The Beat Movement

THE BEAT MOVEMENT

A Literary Protest

The Beats were members of an artistic protest movement in the mid 1950s in which a small group of writers declared themselves disaffected nonconformists and were elevated by the media to the status of antiheroes. GO! (1952), by John Clellon Holmes, is said to be the first Beat novel because it is a lightly disguised account of the lives of key Beat figures—Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and Allen Ginsberg. In the novel, as in real life, they consider themselves to be moral pioneers, turning their backs on materialism, and the values that support it, in favor of adventuresome lives given purpose by the search for meaning. GO! is valued much more highly by literary historians, who consider it documentary evidence of the early days of the movement, than by contemporary audiences, who were largely un-interested, if sales are a gauge.

Definition

The meaning of Beat has always been vague. Kerouac, who is said to have coined the term Beat Generation, seems to have been suggesting that he and his friends were "beaten" down in frustration at the difficulty of individual expression in an era of conformity. At another time he claimed that "beat" was a derivation from "beatific," suggesting that the Beats had earned a kind of intellectual grace through the aesthetic purity of their lives. Ginsberg construed the term to refer to people looking at society from the "underside" and thus avoiding the distortion of commonly held values.

A Square's View

Life magazine, which took the lead in the print media among social commentators seeking to characterize the Beats, described them in 1959 as "sick little bums" and "hostile little females" who were unwashed, uneducated, unmotivated, unprincipled, and lived in the cold-water flats in Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan. The popular media coined the term beatniks and established the stereotype of the man, generically referred to as "daddy-o," in an untrimmed goatee, sandals, soiled sweatshirt, and blue jeans, and the woman, called a "chick," in black leotard, short skirt, black eye shadow, and pale lipstick, sitting lazily in a coffeehouse listening to jazz and muttering phrases that included the words hip, farouty and groovy. Sexual freedom and alcohol and drugs, particularly amphetamines and marijuana, were staples of Beat life, giving further impetus to establishment attacks. There was a fear that the Beat lifestyle would spread from New York City and North Beach in San Francisco to infect Middle America.

The Literary View

The literary establishment was no more receptive to the Beat movement than the popular media. Beat literature was uniformly dismissed as adolescent and uninteresting. Even Ginsberg's Howl (1956) and Kerouac's On the Road (1957), the two major works of the movement, which produced few enduring pieces of literature, were far more widely denounced than praised by critics. Even in retrospect, literary historians tend to dismiss the Beat movement as having been notable more for its social significance than for its literary contributions.

Ginsberg

The poet Ginsberg was the most credible literary figure among the Beats. Like Kerouac he was at Columbia University after World War II, but, unlike most of the other noteworthy Beats, he graduated, having studied with Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling. As a result, Ginsberg had more of a literary tradition on which to draw and his work was given more-serious consideration by critics and academics. He was angrier in his response to the conformity of the time and more flamboyant than any of the Beats except, perhaps, for Cassady.

Howl.

Ginsberg produced only one book during the 1950s, but it galvanized the Beat movement. Howl and Other Poems was dedicated to Kerouac, Cassady, William S. Burroughs, Jr., a hipster father figure to the Beats, and Lucien Carr, who killed an obsessed homosexual lover in an incident that caused both Kerouac and Ginsberg to be indicted as accessories; Carr's name was removed from the dedication page in the second printing, The book was published in October 1956 by City Lights Press, owned by San Francisco Beat poet, publisher, and bookseller Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The small volume was seized by U.S. Customs officials and the juvenile division of the San Francisco Police Department as obscene material, and a highly publicized obscenity trial in August 1957 served to focus attention on Ginsberg's messianic situation report about the deplorable state of American culture. Ten thousand copies were sold by the end of the trial and over a quarter of a million by 1980. Howl is among the bestselling volumes of American verse ever published.

Kerouac

Kerouac's second novel, On the Road, was published in September 1957, the month after the Howl obscenity trial, and it was declared by influential critics to be the definitive fictional statement of Beat tenets. The novel is about essentially the same group and some of the same incidents that provided the material for GO! The timing was better for Kerouac, though, because Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti had drawn national attention to the social dissatisfaction of some college students as they looked uneasily to the prospect of graduation without confidence in the values of the marketplace. Kerouac gave voice to their uncertainty and discontent in his depiction of the Beats, who left convention behind as they headed west from New York City to explore the frontiers of freedom.

Cassady

Kerouac chose a rambler, not a writer, as the embodiment of spontaneity, the primary virtue of the Beat Generation. Cassady was born in 1926 on the road and raised from the age of six in the slums of Denver, where he received his education on skid row. By the age of fifteen he was a prostitute and petty thief; by eighteen he was in jail. The combination of Cassady's street savvy, eclectic education, intelligence, restlessness, and sexual energy attracted Kerouac when they met at in the neighborhood around Columbia University in spring 1945. Cassady's rapid-fire, free-association speech pattern reminded Kerouac of jazz improvisation and provided a model for his fictional technique. With On the Road Kerouac made Cassady into a symbol of Beat virtue, a romantic rogue who blazed his own trail without regard for social precept, civil ordinance, or criminal statute.

Fading Voices

By the end of the 1950s the Beats had made their literary and social statement. Lesser voices continued to promote the spirit of the movement, but they were redundant. Ginsberg and Kerouac had become interested in Eastern religions, which Kerouac wrote about in The Dharma Bums (1958) and subsequent novels, though it was a subject that failed to attract many Beat disciples. Kerouac gradually faded from the literary scene; Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti moved on energetically to other interests and remained major figures in the avantgarde of the 1960s and 1970s; Cassady became a sort of mascot of the hippie movement of the 1960s and 1970s, serving most notably as driver of the bus "Further" for Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters.

Sources:

Ann Charters, "Jack Kerouac," Dictionary of Literary Biography: Documentary Series, vol. 3 (Detroit: Gale, 1983), pp. 71-122;

Charters, ed. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 16: The Beats (Detroit: Gale, 1983);

Bruce Cook, The Beat Generation (New York: Scribners, 1971);

Paul O'Neil, "The Only Rebellion Around," Life (30 November 1959): 114-130;

"Squaresville U.S.A. vs. Beatsville," Life (21 September 1959).