Once upon a time there existed a beautiful country called the United States of America. It aspired to be a place of peace, prosperity, and universal happiness. At some time short of the middle of the 20th. Century, the rest of the world fell into a great war. The United States sent its soldiers to Europe and to Asia, and its soldiers defeated the forces of evil and ended the great war.
The soldiers came home and established the kingdom of universal prosperity and happiness that had always been the American dream: every man held a job, while every woman stayed home, kept house and raised 2.6 children (except for the spinster women who worked as secretaries). The more prosperous men wore suits and ties to work, and earned their money by selling, advertising, and telling other men what to do. The less educated men worked in mills and factories, still earned good incomes, and came home exhausted but happy at the end of the day. All of the men, women and children spent their evenings in front of a new invention called the television set, where paid actors made them laugh and they were encouraged to buy various brands of cigarettes and breakfast cereal.
Everyone owned a home. Working men and their families owned small cottages. The wealthy owned new "ranch-style" homes with flat, treeless lawns. There were even some older neighborhoods with tall houses and large trees in the yard. Life kept getting better: Americans knew this because each time the family traded its old car for a new one (every two or three years) the new one was longer, sleeker, and had a bigger engine.
Everyone was happy -- well, everyone except a few misfits who mysteriously were not satisfied with TV sets, TV dinners, and blue automobiles in the one-car garage.
According to the myths, the Beats were the ones who were not happy. In reality, the America of happy families, each with 2.6 children, was an artificial entity created by the advertising media and that pervasive new medium the TV show. The "blue automobiles" is an image offered by one of the unsatisfied, Allen Ginsberg ("A Supermarket in California"). The America of the 1950's included, as it always had, a mixture of the successful and the unsuccessful, the malicious and the benevolent, the rich and the poor, the benevolent and the avaricious. The fear of Communism and the Soviet Union prompted the government to pour money into weapons research and prompted such fits of domestic madness as the "Red Scare." The Civil Rights Movement, which we associate with the 1960's, actually dates from the immediate post-World War II period: Lunch counter sit-ins date from 1948;. Brown vs. Board of Education, which explicitly repudiated the legality of the "separate but equal" doctrine, was handed down in 1954, the middle of these supposedly "sedate" 50's; the first actual attempts to desegregate Southern public schools date from 1956. That note should remind us of the unequal, unfair, and prejudice-ridden America that then existed, as well as the genuine progress toward a more just society that was taking place.
As for the Beat perspective: was the individual picture offered as the mythic '50's any more real than the broader social picture? Is the secret of life possessing the latest model of blue automobile or is it envisioning William Blake, himself, reciting "Ah! Sun-flower"? Is the secret of life working 40 hours a week to pay for the house in the suburbs and the membership in the country club, or is the secret of life living, feeling, and appreciating the moment? Is the secret of life building more of those identical blue automobiles or creating something that you hope is "deep" and rich and wonderful? Is the secret of life watching that curious gray tube with one's spouse and 2.6 children, or is it in giving expression to some personal emotional need, some need society does not recognize as real, valid, or even sane?
That, I might suggest, is the sense of the Beat movement. It is an advocacy of the self in the face of a culture of conformity; it is an assertion of a reality that is far different than that to be offered by the gray TV screen that America looked to for self-definition in the 50's. I might suggest the Beats rebelled against an American self-image that was, intrinsically, deeply flawed, but also an image that left no room for them, their values, or their very existence.
The piece of writing that stands as the holy writ of the Beat Generation is Jack Kerouac's novel, On the Road. The novel features a group of undirected and misdirected young men and centers on Dean Moriarty, a drifting former juvenile delinquent given to car theft and petty crime -- a sexually attractive young man who, in the eyes of the narrator, has a deep, instinctive understanding of life and its meaning (and the secret of life is antithetical to that found in suburban houses, on TV sets, or in corporate offices).
Kerouac had a fascination with jazz music, and particularly with the improvisation that is a strong element of a good jazz performance. He attempted to fashion his writing so that it appeared headlong, improvisational, and written in answer to the spirit and impulse of the moment. To foster his attempts at what we might term "writing with the flow," he glued pages of typewriter paper end to end, effectively inventing continuous-feed paper. As we might expect with any skilled writer, Kerouac attained his "headlong" effects through serious preparation, concentrated execution, and (doubtless) some editor's assistant checking the spelling. Just as jazz improvisation takes practice, practice, and mastery, writing "in the flow" requires mastery of technique, style, and organizational intentions. (Thus, I suggest bluntly, the critic who dismisses Kerouac's writing as 'sloppy,' is something of a fool.)
I do not find Kerouac's writing quite on a par with most of the material we are reading. It does not lend itself to deep reading, and seems a bit more centered on his Romantic* fixation with Neal Cassady (see below) than what I might term deeper themes. He did catch a sense of the American culture and, notably, he produced a novel that reflected and resonated with the dissatisfaction of a large number of young Americans. The novel was tremendously influential and in some senses quite perceptive. In terms of social influence, On the Road stands as a major work.
_____ *Note the capital 'R.' While romantic elements may also be discerned in Kerouac's fixation on Cassady, Romantic elements, the ones linked to the entire "road" mythos, appear the thematically essential ones..
The second signature book of the Beat Generation is a book of poetry -- the best-selling book of poetry in the United States at that time, Allen Ginsberg's Howl.
Ginsberg attended Columbia University, in New York City, in the 1940's, and fell into the Beat scene in about 1943. In 1948 his apartment was raided by police -- he was sharing his apartment with Herbert Huncke, a junkie friend of fellow writer William Burroughs; Hunckle was keeping drugs and stolen goods in the apartment. (Details of the raid exist in a number of irreconcilable versions; I've no idea which of the variants is closest to historical accuracy.) To avoid prosecution Ginsberg agreed to psychological counseling. He spent time in a psychiatric facility, where the treatment included "curing" his sexual predispositions -- Ginsberg was gay. After release Ginsberg attempted to live a straight life. He succeeded for about three painful years, then abandoned the attempt.
Ginsberg moved to the west coast in 1954; some accounts suggest he was pursuing Neal Cassady (see below) on whom he had evidently developed a "crush"; we might note that he was drawn to the West Coast intellectual scene, rather than focusing on personal questions. One personal item worth mentioning -- in 1954 he met poet Peter Orlovsky; the two maintained a stable, life-long relationship and (perhaps to tweak his nose at "the Establishment") Ginsberg listed Orlovsky as his spouse in his Who's Who entry.
In San Francisco, Ginsberg visited poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore, where Ferlinghetti regularly sponsored public readings. Ginsberg arranged to read Howl; Ferlinghetti was impressed, so impressed that he published the long poem as a book.
U.S. government agents then proceeded to make a major celebrity of Ginsberg by declaring the book "obscene" and prosecuting Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti. At the ensuing trial, figures from throughout the American literary establishment testified in defense of the book. The charges came to naught. The publicity propelled Howl onto best seller lists.
The free-spirited Ginsberg courted controversy on through his life: he lived as an openly gay man at a time when it was quite dangerous; he was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War; as a touring artist, he was kicked out of Communist Cuba for agitating for gay rights there; he was kicked out of Czechoslovakia for agitating against Communism; he simultaneously earned a place on Richard Nixon's infamous Enemies List and the Soviet Union's persona non grata list.
In this class we will be examining, not his Howl of outrage, but a pair of delightfully funny and emotionally rich short pieces, "A Supermarket in California" and "Sunflower Sutra."
William Burroughs -- novelist; wrote The Naked Lunch and Junkie.
Neal Cassady -- though a womanizing heterosexual, Cassady was an object of romantic interest to the openly gay Ginsberg and romantic fixation to the ostensibly heterosexual Kerouac; Cassady also figures as a friend of Ken Kesey (whose two early novels, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion, showed considerable promise, but who is more remembered for his LSD experiments than for his writing) and the driver of the Magic Bus Furthur in Kesey's drug-addled cross-country odyssey, the trip recounted in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; Cassady's reputation rests on his place as a participant and a literary inspiration rather than for any writing he produced.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti -- poet whose original, highly sophisticated style was not "Beat" and whose current work (yes, he is still alive) is social-protest in style and content; Ferlinghetti is famous as the owner of City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco and its small press publishing house as well as for his poetry; that City Lights connection ties Ferlinghetti forever to the "Beat Generation." A quick biographical sketch of Ferlinghetti may be found at http://www.rooknet.com/beatpage/writers/ferlinghetti.html
Other Beat biographical sketches, of similar quality, may be found at the site: http://www.rooknet.com/beatpage/index.html . (Note: an abundance of online material, of varying quality, should be quite readily available on the various Beat figures; "seek and ye shall find"; some shards of what you find may prove accurate.)
Gary Snyder -- poet; see your anthology.
Michael McClure -- poet; see your anthology.
Amiri Baraka -- born LeRoi Jones; playwright, poet, novelist, and essayist; writer on African-American life.
Richard Brautigan -- poet and novelist; his Trout Fishing in America does not, if I recall correctly, contain a single word about fishing.
Joel Oppenheimer -- really one of the Black Mountain school of poets rather than a "Beat," I mention his name in order to note that one of his nephews teaches here at State. You may find a number of the Black Mountain writers, including Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan [see your anthology for both] mentioned in conjunction with the Beat writers.