Jack Kerouac's On the Road at 50: the Beat goes on http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article5139562.ece
Jack Kerouac's hedonistic classic, On the Road, is 50. As exhibitions mark that bohemian, freewheeling novel's birthday, we sort the good, the bad and the ugly of the Beat legacy November 16, 2008 Cosmo Landesman To paraphrase Allen Ginsberg's most famous poem, Howl, I saw the best minds of the Beat generation drunk, stoned, ranting and raving. I saw these legends of American letters in verbal punch-ups and passed out on my parents' living-room floor. I once saw an old and drunken Beat poet chase a pretty young girl into the starry night, his flaccid manhood exposed and flapping like a flag of surrender. My parents are old bohemians who had known the leading figures of the Beat generation in New York in the 1950s; Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady were their playmates. "Come and run away with me, I'm a poet and I'm lonely," a drunken Kerouac once said to my mother and probably every pretty girl in Greenwich Village. The Beat generation were a small group of young writers and poets (Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg), and their friends (Neal Cassady, Herbert Hunke), who found fame in the 1950s for their work and unconventional way of life. They were rebels with plenty of causes: writing, drugs, jazz, women, sex and spirituality. They challenged the stifling conformity and consumerism of middle-class American life and planted the seeds of what became the counterculture of the 1960s. Today, when we think of the Beats, we think of the young and handsome Kerouac and his crazy sidekick Cassady, zooming back and forth across America a journey made famous by Kerouac's second novel, On the Road. Back in the late 1950s, no sane person would have imagined the Beats would still be a source of fascination in 2008. They were condemned as "obscene" and "cultural barbarians" by literary critics. Many commentators thought they were just another fad, the literary equivalent of the Hula Hoop, and destined to be forgotten. It's now 50 years since On the Road was published in Britain, and interest in the Beats is stronger than ever, both here and in America. A pulp crime novel co-authored by Kerouac and William Burroughs, And the Hippos Were Boiled Alive in Their Tanks, has just been published for the first time. Next month, the Royal Academy of Art presents an exhibition of videos, photographs and paintings called Burroughs Live, and the University of Birmingham is hosting a two-day conference on Kerouac, the Beats and post-Beats. Its star attraction will be a display of the 127ft typescript roll on which Kerouac wrote On the Road, in just three weeks. So, what exactly do we owe the Beats? Are they an important literary movement that created the template of post-war youth rebellion and modern bohemianism? Or just a bunch of overblown, macho mediocrities with a talent for self-mythologising? The Beats and literature There's no doubt that the Beats brought to American literature a welcome energy, experimental edge and openness about sex, drugs, race and criminality. They gave a voice and a validation to that alternative America of crazy, creative nonconformists, misfits and bohemians who wanted something more than the security and material comforts of suburban life. That said, the number of great writers and great books produced by the Beat generation is pretty small. (Even On the Road can be tough going for today's young readers.) It's their lives, not the literature, that fascinate their followers. Yet there's no denying their influence on the literature of our time. Good legacy: gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson and novelists William Gibson, Ken Kesey, Thomas Pynchon and Will Self. Bad legacy: the belief that opening up your mind and letting rip a stream of consciousness constitutes readable prose has produced works of tedious, self-indulgent ramblings. See Kerouac's Visions of Cody. The Beats and language They were the ones who brought the lingo of jazz musicians dig, groovy, split, man to young, white America, and thus to teen tribes the world over. Good Beat line: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness" Allen Ginsberg. Bad Beat line: "Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?" Jack Kerouac. The Beats and cinema There is a whole sub-genre known as Beat cinema made up of documentaries (see Burroughs, The Movie), avant-garde films (see John Cassavetes's Shadows) and "Beat exploitation films", featuring sex-mad, pot-smoking beatniks looking for kicks (see Beat Girl, aka Wild for Kicks). For all its avant-garde aspirations, however, Beat Cinema's biggest impact was on Hollywood. Two of its greatest stars James Dean and Marlon Brando used the raw, rebellious primitivism of the Beats in their performances. And without the Beats, we would never have had the road movie. Good legacy: Easy Rider, Wild at Heart, Thelma & Louise, Paris, Texas. Bad legacy: Smokey and the Bandit, Barfly, The Sugarland Express. The Beats and fashion One crucial reason why the Beats still hold such an important place in the iconography of youth culture is that they just look so damn cool in old photographs. Kerouac and Cassady in their jeans and sweatshirts, Burroughs in his sharp, stylish suits these are timeless looks that companies such as Gap have been keen to exploit. Good legacy: blue jeans, shades and berets. Bad legacy: goatee beards, sandals and polo neck jumpers. The Beats and music Think Beat and music, and what comes to mind is some speed-freak lunatic banging away on bongos all night. But the Beats loved jazz and tried to capture its rhythms and improvisational style in their work. Often, they read poetry to live jazz music. But their influence has been on the post-jazz generation. Good legacy: Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Tom Waits, Kurt Cobain and Bono. Bad legacy: Ginsberg singing "Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna" nonstop. The Beats and drugs The flourishing drug culture of the 1960s can be traced back to the influence of the Beats. They believed that pot, speed, peyote and mescaline offered a one-way ticket to spiritual enlightenment and a sure way of finishing that damn novel. Unfortunately, the Beats had a strong link to heroin. Once at a party, Ginsberg asked Dame Edith Sitwell if she would like some; she reputedly declined on the grounds that it gave her spots. Good legacy: On the Road finished in three weeks, thanks to plenty of Benzedrine inhalers. Bad legacy: the idea, perpetuated by Burroughs and others, that there was something cool about being a junkie. The Beats and the road For the Beats, hitting the road, by car or hitchhiking, offered all the freedom and fun a young person could want. In our age of the internet, when young people "surf the information highway", it might seem that the road has lost its romance. (Few people actually hitchhike any more.) The idea of taking the Kerouac drive across America, however, is still alive and well. Just last month, Peaches Geldof described her journey in America as her "Jack Kerouac trip". Good legacy: help to save the planet, pick up a hitchhiker if you can find one. Bad legacy: two years ago, Russell Brand followed in the footsteps of his hero, Kerouac, and went on the road in America. Plenty of verbal car crashes ensued. The Beats and outsiders The Beats were the ones who really championed the idea of nonconformity; they never met an outsider they didn't love. Their most favoured group were blacks. Kerouac suffered from a kind of colour envy. He writes of walking through the "colored" section of Denver, "wishing I was a negro. . . wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted ecstatic negroes of America". Naturally, that was before Obama. The Beats were also prone to see criminals in a romantic light, as if living outside the law gave you a kind of authenticity. Many of the Beats went in for criminal acts themselves: Burroughs would rob drunks to feed his drug habit, Cassady was a car thief, and even sweet Kerouac helped to cover up the murder of a gay man (David Kammerer) by his friend Lucien Carr. Good legacy: helped to promote a more tolerant, inclusive America. Bad legacy: helped to create the terrible idea that criminals were existential heroes. The Beats and women While the Beats had plenty of time for junkies, car thieves, murderers and con men, they didn't want to spend much time with women especially their wives. Women were expected to sit quietly and listen to the men, laugh, be sympathetic, cook and take care of the children. Men who wrote, drank and screwed everything with a pulse, such as Neal Cassady, were heroes; women who tried it were sluts and tramps. Burroughs even managed to kill his own common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, while cavalierly using her as a prop in his re-enactment of William Tell aiming for the apple. (He missed.) Yet the Beats, for all their chauvinism, begat the Beat chick, who later gave birth to the rock chick. Good legacy: Marianne Faithfull, Patti Smith, Chrissie Hynde. Bad legacy: Courtney Love, Kate Moss and Nancy Spungen, the girlfriend of Sid Vicious. The Beats today Do we have a modern equivalent of the Beat generation? Some would argue we're all a little bit Beat nowadays, having absorbed plenty of the liberal attitudes and hedonistic ways they pioneered. That Beat mix of hedonism, self-destruction and art is alive in the likes of Amy Winehouse and Pete Doherty. And you could say the blog is the perfect Beat mode of communication: a chance to pour out your feelings and thoughts without stopping for reflection. Yet most contemporary poets and writers have put away the bottle. Their lives may not fascinate generations to come, but I suspect they will be a lot more readable. And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks is published by Penguin Classics at £20; Kerouac's On the Road scroll is at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, from December 3; Burroughs Live is at the Royal Academy, W1, from December 16 . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. 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