Lesson 1

1944-1954: Origins and

Obscurity

Origins and Obscurity: Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs meet at Columbia, where they explore their seminal ideas and influences.

Prologue

Beat. Kerouac coined the phrase, borrowing it from the jazz musicians who bent the musical term into connotations of being tired, beaten down, and exhausted. Beat also means “be-at,” as in beatitude and beatific, the fulfillment of a spiritual quest. Put the low and the high together, slam the opposites into one whole force, and you begin to see what shaped the Beat generation.

The best biographies of the Beats were written by the Beats themselves, though they often appear in their own works under pseudonyms. Jack Kerouac’s chronicles of the Beats in his novels is the best starting place, and his thinly veiled portraits of himself and his friends trace their lives from their meeting at Columbia University in the mid-Forties through the exciting years that followed. The works of Ginsberg and Burroughs are also highly autobiographical. This lesson outlines the lives of the three original Beat writers, their works, and the forces that influenced their writing.

Quote

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.
– Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”

The Key Players: Allen Ginsberg

Ginsberg’s presence in the original trio of Beats, his extremely productive career as a poet, and his sheer longevity as a popular-cultural icon make him the central figure of the Beat Generation.

Ginsberg was born on June 3, 1926, to Louis and Naomi Ginsberg, in Newark, New Jersey. Louis was a teacher and poet. Naomi was a Communist party member prone to nervous breakdowns; she is the subject of “Kaddish,” the poem Ginsberg thought was his best.

In 1943 Ginsberg went to Columbia University on a YMCA scholarship, and there he met Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Herbert Huncke, in 1944. Their aim to create a “new” literature marks the origin of the Beat writers.

He was just 19 when World War II ended, and he was greatly disturbed by the genocide of that war. In particular, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki haunted him. Many of his poems address the real and potential devastation of the bomb. His works reflect his response to coming of age on the morning of the Nuclear Age, the era that ushered in the Cold War, the political witch hunts of the McCarthy years, and the emergence of the United States as a global military power. Ginsberg considered all of these forces destructive; his consistent response was to demonstrate for peace. And so he lived his life.

If he was consistent in his political agenda, he was equally persistent in his belief that poetry was a visionary expression, a necessary, even spiritual, force for the individual and the collective. He saw that warfare and its implements were products of rational minds, and so he sought a higher consciousness. Ginsberg initially believed that mind-altering drugs were the key to the higher mind (and to great poetry writing), but he came to believe that meditation and yoga provided a consistent means to pure spirituality. Like many of the Beats, he rejected the western mind and sought enlightenment through eastern religion, particularly Zen Buddhism. He became a Buddhist in 1972, when he took the Refuge and Bodhisattva vows. In 1974, he co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where he taught and served as co-director for more than 20 years.

Ginsberg’s development as a poet is noteworthy. The primary influence of his earliest work was William Carlos Williams, a prominent poet who lived in Ginsberg’s hometown of Paterson, New Jersey. Williams and the younger Ginsberg talked about poetry, and Williams expressed his desire to see the cadences of ordinary human speech break down the rigid meters of poetry. To that end, Williams wrote free verse in relatively short lines about very human events, but he hadn’t mastered the sound of speech. Ginsberg accepted Williams’ challenge; indeed, almost all Beat literature is characterized by the sound of a human voice speaking.

Ginsberg described his spiritual encounter with the poet-mystic William Blake in 1948, saying he heard “a very deep earthen grace voice in the room, which I immediately assumed, I didn’t think twice, was Blake’s voice.” Ginsberg heard a voice “like God had a human voice, with all the infinite tenderness and anciency and mortal gravity of a living Creator speaking to his son.” And so Ginsberg received his calling to be a poet. After all, Blake claimed to have had a similar encounter with Michelangelo.

Another important and obvious influence is Walt Whitman, the free-spirited American writer from the previous century whose long-line poems with their catalogues of people, places, experiences, sights, and musings reflected Ginsberg’s famous long poems “Howl” and “Kaddish.” Another influence was Arthur Rimbaud, the French poet who wrote a thousand burning poems before he’d lived a quarter of a century, then stopped abruptly and never wrote again.

Ginsberg’s career as a poet was launched through a surprisingly negative means. When Howl and Other Poems was published in 1956, the collection became the subject of an obscenity trial. The censors were roundly beaten in court, and Ginsberg’s work received a great deal of publicity — and attracted a great many readers. His lifestyle became a model of the hippies in the Sixties, who adopted him as their father figure. At poetry readings, his charisma spread through audiences like wildfire. He published numerous poetry collections and remained a highly public figure until his death in 1997.

Quote

You’re a Genius all the time.
– Jack Kerouac

The Key Players: Jack Kerouac

Jean-Louis Kerouac was born March 12, 1922, to French-Canadian immigrants in Lowell, Massachusetts. His father was a prominent businessman who fell on hard times and became an alcoholic, and Jack went to Columbia on a football scholarship at 17, hoping to return the family to prosperity. World War II intervened, but Kerouac and the navy didn’t mesh well, so he joined the merchant marine. On shore, he discovered Ginsberg at Columbia, and they became lifelong friends.

Kerouac’s first novel, The Town and the City, was published in 1950 under the name John Kerouac, and he wrote almost a dozen more novels in the next few years. With his friend Neal Cassady, Kerouac road-tripped across the country writing one novel after another; he carried his 11 rejected manuscripts in his backpack. When his On the Road was published in 1957, he became instantly famous. However, he struggled with the sudden transition from reject to successful writer, and he could not play the role of Beat poster child for the public. Seven more of his books were published over the next three years, but he received no critical acclaim. He was utterly disappointed that his work was not taken seriously as literature — Kerouac considered himself the equal of Marcel Proust and James Joyce, and to be scorned as the flashy voice of a minor social movement nearly broke his spirit.

He was dubbed the King of the Beats, but he didn’t have the lifestyle or the political leanings to match the name. He was, in fact, politically an outspoken conservative: he supported the Vietnam War when Ginsberg and others were actively protesting it. Ultimately he voiced contempt for the Beat label — he realized that the label restricted him from reaching the critical acclaim he thought he deserved. In short, the wrong people adored his books; he wanted them to be read for their literary merit, not as how-to books for wannabe beatniks and hippies.

Like his father, he took his extreme disappointment to the bottle. Many of his unpublished manuscripts finally found publishers, but he produced nothing new until 1961’s Big Sur, a novel that documents his failed attempt to recover himself. Having made what would be his last stand, and his last road trip, he left the West Coast and moved back in with his devoutly Catholic mother and his third wife, Stella Sampas, a woman from Lowell. (His first two marriages, to Edie Parker and Joan Haverty, each lasted only a few months.) After his mother had a stroke, they moved to St. Petersburg, Florida, where Kerouac became even more reclusive.

He was hostile to people who sought him out with the reverence they were prepared to lavish on him as a cult figure. When Anne Charters, the woman who would become his first biographer, visited Kerouac and his mother to work on a comprehensive bibliography of his works, Kerouac propositioned her and she refused. When he went to the bathroom, his mother showed her a mark in the wall left by a knife Kerouac had recently hurled at her, explaining that Kerouac sometimes grew violent when he was drunk. Charters left quickly.

Kerouac drank himself to death in a few short years. He died in 1969 at age 47.

Like Ginsberg, Kerouac was initially influenced by a major writer. The Town and the City pays homage to Thomas Wolfe and is Kerouac’s most conventional work. The style Kerouac became famous for was inspired by the letters of his friend Neal Cassady (the model for Dean Moriarty in On the Road), whose stories poured out in a frantic and detailed rush. Kerouac’s “spontaneous prose” was the result of long, intense sessions of drug-stimulated typing onto a single roll of paper; he didn’t want to pause even to insert sheets of paper into the typewriter. Kerouac describes the process (see The Portable Beat Reader, p. 58):

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 a 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 (“ludi-crous”), spontaneous, “confessional” interesting, because not “crafted.” Craft is craft.

Kerouac’s revolutionary writings document both his own life and the lives of many of the Beats, who appear in his string of novels. He changed the names and a few locations for legal reasons, but as chronicles, they are painstakingly exact. Taken together, they make up a complex autobiography, which he thought of as the Duluoz Legend.

Quote

I have not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of terminal addiction.
– William S. Burroughs, “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness.”

The Key Players: William S. Burroughs

Burroughs, the oldest of the Beats, outlived both Ginsberg and Kerouac. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on February 5, 1914. A direct descendant of Robert E. Lee on his mother’s side, he was raised in upper-middle-class comfort. In his early years, he was said to be a homosexual bookworm attracted to guns and crime. He earned a degree in English literature from Harvard in 1936 and worked as a bartender, exterminator, and private detective before moving to New York City to pursue a criminal lifestyle. There he deliberately became a heroin addict and consorted with figures in the underworld. Through his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, he met Ginsberg and Kerouac at Columbia.

He and Joan eventually moved to Louisiana, Texas, and Mexico to obtain drugs more easily. Burroughs accidentally killed Joan when she challenged him to shoot a glass off her head in 1951. He drifted through South America and eventually moved to Morocco, where he lived from 1953 to 1958. In 1953 he published Junky, a novel detailing his life as a drug addict, which Ginsberg got published under the pseudonym of William Lee. In 1958 he underwent drug rehabilitation therapy in London and was permanently cured of his addiction.

In 1959, his controversial novel Naked Lunch was published, and it survived obscenity charges in much the same manner that Howl had three years earlier. Burroughs produced several books through his “cut-up” method of writing. He would cut typed pages in half, juxtapose lines, and keep the ones that made interesting combinations. Many of his works explore ways by which people can escape mechanisms that are designed to control societies.

If Ginsberg and the other Beats inspired the hippie generation of the Sixties, Burroughs goes an entire generation further — he is said to be both a hippie mentor of sex, drugs, and rock and roll in the Sixties and the grandfather of punk in the Seventies. The man with the chiseled features and cold eyes also inspired scores of rock musicians. The term “heavy metal” comes from Naked Lunch, and the group Steely Dan derived its name from the novel. His “cut-up” method of composition has been used by the likes of David Bowie and Patti Smith.

Burroughs returned to the United States in 1973, and though he settled in rural Kansas, he gave numerous public readings, including a 1981 performance on Saturday Night Live. He died in 1997 at age 83.

Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs met at Columbia University in 1944, though only Ginsberg was a student at the time. They talked literature, politics, and philosophy, and discussed ways to revolutionize literature.

The end of World War II and the detonation of the bomb in 1945 rendered the world as they knew it absurd, and the buttoned-down culture of post-war America seemed robotic, in denial of the split atom and the divided world. Even modern poetry was too fraught with tight conventions in form and subject matter to reflect the global madness.

Each of the original Beats responded in his own way. Burroughs stuck with his needles; Ginsberg combined poetry, politics, and spirituality; and Kerouac criss-crossed the country writing novels that were all rejected by publishers. Nevertheless, they all kept writing and supported each other’s literary endeavors.

Quote

The highest role is the role in the service of humanity, and if I can make that, I’ll be happy. When I breathe the last time, it’ll be a happy breath.
– John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie

Synchronicity: The Beats, Abstract Expressionism, and Bebop

World War II was raging, but a whole other kind of revolution was happening in New York City as writers, painters, and musicians struggled to push their respective arts in new directions.

The Greenwich Village Art Scene

Ginsberg and Burroughs were English majors, but they lived in an era that emphasized formalism, a philosophy that works of art should be worshipped at a distance, reverenced as museum pieces. Study them for form and see if the content matches, but don’t get too messy with the language. High holy literature was thought to be the antithesis of spontaneous expression, and when push came to shove, form was thought to restrict content. Since there were no real contemporary literary models to speak of, the Beats looked elsewhere for direction.

Their course is comparable to that of the Abstract Expressionists, who were taking painting well beyond the fragmentation of cubism and the pastoral haze of impressionism. Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Jasper Johns, and Franz Kline were working and gathering down the street, as it were, in Greenwich Village. With colors they depicted the new, mad world. Spontaneous expression fueled by a certain outrage was one of their highest aims; they flung paint on huge canvases, painting rapidly, making not so much brush strokes as gestures. The objectives of the early Beats and the Abstract Expressionists were strikingly similar, and though they were close by, there is little evidence of mutual influence. It’s as if the Abstract Expressionists were experimenting in a nearby parallel universe.

The Influence of Jazz

Beat. Music. Bebop. Perhaps music has a greater affinity with language than paint does. It was the New York jazzmen who captured the imagination of Ginsberg and Kerouac. Bebop, the art of improvisation atop highly complex chord changes, was germinating down on 52nd Street, and the Beats were inspired by both the music and the culture of the latest jazz idiom.

In 1944, Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet), Charlie “Bird” Parker (sax), Thelonious Monk (piano), Kenny Clarke (drums), and others were creating modern jazz. They blew open the seven-note Western scale in favor of the twelve-tone chromatic scale, pioneering the harmonic terrain the chromatic scale opened up. They inserted new chords and improvised — fast — on top of that.

Above all, it had to be spontaneous. Do your homework for the week. Listen to “Howl,” just the rhythm of it. A CD of Ginsberg reading “Howl” and other poems is available online (Howl and Other Poems, UPC: 25218771320). You can also read the poem out loud, or take turns reading it with someone. Try to hear the poem, its rhythms and sounds, as if it were a musical composition.

Forget iambic pentameter; you hear bebop. A voice cuts, dives, knives, rolls, howls, growls a single phrase, then takes a deep breath and trumpets another line. Secret, impossible phrases emerge, evaporate, spinning, spawning new spirals of sounds. Kerouac often used “blow” when he meant “write.” His brief codes for producing spontaneous prose (see pp. 57-58 of The Portable Beat Reader) contain three allusions to the techniques of jazz musicians.

How do you do jazz with words? How do you translate the reality of sound that is meant to be heard once into print that can be read many times over? The production must be spontaneous, Kerouac insists. Ginsberg incorporates the rhythm, the surprising textures of words, the juxtaposition of sound and meaning. Listen to some bebop. Check out Dizzy Gillespie’s Salt Peanuts, Bird Works, or Night in Tunisia. Listen to recordings of the incredible Charlie Parker or Miles Davis. Read some Ginsberg and Kerouac. You’ll make some connections.

The End of the Beats’ First Decade: Road Trips and
Unpublished Manuscripts

You have been introduced to the original Beats and their influences. They met in 1944 and 10 years later there were still no Beat texts in print. Yes, Kerouac had published The Town and the City, but it was a rather conventional novel. He carried a stack of rejected novel manuscripts in his knapsack as he traveled with Neal Cassady. The Beats, as yet, had little to show for themselves. Lesson 2 describes the meteoric rise of the Beats a decade after the Columbia University meeting of Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs.

Assignment: 1944-1954: Origins and Obscurity

In The Portable Beat Reader, familiarize yourself with the natural voices of the four key players through their letters. Read the correspondence between Ginsberg and Burroughs (pp. 116-126), and the exchange between Cassady and Kerouac, (pp. 197-211).