The phrase "Beat generation" arose out of a specific
conversation between Jack Kerouac and John
Clellon Holmes in 1948. They were discussing the
nature of generations, recollecting the glamour of the
Lost Generation, and Kerouac said, "Ah, this is
nothing but a beat generation." They talked about
whether it was a "found generation" (as Kerouac
sometimes called it), an "angelic generation", or some
other epithet. But Kerouac waved away the question
and said beat generation - not meaning to name the
generation, but to unname it.
Jack Clellon Holmes's celebrated article in late 1952
in the New York Times Magazine carried the
headline title "This Is the Beat Generation." That
caught the public eye. Then Kerouac annonymously
published a fragment of On the Road called "Jazz of
the Beat Generation," and that reinforced the
curiously poetic phrase. So that's the early history of
the term.
Herbert Hunke, author of The Evening Sun Turned
CrimsonHowl). Or the word would be used as in
conversation: "Would you like to go to the Bronx
Zoo?" "Nah, man I'm too 'beat,' I was up all night."
So, the original street usage meant exhausted, at the
bottom of the world, looking up or out, sleepless,
wide-eyed, perceptive, rejected by society, on your
own, streetwise. Or, as it once implied, "beat" meant
finished, completed, in the dark night of the soul or in
the cloud of unknowing. It could mean open, as in the
Whitmanesgue sense of "openness," equivalent to
humility. So "beat" was interpreted in various circles
to mean emptied out, exhausted, and at the same
time wide-open and receptive to vision.
A third meaning of "beat," as in beatific, was publicly
articulated in 1959 by Kerouac, to counteract the
abuse of the term in the media (where it was being
interpreted as meaning "beaten completely," a "loser,"
without the aspect of humble intelligence, or of "beat"
as "the beat of drums" and " the beat goes on" - all
varying mistakes of interpretation or etymology).
Kerouac (in various interviews and lectures) was
trying to indicate the correct sense of the word by
pointing out its connection to words like "beatitude"
and "beatific" - the necessary beatness or darkness
that precedes opening up to light, egolessness, giving
room for religious illumination.
A fourth meaning that accumulated around the word
is found in the phrase "Beat generation literary
movement." This phrase reffered to a group of friends
who had worked together on poetry, prose, and
cultural conscience from the mid-forties until the term
became popular nationally in the late fifties. The
group consisted of Kerouac, Neal Cassady
(Kerouac's prototype hero of On the Road), William
Burroughs, Herbert Huncke, John Clellon Holmes
(author of Go, The Horn, and other books), and
myself. We met Carl Solomon and Phillip Lamantia in
1948, encountered Gregory Corso in 1950, and first
saw Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter Orlovsky in
1954.
By the mid-fifties, this smaller circle - through natural
affinity of modes of thought, literary style, or
planetary perspective - was augmented in friendship
and literary endeavor by a number of writers in San
Francisco, including Michael McClure, Gary Snyder,
Phillip Whalen, and by 1958 some other powerful
but lesser-known poets, such as Bob Kaufman, Jack
Micheline, and Ray Bremser, and the better-known
black poet LeRoi Jones. All of us accepted the term
"beat" at one time or another, humorously or
seriously, but sympathetically, and were included in a
survey of Beat manners, morals, and literature by
Life magazine in a lead article in 1959 by Paul
O'Neil, and by the journalist Alfred Aronowitz in a
twelve-part series entitled "The Beat Generation" in
the New York Post...."
Check them all out here.
Dean stands in the back, saying, "God! Yes!--and clasping his hands in prayer and sweating. "Sal, Slim knows time,
he knows time." Slim sits down at the piano and hits two notes, two Cs, then two more, then one, then two, and
suddenly the big burly bass-player wakes up from a reverie and realizes Slim is playing "C-Jam Blues" and he slugs in
his big forefinger on the string and the big booming beat begins and everybody starts rocking and Slim looks just as
sad as ever, and they blow jazz for half and hour, and then Slim goes mad and grabs the bongos and plays
tremendous rapid Cubana beats and yells crazy things in Spanish, in Arabic, in Peruvian dialect, in Egyptian, in every
language he knows, and he knows innumerable languages.
- Jack Kerouac
"Not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night".
The method must be purest meat
and no symbolic dressing
actual visions & actual prisons
as seen then and now.
Prisons and visions presented
with rare descriptions
correponding exactly to those
of Alcatraz and Rose.
A naked lunch is natural to us,
we eat reality sandwiches.
But allegories are so much lettuce.
Don't hide the madness.
- Allen Ginsberg
"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"
- Jack Kerouac "On the Road"
"So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river Pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty, I think of Dean Moriarty".
-Last Line from On The Road
This is a story of a real life encounter that my father had with Neil Cassady, Dean Moriarty from "On The Road".
In the 60s in San Francisco I was a young jazz saxophonist living in the cheap hotels of North Beach and I often sat in at a club called Soulville at Webster and McAllister Sts. Neal came there several times with an ex-fashion model turned methadrine freak named Mad Marie, who had lived in my hotel (The Swiss American). Trumpeter, Barbara Donald (then wife of Sonny Simmons) and I were playing after taking some harassment of a racial and gender nature from the regulars. Barbara was burning, amazing everybody and Neal was jumping around yelling. When I started to play he jumped on the bandstand yelling, "Go!! Go!!" in my ear. Later a group of musicians, including Neal were standing in front of the place huddled in their coats against the chill fog night. Neal suddenly bolted running full speed up towards Fillmore St sprinting all the way to Shelton's Blue Mirror, touched the door and ran full out all the way back, skidding to a halt with the group of men, not even breathing hard and offering no explanation, continued his previous conversation. Later one of the guys told me "You know, that guy was Dean Moriarty" in On the Road. I was amazed since the book had a huge effect on me. Neal was a very nice guy, full of compliments and listened to every one with great intensity and those expressive Groucho eyebrows going. Ironically, years later, some movie casting guy came up to me at the LA Musician Union where I was rehearsing a quartet, asked if I had any acting experience and would I come to a downtown LA address where they were filming a movie called "Heartbeat" about Neal and Carolyn Cassidy and Jack Kerouac. They needed an alto saxophonist for a scene where Neal jumps up on stage yelling him on to greater heights. I took my son, went downtown to an old Victorian house and there were John Heard and Sissy Spaceck on the porch. Some casting guy came out, asked me to turn around slowly and said, "He's too tall!" I tried to explain that Neal had jumped on my real bandstand in real life, to a resounding indifference. They asked me if I knew an alto player, goateed, who was shorter. I did. My friend Don Garcia got the gig, made $800 too. Oh well!
-Loren Pickford
Marcel Proust was born on July 10th, 1871 in Auteuil, France, a suburb of Paris. His father, a doctor well known for his work in epidermiology, was married to a stockbroker's daughter of Jewish descent. Marcel was sick from the time he was born, and from the age of nine began suffering from severe asthma, which harmed his chances for a conventional professional career.
In the 1890's he contributed sketches to magazines such as "Le Figaro" and "Le Banquet." He published "Pleasures and Days," a collection of short stories, poetry, and essays, in 1896. His very active social life led to acquaintances with members of the wealthy and aristocratic classes. In 1894, he began an affair with a pianist, Reynaldo Hahn, which prompted him to realize his homosexual tendencies, a realization that came with anguish.
In 1898, Emile Zola published a letter defending Colonel Dreyfus,who was facing charges of treason. Proust became known as "the first Dreyfusard," an identification he welcomed. By the time Dreyfus was cleared of the charges, Proust's social life was already shattered due to anti-Semitism and political hatred.
Proust spent time in a sanitorium in 1905, after the death of his mother. His health failing, he withdrew himself from society and devoted his time to writing. In 1913 he published a piece called
"Swann's Way," which would turn out to be the first installment of a larger series that would become his masterwork.
Another installment, "Within a Budding Grove," was published in 1919. This won the Goncourt Prize and, along with it, instanteous fame and recognition. "The Guermantes Way" and "Sodom and Gomorrah" were published in his lifetime before Proust passed away on November 18th, 1922. The reamining volumes in what was to become known as "In Search of Lost Time" (also known as "Remembrance of Things Past") were published shortly after his death: "The Captive" in 1923, "The Fugitive" in 1925, and, finally, "Time Regained," in 1927.
In his autobiographical novel "Junky", William S. Burroughs
introduces himself into New York's heroin underworld by selling a
gun and a supply of morphine to two men named Roy and Herman.
He describes Herman:
"Waves of hostility and suspicion flowed out from his
large brown eyes like some sort of television broadcast.
The effect was almost like a physical impact. The man
was small and very thin, his neck loose in the collar of
his shirt. His complexion faded from brown to a mottled
yellow, and pancake make-up had been heavily applied in
an attempt to conceal a skin eruption. His mouth was
drawn down at the corners in a grimace of petulant
annoyance."
This was Herbert Huncke, who was born into a middle-class family
in Greenfield, Massachusetts on January 9, 1915 and grew up in
Chicago. As a teenager he was drawn to the underbelly of city life,
and quickly began learning how to support himself as a
professional drifter and small-time thief. A small and unthreatening
lawbreaker, he embodied a certain honest-criminal ethic so purely
that Burroughs and his friends came to love him for it. Jack
Kerouac wrote adoringly of him (as Elmer Hassel) in On The Road,
and Allen Ginsberg shared his New York City apartment with him,
even though he realized Huncke and his junkie friends were storing
stolen goods there. This phase ended in a dramatic police bust on
Utopia Parkway in Bayside, Queens, during which Ginsberg
frantically phoned Huncke and told him to "clean out the place"
before the cops got there. Ginsberg arrived at his apartment
moments ahead of the cops to find that Huncke had taken him
literally. He'd tidied up and swept the floor, but the stolen goods
were not moved. Ginsberg might not have been amused at the
time, but there's a certain Zen purity to this kind of thing that
makes it clear why Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac all liked
Huncke so much.
Huncke was said to have introduced Kerouac to the term 'beat,'
which Kerouac then used to describe his generation to John Clellon
Holmes. Huncke does seem to have a way with words, because he
later attempted to become a writer, and a story called 'Elsie John,'
reprinted in 'The Beat Reader,' is surprisingly good. Still, I think it's
pushing it a bit that Huncke taught writing workshops at Ginsberg's
Naropa Institute poetry school. I wouldn't go to Herbert Huncke to
learn how to write anymore than I'd go to Allen Ginsberg to learn
how to be a thief.
But his prose can be effective and fascinating, and there has been
an increasing interest in Huncke as a writer in recent years. A
superb collection of Huncke's best writings, 'The Herbert Huncke
Reader,' was published by William Morrow in September 1997, and
filmmaker Laki Vazakas's cinema verite documentary 'Huncke and
Louis' records for history the paradoxical life of a celebrated literary
drug addict in old age. This film includes some heartbreaking
scenes of the breakdown and death of Huncke's longtime friend
and lover Louis Cartwright, who was unable to walk the line of the
addict's life as gracefully as Huncke, and dies a lonely death.
Huncke, the survivor, sits on the edge of a bed and sobs -- and
then goes on surviving.
I was never introduced to Herbert Huncke but I did see him "around
town" a bit before he died on August 8, 1996 in a New York City
hospital. Whenever I saw him, the first thought that would come
to my mind was always "this is Elmer Hassel".
Paul Bowles born Dec. 30, 1910, New York, N.Y., U.S.
died Nov. 18, 1999, Tangier, Morocco
In full Paul Frederick Bowles American-born composer, translator, and author of
novels and short stories in which violent events and psychological collapse are
recounted in a detached and elegant style. His protagonists are often Europeans or
Americans who are maimed by their contact with powerful traditional cultures.
Bowles began publishing Surrealist poetry in the Parisian magazine transition at the
age of 16. After briefly attending the University of Virginia, he traveled to Paris,
where his interests turned to music. In 1929 he returned to New York and began
studying musical composition under Aaron Copland. Bowles became a sought-after
composer, writing music for more than 30 theatrical productions and films. During
this time, he also became a member of the loose society of literary expatriates in
Europe and North Africa and started writing short stories. In the late 1940s, he and
his wife, writer Jane Bowles, settled in Tangier, Morocco, a city that became his
most potent source of inspiration. There, he wrote his first novel, The Sheltering Sky
(1949; film, 1990), a harsh tale of death, rape, and sexual obsession. It became a
best-seller and made Bowles a leading figure in the city's expatriate artistic community.