WELL, IT’S ALL over. Jack Kerouac has gone back to his mother on Long Island. Allen Ginsberg returned to the Village. Gregory Corso was last seen on the Champs-Elysées, bound for the Left Bank. And even that unreluctant radical old dragon of Beat Generation public relations, Kenneth Rexroth, has headed for the warmer waters of the Mediterranean, weary of the bombast.
There was a time, of course, one summer (before the literary critics, in their pursuit of prodigies, discovered San Francisco), when we used to sit up all night in a furnished room on Heavenly Lane, playing chess on an orange crate and guzzling tequila from an old canteen; smearing ourselves with self and doing greasy battle over Baudelaire; spending our tortured souls in little midnight coins to buy the body or esteem of world-weary Mardous swathed in dirty serapes. When Sad Sam stood up on a table in Otto’s Grotto and blew God from a tiny gold trumpet, and we all read Robinson Jeffers and wrote novels and listened to the wild sad horns of the Pacific.
Then: They published On the Road, and “Howl” was banned by the San Francisco police department, and Harper’s and the Atlantic, creaking their dusty kaleidoscopes across the Continent, trained them on North Beach. That was the ball game. Suddenly Ivy League colleges started inviting Ginsberg to read poetry to them, and slick magazines were printing Rexroth again, and Jack Kerouac came down from the mountains strangled by a crucifix, all over the front page of the New York Times (“The New York Times is as Beat as I am,” said Kerouac. “Thank God for the New York Times!”). Conspicuous consumptives from Boston University’s School of Fine Arts read bad poetry to worse jazz downstairs at The Rock, in Lou’s Pebble Room; and MacDougal Alley louts in black turtleneck sweaters and white tennis sneakers went running up Sixth Avenue shouting “Buddhism Zens Me!”
Joyfully self-conscious America suddenly discovered its bohemian subculture—in coffeehouses and cold-water flats, congealed in city-slum coagulums reading Ionesco and pretending to be Rimbaud. Maybe America felt guilty about the middle class, about its apartment houses and its antiseptic sex life, about Social Security and the Book-of-the-Month Club. Maybe America was just bored with its suburbs. But whatever it was, America paid more than just attention to its pampered spawn. The Beats made more money than John the Ossified Man.
Colleges threw seminars to discuss them, newspapers sent reporters to interview them, big magazines did photo-features on them, and little magazines published their poetry. America’s intellectuals gave up cultural Scrabble and hauled out all the old bogeymen about the Hero-Bum and the Fragmentation of the Modern World and The Failure of Communication and Aspects of the Anti-Social Revolution. Everything from homosexuality to heroin was back in style again.
The Beat Generation was scrutinized to death. America clobbered it into submission with a kleig light. Its writers stopped writing, or tried to pass off narcissistic adolescent novels the publishers had rejected the first time around, e.g., Kerouac’s Doctor Sax and Maggie Cassidy. The perennial college sophomores unbuttoned their button-down collars, strapped on their sandals, and went running down the beach screaming “Moloch!” San Francisco looked more like the Dartmouth Winter Carnival than the American Left Bank.
What did it all prove? Well, every sibling sociologist with a sampler kit could tell you one thing: it was a panicked flight from reality. It was the same thing as Marlon Brando on a motorcycle or Jimmy Dean in a sports car or Norman Mailer in the Partisan Review. It was sensation-seeking and anarchic. It was apolitical—the sort of Greta Garbo ideology of “I want to be alone.” The world owed us all a living, free wine, easy sex, and folding money. Responsibility had too many syllables and love was a dirty word. But was that all?
It proved at least one thing more. That poetry, painting, music, and fiction are products of the individual. That the great American novel will be written by some antisocial SOB who can’t stand espresso and never heard of Wilhelm Reich—the guy who sits up all night at a typewriter and brings to his peculiar vision the discipline of form and the love of an educated heart. A generation may be disenchanted, but it takes a man alone to chronicle that disenchantment. Art-by-citadel won’t work. It’s in league with brainstorming and Groupthink and government-by-committee. Movements, Generations, Subcultures—these are the strewn carcasses of sterile imaginations, conjured up to explain lamely the why and how of genius. Nobody sees Saul Bellow at Rienzi’s or James Gould Cozzens at the Co-Existence Bagel Shop. Robert Frosts don’t run in rat-packs. Art is individual, the child of solitary individuals who wed their loneliness to their hope. It is sacrilege to call it by the same name as the sour song of displaced doughboys who stand on street corners strumming banjos, shouting at authority, and passing the tin cup.
You see, we were having fun on North Beach before all this happened. Nobody took himself very seriously. It was a stage in the painful growth to a painful manhood. And the poetry-readings and the beer-drinking and the Baudelaire were all part of our slow trudge into maturity, into a world where men must accept the responsibility for their acts, where, eventually, perhaps, men come to that lonely room and face that typewriter and write that novel. But it couldn’t be that way. Nothing is ever slow in America. And that stench you smell from certain quarters is only the burnt wax from wings which ventured too near the sun. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose—as I always say when I’m sad.