by Peter Watson
From New York Eliot and Leavis found kindred spirits in Lionel Trilling and Henry Commager. In The Liberal Imagination Trilling, a Jewish professor at Columbia University, was concerned, like Eliot, with the ‘atomising’ effects of mass society, or with what David Riesman was to call ‘The Lonely Crowd.’16 But Trilling’s main point was to warn against a new danger to intellectual life that he perceived. In the preface to his book he concentrated on ‘liberalism’ which, he said, was not just the dominant intellectual tradition in the postwar world but, in effect, the only one: ‘For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.’ Leaving aside whether this particular claim was true (and Eliot, for one, would have disagreed), Trilling’s main interest was the effect of this new situation on literature. In particular, he foresaw a coarsening of experience. This came about, he said, because in liberal democracies certain dominant ideas spring up, find popular approval, and in consequence put ideas about human nature into a series of straitjackets. He drew his readers’ attention to some of these straitjackets – Freudian psychoanalysis was one, sociology another, and Sartrean philosophy a third.17 He wasn’t against these ideas – in fact, he was very positive about Freud and psychoanalysis in general. But he insisted that it was – and is – the job of great literature to go beyond any one vision, to point up the shortcomings of each attempt to provide an all-enveloping account of human experience, and he clearly thought that in an atomised, democratised mass society, this view of literature is apt to get lost. As mass society moves toward consensus and conformity (as was happening at that time, especially in America with the McCarthy hearings), it is the job of literature, Trilling wrote, to be something else entirely. He dwelt in particular on the fact that some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century – he quoted Pound, Yeats, Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, and Gide – were far from being liberal democrats, that their very strength was drawn from being in the opposing camp. That, for Trilling, was at the root of the matter. For him, the job of the critic was to identify the consensus in order that artists might know what to kick against.18
Henry Steele Commager’s American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character since the 1880s was also published in 1950, the same year as Trilling’s book.19 Ostensibly, Commager took a different line, in that he tried to pin down what it was that separated American thought from its European counterpart. The organisation of Commager’s book was itself a guide to his thinking. It concentrated neither on the ‘great men’ of the period, in the sense of monarchs (which of course America did not have), nor on politicians (politics occupy chapters 15 and 16 out of a total of 20), nor on the vast mass of people and their lives (the Lynds’ Middletown is mentioned, but their statistical approach is eschewed entirely). Instead, Commager concentrated his fire on the great individuals who had shone during the period – in philosophy, religion, literature, history, law, and what he saw as the new sciences of economics and sociology.20 Running through his entire argument, however, and clarifying his approach, was an account of how Darwin and the theory of evolution had affected American intellectual life. After the more literal applications of the late nineteenth century, as exercised through the influence of Herbert Spencer (and discussed in chapter 3 of this book), Commager thought Darwinism had been taken on board by the American mind in the form of a pragmatic individualism. Americans, he implied, accepted that society moved forward through the achievements of outstanding individuals, that recognition of these individuals and their achievements was the responsibility of historians such as himself, that it was the role of literature to make the case both for tradition and for change, to help the debate along, and that it was also the writer’s, or the academic’s, job to recognise that individualism had its pathological side, which had to be kept in check and recognised for what it was.21 He thought, for instance, that a number of writers (Jack London and Theodore Dreiser are discussed) took Darwinian determinism too far, and that the proliferation of religious sects in America was in some senses a pathological turning away from individualism (Reinhold Niebuhr was to make much the same point), as was the more general ‘cult of the irrational,’ which he saw as a revolt against scientific determinism. For him, the greatest success in America was the pragmatic evolution of the law, which recognised that society was not, and could not be, a static system but should change, and be made to change.22 In other words, whereas Eliot saw the scepticism of the higher cultural elite as the chief antidote to the would-be excesses of politicians, Commager thought that the American legal system was the most considerable achievement of a post-Darwinian pragmatic society.
These four views shared a belief in reason, in the idea of progress, and in the role of serious literature to help cultures explain themselves to themselves. They even agreed, broadly, on what serious literature – high culture – was.
Barely was the ink dry on the pages of these books, however, than they were challenged. Challenged is perhaps too weak a word, for the view they represented was in fact assaulted and attacked and bombarded from all sides at once. The attack came from anthropology, from history, and from other literatures; the bombardment was mounted by sociology, science, music, and television; the assault was launched even from inside Leavis’s own English department at Cambridge. The campaign is still going on and forms one of the main intellectual arteries of the last half of the twentieth century. It is one of the background factors that helps account for the rise of the individual. The initial and underlying motor for this change was powered by the advent of mass society, in particularly the psychological and sociological changes foreseen and described by David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Daniel Bell. But a motor provides energy, not direction. Although Riesman and the others helped to explain the way people were changing in general, as a result of mass society, specific direction for that change still had to be provided. The rest of this chapter introduces the main figures responsible for change, beginning with the neatest example.
No one could have predicted that when he stood up to recite his poem Howl in San Francisco in October 1955, Allen Ginsberg would spark an entire alternative ‘Beat’ culture, but on a closer reading of the man himself, some signs were there. Ginsberg had studied English literature at Columbia University under Lionel Trilling, whose defence of American liberalism he had found both ‘inspiring and off-putting.’ And while he composed Howl, Ginsberg worked as a freelance market researcher – and therefore knew as well as anyone what conventional attitudes and behaviour patterns were. If he could be sure what the norm was, he knew how to be different.23
Also, Ginsberg had for some time been moving in a world very different from Trilling’s. Born in Paterson, New Jersey, the son of a poet and teacher, in the 1940s he had met both William Burroughs Jr. and Jack Kerouac in a New York apartment where they were all ‘sitting out’ World War II.24 Burroughs Jr, much older, came from a wealthy Protestant Saint Louis family and had studied literature at Harvard and medicine in Vienna before falling among thieves – literally – around Times Square in Midtown Manhattan and the bohemian community of Greenwich Village. These two aspects of Burroughs, educated snob and lowlife deviant, fascinated Ginsberg. Like the older man, Ginsberg suffered from the feeling that he was outside the main drift of American society, a feeling that was intensified when he studied under Trilling.25 Disliking the formalism of Trilling, Ginsberg was one of those who developed an alternative form of writing, the main characteristics of which were spontaneity and self-expression.26 Ginsberg’s style verged on the primitive, and was aimed at subverting what he felt was an almost official culture based on middle-class notions of propriety and success, an aspect of society now more visible than ever thanks to the commercials on the new television. Still, the evening when Howl received its first performance was hardly propitious. When Ginsberg got to his feet in that upstairs room in San Francisco, about a hundred other people present could see that he was nervous and that he had drunk
a good deal.27 He had, according to one who was there, a ‘small, intense voice, but the alcohol and the emotional intensity of the poem quickly took over, and he was soon swaying to its powerful rhythm, chanting like a Jewish cantor, sustaining his long breath length, savouring the outrageous language.’28 Among the others present was his old New York companion, Jean-Louis – Jack – Kerouac, who cheered at the end of each line, yelling ‘Go! Go!’ Soon others joined in. The chorus swelled as Ginsberg lathered himself into a trancelike state. The words Ginsberg opened with that night were to become famous, as did the occasion itself:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for ancient heavenly connection to the
starry dynamo in the machinery of night
Kenneth Rexroth, a critic and key figure in what was to become known as the San Francisco poetry renaissance, said later that Howl made Ginsberg famous ‘from bridge to bridge,’ meaning from the Triboro in New York to the Golden Gate.29 But this overlooks the real significance of Ginsberg’s poem. What mattered most was its form and the mode of delivery. Howl was primitive not just in its title and the metaphors it employed but in the fact that it referred back to ‘pre-modern oral traditions,’ in which performance counted as much as any specific meaning to the words. In doing this, Ginsberg was helping to ‘shift the meaning of culture from its civilising and rationalising connotations to the more communal notion of collective experience’.30 This was a deliberate move by Ginsberg. From the first, he actively sought out the mass media – Time, Life, and other magazines – to promote his ideas, rather than the intellectual reviews; he was a market researcher, after all. He also popularised his work through the expanded paperback book trade – the publisher of Howl was Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of City Lights, the first paperback bookstore in the United States.31 (In those days, paperbacks were still seen as an alternative, potentially radical form of information distribution.) And it was after Howl was picked up by the mass media that the Beat culture was transformed into an alternative way of life. The Beat culture would come to have three important ingredients: an alternative view of what culture was, an alternative view of experience (mediated through drugs), and its own frontier mentality, as epitomised by the road culture. Ironically, these were all intended to convey greater individualism and in that sense were slap in the middle of the American tradition. But the Beats saw themselves as radicals. The most evocative example of the road culture, and the other defining icon of the Beats, was Jack Kerouac’s 1957 book On the Road.
Kerouac, born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac in Lowell, Massachusetts, on 12 March 1922, did not have a background propitious for a writer. His parents were French-speaking immigrants from Quebec in Canada, so that English was not his first language. In 1939 he entered Columbia University, but on a football scholarship.32 It was his meeting with Ginsberg and Burroughs that made him want to be a writer, but even so he was thirty-five before his most famous book (his second) was published.33 The reception of Kerouac’s book was partly helped by the fact that, two weeks before, Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems had been the subject of a celebrated obscenity trial in San Francisco that had not yet been decided (the judge eventually concluded that the poems had ‘redeeming social importance’). So ‘Beat’ was on everyone’s lips. Kerouac explained to countless interviewers who wanted to know what Beat meant that it was partly inspired by a Times Square hustler ‘to describe a state of exalted exhaustion’ and was partly linked in Kerouac’s mind to a Catholic beatific vision.34 In the course of these interviews it was revealed that Kerouac had written the book in one frenzied three-week spell, using typing paper stuck together in a continuous ribbon so as to prevent the need to stop work in the middle of a thought. Though many critics found this technique absorbing, even charming, Truman Capote was moved to remark, ‘That isn’t writing; it’s typing.’35
Like everything else Kerouac wrote, On the Road was strongly autobiographical. He liked to say he had spent seven years on the road, researching the book, moving with a vague restlessness from town to town and drug to drug in search of experience.36 It also included the characters and experiences of his friends, especially Neal Cassady – called Dean Moriarty in the book – who wrote wild, exuberant letters to Kerouac and Ginsberg detailing his ‘sexual and chemical exploits.’37 It was this sense of rootless, chaotic, yet essentially sympathetic energy of the ‘courage-teachers’ that Kerouac sought to re-create in his book, it being his deliberate aim to do for the 1950s what the F. Scott Fitzgerald novels had done for the 1920s and the Hemingway books for the 1930s and 1940s. (He was not keen on their writing styles but was anxious to emulate their experience as observers of a key sensibility.) In a flat, deliberately casual prose, the book did all the stock things people say about radical ventures – it challenged ‘the complacency of a prosperous America’ and brought out clearly, for example, the role of pop music (bebop and jazz) for the young.38 But most of all it gave us the road book, which would lead to the road movie. ‘The road’ became the symbol of an alternative way of life, rootless but not aimless, mobile but with a sense of place, materially poor but generous and spiritually abundant, intellectually and morally adventurous rather than physically so. With Kerouac, travel became part of the new culture.39
The Beat culture’s turning away from Trilling, Commager, and the others was every bit as deliberate as Eliot’s highbrow imagery in his poetry. The highly original use of a vernacular shared by the drug, biker, and Greyhound bus subculture, the ‘strategic avoidance’ of anything complex or difficult, and the transfer into an ‘alternative’ consciousness as mediated by chemicals were in all respects assiduously subversive.40 But not all the alternatives to traditional high culture in the 1950s were as self-conscious. That certainly applied to one of the most powerful: pop music.
No matter how far back in time we can date popular music, its expression was always constrained by the technology available for its dissemination. In the days of sheet music, live bands, and dance halls, and then of radio, its impact was relatively limited. There was an elite, an in-group who decided what music was printed, which bands were invited to perform, either in the dance halls or on radio. It was only with the invention of the long-playing record, by the Columbia Record Company in 1948, and the first ‘single,’ introduced by RCA a year later, that the music world as we know it took off. After that, anyone with a gramophone in their home could play the music of their choice whenever they pleased. Listening to music was transformed. At the same time, the new generation of ‘other-directed’ youth arrived on the scene perfectly primed to take advantage of this new cultural form.
It is usually agreed that pop music emerged in 1954 or 1955 when black R & B (rhythm and blues) music broke out of its commercial ghetto (it was known before World War II as ‘race music’). Not only did black singers enjoy a success among white audiences, but many white musicians copied the black styles. Much has been written about the actual beginnings, but the one generally agreed upon has Leo Mintz, a Cleveland record store owner, approaching Alan Freed, a disc jockey at the WJW station in Cleveland, Ohio, and telling him that suddenly white teenagers were ‘eagerly buying up all the black R & B records they could get.’ Freed paid a visit to Mintz’s store and later described what he saw: ‘I heard the tenor saxophones of Red Prysock and Big Al Sears. I heard the blues-singing, piano-playing Ivory Joe Hunter. I wondered. I wondered for about a week. Then I went to the station manager and talked him into permitting me to follow my classical program with a rock ‘n’ roll party.’41 Freed always claimed that he invented the term rock ’n’ roll, though insiders say it was around in black music well before 1954, black slang for sexual intercourse.42 But whether he discovered R & B, or rock ‘n’ roll, Freed was certainly the first to push it on air; he shouted at the records, rather like Kerouac yelling ‘Go!’ at Ginsb
erg’s first performance of Howl.43
Freed’s renaming of R & B was shrewd. Repackaged, it was no longer race music, and white stations could play it. Record companies soon caught on, one response being to issue white (and usually sanitised) versions of black songs. For instance, some regard ‘Sh-Boom,’ by the Chords, as the very first rock ‘n’ roll number.44 No sooner had it hit the airwaves, however, than Mercury Records released the Crew Cuts’ sanitised ‘cover’ version, which entered the Top Ten in a week. Soon, white performers like Bill Haley and Elvis Presley were imitating black music and outdoing them in terms of commercial success.45 Films like The Blackboard Jungle and TV programs like American Bandstand further popularised the music, which above all provided a cohesive and instantly recognisable force for teenagers everywhere.46 For the sociologically minded, early pop/rock songs reflected Riesman’s theories very neatly – for example, Paul Anka’s ‘Lonely Boy’ (1959), the Videls’ ‘Mr Lonely’ (1960), Roy Orbison’s ‘Only the Lonely’ (1960), and Brenda Lee’s ‘All Alone Am I’ (1962), although loneliness, one assumes, had existed before sociology. A crucial aspect of the rock business, incidentally, and often overlooked, was the hit chart. In the new transient conformist communities that W. H. Whyte had poked fun at, statistics were important, to show people what others were doing, and to allow them to do the same.47 But the most significant thing about the advent of rock/pop was that it was yet another nail in the coffin of high culture. The words that went with the music – fashion, the ‘altered consciousness’ induced by drugs, love, and above all sex – became the anthems of the generation. The sounds of rock drowned out everything else, and the culture of young people would never be the same again.