Talk Like a Beat? No Way Daddy-o! http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/09/talk-like-a-beat-no-way-daddy-o.html
Posted by Ian Crouch September 26, 2011 Noting the popularity and general good humor of International Talk Like a Pirate Day (which I posted about last week), David Barnett at the Guardian has suggested a new literary-diction holiday, Talk Like a Beat Day, which he proposes for October 7th, anniversary of the night that Allen Ginsberg first recited his poem “Howl” in San Francisco. Beats, like pirates, are an easy target for caricature: pirates were surely less salty, and likely less interesting, than the image we now have of them, and beats, as Barnett himself admits, were not the “pad” living, “rod” driving, “juiceheads” that now inhabit the popular imagination. When we talk like pirates, though, we’re not really offending much of a literary tradition. To talk like a Beat, however—and to embrace the parody of the Beats as beatnik: the drum-tapping, finger-snapping denatured male animal with a beret pulled low over his eyes, cowering in the safety of the coffee house—is to ignore the real substance of the movement’s written language. Louis Menand, in a piece appraising the Beat movement in the magazine in 2007 , wrote that Kerouac and his literary circle had more in common with Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack than with the young men who would later flock to Greenwich Village. They weren’t effete pseudo-intellectuals or proto-hippie communist peaceniks—though it’s easy to see how a watered down version of an already loosely assembled ideology could move in those directions. “On the Road,” Menand writes, is, among its other qualities, “a story about guys who want to be with other guys.” Like all boys’ clubs, it developed short-hand and codes—and adopted a series of cultural poses—but the prose fits more comfortably within a longer-view literary tradition than it does isolated in a slang dictionary. (Barnett, who recognizes the essential silliness of his suggested holiday, links to a kitschy collection of Beatisms .) The characteristic, exuberant prose of the Beats conveys an angry and aggressive young male lyricism that runs both forward and backward through the history of literature, and, to trace just one narrow line in America, goes from writers like Hemingway to Salinger to Kerouac to Mailer. Consider this excerpt from one of the movement's supposed founding documents, the “Joan Anderson” letter that Neal Cassady, the inspiration for the character Dean Moriarty in “On the Road,” wrote to Jack Kerouac in 1950. Fresh from the shower, mirror-primped, stepped my heroine resplendent in her new friend’s housecoat. Just when you think you’ve learned your lesson and swear to watch your step, a single moment offguard will pop up and hope springs high as ever. One startled look and I knew I was right back where I started; I felt again that choking surge flooding me as when first I’d seen her. Cassady was most likely drug-addled when he composed the letter, which is said to have run to seventeen pages (most of it has been lost). But he wasn’t a loopy hep-cat; instead, he was a young man using frank, straightforward, common language to express the full range of his exorbitant moods. Part of the appeal of the Beats was that they wrote in a widely-used American vernacular, not that they created a language of their own. Kerouac died at forty-seven, but even at that young age he seemed to have lived too long. Looking back on the Beat Generation, something he was often asked to do and occasionally obliged, he wrote: Maybe it was the result of the universalization of Television and nothing else (the Polite Total Police Control of Dragnet’s “peace” officers) but the beat characters after 1950 vanished into jails and madhouses, or were shamed into silent conformity, the generation itself was shortlived and small in number. Talk Like a Beat Day is a good idea, if it nudges us back to the rich sources that were later obscured by parody. If you’re moved to join in, try to forget how all the hipster cats sing, and instead maybe ask yourself, thinking of the sad, disaffected young men out there: What would Jake Barnes or Seymour Glass or Sal Paradise say? . -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to sixties-l@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sixties-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
