In 1954, Jack Kerouac discovered Dwight Goddard’s A Buddhist Bible at the San Jose Library. This marked the beginning of his fascination into Buddhism. Jack promoted the Washington state poet Gary Snyder as the Beats’ spiritual guide, and he fictionalized him as Japhy Ryder in Dharma Bums, a book which also contained accounts of a mountain climbing trip Kerouac took with Snyder. In Dharma Bums, the character Ray Smith, who may be likened to Kerouac himself, wrestled with Buddhism and struggled to subdue his sexual desires. Japhy Ryder, however, did not chastise himself; he displayed metta and did not see pleasure as being in conflict with his spirituality. The Dharma Bums recalled the peaceful living together with Buddhist values that Kerouac and Snyder experienced in 1956 in Cabin Mill Valley.
Whilst studying Buddhism, Kerouac kept a journal containing poems, notes on Buddhism, while all the time he was trying to teach his mind compassion, peace and emptiness, through the art of meditation. The Diamond Sutra was the most important Buddhist text for Kerouac. He studied the sutra, hoping to condition his mind to emptiness and to enlightenment. Kerouac was inspired by reading Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden. Thoreau, a nineteenth-century philosopher and transcendentalist (transcendentalism is the prioritising of the spiritual over the material), explained how simple living was the key to enlightenment. Like Thoreau and the poet and transcendentalist Walt Whitman, the Beats looked for spirituality in nature, themselves and the East. Indeed, Kerouac lived alone for sixty-three days in a forest cabin on Desolation Peak, part of the North Cascade mountain range. He had a job there as a fire lookout, inspired by Snyder’s accounts of his experiences as a lookout, but mainly it was Kerouac’s idea to experience solitude, have visions and ultimately become enlightened. And he said of writing, that it’s a ‘silent meditation even though you’re going hundred miles an hour … visions are only obtainable in silence and meditation’ (The Art of Fiction, Kerouac, Paris Review, 1968).
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Experiment with this: Learning How Meditation Inspires Creative Practice
Using your unconscious mind …
Sit in a quiet place. Close your eyes. Connect with your breath. Breathe in slowly through your nose and breathe out slowly through your nose. Allow thoughts to pass through your mind as if they are clouds floating by. Open your eyes. Write down the thoughts you had.
Close your eyes again. Connect with the breath. Imagine your mind is a still pond. Dive into it. What images and visions come to you? Open your eyes. Pick up a pen. Write freely about all that you have seen and felt.
Using your conscious mind …
Create a context in which your meditation experience can exist. Do not censor what you write, just write!
Now re-draft your piece of writing.
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What spiritual practice did the Beats apply to their writing?
In addition to the content of the Beats’ work being fused with Buddhist ideals, the techniques they employed in terms of their creative writing process, in particular the idea of freeing consciousness on to the page, relate to notions of non-attachment in Buddhism, otherwise known as Aparigraha. According to Buddhism, a common pattern of human behaviour is to resist change by clinging to ‘desires’ such as people, emotions, ways of seeing and responding to the world, material possessions, past conditioning, experiences, in an attempt to gain security. Therefore, one has difficulty living freely, accepting change and moving on with life. If one is attached, one’s way of perceiving reality can be the result of many unconscious habits and actions, which are often repeated mechanically without question or insight; this is known as samskara. Non-attachment is the conscious realization that all ‘desires’ are under the control of the will. When one is able to harness the will and focus the mind, one is on a journey of self-study, known as swadhyaya, which leads to self-realization. Through adopting non-attachment techniques, the Beats were able to free their consciousness to the page. To the Beats, the old forms of fiction, for example, those of likes of Jane Austen and Henry Fielding, obscured meaning and stopped them getting to what really mattered, passion, energy, freedom, the rawness and reality of the actual experience. They wanted to write the truth, to let everything pour out in a rush, a stream of consciousness, without pausing to censor or use punctuation; in this way, they would arrive at the essence of meaning, the intensity of the experience.
The Sutras – meaning threads – written by Patanjali to tell a story are concerned with the search for inner balance through self-knowledge. According to the Sutras, non-attachment emerges from a mystical state, a trance, where it is natural to improvise and create and go with the flow; it is about being receptive to whatever comes up, being non-judgemental and detached, which is not the same as being disinterested. This process is about being absorbed in the moment as were the Beats when they wrote, in particular Jack Kerouac when he wrote On the Road, which will be explored in a later chapter. They gave themselves over to the writing and were not constrained by rules or structures; they were not concerned by the blank page. In Buddhism, the concept of emptiness is central to the philosophy. Emptiness is not nothingness, but it is the beginning of everything. Something can come from nothing.
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Experiment with this: Learning to Use Non-attachment in Writing
Using this as a starting point for writing: I am loving the freedom …
Write! Do not be concerned with paragraphs or punctuation. Simply allow the words to flow from your mind onto the page and go with the flow of writing. Do not censor yourself, just trust the process and your unconscious mind. Be in the present moment. Improvise and create. Later, you may see connections between what now seem to be unrelated ideas, words and images, but for now just open up to your writing that will, if you let it, come naturally. Do not be constrained by rules and structures. Do not pontificate. Do not struggle for ideas, do not angst over the mechanics of the writing. Let the writing flow like clear water. Do not be inhibited. Do not worry about writing well. Do not strive for perfection. Keep the pen on the page and, keep your hand moving, keep writing for fifteen minutes or more if you can.
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Sexuality, Drug Culture and Fiction
This chapter explores how sexual experimentation, drug taking and criminal behaviour impacted upon the form and content of the Beat fiction so that contemporary writers can enhance their own fiction by experimenting with these techniques.
What content informed the Beats’ experimental writing practice?
The Beats rejected the mainstream values of America and were drawn to its underside, where there were drug addicts, prostitutes and swindlers. The content of the Beats’ work, therefore, was highly influenced by the dark side of society and much of their writing takes the reader on a journey into this darkness. They were rebelling against normality and the prudish attitudes towards sex that existed in the conservative 1950s. To a certain extent, their literary works were a rage against a system that demanded conformity.
Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg had all been in prison and mental hospital. Neal Cassady was notorious for car theft, but was held in high esteem by the Beats for his passion for Zen. Indeed, On the Road is Cassady and Kerouac’s experience of the decadent journey from New York to California, along the way they descend into one excess after another. As noted, David Kammerer had a fixation on Lucien Carr and pursued him so incessantly that in 1944 in Riverside Park this culminated in Carr stabbing Kammerer, tying his limbs with shoelaces, putting rocks in his pockets and rolling him into the Hudson River. Carr pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sent to the Elmira Reformatory. The stabbing was an incident that Kerouac fictionalized in The Town and the City and later in Vanity Duluoz. In fact, most of the Beats fictionalized their lives, and as already mentioned, Burroughs fictionalized and romanticized his dark experiences too in Naked Lunch, a semi-autobiographical novel which is concerned with his life as a drug user and dealer of junk, heroin.
In addition to his drug habit, Burroughs had
an interest in experimenting with criminal activity and made contacts with the criminal underworld of New York. Burroughs met Herbert Huncke, a criminal and drug addict, who hung about in Times Square. The Beats found him a fascinating and inspiring character; they felt that Huncke, a member of the underclass, had things to teach them as they had been sheltered by their middle-class upbringings. Ginsberg stashed stolen goods for Huncke, which led to him being arrested following a police car chase. He pleaded insanity and was briefly committed to Bellvue Hospital, where he met Carl Solomon. After Solomon’s release, he became the contact which led to the publishing contract of Burrough’s novel Junky, which was published in 1953.
How did content affect the language of the Beats writing?
The Beats used harsh language, slang and expletives within their literature to reflect the harsh reality that they were exploring, and they cited the American poet, father of free verse and journalist, Walt Whitman as being an influence on their work. Wild Boys by William Burroughs, for example, a novel set in an apocalyptic late twentieth century, depicted a gay youth culture whose goal was the downfall of western society. The language of this novel was graphic and visceral, strangely poetic and contained powerful visual imagery.
The camera is the eye of a cruising vulture flying over an area of scrub, rubble and unfinished buildings on the outskirts of Mexico City.
Five story building now walls no stairs … squatters have set up makeshift houses … floors are connected by ladders … dogs bark, chickens cackle, a boy on the roof makes a jack-off gesture as the camera sails past.
Close to the ground we see the shadow of our wings, dry cellars choked with thistles, rusty iron rods spouting like metal plants from cracked concrete, a broken bottle in the sun, shit-stained colour comics, an Indian boy against a wall with his knees up eating an orange sprinkled with red pepper. (Wild Boys, p. 1)
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Experiment with this: Learning to Experiment with Language and Images
Like the opening of this extract, have a camera scanning a scene of your choice. Document what the camera sees. Experiment with the sound and texture of words, be creative and imaginative, and include alliteration and strong visual images in your writing.
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Why did the Beats experiment with sexuality?
The Beats used sexual experimentation as a means to altered states of consciousness and a way of living life to the full and to discover what it meant to be human. They refused to accept limits. Although seen by conventional society as hell-raising bohemians, the Beats were seeking to rise above the restrictive materialistic mores of conventional society.
Most of the Beat Generation were homosexual or bisexual, in particular Ginsberg and Burroughs. One of the contentious issues relating to Howl were the lines within the text, which concerned homosexuality. Howl was originally written in 1955 as a performance piece. Together with Kerouac’s On the Road and William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, Howl was considered to be the most popular and greatest works of the Beat Generation. Howl was published by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books. However, upon its release, Ferlinghetti and bookstore manager Shigeyoshi Murao were charged with disseminating obscene literature. On October 3rd, Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that the work was not obscene. Consequently, Howl went on to be revered for its hallucinatory style and frank exploration of sexuality. The prime emotional drive for the work was Ginsberg’s empathy for Carl Solomon, to whom the poem was dedicated. He met Solomon in a mental institution where he was committed for ninety days.
Burroughs’ Naked Lunch also contains highly sexual content, in particular content about homosexual practices. This work was also prosecuted for obscenity. However, victory by Naked Lunch and Howl marked the end of literary censorship in the United States. The content of Kerouac’s work was also sexual; On the Road mentions Neal Cassady’s bisexuality, likewise Visions of Cody; group sex was featured in Dharma Bums.
Why did the Beats experiment with drugs?
Drug taking was another method the Beats experimented with to achieve altered states of consciousness. They believed that drug taking enhanced creativity, insight and productivity and was a source of inspiration for the content of their writing. They used alcohol, marijuana, Benzedrine, morphine LSD and heroin and were drawn to drugs as they were drawn to jazz.
Kerouac took Benzedrine ‘until he “felt he was blasting so high that he was experiencing real insights and facing real fears. With Benzedrine, he felt he was embarking on a journey of self-discovery, climbing up from one level to the next, following his insights … Benzedrine intensified his awareness and made him feel more clever” ’. Indeed, it was thought that ‘Each of Kerouac’s books were written on something, and each of the books has some feel of what he was on most as he wrote it’ (Sadie Plant, p. 114). At the beginning of the 1960s, Kerouac met Timothy Leary, an American psychologist and writer, who believed that LSD had therapeutic potential for psychiatry and was an important means to self-discovery and the expansion of the world’s consciousness. He conducted experiments with LSD at Harvard University; Allen Ginsberg took part in this research, along with the writer of the influential book One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey, and later Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. It was easy to see how Leary was an attractive person to the Beats, like them he walked his own path questioning authority and shunning conformity. Leary suggested an ideal state of being was to turn off your mind, relax and float downstream, a phrase also associated with the Tibetan Book of the Dead and John Lennon. Leary modelled himself on Aleister Crowley, 1875–1947, a British poet, occultist and mystic, who was a recreational drug taker. Crowley was known by the name The Great Beast 666 and like the Beats and Leary he renounced conformity, advocating the rule Do What Thou Wilt.
For the Beats, taking drugs was an integral part of their lifestyle; it fuelled their writing, informed the content of their fiction and developed a technique known as cut-ups.
What is the cut-up technique?
The ways in which the Beats stimulated creativity was by relinquishing control and by using chance; cut-up is a technique they used in order to achieve these goals, in particular Burroughs who struggled with his various addictions and disjointed mental state which can be argued resulted in the literary technique cut-ups.
Cut-up was a concept first used in the 1920s by the Dadaist, Tristan Tzara; he created a poem by pulling random words out of a hat. This technique was popularized by William Burroughs in the late 1950s and 1960s. He cited T. S. Eliot’s definitive modernist text The Wasteland (1922) as one that he used to create new texts. Firstly, the Beats took finished, linear texts, which were cut into pieces with lines of text or single words. The pieces were then rearranged to form a new, non-linear text. In addition to writers, a number of musicians have used the cut-up technique to create lyrics. These include David Bowie, a musician who embraced William Burroughs’ cut-up technique when writing lyrics for his songs, in particular those on the Diamond Dogs album; other musicians who have used the cut-up technique include Kurt Cobain, the Rolling Stones and Radiohead.
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Experiment with this: Learning to Use Cut-ups
Take any linear text you have written and a feature from a newspaper. Cut both texts into lines and single words. Rearrange the pieces of text to create a non-linear text and to form new phrases and new meanings.
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How was the Beats works affected by drug use?
Depending on the drugs the Beats had taken, their work was undoubtedly affected, both in terms of content and form. Under various drugs it was difficult to sustain thoughts. The mind jumped all over the place. There was a loss of control. As Sadie Plant writs in Writing on Drugs: ‘The words run fast and loose, the thoughts can’t be contained, the ideas dissipate. Characters and authors lose their plots. Words break down … notes trip each other up’ (Sadie Plant, p. 133).
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Experiment with this: Learning to Lose Control
; Imagine a writer is working under the influence of drugs. Write a passage from a novel the writer writes, about a writer who is writing under the influence of drugs. Don’t censor thoughts. Start with an idea and permit it to dissipate. Let the words come fast and freely. Allow characters and authors to lose their plots.
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On the Road
This chapter explores On the Road in terms of form and content, with the intention of showing contemporary readers how to experiment with Jack Kerouac’s techniques, in order to enhance their own writing practice. In addition, it investigates why it was the definitive text of the Beat Generation and why it is still revered and read by many people in the twenty-first century.
Why was it written?
In the writing of On the Road, Jack Kerouac was hitting back at conventional society and conventional writing in an attempt to establish new ground on which writing could exist and be discussed.
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