The Silent Beat || Beat

BeatAuthor(s): Jack FoleySource: Discourse, Vol. 20, No. 1/2, The Silent Beat (Winter and Spring 1998), pp. 182-197Published by: Wayne State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41389882 .

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Beat

Jack Foley

for Zhang Ziqing

When I said I was beat I was beat, man, I was tired, exhausted, worn out. That's what I meant. - Herbert Huncke.

1.

The idea of the Beat Generation, wrote Jack Kerouac, was "gleaned from the way we heard the word 'beat' spoken on street corners on Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America - beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction." He insists that beat "never meant juvenile delinquents, it meant characters of a special spirituality who didn't gang up but were solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization" ( Portable 559) . The word also evoked for Kerouac the world of jazz - "a fabulous beat" (. Desolation 138). Jazz poet Ted Joans remarked that Kerouac "knew more about the old [Harlem] jazz haunts than I did" (242) .

On the Road, the Bible of the Beat Generation, was completed in 1951 but not published until 1957. Earlier that same year, Norman Mailer produced "The White Negro," an ambitious, influential essay which attempted to summarize the historical conditions of the time

Discourse, 20.1 & 2, Winter and Spring, pp. 182-197. Copyright by © 1998 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309.

182



Winter and Spring 1 998 1 83

and to suggest a way out of their restrictions. 'The White Negro" parallels in many ways Kerouac 's book. It begins,

Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. (587)

After the war and the revelation of what went on in concentration camps, Mailer writes, "one could hardly maintain the courage to be individual, to speak with one's own voice." These are "the years of conformity and depression. A stench of fear has come out of every pore of American life, and we suffer from a collective failure of nerve. The only courage, with rare exceptions . . . has been the isolated courage of isolated people" (587).

In the midst of this "bleak scene," (588) Mailer focuses upon the figure of the hipster - a figure who, with his sharply identifiable bohemian life-style, his interest in jazz and drugs, was soon to become extremely familiar to America. Edward Halsey Foster points out that

Anyone could get something of the hip style . . . simply by going to the movies, where the hipster's mannerisms were incorporated into the acting styles of Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Montgomery Clift, and James Dean. . . . Film, noir also incorporated the hipster's paranoid view of civilization. (13)

For both Kerouac and Mailer the hipster became a somewhat un- likely "saviour" figure whose values and lifestyle might arouse them from their moribund state. To Mailer, the hipster was

[T]he man who knows that ... if the fate of twentieth century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.

Emphasizing the deep polarization that was everywhere present in American life, Mailer rails against "conformism": "One is Hip or one is Square . . . one is a rebel or one conforms" (588-89) .

Jack Kerouac's initial impression of hipsters was by no means as positive as Mailer's. When he first saw them "creeping around Times Square in 1944," he "didn't like them." An encounter with Herbert Huncke changed his mind: "Huncke of Chicago . . . came up to me and said 'Man, I'm beat.' I knew right away what he meant some- how." Kerouac suggests that Huncke's word was "perhaps brought



184 Discourse 20. 1 àf 2

from some midwest carnival or junk cafeteria. It was a new language, actually spade (Negro) jargon but you soon learned it. . . . By 1948 it began to take shape" ( Beatific 568-69).

For both Kerouac and Mailer, the black American points the way out of the deadening sense of conformity of post-War America. "In [the] wedding of the white and the black," writes Mailer, "it [is] the Negro who [brings] the cultural dowry":

Any Negro who wishes to live must live with danger from his first day, and no experience can ever be casual to him. . . . [T] here [is] a new breed of adventurers, urban adventurers who [drift] out at night looking for action with a black man's code to fit their facts. The hipster [has] absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes [can] be considered a white Negro. (Mailer 590- 91)

At this point the blatant racism of the central passage of Mailer's famous essay ought to be obvious. Mailer is not (to carry on his metaphor) "marrying" African Americans; he is using them - and what he conceives of as "their" experience - as metaphors in a game of selfhood which he is playing out. This is also true of Jack Kerouac. Neal Cassady, the real-life hero of On the Road , was the Elvis Presley of the Beat movement - the "white boy" who could do it too ("the white Negro") . Longing to be black, the narrator of On the Road says,

I was only myself, Sal Paradise, sad, strolling in this violent dark, this unbearably sweet night, wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted Negroes of America. (149)

James Baldwin rightly characterized such passages as "absolute nonsense . . . and offensive nonsense at that" (231) . Like Elvis Pres- ley, Kerouac seemed to express a "black" sensibility, but, like Elvis, he wasn't black. At the same time, like Elvis, Kerouac was criticized , at times viciously, for being "improper," "wild," "anti-intellectual" - i.e., (in the racist sense) "black." "There were people," Norman Mailer told Bruce Cook, "who made a career out of attacking the Beats" (97) . The whole point of Mailer's essay is to provide a way of empowering Mailer, and, by extension , other white people, particularly white males. It has nothing to do with African Americans. "I had tried," James Baldwin writes, "to convey something of what it felt like to be a Negro and no one had been able to listen: they wanted their romance" (221).

Granted that both Kerouac and Mailer "wanted their romance," it is important to notice that they wanted other things as well. Mailer's metaphor is racist, but he is deeply serious about a human being's ability to transform himself into something other than what




he is, about the possibility of choice in a "bleak" situation. The hipster is offered as something one can become . In a fascinating letter to Neal Cassady (dated January 8, 1951), Kerouac too confesses his desire to be "a tremendous life-changing . . . artist" (Selected Letters 274). In this thrust towards the new, towards new life, transformation, Mailer and Kerouac are united.

On the Road begins:

I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road. (5) 1

The word "life" is repeated twice, and it is to be distinguished from "my feeling that everything was dead" Mailer's language is similar. His "journey" is equivalent to Kerouac's "road": "the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society , to exist -without roots , to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self

"

Kerouac's and Mailer's analyses of their situation coincide in many respects, but Kerouac differs from Mailer on one point: always conservative, Kerouac believes that the "rebellious imperatives of the self' imply an historical tradition - roots. He writes:

Beat goes back much further than 1948 when John Clellon Holmes . . . and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent Existentialism. ... It goes back to the 1880s when my grandfather Jean-Baptiste Kerouac used to go out on the porch in big thunderstorms and swing his kerosene lamp at the lightning and yell 'Go ahead, go, if you're more powerful than I am strike me and put the light out! '. . . . Like my grandfather this America was invested with wild selfbelieving individuality and this had begun to disappear around the end of World War II with so many great guys dead. . . . [S]uddenly it began to emerge again, the hipsters began to appear gliding around saying "Crazy, man."

'The Beat Generation," Kerouac goes on, "at least the core of it, [is] a group of new American men intent on joy" ( Beatific 566-67) . A much cruder version of that statement was made to Bruce Cook: "We were just a bunch of guys who were out trying to get laid" (Cook 89).

For Norman Mailer the hipster = the "existentialist. " And Mailer insists that the existentialist is not only conscious of himself, he is religious: 'To be a real existentialist (Sartre admittedly to the contrary) one must be religious

" (591, my italics).



186 Discourse 20.1 & 2

Jack Kerouac too had a religious side. A lifelong Catholic, he maintained an extraordinarily deep interest in Buddhism. John Tytell points out that the novel Kerouac published after On The Road , The Dharma Bums (1958), "dramatized a crucial shift in the Beat sensibility; instead of continuing to seek escape from boredom and the spiritually corrupting emphasis on materialism and careers through desperate activity, Kerouac began an inward search for new roots. The Dharma Bums replaces the hysteria of On The Road with a quietly contemplative retreat toward meditation"; it dramatizes "the movement toward a union with nature" (24-25).

If the hero of On the Road was based on the nihilistic Neal Cassady, the hero of The Dharma Bums was based on the studious Gary Snyder, whose interest in Buddhism attracted Kerouac greatly. "For many of the Beat writers," writes Tytell, "Buddhism became a form of psychic ballast, and their study of various schools of Eastern thought became a means of deconditioning themselves from Western habits of mind and feeling" (25).

Kerouac' s Buddhism found expression in works such as The Scripture of the Golden Eternity (1956) and Mexico City Blues (1955). In this passage from Mexico City Blues , he makes an important connection between white, black, and Asian, Catholicism, jazz, and Buddhism. Kerouac frequendy envisions a "solitary" male figure who is nearer "reality" than he is: his saintly brother Gerard ( Visions of Gerard) , Huncke the hipster, Cody ( On the Road) , Japhy Ryder ( The Dharma Bums) . Behind such figures is, ultimately, the figure of Christ, who functions traditionally as the mediator between the individual soul and reality. The books in which these characters appear are psychologically a means for both writer and reader to come closer to reality by coming "closer" to the male figure. Here, the Christ figure is Charlie Parker as the Buddha - or, more specifically, as the union of "the sweetness / of Jesus / And Buddha" ( Mexico City). (In his various designations of Parker's name, Kerouac consistently misspelled "Charlie" as "Charley.")

Charley Parker Looked like Buddha . . . And his expression on his face Was as calm, beautiful, and profound As the image of the Buddha Represented in the East, the lidded eyes, The expression that says "All is Well" - This was what Charley Parker Said when he played, All is Well. (241)

The Charlie Parker of Mexico City Blues offers the author the



Winter and Spring 1998 187

problematical assurance that, despite appearances - despite even Parker's recent death - "All is well," a phrase which reverberates throughout Kerouac' s work. Mexico City Blues is a poem about the longing to transcend the world. Kerouac wishes to be, like Charlie Parker and Gerard, "safe in heaven dead," "free / of that slaving meat wheel" (211). Echoing Rimbaud, he writes, "I'm looking for derangement / To bring me landward back / Through logic's cold moon air" (50) .

This interest in transcendence had its effect on the word "beat." "It was as a Catholic," Kerouac writes, "that I went one afternoon [in 1954] to the church of my childhood (one of them) , Ste. Jeanne d'Are in Lowell, Mass., and suddenly with tears in my eyes and had a vision of what I must have really meant with 4 Beat' anyhow when I heard the holy silence in the church . . . the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific" ( Beatific 571).

Kerouac, a French-Canadian, spoke French all his life. In the movement of his myth-making imagination, "Beat" could easily become "Béat" (French, "Blessed"). It is perhaps the word's most startling transformation. The pun is present in Desolation Angels (138; written 1956, 1961) 2 and in the title of Beatitude magazine, founded in North Beach in 1959. In the "Author's Introduction" to Lonesome Traveler, Kerouac goes further still and denies that he is "beat" in any sense of the word: "Am actually not 'beat' but strange solitary crazy Catholic mystic" (viii). This last was an attempt to transcend a word which, by that point, had become an enormous burden to him: "what horror I felt in 1957 and later 1958 to suddenly see 4 Beat' being taken up by everybody, press and TV and Hollywood borscht circuit to include the 'juvenile delinquency' shot and the horrors of a mad teeming billyclub New York and L.A. and they began to call that Beat" ( Beatific 571).

The range of Jack Kerouac's styles is extremely wide. He wrote everything from journalism to popular novels to the extremely "poetic, "Joycean sound experiments of Old Angel Midnight (1956). Asked how he produced his "spontaneous prose" he answered, "[I] just sit down and let it flow out of me." But he insisted that this "flow" was the work of the Holy Ghost (Cook 90) .

2.

On October 7, 1955 a poetry reading was held at The Six Gallery, a cooperative art gallery in San Francisco. The featured readers were Allen Ginsberg (who organized the event) , Michael McClure (whose first reading it was) , Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen,



1 88 Discourse 20. 1 & 2

and Philip Laman tia. Kerouac was visiting Ginsberg at the time and attended, though he did not read. Kenneth Rexroth was Master of Ceremonies.

Ann Charters writes, 'The 'Six Poets at the Six Gallery' reading was the catalyst that dramatically revealed what Ginsberg later called the 'natural affinity of modes of thought or literary style or planetary perspective' between the East Coast writers and the West Coast poets" (Charters, Portable xxvii) .

Both Jack Kerouac and Michael McClure wrote about the Six Gallery event, Kerouac in The Dharma Bums (1958) - in which he calls the Six Gallery the Gallery Six - and McClure in Scratch- ing the Beat Surface (1982). The event soon became famous as the first public reading of "Howl" (though Ginsberg read only the first section of the poem that night) . "Howl" created a sensa- tion. Kerouac collected money for wine and passed around gallon jugs of California Burgundy. When Ginsberg's turn came, writes Barry Miles,

... he read with 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 ajewish cantor, sustaining his long breath length, savoring the outrageous language. Kerouac began cheering him on, yelling 'Go!' at the end of each line, and soon the audience joined in. Allen was completely transported. At each line he took a deep breath, glanced at the manuscript, then delivered it, arms outstretched, eyes gleaming, swaying from one foot to the other with the rhythm of the words. (196)

All descriptions of the Six Gallery event emphasize the trans- formative character of Ginsberg's reading. Michael McClure writes that " 'Howl' . . . was Allen's metamorphosis from quiet, brilliant, burning bohemian scholar trapped by his flames and repressions to epic vocal bard" (McClure, Scratching). Kerouac's communal wine-drinking gave the event a Bacchanalian, Dionysian quality. (Wine is of course associated with various religions.) Barry Miles too attests to both transformation and religious associations. These various elements coalesce into a single image: what the audience at the Six Gallery was xvitnessing was the metamorphosis of Allen Ginsberg , " hornrimmed intellectual hepcat with wild black hair " (in Kerouac's phrase [Dharma 11]), into Allen Ginsberg , "epic vocal bard. "

Ann Charters remarks that Ginsberg "found the audience so fervently sympathetic to his words that he discovered his unrec- ognized talents as a performance artist" (13-14). True enough, but Kerouac's and the audience's shouts of "Go!" indicate that Ginsberg had taken on the persona not only of the poet but of the




jazz musician. Although Ginsberg was not reading his poem to jazz accompaniment (as ruth weiss, Kenneth Rexroth and others were soon to do at The Cellar, a former Chinese restaurant converted into a popular jazz club) , his unaccompanied reading was alive with a sense of music. He describes his poem as full of "long saxophone- like chorus lines" and suggests that writing it was like the experience of a jazz musician improvising (Charters 10). Like the hipster, who "had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro," Ginsberg as poet at this public moment "for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro."

Kerouac' s Mexico City Blues had already presented the jazz musician as analogous to the poet. Ginsberg's notes on "Howl" suggest that writing the poem was a kind of conversion experience, a personal transformation: "I suddenly turned aside in San Fran- cisco ... to follow my romantic inspiration - Hebraic-Melvillian bardic breath" (Charters 10). The extraordinary thing about the event at the Six Gallery was that the audience could witness that transformation: they could see the poet become jazz musician. Ginsberg's powerful reading of "Howl," "arms outstretched, eyes gleaming," was a living emblem of the possibility of change. Through rhythm (the "beat") it turned being "beaten down" ("I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness") into "béat" The poet's longing for the visionary transforms him, through the jazz musician, into epic, Whitmanic, visionary bard. The "Footnote to Howl," completed after the Six Gallery reading, makes the transformation explicit:

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy!

The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and

asshole holy! Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is

holy! everyday is in fternity! Everyman's an angel! The bum's as holy as the seraphim! (134)

In addition to transforming Allen Ginsberg, the evening at the Six Gallery transformed the nature of the movement - and if people had any doubts that they were dealing with a "movement," the evening at the Six Gallery changed that too. The "Beat Generation" of On the Road was focused on cities and cars - on speed. The "Beat Generation" of The Dharma Bums is focused on nature , and it is



1 90 Discourse 20.1 & 2

through its interest in nature that the Beat movement can be seen as - in McClure's phrase - "the literary wing of the environmental movement" (Foley "Interview"). Some years after the reading at the Six Gallery, "at the United Nations Environmental Conference in Stockholm in 1972," writes McClure, "Gary Snyder and I were among the contingent of independent lobbyists . . . who took it upon themselves to represent whales, Indians, and the freedom of the diversity of the environment. We participated in whale demon- strations in Stockholm and immediately following the conference I returned to San Francisco and staged a pro-whale demonstration" (McClure, Scratching 33) .

McClure had "taken it upon himself' to "represent whales" at the Six Gallery too. One of the poems he read that night was "FOR THE DEATH OF 100 WHALES." If "Howl" was a lamentation for the crucifixion of the young by the forces of Moloch, "FOR THE DEATH OF 100 WHALES" is a lamentation for the crucifixion of animals, of mammals , for the imholiness with which we mindlessly murder the creatures around us. Like "Howl," McClure's poem is passionately affirming an other realm of consciousness. The poem arose out of the poet's horror at reading an article in Time magazine (April, 1954): "Seventy-nine bored G.I.'s . . . climbed into four small boats and in one morning wiped out a pack of 100 [killer whales]." In McClure's powerful imagination, man and creature merge. Both are being hunted down; both are being ruthlessly killed:

Goya! Goya! Oh Lawrence

No angels dance those bridges. OH GUN! OH BOW!

There are no churches in the waves, No holiness,

No passages or crossings From the beasts' wet shore. ( Scratching 30-31)

"FOR THE DEATH OF 100 WHALES" is a seed poem with many implications - implications which continue to occupy McClure to this day. If, however, we are to consider the poem an example of "Beat" writing - and it is - we have to admit that we have come a long way from the world of Times Square, cars, and "the white Negro." With this poem and Kerouac 's The Dharma Bums , we have entered into a very different aspect of "Beat" consciousness.




3.

To be an artist at any time involves an act of self-mythologizing, but the kind of mythologizing going on among Beat artists such as Bruce Conner, Michael McClure and Joan Brown was to see oneself as outcast, as waste material, as, in Brown's image, "rat" - the West Coast equivalent to "hipster" (Foley О Her Blackness 17- 20) . The world Brown conjures up in her "ratty objects" (qtd., О Her Blackness 19) is dangerous, liberated, marginalized, and drug-using. Ann Charters remarks that the Beat Generation did not do very well for its women: "Reflecting the sexism of the times, the women mostly stayed on the sidelines as girlfriends and wives" ("Intro." xxxiii). This is no doubt true, but there were nevertheless a number of women present "on the scene." Some of these, like Brown and Jay DeFeo, were visual artists; others were writers; others were simply "beat chicks."

Among the most important of the Beat women writers is Diane di Prima, whose distinguished work extends in many directions. As a young woman, after two years studying physics at Swathmore, she moved to the Lower East Side of New York City, where her various "pads" became centers of discussion and activity. James O. Mitchell's photographs of her at this period are among the most haunting of the time. "NIGHTMARE 2," from her second book, Dinners and Nightmares (1961), is a wonderful, slightly surreal evo- cation of a Beat "pad." Far from being "on the road," the female contingent of the Beat Generation is at home cooking and doing the dishes (di Prima 2) .

Other women writers included Lenore Kandel, whose Love Book (1965), like Howl in 1957, was prosecuted for obscenity; "Beat Generation goddess" ruth weiss who in 1956 inaugurated the com- bination of poetry and jazz at The Cellar; Carolyn Cassady; novelist Joyce Johnson; Eileen Kaufman; Joanne Kyger; Elise Cowen; Joanna McClure; Janine Pommy Vega; Mary Norbert Körte; and Anne Waldman. Jack Kerouac's and Joan Haverty Kerouac's daughter, Jan, published two novels, Baby Driver (1981) and Trainsong (1988), before her untimely death in 1996. The list could easily be extended.

Another group, which Ted Joans called the "Black Beats," was somewhat marginalized even among these marginalized people. Mournfully echoing Langston Hughes's "I, Too," Joans's "I Too, At the Beginning," states, "At the beginning / There were only / Three darker brothers / Born Beat and hipper-than-thou. . . . We, three, also swung America" (Joans 227).

The three writers to whom Joans refers are himself, LeRoi Jones (who changed his name to Amiri Baraka in 1966), and Bob



1 92 Discourse 20.1 àf 2

Kaufman. Of the three, Joans himself, "the last of the original hipsters," the original "Rent-A-Beatnik," is least known, least represented in anthologies. As a 'jazz poet of the Beat Generation," however, he was at the forefront of New York's Greenwich Village "scene" in the 1950s, reading regularly at places such as Cafe Bizarre, Cafe Wha, and Cafe Rafio (Joans 235-255).

Amiri Baraka moved to Greenwich Village in 1957. In his autobiography he writes,

I could see the young white boys and girls in their pronouncement of disillusion with and "removal" from society as being related to the black experience. That made us colleagues of the spirit. (Qtd. in Saloy 163)

Baraka dates his "Beat period" as lasting from 1957 to 1962; he writes of the work he produced at this time: "You notice the preoccupation with death, suicide, in the early works. Always my own, caught up in the deathurge of this twisted society. . . . There is a spirituality always trying to get through, to triumph, to walk across these dead bodies" (Jones n.p.).

The third poetjoans mentions is Bob Kaufman. Though hardly a "white Negro," Kaufman was literally the product of the "wedding of the white and the black": a German-Jewish father and a black Roman Catholic mother. His career summed up many aspects of Beat experience: poverty, revolt, spontaneity, imaginative power, Buddhism, jail, drugs, outcast status, orality, jazz.

Kaufman's obituary states that the word "beatnik," a further degradation of "Beat," referred initially to him." Artist Bruce Con- ner disputes the widely-held belief that the late San Francisco news- paper columnist Herb Caen invented "beatnik" in his column of April 2, 1958. Conner insists that Caen picked the word up from Ethel Gechtoff, mother of artist Sonia Gechtoff {Foley:, "Interview with Bruce Conner"). In any case, Caen popularized the word, which echoed the name of the Russian satellite, "Sputnik." The effect was at once to advertise and trivialize the Beat movement. This phenomenon was happening all over the country - a fact which, as noted earlier, Kerouac greeted with horror. "The resulting publicity," writes Barry Miles, "brought in the police and attracted outsiders. People were arrested and violent crime began to occur. Everywhere 'beatniks' . . . gathered, the police did too. Poetry-jazz bars were raided, and life became difficult" (Miles 245) .

Kaufman's response to this was typical and (to use a word which, in the fifties, had only negative overtones but which can now be used to praise) "subversive." If the Communists had a Communist Man- ifesto, Kaufman could produce an "Abomunist Manifesto," written




not by Marx or Engels but by "Bomkauf." Communism, the bomb, the "abomination" that the public perceived "beatniks" to be were all parodied in Kaufman's manifesto, which also refers to "the Tomb of the unknown Draftdodger" (Kaufman 75-87) . Another of Kauf- man's poems, 'Jail Poems," contains the famous line, 'Thank God for beatniks." Just as the "square" might be transformed into the "hipster," so the poetic imagination can transform a pejorative term like "beatnik" into something positive. But the overall tone in this latter poem is anything but light. The poet is in jail ('There, Jesus, didn't hurt a bit, did it?"); things are edgy, mysterious: "Someone whom I am is no one" (Kaufman, Solitude 56-61).

Kaufman's poem is a reminder that existence as suffering - as, indeed, crucifixion - is a primary theme of Beat writing. (The image of Christ crucified appears again and again in Beat work.)3 Kauf- man's intense suffering - some of it self-inflicted, much of it not - is as much a part of his poetry as his power of imagination. "WHEN THE POET PROTESTS THE / DEATH HE SEES AROUND / HIM," he writes,

THE DEAD WANT HIM SILENCED. HE DIES LIKE LORCA DID, YET LORCA SURVIVES IN HIS POEM . . . HIS POEM IS FOREVER. (Kaufman, 'The Poet" 70)

Here, Kaufman goes far beyond Norman Mailer's idea of living "with death as immediate danger." Kaufman's poetry - his very attempt to affirm life - turns out to be a mode of death. Like Lorca (murdered by a Fascist regime) Kaufman ends by being, if not murdered, at least - in Artaud's phrase - "suicided by society" (Artaud 135-63). But- "HIS POEM IS FOREVER."

And at this point certain aspects of Mailer's "White Negro" become quite clear: "these [are] the years of conformity," "to live with death as immediate danger," etc. All of the qualities Mailer is naming are characteristic of the experience of being in a war. "Conformity" is an issue for the soldier who must "obey orders," as is courage, the constant possibility of death, and a tendency to conceive of things in terms of polarization (the "enemy"). In the midst of a deadening "peacetime," Mailer is re-imagining the conditions of war; he is inventing his own "Cold War." It is a testimony to the depth at which World War II had entered his psyche, and not only his psyche. Many of these artists were vehemently opposed to war but, at the same time, they were expressing war's conditions, its necessary



194 Discourse 20.1 & 2

polarization, its sense that nothing will last and so all we have is the moment - spontaneity. In 1957 Kenneth Rexroth wrote, "I believe that most of an entire generation will go to ruin - the ruin of Céline, Artaud, Rimbaud, voluntarily, even enthusiastically" (Rexroth 367) . In 1997 we can add Bob Kaufman's name to this list. In this, as in so much else, he seems typical of Beat sensibility. Kaufman appears, like Artaud, as a casualty of society 's imagination of war , war not as a physical fact but as a way of structuring consciousness - an imagination which permeates even activities which seem to have nothing to do with war. In this context, Kerouac' s death-longing and Baraka's "preoccupation with death, suicide" become much more comprehensible. In this situation - the perception of world as war - courage ends by being equivalent to death. To be alive in a repressive society is no different from being in a concentration camp: if you assert yourself, you die. Hitler, Kaufman writes, "moved to San Francisco, became an ordinary policeman, [and] devoted himself to stamping out Beatniks" (qtd. in Kaufman's Obituary). The poet's very affirmation - which allows him to live in his poetry - is also his suicide.

4.

The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late Forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly ris- ing and roaming America, serious, cu- rious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way. . . . But as to the actual existence of a Beat Generation, chances are it was really just an idea in our minds. - Kerouac ("About the Beat," 559)

In a short piece it is almost impossible to do anything like jus- tice to the complexities of a subject like the "Beat Generation." William Burroughs is surely accurate when he writes, "There's no doubt that we're living in a freer America as a result of the Beat literary movement, which is an important part of the larger pic- ture of cultural and political change in this country during the last forty years, when a four letter word couldn't appear on the printed page, and minority rights were ridiculous" (qtd. in Charters, Portable xxxi) .




Critics frequently refer to the Beat Generation as some sort of "explosion," as Seymour Krim does when he remarks, "I really think that the Beat thing . . . was an inevitable explosion of people with raw, primary instincts who simply refused to keep them dammed up any longer" (qtd. in Cook 52; my italics). The word "explosion" points to one of the most extraordinary aspects of the Beat movement: its transmutation of America's fear of the bomb. In effect, it was the bomb which exploded in America. But it was not a destructive bomb. It was, despite its considerable dark side, a bomb of life, of culture, of creativity - an indication of what McClure, constantly transforming the imagery of war, calls "THE EXPLOSION happening all around us" ( Rare 17) , the perception of world as powerfully, ecstatically alive.

Instead of lamenting the "passage" of the Beat Generation, we ought to be asking how their energy can be used now. What kind of "Howl," what Visions of Cody is possible for us? The question all these people are asking is how to live. Do we know any more about that subject than they? One wants to say, with Robert Creeley, "You'll have to tell mother we're still on the road" (Creely 63) .

Notes

l- Interestingly, both Kerouac and Mailer emphasize divorce. Kerouac: "my wife and I split up"; Mailer: "to divorce oneself from society."

2- "It's the beat generation, its béat , it's the beat to keep . . . . " (. Desolation

138). 3 Cf. Kerouac 's "wheel of . . . quivering meat," all of it "in dreadful

pain" (Mexico City Blues , 211-212). And Ginsberg's "Born in this world / You got to suffer" ("Gospel Noble Truths," 641), Kenneth Rexroth's 'Thou Shalt Not Kill" (1953) begins, "They are murdering all the young men. / For half a century now, every day, / They have hunted them down and killed them" (233) . In a 1974 interview Bruce Conner described American society as "alienating to the animal, " the cause of a "crucifixion of the spirit" [qtd. In Solnit 65] .

Works Cited

Artaud, Antonin. <eVan Gogh the Man Suicided by Society." Artaud Anthology. Jack Hirschman, ed. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1965.

Baldwin, James. "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy." Nobody Knows My Name. New York: Dial P, 1961. 216-241.



1 96 Discourse 20. 1 & 2

Charters. Ann. CD booklet howls, raps àf roars: recordings from the san franäsco poetry renaissance. Berkeley, CA: Fantasy Records, 1993.

, ed. The Portable Beat Reader. New York: Viking Penguin, 1992.

, ed. The Portable Jack Kerouac. New York: Penguin Books, 1995.

Cook, Bruce. The Beat Generation. New York: Quill, William Morrow, 1971.

Creeley, Robert. "On the Road: Notes on Artists and Poets 1950-1966." Poets of the Cities New York and San Francisco. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1974.

Foley, Jack. "O Her Blackness Sparkles!" San Francisco: 3300 Press, 1996.

Foster, Edward Halsey. Understanding the Beats. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1992.

. "Interview with Bruce Conner." 7/31/92.

. "Interview with Michael McClure." 7/30/92.

Ginsberg, Allen. "Footnote to Howl." Collected Poems 1947-1980. . "Gospel Noble Truths," Collected Poems 1947-1980.

Huncke, Herbert, from dream to dream . Brugge, Belgium: Neptune Music, 1994.

Kerouac, Jack. "About the Beat Generation (1957)." The Portable Jack Ker- ouac.

. " Beatific : The Origins of the Beat Generation (1959)." The Portable Jack Kerouac.

. Desolation Angels. New York: Bantam Book, 1966.

. The Dharma Bums. New York: Penguin Books, 1976.

. Lonesome Traveler. New York: Grove Press, 1960.

. Mexico City Blues. New York: Grove Press, 1959.

. On the Road . New York: Viking Press, 1958.

. Selected Letters 1940-1956. Ann Charters, ed. New York: Viking, 1995.

Joans, Ted. 'Je Me Vois (I See Myself)." Contemporary Authors Autobiography Señes. Vol. 25. Shelly Andrews, ed. Detroit: Gale Research, 1996.

Jones, LeRoi. "An Explanation of the Work." Black Magic: Poetry 1961-1967. Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1969.

Kaufman Obituary. San Franäsco Chronicle. January 13, 1986.

Kaufman, Bob. "Abomunist Manifesto by Bomkauf." Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness. New York: New Directions, 1965.

. "The Poet." The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956-1978.

Mailer, Norman. 'The White Negro." The Portable Beat Reader. Ann Charters, ed. New York: Viking Penguin, 1992.




McClure, Michael. Rare Angel Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1974. . Scratching the Beat Surface. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982.

Miles, Barry. Ginsberg: A Biography. New York: HarperCollins, 1989.

Prima, Diane di. Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1990.

Rexroth, Kenneth. "Disengagement: The Art of the Beat Generation." The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men. Gene Feldman and Max Gartenberg, eds. New York: Dell Publishing, 1958.

. "Thou Shalt Not Kill" (1953). The Portable Beat Reader. Ann Charters, ed. New York: Viking, 1992.

Saloy, Mona Lisa. "Black Beats and Black Issues." Lisa Phillips. Beat Cul- ture and the New America 1950-1965. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1995.

Solnit, Rebecca. Secret Exhibition. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1990.

Tytell,John. Naked Angels. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.



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