Essay 3 – Additional Reading——at least 500 words

Article by John C. Holmes, New York Times Magazine, November 16, 1952. “This article introduced the phrase ‘beat generation’ to the world, although the writers who would come to personify this generation would not be published for several years more.”

Writing Assignment for Essay 3

What does the term “Beat,” as in “Beat Generation” actually refer to? Describe how the author of the article: “This is the Beat Generation” characterizes the “Beat Generation” in its various facets. How well do the two examples of Beat Generation writers embody the author’s characterizations of the Beat Generation?

Be very detailed and specific in your essay and be sure to follow all writing guidelines and conventions that have been established for this course.

Length: 2-3 pages; please keep the essay to no more than 3 pages. Format: Doubled-spaced, typed, font in Times New Roman or Arial, size 12. 1-inch margins all around. Written work for this course is to be submitted only in either Microsoft Word ( ) or Rich Text Format (.rtf).

Why an essay? Students will have the opportunity to gain an understanding of historical inquiry and writing. Reading is a significant part of any historical project. Students selecting an essay topic are also encouraged to use an additional source or two to enhance the experience. Please do not cite the textbook and online reference sources Wikipedia and Britannica, Infoplease, Sparknotes, Answers.com, Ask.com, et cetera. Make use of the online readings posted on the Calendar, supplemental materials posted in the session folders, or journal articles, government documents, newspapers, magazines, and books available through Ivy Tech Library’s Discover! Links to an external site.or print sources at your local library.

‘ThisIs The Beat Generation’ by John Clellon Holmes

This is the complete text of the article by John Clellon Holmes that ran in the New York
Times Magazine on November 16, 1952. This article introduced the phrase ‘beat
generation’ to the world, although the writers who would come to personify this
generation would not be published for several years more. For more on the origin of the
term ‘beat’, see the article following this one..

My commentary : There are some interesting points in this article, but I can’t help feeling
annoyed at the idea of categorizing an entire generation. I don’t believe any true
statement can be made about a million or more people, except statements that are so
general they are true for all times. So, for the hipster and the Young Republican here,
substitute the hippie and the straight of twenty years ago, or the slacker and the yuppie
today. Newspapers and magazines love to get excited about how ‘different’ each new
generation is, but each new generation is just going through the same crisis the one
before it went through. It’s called ‘growing up.’

In saying this, I don’t mean to ‘flame’ John Clellon Holmes, a good writer who recognized
the inanity of labeling a generation and even alluded to it in this article. Furthermore,
I’m sure the idea of defining a generation was nowhere near as played out in the early
50’s as it is now.

This Is The Beat Generation

by John Clellon Holmes
The New York Times Magazine, November 16, 1952

Several months ago, a national magazine ran a story under the heading ‘Youth’ and the
subhead ‘Mother Is Bugged At Me.’ It concerned an eighteen-year-old California girl who
had been picked up for smoking marijuana and wanted to talk about it. While a reporter
took down her ideas in the uptempo language of ‘tea,’ someone snapped a picture. In view
of her contention that she was part of a whole new culture where one out of every five
people you meet is a user, it was an arresting photograph. In the pale, attentive face, with
its soft eyes and intelligent mouth, there was no hint of corruption. It was a face which
could only be deemed criminal through an enormous effort of righteousness. Its only
complaint seemed to be: ‘Why don’t people leave us alone?’ It was the face of a beat
generation.

That clean young face has been making the newspapers steadily since the war. Standing
before a judge in a Bronx courthouse, being arraigned for stealing a car, it looked up into
the camera with curious laughter and no guilt. The same face, with a more serious bent,
stared from the pages of Life magazine, representing a graduating class of ex-GI’s, and
said that as it believed small business to be dead, it intended to become a comfortable cog
in the largest corporation it could find. A little younger, a little more bewildered, it was
this same face that the photographers caught in Illinois when the first non-virgin club was
uncovered. The young copywriter, leaning down the bar on Third Avenue, quietly

http://www.litkicks.com/People/JohnClellonHolmes.html

drinking himself into relaxation, and the energetic hotrod driver of Los Angeles, who
plays Russian Roulette with a jalopy, are separated only by a continent and a few years.
They are the extremes. In between them fall the secretaries wondering whether to sleep
with their boyfriends now or wait; the mechanic berring up with the guys and driving off
to Detroit on a whim; the models studiously name-dropping at a cocktail party. But the
face is the same. Bright, level, realistic, challenging.

Any attempt to label an entire generation is unrewarding, and yet the generation which
went through the last war, or at least could get a drink easily once it was over, seems to
possess a uniform, general quality which demands an adjective … The origins of the word
‘beat’ are obscure, but the meaning is only too clear to most Americans. More than mere
weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw. It involves a sort of
nakedness of mind, and, ultimately, of soul; a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of
consciousness. In short, it means being undramatically pushed up against the wall of
oneself. A man is beat whenever he goes for broke and wagers the sum of his resources
on a single number; and the young generation has done that continually from early youth.

Its members have an instinctive individuality, needing no bohemianism or imposed
eccentricity to express it. Brought up during the collective bad circumstances of a dreary
depression, weaned during the collective uprooting of a global war, they distrust
collectivity. But they have never been able to keep the world out of their dreams. The
fancies of their childhood inhabited the half-light of Munich, the Nazi-Soviet pact, and
the eventual blackout. Their adolescence was spent in a topsy-turvy world of war bonds,
swing shifts, and troop movements. They grew to independent mind on beachheads, in
gin mills and USO’s, in past-midnight arrivals and pre-dawn departures. Their brothers,
husbands, fathers or boy friends turned up dead one day at the other end of a telegram. At
the four trembling corners of the world, or in the home town invaded by factories or
lonely servicemen, they had intimate experience with the nadir and the zenith of human
conduct, and little time for much that came between. The peace they inherited was only
as secure as the next headline. It was a cold peace. Their own lust for freedon, and the
ability to live at a pace that kills (to which the war had adjusted them), led to black
markets, bebop, narcotics, sexual promiscuity, hucksterism, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The
beatness set in later.

It is a postwar generation, and, in a world which seems to mark its cycles by its wars, it is
already being compared to that other postwar generation, which dubbed itself ‘lost’. The
Roaring Twenties, and the generation that made them roar, are going through a
sentimental revival, and the comparison is valuable. The Lost Generation was discovered
in a roadster, laughing hysterically because nothing meant anything anymore. It migrated
to Europe, unsure whether it was looking for the ‘orgiastic future’ or escaping from the
‘puritanical past.’ Its symbols were the flapper, the flask of bootleg whiskey, and an
attitude of desparate frivolity best expressed by the line: ‘Tennis, anyone?’ It was caught
up in the romance of disillusionment, until even that became an illusion. Every act in its
drama of lostness was a tragic or ironic third act, and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was
more than the dead-end statement of a perceptive poet. The pervading atmosphere of that
poem was an almost objectless sense of loss, through which the reader felt immediately

that the cohesion of things had disappeared. It was, for an entire generation, an image
which expressed, with dreadful accuracy, its own spiritual condition.

But the wild boys of today are not lost. Their flushed, often scoffing, always intent faces
elude the word, and it would sound phony to them. For this generation lacks that eloquent
air of bereavement which made so many of the exploits of the Lost Generation symbolic
actions. Furthermore, the repeated inventory of shattered ideals, and the laments about
the mud in moral currents, which so obsessed the Lost Generation, do not concern young
people today. They take these things frighteningly for granted. They were brought up in
these ruins and no longer notice them. They drink to ‘come down’ or to ‘get high,’ not to
illustrate anything. Their excursions into drugs or promiscuity come out of curiosity, not
disillusionment.

Only the most bitter among them would call their reality a nightmare and protest that they
have indeed lost something, the future. For ever since they were old enough to imagine
one, that has been in jeopardy anyway. The absence of personal and social values is to
them, not a revelation shaking the ground beneath them, but a problem demanding a day-
to-day solution. How to live seems to them much more crucial than why. And it is
precisely at this point that the copywriter and the hotrod driver meet and their identical
beatness becomes significant, for, unlike the Lost Generation, which was occupied with
the loss of faith, the Beat Generation is becoming more and more occupied with the need
for it. As such, it is a disturbing illustration of Voltaire’s reliable old joke: ‘If there were
no God, it would be necessary to invent him.’ Not content to bemoan his absence, they
are busily and haphazardly inventing totems for him on all sides.

For the giggling nihilist, eating up the highway at ninety miles an hour and steering with
his feet, is no Harry Crosby, the poet of the Lost Generation who planned to fly his plane
into the sun one day because he could no longer accept the modern world. On the
contrary, the hotrod driver invites death only to outwit it. He is affirming the life within
him in the only way he knows how, at the extreme. The eager-faced girl, picked up on a
dope charge, is not one of those ‘women and girls carried screaming with drink or drugs
from public places,’ of whom Fitzgerald wrote. Instead, with persuasive seriousness, she
describes the sense of community she has found in marijuana, which society never gave
her. The copywriter, just as drunk by midnight as his Lost Generation counterpart,
probably reads God and Man at Yale during his Sunday afternoon hangover. The
difference is this almost exaggerated will to believe in something, if only in themselves.
It is a will to believe, even in the face of an inability to do so in conventional terms. And
that is bound to lead to excesses in one direction or another.

The shock that older people feel at the sight of this Beat Generation is, at its deepest
level, not so much repugnance at the facts, as it is distress at the attitudes which move it.
Though worried by this distress, they most often argue or legislate in terms of the facts
rather than the attitudes. The newspaper reader, studying the eyes of young dope addicts,
can only find an outlet for his horror and bewilderment in demands that passers be given
the electric chair. Sociologists, with a more academic concern, are just as troubled by the
legions of young men whose topmost ambition seems to be to find a secure birth in a

monolithic corporation. Contemporary historians express mild surprise at the lack of
organized movements, political, religious, or otherwise, among the young. The articles
they write remind us that being one’s own boss and being a natural joiner are two of our
most cherished national traits. Everywhere people with tidy moralities shake their heads
and wonder what is happening to the younger generation.

Perhaps they have not noticed that, behind the excess on the one hand, and the
conformity on the other, lies that wait-and-see detachment that results from having to fall
back for support more on one’s capacity for human endurance than on one’s philosophy of
life. Not that the Beat Generation is immune to ideas; they fascinate it. Its wars, both past
and future, were and will be wars of ideas. It knows, however, that in the final, private
moment of conflict a man is really fighting another man, and not an idea. And that the
same goes for love. So it is a generation with a greater facility for entertaining ideas than
for believing in them. But it is also the first generation in several centuries for which the
act of faith has been an obsessive problem, quite aside from the reasons for having a
particular faith or not having it. It exhibits on every side, and in a bewildering number of
facets, a perfect craving to believe.

Though it is certainly a generation of extremes, including both the hipster and the radical
young Republican in its ranks, it renders unto Caesar (i.e., society) what is Caesar’s and
unto God what is God’s. For the wildest hipster, making a mystique of bop, drugs and the
night life, there is no desire to shatter the ‘square’ society in which he lives, only to elude
it. To get on a soapbox or write a manifesto would seem to him absurd. Looking at the
normal world, where most everything is a ‘drag’ for him, he nevertheless says: ‘Well,
that’s the Forest of Arden after all. And even it jumps if you look at it right.’ Equally, the
young Republican, though often seeming to hold up Babbitt as his culture hero, is neither
vulgar nor materialistic, as Babbitt was. He conforms because he believes it is socially
practical, not necessarily virtuous. Both positions, however, are the result of more or less
the same conviction — namely that the valueless abyss of modern life is unbearable.

For beneath the excess and the conformity, there is something other than detachment.
There are the stirrings of a quest. What the hipster is looking for in his ‘coolness’
(withdrawal) or ‘flipness’ (ecstasy) is, after all, a feeling on somewhereness, not just
another diversion. The young Republican feels that there is a point beyond which change
becomes chaos, and what he wants is not simply privilege or wealth, but a stable position
from which to operate. Both have had enough of homelessness, valuelessness,
faithlessnes.

The variety and the extremity of their solutions are only a final indication that for today’s
young people there is not as yet a single external pivot around which they can, as a
generation, group their observations and their aspirations. There is no single philosophy,
no single party, no single attitude. The failure of most orthodox moral and social concepts
to reflect fully the life they have known is probably the reason for this, but because of it
each person becomes a walking, self-contained unit, compelled to meet, or at least
endure, the problem of being young in a seemingly helpless world in his own way.

More than anything else, this is what is responsible for this generation’s reluctance to
name itself, its reluctance to discuss itself as a group, sometimes its reluctance to be
itself. For invented gods invariably disappoint those who worship them. Only the need
for them goes on, and it is this need, exhausting one object after another, which projects
the Beat Generation forward into the future and will one day deprive it of its beatness.

Dostoyevsky wrote in the early 1880’s that ‘Young Russia is talking of nothing but the
eternal questions now.’ With appropriate changes, something very like this is beginning
to happen in America, in an American way; a re-evaluation of which the exploits and
attitudes of this generation are only symptoms. No single comparison of one generation
against another can accurately measure effects, but it seems obvious that a lost
generation, occupied with disillusionment and trying to keep busy among the broken
stones, is poetically moving, but not very dangerous. But a beat generation, driven by a
desparate craving for belief and as yet unable to accept the moderations which are offered
it, is quite another matter. Thirty years later, after all, the generation of which
Dostoyevsky wrote was meeting in cellars and making bombs.

This generation may make no bombs; it will probably be asked to drop some, and have
some dropped on it, however, and this fact is never far from its mind. It is one of the
pressures which created it and will play a large part in what will happen to it. There are
those who believe that in generations such as this there is always the constant possibility
of a great new moral idea, conceived in desparation, coming to life. Others note the self-
indulgence, the waste, the apparent social irresponsibility, and disagree.

But its ability to keep its eyes open, and yet avoid cynicism; its ever-increasing
conviction that the problem of modern life is essentially a spiritual problem; and that
capacity for sudden wisdom which people who live hard and go far possess, are assets
and bear watching. And, anyway, the clear, challenging faces are worth it.

Literary Kicks

Lost, Beat and Hip

It’s generally accepted that Jack Kerouac created the term ‘Beat Generation’ in a 1948
conversation with novelist John Clellon Holmes, who went on to write a New York
Times article about it, ‘This Is The Beat Generation.’ This is true, but it doesn’t explain
what the term ‘Beat’ actually meant.

In fact the original word meant nothing more than ‘bad’ or ‘ruined’ or ‘spent.’ We all use
the word this way. When somebody is trying to get one last hit out of a bowl of weed and
there’s nothing but ashes left, you say ‘Don’t bother, it’s beat.’ Or when you’re tired: ‘I’m
beat.’ There’s beaten-down, beaten-up and beaten-out. The connotation is defeat,
resignation, disappointment.

That kind of beatness is what Kerouac was describing in himself and his friends, bright
young Americans who’d come of age during the Second World War but couldn’t fit in as
clean-cut soldiers or complacent young businessmen. They were ‘beat’ because they didn’t

Literary Kicks

believe in straight jobs and had to struggle to survive, living in dirty apartments, selling
drugs or committing crimes for food money, hitchhiking across the country because they
couldn’t stay still without getting bored. The phrase ‘Beat Generation’ was meant to echo
Ernest Hemingway’s description of his own crowd (which came of age during the First
World War) as the ‘Lost Generation,’ a phrase Hemingway picked up from an off-hand
remark made by Gertrude Stein.

But the term ‘beat’ has a second meaning: ‘beatific’ or sacred and holy. Kerouac, a devout
Catholic, explained many times that by describing his generation as beat he was trying to
capture the secret holiness of the downtrodden. In fact, this is probably the most central
theme in Kerouac’s work (think of the saintly hobos and lonely truck drivers of ‘On The
Road’ and ‘The Dharma Bums’).

On April 2, 1958, after the ‘Beat Craze’ had influenced a flood of alienated young men
and women to converge on the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco, columnist
Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote a column in which he created the term
‘Beatnik.’ The ‘nik’ suffix evoked Yiddish slang (“nudnik”, etc.) but was actually
borrowed from ‘Sputnik,’ a satellite that had just been launched by the Soviet Union,
striking fear into the hearts of many Communist-fearing Americans.

‘Beatnik’ was a perjorative term, of course. Maynard Krebs on the ‘Dobie Gillis Show’
was a beatnik, but he was never Beat.

While ‘Beat’ connoted hobos and exhausted proletarians, the term ‘Hip’ came from
‘Hipster,’ which referred to the fancy-dressing, drug-and-drink-addled sex-fiend
characters that hung around Times Square at night. Kerouac and Neal Cassady and
William S. Burroughs were all fascinated with hipsters, and they even included a true
degenerate hipster in their crowd, Burroughs’ junkie friend Herbert Huncke, who appears
as Hassel in ‘On The Road’ and Herman in ‘Junky.’ Allen Ginsberg tips his hat to ‘angel-
headed hipsters’ in his poem ‘Howl.’ It seems there were two ways to be beat in this era:
the country-mouse beatnik could be a hobo, hopping freight cars and sleeping in parks,
but the city-mouse beatnik had to play the part of hipster to survive.

I don’t know the derivation of the term ‘Hipster’ (hey, what am I, fucking William Safire
over here?), but I could make a totally uninformed guess that it originally referred to hip
flasks — that is, that a ‘hipster’ carried liquor on his hip instead of hidden in his boot like a
‘bootlegger.’ I may be totally wrong here, though. I’ve also heard that ‘hip’ started with
‘hep,’ which would mean that my hip flask theory is wrong, and I have no idea where
‘hep’ came from. I’ve heard that Ken Kesey has a theory that the word came from Chinese
opium smokers who reclined on their hips while they smoked. I’ve also heard that the
word comes from West Africa via the Gullah dialect spoken in the Sea Islands off the
coast of South Carolina. A hipicat denotes a person attuned to his environment, literally
with ‘eyes open.’ Somebody else emailed me that it comes from the military-march
utterance “Hup!” as in “Hup-two-three-four,” but I don’t get what the connection would
be here.

http://www.litkicks.com/BeatPages/page.jsp?what=HerbertHuncke

http://www.litkicks.com/BeatPages/page.jsp?what=KenKesey

In any case, ‘hip’ turned to ‘hippie’ just as ‘beat’ had turned to ‘beatnik.’ I’m sure there’s a
lot more to be said about these etymological matters — please contribute any ideas or
knowledge you may have.

— brooklyn —

Jack Kerouac was born Jean-Louis Kerouac, a French-Canadian child on March 12, 1922
in working-class Lowell, Massachusetts. Ti Jean spoke a local dialect of French called
joual before he learned English. The youngest of three children, he was heartbroken
when his older brother Gerard died of rheumatic fever at the age of nine.

Ti Jean was an intense and serious child, devoted to Memere (his mother) and constantly
forming important friendships with other boys, as he would continue to do throughout his
life. He was driven to create stories from a young age, inspired first by the mysterious
radio show ‘The Shadow,’ and later by the fervid novels of Thomas Wolfe, the writer he
would model himself after.

Lowell had once thrived as the center of New England’s textile industry, but by the time
of Kerouac’s birth it had begun to sink into poverty. Kerouac’s father, a printer and well-
known local businessman, began to suffer financial difficulties, and started gambling in
the hope of restoring prosperity to the household. Young Jack hoped to save the family
himself by winning a football scholarship to college and entering the insurance business.
He was a star back on his high school team and won some miraculous victories, securing
himself a scholarship to Columbia University in New York. His parents followed him
there, settling in Ozone Park, Queens.

Things went wrong at Columbia. Kerouac fought with the football coach, who refused to
let him play. His father lost his business and sank rapidly into alcoholic helplessness, and
young Jack, disillusioned and confused, dropped out of Columbia, bitterly disappointing
the father who had so recently disappointed him. He tried and failed to fit in with the
military (World War II had begun) and ended up sailing with the Merchant Marine.

http://www.litkicks.com/BeatPages/profile.jsp?who=brooklyn

Lowell

When he wasn’t sailing, he was hanging around New York with a crowd his parents did
not approve of: depraved young Columbia students Allen Ginsberg and Lucien Carr, a
strange but brilliant older downtown friend named William S. Burroughs, and a joyful
street cowboy from Denver named Neal Cassady.

Kerouac had already begun writing a novel, stylistically reminiscent of Thomas Wolfe,
about the torments he was suffering as he tried to balance his wild city life with his old-
world family values. His friends loved the manuscript, and Ginsberg asked his Columbia
professors to help find a publisher for it. It would become Kerouac’s first and most
conventional novel, ‘The Town and the City,’ which earned him respect and some
recognition as a writer, although it did not make him famous.

It would be a long time before he would be published again. He had taken some amazing
cross-country trips with Neal Cassady while working on his novel, and in his attempt to
write about these trips he had begun experimenting with freer forms of writing, partly
inspired by the unpretentious, spontaneous prose he found in Neal Cassady’s letters. He
decided to write about his cross-country trips exactly as they had happened, without
pausing to edit, fictionalize or even think. He presented the resulting manuscript to his
editor on a single long roll of unbroken paper, but the editor did not share his enthusiasm
and the relationship was broken. Kerouac would suffer seven years of rejection before
‘On The Road’ would be published.

He spent the early 1950’s writing one unpublished novel after another, carrying them
around in a rucksack as he roamed back and forth across the country. He followed
Ginsberg and Cassady to Berkeley and San Francisco, where he became close friends
with the young Zen poet Gary Snyder. He found enlightenment through the Buddhist
religion and tried to follow Snyder’s lead in communing with nature. His excellent novel
‘The Dharma Bums’ describes a joyous mountain climbing trip he and Snyder went on in
Yosemite in 1955, and captures the tentative, sometimes comic steps he and his friends
were taking towards spiritual realization.

His fellow starving writers were beginning to attract fame as the ‘Beat Generation,’ a label
Kerouac had invented years earlier during a conversation with fellow novelist John
Clellon Holmes. Ginsberg and Snyder became underground celebrities in 1955 after the
Six Gallery poetry reading in San Francisco. Since they and many of their friends
regularly referred to Kerouac as the most talented writer among them, publishers began to
express interest in the forlorn, unwanted manuscripts he carried in his rucksack wherever
he went. ‘On The Road’ was finally published in 1957, and when it became a tremendous
popular success Kerouac did not know how to react. Embittered by years of rejection, he
was suddenly expected to snap to and play the part of Young Beat Icon for the public. He
was older and sadder than everyone expected him to be, and probably far more intelligent
as well. Literary critics, objecting to the Beat ‘fad,’ refused to take Kerouac seriously as a
writer and began to ridicule his work, hurting him tremendously. Certainly the Beat
Generation was a fad, Kerouac knew, but his own writing was not.

His sudden celebrity was probably the worst thing that could have happened to him,

because his moral and spiritual decline in the next few years was shocking. Trying to live
up to the wild image he’d presented in ‘On The Road,’ he developed a severe drinking
habit that dimmed his natural brightness and aged him prematurely. His Buddhism failed
him, or he failed it. He could not resist a drinking binge, and his friends began viewing
him as needy and unstable. He published many books during these years, but most had
been written earlier, during the early 50’s when he could not find a publisher. He kept
busy, appearing on TV shows, writing magazine articles and recording three spoken-
word albums, but his momentum as a serious writer had been completely disrupted.

Like Kurt Cobain, another counter-culture celebrity who seemed to be truly (as opposed
to fashionably) miserable, Kerouac expressed his unhappiness nakedly in his art and was
not taken seriously. In 1961 he tried to break his drinking habit and rediscover his writing
talents with a solitary nature retreat in Bixby Canyon, Big Sur. Instead, the vast nature
around him creeped him out and he returned to San Francisco to drink himself into
oblivion. He was cracking up, and he laid out the entire chilling experience in his last
great novel, ‘Big Sur.’

Defeated and lonesome, he left California to live with his mother in Long Island, and
would not stray from his mother for the rest of his life. He would continue to publish, and
remained mentally alert and aware (though always drunken). But his works after ‘Big Sur’
displayed a disconnected soul, a human being sadly lost in his own curmudgeonly
illusions.

Despite the ‘beatnik’ stereotype, Kerouac was a political conservative, especially when
under the influence of his Catholic mother. As the beatniks of the 1950’s began to yield
their spotlight to the hippies of the 1960’s, Jack took pleasure in standing against
everything the hippies stood for. He supported the Vietnam War and became friendly
with William F. Buckley.

Living alone with his mother in Northport, Long Island, Kerouac developed a fascinating
set of habits. He stayed in his house most of the time and carried on a lifelong game of
‘baseball’ with a deck of playing cards. His drink of choice was a jug of the kind of cheap,
sweet wine, Tokay or Thunderbird, usually preferred by winos. He became increasingly
devoted to Catholicism, but his unusual Buddhist-tinged brand of Catholicism would
hardly have met with the approval of the Pope.

Through his first forty years Kerouac had failed to sustain a long-term romantic
relationship with a woman, though he often fell in love. He’d married twice, to Edie
Parker and Joan Haverty, but both marriages had ended within months. In the mid-1960’s
he married again, but this time to a materialistic and older childhood acquaintance from
small-town Lowell, Stella Sampas, who he hoped would help around the house as his
mother entered old age.

He moved back to Lowell with Stella and his mother, and then moved again with them to
St. Petersburg, Florida. His health destroyed by drinking, he died at home on October 21,
1969. He was 47 years old.

On The Road
by Levi Asher August 11, 1994 7:47 am

Jack Kerouac’s great Beat novel, a charming, honest and poignant story of a friendship
and four trips across America, is in my opinion the best piece of writing to come out of
the Beat Generation. Kerouac has sometimes been accused of leaving his talent back at
the shop when he writes, but here his talent is undeniable. The writing is so good you
start to hear fireworks going off like the Fourth of July by the time the book is over.

The narrator is Sal Paradise, a young novelist-to-be living with his aunt in Paterson, New
Jersey. Sal has got a major Travelin’ Jones. Most of his friends happen to be out west
already. A college friend has invited Sal to live with him in San Francisco, and Sal also
wants to visit Denver, the home of his crazy friend Dean Moriarty. Dean Moriarty is a
fast-talking, womanizing product of Denver reform schools who came to New York,
improbably enough, to learn to be a writer. Sal idolizes Dean for his cowboy style, his
ease with women and his exuberant joy in living. (Dean Moriarty is Jack Kerouac’s real-
life crazy friend Neal Cassady, and almost everything in this book, as in all Kerouac’s
books, really happened.)

The First Trip — New York To Denver to San Francisco to L.A.

Sal tries to hitch out west alone, but doesn’t get very far in his first try (see excerpt that
follows this article). He tries again, taking a bus to Chicago and hitching to Denver. The
tales he tells of this first trip, with its flatboard-truck rides, innocent midwestern cornfield
vistas and wild noisy truck stop luncheonette meals, make up one of the most beautiful
portraits of America ever written.

Sal arrives in Denver, but discovers that his other friends have now ostracized Dean
Moriarty for his wild ways. Sal has to choose between Dean and the rest of his old
college crowd, and it’s no contest: he runs off with Dean. The only other friend who’ll
still hang out with Dean is Carlo Marx, (in real life, Allen Ginsberg). Carlo and Sal and
Dean clown around Denver for a while, until Sal takes off for San Francisco to stay with
his friend Remi Bencoeur. Dean promises to join him soon after.

But Sal finds that Remi Bencoeur has a rotten job and a difficult girlfriend, and leaves for
Southern California, where he meets Terry, a sweet-tempered Mexican girl, on a bus. He
goes to work in the vineyards and cotton fields with Terry and her family for a while, and
then returns to New York alone.

The Second Trip — Virginia to NY to New Orleans to San Francisco

Sal is staying with relatives in Testament, Virginia when Dean shows up at his door. A
girlfriend named Marylou and a friend named Ed Dunkel are waiting in Dean’s car.
Dean’s in a tough spot — he’s traveling with Marylou, but the girl he’s supposed to be with

is Camille, who’s back in San Francisco getting ready to have his baby. Furthermore, Ed
Dunkel left his nagging wife in Tuscon and has to pick her up at the home of Old Bull
Lee (in real life, William S. Burroughs) in New Orleans.

Sal joins their joyride up to Paterson and New York and then down to New Orleans to
stay with Old Bull Lee and his wife. Then they’re off to San Francisco, where Dean
decides to return to Camille and dispose of Marylou by setting her up with Sal. Dean
seems to get a kick out of setting his male friends up with his girlfriends, and Sal and
Marylou go along with the plan, but they both feel used and find themselves hungry and
bored and unable to depend on Dean for anything. Sal decides to go back home:

At dawn I got my New York bus and said good-by to Dean and Marylou. They wanted
some of my sandwiches. I told them no. It was a sullen moment. We were all thinking
we’d never see each other again and we didn’t care.

The Third Trip — New York to Denver to San Francisco and Back Again

Back in New York, Sal finds himself forgiving Dean, and even goes to Denver for no
apparent reason except that he misses Dean. Finally he goes to San Francisco to find
Dean at his house, and Dean recognizes the symbolic importance of this, saying: ‘You’ve
finally come to me!’ Dean and Camille are having problems, and Sal’s arrival is the
catalyst that breaks up their impromptu homelife. Out on the street, Dean and Sal need a
place to stay and go to Ed Dunkel’s wife, only to receive a tongue-lashing, directed at
Dean, that would wilt a houseplant. Everybody, it seems, is getting on Dean’s case now.
The whole crowd goes to hear some live jazz (see excerpt) and then Dean and Sal set off
for the East Coast, planning to travel from there to Italy.

They hitch to Denver, where they find somebody who needs a Cadillac driven to
Chicago. This is a big mistake for the owner of the Cadillac, because Dean and Sal push
the car beyond its limits and make the trip to Chicago in seventeen hours, leaving the car
in less than perfect condition. They hear some more live jazz in Chicago, then wander
back to New York.

The Fourth Trip — New York to Denver to Mexico

Sal’s first novel has been published, but he’s got the traveling bug again. He takes off for
Denver by himself and Dean finds him there. They go off for one last bang-up ride down
to Mexico, where they spend a riotous night in a small village with a roomful of
prostitutes and an old Mexican grandma who sells marijuana from her backyard. Sal ends
up getting extremely sick, and finds again that Dean is only good for the good times,
because Dean leaves him there in his feverish state, rushing off on impulse to marry a
new girlfriend in New York.

The Wrap-Up

Mexico

In a short section at the end, Sal and Dean briefly find each other in New York City, but
Sal is committed to attend a Duke Ellington concert that night at the Metropolitan Opera
with Remi Bencoeur and his girlfriend. He would rather be with Dean, but Remi and his
girlfriend don’t like Dean, and in the end Sal drives off with his other friends, waving to
Dean from the car window. That’s about where the book ends.

The ending is wonderfully ambiguous in terms of its meaning. Just what are we to think
of Dean Moriarty? He is the most magnetic character in the book, but everybody in the
book gets sick of him at one point or another, and even the narrator is forced to realize
that he can’t depend on Dean to stick with him when he’s sick and miserable in Mexico.
We also see that the joyrides get a little less joyful as they progress. Is it possible that
people really do need to grow up, that you can’t ride on forever, going from adventure to
the next? Luckily, this book doesn’t even attempt to answer that question for us; it just
lets us experience the sights and sounds along the way.

‘On The Road’ was published by Viking Press in 1957.

From ‘On The Road’ by Jack Kerouac

‘It was my dream that screwed up’

(Here Sal Paradise (Kerouac) tries to make his first cross-country trip alone, and doesn’t
get very far.)

I’d been poring over maps of the United States in Paterson for months, even reading
books about the pioneers and savoring names like Platte and Cimarron and so on, and on
the road-map was one long red line called Route 6 that led from the tip of Cape Cod clear
to Ely, Nevada, and there dipped down to Los Angeles. I’ll just stay on all the way to Ely,
I said to myself and confidently started. To get to 6 I had to go up to Bear Mountain.
Filled with dreams of what I’d do in Chicago, in Denver, and then finally in San Fran, I
took the Seventh Avenue Subway to the end of the line at 242nd Street, and there took a
trolley into Yonkers; in downtown Yonkers I transferred to an outgoing trolley and went
to the city limits on the east bank of the Hudson River. If you drop a rose in the Hudson
River at its mysterious source in the Adirondacks, think of all the places it journeys as it
goes to sea forever — think of that wonderful Hudson Valley. I started hitching up the
thing. Five scattered rides took me to the desired Bear Mountain Bridge, where Route 6
arched in from New England. It began to rain in torrents when I was let off there. It was
mountainous. Route 6 came over the river, wound around a traffic circle, and disappeared
into the wilderness. Not only was there no traffic but the rain come down in buckets and I
had no shelter. I had to run under some pines to take cover; this did no good; I began
crying and swearing and socking myself on the head for being such a damn fool. I was
forty miles north of New York; all the way up I’d been worried about the fact that on this,
my big opening day, I was only moving north instead of the so-longed for west. Now I
was stuck on my northermost hangup. I ran a quarter-mile to an abandoned cute English-
style filling station and stood under the dripping eaves. High up over my head the great
hairy Bear Mountain sent down thunderclaps that put the fear of God in me. All I could

see were smoky trees and dismal wilderness rising to the skies. “What the hell am I doing
up here?” I cursed, I cried for Chicago. “Even now they’re all having a big time, they’re
doing this, I’m not there, when will I get there!” — and so on. Finally a car stopped at the
empty filling station; the man and the two women in it wanted to study a map. I stepped
right up and gestured in the rain; they consulted; I looked like a maniac, of course, with
my hair all wet, my shoes sopping. My shoes, damn fool that I am, were Mexican
huaraches, plantlike sieves not fit for the rainly night of America and the raw road night.
But the people let me in and rode me back to Newburgh, which I accepted as a better
alternative than being trapped in the Bear Mountain wilderness all night. “Besides,” said
the man, “there’s no traffic passes through 6. If you want to go to Chicago you’d be better
going across the Holland Tunnel in New York and head for Pittsburth,” and I knew he
was right. It was my dream that screwed up, the stupid hearthside idea that it would be
wonderful to follow one great red line across America instead of trying various roads and
routes.

In Newburgh it had stopped raining. I walked down to the river and I had to ride back to
New York in a bus with a delegation of schoolteachers coming back from a weekend in
the mountains — chatter chatter blah-blah, and me swearing for all the time and money I’d
wasted, and telling myself, I wanted to go west and here I’d been all day and into the
night going up and down, north and south, like something that can’t get started.

Allen Ginsberg
by Levi Asher July 24, 1994 2:00 pm

Louis Ginsberg was a published poet, a high school teacher and a moderate Jewish
Socialist. His wife, Naomi, was a radical Communist and irrepressible nudist who went
tragically insane in early adulthood. Somewhere between the two in temperament was the
Ginsberg’s second son, Irwin Allen, born on June 3, 1926.

A shy and complicated child growing up in Paterson, New Jersey, Allen’s home life was
dominated by his mother’s bizarre and frightening episodes. A severe paranoid, she often
trusted young Allen when she was convinced the rest of the family and the world was
plotting against her. As the sensitive boy tried to understand what was happening around

Paterson

him, he also had to struggle to comprehend what was happening inside him, because he
was consumed by lust for other boys his age.

He discovered the poetry of Walt Whitman (the original Beatnik) in high school, but
despite his interest in poetry he followed his father’s advice and began planning a career
as a labor lawyer. This was what he had in mind when he began his freshman year at
Columbia University, but he fell in with a crowd of wild souls there, including fellow
students Lucien Carr and Jack Kerouac and non-student friends William S. Burroughs
and Neal Cassady. These delinquent young philosophers were equally obsessed with
drugs, crime, sex and literature. Ginsberg, the youngest and most innocent member of the
circle, helped them develop their literary smarts, while they helped him in turn by utterly
shattering his bookish naivete.

His new crowd was based at Columbia, but they did not encourage him in his studies, and
he eventually got suspended from Columbia for various small offenses. He began
consorting with Times Square junkies and thieves (mostly friends of Burroughs),
experimenting with Benzedrine and marijuana, and cruising gay bars in Greenwich
Village, all the time believing himself and his friends to be working towards some kind of
uncertain great poetic vision, which he and Kerouac called the New Vision. He began a
passionate (for him, anyway) sexual affair with the reluctant Neal Cassady, and visited
Cassady in Denver and San Francisco, helping to set in motion the cross-country trend
that would soon inspire Kerouac’s ‘On The Road’ adventures. The joyful craziness of his
city friends somehow became a symbolic counterpoint, for Ginsberg, to the real craziness
of his mother, whose condition continued to worsen until she was hospitalized for life
and finally lobotomized. Many people deal with insanity in the family by becoming
exaggeratedly normal, but Ginsberg went in the opposite direction. Knowing himself to
be basically sane, he embraced bizarreness as a style of life, as if seeking to find the edge
his mother had fallen over. Reading William Blake in a Harlem apartment one summer
day in 1948, the 26-year-old Allen Ginsberg had a tremendous mad vision in which
Blake came to him in person. This was the great moment of his life, and he joyfully told
his family and friends that he had found God.

The whole wild scene crashed, though, when the criminal activities of several of
Ginsberg’s friends (such as Burroughs and Herbert Huncke) resulted in his arrest and
imprisonment. Ginsberg entered a ‘straight’ phase: he recounced Burroughs, immersed
himself in psychoanalytic treatment, and even began dating a woman named Helen
Parker. Now a self-declared heterosexual, he found a job as a marketing researcher. In an
office in the Empire State Building, he helped develop an advertising campaign for Ipana
Toothpaste (remember the ‘Brush-a brush-a brush-a!’ scene in the movie version of
‘Grease’?)

This phase was not meant to last. He met a kindred spirit, Carl Solomon, in the waiting
room of a psychiatric hospital. He introduced himself to the important New Jersey poet
William Carlos Williams, whose epic visionary poem about the town of Paterson had
impressed Ginsberg greatly. Bearing a letter of introduction from the poet Williams,
Ginsberg travelled to San Francisco and met Kenneth Rexroth, ringmaster of an emerging

vibrant and youthful local poetry movement, which Ginsberg became a part of almost
instantly.

At the age of 29, Ginsberg had written much poetry but published almost none. He
worked hard to promote the works of Kerouac and Burroughs to publishers, neglecting to
promote his own. Even so, he was the first Beat writer to gain popular notice when he
delivered a thundering performance of his new poem ‘Howl’ at the now-legendary Six
Gallery poetry reading in October 1955. This great poem, conveniently publicized by a
bungled obscenity charge that made Allen a worldwide symbol of sexual depravity (as
homosexuality was then perceived), was the great expression of Beat defiance, just as
Kerouac’s ‘On The Road,’ published two years later, would be the great expression of
Beat yearnings.

Ginsberg followed ‘Howl’ with several other important new poems, such as ‘Sunflower
Sutra.’ Now at a critical stage in his career, he was somehow able to avoid the ‘fame
burnout’ that would soon engulf Kerouac. According to Bruce Cook in his book ‘The Beat
Generation,’ Ginsberg even mellowed considerably during this period, after travelling the
world, discovering Buddhism and falling in love with Peter Orlovsky, who would remain
a constant companion (though their relationship was not monogamous) for thirty years.
Perhaps most importantly, he exorcised some internal demons by writing ‘Kaddish,’ a
brilliant and surprising poem about his mother’s insanity and death.

His celebrity continued to grow as the ‘Beat’ concept evolved from an idea into a
movement and then into a cliche. In the early sixties, Ginsberg threw himself into the
hippie scene. He and Timothy Leary worked together to publicize Leary’s new discovery,
the psychedelic drug LSD, and Ginsberg attempted to turn on every famous cultural
figure in his address book, including Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline, Dizzy Gillespie,
Thelonius Monk, Robert Lowell and Jack Kerouac (whose cranky response sent Timothy
Leary on his first bum trip).

As a famous American poet, Ginsberg was able to attain audiences with important
political figures all over the world, and during the 60’s he took advantage of this
repeatedly. He pissed off one important official after another, causing furors in India,
getting kicked out of Cuba and Prague, and annoying America’s right wing to no end. He
was a familiar bushy-bearded figure at protests against the Vietnam War, and his
willingness to state his controversial views in public was an important factor in the
development of the revolutionary state of mind that America developed during the
1960’s.

The list of 60’s events that Ginsberg played an important part in is almost unbelievably
huge. He participated in Ken Kesey’s Acid Test Festivals in San Francisco, and helped
Kesey break the ice between the San Francisco hippies and the antagonistic Hell’s
Angels. In the summer of 1965 Ginsberg made a seminal trip to London with several
other Beat figures. Their reading at the Royal Albert Hall signalled the beginning of the
London underground scene, based at the UFO Club, from which bands like Pink Floyd
and the Soft Machine would emerge. Bob Dylan often cited Ginsberg as one of the few

literary figures he could stand. Ginsberg can be seen standing in the alley in the
background of Dylan’s 1965 ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ video, and would later play a
major part in Dylan’s 1977 film ‘Renaldo and Clara.’ Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Michael
McClure led the crowd in chanting ‘OM’ at the San Fransisco Be-In in 1967. Ginsberg,
Burroughs, Jean Genet and Terry Southern were key figures at the Chicago Democratic
Convention antiwar protests in 1968. One of the only radical events of the Sixties that
Ginsberg was not a part of was the Stonewall gay uprising, and Ginsberg showed up at
the site the next day to offer his support.

In 1970 Ginsberg met the controversial Tibetan guru Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.
Ginsberg would soon accept Trungpa as his personal guru. He and poet Anne Waldman
joined to create a poetry school, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, at
Trungpa’s Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

In the early eighties, Ginsberg even joined the punk rock movement, appearing on the
Clash’s ‘Combat Rock’ album and performing with them on stage.

Ginsberg carried on an active social schedule until his death on April 5, 1997. He never
moved away from his humble apartment in the poetry-rich streets of New York City’s
Lower East Side, and would constantly be seen at local readings and multicultural
gatherings, either on a stage or in a crowd. He was one of my favorite living writers, and
yet I personally grew so accustomed to seeing him sitting a few benches from me at
readings that I stopped noticing. Now that he’s dead these moments take on a broader
dimension in my memory.

I spoke to him at length only once; you can read about it here.

I also saw him read poetry countless times, but it never stopped being a unique
experience. He was a truly and simply free soul on stage, clinking little finger cymbals
and barking weirdly melodic chants with an impish smile behind his graying beard and
thick glasses. I particularly remember seeing him at a Carnegie Hall benefit for Tibet
House, where performers like Paul Simon and Philip Glass received polite applause from
the well-dressed crowd. Ginsberg wandered out looking like a bearded shtetl shoemaker
and began croaking a weird and hilarious rant about meditation. The crowd loosened up
for the first time, laughing at his Zen jokes, and they finally gave him the biggest
applause of the night.

(One good way to experience this poet’s utter weirdness today is to listen to his music.
Songs like “Birdbrain” and “Gospel Noble Truths” are two of the more bizarrely
rewarding. But don’t play this stuff at a party unless you want everybody to go home.)

There is also now an official Allen Ginsberg website.

The first great thing about Ginsberg was his refusal to be embarrassed or to deny himself.
And the other great thing was his poetry, which spoke in so strong a voice that his talent
could not be denied.

How I Met Ginsberg

http://www.allenginsberg.org/

Let’s end this with a recitation from Blake, which is how Ginsberg used to end his poetry
readings.

ll The Hills Echoed

(I asked Stephen Scobie if he knew the name of the Blake poem Ginsberg often chanted
at readings. This is what he sent me back. — Levi Asher)

Interpolated from poems in “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of
Experience” by William Blake

“Nurse’s Song”

When the voices of children are heard on the green
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast
And everything else is still.

“Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down
And the dews of night arise;
Come, come, leave off play, and let us away
Till the morning appears in the skies.”

“No, no, let us play, for it is yet day
And we cannot go to sleep;
Besides, in the sky the little birds fly
And the hills are all cover’d with sheep.”

“Well, well, go & play till the light fades away
And then go home to bed.”
The little ones leaped & shouted & laugh’d
And all the hills echoed.

When the voices of children are heard on the green
And whisp’rings are in the dale,
The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind,
My face turns green and pale.

Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down,
And the dews of night arise;
Your spring & your day are wasted in play,
And your winter and night in disguise.

(Allen Ginsberg)

http://www.litkicks.com/Texts/BlakeHills.html

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Literary Kicks

Literary Kicks

• ‘This Is The Beat Generation’ by John Clellon Holmes

This Is The Beat Generation
Lost, Beat and Hip
The First Trip — New York To Denver to San Francisco to L.A.
The Second Trip — Virginia to NY to New Orleans to San Francisco
The Third Trip — New York to Denver to San Francisco and Back Again
The Fourth Trip — New York to Denver to Mexico
The Wrap-Up
From ‘On The Road’ by Jack Kerouac
 ll The Hills Echoed
Interpolated from poems in “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience” by William Blake