[2 articles] The Mad Ones
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/books/review/Leland-t.html By JOHN LELAND Published: April 10, 2009 THE BEATS A Graphic History Text by Harvey Pekar and others. Art by Ed Piskor and others. Edited by Paul Buhle 199 pp. Hill & Wang. $22 The writers of the Beat Generation had the good fortune to give themselves a name and to write extensively about their lives, in novels like Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" and William Burroughs's "Junkie," in poems like Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and, later, in memoirs like Joyce Johnson's "Minor Characters" and Hettie Jones's "How I Became Hettie Jones." Jones once said they couldn't be a generation because they could all fit in her living room, but in the popular imagination they were much more than the sum of their body parts or writings. They were a brand. When the country still considered literary writers and poets important public figures, these were literary writers and poets who came with luridly colorful lives, full of sex and drugs and cars, "the best minds of my generation," "the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live," cultural avatars who were often linked more by lifestyle considerations than by writerly ones. If they inspired lots of bad poetry set to bongos and little poetic discipline, they have even more effectively escaped disciplined literary or historical analysis. They rocked; they posed a threat to the nation's youth. Either you got them or you didn't. What could matter compared with that? "The Beats" moves this mythology into the comics realm, where it finds a nice fit. In the introduction, Harvey Pekar and the lefty historian Paul Buhle write that the book has "no pretension to the depth of coverage and literary interpretation presented by hundreds of scholarly books in many languages," adding that "no one claims this treatment to be definitive. But it is new, and it is vital." The pages that follow, mostly written by Pekar and illustrated by his frequent collaborator Ed Piskor, live up to both of those claims, while also living down to the caveats. "The Beats" is plainly celebratory. The writers and artists don't try to untangle the Beats' hazy history which is often drawn from works of fiction or to examine their writings. There are almost no quotations. But the medium provides a new angle on a familiar story, in a voice more directly empathetic than those of many prose histories. It gives the hipsters back their body language. In a book that is largely about license and the enlightened rebel, it is easy to find reflections of both in the graphic form. The panels, which are flat and often horrific, capture the dullness and insanity not only of the lives the Beats sought to escape but of the ones they made in their place. The Beats here inhabit a world that looks a lot like Harvey Pekar's Cleveland. No wonder they had to go go go and not stop till they got there. Some of the history is off. Jan Kerouac was not shown by a blood test to be Jack's daughter (the test was inconclusive), and Pekar scrambles the chronology of some of Kerouac's books and stylistic breakthroughs. Nancy J. Peters, a part owner of the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, was unwisely tapped to help write the chapter on the store, which includes lines like "City Lights is not only a bookstore and publisher, it's a historic public space and an international cultural center," and "Today, City Lights has come to symbolize the American spirit of free intellectual inquiry." Here, nonobjective history gives way to plain self-promotion, and not even cool self-promotion. And sometimes the scope of history overwhelms the panels. There's too much to tell, and the telling gets clunky and dutiful: "Another 1950 occurrence was Kerouac's trip with Cassady to Mexico City, where Burroughs had been living since his last drug bust and working on 'Junkie,' a classic of its kind, which Ginsberg, who was always acting as an unpaid agent for other writers, encouraged him to write and finally got Ace Books to publish." The freshest chapters are on the less well-known characters, and those in which the writers insert themselves. Nick Thorkelson and Pekar, in their hallucinatory chapter on the jazz-influenced poet Kenneth Patchen, begin: "My high school friend Dave Burton turned me on to Kenneth Patchen's picture poems in 1961. We were on the lookout for anything 'beat,' which for us meant tough, funny . . . & ecstatic. Patchen had it all!" This, perhaps, is the Beats' true legacy: the impact they continue to have on people who encounter them for the first time, even if that impact isn't literary. Discussions of "On the Road" tend to begin, "I was 17 when I first read it, and it made me . . ." in ways that discussions of "Ulysses" or "The Great Gatsby" do not. (They tend to end there as well, alas.) "The Beats" captures some of the wonder of that first encounter and places it in historical and political context. Here was a group of writers who hoped to change consciousness through their lives and art. They fit America's romance with the outsider. That they were products of elite colleges Harvard, Reed, Columbia, Swarthmore and owed their visibility to nonoutsider publications like Mademoiselle and this newspaper is a paradox "The Beats" chooses not to engage. They rocked. -- John Leland, a reporter at The Times, is the author of "Hip: The History" and "Why Kerouac Matters." -------- It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's the Beats! http://newledger.com/2009/04/its-a-bird-its-a-plane-its-the-beats/ April 10th, 2009 by Micah Mattix In his blog at The New Atlantis, Alan Jacobs posted recently on the use of comics in criticism. He singles out Alison Bechdel's review of Jane Vandenburgh's A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century: A Memoir in The New York Times for special praise, and I would have to agree with him. For Jacobs, Bechdel's words and images "work together" to "provide a denser and more meaningful experience for the reader." Indeed. Unfortunately, this is not the case with Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle's recent graphic history of the Beats. While the idea of the book is intriguing, its execution is rather disappointing. The book begins with a ninety page history of the three major BeatniksJack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughsbefore it transitions into critical "perspectives" of the Beats. The first half of these "perspectives," however, is a continuation of the historydealing with so-called "minor" figures. The second half of the "perspectives," which is to say, the last fifty pages of the book, is a mix of critical and thematic pieces. Unlike Bechdel's piece in The New York Times, in Pekar and Ed Piskor's contributions to The Beatswhich make up over two-thirds of the bookthere is little interaction between the text and the images. I don't know how Pekar and Piskor worked on the book, but judging by the final product, my guess would be separately. There is no collaborative synergy in The Beats. The images illustrate the text rather than help to tell the story. Furthermore, almost all of the text is narration, and when there is dialogue it is largely there to provide direct emotional expression of the narration. Thus, in the narrative box, we read: "Kerouac flunked the test, but he still joined the Navy, only at the bottom, not as an officer." In the image, a young Kerouac exclaims: "How could I have screwed up so badly?" This is the modus operandi throughout the bulk of the book and it creates the feeling that you are always reading it twice. While there are some images that are striking, the book does not break much new ground graphically. Indeed, much of The Beats is simply boring. The book is also a bit of a strange muddle in terms of what it actually says about the Beats. It unashamedly sets out to glorify them. "There was," Pekar and Buhle write, "never anything like them in American literature and American culture, and it is unlikely that there will ever be anything much like them again." Their accomplishments, according to Pekar and Buhle, were legion. They "stood between the social collectivism of the Franklin D. Roosevelt years and the do-your-own-thingism of the 1960s," "restored the role of the poet to the public space," "renewed the thrill of discovery on their own terms" because of their heroic refusal to accept any predetermined ideology (except their own, of course), and now serve as beacons of individual freedom to young people worldwide. Strangely, however, one of the main things that Pekar shows us is that while love was one of the mantras of the Beat generation, the love that the Beats showed was far from heroic. Rather it was often a megalomaniac self-love, expressed in sometimes beautiful, sometimes pitiful, forms. In reading The Beats, I was reminded of William F. Buckley Jr.'s 1968 interview with Allen Ginsberg on Firing Line for PBS. Buckley's first question to Ginsberg was whether he believed that the "hippies" were "an intimation of the new order." Ginsberg does not respond to the question at first, but he comes back to it towards the end of the interview. Yes, the hippies are the beginning of a "New Order," Ginsberg claims, but it is an order that is based on love. This is all fine and good in theory, but, as Ginsberg himself shows, it is rather hard to put into practice. In the context of a discussion of the use of offensive language, Buckley asks Ginsberg why he cannot, out of "love" for others, avoid using such language: "if it would be offensive to some people to hear those words spoken, then you would presumably assume the burden of expressing yourself without using them." Ginsberg claims he cannot do this, however, because it would conflict with his own agenda of freeing them from the constraints of the bourgeoisiea freedom, of course, that he strongly desires for himself. Indeed, in his interview with Buckley, and on a number of other occasions, Ginsberg's championing of love often seems to be less motivated by a desire to show love to others than by a desire to extract love from them. We are all guilty of this to some extent, and, of course, tend to avoid calling attention to it. The focus of much of The Beats, however, whether it was intended or not, is on how self-centered many of these poets and novelists wereskilled in extracting love and attention from others, but giving little. In fact, sometimes Pekar makes the Beats look worse than they actually were, providing us with a rather stereotypical (and sometimes incorrect) image of them as drunk nihilist, hungry for literary and political fame and little else. The Beats did live very self-centered lives. However, whatever one thinks of their respective poems and novels, a number of which I think are important, their motives for writing were more complex than Pekar sometimes presents them. Thus, in writing a graphic history that aims to glorify the Beats, Pekar and Buhle come across as glorifying the Beats' megalomania. They do provide some implicit criticism on occasion, but overall the history lacks balance. "No one claims," Pekar and Buhle write in their introduction, "this treatment to be definitive. But it is new, and it is vital." I tend to disagree. While the book's presentation of the Beats is certainly new, it is hardly vital. This is not to say that there are not some notable exceptions. Jeffrey Lewis's and Tuli Kupferberg's collaboration and Joyce Brabner's contribution are, to my mind, worth working through. However, much of the rest of the book falls a bit flat. -- Micah Mattix teaches English at the University of North Carolina. . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
