebox, a 1990 piece for voices and ensemble, and Symphony No. 6: Plutonian Ode, composed in 2001 for soprano and orchestra. The latter exists in two versions, one of which has been recorded with Ginsberg reading the poem that inspired the composition.
As a songwriting poet, Bob Dylan has earned a place in Ann Charters’s important Portable Beat Reader anthology. And some observers hold that the Beat Generation spirit as well as British “beat music” had something to do with the name selected in 1960 by the English rock band known forevermore as the Beatles. That group certainly admired Burroughs, whose mug shot is included on the photo-filled jacket of their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Late in his career Burroughs cultivated an interest in punk rock, made appearances with the performance artist and musician Laurie Anderson, and collaborated with the singer Tom Waits, carrying the Beat legacy to a new generation of music-oriented audiences.
Beat spontaneity, audacity, and introspection have also manifested themselves vigorously in the visual arts, taking their purest form in abstract expressionism. That movement emerged in the pre-Beat 1940s and flourished during the Beat-influenced 1950s, represented most famously by action painters (e.g., Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning) and color field painters (e.g., Helen Frankenthaler, Clyfford Still). Loosely speaking, action painting can resemble Kerouac’s breathless prose and the white heat of bebop, while the comparative stasis of color-field canvases recalls the contemplative aspects of verse by Snyder and Rexroth and the quiet intensity of West Coast cool jazz. Works by such minimalist artists as Ellsworth Kelly and Donald Judd might be likened to Kerouac’s haikus.
The willingness of Beat writers to engage with everyday culture forged a link between their work and pop art, pioneered by painters like Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein and carried to its pinnacle by Andy Warhol in his remarkable paintings, sculptures, and films. Robert Rauschenberg’s collage-like “combines” used found objects much as Beat writers used everyday “found speech,” and the common interest of many Beats and artists in surrealism and Dada energized everything from “happenings” to the conceptual works of Fluxus artists. Artists linked to San Francisco’s Funk art group included such Beat-affiliated figures as Bruce Conner, Wallace Berman, Robert Nelson, and Robert Frank.
Beat culture has a solid presence in photography, as well. Ginsberg became a major photographer, taking an enormous number of memorable pictures from the late 1940s to the end of his life. Robert Frank’s seminal photo book The Americans was published in a U.S. edition with an introduction by Kerouac, which is in perfect synch with Frank’s piercing, eclectic vision.
Burroughs was the Beat most intimately involved with visual art, starting with the photomontages and scrapbooks he made after discovering the cut-up method. Later he invented “shotgun painting,” and later still he turned to more traditional forms of abstract expressionism, collaborating with Keith Haring and Robert Rauschenberg. Ferlinghetti was also committed to visual art. His cover painting for Pomes All Sizes, the Kerouac collection published by City Lights in 1992, is a powerful example of his ability to evoke the unseen substance of an inner life. Gregory Corso made paintings and drawings too, often to illustrate his poems, demonstrating a sense of line that recalls Jean Cocteau.
Most interesting of all are the paintings and drawings that Kerouac created over many years of intermittent work. Most are stronger on emotional passion than technical skill, but some of his drawings have an intimacy and playfulness that are fully in tune with his from-the-hip writing. He took art seriously, telling friends he would have been a painter if he hadn’t become a writer. Speculating on why so many Beat writers were attracted to the visual arts, the critic Ed Adler wrote that they were seeking “to broaden their anthropological explorations and reportorial observations and venture out into the vast alternative sensual hemisphere beyond the limits of the dialectic, beyond verbiage and vocabulary, beyond the lexiconical limits of text, beyond words themselves, to a place where they could find that ineffable extra to flesh out and more fully evolve the totality of their lives.”
William S. Burroughs says in the documentary What Happened to Kerouac? that “the whole Beat movement has become a worldwide cultural revolution, absolutely unprecedented. There’s never been anything like it before. Penetrating the Arab countries, which is really a hermetic society. And then their affiliation with the political activists that went on in the ’60s—although the Beats were originally nonpolitical, others who were political were really following the Beat movement to its logical conclusion.”
Burroughs is right. Beat ethics, aesthetics, and social values have traveled far beyond the United States, partly because of the power of Beat ideas, and partly because the Beats themselves were cultural borrowers. One thinks of Burroughs’s fascination with Moroccan life, Kerouac’s affection for his French Canadian roots, Ginsberg’s travels in Europe and India, the impact of Japanese arts on Snyder and Whalen, and the allure of the Beat Hotel in Paris.
The Blue Neon Alley website locates Beat-related groups in a diverse array of places and languages: four in France; two each in Russia, Australia, Spain, Italy, and the United Kingdom; and one each in Japan, Denmark, Norway, and Germany. Conferences on the Beats have been held in Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, China, and elsewhere. Reports of new Beat colonies should be accepted with caution, however, since unhip observers give “Beat” a wide range of meanings, some of them inappropriate. A rising number of Chinese college students are getting hooked on city life, for example, and they have been called the Beat Generation of their country. What attracts these “Beats” is not the urban scene for its own sake, though; it is the lure of middle-class living with famous American brands at their disposal, and this is in fact a caricature. Kerouac wrote On the Road, not “At the Mall.”
Neither the core Beats nor their followers ever resolved the basic contradiction of their philosophy. On one side was an extroverted desire to influence culture and society; on the other was an introverted drive to find aesthetic and spiritual purity. This conflict didn’t bother them because they were skilled at the art of holding two or more incongruous ideas in mind at the same time. And they could always explain their inconsistencies as cheerful exercises in Zen-like transcendence.
The very haziness of the Beat agenda helps account for its ongoing appeal. From the punks to the slackers, from Generation X to the Millennials and the Occupy activists, the very names of many youth-culture groups have carried on the Beat tradition of blending antiauthoritarian edginess with cynicism about clearly targeted protest. These groups have generally lacked the Beats’ confidence in spiritual creativity and intuitive wisdom, but they have been broadly in tune with the Beats’ distrustful attitude toward top-down organization and conventional notions of propriety, decency, and decorum. A commentary in the New York Times even compared the Beats with the conservative Tea Party movement, saying that both groups are driven by the same ideological standby of American protesters: the call for individual freedom.
The Beat Generation’s influence still lingers, and its rebellious values have come back into fashion among young people with misgivings about the sociocultural status quo. Even the cyberpunks of the 1990s and 2000s are the Beats’ fraternal twins, ornery loners fending off mainstream culture while paving the way for—perhaps—more explosive movements to come. The best ideas of the Beats remain as bracing, spirited, and subversive as in their heyday.