The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats

by Allen Ginsberg

  I remember Kerouac telling me that there was a point where he and Neal were taking a piss together, without any erotic interest in each other, and Neal looked up and acknowledged, “I love you, Jack” and Jack did the same to him. It was the epiphanous moment in Visions of Cody, when they declared their love for each other openly in an odd moment and told each other. What always struck me was that the thing I wanted most was just that, exchanging love with another man. I interpreted it as a sexual or genital thing, but I’ve experienced it over the years as just heart feeling.

  At this point in the book the girls have all turned on the hero Dean Moriarty, and denounced him as a jerk and a creep and a lousy lay and irresponsible and insensitive.

  Just as flat as that. It was the saddest night. I felt as if I was with strange brothers and sisters in a pitiful dream. Then a complete silence fell over everybody; where once Dean would have talked his way out, he now fell silent himself, but standing in front of everybody, ragged and broken and idiotic, right under the lightbulbs, his bony mad face covered with sweat and throbbing veins, saying, “Yes, yes, yes,” as though tremendous revelations were pouring into him all the time now, and I am convinced they were, and the others suspected as much and were frightened. He was BEAT—the root, the soul of Beatific. What was he knowing? He tried all in his power to tell me what he was knowing, and they envied that about me, my position at his side, defending him and drinking him in as they once tried to do. Then they looked at me. What was I, a stranger, doing on the West Coast this fair night? I recoiled from the thought.156

  Later on a similar blankness and insensitivity that all the women objected to was due to speed [amphetamines], which desensitized Cassady. At this point, however, there was no particular physiological chill in his brain or in his body. As indicated in the book, the main character was trying to satisfy everybody sexually and set afire everybody’s imaginations, and act as everybody’s Bodhisattva, but it was too hard a juggling act to keep everybody happy.

  One idea that occurred to Jack was that jazz was a clarion call to a spiritual awakening. It was a fellaheen language, so it spoke for the most oppressed. The rejected and condemned became agents of the divine. Kerouac saw new jazz as a clarion of a new consciousness. It wasn’t only bebop, it was the whole notion of American blues and black music. It came in a slightly different way than he expected with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan adapting old black blues, Skip James and Robert Johnson. African body rhythms penetrating through the mechano-civilized world, setting up a vibration in the human body that made people dance together again.

  Mission Street that last day in Frisco was a great riot of construction work, children playing, whooping Negroes coming home from work, dust, excitement, the great buzzing and vibrating hum of what is really America’s most excited city—and overhead the pure blue sky and the joy of the foggy sea that always rolls in at night to make everybody hungry for food and further excitement.157

  The first stop would have to be Sacramento, which wasn’t even the faintest beginning of the trip to Denver. Dean and I sat alone in the back seat and left it up to them and talked. “Now, man, that alto man last night had IT—he held it once he found it; I’ve never seen a guy who could hold so long.” I wanted to know what “IT” meant. “Ah well”—Dean laughed—“now you’re asking me impon-de-rables—ahem! Here’s a guy and everybody’s there, right? Up to him to put down what’s on everybody’s mind. He starts the first chorus, then lines up his ideas, people, yeah, yeah, but get it, and then he rises to his fate and has to blow equal to it. All of a sudden somewhere in the middle of the chorus he gets it—everybody looks up and knows; they listen; he picks it up and carries. Time stops. He’s filling empty space with the substance of our lives, confessions of his bellybottom strain, remembrance of ideas, rehashes of old blowing. He has to blow across bridges and come back and do it with such infinite feeling soul-exploratory for the tune of the moment that everybody knows it’s not the tune that counts but IT—” Dean could go no further; he was sweating telling about it.158

  That’s a pretty accurate description of inspiration, which is to say breath. I would now define it by hindsight as unobstructed breath, as a physiological state of unobstructed breathing, which is known as inspiration, spiritus, breath. It was that particular breakthrough to unobstructed inspiration and expiration of breath that was the key to most of On the Road. Kerouac was discovering it in black music and somewhat in black speech and black society. He didn’t find it as evident in white society and that’s why he had at least that little glimpse or vision of black America as being the salvation of the United States, as having the soul, or as having the ultimate spirit of the United States. Strictly fellaheen in the sense that it was just taking place in little tiny jazz clubs in San Francisco or Detroit or Cleveland or New York. It wasn’t official, people were doing it by themselves, out of their own sense of joy.

  What he’s admiring in the musicians is their individual caricature and then every once and a while some heroic kid will come with a breath of extreme sweetness and gentleness and delicacy. Kerouac’s original interest was in the spiritual personality of the musicians and their American archetypal gestures. What kind of men they were, what kind of sensibility they had. Nobody had looked on jazz musicians with that kind of insight, except other jazz musicians.

  We were both exhausted and dirty. In the john of a restaurant I was at a urinal blocking Dean’s way to the sink and I stepped out before I was finished and resumed at another urinal, and said to Dean, “Dig this trick.”

  “Yes, man,” he said, washing his hands at the sink, “it’s a very good trick but awful on your kidneys and because you’re getting a little older now every time you do this eventually years of misery in your old age, awful kidney miseries for the days when you sit in parks.”

  It made me mad. “Who’s old? I’m not much older than you are!”

  “I wasn’t saying that, man!”

  “Ah,” I said, “you’re always making cracks about my age. I’m no old fag like that fag, you don’t have to warn me about my kidneys.” We went back to the booth and just as the waitress set down the hot-roast-beef sandwiches—and ordinarily Dean would have leaped to wolf the food at once—I said to cap my anger, “And I don’t want to hear any more of it.” And suddenly Dean’s eyes grew tearful and he got up and left his food steaming there and walked out of the restaurant. I wondered if he was just wandering off forever. I didn’t care,—I was so mad—I had flipped momentarily and turned it down on Dean. But the sight of his uneaten food made me sadder than anything in years. I shouldn’t have said that . . . he likes to eat so much . . . He’s never left his food like this . . . What the hell. That’s showing him, anyway.

  Dean stood outside the restaurant for exactly five minutes and then came back and sat down. “Well,” I said, “what were you doing out there, knotting up your fists? Cursing me, thinking up new gags about my kidneys?”

  Dean mutely shook his head. “No, man, no, man, you’re all completely wrong. If you want to know, well—”

  “Go ahead, tell me.” I said all this and never looked up from my food. I felt like a beast.

  “I was crying,” said Dean.159

  That’s their relationship. There’s an enormous tenderness in Dean, which is unusual in American literature with heroes. It’s implicit in Whitman but it isn’t in most novels. I think that’s why this book made a breakthrough.

  “Well,” they said, “we never knew we’d get to Chicago so fast.” As we passed drowsy Illinois towns where the people are so conscious of Chicago gangs that pass like this in limousines every day, we were a strange sight: all of us unshaven, the driver bare-chested, two bums, myself in the back seat, holding on to a strap and my head leaned back on the cushion looking at the countryside with an imperious eye—just like a new California gang come to contest the spoils of Chicago, a band of desperados escaped from the prison
s of the Utah moon.160

  I always liked that phrase. “A band of desperados escaped from the prisons of the Utah moon.” Utah moon, because Utah looks like the moon, the lunar landscape, maybe. Kerouac makes this little suggestion, when you’re finished making your statement, add a little extra word, “from the prisons of the Utah moon.” A little extra note in the cadenza. One association added on to another, just for the sheer pleasure of reflecting the intelligence of the mind. I remember that as one of the glorious sentences in his book.

  These are Cassady’s instructions to Kerouac on prose and on storytelling.

  We all decided to tell our stories, but one by one, and Stan was first. “We’ve got a long way to go,” preambled Dean, “and so you must take every indulgence and deal with every single detail you can bring to mind—and still it won’t all be told. Easy, easy,” he cautioned Stan, who began telling his story, “you’ve got to relax too.” Stan swung into his life story as we shot across the dark. He started with his experiences in France but to round out ever-growing difficulties he came back and started at the beginning with his boyhood in Denver. He and Dean compared times they’d seen each other zooming around on bicycles. “One time you’ve forgotten, I know—Arapahoe Garage? Recall? I bounced a ball at you on the corner and you knocked it back to me with your fist and it went in the sewer. Grammar days. Now recall?” Stan was nervous and feverish. He wanted to tell Dean everything. Dean was now arbiter, old man, judge, listener, approver, nodder. “Yes, yes, go on please.” We passed Walsenburg; suddenly we passed Trinidad, where Chad King was somewhere off the road in front of a campfire with perhaps a handful of anthropologists and as of yore he too was telling his life story and never dreamed we were passing at that exact moment on the highway, headed for Mexico, telling our own stories. O sad American night!161

  That business of telling all the details of a whole life story was characteristic. Kerouac did that in his art and that was his whole thing, to be the recording angel, or the great rememberer. He wanted to tell the entire detailed story of his lifetime. We thought our own personal histories were forever forgotten, lost and unimportant. Then as we began telling each other what we thought when we were young and the progress of our soul’s consciousness insights, we found that we all had the same sort of divine ambition. We all had discovered how big the universe was, discovered death, had our first sexual tickle, got scared at the movies. We began to discover that our own lives were mythological in the sense that everybody’s life was mythological. We all had a tender poignant memory of our old blankets and dolls and kiddie carts and supermarkets and childhood curbstones and marble games and picket fences and storm fences behind telephone buildings. We all had these archetypal recollections and it seemed that if one talked with anybody else, they also had their own archetypal recollections, but they had no way of realizing that those archetypal recollections were the very angelic bricks of their own lives, the foundation of their lives. Their early childhood thrills and symbols were the basis of all adult judgment and opinions and trips to the moon. It was a whole hidden memory life that was never expounded or exposed or shared or traded. That was the significance of this passage and what Cassady was especially interested in. Everyone he met had his own history all the way back, rather than the history he read in the books about World War I, Bismarck, and the Greeks and Romans. It was the real tangible history of our own history, which was almost as hidden and mysterious as the history of the Egyptians, because when finally somebody began telling the complete story of his life they would discover that they had forgotten many giant pyramids and huge sphinxes that stood in the department stores of Lowell and Paterson, and strange characters that had prophetic meaning from River Street or Merrimack banks, shrouded strangers and old bag ladies that were prophetic of later understandings and insights. This little passage of telling histories, life stories, is a memento of that, but the whole book is that also.

  I was so exhausted by now I slept all the way through Dilley and Encinal to Laredo and didn’t wake up till they were parking the car in front of a lunchroom at two o’clock in the morning. “Ah,” sighed Dean, “the end of Texas, the end of America, we don’t know no more.”162

  That theme goes all through the book, the end of America, going to the extreme coasts, restoring the country physically and coming to the end, then having to face a blank wall, like the redbrick wall on Saturday night where nothing’s happening despite all the excitement of everybody wanting to get into ecstasy, coming to a blank wall at the end of America. It has been noted by many commentators that this era was the end of the exploration of America. The last gasp of the automobile cowboys before the gasoline shortage, before gasoline itself became suspect. Magic land, end of the road. Neal’s advice is:

  “Now, Sal, we’re leaving everything behind us and entering a new and unknown phase of things. All the years and troubles! and kicks—and now this! so that we can safely think of nothing else and just go on ahead with our faces stuck out like this you see, and understand the world as, really and genuinely speaking, other Americans haven’t done before us—they were here, weren’t they? The Mexican war. Cutting across here with cannon.”

  “This road,” I told him, “is also the route of old American outlaws who used to skip over the border and go down to old Monterrey, so if you’ll look out on that graying desert and picture the ghost of an old Tombstone hellcat making lonely exile gallop into the unknown, you’ll see further . . .”

  “It’s the world,” said Dean. “My God!” he cried, slapping the wheel. “It’s the world! We can go right on to South America if the road goes. Think of it! Son-of-a-bitch! Gawd-damm!”163

  It was the first time they’d ever been out of the United States, that bespeaks the provincialism of American mind at that time. Like the assumption that what we had in New York or Denver was some self-enclosed universe and all of a sudden these guys found themselves going into a completely strange other nation and realized that the American standard was not the only standard. That was also part of the breakthrough of the Beat Generation. It was a surprise to find out that it was different everywhere in the world except here and that this was not the entire universe of consciousness or discourse or manners or plumbing.

  Now, the fellaheen. Of course, a naive view, but not too naive for those days.

  The city of Gregoria was ahead. The boys were sleeping, and I was alone in my eternity at the wheel, and the road ran straight as an arrow. Not like driving across Carolina, or Texas, or Arizona, or Illinois; but like driving across the world and into the places where we would finally learn ourselves among the Fellahin Indians of the world, the essential strain of the basic primitive, wailing humanity that stretches in a belt around the equatorial belly of the world from Malaya (the long fingernail of China) to India the great subcontinent to Arabia to Morocco to the selfsame deserts and jungles of Mexico and over the waves to Polynesia to mystic Siam of the Yellow Robe and on around, on around, so that you hear the same mournful wail by the rotted walls of Cadiz, Spain, that you hear 12,000 miles around in the depths of Benares the Capital of the World. These people were unmistakably Indians and were not at all like the Pedros and Panchos of silly civilized American lore—they had high cheekbones, and slanted eyes, and soft ways; they were not fools, they were not clowns; they were great, grave Indians and they were the source of mankind and the fathers of it. The waves are Chinese, but the earth is an Indian thing. As essential as rocks in the desert are they in the desert of “history.” And they knew this when we passed, ostensibly self-important moneybag Americans on a lark in their land; they knew who was the father and who was the son of antique life on earth, and made no comment. For when destruction comes to the world of “history” and the Apocalypse of the Fellahin returns once more as so many times before, people will still stare with the same eyes from the caves of Mexico as well as from the caves of Bali, where it all began and where Adam was suckled and taught to know. These were my
growing thoughts as I drove the car into the hot, sunbaked town of Gregoria.164

  That’s pretty sublime, I thought. That’s also influenced by his readings in Spengler’s Decline of the West. He’s basically taking off from Spengler’s prose in this particular passage. They discover that what was bohemian in America was just ordinary lifestyle in Mexico, eating off a newspaper or eating a cow’s head.

  This was the great and final wild uninhibited Fellahin-childlike city that we knew we would find at the end of the road.165

  Culturally that’s probably the point. Most critics have assumed that there is no point to the book or that there is nothing at the end of the road but blankness. But they get to the end of the American road and discover that there’s a world outside of America, and a whole vast fellaheen, non–Time magazine, nonmechanical, non–­petrochemical existence, that escapes the purview of the New York Times and the Washington Post and the universities and the calculations of academics and mathematicians and politicians and artists. And then the conclusion.

  So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.166