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THE
BEATS : AUTHORSHIPS, LEGACIES
By A. Robert Lee
Reviewed by Jim Burns
Reception in intellectual circles was generally hostile.
“Know-nothing bohemians”, sneered Norman Podhoretz in
Partisan Review, and not
many academics seemed sympathetic to Beat writing. Thomas Parkinson
was an exception in the
Nor was the literary establishment enthusiastic about the arrival of
the Beats. Cyril Connolly and Philip Toynbee both wrote dismissive
reviews of Lawrence Lipton’s
The Holy Barbarians, though it was admittedly a book that easily
lent itself to being ridiculed because of its outlandish claims
about Beat aims and achievements. And A.Alvarez was always more than
happy to attack Ginsberg and the others for allegedly clinging
together for companionship because their work had little credibility
otherwise. And that may have been the least of their many sins in
his eyes. I’ve used a few British examples, but there’s no reason to
think that the situation was essentially any different in the
How things have changed. There is now something of a mini-industry
in Beat studies, with journals devoted to examining the poems and
novels, degrees to be earned with earnest dissertations, and local
and international conferences at which the dedicated gather to
exchange information and ideas. I’m not dismissing such endeavours.
As a non-academic with a long-standing involvement in writing about
specific aspects of the Beat experience, I’ve hovered around the
fringes of this world without wanting to be overwhelmed by it.
Still, I can’t help thinking that there is a certain amount of
amusement (or is it bemusement?) to be had in recalling all those
little magazines and small-press publications that we struggled to
obtain (and sell, if one was involved in their production) currently
being traded at high prices or preserved in special collections.
I have to admit that I now back away from many books about the
Beats. They simply can’t re-create how exciting it was to wait for
the latest issue of Evergreen
Review or Big Table
or The Outsider to flop
through the letterbox, or to get new books from Totem Press,
Auerhahn Press, and City Lights, And to receive letters from the
poet and novelist Gilbert Sorrentino, the poet and editor Paul
Carroll, and the essayist and anthologist Seymour Krim. They were
all friendly and informative when I got in touch with them, perhaps
because it seemed essential then for people to make contact.
And it wasn’t for the purpose of furthering academic careers.
We just wanted to know what was going on. The Beats weren’t the only
game in town, and there was a lot of mixing among the players. The
whole range of what was referred to as The New American Writing was
worth looking into, even if it didn’t always in the end appeal. I
never could get to grips wIth Charles Olson, John Ashbery, or
Michael McClure.
The thoughts expressed above were triggered by reading A Robert
Lee’s informative The Beats:
Authorships, Legacies, which displays an enthusiasm for its
subject that is not always found in academic surveys. He seems to
genuinely like the work of most of the writers he discusses, and he
doesn’t restrict himself to a handful of familiar names, or a few
well-known books. He usefully roams around the world of the Beats
and demonstrates how varied it was. It can’t be reduced to a limited
area of activity.
Lee’s opening chapter, in which he races through “Beat Origins and
Circuits, 1940s to 1960s”, offers a wide-ranging survey of how the
Beats, the major names at least, came together, what their ideas
were, and where they met up in print. Little magazines and small
presses were of key importance in disseminating work by Beat
writers, and they began to flourish in the late-1950s and
early-1960s, not only in
Lee also has notes on several anthologies which, he suggests, had
important roles to play in drawing attention to the Beats. One of
them, The Beat Generation and
the Angry Young Men, certainly had an influence
in terms of giving some people a taste for the Beats, though
retrospective views tended to distance them from what were claimed
to be dissident voices in Britain. It was hard to see what
conventional wrters like Kingsley Amis and John Braine had in common
with Kerouac and Carl Solomon. And even in the American section,
some of the writers were quick to disown Beat connections.
Chandler Brossard’s Who Walk
in Darkness is sometimes said to be an early Beat novel, but has
more to do with 1940s
I think it’s worth stressing that, as Lee points out, most of the
Beats, if asked, declined to think of themselves as Beats. They
always spoke well of their fellow-poets and novelists, but
Ferlinghetti, Snyder, Burroughs were quick to deny the Beat label.
Gregory Corso almost laughed it away. The poet Jack Micheline was
often linked to the Beats, but identified more with an older
bohemian tradition, as exemplified by the likes of Vachel Lindsay
and Maxwell Bodenheim. It was one reason why I was drawn to his
work. In general, it’s only necessary to briefly scan the work of
the Beat writers to realise that they differed widely in how they
wrote.
1960 was a key year for anthologies, with
The New American Poetry,
Beat Coast East, Beatitude
Anthology, The Beat
Scene, and The Beats
all being in the bookshops. I always liked these collections because
they didn’t only feature Beats even when that word was in their
titles, so it was possible to pick up on some interesting writers
generally from their contents. Lee says that
Beatitude Anthology was
one of those that “helped point Beat towards canonisation and
classroom”, but I hope it’s stressed in the classroom that a lot of
the poems in it were not very noteworthy.
I don’t think most poems in any context (magazine, anthology,
individual collection) are all that wonderful. You need to be
dedicated to keep reading them.
Poems like “Mexico 5 ‘59” by Marc, and “Lover” by Jo, both in
the Beatitude Anthology,
might have some sociological interest, and are useful as
examples of what minor Beats got up to, but they don’t have a great
deal else to recommend them.
It may not be strictly related to Beat literature, but then again it
perhaps is, when Lee says that “the original 1920s meaning of
hipster was one who carried a hip flask of booze”. I’ve come across
a few definitions of hip and hipster over the years, though not that
one. There used to be a suggestion (stemming from a 1930s Cab
Calloway record) that it derived from the practice of lying on one’s
hip when smoking opium. The most likely explanation, however,
emanates from research by David Dalby who found that the Wolof tribe
of
Lee proceeds to deal with the leading Beat writers – Ginsberg,
Kerouac, Burroughs, Corso, Ferlinghetti, John Clellon Holmes,
Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, and Herbert Huncke (a curious
inclusion, and perhaps there because of his influence on some of the
others rather than his literary talents). His comments on their work
are brisk and astute, though he rarely raises questions about its
quality. How much of Ginsberg’s poetry after the 1950s and into the
early-1960s was really good? And wasn’t it sometimes true that
Burroughs could be repetitive and a little bit of his writing was
often preferable to reading it in bulk? Isn’t Corso likely to be
best-remembered for his fine poem, “Marriage” and a few like “Poets
Hitch-hiking on the Highway” and “Birthplace Revisited”, rather than
those where he adopted a lofty tone and tried to seem significant?
And has John Clellon Holmes’s jazz novel,
The Horn, retained the
qualities some people initially thought it had? What about Kerouac,
whose writing could be variable? He wasn’t always a pleasure to
read. Old Angel Midnight
is just hard work.
It might just come down to personal preferences, but it’s worth
asking the questions. Incidentally, Lee refers to an article called
“West Coast Rhythms” by Richard Eberhart that he says appeared in
The New York Review of Books
in 1956. But that publication only started in the 1960s, and the
piece in question appeared in the
New York Times Book Review.
Lee gets it right in his notes for the Ginsberg chapter.
There are useful observations on women writers who qualify for an
appearance in the Beat category, and it’s good to see Diane di Prima
receiving attention. It could have been pointed out that memoirs of
life among the Beats by Carolyn Cassady, Joyce Johnson, Bonnie
Bremser, Hettie Jones, and others often give a truer account of what
it was like than most of those we had, whether in fact or fiction,
from their male companions. A minor novel like Mimi Albert’s
The Second Story Man also
provides a picture of how women were treated by male bohemians. The
men were usually concerned to create myths about their personalities
and activities, but the women, on the whole, told it as it was. I’ve
never been sure about di Prima’s
Memoirs of a Beatnik, but
it was written for Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press, so allowances
should be made for its sexual confessions and their truthfulness.
It’s a personal memory, but I met Carolyn Cassady a few times and
corresponded with her. She was a lady with sophisticated tastes, and
told me that she didn’t particularly care for most Beat writing.
Black Beats are dealt with in the lives and publications of Leroi
Jones (Amiri Baraka as he later became), Ted Joans, and Bob Kaufman.
I think with Leroi Jones the Beat aspect is best covered in his
earlier poems, and his activities, shared with Hettie Jones and
Diane di Prima, with the publications,
Yugen and
The Floating Bear. Ted
Joans was a livewire who I came across in
Mentioning Kaufman makes me think that one aspect of the lives of
some of the Beats that isn’t often looked at is their early
involvement in forms of radical politics. Kaufman had been an
activist in the National Maritime Union which, in the 1940s, had a
largely communist leadership. Gary Snyder had a background
influenced to a degree by IWW (Industrial Workers of the World)
legends, John Clellon Holmes admitted to Marxist-leanings in the
1940s, Carl Solomon had joined the Communist Political Association
(the American Communist Party under a different name), Lawrence
Ferlinghetti was interested in European anarchist-bohemian
traditions, Jack Micheline, who could come across like a proletarian
poet in the 1930s style, involved himself in a small radical group
for a time, and Stuart Perkoff (based in Venice West, Los Angeles,
and not mentioned by Lee) had flirted with communism at one stage.
Even the conservative Kerouac had edged around left-wing ideas, as
he owned up to in his idiosyncratic way in
Vanity of Dulouz: “It was
great. In those days we were all pro-Lenin, or pro-whatever,
Communists”. The point I’m making is that when they drifted away
from formal politics they moved to bohemia and the Beat and not to
middle-class conformity.
I quite admired Lee’s book, and I should add that he performs a
handy service in attempting to show how the Beat influence carries
on through writers who came along later, and in popular music. It
does occur to me to wonder what Kerouac would have made of the music
that younger Beat enthusiasts enjoy? Lee mentions some little-known
figures, such as Martin Matz. His book,
In the Seasons of My Eye:
Selected Writings 1953-2001 is of interest not so much for its
literary qualities, but for indicating how someone on the fringes of
the Beat movement lived and wrote. I do think that characters like
Matz would have been around, anyway, Beat or no Beat, and would have
just been described as bohemians. There are a few books that I wish
Lee had looked into: Kerouac’s
Maggie Cassidy,
Holmes’s Get Home
Free, and Lew Welch’s
Ring of Bone: Collected Poems 1950-1971 are among them.
Maggie Cassidy is
mentioned, but only in passing.
But this is not a complaint and I suppose everyone has
fond memories of reading books they would like to see
better-acknowledged.
The Beats: Authorships, Legacies
is extremely useful from the point of view of not only delivering a
swift summation of Beat writing in general, but also for providing a
great deal of information about a wide variety of publications
relating to the Beats. It has much to offer both for its commentary
and its factual details.
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