Beat Generation

The term beat generation was introduced by Jack Kerouac in approximately 1948 to describe his social circle to the novelist John Clellon Holmes (who published an early novel about the beat generation, titled Go, in 1952, along with a manifesto of sorts in the New York Times Magazine: "This is the beat generation"). The adjective "beat" (introduced by Herbert Huncke) had the connotations of "tired" or "down and out", but Kerouac added the paradoxical connotations of "upbeat" and "beatific".

Calling this relatively small group of struggling writers, artists, hustlers and drug addicts a "generation" was to make the claim that they were representative and important—the beginnings of a new trend, analogous to the influential Lost Generation. This is the kind of bold move that could be seen as delusions of grandeur, aggressive salesmanship or perhaps a display of perceptive insight. History shows it was clearly not just a delusion, but possibly a real insight into some real trends that became self-reinforcing: the label helped to create what it described.

The members of the beat generation were new bohemian libertines, who engaged in a spontaneous, sometimes messy, creativity. The beat writers produced a body of written work controversial both for its advocacy of non-conformity and for its non-conforming style.

Echoes of the Beat Generation run throughout all the forms of alternative/counter culture that have existed since then (e.g. "hippies", "punks", etc). The Beat Generation can be seen as the first "subculture". See the "Influences Upon Western Culture" section below.

History

The canonical beat generation authors met in New York: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, (in the 1940s) and later (in 1950) Gregory Corso. Columbia University, where Ginsberg and Kerouac had met as undergraduates, was its original locale. In the mid-50s this group expanded to include San Francisco area figures such as Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch.

Some major works from these writers are Kerouac's On the Road, Ginsberg's Howl, and Burroughs' Naked Lunch.

Perhaps equally important were the less obviously creative members of the scene: Lucien Carr (who introduced Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs); Herbert Huncke, a drug addict and petty thief met by Burroughs in 1946; Hal Chase, an anthropologist from Denver who in 1947 introduced into the group Neal Cassady. Cassady was immortalized by Kerouac in the novel On the Road (under the name "Dean Moriarty") as a hyper wildman, frequently broke, largely amoral, but frantically engaged with life.

Cassady was known for "rapping" the loose spontaneous babble that later became associated with "beatniks". He was not much of a writer himself, though the core writers of the group were impressed with the free-flowing style of some of his letters, and Kerouac cited this as a key influence on his invention of the spontaneous prose style/technique that he used in On the Road (the other obvious influence being the improvised solos of Jazz music).

All of this does not yet mention the oft-neglected women in the original circle, such as Joan Vollmer and Edie Parker. Their apartment in the upper west side of Manhattan often functioned as a salon and/or crash-pad, and Joan Vollmer in particular was a serious participant in the marathon discussion sessions. See the section "Women of the Beat Generation" below.

In 1950 Gregory Corso met Ginsberg, who was impressed by the poetry Corso had written while incarcerated for burglary. Then during the 1950s there was much cross-pollination with San Francisco area writers (Ginsberg, Corso, Cassady and Kerouac all moved there for a time). Ferlinghetti (one of the partners who ran the City Lights press and bookstore) became a focus of the scene as well as the older poet Rexroth, whose apartment became a Friday night literary salon. Rexroth organized the famous Six Gallery reading in 1955, the first public appearance of Ginsberg's poem Howl. A short fictional account of this event forms the second chapter of Jack Kerouac's 1959 novel The Dharma Bums.

When On the Road was finally published in 1957 (it had been written in 1951), it received a strong review in the New York Times Book Review and became a best-seller. This produced a wave of fame that all of the beats from then on had to surf on or drown under.

The Beatnik Stereotype

The term "Beatnik" was coined by Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle on April 2, 1958 as a derogatory term, a reference to the Russian satellite Sputnik, which managed to suggest that the beats were (1) "way out there" and (2) pro-Communist. This term stuck and became the popular label associated with a new stereotype of men with goatees and berets playing bongos while women wearing black leotards dance.

A classic example of the beatnik image is the character Maynard G. Krebs played by Bob Denver on the Dobie Gillis television show that ran from 1959 to 1963.

In the popular television cartoon show, The Simpsons, the parents of Ned Flanders are beatniks. (See episode 4F07 - "Hurricane Neddy")

A sensationalist Hollywood interpretation of the sub-culture can be seen in the 1959 film The Beat Generation.

Women of the Beat Generation

There is typically very little mention of women in a history of the early Beat Generation, and a strong argument can be made that this omission is largely a reflection of the sexism of the time rather than a reflection of the actual state of affairs. Joan Vollmer (later, Joan Vollmer Burroughs) was clearly there at the beginning, and all accounts describe her as a very intelligent and interesting woman. But she did not herself write and publish, and unlike someone like Neal Cassady, no one chose to write a book about her; she has gone down in history as the wife of William Burroughs, killed in an accidental (or perhaps "accidental") shooting.

Gregory Corso insisted that there were many female beats, but that it was hard for them to get away with a Bohemian existence in that era: they were regarded as crazy, and removed from the scene by force (e.g. by being subjected to electroshock). In particular, he mentioned a young woman named "Hope", who he asserted was the original teacher of Kerouac and Ginsberg regarding eastern religion, introducing them to subjects such as Li Po.

Still, many of those who entered the scene slightly later in the mid-1950s have persevered, for example: Joyce Johnson (author of Minor Characters); Hettie Jones (author of How I Became Hettie Jones); and Diane Di Prima (author of This Kind of Bird Flies Backward, Memoirs of a Beatnik). And still later a number of women writers emerged who were strongly influenced by the beats, such as Janine Pommy Vega (published by City Lights in the 1960s) and Patti Smith who emerged in the early 1970s.

Influences on Western Culture

There are many writers, artists and musicians who explicitly acknowledge a debt to the beat writers (and for more about them, see the individual articles for each author); but the Beat Generation phenomena itself has had a huge influence on Western Culture overall, larger than just the effects of some writers and artists on other writers and artists.

In many ways, the Beats can be taken as the first subculture (here meaning a cultural subdivision on intellectual/artistic/lifestyle/political grounds, rather than on any obvious difference in ethnic or religious backgrounds). During the very conformist post-World War II era they were one of the forces engaged in a questioning of traditional values which produced a break with the mainstream culture that to this day people react to -- or against.

There's no question that Beats produced a great deal of interest in lifestyle experimentation (notably in regards to sex and drugs); and they had a large intellectual effect in encouraging the questioning of authority (a force behind the anti-war movement); and many of them were very active in popularizing interest in Zen Buddhism in the West.

Historical Context

However, it shouldn't be presumed that the Beats emerged in a vacuum without predecessors, and they certainly were not the only form of cultural rebellion that was happening during that period. For example, the Beats were sometimes compared to an even more amorphous British group of writers called the Angries, and around that time there was also some extreme artistic experimentation produced by musicians such as John Cage and other members of the Black Mountain College scene. Nor should it be assumed that the Beat influence was limited to the 1950s and 1960s. Gary Snyder was one of the movement's leaders who institutionalized the Beat ethos on the university level, where he continued to teach writing well into the 1990s, influencing a new generation of authors such as novelist Robert Clark Young.

Quotes

"The so-called Beat Generation was a whole bunch of people, of all different nationalities, who came to the conclusion that society sucked."

- Amiri Baraka

"But yet, but yet, woe, woe unto those who think that the Beat Generation means crime, delinquency, immorality, amorality ... woe unto those who attack it on the grounds that they simply don’t understand history and the yearning of human souls ... woe in fact unto those who those who make evil movies about the Beat Generation where innocent housewives are raped by beatniks! ... woe unto those who spit on the Beat Generation, the wind’ll blow it back."

- Jack Kerouac

See also

• Literary Kicks
• Hippie

References

Print

• Knight, Brenda. Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution. ISBN 1573241385

Online

• Beat Literature: Open Directory Project
• Biographies of Beat Generation writers, artists, & poets
• Beat Generation photographs by Larry Keenan
• Blue Neon Alley - Beat Generation directory
• Beats In Kansas: The Beat Generation in the Heartland