by Simon Warner
By the end of the 1950s, the leading triumvirate of Beat writers had shared their key works with the world. Yet the decade to follow would see them follow highly individual and, in some ways, conflicting tracks. Ginsberg, with Orlovsky, would spend the early 1960s travelling to countries and cultures quite different from their US experience, including territories that had been marked out of bounds to Americans – Cuba, the USSR and Eastern Europe – as the Cold War intensified. But the poet also visited South America and India in an odyssey that balanced spiritual questing with his more politically driven strivings. From the mid-1960s, however, he would bring his blend of Buddhist allegiance and commitment to social change to the fore, linking with the drug radicals such as Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey and the anti-Vietnam movement, to become one of the most prominent activists on the frontline of the American counterculture. Having published a tribute to his late mother in ‘Kaddish’ in 1961, Ginsberg would develop a long series of what he called ‘auto-poesy’ from 1965, sketches and phrases recorded on tape when he toured the US. Burroughs would leave Paris and head for London, one of the vibrant centres of the new cultural scene. But if his writing continued apace – book titles like The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket that Exploded (1962) and Nova Express (1964) would appear during this period – and his interests in film as a medium grew, he took little direct interest in the cultural revolution, broadly rejecting the pacific messages and spiritual content of the hippy insurgence and maintaining a low profile. Kerouac would also reject the counterculture’s thrust, attacking its un-American values and regarding the introduction of a psychedelic drug like LSD to the US as a Communist plot to destabilise the nation’s youth. He found the anti-war movement equally distasteful and criticised it in print and on television. He published fiction, too – Big Sur (1962), Desolation Angels (1965) and The Vanity of Duluoz (1968), for instance – but the flare of fame that had engulfed him at the end of the 1950s left him with deep psychological wounds. Turning increasingly to drink, he became a hermit-like figure, tied to his mother’s hearth and ragingly conservative in his views, even upsetting Ginsberg with his anti-Semitic remarks. In 1969, aged 47, the ravages of drink led to organ failure and his death was recorded in St. Petersburg, Florida on 21 October.
Ginsberg and Burroughs would last much longer. By the early 1970s both were living in New York City again. Ginsberg remained a social activist, arguing fervently for causes that pursued peace and campaigns that supported sexual rights for gay men and women. Once the hippy flower had faded, Burroughs’ more dystopian visions, now expressed more and more in a science fiction mode, chimed with the punk and new wave insurrection in popular music and the wider arts, and he was seen as a guiding light to many working in those areas. In 1974, Ginsberg would establish the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, attached to the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where he, Burroughs and Corso58 would all teach. Ginsberg and Burroughs would continue to write, to publish and to read, until their deaths within months of each other in 1997 – Ginsberg, aged 70, in New York on 5 April and Burroughs, aged 83, by now in Lawrence, Kansas on 2 August. By then, the Beat impulse had been throbbing for more than half a century and a major exhibition mounted in 1995–6, a couple of years before their passing, called Beat Culture and the New America 1950–1965, staged at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, then in Minneapolis and San Francisco, sent the clear message that this radical force in literature and the broader arts, even if it had never quite been incorporated into the cultural establishment, had left a deep and enduring impact on the US and global landscape, a thorn in the side of mainstream thinking and the complacencies of convention and a powerful thread in the changing of the nation’s consciousness. There remain, still, debates about who or what the Beat Generation precisely was – which individuals require inclusion, who may be merely at the fringes of the core – but Bill Morgan has some useful reflections, citing the central importance of Ginsberg to our understandings and perception of this literary community. He explains: ‘The history of the Beat Generation is really the story of [Ginsberg’s] desire to gather a circle of friends around him, people he loved and could love him. What united these people most was not only a love of literature but also Ginsberg’s supportive character, a trait that often verged on obsession. It was their friendship that they shared and not any one common literary style, philosophy or social theory.’59
What though has been the appeal of this gathering of writers to the rock musicians who have followed in their wake? It is, quite possibly, the over-arching ideas of the Beats, or maybe an idealised view of what they were and what they did, as much as the high quantity of actual literary work they produced, that have been most pervasive in shaping rock consciousness. Just as the Beats valorised jazz and its soloists in a manner that was frequently over-idealised, perhaps the rock generation have repeated that feat with the Beats, setting their artistic ancestors on a pedestal in a fawning, less than critical, manner. After all, for all their fascinating lives, their substantial legacy in words, the Beats were flawed individuals: some may have sought the status of saints or gurus or guides, at least, with admirable persistence, as Kerouac chased a beatification of sorts, Ginsberg tracked nirvana and Burroughs aimed his vitriolic attack on the power of authorities of all kinds. Yet their biographies are so often haunted by self-doubt, desperation, despair, fear of failure, even tragedy, as much as success, acclaim and self-actualisation. Their life narratives may read like a raging stream of thrills and excitement, factuality moulded into barely-disguised fiction. But, along the way, their picaresque tales were scored by the thorns of death, murder and manslaughter, addiction, obsession and frustration, terms in jail and spells in the asylum, lurking criminality often at the fringes and obscenity battles in the courts, unfulfilled sexualities and unhappy relationships with partners, and even large-scale fallings-out between many of the main players in this extended drama. Kerouac and Burroughs were early accessories to a gay murder by Lucien Carr; Ginsberg was incarcerated in a mental hospital after his links to a gang of thieves were exposed; Cassady was a regular prisoner and Corso had been locked up, too. Burroughs shot his common-law wife. Both he and Ginsberg had desired Cassady as a sexual ideal, but he spent a lifetime chasing women at the ultimate expense of his marriage to Carolyn. Kerouac rejected his only daughter for many years; Burroughs saw his own son die of drink-linked causes; Ginsberg’s mother’s mental health and early death had a powerful impact on his maturing worldview. Ginsberg and Burroughs faced the courts who wanted to ban their work – a mixed blessing when judicial attacks brought global publicity but also large personal stresses on them as artists. And none of this considers the dubious sexual pursuits of boy lovers by Burroughs nor the political opinions of Kerouac who, later in life, backed the war in Vietnam, adopted staunchly Republican positions and even anti-Jewish ones, a barbed riposte maybe to Ginsberg’s leftist philosophies and enthusiastic participation in the hippy counterculture, as alcohol became his great crutch and creeping destroyer.
But what did this literary group convey which stirred the imagination of later performing and composing creatives? As we have suggested, the lure of travel, the notion of the open road, the sense of movement, moving on and heading for the next horizon, that permeates most forcefully the works of Kerouac, has provided popular music, and most often its rock fraternity, with an ethos, a model, to follow. Turner has dubbed Kerouac ‘the James Dean of the typewriter’60 while Miles refers to him as ‘a cultural icon along with the young Marlon Brando, the young Elvis and James Dean’.61 Central themes in many of his key works – from On the Road (1957) to The Dharma Bums (1958), Lonesome Traveller (1960) to Desolation Angels (1965) – are transience, impermanence and the prospect of fresh excitements. In Neal Cassady, Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty in On the Road and Cody Pomeray in Visions of Cody (1973) and several others, there seems to be a living embodiment of Kerouac’s vision: in Cassady’s frenetic speech and impulsive style, the existential hero,
avaricious in his sexual desire, is personified, caring only for gratuitous pleasure, the needs of now and, almost immediately afterwards, the forthcoming adventure. As Kerouac most famously states in On the Road: ‘[T]he only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centrelight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”’62 In Cassady, or at least in Moriarty, he appears to have found that explosive concoction.
We may argue that the theme of the road – a spine that dominates the Kerouac/ Cassady mythology or that of their fictional alter egos Sal Paradise and Moriarty – is powerfully sustained in the machismo legend that surrounds rock as a live medium: the tour, the travels from town to town, the brief and intense salvation of the stage and the post-gig availability perhaps of new and willing women, ravaged fleetingly, and then forgotten in a haze of adrenalin, alcohol and pills. No one would suggest that the code of the musician on the highway was created by Kerouac’s stories alone but his central novel, On the Road, and much of his other writings intensified the hope, the dream, that the chance to move, the urge to go, would bring multiple experiences and many fresh, sensory opportunities. As Carr et al. comment: ‘Kerouac’s spiritual desperation crash-coursed him through Zen, Roman Catholicism, mysticism and hip. Drugs, sex and jazz fuelled the hot rod go-go-go prose style.’63
In Burroughs, rock perceives the terror and the thrill of narcotic experiment, the possibilities and the pitfalls. The creator of The Naked Lunch (1959) and The Soft Machine (1961) seems to prompt the extraordinary – and quite conceivably misleading – presumption that the drug user and abuser can manage, and therefore survive, his excesses. In that sense, he provides an example of survivor who has tasted most poisons, never apparently cowered from the challenge of chemical or organic disorientation and, by living to a grand age, virtually proved that indulgence and early death are not necessarily indivisible bedfellows. As Leland opines, in a view that stretches across the undercurrents of several ages and numerous countercultures and frames the dark appeal of this form of transgression, neatly if bleakly: ‘Though most people take drugs for pleasure, hip clings more to the downside: the furtiveness of copping, the risk of harm, the compulsions of the addict.’64 Bono comments that Burroughs ‘was a great, walking bad example of doing junk and he lived to be 84’.65 Yet this novelist is much more than a mere receptacle for artificial stimulation who endured a life-long toxic storm: he is also a fervent anti-authoritarian, an enemy of systems of control – whether the state, the law or the church – and is thus a committed, if hardly conventional, libertarian. His interest in radical art and experiment is also particularly notable and his literary innovations, from the cut-up to the fold-in, mark him as one of the true ground-breakers in late twentieth-century literature and the wider arts.
In 1962, fellow writer Norman Mailer said: ‘Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.’66 Caveney claims that ‘no writer has proved as eclectic as Burroughs in his influence on pop, leaving his mark on a whole range of movements from punk to techno, hip hop to grunge’,67
while Miles comments: ‘[H]is ideas, images and language have reached the general population by non-literary means: through films, videos, records and tapes or through artworks by the many artists who have been influenced by his images and ideas.’68
Ginsberg may be regarded as the radical politico, as interested in broader social causes as his own personal ambition, but also as a sexual pioneer, libertine and even exhibitionist. Said Mikal Gilmore in his 1997 obituary: ‘Allen Ginsberg not only made history – by writing poems that jarred America’s consciousness and by insuring that the 1950s Beat movement would be remembered as a considerable force – but he also lived through and embodied some of the most remarkable cultural mutations of the last half-century.’69 He may have been a campaigning homosexual – his signature poem ‘Howl’ (1956) was, in part, a premature gay cri de coeur – but, in his own declamatory way, in his bold public persona, he helped to open up a door to the wider sexual revolution of the 1960s – even that one eventually enjoyed by the heterosexual population, too – by raising questions about issues of libido and repression and liberty in the decade before, when it was not just a rebellious gesture to explore such topics, but actually an act of inherent danger to the individual, in an era when the US state was determined to homogenise the thinking of its populace and excise the dangers of leftist insurgence. We might also point to his ‘auto-poesy’, which emerged after 1965, like those examples in The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965–1971 (1973), many of which are travelogues akin, in some ways, to Kerouac’s, records of energetic odysseys, but fragmentary, picaresque and kaleidoscopic. Adds Gilmore: ‘As much as Presley, as much as the Beatles, Bob Dylan or the Sex Pistols, Allen Ginsberg helped set loose something wonderful, risky and unyielding in the psyche and dreams of our times. Perhaps only Martin Luther King Jr.’s brave and costly quest had a more genuinely liberating impact upon the realities of modern history, upon the freeing up of people and voices that much of established society wanted kept at the margins.’70 This did not please all and certainly not even those in his closest circle. Kerouac, he said, was ‘mad at me for working in relation to the political scene’ because he thought that ‘was a betrayal or a diversion or a complete divagation from what he had in mind and what I had in mind’ which was ‘the attempt to open up the heart’.71 Ginsberg’s determined course damaged the friendship but did not deflect him from the wider project on which he had embarked. For other would-be movers and shakers, the poet had sparked intense dreams of possible transformation beyond the literary sphere: ‘Howl’ would trigger hope and intent in the hearts and heads of a wave of younger artists. Diane di Prima felt that Ginsberg and ‘Howl’ ‘could only be the vanguard of a much larger thing. All the people who, like me, had hidden and skulked, writing down what they knew for a small handful of friends…all these would now step forward and say their piece’.72 Future Fug Ed Sanders spent 50¢ on Ginsberg’s book, and purchased two issues of Evergreen Review. ‘I absorbed all that information and, you know, that was it. My life changed overnight.’73 His collaborator-in-waiting, Tuli Kupferberg, was similarly awakened by the poem’s astringent manifesto. ‘It was political and it was personal and it seemed to free the forms up. It was certainly what was needed at the time. It really came as a great cleansing shower, something that opened up everything again.’74
Yet there are various other Beat threads, too, that would feed into the history that follows – from the Buddhist affiliations of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Gary Snyder; interests in the ecology exemplified by Snyder and Michael McClure; the DIY enterprise of publishers of books and journals, characterised most prominently by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights, but also in the many poetry magazines produced by Leroi Jones, Hettie Jones, Diane di Prima and others, representing entrepreneurial action outside the commercial mainstream; and the black radicalism of Leroi Jones, assuming the name Amiri Baraka in 1965, and essentially abandoning his Beat associations for the African-American struggle.
But if we are painting a portrait of the essence of Beat and its sustaining injection to the succeeding rock culture, it is hard not to home in on factors other than the literary or the political or the spiritual. For it is surely in its taboo-breaking, its rule bending and its risk-taking, that Beat provides a model of engagement to so many of rock ’n’ roll’s protagonists. As Leland comments:
One indisputable fact about the Beats is that they were a divisive force, and however benign or inoffensive the language they wrapped around themselves, the truth – ‘Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb’75 – was more exciting, more threatening and more commercially viable. Through their writings, often about themselves, they promulgated the hip promise that society’
s margins held more of its life than the mainstream. They were the circus that some children ran away to join, others wished they had the nerve, and even more parents feared lest their children run next. Dislodging themselves from the complacency of the Eisenhower era, the Beats indulged in the horror, sadism, sexuality or unbridled irresponsibility that lay just outside the average Joe’s grasp.76
Turner has already emphasised the fact that whatever rock’s principal cast members played out in the decades from the 1960s onwards, the Beats had already experienced. So it is perhaps that draw of transgression that holds the most magnetic pull. The social forces that had held the West in a particular grip for several hundred years – those controlling monoliths of church and state, the power of the law and the persuasive threat of social ostracism generated by family or peers or community – were challenged in a particularly direct fashion during those post-Second World War years and the Beats were a concentrated, and articulate, embodiment of that challenge. Society’s failings, its horrifically self-destructive tendencies, its ethnic intolerances, had all been exposed by the terrors of global conflict, by the horrifying emblems of industrial-scale genocide and the utter devastation of great cities obliterated by unfettered application of irresistible technologies on unarmed civilians. The Beats were keen to take on these injustices but they also believed that in the liberation of self – through life and art – that there were other ways to test the frayed fabric of a civilisation in crisis. Says Bill Morgan: