Lesson 2
1955-1960: The Beats Flourish
The Beats hit the streets and the presses. Gaining instant notoriety, they begin shaping the course of culture and literature.
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Neal is, of course, the very soul of this voyage into pure, abstract, meaningless motion. He is the mover, compulsive, dedicated, ready to sacrifice family, friends, even his very car itself to the necessity of moving from one place to another. Wife and child may starve, friends exist only to exploit for gas money. Neal must move.
– William S. Burroughs, 1949 letter to Allen Ginsberg
Beat Embodied: Neal Cassady
The last key figure among the early Beats never published a book, but he embodied every ideal the Beat writers strove to portray. He is Dean Moriarty of On the Road fame; he is Cody in five other Kerouac books: Visions of Cody, The Dharma Bums, Desolation Angels, Big Sur, and Book of Dreams. He was born on the road, lived there, and died, well, close to the railroad tracks. Cassady was born February 8, 1926, in Salt Lake City, Utah. His parents were traveling to Hollywood to establish a business. After his parentsâ¿¿ divorce six years later, he lived with his alcoholic father in Denver, and as soon as he was old enough to drive (though not lawfully), he spent most of his time stealing cars and driving around with girls — when he wasn’t in reform school.
He was utterly engaging, a charming cross between a cowboy and a con man, the affable pool hall drunk, the alluring spirit of the West personified — he even bore the name of an outlaw. His bodily motions were fluid and quirky. Even on those rare occasions when he was standing still, he looked as if he were dancing. To the East Coast boys he was an exotic figure, almost the antithesis of what they were — he was street smart, not book smart, a hard-driving, seductive, good-time guy. They were college students and literati; Cassady was a reform school dropout. Despite these differences — or maybe because of them — they wanted to invent a literature that captured his essence.
Cassady’s route to Columbia was as circuitous as the rest of his life’s travels. A friend of his from Denver, Hal Chase, was enrolled at Columbia, and Chase knew Ginsberg and Kerouac through Joan Vollmer. Cassady visited Chase in New York, and there he met Ginsberg and Kerouac. Cassady wanted Ginsberg to teach him how to write poetry, and he wanted lessons in prose from Kerouac. Cassady had a knack for knowing what people wanted of him and how to get what he wanted from them, and he subsequently had an affair with Ginsberg. Kerouac knew Cassady was a hustler, and the Cassady-Ginsberg relationship was distasteful to him, but Kerouac was also aware of the many affairs Cassady had with women. Something about the freewheeling Cassady appealed to Kerouac, and he and Cassady later undertook the series of road trips that would be celebrated in On the Road.
Cassady never published a book during his lifetime, so it is a bit strange that he not only became the central figure of Kerouac’s On the Road, he is also largely responsible for the style in which the book is written. Cassady was a prolific letter writer, and his writing style was an extension of his lifestyle — it just spilled out onto the page, a stream of consciousness turned flash flood, jigging, conning, splashing, and raging. Cassady himself called it “a continuous chain of undisciplined thought.” One hilariously detailed account of his bawdy escapades with “Cherry Mary” in Denver thrilled Kerouac intensely, and it pointed Kerouac away from the high-church prose of Thomas Wolfe that he so adored and showed him the possibilities of spontaneous prose. Were it not for Neal’s letters, Kerouac might never have found his own style and technique. Until he began to emulate Cassady’s voice on paper, Kerouac did not find his own writerly voice. Check out this excerpt from a letter from Neal Cassady to Jack Kerouac:
One day in the spring of ‘41, I was just 15, we stole a Plymouth on Stout and 16th Sts. We ran out of gas just as we pulled into Colo. Springs. I walked a block or so and saw a ‘38 Buick at the curb, got in, picked up Bill on the corner and we were off again.
Cassady fathered many children and married a number of women. He eventually settled down with one named Carolyn and took a railroad job in northern California. But he couldn’t stay still for long. In the Sixties, he hit the road again; this time it was with Ken Kesey on an acid trip in a psychedelic bus. Their theater-on-wheels rolled across the country; its destination was New York, site of the 1964 World’s Fair and the publication party for Kesey’s novel Sometimes a Great Notion.
Cassady was the first of the four major Beat figures to die. He passed out drunk by the railroad tracks outside San Miguel De Allende, Mexico and was taken, comatose, to a hospital, where he died within hours.
Prelude in 1952: Holmes Deduces “This is the Beat Generation”
The Beats had met in New York and scattered, but they remained close through letters and frequent visits. Neal Cassady was the magnet that drew Ginsberg to the west for the first time, and Kerouac hitchhiked a romantic path on the pioneer routes of Highway 6, intending to see Cassady in Denver in July 1947 before going on to San Francisco. They later embarked on a series of drug-fueled road trips that would become the episodes of On the Road. Their circle of acquaintances had widened, and Kerouac’s friend John Clellon Holmes published one of the first Beat-tinged books, Go, early in 1952. The novel depicted events from the lives of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Cassady, and himself.
On November 16, 1952, Holmes published the article in the New York Times Magazine that named the Beat Generation. In it, Holmes contrasts the current post-war generation with the previous post-war (WWI) generation, which had dubbed itself the “lost” generation:
It migrated to Europe, unsure whether it was looking for the “orgiastic future” or escaping from the “puritanical past.” Its symbols were the flapper, the flask of bootleg whiskey, and an attitude of desperate frivolity best expressed by the line: “Tennis, anyone?” It was caught up in the romance of disillusionment, until even that became an illusion.
The current generation, Holmes asserts, is not lost, but is looking for faith, because if anything is lost, it’s the future. But the realist recognizes that the future has always been dubious anyway:
Only the most bitter among them would call their reality a nightmare and protest that they have indeed lost something, the future. For ever since they were old enough to imagine one, that has been in jeopardy anyway. And so he characterizes the generation as one that is on a quest of spirit, asserting, the problem of modern life is essentially a spiritual problem.
Holmes acknowledges, “The difference is this almost exaggerated will to believe in something, if only in themselves. It is a will to believe, even in the face of an inability to do so in conventional terms. And that is bound to lead to excesses in one direction or another.” These can be in the form of “drugs or promiscuity,” he notes, or they can take another form:
Though it is certainly a generation of extremes, including both the hipster and the radical young Republican in its ranks, it renders unto Caesar (i.e., society) what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s. For the wildest hipster, making a mystique of bop, drugs and the nightlife, there is no desire to shatter the “square” society in which he lives, only to elude it.
The post-war era was a time of bomb-consciousness, a not knowing what to make of Hiroshima and the Cold War. What’s a generation to do? Holmes writes:
Any attempt to label an entire generation is unrewarding, and yet the generation which went through the last war, or at least could get a drink easily once it was over, seems to possess a uniform, general quality which demands an adjective. . . . The origins of the word “beat” are obscure, but the meaning is only too clear to most Americans. More than mere weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and, ultimately, of soul; a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness. In short, it means being undramatically pushed up against the wall of oneself. A man is beat whenever he goes for broke and wagers the sum of his resources on a single number; and the young generation has done that continually from early youth.
Near the conclusion, Holmes underscores the primacy of the bomb and its attendant chaos in the minds of the Beat Generation, addressing the possibility of more war as if it were inevitable:
This generation may make no bombs; it will probably be asked to drop some, and have some dropped on it, however, and this fact is never far from its mind. It is one of the pressures which created it and will play a large part in what will happen to it.
Holmes views the emerging generation as one that is possessed of a bizarre blend of the spiritual quest and the very real threat of nuclear annihilation.
Holmes does not admit in the article that he had pried the term “beat” out of Jack Kerouac, almost forcing him to name the generation. According to Kerouac’s biographer Ann Charters, Holmes says that he asked Kerouac what typified the generation, and Kerouac replied:
It’s a sort of furtiveness. . . . Like we were a generation of furtives. You know, with an inner knowledge there’s no use flaunting on that level, the level of the “public,” a kind of beatness — I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we are — and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world . . . [sic] It’s something like that. So I guess you might say we’re a beat generation.
Holmes’s Go is considered by many to be the first Beat-influenced novel, but later in 1952, Ace Books published Burroughs’ Junky, the first whole-cloth Beat novel. Allen Ginsberg had arranged for the publication of Junky.
According to Ann Charters in Kerouac: A Biography, Kerouac realized another possible meaning of Beat in the summer of 1954:
Kerouac suddenly realized that beat had another meaning, a religious interpretation. Beat meant beatitude or beatific.
For Kerouac, a lifelong Catholic who was studying Buddhism that summer, the quest for faith in the Beat tradition carried connotations of beatitude — the ultimate religious vision, the glimpse of a salvific God.
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Let’s shout our poems in San Francisco streets — predict earthquakes!
- Kerouac letter to Ginsberg, circa Fall 1955
October 1955: The Poetry Revolution Begins
To concentrate on writing his novels, Kerouac had withdrawn a bit from his friends in the early Fifties, but Allen Ginsberg’s New York apartment had become a gathering place of poets interested in articulating a new vision.
Ginsberg moved west in the mid-Fifties to attend Berkeley, and Kerouac, having finally sold On the Road, joined him there in September 1955. Ginsberg had mailed Kerouac a copy of his latest poem, and Kerouac had written in response, “I received your Howl” — and so the poem found its name. Ginsberg quickly inserted himself into the poetry scene, becoming acquainted with Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Philip Lamantia, and Michael McClure. Shortly after meeting Gary Snyder, Ginsberg planned a poetry reading at the Six Gallery.
Some 150 people showed up for the reading. Kerouac was there, collecting money for wine, which was passed liberally through the audience all evening. Lamantia read first, a selection of poems by John Hoffman, who had recently died of a peyote overdose. Newcomer Michael McClure read next, followed by Philip Whalen.
Ginsberg stole the show. He read “Howl” for the first time, not knowing he was creating a sensation, unleashing a movement that would not be stopped. He was galvanizing the spirit of the Beat Generation, sounding the notes of the new poetry. It was his first poetry reading, and he chanted a line, drew a breath, and then chanted the next. The audience went wild. At 29, Ginsberg had few publications — but gained instant notoriety. He was launched, and subsequent readings fueled his celebrity.
After the furor quieted, Gary Snyder, a Berkeley student and Zen poet who wanted to become a Buddhist Monk, read “A Berry Feast.”
The Six Gallery reading marks the genesis of Beat poetry, the moment when it ceased to be a subterranean phenomenon and reared its head, never to be suppressed. Ginsberg had sounded the barbaric yawp of the Beat Generation, and the Six Gallery listeners recognized it. The larger world remained unaware of the revolutionary work, but that would change within months, when the poem was published in 1957. Fueled by publicity from the resulting obscenity trial, “Howl” attracted a huge national audience.
Proliferation in the Press, Mainstream and Otherwise
A community of like-minded poets converged in the Bay Area in the early Fifties, and they had established publications to showcase their work. One of the most important was Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who had co-founded a magazine, City Lights, in 1953, and he attached a bookstore of the same name to the business. As the business and the poetry movement grew — and poets had accumulated enough work for collections — Ferlinghetti made another bold move. In 1955, he founded a publishing company (called City Lights, of course), which produced the Pocket Poets Series. The first in the series, Ferlinghettiâ¿¿s own Pictures of a Gone World initiated the series in August 1955. Kenneth Rexrothâ¿¿s Thirty Spanish Poems of Love and Exile and Kenneth Patchen’s Poems of Humor followed in 1956.
In short, the West Coast poetry community was ready for the poetry revolution when Ginsberg arrived from New York. Poetry readings proliferated in various Bay Area locations, and the presses were in place. Ginsberg still craved acceptance of the East Coast publishers, which constituted the nation’s serious literary “establishment.” (He didn’t want glory so intensely that he would allow Berne Porter, a publisher in San Francisco, to print a fancy and expensive limited edition of “Howl.” By suggesting publication in that form, Porter seems to have missed the whole point of the poem.) Ginsberg moved back to the scene in New York. “Howl,” continued to get attention from literary critics; some praised, some decried, but all had a strong opinion.
Ferlinghetti’s fourth City Lights publication is the most famous. Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems is an obvious choice for the Pocket Poets Series, and it was printed in 1956. The first edition sold out, and no one could have predicted what would happen to the second edition. The volume was printed in England, and Customs officials seized the shipment when it entered the country in March 1957, and Ferlinghetti was put on trial for publishing an obscene text.
After much testimony that Ginsberg was using the language of everyday people and that the graphic sexual content was necessary to the work, Judge Clayton W. Horn found that Howl was acceptable. Readers gather around banned books like moths around streetlights and naturally the trial attracted curious readers. The Beat poets were officially on the map, and they were slowly becoming part of the mainstream culture. Without the obscenity trial, the process might not have been so rapid. Howl became a manifesto, the key figure of the poetry revolution. Numerous public readings further bolstered Ginsberg’s fame.
Other publications ensured a growing audience for the Beats in 1957. An essay by novelist Norman Mailer, “The White Negro,” focused on Beats and hipsters; Frank O’Hara’s poetry collection Meditations in an Emergency was published, and several literary magazines featured the work of the Beats. The City Lights Bookshop became a beacon for the new poets and their admirers. Gregory Corso published The Vestal Lady on Brattle, and Kerouac’s “Jazz of the Beat Generation” was published in New World Writing.
1957: On the Road Hits the Page
The Beat poets were enjoying enormous popularity, but the prose writers were not to be left out of the raging party. Granted, Holmes’s Go and Burroughs’s Junky had been in print for a time, but these accounts of Beat life hadn’t attracted great attention. Kerouac had sold his novel On the Road in 1955, but it was not published until September 1957 — and then it had been revised substantially. Adoring fans who bought his story that he had disgorged the book in a three-week, drug-bolstered interval onto one continuous roll of paper were not told that the manuscript was substantially revised for publication. In the interim, he had written several more novels, and in his knapsack he carried 11 manuscripts that publishers had refused.
His fortunes changed overnight with the publication of On the Road, which became an instant classic. Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise became Beat cult figures, and Kerouac felt vindicated in his belief that he was a literary star of the magnitude of James Joyce and Marcel Proust. After years of bumming, starving, drugging, and writing incessantly, Kerouac had a best seller, and there was no obscenity trial to draw attention to his work.
On the Road and Howl became handbooks for young people attracted to the Beat lifestyle. Kerouac’s novel showed the young culture the virtues of footloose mobility, and the great quest was on again, Beat style.
1959: Naked Lunch
The last of the original Beats was published for the second time in 1959. Burroughs had published Junky in 1953, but Naked Lunch took decadent prose to new highs (or lows, to some readers). In a 1957 visit to Burroughs in Tangiers, Kerouac had typed up the handwritten fragments that littered Burroughs’ living space; Kerouac also titled the piece. The book established Burroughs as a cutting-edge writer, and he joined Kerouac and Ginsberg as celebrities.
Conclusion
In less than 15 years, the three original Beat visionaries had risen from obscurity to become public figures, the literary gurus that they had dreamed of becoming since their Columbia days in 1944. Each had traveled many miles, and their own writing techniques had evolved in different directions, but their friendships had been lasting ones. Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs, along with their friend Neal Cassady, had also been key players in a revolution that expanded beyond poetry and literature. Increasingly, they were viewed as the embodiments of a new culture as well. At the end of the Fifties, the original Beats were riding high.
Assignment: 1955-1960: The Beats Flourish
Read Allen Ginsberg’s classics “Howl” and “Kaddish” in The Portable Beat Reader (pp. 62 and 77).
