This really is the uncensored and complete story. The book is full of interesting stories and little moments which give a very personal understanding of the members of the "beat generation." One story that in particular caught my interest is the account of Lucien Carr biting off glass from his beer bottle; bleeding badly he challenges the others to do the same, and Burroughs enters the room with a try of razor blades and light bulbs as "hor d'ouevres."
The book's theme is that the beat movement should be seen as an extensive social group with Allen Ginsberg at the center bringing and keeping everybody together. Whether this is totally accurate (this is the first history of the movement I've read) isn't really important. The thesis gives a nice structure to the work and is credible enough. What defines the Beat Generation is a general attitude of life; adults coming of age in the World War Two and post-war years feeling a lack of authenticity and spirituality in American society, who welcomed and experimented with alternative and low life ways of living as personal inspiration. The beats were as intellectual as they were sensual, an aspect overlooked by contemporaries be they reactionaries or hippie baby boomers.
As for the name the beat generation, it was coined by Jack Kerouac who first heard it from small time thief Herbert Huncke describing the beaten down feeling of the post war conformist culture as well as the spontaneous feeling of jazz music which inspired their work. John Clellon Holmes, whose 1953 book Go is the first beat novel, got to describe the generation to readers in the New York Times and brought the term to public consciousness. And as for the name of this book, it's from a footnote in Howl: "The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!"
The beginning of the beat generation was a chance encounter between college students Allen Ginsberg, a New Jersey native, and Jack Kerouac, from Lowell Massachusetts, at Columbia university during World War II when Allen heard music coming out of Jack's room at the residence halls and decided to visit him. Ginsberg and Kerouac, who was there on a football scholarship, got to know another classmate Lucien Carr and through him David Kammerer, an older homosexual admirer, and through Kammerer William Burroughs, heir to inventor of an adding machine, became part of the group. Burroughs, Carr, and Kammerer's all previously lived in St. Louis Missouri; Kammerer followed Carr to New York and so did Burroughs. Through yet another Columbia student, Hal Chase, Ginsberg and Kerouac got to know Neal Cassady with whom they would make their famous cross country travels. By hanging out with these individuals, the inhibited Allen and Jack got inspiration for their work as well as the ability to transgress social boundaries. This is when the lore of the generation begins, with a story of murder figuring in at the beginning. Kammerer's sexual advances on Carr who was straight weren't welcome and when David tried to follow Lucien on a trip overseas, Lucien stabbed David and threw his body into the water. Kerouac and Burroughs would collaborate on a book about the event, And The Hippos Were Boiled in Their Pots which was published only recently, named after a radio report they heard about a zoo fire. Carr got off pretty easily as back then murdering a homosexual wasn't much of an offense, so he literally got away with murder.
Allen and Burroughs got involved with criminals and criminality through Herbert Huncke, the king of 42nd st, which furthers the story. Herbert was living with Allen and started stashing stolen items there. In 1949 Ginsberg was caught in a police chase in a car with stolen goods and escaped after the car crashed, but was incriminated by the writings left behind. He escaped hard time by pleading insanity and become institutionalized. While institutionalized Allen met Carl Solomon who introduced surrealism to him. Solomon himself was institutionalized for his erratic behavior which was at least partly aesthetic, like throwing potato salad at a lecturer on Dadaism. Solomon actually demanded a lobotomy be performed on him. Allen was so influenced by Carl that he dedicated his famous poem Howl to the man.
Burroughs sold morphine syringes to Herbert, who thought Bill was FBI due to his attire, an account retold in Burroughs' first novel Junkie. Bill would move to Texas with his common law wife Joan Robinson to try his hand at farming hemp, and then sell it as marijuana.
While staying in Mexico in the early fifties Burroughs killed his wife Joan. While drinking Joan put a glass on top of her head and dared Bill to shoot it off, like the legend of William Tell. Burroughs was usually a good shot, but he missed and killed Joan. Burroughs left Mexico, was tried in absentia, and for nearly two decades didn't live in the US for any protracted period of time; not coming back permanently until 1974. By then the US changed and was becoming more open to alternative lifestyles, but I suspect it really was Joan's death. He did say that Joan's death made him become a writer. Much of Naked Lunch is inspired by his travels in South America and his time in Tangiers.
The rest of the beat story is mostly geographical. Living and typewriting in Mexico City, Kerouac making his famous travels with Neal Cassady to the west coast, meeting European intellectuals like Duchamp and Celine in Paris at the "beat hotel", Burroughs spending two decades living outside the United States in Europe and Tangier Morocco, and very significantly setting up a west coast cultural movement in San Francisco, making ties to the burgeoning counter culture. Ginsberg moved to San Francisco after failing to rekindle a romance with Cassady in California, his wife didn't approve of it. It was there that Allen gave an important public reading of Howl at the Six Gallery 1955 which was met with great enthusiasm.
Notoriety of their writing built up slowly over the 1950s. In San Francisco the city lights bookstore run by Lawrence Ferlinghetti published their work in pocket editions and contact was made between the west coast counterculture there with the beats who originated in New York City, along with the so-called subterraneans of Greenwich Village, where a folk music movement would latter blossom. Kerouac's On the Road got a positive review in the New York Times when it finally came out and he was dubbed the voice of a generation. The two high profile censorship court cases of Howl and Naked Lunch also boosted their public profile. It was in San Francisco and the city light bookstore that Ginsberg poem ran into legal trouble, peddling profanity. The judge sided with Ginsberg and the ACLU and accepted the artistic merits of the work. The case also led to an end of censorship of other controversial works Tropic of Cancer and Lady Chatterley's Lover. Naked Lunch was banned in Boston in 1962 which was reversed by the state Supreme Court in 1966. After this decision outright censorship, like the destruction of Wilhelm Reich's books, would become a thing of the past.
Most people who know of the beats know only of the big three: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S Burroughs and their well known respective works Howl, On the Road, and Naked Lunch. But there were many others important to the movement and who influenced or appeared in their work. Most prominently Neal Cassady who appears as Dean Moriarty in On the Road, and who inspired the spontaneous free writing style used in the book, in a letter sent to Jack describing his sexual conquests. Other important figures besides those I've mentioned were Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of the few African Americans Leroi Jones, Diana Di Prima, Ginsberg's lifetime partner later in life Peter Orlovsky, Gary Snider etc. The largely white and male status of the generation is discussed by Morgan in a critical though contextual light. The generation was throughly progressive in its acceptance and practice for many of homosexuality. Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kammerer were homosexual and Cassady slept with men from time to time. Their writings are the first and most honest portrayals of homosexuality in American literature, and so the pc crowd can get over some of their sins.
It is still useful to view the history of the beat generation through the three personalities of Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs. Ginsberg was the communicator and movement builder of the group, making important relationships with the likes of Bob Dylan. Ginsberg came up in the age not only of repression of homosexuality, but active efforts to reform non hetero behavior through the medical establishment. He actually convinced himself that his homosexuality was a sign of mental insanity, which had taken over his mother. Ginsberg went through psychotherapy which actually convinced him to date women and be straight. Incidentally his mother went through psychiatric surgery, which Ginsberg agreed to with great regret, which turned her into a vegetable. Ginsberg of the three was shy and inhibited, as was Jack, but also it seems the most congenial and ecumenical. His curiosity, desire to experiment, and just to be with people like himself helped to link the people in the book together. Also as mentioned once in the book Allen sort of took on the persona of his Jewish mother, protective and understanding.
Jack Kerouac is a tragic case. Shy and inhibited like Ginsberg, he was also fairly conservative. Though the heterosexual of the trio, he was married thrice and avoided child payments for the rest of his life, denying paternity. Of the three he is the intellectual spokesman of the generation, who articulated its principles and aimed the most to be a traditional writer. He had a knack of coming up with titles and phrases, "he took life in the raw" is how he describes Dean Moriarty in On the Road. Kerouac really just wanted to be a respected American writer like Thomas Wolfe. Though now recognized as one of the great American novelists by many, in his lifetime he and his writings were the subject of criticism and ridicule. He didn't like the counterculture and distanced himself from the outside world. An important reason for this was his strong attachment to his mother Gabrielle; if Jack never let go of the apron strings he would never get to be his own man. As she aged Jack spent more time and moved in with her, probably something to do with his French Canadian heritage. What did Jack in was his drinking problem, which led to his death and unlikable public persona. He made a serious attempt to kick his habit, recounted in one of his last books Big Sur in the Sierras, but wasn't successful. Kerouac died before reaching 50, in 1969, to be outlived by Ginsberg and Burroughs who lived to the 1990s. Recently, as in twenty first century, there has been "new" material from and about Kerouac such as the 2007 publication of the original taped together scroll manuscript of On the Road, the 2008 publication of the Burroughs collaboration And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Pots mentioned earlier, as well as the 2012 movie adaptation of On the Road directed by Walter Salles, which is okay (don't watch before reading the book). So he lives on.
Burroughs is portrayed as aloof and intellectually eccentric, despite having a deadpan demeanor and dressing in a g-man suit. The oldest of the group he was also the most revolutionary artistically. He along with Brion Gysin pioneered the cut up method: take a page and cut it down the middle and place the halves with halves of other pages to make something completely. This method can open up new ways of reading texts and he claimed see into the future. Much of Burroughs' work enters the realms of fantasy, science fiction, and even horror. There is a dark humor to his writing and along with the anti realism would go on to influence postmodern literature. Burroughs is the one who's influence extends beyond the 1960s to the punk/alternative subcultures, being an inspiration to Ian Curtis of Joy Division and even collaborating with Kurt Cobain before Nirvana went big. Bill even appears in the music video Just One Fix by industrial band Ministry. Director David Cronenberg was heavily influenced by Burroughs with his postmodern horror vision, and even directed a film adaptation of Naked Lunch in 1991 which is also biographical. Burroughs really outlived the beat generation and the 60s counterculture which he didn't like and anticipated the new cultural and youth movements of the late 20th century.
If Ginsberg is the Jewish mother, Kerouac is the wayward son and Burroughs is the perverted uncle. In terms of their political views Ginsberg was the liberal activist most sympathetic to socialism, Kerouac was conservative, and Burroughs a libertarian maybe leaning to the right.
Of great interest is the connection between the beats and the 60s counterculture. Cassady was the driver of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' acid trip, recounted in the book The Electric Cool Aid Acid Test. Huncke and Burroughs participated in the 1948 Dr. Alfred Kinsey sexual study of the American male which presaged the sexual revolution. Allen partook along with Kesey in the mk-ultra program, the CIA program which tested LSD. Timothy Leary also associated with the beats but his drug advocacy was not as intellectual as theirs was. Burroughs traveled South America looking for powerful hallucinogenic drugs to inspire his writing.
The beats were the beginning of the American counter culture all the way back in the 1940s, chiefly in Greenwich Village and San Francisco where later movements grew out of. Kerouac himself claimed that the actual movement ended by the early 50s, whereas in the popular mind beatniks went all the way up to the 1960s, reading poetry to jazz music and wearing all black turtlenecks and sun glasses, playing bongos and smoking cigarettes. When you consider the generation as a social group around Allen Ginsberg, then the generation extends from the 1940s to the 1970s, as this book recounts.
The beats hold a special place in history. They exist as an example unto only themselves and those who care to listen. They were against the controlling conformist world they came into and were misunderstood by the later counterculture which didn't care for the intellectual and reflective side. I think they exemplified what Americans should be, proud individualists who dare to explore new things, no matter how seemingly strange or dangerous. Their goal was to expand human consciousness into both the lewd and obscene as well as the intellectual and spiritual. The entire capability of human experience, which most movements and cultures throughout history seek to limit to fulfill their agenda. It reminds me of what John Stuart Mill said in response to the simple utilitarian criteria of all pleasures being equal: "it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied." While typing away manuscripts their raucous exploits could be given the careful treatment of conscious reflection to cull something greater than the sum of disparate events, and communicate this to willing readers. If you want to understand the members of the beat generation, you have to read and think as well as "be" and "feel". I don't expect you to understand.
I got interested in the beats back in High School. My interest was consummated when I first read On the Road the summer of my senior year. Around the same time I was fascinated with the book and movie Into the Wild which is about Christopher McCandless' own cross country journey and rejection of the life expected of him. Towards the end of high school I came across a copy of Naked Lunch in a name-your-price bookstore downtown which sold old playboys with a nobody under 18 label. I later befriended a neighbor who I didn't know existed not far from my street who had a little collection of beatnik literature, which is where I read Howl while house sitting. My interest in Kurt Cobain and the music along with the reading Jon Savage's history of the Sex Pistols England's Dreaming in middle school was what convinced me that the ethos of the American counter culture was how I should model my own life. Nothing has pleased me like making connections between the individuals who have have influenced and interested me. Jim Morrison also read On the Road at a formative age. It's the people who expressed themselves in the way they conducted their lives which becomes handed down to posterity who make life something to be treasured. For me it begins historically with beats, like when John Lennon said that before Elvis there was nothing.
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