A. D. Winans
Looks Back at the Beat Generation
Generally speaking,
counter-culture describes the values and norms of behavior of a
cultural group or subculture in conflict with those of the
cultural mainstream of the day, a visible phenomenon that
reaches critical mass and persists for some time. The Beat
Generation meets this definition.
The Beat Generation was composed
of a group of American poets and writers who first congregated
in New York and later joined their West Coast brothers and
sisters. The movement became prominent in the 1950s and 1960s.
The Beats engaged in spontaneity, passionate dialogue, open
sexuality, and experimentation with drugs. Their work reflected
this and it began to infiltrate the established literary
magazines. The influence of the Beats on postmodern literature
is undeniable.
I grew up in the 1950s, in an era
in which you were expected to be a logically thinking,
level-headed individual whose purpose was to work hard, raise a
family, and be patriotic to your country. It was a society of
rules, order, and materialism. There was little if any room for
individualistic behavior.
As the Fifties progressed, the
Beat movement began to emerge. It had its roots in New York
(Greenwich Village) and San Francisco (North Beach). The Beats
openly challenged and defied the established order. They spoke
out in opposition to what America represented, as they rebelled
against everything the Establishment stood for: the repression
of dissent in the name of militarism, racism, materialism, and
conformity.
Bob Kaufman personifies the true
meaning of the Beat spirit. He was one of the original Beat
voices to come out of the Fifties and is rightfully considered
by many to be the most influential black poet of his era, though
his poetry transcends race identification. Like many of the
Beats, he started out in New York and later found his way to San
Francisco’s North Beach. While Allen Ginsberg was reading his
poetry to large audiences, Kaufman chose another path, becoming
the undisputed street poet, who frequented the Co-existence
Bagel Shop, located on Grant and Green. His poetic technique
resembles the surreal school of poets, ranging from a powerful,
lyrical vision to the more prophetic tone found in his political
poems. Kaufman considered himself a Buddhist. He believed a poet
had a call to a higher order. He lived a life of spirituality.
He denounced materialism.
People flocked to the
Co-existence Bagel Shop in the hope of seeing him read. He
delighted the audience by jumping up on one of the tables and
reciting a newly written poem, or by reading poems from the
master poets, such as Eliot, Pound, and Blake. When he read,
there was total silence. The audience hung on his every word.
His fate was sealed, however, the day he wrote on the walls of
the Bagel Shop, “Adolph Hitler, growing tired of fooling around
with Eva Braun, and burning Jews, moved to San Francisco and
became a cop.” This was the beginning of his regularly being
harassed by the police and frequently receiving beatings at the
old Kearny Street Hall of Justice. By the late Sixties he had
fallen victim to drugs and forced shock treatments at New York’s
Bellevue Hospital and was but a shell of what he had been in the
Fifties.
The Beats were among the first to
fictionalize and embellish their lives to readers worldwide who
thrived on the experiences of the authors. By the late Fifties
they had cemented their role in the New American Counterculture
but, much to their dismay, it was their “lifestyle,” rather than
their art, that began to take center stage. What distinguished
them from ordinary malcontents was their talent and inner
conviction. They represented a large contingency of restless and
disenchanted young people around the world. But it was also a
time when the media began to mass-produce and market the “ideal”
America. The media began its drum roll to destroy a culture
revolution and turn it into a cultural fad. The word Beat began
to lose its significance as part of an artistic sub-culture and
became instead a label for anyone choosing to live simply and
humbly as a Bohemian, or who acted rebelliously. In 1958, the
word beatnik was coined by the poet Bob Kaufman to characterize
the physical allure of the Beats, instead of their social and
intellectual radicalism.
When I returned from Panama in
1958, the Beats were already beginning to move out of San
Francisco’s North Beach, migrating to places like Mexico and
Venice Beach, California. The term beatnik became the brunt of
jokes, rather than representative of a serious revolution. The
mass media depicted the only two things publishers and tycoons
wanted to exploit about the Beats: their image and their
lifestyle.
In order to comprehend the
creative surge that took place in North Beach during this time,
it is first necessary to understand the literary tradition of
San Francisco. It was only natural that the Beat movement
flourished there, where it blossomed and came to fruition. But
the truth is a literary Bohemia existed in San Francisco long
before Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and other Beat souls
came to the city.
The North Beach creative hub took
place in a six-block radius from lower to upper Grant Avenue,
centered around a large number of bars, cafés and coffee houses,
frequented by poets, artists, and jazz musicians. While Grant
Avenue was the center stage of creativity, the bevy of Beat
oriented cafés and bars actually extended from Broadway and
Columbus, and all the way to the produce district, where the
self-proclaimed king of the Beats, Big Daddy Nord, held court in
a large warehouse. Eric’s Pad, as it was known, remained open at
all hours. You could walk in any night of the week and see
blacks and whites freely mingling and dancing to the music of
bongo and conga drums. On the upstairs roof there was a string
of mattresses, with couples fornicating in full view of
onlookers, some quite agog, others blasé.
But two decades earlier, San
Francisco was already thriving with creative energy, during what
was known as the “San Francisco Renaissance,” a designation for
a range of poetic activity centered throughout the city. Kenneth
Rexroth, often referred to as the “Father of the Beats,” is also
generally considered to be the founding father of the
Renaissance. Rexroth was a prominent second-generation modernist
poet who corresponded with Ezra Pound and William Carlos
Williams. He came to the city from Chicago, where he had
operated a jazz and poetry tea room known as the Green Mask,
which housed an upstairs brothel, right in line with San
Francisco’s bawdy history. Rexroth was not only a poet and
writer but also a union organizer. He hung out on San
Francisco’s Waterfront encouraging dockworkers to become union
members.
Rexroth held regular readings in
his apartment, located over a record store in the Fillmore
District. Among the many poets who frequented the meetings was
Philip Whalen, who later appeared in Kerouac’s novels as “Ben
Fagin” and “Warren Coughlin.” The poets who attended the
meetings represented a wide range of writing styles, from the
ballads of Helen Adams to the bawdy rhymes of poet and filmmaker
James Broughton. The readings were a haven for both young and
old poets as well as visiting luminaries.
If Rexroth was the father of the
Beats, then Madeline Gleason was the founding mother. During the
1940s, both Rexroth and Gleason befriended a group of younger
Berkeley poets, including Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan.
In 1952, Dylan Thomas came to the
city and captivated a standing-room audience, which came to see
the Welshman drunkenly read his work. A year later, Lawrence
Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin opened City Lights Bookstore,
partly to finance City Lights Journal, which, at the time, was
publishing the surreal poet Philip Lamantia.
When Ginsberg came to the city in
the early Fifties it was only natural he would find his way to
Rexroth’s weekly gatherings. In 1954, Ginsberg had not yet
acknowledged his homosexuality, but this same year he met Peter
Orlovski, and the two became life partners. During this same
time, Rexroth was reading his poetry to jazz accompaniment at a
small cellar bar on Green and Columbus streets, while Jack
Spicer presided over the famous “Blabbermouth Night” at a bar
called “The Place” on upper Grant Avenue. It was around this
time that Ginsberg began writing the first lines of his epic
poem Howl. Encouraged by Kerouac, Ginsberg began searching for a
place to showcase the poem. Rexroth organized a reading at the
Six Gallery, located at Fillmore and Greenwich streets. The
reading featured Ginsberg, Snyder, Whalen, and Philip Lamantia,
with Rexroth serving as master of ceremonies. Kerouac was not on
the bill but did attend the event. The reading drew a large
crowd, with Kerouac drunkenly passing large jugs of red wine
through the audience. Ginsberg was the last poet to read and,
urged on by Kerouac, gave a passionate reading, a reading which
held the crowd spellbound and which launched him on his way to
fame.
The most important accomplishment
of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Cassady was to make rebellious young
people throughout the land aware that there were others out
there who felt the way they felt. This was expressed by Diane di
Prima, who is quoted as saying that Howl encouraged her and
others to step forward and make their voices heard. She was in
effect heralding the cause of a new clan of poets who would
become known as the Beat Generation.
The single most important event
that helped the Beats gain notoriety occurred on March 25, 1957,
when agents from the U.S. Customs Bureau seized the first
shipment of Howl and declared the book obscene. Ferlinghetti and
Shig Muro (the manager of the City Lights)) were charged with
selling obscene literature. The American Civil Liberties Union
intervened, providing free legal assistance. Writers and critics
testified on behalf of City Lights, and Judge Clayton Horn set a
precedent by ruling that if a book has “the slightest redeeming
social importance, it is protected under the First and
Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. and California Constitutions
and therefore can not be declared obscene.” This legal precedent
allowed D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry
Miller’s Tropic of Cancer to be published by Grove Press.
It’s equally important to note
the influence of jazz on the work of the Beats. Charlie Parker
and Charles Mingus were among the many jazz musicians to whom
the Beats were drawn. In the late Fifties and into the Sixties,
Jazz was central to what was happening. Wes Montgomery and Cal
Tjader were very much part of the scene. The Fillmore District,
a largely black community, was known as “Bop City,” a hangout
for musician such as Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan.
It was common to see New York
jazz musicians visiting San Francisco’s Fillmore District, and
it was here that musicians and lovers of jazz gathered in the
early hours of the morning. The Beats and bebop were like twins.
Carter Monroe points out, “When discussing the Bebop movement in
terms of Beat Literature, you are talking about the freedom it
represents.”
A great deal of Beat literature
in terms of influence is all about content and challenging
social mores. Bebop challenged the existing parameters of music.
You can see this influence in the work of Jack Kerouac and
perhaps even more so in the work of the poet Bob Kaufman. In
North Beach, Kaufman was regarded as the Bebop poet, and much of
his poetry is infused with jazz.
Today both literary critics and
academics alike recognize the Beats as legitimate poets,
writers, and artists, but the legitimacy did not come without a
cost. As is often the case, success comes with a price tag, and
so it came for some of the Beats. Many of the Beat poets were
co-opted into the system. Ginsberg applied for and received not
one but three NEA writing grants and he sold his archives to
Stanford University for over a million dollars. William
Burroughs made commercials and had a small role in a movie.
Ferlinghetti’s once avant-garde bookstore can’t be distinguished
today from other commercial bookstores, and he is second only to
Ginsberg in marketing himself, commanding thousands of dollars
for a reading. It was poets such as Jack Kerouac, Micheline,
Kaufman, Corso and Ray Bremser who remained true to the Beat
spirit right up until the time of their deaths. And while
today’s youth remain intrigued by, if not directly influenced
by, the Beat Generation, there hasn’t been a real
counter-culture revolution in the U.S. since the hippie
phenomenon, which was a youth movement that began in the U.S.
during the early 1960s and, as was the case with the Beats, soon
spread around the world.
The word hippie is said to have derived from the word “hipster”
and was initially used to describe beatniks who had moved into
San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. These people embraced
the counter-culture values of the Beat Generation, forming their
own communities, listening to Psychedelic Rock, embracing sexual
revolution, and experimenting with drugs like LSD, grass, and
peyote in order to explore alternate states of consciousness.
In 1967, a “human be-in” was
held, leading to the legendary 1967 Summer of Love and two years
later to the 1969 Woodstock Festival on the East Coast. Hippie
fashions and values had a major effect on the broader culture,
influencing popular music, film, literature, and the arts. The
hippie legacy can be observed in contemporary culture in many
forms…. from health food to music festivals to today’s sexual
mores.
I had the good fortune of
experiencing the tail end of the Beat Generation, the Post-Beat
Generation that followed and the birth and the death of the
Hippie Generation.
POEM FOR
GINSBERG
I saw the best minds of my
generation
destroyed by greed, not so starving
hysterical, naked under their fashion designer clothes
driving themselves through congested city streets
looking for non-existent parking spaces
aging hormone-driven biological clock mothers
offering their purple-veined breasts to baby suckling
zombies, in and out of public
Whose stock market-driven and laser vision perception
sipped Starbuck’s coffee under protective awnings
while watching street cops shoo off the homeless
who chatted aimlessly on their cell phones
making reservations at trendy restaurants
while whining about the quality of the wine
who fucked only by appointment, dutifully expecting
a climax in sixty seconds or less
who shopped at organic food markets looking
for eternal youth while seeking cash rebates
with no idea what to do with them
who saw the Savior while vacationing in Palm Springs
and God on Turner TV
who taught their children how to use ATM machines
while devising clever tax-evasion schemes
who gave up writing to save a tree
and claimed it as a tax deduction
who drove their cars in the bicycle lane
hoping for some excitement
who pierced their nipples cocks and tongues
wanting to be among the hip and young
who pledged their allegiance to the Almighty Dollar
while writing protest letters to their daily newspaper
Holy is the sock. Holy is Swiss cheese.
Holy is the Bank of America. Holy is cable television.
Holy is the condom. Holy is the U.N.
Holy is pop culture.
Ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching is the new
Holy Order
the holy of the unholy
the best minds of my generation
—A. D. Winans
San Francisco, California
October 5, 2008
