IN GREENWICH VILLAGE a dreamy young beggar in a tattered Ivy League summer suit and a buttondown collar with both buttons missing turns on an uptown couple to ask, “Gimme a quarter for a Cadillac, hey?”
In New Orleans a pretty little department store model approaches a man at a party, takes off her sweater, then her bra, and says, “Let’s ball, dig”—by which she means, Let’s try a new far-out sound on the hi-fi. If he reaches out to touch anything but the tone arm, she will say, “You’re through, frantic boy. You are sawed off.” He disappears from future guest lists.
In Denver a gaggle of young lads, not knowing what to do on a warm spring evening, steal a car each, drive them to the other side of town, park, steal a few more, drive back to the starting point, park, and then settle down to giggle about the confusion of the owners and the police. Silence. Return of boredom. Yawn. Finally one says softly, “Pops, why didn’t we think of picking up on some chicks?”
In St. Louis a girl and her friend, who used to be a drummer with a well-known quintet, both of them suffering withdrawal symptoms—he has been working to support their habits by pimping for the girl—beg an old pal to put them up with bed and fridge for a few days. While the friend is away at work, they telephone a friend in San Francisco, give him the bit, and after gassing awhile, suggest that they both just keep the connection and leave the telephones off the hook. Their friend won’t get the bill until they are gone, far gone. Why do this to him? “He’s square, so square, man.”
In Detroit a hi-fi engineer clucks sympathetically at the plight of a young couple in college. It’s true love, but they have no place to go. The back seat of a car is for puppy love and sprained backs. OK, they can use his apartment. What they don’t know is that there is a microphone concealed in the mattress. Their friend invites them to a party where he plays the tape before strangers.
In San Francisco a group of young poets announces Religious Poetry Night, attracting a hall full of the plump, mournful ladies (purple hats, veils, heaving freckled bosoms) who adore such things. The first poet gets up to read. “C— S——!” he shrieks at the audience.
On State Street in Chicago a frozen-faced grifter stops a passer-by, pushing out his hand and murmuring, “What you say, pop? Give me a piece of skin.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know you.”
“I don’t know you either, man, but you like to have a party?” He slides off and away with a passive dreamy girlish look which has nothing sweet about it: it plots impossible meanness, anything to make him feel something. He doesn’t know anybody, and says “man” to everybody because he can’t be bothered remembering names.
In midtown Manhattan a writer, Jack Kerouac, prepares for his interview on TV. “We’re beat, man,” he says. “Beat means beatific, it means you get the beat, it means something. I invented it.” For the television audience he announces, “We love everything, Billy Graham, the Big Ten, rock and roll, Zen, apple pie, Eisenhower—we dig it all. We’re in the vanguard of the new religion.” Jack Kerouac likes to write of Charlie Parker as God and himself as the Prophet.
These are hipsters.
Who is the hipster, what is it? The pure beast is as hard to track as the pure “student” or “midwesterner,” but let us follow the spoor of history and symptoms. We will probably find that “pure hipster” is a phrase like “100% American”—an unstable compound with an indefinite content.
Hipsterism began in a complex effort of the Negro to escape his imposed role of happy-go-lucky animal. A few highly self-conscious urban Negro men sought to imitate “white” diffidence, or coolness, or beatness. They developed a style which was both a criticism of their Bible-shouting and jazz-loving parents and a parody of the detached, uninvolved city ofays. They improvised on an unstated theme—like bop—and if you weren’t with it, with it and for it, you heard nothing but jangle. The horn rims of the intellectual came to be known as bop glasses. They blew fine abstractions. The joke was a good one.
Then their white friends took up the fashion, complicating the joke by parodying a parody of themselves. Cool music was the artistic expression of this hypertensive chill. However, in order to keep from dancing, keep from shouting, keep from feeling, a further help was needed and it was found in heroin. Some of the earlier hot musicians had used marijuana, many drank; these were springs toward jumping high in a group. There was a strong prejudice against the cats who went on junk, expressed in the superstition that you might mainline a fatal bubble of air into your veins. Uh-uh, no baby, they said: and in practice they found that the junkie blew lousy drum or horn, no matter what he thought he was blowing.
The new generation preferred supercelestial private music, however. Heroin dissolves the group and each man flies alone all the way to Barbados. And without flapping his arms.
Many other young Americans felt beat, wanted to keep cool, and so into the arms of the first hipster society, that still unravished bride of bop quietness, ran three angry herds: (1) Main-street thugs with their sideburns, their cycles, and their jeans; (2) college kids and a few literary chappies, finding in the addict’s cool stance an expression of the frustration of fluid-drive lives in which the juicebox had gone dry; and (3) Upper Bohemia, tired of Van Gogh, Italian movies, charades, and sex, and so ready to try anti-art, anti-sex, anti-frantic nonmovement. These latter comprise the Madison Avenue hippies, models who strip merely to express their hatred of fashion magazines, admen and lawyers who marry call girls, a host of Ivy League symbol-manipulators, bloated with money and debt, pink with General Electric sun tans and shame, who express their benzedrine blues by wigging at night near a blasting rig. “Well, you know . . . Albert Schweitzer doesn’t make me climb the wall. . . . Is it true he eloped with Kim Novak?”
“Everyone says,” remarks the pretty girl who seeks to please, “that I’m exceptionally fastidious, but would you like me to do something nasty for you? I really wouldn’t mind. My name is Grape-Nuts, what’s yours?”
Let us now move in closer to the hipster’s harried heart. When the hipster makes it with a girl, he avoids admitting that he likes her. He keeps cool. He asks her to do the work, and his ambition is to think about nothing, zero, strictly from nadaville, while she plays bouncy-bouncy on him. When the hipster makes it with boys, it’s not because he’s a homosexual and cares for it—it’s for money, a ride home, pass the time of night while waiting for the band to come back on. When the hipster steals a car, he doesn’t keep it or sell it; he hides it where the squares will have trouble finding it, and writes “Mort a Louis A” in soap on the windshield. When the hipster digs music, Proust, or religion, it’s to talk over, it’s to carry around in his jeans, it’s to hit his buddies with; it makes no sense or feeling, and the weirder it is, the cooler the kick.
In other words, the hipster is a spectacular instance of the flight from emotion. He is like a sick refrigerator, laboring with tremendous violence, noise and heat, and all for one purpose—to keep cool. This refrigerator is powered by crime without economic need; an editor to one of the hipster writers complains, “Jeez, when I slept on park benches and boosted from the A and P, I did it because I had to. My kick was that I needed sleep and food. I didn’t do it to tell people about.” The refrigerator is powered by sex without passion; the sole passion is for the murder of feeling, the extinguishing of the jitters. The refrigerator is powered by religion without faith; the hipster teases himself toward the black battiness of oblivion, and all the vital refreshment which religion has given the mystics of the past is a distraction from the lovely stupor he craves. Unlike Onan, who spilled his seed upon the ground, the hipster spills his brains and calls it piety. He also wears music, art, and religion as a kind of badge for identification. Instead of the secret handshake which got him into Uncle Don’s Boys’ Club or the Orphan Annie Secret Society, he now says, “You dig the Bird? Proust? Zen?”
“I’m hip.” says his friend. This phrase means: No need to talk. No more discussion. I’m with you. I got you. Cool. In. Bye-bye.
The language of hipsterism is a means toward noncommunication, a signal for silence. The truest lingo is narcotics, because this more than anything gives Little Boy Beat what he wants—release from imagination and the body—an illusion not of omnipotence, as we are sometimes told, but of a timeless browsing in eternity. In other words, a cool simulation of death. The sentimental and sensational talk about drugs producing sex maniacs is nonsense. The man on a habit needs nothing more than his fix. Quiet, quiet. He may perform terrible violence to get the drug, but not sex: pleasure has nothing to do with the dreamy high of heroin. The pale soft face of the addict, with his smudged passive eyes and his drooping mouth, is almost ladylike in its sweetness. It has no fight or love in it.
Heroin enables the hipster to stand guard over his soul, dreaming of cool nothing, beautiful beat nothing, while his feet go ratatat and he strokes a switchblade, a hand, or a copy of Swann’s Way. Needless to say, the proto- and quasi-hipsters do not usually go all the way to the perfection of heroin.
The current fad for the hipster—his language, manners and attitudes—indicates that he is, as that fearful phrase goes, “no isolated phenomenon.” Jack Kerouac proclaimed, “Even the Ivy League is going hip.” Emerging out of bop, narcotics, and the subtle rebellion of the Negro against the charge of being “happy, excitable, emotional,” the hipster takes one of his chief public models from that most authentic American source, the movies. He ignores the injunction of the pious thirteenth-century moralist, John of Garland, who wrote: “Be not a fornicator, O Student! Stand and sit upright, do not scratch thyself!” The Stanislavsky hipsters scratch as if their soul’s unease were actually juicy fleas, slouch as if leaning to catch Marlon’s word from earth or Jimmy’s from vaulted heaven. The movie shadow of Dean or the Brando of The Wild One is a part of the image of the hipster, whether he be the smooth pink Ivy League metahipster, staring at himself in the mirror of one of those shops where they apparently do operations to remove the bones from men’s shoulders, or the long-chinned hairy protohipster with a girl jiggling on the behind seat of his Harley-Davidson “74.” In many theaters where The Wild One played, there was a lineup afterwards in the men’s room, the cyclists in their nail-studded black jackets scowling with adoration into the mirror as they rehearsed their public roles. Each man was Brando, distant and violent. Each man was Marlon, cool and beat. They stood in a row without shame, almost without vanity (so pure it was), like neophytes for sacrifice in their penitential leather, silver trim, sideburns, and duckass haircuts. Scratch not, O Hipster!
And so the hipster’s lines of communication spread from a four-bit movie-house in a small town of the Midwest to the chic saloons of New York and the Coast. He reminds us of the Teddy Boys of England, the breaking-loose wild brats of defeated Japan, the existentialist zazous of Paris, tootling the petrified dixie they learned from old Beiderbecke records. His apologists, particularly the literary hipsters of San Francisco and New York are fond of reaching back into history to invoke the criminal gods of French poetry—Rimbaud, who mysteriously vanished into Africa, Villon, who ended up dancing on the gallows, Genet, who is now a poet and playwright hero of Paris after a career of thievery, blackmail, and male prostitution. The very important difference between the American literary hipster and his foreign models is that the great artist-criminals were true outcasts from society: they did not pick themselves up by the seat of their own pants and toss themselves out. They were driven by class differences and economic pressure. A few of the Americans have performed spectacularly—mostly in the loony bin; one even played William Tell with his wife and blew her head off—but these are individual troubles, not the product of any vast and windy guilt of society. Who ain’t got personal troubles? I dig yours, man; but I got mine too.
In any case, the 1958 hipster is not the bold medieval troubadour prince of song and con, nor the romantic adventurer poet of later times, nor the angry driven Depression stiff: he is the true rebel without a cause. No, of course, he has a cause—his charred self, but a self without connection or need. He is a reticent boyo with a yen for thuggery, a reluctant visitor to the affairs of men, a faintly girlish loiterer near the scenes of violence. If he can’t be a big boom-boom hero in a war, like Gary Cooper, at least he can take the muffler off his rod, like Marlon. Mainly he is afflicted with the great triumvirate disease of the American male—Passivity, Anxiety, Boredom. Individualists without individuality, a sleepy brawl of knowing nonthinkers, the lonely crowd at its grumbling loneliest, the hipsters fall naturally to the absolute submission of a marriage to heroin. Like the submission to boredom in television and all the other substitutes for personal creative-ness in American life, narcotics involve an abdication of good sense by men deprived of the will to make their own ways.
“I dig everything, man.”
“What do you want to do now?”
“I don’t know, man. Get some kicks somehow.”
If the description of the hipster as “passive” strikes you as harsh, look up the dictionary definition of the word: “Med. Pertaining to certain morbid conditions characterized by deficient vitality and reaction.”
The word hipster came in with bop, which is a way of keeping cool musically, at the same time that narcotics addiction burgeoned—a way of keeping cool sexually. The drug-taking hipster is not a sexual anarchist; he is a sexual zero, and heroin is his mama, papa, and someone in bed. (The pusher in A Hatful of Rain is called “Mother.”) Not every quasi-hipster mainlines into the tattoo on his arm, of course, but the style of life is set by those who do. The coolest boys call each other “daddy-o,” as if their passivity extends to thinking of every man as a potential guardian father. Of course, the traveling musician also cannot be bothered to remember names, so everyone is “man,” “pops,” “daddy-o.” They worship the purple fantasy of tom-tee-shirted masculinity created by Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and others who have invented a new theatrical type—the male impersonator. Adorably brutal, stripped of the prime attributes of manliness—intelligence, purpose, control—they are the curvaceous Mae Wests of popular melodrama. Having died, James Dean and Charlie Parker are defined as immortal. Living and growing up a bit, Marlon Brando is a traitor to this myth of saintly suicide by sports car or heroin. They might have forgiven his giving up the bongos, but his receding hairline is a disgrace to the cause. The strong silent hero must also be weak and pretty.
One of the curious bypaths of hipsterism leads to their far-out religious camp. Jack Kerouac says, “We’re in the vanguard of the new religion,” which is a little like the monk in the story who claimed that he was the world champion for humility. They picked up on St. John of the Cross for a time, Catholic ritual, St. Francis of Assisi (they were St. Frantics); then they moved on toward Byzantine, Greek, and Orthodox fantasies, with ikons and incense; they made the Dostoevski scene. In recent years some have taken to calling themselves Zen Hipsters, and Zen Buddhism has spread like the Asian flu, so that now you can open your fortune cookie in one of the real cool Chinese restaurants of San Francisco and find a slip of paper with the straight poop: “Dig that crazy Zen sukiyaki. Only a square eats Chinese food.” Promiscuity in religion stands, like heroin, for despair, a feverish embracing of despair, a passive sinking into irrationality. Zen and other religions surely have their beauties, but the hipster dives through them like a sideshow acrobat through a paper hoop—into the same old icy water of self-distrust below. The religious activities of the hipsters cure their unease in the world the way dancing cheek to cheek cures halitosis.
No wonder the hipster says, “Nada, I’m beat—I’m right in there, see—I’m the most religious, the most humble —I’m swinging, man.” He stammers because something is missing, a vital part, the central works. His soul, sense of meaning, individual dignity (call it how you like) has been excised as unnecessary by a civilization very often producing without good purpose. He feels that love is not love, work is not work, even protest is not protest any more. On the consumer’s assembly line, in the leisure-time sweatshop, he pieceworks that worst of all products of anxiety—boredom. This is the response of retreat from the cold inanities of his time payments, luxurious discomfort, dread of the successful future. Boredom is a corollary to anxiety. As the middle-class man now buys a brick for the new church (Does God need that basement bowling alley?), so the hipster tries to find himself in intuitions of meaning through the Anchor edition of Zen tales, or through some other fashionable interior decoration. Naturally he stammers, “Cool, mon, real cool.” He wants to stop moving, jittering, flittering. He displays himself as exemplary because he has no wife, children, responsibilities, politics, work. The middle-class man both has and does not have these things. Who can call moving bits of paper a job? Most Americans are paper-movers. How is love of wife and children more than a social habit when a man feels qua man (not as husband or father) that he has no authority except in his own home?
When a man’s house is his only castle, then he has no castle.
Both smugness and ambition are characteristics of human beings, not of animals, though rats and rabbits can be taught despair by repeated electric shocks. Faced by the threat of absolute manipulation, the hipster mobilizes himself for a last stand—and hops about the cage, twitching his tail, bumping the charged wires.
The cliché which tells us that Americans love Things, Possessions, does not go far enough. Americans also demand experiences of power, one way or the other, in person or out of the picture tube. This seems normal enough to be a condition of life, but not when the starved mirage of power crowds out the quietness which gives experience meaning and organizes a man to face his private issues of working, loving, having children, dying. Certain experiences lead away from rather than toward, and faster and faster we go: the experience does not help; we try wilder experience; this does not help; still more wild, wilder. The extreme of a flatulent submission to the mass media eventually stops all experience in its tracks, in the guise of giving perfect experiences which make it possible to carry on. Television as a medium of entertainment is not the villain any more than good whiskey is a villain; they can both be good friends. It is the bleared submission by depleted souls which destroys. Relaxation is one thing—sharing experience vicariously is a great experience to which the imagination entitles us. To be stunned is another matter entirely. Despair by electronic shock.
Sensitive to all this, the hipster has decided to quit —resign—have no more of it. Instead of being part of a mass audience before the picture tubes, he becomes an audience of one before the hypo. He gives up on the issue of being human in society. He decides that the problem does not exist for him. He disaffiliates. The man who cares is now derided for being “frantic.”
But of course the hipster is still a part of a bewildered America in which Tab Hunter confides to an interviewer that he can only sleep with his Teddy bear in bed with him. The hipster is victim of the most hopeless condition of slavery—the slave who does not know that he is a slave and is proud of his slavery, calling it “freedom.” Incurable? Nearly. The posture of negation and passivity thinks it is religion and rebellion; instead it is a mob phenomenon. These nihilists sail dreamy down the Nile of throughway America, spending many a sleepless day figuring out something real cool to do at night, and end up trying to convince themselves, as Jack Kerouac does, that Charlie Parker is God. Kerouac’s birdmen in his novel, On the Road, search for coolness within their beatness, hipness within their jeans-and-dirty-hair dream of quickies with marvelous girls (who also wear dirty hair and jeans). Occasionally, as in the Kerouac variety of superfrantic subhipster, sex takes the place of dope. This is a kind of sex which also takes the place of sex. The way some men gloat over possessions, he keeps score of his hero’s erotic blitzes, forgetting that —if you are the trooper who uses sex as a weapon—every notch in a weapon weakens the weapon.
The hipster is a street-corner, bar, and partying phenomenon, a creature of mobs. One Rimbaud may be a genius; a crowd of them is a fad. An earlier fad for psychoanalysis has this in favor of it: Freud believed in the prime value of emotions, but in a necessary control by the intelligence. In other words, he valued society despite the discontents of civilization. The hipster gives up society, gives up intelligence, and thinks he is doing this in favor of the emotions; but he has already, without making a decision about them, let his feelings seep away through a leaky personality. What is left is a spasmodic jerk, though some of the individual spokesmen also have vivacious talent. No wonder that the madhouse is seen as the refuge of their “best minds.” Catatonia, here we come.
These shrill moonbirds turn out to be rigid earth satellites, rocketed by bureaucrats beyond their ken into the air of reality, where they circle in a pattern determined without choice, give out a diminishing signal, draw to earth and burn, crumble, vanish.
When Yeats looked into the future to find a terrible savior, an evolution up from animality into something strange and wonderful:
What rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethelem to be born?
—he did not mean James Dean. Perhaps, as they claim, the tunneling hipster’s avoidance of feeling can lead to a new honesty of emotion. Perhaps a groundhog might some day learn to fly, but man O man, that will be one strange bird. 1958
“WHOEE, I told my soul.” This urgent message from Jack Kerouac to his soul contains most of the sense which emerges from his frantic tirade in the form of a novel, On the Road, and it is his ability to make such stuff hip, cool, beat, and frantic, all at once, which has earned him a title more valued nowadays than that of “novelist”: He is a Spokesman.
For what this time? Kerouac has appointed himself prose celebrant to a pack of unleashed zazous who like to describe themselves as Zen Hipsters—poets, pushers and panhandlers, musicians, male hustlers, and a few marginal esthetes seeking new marginal distinctions. They have a center in San Francisco, another in Greenwich Village, and claim outposts in Tangiers, on merchant vessels, in Chicago, a fragment among the fragments in New Orleans, a fringe of the fringe in Mexico City. Despite all wandering, however, their loneliness for the herd sends them eagerly trumpeting back into each other’s arms after brief periods of saying whoee to their souls among the outlanders. At least two of them happen to be talented—Allen Ginsberg, a poet of shock and wild wit, whose blathering Howl really does contain some of the liveliest epithets in contemporary verse; and Jack Kerouac, whose mammoth journal has been edited into the form of a novel by The Viking Press. One of the heroes of On the Road, of course, is Allen Ginsberg (under the name of Carlo Marx), just as one of the heroes of Howl is Jack Kerouac (under the name of Jack Kerouac).
Who are these hipsters, what are they? A distinction must be made between the authentic beast—a phenomenon of frigidity and shock—and its literary fleas, who are mainly Ivy League desperadoes, romantic dreamers fondly recalling hypes and heists that other chaps hyped or heisted. In the background of Kerouac’s book glimmer the cultural signs that the people he is spokesmaning for are really here: their photographs in Harper’s Bazaar and Mademoiselle; two issues of the Evergreen Review and New Directions 16 largely devoted to their work; a publishing venture in San Francisco; articles on them in The New York Times, The Nation, the New Republic, New World Writing, Dissent, the Chicago Review, and elsewhere; a few books, including Clellon Holmes’s Go/, which belongs to an earlier period (1952), although it describes many of the people implicated in On the Road. (Historical periods rush upon us like men’s fashions: “Bop was somewhere between its Charlie Parker Ornithology period and another period which began with Miles Davis. . . .”) Mr. Ginsberg and Mr. Gregory Corso recently teamed up to make an agitprop tour of New York which shook Madison Avenue real bad, though they have yet to appear on behalf of Schweppes (with beards), Hathaway (eyepatch), Marlboro (tattooed hands), or in poems by e. e. cummings (they too are free spirits, FREE, they told him).
On the Road carries the ensign of the hipster with considerable humor and vitality, much awe, and a little of the literary hipster’s prevalent social disease, the faked-up pretension that these are underground intellects who know all about Zen Buddhism, St. John of the Cross, Proust, and good bad old Charlie Parker, and could tell us if they only cared to. The awe breaks to happy moments of lucidity which are those of a real writer. Kerouac then sees the hipster, agape and bedazzled, mumbling about the world-historical significance of bop—but only mumbling. What he tells, he tries to tell true-enough according to his lights. At times he almost seems to understand that Charlie Parker blew fine horn, but was not God.
However, there is a structural flaw in this contemporary revival of the literary-criminal or ecstatic-delinquent underground which makes Jack Kerouac’s book a proof of illness rather than a creation of art, a novel. In the first place, Villon, Rimbaud, and Jean Genet really lived by their criminal passivity and wits. They showed their rumps to society because they were caught from behind. These Americans, however, are literary in their coolness, hipness, beatness, and they are unauthentic exactly to the degree that they are literary. The hipster-writer is a perennial perverse bar mitzvah boy, proudly announcing: “Today I am a madman. Now give me the fountain pen.” The frozen thugs gathered west of Sheridan Square or in the hopped-up cars do not bother with talk. That’s why they say “man” to everyone—they can’t remember anybody’s name. But Ginsberg and Kerouac are frantic. They care too much, and they care aloud. “I’m hungry, I’m starving, let’s eat right now!” That they care mostly for themselves is a sign of adolescence, but at least they care for something, and it’s a beginning. The hipster is past caring. He is the criminal with no motivation in hunger, the delinquent with no zest, the gang follower with no love of the gang; i.e., the worker without ambition or pleasure in work, the youngster with undescended passions, the organization man with sloanwilsonian gregory-peckerism in his cold, cold heart. He has entered a deep cavern where desire and art are unknown; swimming blind, scared, and silent, he eats whatever is alive—a symptom of trouble, but hardly feeling it any more.
Still, hipsterism has touched a number of writers, since the extremes always attract and the hipster fish is the coldest and clammiest and perhaps the deadliest creature of the deep seas in which we all now swim. “Nothing human is alien to me.” Goethe, among others, said it. The hipster’s pressured soul, squirting bile, excites the artist who, out of pity or morbidity, either saintly or slumming, dives into the world of the ice-blooded. Yes, something has made them that way. There are connections. They have carried their rebellion from society past the end: excising from their innards the cant of a mass culture, these fierce surgeons have also badly cut up their humanity. They are cool. Now they blow nothing but the miseries.
Bernard Wolfe has learned to keep a heavy leg outside, in the wide world of politics and philosophy, and therefore to make art of the hipsters’ death-in-life; Norman Mailer has gone to school to them, and may yet graduate, as he has restlessly graduated from other ideologies. The poet Kenneth Rexroth is their youngish elder statesman, whose collected essays in their defense might be entitled Zen Strikes Back; Lawrence Lipton contributes a hairy, academic apologia pro vita nostruomo; the late Isaac Rosenfeld was one of their most perceptive critics. There are others whom the stoolies of criticism have fingered with deadly inaccuracy, such as Nelson Algren, Chandler Brossard, Anatole Broyard, and (may he put away his Harley-Davidson “74,” nevermore to roam in nail-trimmed leather jacket and buttock-cracking jeans) Herbert Gold. But if we grant that the hipster-writer exists, the first thing to understand about him is that he is not a hipster, although he likes to play as if, any more than Nelson Algren is a Polish poker player. He is propagandist for a cause that does not ask to be preached. He is hung up on the dilemma of being cool and frantic at the same time. “Some of the best minds of our generation,” chants Allen Ginsberg, “have given up thinking.”
By definition an artist cannot be a hipster though he might follow the old style of dipping into forbidden waters, reminding us in various ways of Brecht, Gide, Gorki, and a number of English and Spanish philosophical picaros. Coolness can be defined as refusing-to-care—not uncaring, but refusing. The hipster steals a car with a copy of Swann’s Way in his pocket—a book he doesn’t read, a car he doesn’t want. The hipster’s ideal is to smoke a cigar and study the Daily News while having immobile sexual intercourse. He has to carry out the act in order to refuse its meaning in vitality and refreshment and to debase the girl: he cannot simply abstain. The frantic man swings. He may move badly; his prose may be derivative and his reactions premature; but he moves, man. The ash spills from his cigar. He gets more than kicks out of life.
When Kerouac wails about “many and many a lost night, singing and moaning and eating the stars and dropping the juices drop by drop on the hot tar,” he is in a respectable literary tradition, and the tradition’s name is Thomas Wolfe. This is not hipster talk. When he passes through Fresno, sees an Armenian, and thinks: “Yes, yes, Saroyan’s town,” he has some of that aging bucko’s freewheeling self-love—and just as literary. When he hints at orgy, his real daddy is the daddy of all the living boheems, Henry Miller, though he practices a conciseness of sexual rhetoric which probably derives from the publisher’s timidity rather than from any cool indifference. Sometimes he writes the purest straight-and-true Hemingway, as when he meets a Mexican girl: “Her breasts stuck out straight and true.” Later his friend Dean is driving a car no-hands, but “it hugged the line straight and true.”
This is not beat. This is not cool. This is not hip. This is the Columbia College boy vacationing on his GI Bill money, reading Papa. But despite all the bookish derivations, Kerouac retains a stubborn integrity: “I had nothing to offer anybody but my own confusion.”
He has something more to offer. I would guess, writing before publication, that the bookselling business is not yet ready for a particular blend of nihilism and mush which might someday take its place in the gassy world of bestsellerdom.* When Kerouac mentions the Bomb, he makes us blush: he doesn’t mean it, it’s pure stylishness, and we resent the fact that the great disaster of contemporary history should be used in passing to let us know that a poet “cares.” However, beyond the pretense, the derivations, the plotless rambling, the grate of vacant noise, Kerouac somehow achieves communication of a happy sense for the humor of car-stealing and marital confusion, for the insanity and pomp of addicts, for the joys of being tormented. And he gives us a fascinating tape recording of the skinny Bunyanesque car-thief, Dean Moriarty, craving intellect, wives, fast travel and bop, emitting fiery nonsense from the tail of his hurtling nuttiness:
But of course, Sal, I can talk as soon as ever and have many things to say to you in fact with mv own little bangtail mind I’ve been reading and reading this gone Proust all the way across the country and digging a great number of things I’ll never have TIME to tell you about and we STILL haven’t talked of Mexico and our parting there in fever—but no need to talk. Absolutely, now, yes?
He balances the crazed Dean with a certain wryness about himself, whom he calls Sal Paradise:
She was a nice little girl, simple and true. . . .
Oh-oh, Hemingway again.
. . . and tremendously frightened of sex. I told her it was beautiful. I wanted to prove this to her. She let me prove it, but I was impatient and proved nothing. She sighed in the dark. “What do you want out of life?” I asked, and I used to ask that all the time of girls.
Here he enlists both our indulgence and our sympathy for poor impatient Sal, and does it with wit and feeling and imaginative detachment. But at other places he is capable of the melodrama of the pure-bred dormitory genius:
I would be strange and ragged and like the Prophet who has walked across the land to bring the dark Word, and the only Word I had was “Wow.”
At still another juncture he forgets that he is the Prophet of Wow and informs us that his word is Mad. There are other words in his sack, too.
But wha hoppin?
Nothin’ hoppin, man.
Dean Moriarty is brilliantly transcribed, not rendered as a man through time and desire, despite all his velocity. He begins mad, he stays mad, he concludes mad: he is a stripped, tormented, dancing celluloid doll, burning fast, without a gesture than can surprise us. Kerouac is loyal to him. In garlands of prose, the words mad, madness, madly are the stems to which the buffeted reader can look for a principle of organization. It is the end of the philosophy for which the hungering boy traveler yearns, the great death-in-life to fill the boredom. He is fading away because of boredom, since nothing can make him happy, nothing can enlist him for more than a few spasmodic jerks, and the mad ones seem in his eyes to have an inner purpose. They are driven, while he is hung up. Unfortunately for communicative purpose, after many repetitions of the phrase, “It was mad,” we hear not the trumpets of Blake nor the divine flap of Antonin Artaud, but rather an interior decorator describing last night’s binge. “As in a dream,” he adds—because he wants to make life a mad dream and so pronounces MAD and DREAM at us over and over—“we made the bed bounce a half hour.” The precise report of the time arouses our suspicion. Why was he looking at his watch? Such modest journalism does not imply a dreamlike transport.
Kerouac’s people rarely talk, respond, exchange warmth with each other. They split their guts to cross the continent, say “Hello, whooee, wow, Charlie Parker, soul” to their friends, get a quick divorce, make a quick marriage, and rush back to San Fran to a first or second or third wife, bringing along a girl from Denver. They zoom up and down the continent for no reason but bored impulse, though they call it “find our souls.” Then they write eighteen thousand-word letters explaining why they never had that good long talk. Words fly, but they cannot communicate. They “tell” each other things: “Went for a walk in the middle of the night and came back to my girl to tell her what I thought about during my walk. I told her a number of things.”
Even the wonderful chatter of the run-on hero, Dean Moriarty, which is the strongest thing in the book, tells us only one thing: He began as a psychopath and ended as a psychotic. Though lively along the way, this is not much of a journey, and tells little of anyone’s life—including the real life of Moriarty.
On the Road asks us to judge the lives of its characters; it requires no real-life acquaintance with them to see that they are “true” projections—that is, the book represents Kerouac’s attempt to do justice to his friends. This is a very different matter from the artist’s attempt to project meaningful people through the medium of his imagination onto the medium of the imaginations of readers: characters who will be true to possibility, not necessarily to fact. On the Road reads right along—it contains, essentially, some lively rambling conversation about the exploits of big bad boys—but it is deeply insular in its intentions. Kerouac has not faced an important decision about whom he is writing for—his “soul” (to prove that he has one), his friends (to prove that he is worthy of them), or the public at whom his editor and publishers aim the book. He seems to be confused by the difference between writing a novel about hipsters—a legitimate stunt in an age of antiheroes—and becoming a hipster in order to leave a track of paper.
Kerouac displays some of the belly-patting in-group satisfaction which is expressed, in another arena, by another confused champion, Homer Capehart, senator from Indiana, who said, “I would rather be a friend of the President of the United States without brains than a friend of the Senator from Oklahoma with brains.” Underlying Kerouac’s autobiographical study of himself and his friends (“Fiction is not possible—my pals are too great—we must do justice,” he seems to say) is the decision that he would rather be a friend of a mediocre poet with madness than of a good poet without madness, rather a hip madman than a nonhip sane one, rather a beat bum than anyone else in the world. The writer and the senator are equally smug.
Another example of insularity: locked in the privacy of fond illusion, Kerouac even believes in the “happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America” with an old-fashioned heartache of nostalgia that is quite touching except for the harm and ignorance it stands for. It is my impression that such writers at Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin are responding to a different sort of experience; the evidence of Negro life shows this people moving out of the Happy, True-hearted, Ecstatic category into a more complicated set of responses to the pressures under which they live. The reader can cite his own experiences, anything from bus boycotts to cool jazz, in support of this truism. It may be cause for sighing to the sentimentalists, but like the stationary hipster, “Movement,” in Bernard Wolfe’s novel, The Late-Risers, or the unnamed hero of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the Negro today aims to be more white than the whites.
I take the Ginsberg of Howl and the Kerouac of On the Road to be typical of their little boys’ town at its rare best, serious, convinced, and trying hard. Through them, one can ask what this clan of superfrantic subhipsters wants. Are they bringing a scout’s message, a Word? Do they represent a new style of American? Will they provide a bracing antidote to the chronic headache of American culture?
They seem to be more a wounded shrilling and shrinking than an angry and vital reaction. Curiously enough their command performance of ecstatic rituals has misled them; they feel no ease in the expense of impulse; puzzled, they withdraw from pleasure. Madness is the penultimate escape, which seems both to allow joy and illumination and to oil over the troubling itch of responsibility. It seems so, that is, to the broody tourist, traveling home to his mother’s suburb to describe his friends to his notebook, and then justifying them to his editors. I am sure that from within madness is different, and less delightful. They are ascetics of excess. They yearn for the annihilation of sense through the abuse of the senses. They look for a society of unchanging virtue in which the risks of possibility have been removed; pure love will reign, green marijuana will be discovered in the mad glove compartments of every straight and true stolen car, Saroyan will live at peace in Fresno, souls will tell each other things. The terms of heaven have changed, but all this is very familiar. The ultimate goal is that single small step beyond madness.
What Kerouac wants is what the mystics driven by fright in all ages want, “the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows . . . the stability of the Intrinsic mind.” Such unhappy nonsense, such droopy-jeaned nay-saying to the blessed facts of time and change! There are other possible mysticisms, but Kerouac models his heaven on Marie Stopes’ elegant, Swedenborgian, impossibly weary orgasm, saying “wow!” in advance just because he hopes to describe it as “MAD.” No wonder all the fireworks. The experience he craves is simple, dark, and in any case inevitable to all of us sooner or later—immolation. He is not content to wait. Mortality terrifies him; better death at once than the long test of life. He expresses this fantasy with convulsive violence, trying to disguise the truth from himself and from the reader, using breathless-ness as a surrogate for energy. But he is compelled. The jitters are not an active state of being. He puts to the service of his rockabye dream of oblivion all the violence, sex, drink, dope, and the batty babbling buddies with whom he populates his heaven, anything, every easeful and bitter experience, even that of turning to rot in the Mexican jungle:
The jungle takes you over and you become it. . . . The dead bugs mingled with my blood; the live mosquitoes exchanged further portions. . . . Soft infinitesimal showers of microscopic bugs fanned down on my face as I slept, and they were extremely pleasant.
It would help Jack Kerouac if he could find within himself the strength to stop writing about Love, Life, and Death (with a dot dot dot between these stylish abstractions) and remember the real boy who enjoyed midget auto races. He might then discover that he knows something about death, life, and love. At present he is a wolf of the hotrod age, Thomas and Virginia melted together into a damp creature from which even Aristophanes, who loved hybrids, would turn away. This wolf bays at the hipster moon, but howls for the Helen of someone else’s youth; it ravens down the raw streets of America, taking gladness in the fact that the Mississippi has lived up to its advance notice in Mark Twain, describing one haunt after another as “storied,” literary as literary can be, raised on the great books, as aren’t we all? Where Thomas Wolfe broke his head butting against the world of New York intellectual highlife, Jack Kerouac is butting but unbroken against the world of the hipsters, a party that never quite pleases its adherents, no matter how much marvelous wild partying foreplay. Despite its drag race of words and gestures, On the Road does nothing, thinks nothing, acts nothing, but yet manages to be a book after all—a loving portrait of hip Dean Moriarty and his beat, cool friends as they run 110 miles an hour in order to stand still. It’s a frantic book, and for that reason there is hope for Jack Kerouac.
Pseudo-Hipster, You Can’t Run Further.
Meta-Hipster, You Can’t Yell Louder.
Hipster, Go Home.
1957
A MODEST PROPOSAL: that the United States government declare the planting of trees illegal.
Result: at last the youth of America will find something new to do. Boys will sneak out in the dead of night with seedlings. The most advanced writers will discover a fresh subject matter: celebration of the gangs of roving youths, clad in torn tee shirts and blue jeans, with pockets filled with seeds and a language all their own. Defrocked tree surgeons in sordid little upstairs offices will forge prescriptions for oak, pine, and maple, for purely agricultural purposes. Teen agers, posing as landscape architects or lumber growers, will hold up nurseries and make off with truckloads of potted birch.
Naturally, there must be rigorous repression—raids of illegal plantations, destruction of smuggled saplings. Camouflaged greenhouses will spring up in every corner of the great cities. The menace of the treeniks will be explained in the popular magazines, with actual photographs of boy and girl treeniks loafing on pine needles. The fellow travelers of the treeniks, who do not actually plant trees themselves, will meet to play the bongos about it, employing with partial accuracy the language of reforestation, composing rhapsodies about the joy of the open road when you have an unplanted field before you. A few noisy tree-planters must be put in prison. Pushers, selling saplings, will go into hiding. For offering an acorn to a minor, the punishment will be twenty years. Harboring a Dangerous Vegetable will be an even greater offense.
In coffee houses all over the country, poems will be read to jazz, all about how cool it is in the shade of the willow, dig. (“This is what I mean timber, man.”) At this point every high school boy will want to be a treenik and the price of illegal saplings to an addict who really needs his fix may go as high as a hundred dollars.
The police will be sent out on raids, burning and chopping and destroying any tree they discover. But they can never catch up with an acquiescent populace. The more they punish and destroy, the more widespread will be trees and treeniks. Certain policemen, of course, will grow wealthy. There will be mysterious traces of soil under their fingernails and in the trunks of their white Cadillacs.
Students of popular culture will attempt to define the difference between Treesters and Treeniks. (The Treester planted trees before anyone else knew that they existed. The Treenik only started when it became a federal offense, described in detail in Life magazine.) The metaphysical sociologists will point out that this fad represents another manifestation of what William James called the need for a “moral equivalent of war.” That is, the youth of our society requires some significant action which combines violence, innovation, and rebelliousness with an outlet for creative desires, the instinct to follow fashion, and a herd obedience. The Grove Press will devote its Evergreen Review to the glorification of the New Arboreal Revolution (sex replaced by tree-watching).
And while the police raid and the non-tree un-wardens burn and the prisons are filled with illegal tree users and the youth is corrupted and the commentators commentate, this huge America of ours will in no time at all be covered by forests, green, immense, silent, and mysteriously consoling.
1960
* it was.—H. G., Jan. 1962.