Many tried to copy them, but the best they were able to achieve were embarrassing replicas of the originals. The Beat Generation was an unique event - or, in other words, it was a “moment in time” that the universe will probably never provide again, an intersection of characters and circumstances that met thanks to true cosmic luck. And that obviously helped changing the world.
Many tried to copy them, but the best they were able to achieve were embarrassing replicas of the originals. The Beat Generation was an unique event - or, in other words, it was a “moment in time” that the universe will probably never provide again, an intersection of characters and circumstances that met thanks to true cosmic luck. And that obviously helped changing the world.
“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 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.” Said by Sal Paradise in the opening lines of the nowadays more than famous On The Road. Written by Jack Kerouac, author of the seminal novel of Beat’s Generation counterculture. In On The Road, Kerouac tells not only a story that would end up defining a group and a generation, but also traces the profiles - the book is a roman à clef where the main characters are Kerouac himself and his compangons de route (intellectually and literally speaking) and other names - of the great protagonists in a movement that, although reasonably ephemeral, impacted in an indelible way the history of the 20th century in the American popular culture, which, by extent, means that it left scars, traces, descent, inspirations and references in the ocidental culture that lasted until this day. “There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars”, this was the group’s motto and it was like that, through these words and also through the voice of Sal Paradise, that Kerouac explained it in his bigger novel.
The counterculture
Imagine the following scenery: in the United States of America, they are established as the biggest military-economic power in the planet, there is a generation lost in post-war times, in the aftermath of a mass destruction - World War II - that impacted the world and caused more than 100 million deaths in Europe. This is about a youth seeking a new direction and, at the same time, on the top of a new era in which technology, with all its comforts, was near, and also sexual revolution and music explosion would come to open social (and economic) paths for that to happen. There was a new world ready to happen and, before that, even more urgent, there was a new world ready to be conceived. If all directions were possible, also all abysms were available, with its pitfalls of direct access to novelty, facilitation and what we may disdainfully and inaccurately call nihilism (because the search for a meaning in life has its B-side, which is not finding any meaning at all).
Let’s talk about finding the meaning in life. Counterculture is a concept popularised in the 60s and that was characterised by the creation of ideals and schools of thought that focused a new way of being in the world. Already then it was about pointing out the materialistic excesses and the risks associated with a consumerist society, that was leaving behind its human identity, its spirituality - not to be confused with religion, even because these were not, in any way, conservative movements - and its connection to the universe, existence and a vast terminology that, when counted without caution, may result in a dangerous listing of seeming clichés. However, it is important not to diminish the role of this movements - the such countercultures - in the change of paradigms (social, political, artistic, spiritual), mainly in the Western world during what remained of the 20th century and what would come to follow, leaving echoes and repercussions to be found until our days.
Pioneers amongst these post-war countercultures in the United States, the Beat Generation emerged, like many others that followed, from of a group of intellectuals in college that made use of what was learnt, read and studied in order to create a world somewhat different to what had been, a few years ago, almost the most barbarian breakdown: through war. Columbia University, in New York, was the perfect campus: cosmopolitan, it received in just one go, around the end of the Second World War, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Lucien Carr, besides the already mentioned and quoted Jack Kerouac. The name “Beat Generation” will have been coined by Kerouac himself, in 1948, in conversation with the writer John Clellon Holmes, author of Go, a book known by many as “the first beat novel”. Kerouac will have used the saying, on a first approach, to describe a “beaten”, “tired” or “shaken” generation. Later, the writer will have better defined the limits of his own expression, adding a set of secondary meanings and adjacent connotations, for example, referencing upbeat, that points towards a completely opposite way: good energies, good vibes, optimism, joy, harmony. We have, therefore, a name whose definition is not only conflicting but even ambiguous. After all, which of these variations will be the closest to its real meaning? In normal circumstances, we would say that the truth lies in the middle. But here it will be anything but that: the truth will lie on those two opposites, the optimism of a generation with all the novelty, all the hope, and a new ambition ahead, at the same time it debates itself with moral dilemmas, drastic changes in paradigms and the undeniable fear of arriving new times, after a traumatic and devastating event whose wounds would take several decades to heal.
Anti-conservatism was something close to the group and common to each of its members. The Beat elements see themselves as anti-academics, even though many of their first ideas came precisely from a reaction to academia and to the then existing dogmas - what would make them, as a rule, also academics. But let’s not lose ourselves in the midst of useless debates: there was a system, there was a group of brilliant young people, whose personalities and thoughts were seasoned with the most unstoppable mixture of all - the generational dissatisfaction (many years later, another underground figure would come to define this feeling: teenage angst - it would be Kurt Cobain, but we were not meant to mix grunge with Beat Generation, so let us forget this part) with the optimism of searching for a new spirituality.
Sex, crimes and jazz
There is a popular figure important, or even indispensable, for the Beat Generation - Kerouac would even say that the original beat generation expression came from him - that, unlike the other members of the group, was not a student at Columbia University. By the contrary: Herbert Huncke was a small criminal that wandered around the Times Square area. Born in Massachusetts and raised in Chicago, Huncke went living to the streets of New York after some troubled teenage years. After his parents divorce, he started using hard drugs and ended up homeless. In Manhattan, right at the heart of the big apple, he was in control of the area where he performed - minor thefts, various scams, deceits and frauds, drug traffic, prostitution businesses - thereby gaining the nickname Mayor of the 42nd Street. During World War II, he landed on Normandy. He was, at the time, in the merchant Navy. He saw what few had seen. When he returned to America, he came back to the 42nd Street and it was there that he met Burroughs and his friends. Huncke’s influence on the group was immense. Burroughs, mostly, showed a great interest for the life of a misfit - and by “misfit” we mean criminal, literally: thefts, escapes, traffic and drug use, all of these activities from the underworld intrigued him. So it comes as no surprise that, among his biggest works (and many will highlight, before all others, The Naked Lunch) we find The Electronic Revolution (a kind of an essay which resorts to extravagant literary techniques, like collage), in which Burroughs entertains by describing, with chaos and detail, technical ways to ruin organisations as we know them.
Burroughs is perhaps, of the entire Beat Generation, the most libertarian. However, the charms of the marginal life attracted the entire group, mainly when it came to consuming hard drugs, a department where the Beat was specialised in. The use of opiates, in some cases leading to dependency and related problems - perhaps we find here one of the reasons why Sal Paradise’s wife wanted to leave him -, was recurrent among the group. Besides alcohol, of course, and also weed, the main Beat members consumed frequently benzedrine, morphine and psychedelic drugs, that went from LSD to ayahuasca. Drug use was many times related to the attendance of jazz clubs, something that the members where fans of, particularly Kerouac, for who figures like Billie Holiday were god-like - in On The Road, the relationship of the writers with jazz is quite explicit (and it matters to remember that the peak of the Beat Generation happens in the transition from the 40s to the 50s, therefore, even before the success and massification of new musical waves in rock’n’roll and others). The use of drugs served also two other purposes: artistic inspiration - and is probably important to add here to the initial Beat Generation definition, besides its hard core of writers in Columbia, the name of the painter Jackson Pollock - was one of them; spiritual search was another. If, in the arts, results were diversified, as well as the levels of success, in spirituality, the result originated common points: the appreciation for Nature and an affinity to the spiritual philosophies of Far East, particularly Buddhism and Taoism, common to main elements of the Beat.
Another relevant aspect to the way of being and to the philosophy - if that is what we might call it - of the Beat Generation is sexuality. Free love, sex without limits nor prejudice, complete liberty, even libertinage, well, all of a series of concrete insults to the Christian principles that guided and controlled a very conservative, very traditional regarding its habits and appearances, America. In the Beat Generation, sexual orientation could be an enigma, like in the cases of Ginsberg and Burroughs, whose bisexual practices became even harder for fitting them under strict labels. But also, what does that matter for? Mentioning sexuality is only important for portraying how, once again and in several sectors, the Beat Generation was positioned in the field opposite to the system, in the “wrong” side of the rules.
Emerge and succumb
The goal was to travel, to continue a journey, down the road. It is not a metaphor nor an easy allusion to Kerouac’s title: the Beat Generation spread and reached other territories, it did not stayed in New York. Jack Kerouac arrived to the Pacific through the Northwest of the United States, from the states of Oregon and Washington. Allen Ginsberg, in his turn, arrived to San Francisco, where he integrated what was named as San Francisco Renaissance, a circle of poets who had in common with Ginsberg a series of principles and shared conducts. From all this way of being and of being seen, of creating and of facing life, resulted a series of works, some bigger, others smaller. Herbert Huncke launched, in 1965 and with modest success, Huncke’s Journal. Later, already in 1987, he would published the autobiography Guilty of Everything. Lucien Carr was mostly an editor, besides being a fascinating and passionate character - passionate, for example, for the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, which would ended up disseminating and influencing the whole group. Ginsberg and Burroughs published several works of great success. Two of the biggest from Burroughs were already mentioned, but there is more: the style and technique of the cut-up were marks that the author left for posteriority. Ginsberg has poetry as the first mark he left. We must highlight that, at the beginning of their careers, Burroughs and Ginsberg signed The Yage Letters (1963), a collection of letters.
The way of life and the works published at a time of social agitation in which America searched for a new light and new references ended up, naturally, creating results. What was a counterculture would end up emerging and right away succumbing in the foam of days, being appropriated by the Beatnik culture, a superficial reviewing of the Beat Generation principles and its way of being in life and in the world. That revisionism and, why not, that appropriation resulted in a species of representation, caricature, of what the Beat Generation had created, defended and developed, from literature to spirituality, always on the less visible and less conventional side of society. The heritage they left, however, was quickly processed and transformed into symbols - a way of dressing, the use of drugs, the mannerisms, a pseudo and vain intellectuality. In the end, all was transformed into tics and props to serve the masses - the same masses that, before it all, made that group of free-spirited boys embrace a different way of being in life and in the world. But is it not always this that happens when we pulled something magical from the underground to make it mainstream?
Originally translated from The Underground Issue, published October 2021.Full credits and stories on the print issue.
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