Chapter I
A Gospel of Emancipation
We’ll get you through your children.
—Allen Ginsberg, 1958
The core of the heresy of the Free Spirit lay in the adept’s attitude towards himself: he believed that he had attained a perfection so absolute that he was incapable of sin.
Disclaiming book-learning and theological subtleties, they rejoiced in direct knowledge of God- indeed, they felt themselves united with the divine essence in a most intimate union. And this in turn liberated them from all restraints. Every impulse was experienced as a divine command; now they could surround themselves with worldly possessions ... now, too, they could lie or steal or fornicate without qualms of conscience. For since inwardly the soul was wholly absorbed into God, external acts were of no account.
—Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, 1957
A toxic cultural movement
In November 1995, an exhibition called “Beat Culture and the New America: 1950-1965” opened at The Whitney Museum of American Art. Considered as an art exhibition, this traveling melange of some two hundred objects hardly existed. In more ways than one, walking through the exhibition was like touring a junk shop.
3 Forgettable and justly forgotten paintings, sculptures, and films were intermixed with innumerable books, photographs, magazines, and other literary detritus, all scattered about the Whitney’s exhibition spaces while the drug-inspired jazz of Miles Davis droned on in the background: that is what “Beat Culture and the New America” had to offer. The two or three objects of even minimal aesthetic accomplishment on view—some paintings by Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline —were not products of the Beat sensibility at all but merely happened to be created at the same time that the Beats got going.
Although aesthetically nugatory, “Beat Culture and the New America” was an exhibition of considerable significance—but not in quite the way that Lisa Phillips, its curator, intended. Casting a retrospective glance at the sordid world of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and other Beat icons, the exhibition unwittingly furnished a kind of pathologist’s report on one of the most toxic cultural movements in American history.
In this sense, at least, the Whitney deserved our gratitude for sponsoring “Beat Culture.” The romance that has surrounded the Beat generation since the mid-Sixties has acted as a kind of sentimental glaze, obscuring its fundamentally nihilistic impulse under a heap of bogus rhetoric about liberation, spontaneity, and “startling oases of creativity.” Notwithstanding their recent media make-over, the Beats were not Promethean iconoclasts. They were drug-abusing sexual predators and infantilized narcissists whose shamelessness helped dupe a confused and gullible public into believing that their utterances were works of genius. We have to thank Lisa Phillips and the Whitney for inadvertently reminding us of this with such vividness. If nothing else, “Beat Culture and the New America” showed that the Beats were not simply artistic charlatans; they were—and, in the case of those who are still with us, they remain—moral simpletons whose destructive influence helped fuel the cultural catastrophe with which we are now living.
Not, of course, that the folks at the Whitney saw it this way. But then the Whitney Museum has long been a splendid example of cultural breakdown. In his foreword to the catalogue, David Ross, at that time the Whitney’s director, complained that the “depth and seriousness of Beat culture” was insufficiently appreciated by many postwar journalists, whose “reactionary” response led them to dismiss the Beats as “loony beret-wearing weirdos, conspiratorial communists, amoral homosexuals, filthy drug-addicted hipsters, or merely pathetic wannabe artists.”
One nice thing about David Ross was his predictability. On the subject of Beat culture, one knew in advance that he would deplore “McCarthyism” and the Fifties generally, and that he would then trot out a number of clichés about race-class-gender, ending with a flourish about the importance of federal funding for the arts. And right on cue he told us that the Beats suffered from “politicians looking for convenient scapegoats,” that they “opened up a closed-down culture,” and that later “artists struggling with their emerging sexual identities found the Beat world a nurturing place, where desire could be freely expressed and pleasure openly extolled.” Finally, he registered his relief that he can “still cite the National Endowment for the Arts as a public champion of important exhibitions such as this once.”
Lisa Phillips sang a similar song, but waxed even more lyrical. In “Beat Culture: America Revisioned,” her essay for the catalogue, Phillips spoke of the “enduring achievement” and “now legendary literary accomplishments” of the Beats, whose “vanguard and antimaterialist” stance set them against the “conformity and consensus of official culture” and the “smug optimism of the Eisenhower years.” In one remarkable passage, she explains how
during the Cold War, in the aftermath of World War II, a new generation emerged in America, known as the Beat generation. Disillusioned with the progress of science and Western technocracy, the Beats embarked on a quest for a new set of values out of which to build a new faith, [and] a new tribal ethic was born. Although once rejected by mainstream society as outlaws, rebels, and morally dangerous, today the Beats are recognized as icons of America’s counterculture and as one of the most influential cultural movements of the century. Their literary works, which aroused great controversy and academic disdain when first published in the fifties, are now part of the canon of American literature taught in universities around the country. Their archives are selling for vast sums, ... and first editions of their books are highly sought after. Perhaps most important, the Beats continue to inspire younger generations of artists with their directness, courage, and intensity of vision.
There is a great deal one could say about this paragraph, beginning with that supposed disillusionment with “the progress of science and Western technocracy” The Beats regularly denounced (in the words of that proto-Beat, Henry Miller) the “air-conditioned nightmare,” but they freely availed themselves of the fruits of modern science and technology—electricity, jet travel, penicillin, not to mention other drugs. Nevertheless, there is one frighteningly accurate statement in Phillips’s inventory: namely, that the Beats “are now part of the canon of American literature taught in universities around the country.” As she later observed, “the Beat rebellion gave form to an invisible turning point in American culture at mid-century.”
David Ross and Lisa Phillips celebrated this development as a giant step forward for freedom and creativity. In fact, the institutionalization of the Beat ethic has been a moral, aesthetic, and intellectual disaster of the first order. (It has also been a disaster for fashion and manners, but that is a separate subject.) We owe to the 1960s the ultimate institutionalization of immoralist radicalism: the institutionalization of drugs, pseudo-spirituality, promiscuous sex, virulent anti-Americanism, naïve anti-capitalism, and the precipitous decline of artistic and intellectual standards. But the 1960s and 1970s only codified and extended into the middle class the radical spirit of the Beats, who, in more normal times, would have remained what they were in the beginning: members of a fringe movement that provided stand-up comics with material.
The church of the Beats
Looking back on it now, it seems peculiarly appropriate that the only real job that the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg ever had—for more than a few weeks, anyway—was in market research. He clearly had a tremendous gift in that direction. For although he later ridiculed his time on Madison Avenue (“We spent $150,000 to learn that most people didn’t want furry teeth,” he scoffed)—as indeed he ridiculed every other aspect of middle-class, bourgeois life—his own career as a poet and spiritual guru depended crucially on his talent as a tireless self-promoter. It was the one talent, in fact, that he indisputably possessed in great abundance.
Readers only vaguely familiar with Ginsberg’s life and work will doubtless find this surprising. When he died at seventy of liver cancer in April 1997, Allen Ginsberg was almost universally celebrated as a major literary figure—and one who, moreover, exercised a benign if sometimes “controversial” influence on the cultural and ethical life of his times. A smiling, sybaritic hippie, lost in clouds of incense and marijuana, chanting mantras, seducing young men, he disparaged the United States while preaching nonviolence and love, and taking off his clothes in public at every opportunity. Among other things, Ginsberg was an active supporter of the North American Man Boy Love Alliance (NAMBLA), an organization devoted to encouraging homosexual pedophilia: “I don’t know exactly how to define what’s underage,” Ginsberg once said—adding that he himself “had never made it with anyone under fifteen.” It says a lot about our culture—or perhaps it is one more testimony to Ginsberg’s marketing skills—that such a man should be exalted by the mainstream press as a beneficent or at least harmlessly amusing presence. As Norman Podhoretz noted in his recent memoir, “in later life, Ginsberg would adopt a sweet and gentle persona, but there was nothing either sweet or gentle about the Allen Ginsberg” of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The few dissenting voices
4 at the time of his death were drowned out in a chorus—one might say a “Howl,” after Ginsberg’s best-known poem—of fulsome eulogy. In a front-page obituary,
The New York Times hailed Ginsberg as “the poet laureate of the Beat Generation,” “one of America’s most celebrated poets,” whose “irrepressible personality ... provided a bridge between the Underground and the Transcendental.” An hour-long PBS television documentary paraded a long list of luminaries, from Joan Baez to Norman Mailer, to extol his “courage,” his literary and spiritual daring, and (a favorite epithet) his “gentleness.” Not to be outdone, the well-known poetry critic and Harvard professor Helen Vendler wrote in the September-October 1997 issue of
Harvard Magazine about Ginsberg’s “great gifts to world culture,” “the moral base of his poetry,” and her “own profound gratitude for his work and the life out of which it came.” (“He allowed me my own rage, social criticism, and coarseness,” she claimed, no doubt correctly.)
Ginsberg’s friend William S. Burroughs, II, Beat novelist and sometime heroin addict, whose paternal grandfather invented the adding machine, got a similarly enthusiastic send-off when he died at eighty-three in August 1997. No one spoke of his “gentleness,” of course. “Gentleness” was definitely not part of Burroughs’s reputation as the author of Junkie, Naked Lunch, and other surrealistic hymns to violence, drug abuse, and extreme sexual degradation. “Bill was never keen on the love-and-peace side of the sixties,” one fan noted. “The only way I’d like to see a policeman given a flower,” Burroughs sneered, “is in a flowerpot from a high window.” The first line of the obituary that appeared in The Village Voice summed up Burroughs: “Addict, killer, pederast.” Even so, a memorialist in New York magazine assured readers that, whatever his pathologies and fondness for guns, Burroughs was really “a sweet, funny, and lonely man. Just lovely.” And naturally there were plenty of encomia to Burroughs’s “courage,” “candor,” and “strange genius,” his exalted place (in the words of the Los Angeles Times) as “a seminal figure of the Beat Generation.” “Seminal” indeed: “He spent years experimenting with drugs as well as with sex” The New York Times cheerfully reported, “which he engaged in with men, women, and children.”
The enthusiastic praise that Ginsberg and Burroughs elicited on the occasion of their deaths was not just valedictory piffle, white lies that surround the dead like a second shroud. During his lifetime, Ginsberg was showered with just about every literary award and honor it was possible to win, short of the Nobel Prize, including the National Book Award, election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, even, in 1993, the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres. This enemy of “materialism” and the corporate culture of “Amerika” had his eight-hundred-page Collected Poems published by Harper & Row (now HarperCollins) and received more than one million dollars for his papers from Stanford University.
Burroughs, who lacked Ginsberg’s charm and craving for publicity, did not prosper to the same extent. As an heir to a fortune built by American ingenuity, he didn’t need to. But Burroughs, too, lived to see himself lionized, both as an important literary figure and as a hero and role model for countless rock musicians, from The Beatles to David Bowie. Having begun as outlaws from the establishment, literary and otherwise, Ginsberg and Burroughs were taken up by a grateful academic establishment desperate to play a role in the countercultural carnival. Innumerable papers, monographs, and dissertations have appeared to praise and interpret their works, and both men were the subject of fawning biographies in the early 1990s.
The third celebrated member of the Beat triumvirate was Jack Kerouac. It was he who coined the phrase “Beat Generation,” and who, one is reminded again and again in the literature about the Beats, suggested the title of Naked Lunch to Burroughs. Kerouac managed to drink himself to death in 1969 at the age of forty-seven. Consequently, he missed out on a lot of what we might call the pre-posthumous adulation showered on his friends Ginsberg and Burroughs when the culture caught up with their radicalism in the 1970s. Moreover, Kerouac became an increasingly problematic figure for fans of the counterculture: by the end of his life he had returned to the Roman Catholic faith, espoused conservative political views, and supported the war in Vietnam.
Nevertheless Kerouac, too, was subsequently lionized by the establishment he once affected to scorn. Not only are all (or virtually all) his works still in print, but Viking recently honored him with a fat Portable Jack Kerouac, a tribute once reserved for genuinely accomplished writers. There is a scholarly edition of his letters from 1940-1956 (with no doubt more to come) and a special fortieth-anniversary reissue of Kerouac’s most famous book, On the Road, first published in 1957. There are also the usual academic studies and at least one star-struck biography His home city of Lowell, Massachusetts, even saw fit to name a new park after him in 1987.
About the Beats generally, an “Appreciation” of Burroughs in The Washington Post admirably summed up the current state of received opinion. The obituarist quotes from a book of Burroughs’s dreams: “I attend a party and dinner at Columbia. Allen Ginsberg is there and rich. He has founded some sort of church.” The obituarist comments: “This was no dream; this was reality.... [Today,] the church of the Beats is stronger than ever, unquestionably the most significant literary congregation in America since the Lost Generation of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.”
Flirting with the underworld
Well, that is partly true. The Beats were tremendously significant, but chiefly in the way that they provided a preview in the 1950s of the cultural, intellectual, and moral disasters that would fully flower in the late 1960s. The ideas of the Beats, their sensibility, contained in ovo all the characteristics we think of as defining the cultural revolution of the Sixties and Seventies. The adolescent longing for liberation from conventional manners and intellectual standards; the polymorphous sexuality; the narcissism; the destructive absorption in drugs; the undercurrent of criminality; the irrationalism; the naïve political radicalism and reflexive anti-Americanism; the adulation of pop music as a kind of spiritual weapon; the Romantic elevation of art as an alternative to rather than as an illumination of normal reality; the pseudo-spirituality, especially the spurious infatuation with Eastern religions: in all this and more the Beats provided a vivid glimpse of what was to come.
The chief difference between the Beat Generation and the Sixties was the ambient cultural climate: when the Beats first emerged, in the mid-Fifties, the culture still offered some resistance to the poisonous antinomianism the Beats advocated. But by the time the Sixties established themselves, virtually all resistance had been broken down. It was then that the message of the Beats gained mass appeal. Reaction to the Vietnam War probably did more than anything else to enfranchise their antinomianism, though the introduction of the birth-control pill certainly did a great deal to further the cause of the sexual revolution, a prime item on the agenda of the Beats. In short order, the unconventional became the established convention; the perverse was embraced as normal; the unspeakable was broadcast everywhere; the outrageous was met with enthusiastic applause.
In a word, the establishment of the Beat “church” was significant as a chapter in the moral and cultural degradation of our society. Regarded as a literary phenomenon, however, what the Beats produced exists chiefly as a kind of artistic antimatter. It would not be quite right to say that its value is nil, for that might imply an innocuous neutrality. What the Beats have bequeathed us is actively bad, a corrupting as well as a corrupt phenomenon. To borrow an image from the Australian philosopher David Stove, the Beats created a “disaster-area, and not of the merely passive kind, like a bombed building, or an area that has been flooded. It is the active kind, like a badly-leaking nuclear reactor, or an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in cattle.” Two things have kept what the Beats wrote in circulation: the academic maw, with its insatiable appetite for verbal fodder of any kind, and the unhealthy craving for instances of psychopathology that the Beats not only exemplified but also helped to foster in their work and in their lives.
Of the Beat triumvirate, Kerouac was probably both the most pathetic and least noxious character. Psychologically, he was a mess—as indeed were Ginsberg and Burroughs. But, unlike them, Kerouac never mastered the knack of sanctifying his pathologies and inducing others to bow down in obeisance. The three met in 1944, when Ginsberg was a student at Columbia College. In 1945, they lived together, with a shifting cast of low-life friends, in an apartment leased by Joan Vollmer, a drug-addicted student at Columbia’s School of Journalism whom Burroughs, despite his homosexuality, married.
Having explained that “it was not long after Bill’s sixteenth birthday that he conducted his first experiments with mind altering drugs,” Burroughs’s biographer Barry Miles gives us a good sense of the Beat life on 115th Street. (Incidentally, why is it that drug abuse is always described as an “experiment,” as if some important scientific enterprise were at stake instead of hedonistic self-indulgence?)
Bill continued his experiments with drugs, joined by Allen, Jack, and Joan. Joan had developed a liking for benzedrine, which was easily available in nasal inhalers, and she quickly became addicted. Jack took so much that his health suffered; he became very run down and developed phlebitis in his legs. Ginsberg found that benzedrine made him write “stanzas of gibberish” and used it less than the others....
Bill’s friend [Herbert] Huncke took to using the 115th Street apartment as a place for storing stolen goods, once even leaving a stolen car parked outside. Bill was shooting up quite openly in front of everyone.
Burroughs, who had graduated from Harvard a decade earlier, was in and out of jail, living a drug-sodden existence in New York on an allowance from his parents. As Miles explains, “$200 a month, ... which in 1946 was plenty to live on, was not enough to feed his habit. Bill began helping Phil White roll drunks on the subway.”
Although not as susceptible to criminal machinations as was Burroughs, Kerouac, too, was a denizen of this world, as was Ginsberg. It was the botched world of an ivy-leaguer flirting with the underworld from a position of privilege. Like Ginsberg, Kerouac had attended Columbia in the early 1940s, but dropped out in 1942. He enlisted in the Navy in 1943, was discharged for psychiatric reasons a few months later, and drifted back to New York. He was married three times: twice for a matter of months, the last time in 1966 when he was already lost in an alcoholic fog. He had a daughter by his second wife, but hysterically denied paternity and refused to pay a penny for child support until the child was ten years old (at which point the court ordered him to pay twelve dollars a week until the child was twenty-one). When not “on the road,” he spent most of his adult life living with his mother.
Although predominantly heterosexual, Kerouac also had sex with Ginsberg and Burroughs (who in turn had sex with each other). For all of them, sex functioned chiefly as a prop to wounded narcissism. For Ginsberg and especially for Burroughs, this transformed sex into an obsessive, predatory activity in which an endless stream of “partners” —male or female, young or old-became little more than discardable accessories to masturbation and fantasies of absolute transcendence. Kerouac’s insecurities hobbled this aspect of his narcissism, making him somewhat less promiscuous but also distinctly more helpless than Ginsberg or Burroughs.
Kerouac famously wrote
On the Road in less than three weeks on a single continuous roll of paper: 175,000 words in twenty days. In this he was abiding by the procedures he had outlined in his once-famous manifesto, “The Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” (1953). Here are two samples:
LAG IN PROCEDURE. No pause to think of proper word but the infantile pileup of scatological buildup till satisfaction is gained, which will turn out to be a great appending rhythm to a thought and be in accordance with Great Law of timing.
CENTER OF INTEREST. Begin not from preconceived idea of what to say about image but from jewel center of interest in subject of image at moment of writing, and write outwards swimming in sea of language to peripheral release and exhaustion—Do not afterthink except for poetic or P.S. reasons. Never afterthink to “improve” or defray impressions, as, the best writing is always the most painful personal wrung-out tossed from cradle warm protective mind—tap from yourself the song of yourself, blow!—now!—your way is your only way-“good”-or-“bad”-always honest, (“ludicrous”), spontaneous, “confessional,” interesting, because not “crafted.”
It is possible that such stuff once seemed fresh. Nowadays, it reads as sub-Romantic adolescent nonsense, the kind of thing you hope high school teachers are busy discouraging. On the Road, too, is a period piece: it is the literary equivalent of the huge fins on a 1950s Cadillac, though not as impressive. Kerouac’s impassive “this-happened, then-this-happened, then-this-happened” prose is a caricature of Hemingwayesque precision: a barren rather than a pregnant sparseness.
We drove to Terry’s family shack. It was situated on the old road that ran between the vineyards. It was dark when we got there. They left me off a quarter-mile away and drove to the door. Light poured out of the door; Terry’s six other brothers were playing their guitars and singing.
In short, an insomniac’s dearest wish. Truman Capote had the last word on Kerouac’s prose when he observed that “it isn’t writing at all-it’s typing.”
“Starving hysterical naked”
It is impossible to look so kindly on Ginsberg’s or Burroughs’s literary work—or so indulgently on their lives. Significantly, the most famous work of both writers—Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems (1956) and Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959)-first came to public notice through the obscenity suits that they provoked. (Of course, the legal actions against both works failed. And like all court decisions that promote pornography, the decisions clearing both works of obscenity are invariably described as “landmark” decisions by their partisans.)
As was seen clearly when the works first appeared, their primary claim is not literary but ethical or moral. More precisely, both issued a defiant challenge to prevailing moral standards, Howl in its glorification of drugs, madness, and promiscuous sex, Naked Lunch in its grisly depiction of depravity, sexual torture, and heroin-induced dementia. The challenge, alas, encountered no effective resistance. In one of the many flattering obituaries that appeared about Burroughs, a long-time associate is quoted as saying that “William Burroughs opened the door for supporters of freedom of expression.” Obituaries of Ginsberg were full of similar testimony: the poet as crusader for free speech. In fact, both writers contributed heavily to the debasement of the debate over free speech by implicating it irrevocably in the defense of pornography. If they “opened the door” on anything, it was on the academic and social enfranchisement of pornography as a morally neutral matter of “lifestyle.”
Most of Ginsberg’s poetry is little better than doggerel. “Hūṃ Bom!” (1984) is typical.
I
Whom bomb?
We bomb them!
Whom bomb?
We bomb them!
Whom bomb?
We bomb them!
Whom bomb?
We bomb them!
Whom bomb?
You bomb you!
Whom bomb?
You bomb you!
And so on, for two pages. Ginsberg’s style is often praised as “Whitmanesque” by its fans, but that is a calumny upon Whitman. It is true that, like Whitman, Ginsberg makes abundant use of anaphora, repeating certain phrases again and again for rhetorical effect. But what was fresh and individual in 1855, when Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, seems, in Ginsberg’s hands, mannered, pretentious, hectoring. There’s much more wind than Whitman in Ginsberg’s verse. In the breathless effervescence of Song of Myself, Whitman transformed megalomania into poetry: the merely personal is lost in an almost mystic apprehension of nature. In Ginsberg, the megalomania is always personal. His preachy verse lurches from the sickly sentimental to the pornographic (“Sweet Boy Gimme Yr Ass”) to the politically tendentious (“Verses Written for Student Antidraft Registration Rally 1980”). There are several poems to drugs: “Lysergic Acid,” “A Methedrine Vision in Hollywood,” “Mescaline,” etc., and lots of four-letter words and pornographic descriptions of sex acts.
Come on go down on me your throat
swallowing my shaft to the base tongue
cock solid suck—
I’ll do the same your stiff prick’s soft skin, lick your ass—
Come on Come on, open up, legs apart here this pillow
under your buttock
Come on take it here’s vaseline the hard on here’s
your old ass lying easy up in the air-here’s
a hot prick at yr soft mouth asshole—just relax and let it in—
Is it any wonder that Helen Vendler, with “profound gratitude,” should have spoken of Ginsberg’s “great gifts to world culture” and “the moral base of his poetry”?
“Kaddish” (1959), after “Howl” Ginsberg’s best-known poem, is meant to be an elegy for his mother, who died in an asylum in 1956 shortly after Ginsberg authorized that she be given a lobotomy. Some people have claimed to find the poem a moving filial tribute. I confess that it impresses me as a long, shapeless, stream-of-consciousness rant. Ginsberg settles various family scores and says a lot of disgusting things about his mother that, because of the “Whitmanesque” bad writing, are supposed to be touching.
As for “Howl,” I am sometimes tempted to agree with the characterization of the wit who described it as “the greatest comic poem in the language.” In the end, however, “Howl” has had far too damaging an effect to be considered merely an unwitting comic performance. In addition to being Ginsberg’s most famous poem, “Howl” also epitomizes a central mendacity of the entire Beat enterprise. In essence, the poem is a paean to madness and drug abuse as the only really authentic responses to life in a repressive society, i.e., our society, the United States circa 1956:
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.
Of course, far from being “the best minds” of his generatio—is it really necessary to say this?—“the angelheaded hipsters” whom Ginsberg saw destroyed were the unhappy misfits of a prosperous and overindulgent society. In romanticizing the madness of those he met in the psychiatric institution where he was incarcerated for eight months in the late 1940s or later when he became a prophet of psychedelia, Ginsberg deliberately falsified their suffering. As Norman Podhoretz observed in Ex-Friends, Ginsberg’s suggestion that madness provides access to a higher reality is “heartless nonsense.” “There was,” Podhoretz notes, “something cruel about drafting such pitiable creatures into the service of an ideological aggression against the kind of normal life to which they would have given everything to return. And it was all the more heartless for parading itself as compassion.”
This glorification of madness, drug abuse, criminality, and excess is a defining current of the Beat sensibility. Burroughs’s biographer Barry Miles tells us that all the Beats “shared a passionate desire to ‘widen the area of consciousness ,’” and cites their insatiable appetite for drugs as one piece of evidence of this desire. In 1966, Ginsberg even testified before Congress about the “mind expanding” potential of psychedelics. But in fact, as the philosopher Harvey Mansfield has observed in his essay “The Legacy of the Late Sixties,” the idea that drugs are an aid to “mind expansion” is “an illusion so pathetic that one can hardly credit that it was once held.” It is a prime example of what the historian Christopher Lasch (in
The Culture of Narcissism) once called “The Banality of Pseudo-Self Awareness.” The central appeal of drugs, as Mansfield noted, “is that of infinite power together with infinite desire.” It is not an accident that a celebration of drugs went hand in hand with the sexual revolution and the tremendous upsurge in juvenile political radicalism. Here is Timothy Leary describing Ginsberg’s reaction to a dose of psilocybin in 1960:
Allen, completely naked except for his glasses, waved a finger in the air. “I’m the Messiah,” he proclaimed. “I’ve come down to preach love to the world. We’re going to walk through the streets and teach people to stop hating. ... We’ll call Kerouac on Long Island, and Kennedy and Khrushchev and Bill Burroughs in Paris and Norman Mailer.... We’ll get them all hooked up in a big cosmic electronic love talk. War is just a hang-up.”
“And then,” Leary noted in a memoir, “we started planning the psychedelic revolution.”
There is something highly comic in this spectacle, of course—especially in the prospect of calling on Norman Mailer to help with the envisioned love march. But there is nothing at all funny about the many shattered lives that the Beats’ glorification of excess left in its wake. William Ever-son, a second-tier Beat propagandist and poet, has written that the rise of the Beats marked the “reemergence in the twentieth century of the Dionysian spirit.” In a sense this is right. But as the Greeks knew, Dionysus is not necessarily a friendly deity. It would be closer to the truth to say that the rise of the Beats marked the elevation of criminal irresponsibility in American society to a new position of romance and respectability. The Beats inaugurated the long march through the moral territory of American culture. Who knows how many lives were blighted along the way as a result of their proselytizing on behalf of drugs and promiscuous sex?
A religious writer?
Burroughs’s even creepier world, marked by paranoia and unrelieved sordidness, has left a number of individual casualties we know about quite well. It would be difficult to overstate the loathsomeness of Burroughs’s opinions. Asked about Christianity, he said: “I’m violently anti-Christian. It was the worst disaster that ever occurred on a disaster-prone planet, the most virulent spiritual poison. ... Fundamentalists are dangerous lunatics. There’s really no place for them in an over-crowded life boat. They’re a menace.”
Burroughs apparently thought women were a menace, too. He once advised Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg’s boyfriend, to “take a tip from me, kid, and steer clear of’em. They got poison dripping all over ’em.” In an interview from 1969, Burroughs explained that “I think love is a virus. I think love is a con put down by the female sex. I don’t think it’s a solution to anything.... I think they [women] were a basic mistake, and the whole dualistic universe evolved from this error.” Ginsberg recalled that Burroughs, in a fit of paranoia, believed that women were extraterrestrial agents and that “maybe you had to exterminate all the women, or get rid of them one way or another. Evolve some sort of male that could give birth by parthenogenesis.”
Barry Miles claims that Burroughs later “modified” his feelings about women. Perhaps he did. In any event, in 1951 Burroughs was living in Mexico with his wife, Joan, and the young son he had fathered. Unable to procure her favorite amphetamines, Joan was drinking a quart of tequila a day—which, Burroughs’s biographer tells us, cost four cents, “the cost of a boy,” whose services Burroughs availed himself of regularly. Burroughs’s drug of choice at the time seems to have been yage (a hallucinogen that Ginsberg indulged in frequently as well). He was also drinking heavily. One afternoon, he and Joan were very drunk at a friend’s apartment. “Bill opened his travel bag,” Miles recounts in his biography, “and pulled out the gun.” Burroughs then said,
“It’s about time for our William Tell act. Put a glass on your head.” They had never performed a William Tell act before but Joan, who was also very drunk, laughed and balanced a six-ounce water glass on her head. Bill fired. Joan slumped in her chair and the glass fell to the floor, undamaged. The bullet had entered Joan’s brain at the temple. She was pronounced dead on arrival at Red Cross Hospital.
Burroughs jumped bail and fled Mexico rather than stand trial. He later said that it was his wife’s death that made him a writer, forcing him into “a lifelong struggle, in which I have no choice except to write myself out.” Another choice might have been to lead a responsible life and take care of the son he had fathered and the daughter he had inherited from his wife’s previous marriage. But Burroughs abandoned them both to other family members. His son survived until 1981, when he finally managed to drink himself to death at the age of thirty-three. Burroughs claimed to have felt badly about that, too.
There is not much to be said about Burroughs’s writing. It consists of semiliterate ravings by a very sick mind, a kaleidoscope of surrealistic depictions of drug-taking, violent, often misogynistic fantasy, and sexual depravity. Here is a random sample:
A horde of lust-mad American women rush in. Dripping cunts, from farm and dude ranch, factory brothel, country club, penthouse and suburb, motel and yacht and cocktail bar, strip off riding clothes, ski togs, evening dresses, levis, tea gowns, print dresses, slacks, bathing suits and kimonos. They scream and yipe and howl, leap on the guests like bitch dogs in heat with rabies. They claw at the hanged boys shrieking: “You fairy! You bastard! Fuck me! Fuck me! Fuck me!”
One of Burroughs’s favorite scenarios was to picture young boys being simultaneously hanged and sodomized:
Suddenly the Mugwump pushes the boy forward into space, free of his cock. He steadies the boy with hands on the hip bones, reaches up with his stylized hieroglyph hands and snaps the boy’s neck. A shudder passes through the boy’s body. His penis rises in three great surges pulling his pelvis up, ejaculates immediately.... The Mugwump pulls the boy back onto his cock....
Et cetera.
No wonder great claims have been made for Burroughs’s writing, particularly Naked Lunch. One academic essay compares Burroughs’s book with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “the sex and sadism,” this writer tells us, “spring not from the diseased mind’s explosion into a chaos of violence and obscenity but from the major conventions of a literary genre and from the world-view suggested by the procedures of philosophical analysis and implied in the early work of Wittgenstein.” During the obscenity trial over publication of the book, Norman Mailer testified that Burroughs was in his opinion “a religious writer.” Only slightly less ridiculous was the claim made by the critic and novelist Mary McCarthy in 1963 that there were “many points of comparison” between Jonathan Swift and Burroughs, and that, “like a classical satirist, Burroughs is dead serious—a reformer.” McCarthy was wrong. Burroughs was not a reformer. Unlike Swift, he had no ideal to oppose to the degradation his books depicted. On the contrary, he was a cynical opportunist who realized that calling his work “satire” could help exempt it from legal action.
The legacy of the Beats
One of the most remarkable things about the Beat generation was the extent to which its spokesmen managed to con a gullible public into accepting their publicity. They told the world that they were rebelling against a drab, repressive society, and the world believed them. In fact, when the Beats hove into view, in the late Forties and early Fifties, American society was vibrantly alive. In the aftermath of World War II, it was confident, prosperous, and dynamic, helping to rebuild a shattered Europe and rising to contain the newly militant Soviet threat. Notwithstanding the distraction of Senator McCarthy and his hearings, domestic life in the United States had never offered young people more real freedom, economically, socially, or intellectually. Universities were newly galvanized and cultural life generally was marked by a seriousness of purpose and level of accomplishment that have never been regained.
The Beats disparaged all this, preferring fantasies of absolute liberation to the real freedoms that surrounded them. Like the medieval heretics that Norman Cohn wrote about in The Pursuit of the Millennium, the Beats cultivated an extreme narcissism that bordered on self-deification and that “liberated them from all restraints” and allowed them to experience every impulse as “a divine command.” What Norman Podhoretz observed of Ginsberg was also true of the Beats generally: they “conjured up a world of complete freedom from the limits imposed by [bourgeois] responsibilities.” Podhoretz added, “It was a world that promised endless erotic possibility together with the excitements of an expanded consciousness constantly open to new dimensions of being: more adventure, more sex, more intensity, more life.” Alas, the promise was illusory. Instead of an “expanded consciousness,” the Beats purchased madness, ruination, and, for many, an early death. Their attack on bourgeois responsibility led not to greater freedom but to greater chaos. The erotic paradise they envisioned turned out to be rife with misery.
In a memorable image, Immanuel Kant spoke of a dove that, soaring above the ground and feeling the resistance of the air, imagines that “its flight would be easier still in empty space.” The dream of absolute fulfillment cultivated by the Beats is just as illusory. The Beats, like their successors in the Sixties, have often been described as “idealists.” But fantasies of total gratification are not the product of idealism. They arise from a narcissism that, finding the world unequal to its desires, retreats into a realm of heedless self-absorption. Modesty, convention, and self-restraint then appear as the enemies rather than as the allies of humanity. In this sense, the Beat generation marks a step away from civilization. As the nineteenth-century English writer Walter Bagehot observed, savages, contemporary or prehistoric, prefer “short spasms of greedy pleasure to mild and equable enjoyment; ... they [cannot] postpone the present to the future.”
Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac were all on the side of the savage. That their penny-ante gnosticism was not only perpetuated but mythologized and spread abroad as a gospel of emancipation is something for which we have the Sixties to thank—or to blame. The Beats did a remarkable job of marketing their perversions and self-indulgences. But just as America’s cultural revolution drew on the example of the Beats to propagate its radical antinomianism, so the Beats required the Sixties to complete their own apotheosis and long march through the soul of American life. Ginsberg turned out to be depressingly prescient when, after a heated argument with Norman Podhoretz in 1958, he yelled, “We’ll get you through your children!” For countless American families, that turned out to be only too true.