Chapter One “This is the Beat Generation”1

Introduction

In 1945 two major events occurred which dramatically impacted upon the course and direction of American history. World War Two ended and Franklin Delano Roosevelt died. World War II climaxed with the dropping of the atom bomb upon the Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The atom bomb created a new kind of warfare, one which

America held the monopoly over, at least for the time being. Its existence and usage transformed international relations irreversibly and helped create a new bi-polar world in which the Democratic United States and the Communist USSR vied for power. Roosevelt, the longest reigning president in America history, died in 1945, and was succeeded by his vice president Harry S. Truman. Roosevelt had endured four terms as President and many

Americans who had known Roosevelt in this capacity for so long doubted if there was any other suitable alternative. The American nation had some very interesting decisions to make nationally and internationally in the post-war years. Would it decide to look back to a time before the New Deal Democrats and the dropping of the Atom bomb or forward into new and unknown territory?

Journalist Gilbert Millstein, quoting John Aldridge, commented that:

There were four choices open to the post-war writer: novelistic journalism or journalistic novel-writing; what little subject-matter had not been fully exploited already (homosexuality, racial conflict), pure technique (for lack of something to say), or the course I feel Kerouac has taken – assertion ‘of the need for belief even though it is upon a background in which belief is impossible and in which the symbols are ‘lacking’ for a genuine affirmation on genuine terms.’2

1 Title taken from: John Clellon Holmes, “This is the Beat Generation,” The New York Times, 16 November 1952. 2 Gilbert Millstein, “Books of the Times,” The New York Times, 5 September 1957.

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This “assertion for the need for belief even though it is upon a background in which belief is impossible”3 came to characterise not only Kerouac’s literary style but also the youth of the postwar generation who bought his literature and who thought that

Kerouac had written their book. The disruptive events of the previous decades had instilled in Kerouac, as with the other people of his general age group, a sense of distrust of international, collective agreements at the political level. The result of this was the alienation of a large number of people, particularly the young, from major world events.

In response to this alienation this group began to look inward rather than outward for direction. Kerouac was a prime example of this inward search. He dispatched with commonly regarded outward symbols and measures of success such as football and university to embark upon the task of writing. William S. Burroughs commented that

“Jack Kerouac knew about writing when I first met him in 1944 when he was 21. Already he had written a million words and was completely dedicated to his chosen trade.”4 Going against his family’s wishes, Kerouac had given up on real world ambitions. In place of these he embarked upon an individualistic inward search. The impression many people got of Kerouac, like the others of his age who gave up on achieving these outward signs of success, was one of paradox. Allen Ginsberg commented on his first impression of

Kerouac that “I remember being awed by him and amazed by him, because I’d never met a big jock who was sensitive and intelligent about poetry.”5 His father is recorded as

3 John Clellon Homes, “This is the Beat Generation.” 4 William S. Burroughs to Ann Charters, n.d. Box 18g, Papers of Jack Kerouac, NYPL. 5 Matt Theado, ed. The Beats: A Literary Reader. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003. 19.

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having said to Kerouac, “forget this writing stuff, Jean, it’ll never pay. You’re such a good student – sure you’ll go to college, get a job. Stop dreaming!”6

John Clellon Holmes commented in his article from which this chapter takes its name that “any attempt to label an entire generation is unrewarding, and yet the generation which went through the last war, or at least could get a drink easily once it was over, seems to possess a uniform, general quality which demands an adjective.”7 The adjective which Clellon Holmes used to describe this “uniform, general quality” was that this generation was beat. He had taken the word from a meeting which he had held with

Kerouac in which the two were attempting to locate what was unique about their generation separating it from the generation before and after. Kerouac recalls in an article written for the fairly new and vogue Playboy magazine how he came up with title. It was

When John Clellon Holmes (author of Go and The Horn) and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent Existentialism and I said ‘You know, this is really a beat generation’ and he leapt up and said ‘That’s it, that’s right.’8

There was something about the way this word sounded and how Kerouac applied the term that seemed to describe the postwar generation of which both Clellon Holmes and Kerouac were a part, and both agreed upon it. There was something about this term that uncovered what they were trying to say about the generation. This meeting took place during 1948 and the word beat had, of course, been in existence far longer than this. Its exact origin is as debated as its meaning, but there is no doubt that in this new context

(being applied to the postwar generation) the word took on a new meaning, perhaps the one it is best known for today.

6 Steve Watson. The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944 – 1960. New York: Pantheon, 1995. 23. 7 John Clellon Holmes, “This is the Beat Generation.” 8 Jack Kerouac, “The Origins of the Beat Generation,” Playboy Magazine, June 1959.

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Kerouac had first heard the word beat used by Herbert Huncke,9 a Times Square hang-out who had a history of prostitution and drug taking. When Kerouac heard Huncke say beat first around about 1944 he instantly took note of it. Huncke seemed to personify the state of being beat: beaten down, downtrodden. Kerouac liked the sound of this term and its implications. From this time onward Kerouac used this term often in conversation with friends and in his experiments with writing.

The statement beat first appeared in print in Kerouac’s first published work The

Town and the City which appeared in 1950. It appears as merely one in a book of 400 pages which was edited down from over 1100. One review reads, “a first novel of moral strength. Recommended, but not for the faint-hearted.”10 Heavy references, both in model and in style, were made to Thomas Wolfe who was Kerouac’s literary idol. The work was good enough in quality to earn Kerouac a $1000 advance, but did not achieve anything remarkable in sales. Most of the attention paid to this work has been done since Kerouac achieved greater literary success.

In 1952 Clellon Holmes published his first book Go, which is based upon much the same material and time period as Kerouac’s Town and the City, the period of time in which the authors of the Beat Generation came together centred around Columbia

University in New York during the mid 1940s. While Go did not do anything remarkable in sales either, it is significant as being the first Beat Generation book. While Kerouac’s first novel followed the long, drawn out style of Wolfe and is written in stark contrast to

9 Herbert Huncke, though more commonly associated with another “Beat Generation” writer William S. Burroughs, was of profound interest to Kerouac who once wrote of him, “America goes “Blast” – fine people like Huncke will be buried under the Stucco hotel ruins – ah – Lucien will rave.” Sketchbook one of ten, “Passing Through,” Box 18c, Papers of Jack Kerouac, NYPL. 10 Matt Theado, ed. The Beats: A Literary Reference. 140.

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his later work which comprised the Dulouz Legend, this publication was written more in style with later beat works and for this the significance of the book is two-fold.

In this publication the word beat, being used in this context, makes another printed appearance. Clellon Holmes originally intended on publishing the book under the original title Beat Generation. However Kerouac, upon whom the character Pasternak of this book was based, had other designs for the phrase did not allowed this and Clellon Holmes was forced to change the title.11

The publication of this novel is not insignificant in the development of the term and idea of the Beat Generation. Following its publication Clellon Holmes was prompted by journalist and reviewer Gilbert Millstein, who was alerted to this emerging literary group, to write an article about what was typical about the characters and lifestyle he was portraying. Clellon Holmes came up with the article “This is the Beat Generation” which appeared in the New York Times Magazine following the publication of his book. This newspaper article served to bring the term to an even wider audience than it had previously been given. The article attracted a wider attention and brought Kerouac and

Clellon Holmes wider recognition and some figures among the establishment began to pay them more notice.

In this lengthy article, Clellon Holmes explores the history and origin of the word beat and phrase beat generation. He provides some background on what it applies to, by providing examples, and gives it a definition. Clellon Holmes writes about his generation in a way which has characterized social and cultural discourse only really since the end of

World War II. In this sense what Clellon Holmes is doing is setting the precedent for future social and cultural onlookers. Each decade, or new generation, has people who

11 Even the title Go seemed surprisingly close to a Kerouac’s poem titled: “Go, Go, Go.”

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move forward to define it and also to describe it. The most recent example of this desire to define what is different and unique about a generation comes in the 1990s, commonly associated with the phrase Generation X. This term comes from the novel by Canadian author Douglas Coupland of the same title which appeared in 1991. This book, in the margins of which are noted new and interesting phrases, does well as the clearest, most recent exposition of cultural and social discourse and generation-decade defining. Clellon

Holmes seems to negotiate a course which has been followed by subsequent social commentators: either get there first in defining or come up with the best definition.

In the article Clellon Holmes puts a face on the generation. His example of this face he takes from “a national magazine…story under the heading ‘Youth’ and the subhead ‘Mother is Bugged at Me.”12 It “concerned an eighteen-year-old Californian girl who had been picked up for smoking marijuana and wanted to talk about it.”13 Clellon

Holmes argues that this “clean young face has been making the newspapers steadily since the war.”14 It could be found “standing before a judge in a Bronx courthouse, being arraigned for stealing a car, [and] it looked up into the camera with curious laughter and no guilt.”15

Clellon Holmes discusses what it means to be beat which he demonstrates to be found when “a man is beat whenever he goes for broke and wagers the sum of his resources on a single number”16 He cites examples which demonstrate that “the young generation has done that continually from early youth.”17 This article does more to open discussion on the topic of whether there is a Beat Generation than to close it. Clellon

12 John Clellon Holmes, “This is the Beat Generation.” 13 John Clellon Holmes, “This is the Beat Generation.” 14 John Clellon Holmes, “This is the Beat Generation.” 15 John Clellon Holmes, “This is the Beat Generation.” 16 John Clellon Holmes, “This is the Beat Generation.” 17 John Clellon Holmes, “This is the Beat Generation.”

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Holmes cites a long piece which can be separated from the rest of the article for the fact that it describes in detail the experiences of the generation coming of age after the war of which he and Kerouac were a part:

The fancies of their childhood inhabited the half-light of Munich, the Nazi-Soviet pact, and the eventual blackout. Their adolescence was spent in a topsy-turvy world of war bonds, swing shifts, and troop movements. They grew to independent mind on beachheads, in gin mills, and USO’s, in past-midnight arrivals and pre-dawn departures. Their brothers, husbands, fathers or boy friends turned up dead one day at the end of a telegram. At the four trembling corners of the world, or in the home town invaded by factories or lonely servicemen, they had intimate experience with the nadir and the zenith of human conduct, and little time for much that came between. The peace they inherited was only as secure as the next headline. It was a cold peace.18

The account that Clellon Holmes provides here draws upon the international events which ran up to World War II and hints at the pointlessness of these events by criticizing their outcome – the Cold War. He traces the experiences of people like himself and Kerouac who were born in the 1920s and passed through several unique and wide- ranging national and international events experienced by Americans at those times. He places the story at the level of individual experience, which many could relate to. What is interesting is that the examples he cites are peculiarly American in context. Though there have been a few attempts to link the post-war generations of Britain, France, and America together, it has been with little success.19 The Beat Generation was a distinctly American phenomenon. Its members had grown up through a series of widely diverse decades,

18 John Clellon Holmes, “This is the Beat Generation.” 19 Gene Feldman, ed. The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men. New York: Citadel Press, 1958. This publication is one which brings together, unconvincingly, the similarities between these two literary movements. Connections have also been made to the French “Existentialist” movement which was in existence at this time involving the youth of France. The only real connection between the three was that, at their head, were young writers writing in the post-war period. They otherwise differed tremendously. A debate was held at Hunter College Playhouse, November 6, 1958 in which some members of the “Angry Young Men” and the “Beat Generation” discussed the features of their respective “movements.” Little more evidence than the transcript of this debate is needed to see each group’s ignorance of one another. Consult; Marc D. Schleifer, “The Beats Debated – Is it or Is It Not?,” The Village Voice, 19 November 1958.

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economically, politically, socially and culturally and at each instance they had their hopes and aspirations beaten down. They had, Clellon Holmes demonstrates, been brought up to expect defeat – the point that Kerouac had been making when he came up with the phrase in the first place. This had the effect that the generation began to disregard unity and declined to trust the collective mood. It began to look inward for guidance.

Though this article brought a certain degree of recognition and notoriety to the authors Clellon Holmes and Kerouac and to the terms beat and Beat Generation it would be a further five years before the terms would explode across America as a national and increasingly international phenomenon. Kerouac had written On the Road at the beginning of the 1950s and its publication had been prophesised as early as 1950 when a mention of it was placed on the cover of his first book The Town and the City. Yet the work took until 1957 to appear in print. Between 1951 when it was written and 1957 when it was published the work had been passed between several editors, each of whom had rejected it. Three article extracts taken from the work had appeared in magazines between these times which helped attract attention to the work. If nothing else they added to its legendary, underground status.

This long prophesized second novel of Kerouac’s, On the Road, finally appeared in September 1957. Kerouac had toyed with the idea of several titles for this work, one of which was Beat Generation, but had decided against it in favour of another. Kerouac, reasoning to his editor, had discounted several possible titles which might have taken the place of On the Road. His final reasoning for going with On the Road was that it “is the

DEFINITE road of beatness, ‘Anywhere Road’ sounds like the opposite idea…the

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definite misty road of Sal Paradise wandering to find a meaning etc. THE road…”20 The title of the work gave the active idea of a state of being on the road. For this, among other things, the work has been interpreted historically as the novel of the Beat Generation as it defines its central tenets. Joyce Johnson, Kerouac’s girlfriend at the time of publication, recalls their reading of the first review of On the Road:

There was a news-stand at Sixty-sixth Street and Broadway right at the entrance to the subway. Just before midnight we woke up and threw on our clothes in the dark and walked down there still groggy with the heaviness, the blacked-out sleep, that comes after making love. According to Viking, there was going to be a review. ‘Maybe it’ll be terrific. Who knows?’ I said. Jack said he was doubtful. Still. We could stop at Donnelly’s on the way back and have a beer. We saw the papers come off the truck. The old man at the stand cut the brown cord with a knife and we bought the one on top of the pile and stood under a street lamp turning pages until we found ‘Books of the Times.’ I felt dizzy reading Millstein’s first paragraph – like going up on a Ferris wheel too quickly and dangling out over space, laughing and gasping at the same time.21

Johnson’s reaction to the review is quite justified as one can see upon reading it.

The treatment which is given of the book is astonishing and it is by all accounts a rave review. Millstein’s responsibility was not normally that of the book review section, but rather that of the Sunday magazine. It has been suggested that it was a tactical manoeuvre on the part of Viking to release the book when two of the better known reviewers were on holiday thus releasing the opportunity of reviewing it to this younger, more beat friendly individual. It has been noted that “perhaps neither Orville Prescott nor Charles Poore felt ready to deal with so unorthodox a novel. [Or] perhaps it was handed over to Millstein because of his known partiality for avant-garde writing.”22 Either way, none can account for the amazing review that Millstein gave the book.

20 Jack Kerouac to Keith Jennison, Orlando, 26 December, 1956, Matt Theado, ed. The Beats. 165. 21 Joyce Johnson. Minor Characters: A Young Woman’s Coming-of-Age in the Beat Orbit of Jack Kerouac. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1983. 184-5. 22 Bruce Cook. The Beat Generation. New York: Scribners, 1971. 71.

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Millstein’s comments assured, at least, that subsequent reviewers would have to pay attention to the work and his review in many ways set the precedent. He comments in his Books of the Times review that “On the Road is the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat’ and whose principal avatar he is.”23 This, added to the strength and popularity of the book helped launch the terms beat and Beat Generation into every- day speech.

Kerouac, who could trace a catalogue of negative impressions of his work, was surprised at this reception. The article is a source of endless praise about the book and

Millstein’s selection of quotes help sets the precedent for later references to the work. He quotes:

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 dull or 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!’.24

This quote is an illuminating statement and demonstrates the central tenets of the

Beat Generation of which Kerouac was the principal avatar. This quote is one of the guiding principles of the first postwar counterculture in America. It is an exemplar of the

American desire to live without constraints negotiated into the postwar context in a way that implies the novelty of this belief.

Millstein notes that other comparison could be made between the Beat Generation and the Lost Generation. Both groups were American authors who wrote in the years after a World War and came to be recognized as a distinct group which grew to international

23 Gilbert Milstein, “Books of the Times.” 24 Jack Kerouac. On the Road. New York: Viking, 1957. 7.

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renown. Millstein commented on the similarity between the Beat Generation and the Lost

Generation that:

Just as, more than any other novel of the Twenties, ‘The Sun Also Rises’ came to be regarded as the testament of the ‘Lost Generation’ so it seems certain that ‘On the Road’ will come to be known as that of the ‘Beat Generation.’ There is, otherwise, no similarity between the two; technically and philosophically, Hemingway and Kerouac are, at the very least, a depression and a World War apart.25

Thus, the Beats are similar to the Lost Generation in that they now have a book which is their bible other than the bible. However, they differ in several notable and crucial ways. The necessary demarcation line can be drawn on the subject matter of the work of each literary group. The Beat Generation writers were happy being American in

America while the Lost Generation writers chose to be Americans abroad. While the Beat

Generation was content to make America the subject of its work, the Lost Generation made being American the subject of its work. Millstein concludes the article by saying

“On the Road is a major novel.”26

This review helped launch the book to national and international acclaim and the terms beat and Beat Generation with it. It is in the context of this period more than anything else that these terms are expressed. Following the explosion of this term onto the main stage of social and cultural discourse it picked up several different meanings, some derogatory, others simply evolutionary.

Thus the Beat Generation was a distinct group of individuals who came of age in the years following World War II. They were beat as they had passed through a series of national and international crises which gave them the impression of expecting defeat. That they had experienced this continual disappointment from the beginning of their lives

25 Gilbert Millstein, “Books of the Times.” 26 Gilbert Millstein, “Books of the Times.”

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defined them as a generation because as a result they had certain shared, certain common characteristics.

They had, most commonly, been born during the 1920s, a decade most commonly referred to as the Roaring Twenties. Following this they had passed through the Wall

Street Crash in 1929 and ensuing Great Depression which clouded their experience of the

1930s of which the historically applied title the Dirty Thirties is quite appropriate. The events of the Dust Bowl did nothing to heighten the American experience of this decade.

It took World War II to pull America out of the economic crises that had lasted most of the 1930s. America landed safely on the other side of World War II only to find itself in an emerging Cold War situation with Russia. These experiences were shared by all

Americans of this time and though each individual would have a different account of the effects of these events it would be hard to imagine these outcomes being taken in a positive light. The Great Depression and World War II were of such national and international proportions that the United States was changed to the point of no return.

There would be no harking back to the times before World War II or the New Deal.

America was one of the few countries in the world to emerge from the war more financially stable, perhaps owing to the fact that America had – excepting Peal Harbour – been saved from the physical effects of total war. The war had given America more of an assurance and involvement in international politics, as demonstrated in the part it played in establishing the United Nations. Soon countries talked not in terms of The Big Three – referring to America, Britain and Russia – but of a bipolar world in which there were only two superpowers – America and Russia. America represented Democracy and Russia

Communism; the opposition between these two frameworks would guide postwar politics and relations. America and the world were very different places if one looked at how they

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existed before and after the war and compared the two images. America stepped into a more direct involvement with European and other powers and in so doing became a

World Power in itself.

The Beat Generation had survived this series of national and international level crises mostly intact. What it had done was to make the young generation distrusting of collectivisation, of politics, and of politicians. As a result, this generation began to look inward for its guide and for its expression. The effect of this would, in the long run, have a tremendous effect on the American experience and as a result of this it makes for a highly interesting and informing study in American history.

In this chapter in American history Kerouac was, reluctantly or not, a figurehead of the younger generation. While many intellectuals of this time (usually gathered around magazines or other such publications) attempted to diagnose what was unique and peculiar about the postwar generation, none was able to arrive at a better description than

Kerouac’s statement that they were beat. The feeling of “beat-ness” had set in long before

World War II had begun and its effects would play out in the postwar years. This sense of disappointment had been present continuously since their youth as they had passed through the Roaring Twenties, Dirty Thirties, through World War II and into the Cold

War. It manifested itself most profoundly in the 1950s which is the decade with which the terms beat and Beat Generation are most commonly associated. What is telling about the growing commercialism of this time was that Kerouac was unable to use his own invented term Beat Generation as the title of a play he wrote because a low budget film made in

1958 had copyrighted the phrase for its own use. This meant that his 1960 play, originally given the title, had to be renamed Pull My Daisy. The term Beat Generation came into existence in the 1940s, and exploded into the American consciousness in late 1957. The

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years between these two dates had seen the term gaining a broader audience through its appearance in books, articles and in the discourse of underground literary circles. Its clearest exposition came in the form of Kerouac’s On the Road which, though it did not appear until late in the decade, defined the generation coming of age in the 1950s. It had been written in the first two years of this decade about experiences Kerouac had with Neal

Cassady in the late 1940s. Following this time the term has gained international acclaim and has been recorded with various contractions and additions using the core word beat.

This thesis is titled “Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America in the 1950s” and it looks at each of the three components mentioned in the title. It is argued that Kerouac was a very important figure in the post-war period. Kerouac exploded into the American mainstream in 1957 with the publication of his work On the Road. This work had a huge impact upon society and culture at this time, most notably on the young who used this book as a reference guide to rebellion. Perhaps a measure of the importance of the work is the fact that it was lifted out of merely a literary sphere and given far wider meaning. This thesis looks at the generation coming of age at the end of World War II which Kerouac described as beat. It constituted the first post war counterculture.

It is argued that Kerouac was a significant figure of the 1950s not only in literature but in every aspects of social and cultural life. He is a good figure to study when one is looking at the 1950s as he, unlike his other friends and literary companions, was unable to make the move into the culture of the 1960s. While his muse Neal Cassady and his literary friend Allen Ginsberg were able to pass into the next decade, Kerouac remained firmly entrenched in the 1950s. His few television and public appearances in the 1960s help endorse the view that Kerouac remained, in outlook and viewpoint, very firmly entrenched in the 1950s. Kerouac’s fame rests upon his most famous work, On the Road,

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and on the fact that this work broke new ground in respect to just about everything that

American society was built upon, not just its literary style. This work, like others of Beat

Generation authorship, is fairly uncontroversial by today’s standards. At the time of publication however this sort of literature was very provocative – the subject of real outrage. It was almost the symbol of what the establishment did not like about the youthful generation and as a result many of the criticisms of the work are peculiarly neither literary nor critical, but moral. Through work such as this, Kerouac, along with a few others, helped break ground in terms of personal freedoms. It is argued that, in this decade of paradox, Kerouac played a critical role as one of the rebels who went against the expected. In doing so he helped break ground for his own and subsequent generations.

It is for this that Kerouac is remembered in history – as an icon of rebellion. Kerouac can be seen as part of a small literary circle dubbed the Beat Generation, but also as a part of a cultural phenomenon emerging in the 1950s. It was not only his work but the implications and ideas behind it which were so threatening to America. For provoking such outrage

Kerouac was one of the figures of the first post war counterculture to appear in America.

Kerouac, and other icons of rebellion and nonconformity, served as models for the young who were unhappy with the constraints of their lives and who wished to express their discontent through individualism. The popularity of the beat message was one adopted nationally at rapid pace. Due to the unique position America was in at this time, having taken over as the cultural epicentre of the western world, the Beats had a far wider impact than merely that of America. Beat philosophy was adopted internationally and was a crucial influence upon all areas of popular culture at this time. The outcome of this meant that the younger generation pushed back boundaries, ones which later generations were unwilling, or unable to readopt.

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Historiography

Clellon Holmes commented that “most books that come out are contained. That is,

‘I want to read that book.’ But what happened when On the Road came out was, ‘I want to know that man. It wasn’t the book so much as it was the man.’”27 He further commented that “he [Kerouac] was on John Wingate’s television show, and two minutes after that show aired, I had phone calls from people I knew saying, ‘I’ve got to meet this man. Got to. You know him. I’ve got to meet him.’ And I said, “What are you talking about? Read his book.’ ‘No, no. It’s not that. He knows everything….’”28 In an interesting way, what

Clellon Holmes states in this oral record is that which has come to dominate the study of

Kerouac: most attention has been paid to him rather than his work.

The second, or next, level at which Kerouac has been studied is as a part of a small group of influential and controversial writers. At the smallest interpretation this group contains only a few select writers: Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. At an intermediary level this study has compared Kerouac with an even wider group of associated writers who published in or around this time (including the former names mentioned): Gregory Corso, Phil Whalen, and poets of the Black Mountain group. At its widest parameter this has seen Kerouac included in a study of people who were non- publishing (or at least not primarily publishers). This includes persons outside of this inner circle such as Neal Cassady and Herbert Huncke. Though not renowned for their writing, they are famed as being influences on the beat style.

The third level at which Kerouac has been studied is in that of literary criticism.

This has historically been the least significant of the three levels, the one least sure of

27 Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee, ed. Jack’s Books: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac. New York: Penguin, 1979. 240. 28 Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee, ed. Jack’s Book. 240-1.

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itself and under most contention. Literary critics judged early on that “On the Road [did] not to fit into any traditional generic category and was thus deemed to be a deeply flawed work.” 29 The study of this book alongside other prose, poetry and drama that Kerouac has written has been somewhat hampered by this assumption which has, for better or worse, remained.

The first biography on Kerouac to appear was in 1961 by which time Kerouac’s fame was beginning to subside and he was drifting out of the media limelight. This study came in the form of an MA thesis by Boston College student Bernice Lemire. The thesis concentrates on the work that Kerouac had written and published about his childhood growing up in Lowell and precedes published academic studies of Kerouac by over a decade. 30

The first posthumous biography of Kerouac was written by Ann Charters, who was in attendance at his funeral in 1969. Charters, a well known author and editor herself, has contributed greatly to the Kerouac legacy, which she has taken an active part in preserving. She has published and edited several notable works on Kerouac and his other literary companions of this time and has done much to perpetuate what is in print of

Kerouac’s today. Her 1972 publication of Kerouac: A Biography was aided by her previous conferences with Kerouac which were initially started through a friend and subsequently continued through her own endeavours and their correspondence. That she had personal (and presumably friendly) contact with Kerouac characterises the first phase of biographies which shared some personal experience of the author. Charles E. Jarvis, a childhood friend of Kerouac’s and professor at the then Boston College (now the

29 Robert Holton. On the Road: Kerouac’s Ragged American Journey. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1999. 13. 30 Jim Jones. Jack Kerouac’s Nine Lives. Boulder Co.: Elbow / Cityful Press, 2001. 16-17.

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University of Massachusetts at Lowell), published Visions of Kerouac, his version of

Kerouac’s life. This work appeared in 1972, the same year as Charters,’ and his work has benefited also from this personal contact, though at times it can be seen to cloud his interpretation of events. It would not be possible, here, to look at all the biographies that have been written on Kerouac for there have been at least nine full-length publications in the three decades since Kerouac’s death, leading one author to title his book Kerouac’s

Nine Live. What, therefore, appears here is a short selection based on representation. As is common in all biographies of famous people there are a variety of motives for writing about someone. Some of Kerouac’s biographies have been written with hagiographical interpretations in mind, written only to aggrandize the impression we have. Others, more commonly the work of revisionist historians have looked at the scandalous and debated aspects of Kerouac’s life.

A biography published in the late 1970s proclaimed, “as for the rest, what hasn’t been said here, don’t get yourselves upset about it: somebody else will write about it one of these days.”31 True to form, very soon another biography did appear seeking to resolve the issues of Kerouac’s life. The number of biographies already available on Kerouac spurred another to say that “since there are already a number of adequate biographies of

Jack Kerouac, I have kept the account of his own life as brief as possible relating only those details essential to understanding”32 his life.

Certain trends emerge within the study of Kerouac, one of which has been the extent to which historians have been guided by his published work. Kerouac wrote what he regarded as true-story novels and there is little reason to doubt the truth of what he

31 Victor Levi-Beaulieu. Jack Kerouac: A Chicken Essay. Quebec: The Coach House Press, 1975. 170. 32 Warren French. Jack Kerouac. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986. xiii.

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wrote. Kerouac had a well commented upon memory and imagination which has itself been the subject of many articles and interpretations. What has emerged is that Kerouac’s reflections cannot always be taken as the exclusive source of truth as they have not always proved to be the best authority on Kerouac’s life. Several instances have shown that he has enlarged the truth, as writers are wont to do at times.

Gerald Nicosia’s Memory Babe: A critical Biography of Jack Kerouac which was first published in 1983 is the most exhaustive single publication on Kerouac so far. This monolithic work of over 700 pages demonstrates Nicosia’s compulsive obsession with

Kerouac. In its compilation he interviewed over 200 people who had known Kerouac.

Most of these interviews were conducted in the late 1970s, although it would be 1983 before the book appeared in print – a testament to the work involved in its production.

The book operates without a central argument other than to celebrate “the spirit of Jack

Kerouac”33 to which it is dedicated.

The largest number of Kerouac biographies appeared in the decade of the 1970s.

The 1980s demonstrated a diminished but continuing interest in Kerouac while the 1990s has seen a resurgence of interest in this field. While most scholarly attempts to describe

Kerouac have focussed on his personal life, none have done so more shockingly than Ellis

Amburn’s Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac, which appeared in

1998 as the tenth biography on Kerouac. This book is the work of a revisionist historian who has set out to argue the thesis that Kerouac was homosexual. The book proclaims to be “the first biography of Jack Kerouac to portray fully the intense inner life that inspired

33 Gerald Nicosia. Memory Babe. A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. New York: Grove, 1983. 11.

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his work by his last editor.”34 The personal experience of which she boasts is what she markets as her best qualification to write about him. The material which Amburn uses to support her argument comes from a selective period of time. Ferlinghetti commented that

“Allen [Ginsberg] was always saying…Kerouac was gay, but I thought that was really absurd. He was one of the biggest women chasers I ever met.”35 The material appears to be from, in the words of another biographer, “the anecdotes concerning his erratic behaviour during his last sad years that has grown into a kind of mean-spirited legend of its own.”36 Historian Douglas Brinkley is currently at work on the most recent biography which is scheduled to come out in 2005. Brinkley is modelling his work on “David

Donald’s Look Homeward: The Life of Thomas Wolfe and Gary Will’s John Wayne’s

America, suggesting a combination of literary and popular culture biography.”37 Segments of the work have already appeared in Atlantic Monthly Magazine.

The second level at which Kerouac has been studied is his membership in a small group of literary writers and figures who published in the postwar period. The core, or inner circle, of this group is mainly regarded to be comprised of Kerouac, Ginsberg and

Burroughs, who met and became friends at various times during late 1944. Each in some way, directly or indirectly, was associated with Columbia University. The authors collaborated with one another and served to influence each other’s work at times throughout their careers. They maintained contact with one another throughout the course of their lives in travelling and literary exploits. Though Kerouac died in 1969, Burroughs and Ginsberg remained alive until 1997. Some scholars have chosen to enlarge this inner

34 Ellis Amburn. Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac. New York: St Martins, 1998. Cover. 35 Paul Iorio, “A Howl that Still Echoes: Ginsberg Poem Recalled,” San Francisco Chronicle, 28 October 2000. 36 Warren French. Preface. 37 Jim Jones. 43.

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circle to include other authors with whom this group was associated contemporarily.

Some of this has been for the purpose of including beat individuals who are not well known for their work but more for their lifestyles and influences. Others have been included in this inner circle for the benefit of monopolising on the success of the beat writers and the name they gave the style. When people talk of the Beat writers in modern discourse, most are usually referring to the group of three writers of which Kerouac was a central figure.

Bruce Cook’s The Beat Generation, informs us that “if you had gone out and asked who the Beats were on any college campus in, say, 1958, you would have heard the same three names mentioned over and over again in response.”38 He traces these figures through the decade of the fifties, and into the 1960s. Closing the book at the well known

Woodstock music concert, Cook gives the reader an impression of what he feels the legacy of the Beat Generation was and what sort of a precedent the group established for the following Hippie Generation.

Steve Watson’s The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and

Hipsters, 1944 – 1960 also looks at these three individuals. Their relationships with one another are commendable for their cohesion and duration. Giving each author similar attention Watson provides an interesting summary of their relationship to one another and also looks at a number of friends they shared.

James Cameron’s This is the Beat Generation: New York – San Francisco – Paris takes a look at “Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs [who] had each

38 Bruce Cook. 5.

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seen the insides of a mental hospital and a prison by the age of thirty.”39 Cameron looks at the same events which shaped the group, what made them different from the established literary world and the people who influenced their writing.

Another work which takes a look at Kerouac as a part of a small group is David

Halberstam’s The Fifties. Halberstam connects Kerouac with the other members of the

Beat Generation and explains their circumstances well. He connects Jack Kerouac more loosely with other rebel icons of his time: Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Elvis Presley.

He describes these icons of literature, theatre, music, and screen as being the “new tradition of American Rebels.”40 This connection is an interesting one as by all accounts

“Millions of moviegoers saw Dean and Brando, paving the way for Kerouac’s breakthrough as another in the line of attractive, misunderstood, and possibly dangerous models for teens.”41 In essence, Halberstam is arguing that what Kerouac was doing for literature others were doing in the other social and cultural forums of theatre, film, and music. Between these four individuals all areas of America popular culture at this time were covered.

It has been noted that “biographical studies have proliferated, as have studies of the Beat Generation, but critical commentary has not been so abundant.”42 Kerouac’s place in the field of the American Classics must be assured on the basis of his On the

Road publication alone. However it has taken a while for Kerouac to be allowed entrance into the accepted literary establishment. The life companion of Allen Ginsberg, Peter

Orlovsky, in conversation with Columbia professor and friend Elbert Lenrow in March

39 James Campbell. This is the Beat Generation: New York – San Francisco – Paris. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1999. Cover. 40 Matt Theado, ed. 48. 41 Matt Theado, ed. 48. 42 Robert Holton. 13.

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1958, made an interesting comment which supports this idea. Lenrow recounts: “we three sat down to dinner in the Village, and Peter brought me up to date (it was now March). He laughingly alluded to Jack’s latest appearance on TV, with Wingate, “When all of the

Sarah Lawrence girls adopted him as a term paper subject!”43 While humorous, this corresponds with the general view that although Kerouac’s presence was felt on university campuses across America it was not through the hands of the professors. Further, “while the novel [On the Road] was invisible on most English department reading lists, it was nonetheless widely read and discussed on campuses all across America.”44 It appears that literary critics are still unsure of Kerouac’s prose and “despite their critical insights, important studies by George Dardess, Tim Hunt, John Tytell, and Regina Weinreich that argued for the literary strengths of Kerouac’s writing had little effect on the reigning attitudes to Kerouac’s work.”45 Some have argued that Kerouac is merely a continuation of a particular style in American prose and that his message can be likened to that established in the long line of Walt Whitman, Herman Melville and Mark Twain. Others have argued that Kerouac has set a new course in literature and for that deserves a unique place in the field. Though comparisons have been drawn between Kerouac’s work and that of the other authors mentioned his inclusion as being one of the Great American

Novelists has only been recent and is still a matter of contention.

Chapter two of this thesis is titled “The Only Rebellion Around” in reference to an article written about Kerouac and the Beat Generation which appeared in Life Magazine in 1959. This chapter is divided into two parts for the purpose of reflecting the wide ranging impact that the Beats had upon this period. The first part is titled “The New

43 Elbert Lenrow. 50. 44 Robert Holton. 9. 45 Robert Holton. 3.

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American Rebels: A New Kind of Hero” and the second is titled “The Beat Mind in a

Conservative Age.” The first part of this chapter deals with the social and cultural aspect of the 1950s and the second deals with the political and intellectual framework within which Kerouac operated. The selected overall chapter title best depicts the role Kerouac and the Beat Generation played in the 1950s. This chapter will compare Kerouac to the other (male) icons of his time: Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Elvis Presley. With

Kerouac being the reference point, it shall look at what these figures contributed to this period.

Chapter three is titled “A Million Coffee Bars and a Trillion Pairs of Levis” in reference to a quote made by William S. Burroughs while commenting on Kerouac’s legacy. Burroughs made several references to Kerouac’s legacy in writing, speeches, interviews, and letters all of which are on a similar theme. This chapter is also divided into two parts, the first of which looks at Kerouac’s “Legacy,” the second part being the

“Conclusion” to this thesis. This chapter will examine Kerouac’s most immediate impact and long term influence. It shall interpret how Kerouac has been portrayed since his death in 1969 and trace some significant developments in the establishment of his notoriety in history. This chapter will look at the subsequent generation of the 1960s, historically dubbed the “Yippies,” the “Hippies” or the “Hippie Generation.” It shall compare

Kerouac’s Beat Generation and the 1960s Hippie Generation and establish what connections can be made between the two groups. It will look at what sort of a precedent

Kerouac established for the generation coming of age in the 1960s. The conclusion lays out the main themes of this paper and summarise what Kerouac’s contribution has been to this period, and subsequent ones in American history.

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Chapter Two “The Only Rebellion Around”46

In among a number of advertisements of new-fangled domestic technology, an increasingly large feature of 1950s culture, are the pictures and descriptions of an

“automatic Handy-Lite Reel” with a proud, grinning male model star and an ad for “an automatic Clothesline Reel” with a rather bemused, but otherwise sincere, looking housewife. The article “The Only Rebellion Around” from which this chapter takes its title appears in the midst of this array of technology which the advertisers assure makes modern life much more convenient.

The article begins with a photograph of “a Beat’s entire ‘pad’ or household, as re- created in studio shot using paid models, [which] contains all the essentials of uncomfortable living.”47 It is well that the author states that this is a “studio shot using paid models” as, from this, it is easy to see that the shoot is taken for the express purpose of displaying what the author of the article wants to display about the Beats. The photograph displays a disorganised room which includes, rather disconcertingly,

“marijuana for smoking” in the proximity of a “beat baby, who has gone to sleep on floor after playing with beer cans.” The picture is the visual comparison of the subtitle to the story: “But the Shabby Beats Bungle the Job in Arguing, Sulking and Bad Poetry.”48

From the inclusion of certain stereotypically Beat things such as an espresso coffee, bongo drums, jazz music, drugs (and related paraphernalia), and clear signs of cheap living, it is clear that this article was published not too long after the Beat terminology exploded into the American mainstream culture from its subterranean roots

46 Title taken from: Paul O’ Neil, “The Only Rebellion Around,” Life Magazine, 30 November 1959. 47 Paul O’ Neil, “The Only Rebellion Around.” 114. 48 Paul O’ Neil, “The Only Rebellion Around.” 115.

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where it had been dwelling for the years prior to 1957 and the publication of Kerouac’s

On the Road. The author is still unclear or uncertain about what to say about the Beats.

This article is valuable for its appearance close to the beginning of the Beat craze which began in 1957 and for its take on the beats. On a literal level this article is an example of one author in one major publication at this time. On another level this article can be taken as representative of many author’s opinions which appeared in several major publications at, or around, this time. The article is of considerable length, enough to show a depth of knowledge about the subject in question, but from the outset it seems that its opinions are clear – Beats and the Beat Generation are not good things. Paul O’Neil begins the article with the following statement:

If the U.S. today is really the biggest, sweetest and most succulent casaba ever produced by the melon patch of civilization, it would seem only reasonable to find its surface profaned – as it is – by a few fruit flies. But reason would also anticipate contented fruit flies, blissful fruit flies – fruit flies raised by happy environment to the highest stages of fruit fly development. Such is not the case. The grandest casaba of all, in disconcerting fact, has incubated some of the hairiest, scrawniest and most discontented specimens of all time: the improbable Beat Generation, who not only refuse to sample the seeping juices of American plenty and American social advance but scrape their feelers in discordant scorn of any and all who do. 49

This beginning, in which the author lays out his opinion quite openly, leads the reader into believing this tone of disgust will continue throughout the article. However as the article unfolds, and more information is given, it seems that the author is not entirely endorsing this viewpoint, even though he makes it. He alerts us to the things that the Beats do not enjoy about modern day American society, but does so in a roundabout way. He cannot bring the Beats to our attention without first implying that this is because they are

49 Paul O’Neil, “The Only Rebellion Around,” 115.

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unable, or unwilling, to celebrate the joys of American prosperity in the postwar era.

Instead they shun just about everything which this society is built upon:

Mom, Dad, Politics, Marriage, the Savings Bank, Organized Religion, Literary Elegance, Law, the Ivy League Suit, and Higher Education, to say nothing of the Automatic Dishwasher, the Cellophane wrapped Soda Cracker, the Split-Level House and the clean, or peace-provoking, H-bomb.50

It is as if O’Neil is suggesting that the Beats are ungrateful for all the benefits of a prosperous economy which enrich post war American, and that this is their fault and not that of society. O’Neil’s article attempts to undermine the Beat’s impact on America as much as he can, and does so using such devices as satire, irony and humour. He comments that “little of this is as remarkable as the Beats like to think”51 and that Beats have given “poetry, a new and abrasive connotation.”52 He brings to our attention the fact that “armies of Americans experience a sense of tongue-clucking outrage at the antics of

Beatdom’s more strident practitioners, but most of them also experience a morbid curiosity about them.”53 It is this curiosity, more than anything, that drives the article which is, after all, looking at “the most curious men of influence the 20th Century has yet produced.”54 O’Neil displays some insight into the commercial side of this craze, where the Beats began to emerge (Greenwich Village and North Beach), and what their basic beliefs are, but attempts to put a slant on everything to make it look in some way derogatory. He is able, however, to concede that “the Beat Generation…is primarily important in the U.S. as the voice of nonconformity, the fount of what might be described

50 Paul O’Neil, “The Only Rebellion Around.” 115. 51 Paul O’Neil, “The Only Rebellion Around.” 115. 52 Paul O’Neil, “The Only Rebellion Around.” 116. 53 Paul O’Neil, “The Only Rebellion Around.” 116. 54 Paul O’Neil, “The Only Rebellion Around.” 116.

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as a sort of nonpolitical radicalism.”55 And “no matter what else it may be, it is not boring, and in the U.S. of the 1950s it is the only rebellion in town.”56

This article is a fairly representative example of the many articles on the Beats which appeared around this time. Its purpose is “to ridicule the Beats in all particulars, yet to take them seriously in general – as a trend, an indication of something greater taking shape beneath the surface.”57 O’Neil is therefore undecided about whether the Beats and the Beat Generation being “The Only Rebellion Around” is a good or bad influence. The reader is unclear what O’Neil’s thesis is, while complementing the group, at least on some levels in this work (not least by writing it in the first place), he chooses to condemn them on others. A quote taken from an interview with Lawrence Ferlinghetti some forty years later helps lay this issue to rest:

And of the Beat movement itself, he’s [Ferlinghetti] still a believer: ‘The Beat message became the only rebellion around – and it is still the same today….With the dot-commies and the whole computer consciousness, the Beat message is needed now more than ever.’58

The New American Rebel: A New Kind of Hero

Joyce Johnson recounts her first impression of Jack Kerouac:

The windows of Howard Johnson’s are running with steam so you can’t see in. I push open the heavy glass door, and there is, sure enough, a black-haired man at the counter in a flannel lumberjack shirt slightly the worse for wear. He looks up and stares at me with blue eyes, amazingly blue. And the skin of his face is so brown. He’s the only person in Howard Johnson’s in colour.59

Johnson’s impression would no doubt be similar to many of her generation, both male and female, who came into contact with Kerouac. In a generation of men most

55 Paul O’Neil, “The Only Rebellion Around.” 118. 56 Paul O’ Neil, “The Only Rebellion Around.” 118. 57 Bruce Cook. 91. 58 Paul Iorio, “A Howl That Still Echoes: Ginsberg Poem Recalled.” 59 Joyce Johnson. Minor Characters. 127.

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commonly associated with the Grey Flannel Suit, Kerouac added literal colour to the scene she depicts in his coloured apparel. This quote is also representative of the impression that many at this time would get of Kerouac, coming into contact with him either in person or through his literature. This is because Kerouac added colour to a generation that was otherwise “captured in black and white.” 60

Kerouac has been linked to three other cultural icons of this time: Marlon Brando,

James Dean, and Elvis Presley. Each grew to national and international recognition around the same time and each was a different kind of icon from those that had existed in

America before the war. They were the New American Rebels who were not only new heroes to the youth, but represented a new kind of hero youth could associate with. They became symbolic of what was new about America in the postwar era. What distinguished this group from others was that their lifestyle was the same in real life as it was portrayed in their films, songs and literature. This natural element to these figures is perhaps what distinguished them from others who had dominated the media prior to their appearance.

Taken collectively there was something about what these people were saying. James Dean and Marlon Brando had been associated with the Method School of acting which, under the guidance of Elia Kazan, instructed its actors to guide their performances from within.

When Elvis Presley graced the stage he just let himself go and did what came naturally to him. He was shocked by the impact that this had upon his audiences. He continued with his style of performance, however, as it was what he did when he behaved naturally on stage which gained him notoriety. Kerouac, like these actors of the Method School, looked inward for direction.

60 David Halberstam. The Fifties. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993. 3.

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This inward search for true feelings to evoke in each of these icons areas of culture at this time was demonstrated in the fact that each had a similar image. Each was physically the embodiment of an All-American – a source of attraction to male and female alike. Males were able to idolise these figures and women could yearn after them. Each possessed a certain vulnerability which came across in the media and in their personal lives and each was down to earth, in the sense that they could be just like you or I.

In the following example it is possible to discern the way in which these figures differed from the orthodox:

Differ? How can I put it? I remember once walking down Lexington Avenue…when across the street a man came running out of a Greek restaurant with a piece of fruit in his hand and the manager close behind, yelling for him to stop. Just as I was thinking, ‘I hope the guy catches him,’ Jack said out loud, ‘I hope the guy gets away.’61

This is taken from a quote made by Alan Harrington who is pseudonymously referred to as Ketcham in John Clellon Holmes novel Go. In this example the conservative can be discerned from the rebel. The rebel is not only the one who is vocal but is brash and outspoken. There was much separating the two generational perspectives, not merely a depression and a war. The narrator of this story is presumably of the Silent

Generation of before the war which was noted for being just that – silent. This type of outlook characterised Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and these New American Rebels. In another example which helps bring this sense of challenging social norms across Kerouac wrote:

besides, ‘work’ always means somebody else’s work, you push another man’s boxes around wondering ‘why doesn’t he push his own boxes around?’ And in Russia probably the worker thinks, ‘Why doesn’t the Peoples Republic push their

61 Bruce Cook. 47.

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own boxes around?’ At least by working for [Philip Whalen], I was working for a friend.”62

This gives insight into the extent to which Kerouac was a spokesman for his generation, in dealing with their anxieties. Many began to question the importance of their work and shun the common ideals of human industry. In thinking of work in this way

Kerouac represented a threat to the time period which was heavily conservative. He, like other rebellious figures of this time, began to question (and therefore challenge) the importance of conventional work life and the lifestyle this brought about.

It can be argued that these icons of rebellion, Brando, Dean, Kerouac, and Presley, were merely responding to something which was already there and that was the reason why each was able to capture their popularity so quickly and in the way they did. One quote helps support the notion that there was already a group of disaffected youths who were in existence in America at this time and that people such as these became the outlet for their concerns:

It is difficult, separated by time and temper from that period to convey the liberating effect that On the Road had on the young people all over America. There was a sort of instantaneous flash of recognition that seemed to send thousands of them out into the streets, proclaiming that Kerouac had written their story, that On the Road was their book.63

This comment supports the point that the youthful generation were simply waiting and looking for such a symbol or icon to attach to in their search for identity. The films, songs, and books in which this rebellious lifestyle provided the youth with something they could mirror or copy in the hope of being like their misunderstood idols. Brando will eternally be remembered as his character in A Street Car Named Desire, Stanley

Kowalski. James Dean, who starred in only three movies, will be remembered as being

62 Sketchbook nine of ten, “Passing Through,” Box 18c, Papers of Jack Kerouac, NYPL. 63 Bruce Cook. 6.

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Rebel Without A Cause’s Jim Stark. Elvis Presley is immortalised in both song and a number of low budget Hollywood films. Jack Kerouac’s image has largely been associated with the photograph which appears on the front cover of his second novel On the Road.

Kerouac provides the background to the taking of this photograph:

That natty picture of me on the cover of On the Road results from the fact that I had just gotten down from a high mountain where I’d been for two month completely alone and usually I was in the habit of combing my hair of course because you have to get rides on the highway and all that and you usually want girls to look at you as though you were a man and not a wild beast but my friend Gregory Corso opened his shirt and took out a silver crucifix that was hanging from a chain and said ‘Wear this and wear it outside your shirt and don’t comb your hair.’64

The photograph in question was instantly snapped up as being a good marketable image. Kerouac, knowing no other way to respond to being photographed, “posed just like that, wild hair, crucifix, and all”65 for Mademoiselle which was a contemporary magazine targeted toward girls. Joyce Johnson, the girlfriend of Kerouac at the time of the publication of his second novel On the Road, comments upon her impression of the photo which depicted

A writer who had a crucifix around his neck and tangled black hair plastered against his forehead as if he’d just walked out of the rain. He looked wild and sad in a way that didn’t seem appropriate for the occasion.66

It is this iconic impression of Kerouac, the embodiment of ruggedness and youthful authenticity, which has largely stayed with us. Like the other iconic forms of

Brando, Dean and Presley, they gave the viewer a certain impression of these New

American Rebels which was appealing, not least because it was sexual.

64 Jack Kerouac, “The Origins of the Beat Generation.” 31. 65 Jack Kerouac, “The Origins of the Beat Generation.” 31. 66 Joyce Johnson. Minor Characters. 118.

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This group of New American Rebels was exclusively male. Women would be free to watch these men, and react to them, but would not ever really be incorporated into their group. As was the mood of the time, “men were taken seriously. Women, by contrast, were doomed to serve as support troops.”67 Their place, if anything, would be to hope that in some way they could protect the vulnerable side of these icons through mothering them as their girlfriends. John Clellon Holmes wrote in a Dream Letter to Allen Ginsberg in

1954 that “the social organisation which is most true of itself to the artist is the boy gang.”68 This definition remained largely true of influential groups at this time such as the

Beats and this new hero to the young, the New American Rebel.

The subject and direction of the rebellion which was associated with the Beats and the New American Rebels was an important one. Halberstam comments that “in one of his first important films, the Wild One, Brando plays a member of a motorcycle club.

‘What are you rebelling against?’ asks a girl in the small town. ‘Waddya got?’ asks

Brando.”69 This attitude is symbolic of what this new rebellion was about and this quote has largely been taken on as its representation. Each of these four individuals shared this character trait which means that they can reliably be grouped together. Clellon Holmes described Kerouac to a friend as “this new, young Marlon Brando of literature”70 Elvis

Presley was described, in a similar way, as being a “guitar playing Marlon Brando.”71

And “If Dean had learned from Brando, now others would copy Dean. Elvis Presley, for one, wanted to be known as the James Dean of rock and roll.”72 In essence, what people meant when they referred to one of these individuals is the same as they meant when they

67 David Halberstam. 568. 68 Joyce Johnson. Minor Characters. 79. 69 David Halberstam. 269. 70 Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee, ed. 240. 71 David Halberstam. 477. 72 David Halberstam. 486.

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referred to another. The names were interchangeable as these characters were all represented as the same rebellious icon in popular culture.

The nature of Kerouac’s rebellion was just the same as Marlon Brando’s. Kerouac rebelled against all forms of authority. Kerouac was the only one of his boyhood friends to leave his hometown Lowell for any significant length of time. He walked out of

Columbia University which he attended on a football scholarship. He was discharged from the Merchant Navy on the grounds of a mental disorder which he had clearly been faking in order to be removed. Kerouac was unable to deal with the rigours of marriage, or indeed any serious or long term relationship. He split with his first wife shortly after marrying her and his second wife also. He married for a third time but from the contents of a letter he wrote his nephew even this was losing its attractions:

Dear Little Paul: This is Uncle Jack. I’ve turned over my entire estate, real, personal and mixed, to Memere, and if she dies before me, it is then turned to you, and if I die thereafter, it all goes to you. The will is locked in a bank vault of the Citizens National Bank of St. Petersburg. I have a copy of the new will in the house just for reference. My St. Pete attorney who did this for me is Fred Bryson. I just wanted to leave my ‘estate’ (which is what it really is) to someone directly connected with the last remaining drop of my direct bloodline, which is me, sister Carolyn, your Mom, and not to leave a dangblasted fucking goddamn thing to my wife’s one hundred Greek relatives. I also plan to divorce, or have her marriage to me annulled.73

Kerouac’s message, much like his other rebellious counterparts, was one which embraced individuality and freedom. World War II had a very disrupting effect upon the

American experience in the twentieth century. As a result of this disruption the people of the post war age were acting in new and un-chartered territory. As people were re- defining themselves in this new age this group of individuals which was appearing was

73 Jack Kerouac to Paul Blake Jr. 20 October 1969. Box 18b, Papers of Jack Kerouac, NYPL. This one page letter, written to Blake, Kerouac’s nephew was probably the last page of prose Kerouac wrote.

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doing so in a different and unique way through their adoption of a non-mainstream and, therefore, controversial manner of living.

These four individuals: Brando, Dean, Kerouac, and Presley, became the symbols of discontent within contemporary American society. It is important to note, however, that though this new group shunned the thing upon which American society was becoming increasingly built at this time – material wealth – the four served their purpose in it just like everyone else. This purpose became increasingly apparent as time went on. These individuals emerged as America’s first postwar counterculture. Prior to breaking out into the mainstream, people such as Kerouac had embraced the characters of the underworld while the movement which they were about to give their name to was still underground.

America was, in the 1950s, still a segregated society and while the Beats such as

Kerouac and these other rebels were doing their work in uniting the youth movement still much work had to be done uniting the races of America. People such as Kerouac became closely associated with black jazz culture and its outward symbols: music, drugs, pre- marital sex, un-regulated dress, slang, and other examples of non conformity in values.

Kerouac liked the subterranean lifestyles of these individuals with whom he associated.

He wrote a book in which he celebrated this culture titled The Subterraneans. Kerouac defines subterraneans, a term he had adopted from Allan Ginsberg, as:

Hip without being slick, they are intelligent without being corny, they are intellectual as hell and know about Pound without being pretentious or talking too much about it, they are very quiet, they are very Christlike.74

Kerouac used the word Fellaheen when discussing this kind of individual who was underneath society. This group was comprised of drug addicts, prostitutes, homosexuals, blacks and others who comprised the bottom rung of society in America at this time.

74 Jack Kerouac. The Subterraneans. New York: Grove, 1958. 2.

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Kerouac found members of this group particularly welcoming, for perhaps an idealistic view of his, that they didn’t favour anyone over anyone else. These groups tended to congregate around places such as Greenwich Village, in New York, and North Beach in

San Francisco. David Halberstam noted that:

If counterculture existed anywhere in America in the forties and early fifties, it was in Greenwich Village. Here were Italian restaurants with candles stuck in old Chianti bottles, coffee houses with poets and artists, small theatres and clubs that featured modern jazz; here were interracial couples and homosexual and lesbian couples living rather openly. The battle cry was the rejection of commercialism and materialism…not so much a political rebellion as a restlessness with the conventions of the American middle class.”75

The 1950s youth culture was well known for its journey across the country to the west. When it arrived in the middle of the 1950s it exploded in San Francisco’s North

Beach area. Though the locations differed the same core values of rebellion were present as they had been in Greenwich Village.

Each of these four New American Rebels was attracted to the underground culture commonly associated with the blacks. Its appeal was two fold: it was different and, therefore, exciting and it was removed from mainstream American culture in the 1950s.

While America had moved quickly, in an accelerating pace, since the postwar period, the people who were not part of it had remained essentially the same. Part of the appeal of the subterraneans was that they hadn’t been influenced or affected by the fast-moving and increasingly materialistic society which was coming into existence nearly so much as the white culture had. In this way Kerouac was able to step into what must have felt like an older America as it was removed from the far changed consumer world of the 1950s.

Kerouac wrote down in one of his many notebooks that:

75 David Halberstam. 268.

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The thing I like about Chinatown, you look around, you see that everybody has a vice, beautiful vice, whether it’s O, or wine, or Cunt, or whiskey – you don’t feel so isolated from man as you do in Anglo Saxon Broadways of glare and traffic.76

The isolation he spoke of is one that many of his age group would have felt at this time from a mainstream and increasingly mass orientated society which had been growing since the end of the war. The group was pioneering a new way of living which grew out of its sense of alienation and isolation from a society which increased levels of monotony at the price of individualism. As a result of this alienation it felt more at ease associating with individuals who were not visibly a part of mainstream society. In this way it could interact with an America before this change had begun. The 1950s was still a time of much segregation between blacks and whites. On a bus ride to San Francisco with his mother in 1957 Kerouac commented upon the segregation in the bus in which blacks were to sit exclusively at the back of the bus, thus leaving the front rows free for whites:

groans everywhere, all the way to the back seats where black sufferers suffer no less because their skin is black. Yes ‘Freedom Riders’ indeed, just because you’ve got ‘white’ skin and ride in the front don’t make you suffer less. 77

Though inflected with Buddhist meaning (all life is suffering) this comment brings up a crucial issue of Kerouac’s interpretation of black living. It serves to remind us of the segregated time in which Kerouac lived. He regards the black experience as no different from his own in the sense that both white and black alike have to deal with similar problems of living. This is somewhat naïve and idealistic in that blacks were still largely considered second class citizens in the American society of this time. The important distinction that he notices is their separation which means that they both have a different

76 Sketchbook one of ten, “Passing Through,” Box 18c, Papers of Jack Kerouac, NYPL. 77 Sketchbook eight of ten, “Passing Through,” Box 18c, Papers of Jack Kerouac, NYPL.

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experience. While in Tangiers visiting William Burroughs Kerouac wrote following an opium overdose:

All I wanted was some Wheaties by a pine breeze kitchen window in America, that is, I guess a vision of my childhood in America – many Americans suddenly sick in foreign lands must get the same childlike yearn, like Wolfe suddenly remembering the lonely milkman’s bottle clink at dawn in No. Carolina as he lies there tormented in a London room, or Hemingway suddenly seeing the autumn leaves at Ann Arbor in a Berlin brothel. Scott Fitz tears coming to his eyes in Spain to think of his father’s old shoes in the farmhouse door. Johnny Smith the tourist wakes up drunk in a cracked Istanbul room crying for ice cream sodas on Sunday afternoon in Richmond Hill Center.78

The homesickness and yearning for sanctuary of which Kerouac speaks represents the human desire for a place where he can act like himself and not feel self conscious for doing so. In the subterranean community he found this sanctuary. In this example he was looking for a refuge which would take him from his containment “in foreign lands” and away to a more peaceful and welcoming sanctuary. In many ways the black, subterranean culture operated as this home while Kerouac was in America – a refuge from mainstream society. Kerouac was fascinated by the lives of these individuals and incorporated them into his prose. He commented in a notebook that: “I must believe in the lives of people and the history of their reality – I must become a historian – observe the history of society and write histories of the world in wild hallucinated prose.”79 He stated that “he who summons his race, and sits beneath history, is Fellaheen.”80 That the black group “sits beneath history” is significant as it reinforces the idea that blacks are not completely represented in formal histories of this time.

Three important figures in standardisation and mass production at this time were

Henry Ford, William Levitt and the McDonald brothers. Each of these institutions

78 Sketchbook seven of ten, “Passing Through,” Box 18c, Papers of Jack Kerouac, NYPL. 79 Sketchbook one of ten, “Passing Through,” Box 18c, Papers of Jack Kerouac, NYPL. 80 Sketchbook one of ten, “Passing Through,” Box 18c, Papers of Jack Kerouac, NYPL.

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contributed in its own way to the identity problem people such as these new rebels were having in this new society. Henry Ford’s legacy has been felt in the mass production car which in the 1950s was most widely associated with General Motors. William Levitt had revolutionised the arrangement of housing with the introduction of large numbers of similar looking and shaped housing in one area and the McDonald brothers had a similar impact on the food industry by mass producing the same kind of food. The corporate development which had obviously been going on for a considerable time before the war emerged at the forefront of cultural consciousness. This competitive capitalist environment stifled what Kerouac saw as being good in America as it placed rampant consumerism as the driving force of society in which people increasingly found their expression and sense of self. In their location of identity in mass oriented cultural object, individualism was greatly threatened.

Kerouac, among these other figures, felt disenchanted with these changes. He noted: “I want to be alone – since that repudiation of a human wish Americans have become adjusted to their machines.”81 He would prefer to assert his ability to be an individual over that of his ability to conform. He harked back to an America that was disappearing, an earlier America where individualism was rampant. It was his desire to capture in his work American emotion before it was too late; he noted that “feeling may soon be obsolete as America enters its High Civilization period and no one will get sentimental or poetic any more about trains and dew on fences at dawn in Missouri.”82

Kerouac’s value structure and his subject matter were distinctly American. He commented that:

81 Sketchbook three of ten, “Passing Through,” Box, 18c, Papers of Jack Kerouac, NYPL. 82 Jack Kerouac. Visions of Cody. New York: Penguin, 1972. Preface.

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The only thing to do is be like my mother: patient, believing, careful, bleak, self- protective, glad for little favours, suspicious of great favours, beware of Greek’s bearing fish, make it your own way, hurt no one, mind your own business and make your compact with God. For God is our Guardian Angel and this is a fact that’s only proven when proof exists no more.83

Taken in isolation, each of these suggestions or guidelines appears quite simple.

Collectively however they endorse the simple core Christian value system. Therefore, though Kerouac was at once going against the system, he was doing so while also sharing many of the values upon which it was based. He was against the direction in which society was going but still attested to its central values.

Kerouac wrote in a notebook: “ain’t no atom bomb will blow up America,

America itself is a bomb bound to go off from within”84 – an assessment that was largely correct. Very shortly after the explosion of Beat consciousness into the mainstream of society in 1957 America found itself to be very unsettled as a nation. Where there was once a single dominant culture, people such as the New America Rebels were helping to create many. This was, however, a very necessary and organic thing. Once the rebellious lifestyle, which people such as Kerouac led, became more widely known it became a

“revolution institutionalised.”85

What is interesting to note is that not only were the New American Rebels adopted nationally as icons of rebellion, but internationally also. The Beat message caught on quickly in all parts of the world:

You know, you can’t imagine how widespread the interest is in them. I’ve met writers and teachers in places like Beirut and Karachi, or even Helsinki, where they may never have heard of any American writers except Ginsberg and Kerouac. It’s remarkable. You can forget about Herman Melville, Mark Twain or Henry

83 Sketchbook eight of ten, “Passing Through,” Box 18c, Papers of Jack Kerouac, NYPL. 84 Sketchbook one of ten, “Passing Through,” Box 18c, Papers of Jack Kerouac, NYPL. 85 Bruce Cook. 100.

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James. All they know about American literature is the Beat Generation – and that’s all they need to know. They love it.86

This is due to the fact that the message of people like Kerouac and the other New

American Rebels was highly attractive. “When Kerouac spoke of his as a Beat

Generation, he meant the whole of it, a social unit”87 and there was something very attractive about this – the idea of the whole youth generation being a grouping. Added to this, America had become the focal point of the world in terms of culture, (at least the western world) in the period following World War II. The effect of this was that the Beats gained a far larger audience than they might otherwise have done. Being the only counterculture going on in America at this time they received wide international attention and operated as a model for rebellion. Not only was the image of people such as Kerouac advertised nationally, it began to take on international proportions and did so with rapidity. Other youths round the world must have felt this same alienation. Allen Ginsberg commented on the Beat impulse to assert its individualism that:

Its all been in the gnostic tradition, the underground mystical tradition of the West. Not that we originated it, just carried it on a little here in America. Yes, here, here it’s a problem. Because its only by getting out from under the American flag and marching to a different drummer in the Thoreauvian sense that one can find one’s own self here. And you have to do it, too. It’s either that or take the mass- produced self they keep trying to shove down your throat with their cigarette advertisements and so on.88

Thus, people like Kerouac, the Beats and the New American Rebels were able to touch upon something which could be easily manipulated to suit something existing in many post war youth generations around the world. That America’s New York had taken from

86 Bruce Cook. 150. 87 Bruce Cook. 123. 88 Bruce Cook. 104.

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Paris the title of “centre of Western culture”89 could not be the only reason. There were other people around the world who wanted to live the lifestyle Kerouac and these others did. Other people wanted to re-create the experiences this group was having as best they could. Kerouac and these others had brought to the world’s attention the problems endemic in the new, modern western society:

The traffic problem is merely that cars by the millions enslave us to new city and highway production systems requiring hours of driving to and from needs, in ‘congested’ arteries naturally – where once you’d a walked. These are all conditions pointing to the imminent cancerous death of America, the final cog in the western Civ. Machine.90

There was a unity felt with Kerouac, the Beats, and the other New American

Rebels which caught on nationally and internationally. They seemed to respond to a crisis of identity going on in a large number of countries at this time. America, which was increasingly becoming the focal point of popular culture in the world at this time, was looked upon and revered by many. Their message, which was to enjoy freedom and living, was carried internationally. This had the effect of lifting what was otherwise an underground culture to the mainstream not only of America, but several other countries.

Part of the main attraction to people like Kerouac was that the underground world of his Fellaheen was untouchable by the mainstream and mass oriented which was becoming more dominating in society. It is likely that

If jazz were then as respectable as it has since become, it would not have seemed half so attractive to them. It was the illegitimate atmosphere of the jazz milieu, with its overtones of criminality, sex, drugs, and violence, that brought them back night after night.91

89 Richard H. Pells. The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s. New York: Wesleyan University Press, 1989. xvii. 90 Sketchbook three of ten, “Passing Through,” Box 18c, Papers of Jack Kerouac, NYPL. 91 Bruce Cook. 220.

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Most Beat novels included some reference, however obscure, to members of the underworld, while the aforementioned book The Subterraneans was, in its entirety, about this underground culture. Kerouac wrote this story about his relationship with a black girl

Mardou Fox (real-life Alene Lee) which would be something many would have been highly conscious of at this time. Every early Beat novel included a compulsory Jazz scene in which the characters were enjoying the sound and lifestyle associated with the music in these early stages. The attraction to jazz was such that there were later experiments of reading poetry to the music and Kerouac had always tried to emulate the style of jazz on paper.

What is interesting about these characters mentioned – Marlon Brando, James

Dean, Jack Kerouac, and Elvis Presley – is that what they were doing was generally the same. Their real power came in the fact that they, together, sparked a national and increasingly international movement among the younger generation. They helped resolve some of the crises that the youth were having in this new age. Though each of the New

American Rebels was an individual, there are comparisons to be made between them in that they all broke new, un-chartered territory in terms of living. This was part of the

“phenomenon of the fifties…. [in which] they were playing with this new instrument without knowing its real power.”92 They were pioneers in terms of being the first postwar

American counterculture.

There were others who helped add the effect that these individuals had upon removing the constraints within American society at this time. Not least were Hugh

Hefner and Alfred Kinsey. Hefner began Playboy Magazine in the mid 1950s and

92 David Halberstam. 660.

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As far as [Hugh] Hefner was concerned, he was a direct lineal descendant of Alfred Kinsey, whom he regarded as a hero, the man who had, more than anyone else pointed out the hypocrisy in daily American life, the difference between what Americans said about sex and what they actually did.93

Alfred Kinsey helped remove some of the tensions which Americans felt about discussing sex and their sex lives. Joyce Johnson commented that “in the 1950s, sex – if you achieved it – was a serious and anxious act.”94 There were many apprehensions and misconceptions about the issue which such an individual helped bring to the attention of

Americans of 1950s. The Beats had experienced the Kinsey Report through Herbert

Huncke, whom Kinsey had interviewed personally.95 Hefner added to this aura of sexual experimentation with the publication of his magazine in which appeared photographs of naked or partly dressed, young women. These two individuals also helped challenge some of the restraints about sexual openness at this time. Each of the figures of the New

American Rebels had something sexual in their attraction and their open-ness about the issue of sex also went against the grain of American morality at this time.

Kerouac himself noted an unorthodox sexual experience he had in his book The

Dharma Bums called a “Yabyum.”96 This term, which had a foreign origin, was essentially another meaning for group sex. These ideas about sex which Kerouac and these others were endorsing were by no means new. What was merely taking place was that these individuals were bringing these ideas and neuroses, which had otherwise remained slightly under the surface, to public attention. These attitudes provoked outrage among the establishment at all levels in American society, but then it did not take much to make an impression upon this conservative group. Kerouac, the Beats and the New

93 David Halberstam. 573. 94 Joyce Johnson. Minor Characters. 89. 95 Matt Theado, ed. 26-8. 96 Jack Kerouac. The Dharma Bums. New York: Penguin, 1958. 27.

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American Rebels was guided by a new and controversial idea, “always do what you want.”97

The Beat Mind in a Conservative Age

Jack Kerouac’s On the Road appeared in 1957 – the same year that Allen

Ginsberg’s poem Howl and Other Poems had been released by City Lights Publishers as number four in its pocketbook series. If the Kinsey Report and Playboy Magazine had been controversial for their upsetting of American morality over the course of the previous few years, these publications would help disrupt the bedrock of the nation’s morality even further. The story began with the publication of Howl and Other Poems by

Allen Ginsberg. This pocketbook of poems was very popular locally in San Francisco, where two years earlier, in 1955, Ginsberg had performed the title poem live for the first time. The pocketbook

achieved a nationwide reputation when it was seized by United States customs officials en route from England, where the first edition was printed. After Ferlinghetti published another edition printed in the United States, he and his bookstore clerk were arrested and charged with selling obscene material. The American Civil Liberties Union defended City Lights, and after a celebrated court battle that further boosted the book’s renown Howl was declared not obscene.98

The trial brought Ginsberg national and international attention and gave his book a large amount of free advertising which has helped sell the book in record numbers ever since. On the Road appeared in the aftermath of this publication and trial and benefited from the attention the book gave to the Beat writers. The publishers of On the Road forced Kerouac to undertake serious and lengthy steps to remove possibly libellous material before its publication. Publishing allegedly obscene material was not something new to the Beat writers. William S. Burroughs “Naked Lunch (1959) maintains the

97 Jack Kerouac. The Subterraneans. 61. 98 Matt Theado, ed. 64.

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distinction of being, in 1965, the last literary work banned for alleged obscenity in the

United States.”99 By modern day standards the Beat material is quite tame and it therefore seems preposterous to think that it was ever placed under ban. However, contemporarily, this material was very shocking. The Beats served as the precursor to the freedoms of publication which are now taken for granted. A more modern reader would not notice the shock value in this material in the same way a contemporary reader would. This is also in part what makes the work of the Beats so important. While the work is of a high standard and is thus very readable, the context in which it was published made it all the more exhilarating. Kerouac and the other Beat writers really shook the foundations of American society. For this Kerouac had to suffer years in obscurity. Writing in 1959, Kerouac commented that

the manuscript of [On the] Road was turned down on the grounds that it would displease the sales manager of my publisher at the time, though the editor, a very intelligent man, said ‘Jack this is just like Dostoevsky, but what can I do at this time.’ It was too early.100

It took Kerouac six years to publish his second novel, which launched him and the

Beat writers from relative obscurity and into the media limelight and fame. His manuscript had been passed around between no less than seven publishers before one company, Viking, was willing to take a risk on it. Three excerpts from the work were published during this time which helped bring it attention, and if nothing else helped build up the already large underground knowledge of its existence.

There are many reasons why Kerouac’s On the Road was not published sooner, not least being its presentation. Kerouac had written the work on a single roll of teletype paper which extended some 120 feet in length. This was not the usual single typed sheet

99 Matt Theado, ed. 17. 100 Jack Kerouac, “The Origins of the Beat Generation.”

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manuscript presentation which editors were used to. Kerouac was also very difficult to deal with. His first publication Town and the City had been reduced from its original 1100 pages through careful editing to only 400. Because his writing was so personal to him,

Kerouac had found it very difficult to cope with this editorial intrusion. Robert Giroux, commenting on the presentation of On the Road, said:

I couldn’t imagine how he had gotten it onto a roll of paper like that…Or why he should have wanted to. I remember I said to him, ‘What about corrections? After all, the idea of separate sheets of paper is to make it easer to re-write.’ He said, ‘I don’t make any corrections. Everything’s down there just the way I want it. And he meant it….That was my first experience as an editor with this my-words-are- sacred attitude in a writer.101

His attitude made it even more difficult to work with the already difficult text. Its content was, however, the most disconcerting thing. Kerouac had, of course, written about real life people and the events of which he spoke were not imagined either. This he had to cover up by creating fictional names for the characters that appeared in his book and, on occasion, changing the place names also to suit this end. This rankled him and in a preface to a book published posthumously Kerouac wrote: “In my old age I intend to collect all my work and re-inset my pantheon of uniform names, leave the long shelf full of books there, and die happy.”102 Getting this work into print had taken six years over which time

Kerouac had allowed himself to be put off by the mood of his times. Anguished by this period in which he was unable to publish his work, Kerouac wrote to his career-long literary agent Sterling Lord:

I think the time has come for me to pull my manuscripts back and forget publishing. Clearly, publishing is now in a flux of commercialism that began during World War II; for instance I wonder if Thomas Wolfe’s wild huge books

101 Bruce Cook. 75. 102 Jack Kerouac. Visions of Cody. Preface.

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would be published today if he was just coming up, like me. But they’ll swing back to the ardour of the Thirties, maybe in 1960.103

He was aware that the times he was seeking to publish in were conservative and not particularly welcoming or favourable to the idea of publishing new and potentially controversial literature. But Lord, his agent, was “deeply impressed with Kerouac’s talent and was convinced that On the Road was a truly important book that had to be published.”104 The responses Kerouac got from readers of his unlikely manuscript were not usually positive, a reflection on the establishment at this time. His hope that “they’ll swing back to the ardour of the Thirties, maybe in 1960105 largely came true though it would take the publications of works like On the Road for it to do so.

This sort of response was typical of much of the establishment at this time.

Kerouac and his literary companions received criticism from both the Left and Right of the political spectrum. This was owing to the fact that many were unsure of what the Beat writers stood for and were openly hostile to protect their interests and do what they thought was their duty: to guard the public from them. What is interesting is that all of these groups and intellectuals were confronting the same types of questions but were answering them all in a different way. The establishment was, for the longest time, unsure of the nature of the Beat writers and saw fit to condemn them at each given opportunity, for the good of the people, they believed. This criticism was perhaps also provoked by the way people such as Kerouac responded to members of the establishment, which gave them a kind of “programmatic ruthlessness to their impudence. It was as though they had put aside any notion of revolting against the establishment and had decided to merely

103 Jack Kerouac to Sterling Lord, 23 January 1956, Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940 – 1956, ed. Ann Charters. New York: Viking, 1995. 446 – 468. 104 Bruce Cook. 75. 105 Jack Kerouac to Sterling Lord, 23 January 1956, 446 – 468.

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thumb their noses at it.”106 As such the establishment took it upon itself to protect its interests from this migrant community of radicals whom it believed would disappear as quickly as it rose. In becoming a part of the establishment the Beats brought about a shift in the existing order which was an unwelcome proposition to existing members.

Joyce Johnson, commenting in 2000 upon an edited letter she had written in 1957, wrote that “despite this show of interest, Partisan Review was actually very hostile to the

Beat writers, fearing a shift of power.”107 Partisan Review and other magazines like it were the dominant intellectual influence on the America of this time. Another magazine which helped condemn the Beats was Commentary. The intellectual community in

America at this time grouped around such magazines in extended circles, which included permanent and part time writers. Taking examples from these works it is easy to understand the role these people saw themselves in; “they saw themselves – Mrs. Trilling makes this painfully clear – as the defenders of the True Faith.”108 It would be wrong to single Partisan Review out entirely, on account of the power of persuasion it held in the

American intellectual community at this time, as many were doing it. In fact “there were people who made a career out of attacking the Beats.”109

The first article which Partisan Review published on the Beats was by Norman

Podhoretz. Its title alone sets the precedent for the article: “The Know-Nothing

106 Bruce Cook. 7. 107 Joyce Johnson and Jack Kerouac. Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letter, 1957 – 1958. New York: Penguin, 2000. 82. This comment was written in reference to the following passage of a letter which Johnson wrote to Jack Kerouac and appears on the same page; “I called Partisan Review today and found that Burroughs’s ms. is still being read (which they said was a good sign), and Allen’s poem is going to be in the Winter issue.” Kerouac referred to Johnson, his then girlfriend, who was updating him with events happening in New York in his absence as “Miss Grapevine” (119). 108 Bruce Cook. The Beat Generation. 17. Diana Trilling was a writer for Partisan Review. Her Husband Lionell Trilling was a professor of English at Columbia University who had come into contact with several members of the Beat writing group. Her most famous work referring to the Beats is Diana Trilling, “The Other Night at Columbia,” Partisan Review, 26, no. 2, (1959) 214 – 230. 109 Bruce Cook. 97.

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Bohemians.”110 Kerouac took this kind of criticism quite personally as it was not really a criticism of his work (and he always saw himself as an artist), but more of the effect his work had upon society. Commenting on the establishment in a letter to a former professor of his, Kerouac wrote the reactions to his fame:

But I am well loved. Every single woman I’ve met in the past week (excepting dikes) has wanted to make love to me (married or not), at least secretly. I am well loved also by almost all men. It’s the SYSTEM that rejects me, and you, and all of us. The system of ignorance. It bears watching, that lil ole system.111

The recipient of this letter was Elbert Lenrow, a Columbia University professor of

Kerouac and other Beat writers. Lenrow had maintained his connection with Kerouac through letters, both prior to and following the publication of On the Road. Lenrow had the benefit of marking some of Kerouac’s papers; commenting upon a term paper of

Kerouac’s he wrote: “Quoting Wordsworth is not bad for one who has been termed a

“Know-nothing bohemian.”112 This is an appropriate response to Podhoretz’s article and comes from someone of comparable stature in the intellectual community at this time.

That Kerouac remained friends with his Columbia professor is no new Ivy League tradition. It can be taken as representative of the Beats’ relationships with the people in the established literary and intellectual fields. In the 1950s Columbia University was a very influential institution. Mark Van Doren and Lionell Trilling were on the faculty among others. Each played a role in assisting the Beat writers, either through letters of introduction to editors by whom they were hoping to be published or by reading and commenting upon their work. Ginsberg, in an appreciative letter to Lenrow, had written:

You were really helpful in sympathy to our literary desires & ken, that was an encouraging tradition of humane curiosity toward us that you displayed. At least I

110 Norman Podhoretz, “The Know-Nothing Bohemians,” Partisan Review, Spring 1958, pp 305-318. 111 Jack Kerouac to Elbert Lenrow, Winter 1957. Elbert Lenrow, Kerouac Ascending. 46. 112 Elbert Lenrow.37.

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got the feeling of an old secret tradition, maybe connected with the Wolfe memorabilia you showed Jack.113

It was the subject of much literary and intellectual discussion what the new Beat writers were about. It is always easier to discern what a countercultural group is against than to work out what they are for. The subject of deciding just what the Beats were confounded many intellectuals and critics at this time. The problem perhaps arose from the fact that there were many who comprised the Beat literary group. At the core of this group were Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs though in close proximity to these individuals a number of other poets and writers could also be included. The intellectuals of this time looked at the more negative things that united this group: criminal records, lack of regular employment or life in the straight world rather than anything else. This was easier than looking for what united the group, perhaps because of their diversity and that they were asserting their individuality, not only from society but also, presumably, from each other. Norman Mailler, author of The White Negro, was one of the few members of the established intellectual community who was an outright supporter of the

Beats. Described as “an articulate and energetic defender of the faith, he appeared often on television talk shows and usually made a point of identifying himself with Kerouac,

Ginsberg and Burroughs and promoting their work.”114

The core of the group was defined as Beat but the word picked up several contractions and additions in the period of Beatsploitation. Herb Caen, a San Francisco newspaper chronicler, came up with perhaps the most well known term that became associated with the group, Beatnik. The idea behind his invention of the term was to ridicule the group. The addition of the “-nik” at the end of the word was taken from the

113 Allen Ginsberg to Elbert Lenrow, n.d. Elbert Lenrow. Kerouac Ascending. 58. 114 Bruce Cook. 95.

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Russian word Sputnik – the name of a recent satellite launched by that country. The launching of Sputnik I and Sputnik II had serious psychological impact on the American psyche as it meant that the Russians were ahead in terms of space technology. The

Russian launch attacked the core of American pride in the postwar period, and thus their leadership in the world. The affixation of the “-nik” associated this launch with the Beats.

Contemporaneously it would have had humorous and political implications. In this way the Beats could be dressed with meaning which they did not have. J. Edgar Hoover of the

FBI declared that the three greatest menaces to America were: “Communists, Eggheads,

[and] Beatniks.”115 Relating these groups as being anti-American imbued them with subversive meaning. Dressed up in this way the Beats could be seen as a threat to national security. This affixation of political meaning was grossly incorrect however, as “the movement was, essentially, apolitical – a last-ditch stand for individualism and against conformity. That, anyhow, was how Jack saw it, and he was present at the creation.”116

Other names given to the Beats were, of course, most obviously Beat Generation, which was picked on and abused. Many pondered what Kerouac was referring to with the word generation, whether he meant just his select group of writers, which would seem restricted since a group that small could hardly be called a generation. Kerouac had, of course, meant the whole of his generation who were coming of age around the end of the war. Other descriptions and appellations to the word Beat that were picked up along the way were: “mutiny,” “rebellion,” “insurrection,” “craze,” “fad,” and “movement” among others. Yet the group was not explicitly political or subversive. These additions all gave

Kerouac and the Beat group a political meaning which they never had, at least not in the

115 Robert Holton. 8. 116 Bruce Cook. 85.

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first place. It was, at least at the outset, a non-political movement. Ironic as this may sound, such an idea had political capital in these times.

Magazines would hint at political sympathies of the Beats. For example, one magazine stated that “people like them distributed pamphlets for the Communists in the

1930s.”117 Though the author was not coming right out in making this political affiliation, he did come close. One of the few instances where politics enters Kerouac’s work was in his second novel On the Road in an exchange between two characters. Remi Boncoeur

(real life Henri Cru) said to Sal Paradise (real life Jack Kerouac): “I have told you what

President Truman said, ‘we must cut down on the cost of living.’”118 In this context the characters take this political slogan to justify their thievery of groceries while working as special policemen which is in itself a tremendous irony considering that this is a contradiction of what President Truman actually meant. Taking this slogan out of its original context demonstrates to the reader Kerouac’s awareness of political phraseology, but not his ability to apply it correctly.

Kerouac’s inability to apply political slogans to his own life can be taken as representative of his contemporaries’ alienation from politicians and political discourse.

Much of post war discourse concerned the sense of alienation which was felt by people such as Kerouac and members of his generation. These people increasingly found themselves on the outskirts of what

You’ll see if you take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street each with the lamplight of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards; dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of on wheels.

117 Paul O’Neil, “The Only Rebellion Around.” 118 Jack Kerouac. On the Road. New York: Viking, 1957. 63.

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You’ll see what I mean, when it begins to appear like everybody in the world is soon going to be thinking the same way.119

Kerouac and the Beats’ way of dealing with the alienation which is depicted here was to reject what has built it up. Kerouac once commented that “houses are full of things that gather dust” – a statement which was significant in many ways. In this suburban house buying world of post-war America people found their identity in suburban living and materialism. Taken literally this quote is fairly meaningless, but its implication was widespread. It attacked the core ideas on which America was priding itself in the years following the war. This and other statements like it of Beat origin are words of dissent.

Dissenters can be found in each decade of American history so in this way what the Beats were doing was not new. What they were doing however was translating these notions of dissent into the post war context. For this reason what the Beats were saying was very important indeed. Much of the intellectual community’s impressions of the Beats was affected by communism and the spectre of Joe McCarthy and what became known as

McCarthyism. The 1950s was “the era of Joe McCarthy, the HUAC hearings, and a series of spy trials that together spread a brooding pall of suspicion over all of American society.”120 Anyone dissenting, like the Beats, was to be treated as if was communist owing to the witch-hunt mentality that existed at this time. Kerouac found that his message had been misconstrued, stating in an interview in 1968 that “what really bothered me a lot, though, was the way a certain cadre of leftists among the so-called Beats took over my mantle and twisted my thoughts to suit their won purpose.”121 The effect of the

McCarthy trials had been to shift the country’s interests far to the right of the political

119 Jack Kerouac. The Dharma Bums. New York: Viking, 1958. 104. 120 Bruce Cook. 10. 121 Bruce Cook. 88.

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spectrum. Therefore, being in the political left at this time was a particularly insecure position to be in. More than anything else the Beats were looking for change from this regulatory state through the introduction of new, more open codes to live by. Kerouac, like the other Beats felt restrained by this new society and in acting upon these feelings was condemned. In The Dharma Bums Kerouac comments, through his character Ray

Smith, upon the increasing scale and effect of the American police state upon Americans:

The American Hobo is on the way out as long as sheriffs operate with as Louis- Ferdinand Celine said, ‘One line of crime and nine of boredom,’ because having nothing to do in the middle of the night with everybody gone to sleep they pick on the first human being they see walking. – They pick on lovers on the beach even. They just don’t know what to do with themselves in those five-thousand dollar police cars with the two-way Dick Tracy radios except to pick on anything that moves in the night and in the daytime on anything that seems to be moving independently of gasoline, power, Army, or police. I myself was a hobo but I had to give it up around 1956 because of increasing television stories about the abominableness of strangers with packs passing through by themselves independently. – I was surrounded by three squad cars in Tucson Arizona at 2 A.M as I was walking pack-on-back for a night’s sweet sleep in the red moon desert.122

This example shows that the police helped enforce conformity and question anything representing dissent. In this way Kerouac comments upon the alienation felt from a society which couldn’t understand his simple desire to sleep out in the open in the desert. He hints at the causes of this as being as far reaching as the television and technology he demonstrates serve to separate people from one another. Kerouac commented in a notebook that “there are so many silly laws including the ultimate imminent law against flatulating its all too confused to even be called ‘order’ anymore.”123

122 Bruce Cook. 38. 123 Sketchbook nine of ten, “Passing Through,” Box 18c, Papers of Jack Kerouac, NYPL.

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Kerouac and the Beats could trace their roots to the underground, subterranean lifestyle but soon became a part of the mainstream as they too became established. Their presence was never welcome and, “once they were established, neither Jack Kerouac nor

Allen Ginsberg ever received favourable reviews.”124 Dissenters against American society such as Kerouac and the Beats were well needed however. Kerouac and the Beats were faced with the same problems that the intellectual establishment were, but dealt with these problems in a different way. What led the Beats to respond to the profound sense of alienation felt at this time in the way that they did was what attracted so much attention to the group. It was the fact that the Beats were so radical and revolutionary in the way they dealt with these sentiments that earned them notoriety.

For this many were branded as communists, as this had such a negative implication at this time. William S. Burroughs jokingly responded to this, stating in true

McCarthy trial form that “I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the Beat

Generation. The accused pleads not guilty.”125 The McCarthy trials had rooted out a number of persons in the entertainment industry and in positions of trust or power and brought them down through accusing them of having communist affiliations.

The Beats took on a far wider and more political meaning than they had ever bargained for. Though it had started out as essentially a social and cultural entity the Beat message began to take on another, more political meaning, through the process of change.

Kerouac and the Beats were about staying away from politics. They had grown up with the experience of politics and had grown to distrust its implications. They were notoriously difficult to pin down to any one thing as each was asserting his individuality.

124 Bruce Cook. 9. 125 Bruce Cook. 165.

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In religion the Beats took on a different meaning, and were met with disdainful responses.

Kerouac commented in a notebook the discourse he had with an undisclosed civilian:

“You are Buddhists! Why don’t you stick to your own religion?”126 This reflects upon the conservative aspect of this age in which the Beats lived. In a letter to his editor commenting further upon this restrained type of thinking, Kerouac wrote: “my books are never bestsellers because, as I can see from re-reading Gerard, they’re too complicated for average readers. I think I hit about the right level of commercial success to meet my needs.”127

The 1950s are a decade referred to as the Eisenhower Era in reference to the fact that this president was in office for so long. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency lasted from 1953 to 1961 and he left his mark upon the United States during his time in much the same way that each president does in the course of his office. He replaced Harry S.

Truman and was himself replaced by John F. Kennedy. The coming of Kennedy marked a new age in American politics and its outlook – more confident and less restrained. This change in the direction and course of American history was initiated in the decade of the

1950s but took time to reach its fruition. The people who had assisted in bringing about this change were people like Kerouac, the Beats and the New American Rebels. They would be eclipsed by later developments with the Hippies and the political rallies that took place in the 1960s. The roots of these rallies, personal freedoms, and civil rights campaigns took on new and different forms in the 1960s from where they had begun in the 1950s. There were many more rebels and rebellious icons in the 1960s which had a far

126 Sketchbook nine of ten, “Passing Through,” Box 18c, Papers of Jack Kerouac, NYPL. This statement was made in response to an individual who made enquiries into Kerouac and his friend Philip Whalen’s employment; ‘What kind of fella is that [Philip] Whalen? No wife, no family, nothing to do? Does he have a job?’ Kerouac responds to this by saying, ‘He has a part time job inspecting eggs in the university laboratory up the hill, He earns just enough for his beans and wine. He’s a Buddhist.’ 127 Jack Kerouac to Robert Giroux. 18 April 1963. Box 43, Papers of Jack Kerouac, NYPL.

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greater and wider reaching impact upon society. In the 1950s however, there were relatively few rebellious figures who operated as models to the young. The few that were around were people such as Kerouac, the Beats and the New American Rebels who were in their time the only rebellion around.

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Chapter Three “A Million Coffee Bars and a Trillion Pairs of Levis”128

The title of this chapter is taken from a letter which William S. Burroughs wrote to

Ann Charters on the subject of Kerouac’s legacy and the impact his literature had upon his generation. The full citation reads: “Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a trillion Levi’s to both sexes…Woodstock rises from his pages.”129 A similar quote by

Burroughs, also on the topic of Kerouac, appears in an introduction to a more recent edition to On the Road which appeared in 1991 penned by Ann Charters. She records

Burroughs as saying that “after 1957 On the Road sold a trillion Levis and a million espresso machines, and also sent countless kids on the road.”130 The slight discrepancy between the two statements can perhaps be accounted for by the fact that Burroughs often spoke of the influence of Kerouac and that he said things reverberating around the same theme on several different occasions. While there appears to be debate over what

Burroughs actually said there can be no debate over the meaning.

The citation of the Woodstock concert is informing, as Kerouac died only two months after this important event in the Hippie experience. This reference alludes to the fact that the Hippies were a countercultural continuation of the Beats. Though many spoke of Kerouac’s legacy, few people have been more quoted than Burroughs. The quotation around which the title of this chapter is built is perhaps one of the more frequent comments on Kerouac’s impact and legacy.

128 Title take from: William S. Burroughs to Ann Charters, n.d. Box 18g, Papers of Jack Kerouac, NYPL. 129 William S. Burroughs to Ann Charters, n.d. Box 18g, Papers of Jack Kerouac, NYPL. 130Ann Charters, introduction to On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. New York: Penguin, 1991. xxvii.

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In the same letter, Burroughs stated that “a whole migrant generation arose from

On the Road to Mexico, Tangiers, Afghanistan, [and] India.”131 Thus the story of Sal

Paradise and Dean Moriarty hitting the road gave to its readers a wish to travel not only the American continent mentioned, but others also. Burroughs was quoted, in interview with Bruce Cook, as saying “Kerouac…had tremendous influence. The kind of migrating that he described in On the Road has become practically a worldwide movement. People began migrating from Paris to Katmandu to Marrakech, and it all started with

Kerouac.”132

Kerouac’s wanderlust, which formed the subject matter of his work, was so strong and captivating that many people not only celebrated it but wished to emulate it. The lifestyle which he spoke of in his work was so new and controversial that it captivated a large number of people, mostly the younger generation. Burroughs had first met Kerouac in New York during 1944 through mutual acquaintances and rapidly became friends.

They influenced each other’s work and even collaborated on a short unpublished novel titled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks.133 The two remained life long friends and literary companions. Thus, what Burroughs provides in these quotations is insight into a close friend and into the impact of a work which he felt first hand.

Legacy

Elbert Lenrow, reflecting upon the 1950s wrote:

A decade passed very quickly, especially when it is a decade of change. I was reminded of that change when reading in a Lewis Nichols column, ‘American Notebook’ (26 May 1968), of a ‘sentimental’ journey Nichols paid to the North

131 William S. Burroughs to Ann Charters, n.d. Box 18g, Papers of Jack Kerouac, NYPL. 132 Bruce Cook. 179. 133 Matt Theado, ed. 39. Burroughs and Kerouac wrote alternate chapters in this unpublished book which was modeled upon popular detective thriller writer Dashiel Hammett. Burroughs had heard the phrase which became the title of the book on a radio news broadcast about a fire at the St. Louis Zoo.

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Beach section of San Francisco. ‘A decade or so ago, when Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg and the Beats were flaming meteors, North Beach was Bohemia.’ He found that the rents had gone up, driving the Bohemians away. ‘Ginsberg could no longer afford the rent for the house on the hill of Montgomery Street where once he lived.’134

North Beach had been the lower end of the market in town and as a result attracted people like the Beats who were quite happy to live in this cheap environment. What happened though was that once the Beats were launched into the mainstream, places like

North Beach began to attract tourist, bringing in money, making it more upmarket and thus soon pushing out its original inhabitants. Joyce Johnson, giving a female perspective on first hearing about this newly discovered subterranean location, commented that:

North Beach, a run down area where there were suddenly a lot of new coffee shops, jazz joints, and bars, as well as an excellent bookstore called City Lights that was the centre of activity for the poets. Thus several thousand young women between fourteen and twenty-five were given a map to a revolution.135

But as North Beach became more populated it pushed the Beats, who were unable to pay the high rents, out. As this part of San Francisco became the trendy part for the young, hip and bohemian it pushed the older Beats out. It is common in terms of urban development that one part of town will develop and in prospering push out its original inhabitants. This was significant though for the Beats as it meant that they would have to find somewhere else cheap to locate in San Francisco if they wished to create a community there. With North Beach out of reach to the young in terms of finance they had to find somewhere else. The young who began to move to San Francisco in the later stages of Beat development moved to another part of the city known as Haight-Ashbury.

This shift in location was a significant move as in this new area the group began to define themselves in ways more advanced than the Beats had. This would have widespread

134 Elbert Lenrow. 55-6. 135 Joyce Johnson. Minor Characters. 118-9.

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repercussions of national and international proportion. San Francisco was the cultural model for America at this time at a point when America was increasingly becoming the model of other countries around the world. Lenore Kandel commented on the peculiar nature of San Francisco in America saying that “it’s part of the physical structure of the place. The wind blows clean here, and it’s a kind of birthing place. It always seems to be a few steps ahead of the rest of the country.”136

Soon the area of San Francisco known as Haight-Ashbury took over as the young, hip and bohemian place. Sick of the high prices, tourists, and commercialism, which the

Beats attracted to North Beach, they moved elsewhere. This new area began to represent what North Beach had to the Beats who had located there some years previously. This move from one district of the city to the other can be taken as representative of the change going on in culture, or rather, counterculture in America at this time. Not only this but the residents of Haight-Ashbury began to be known as and referred to as something else; they began to be referred to as Hippies. This new slogan or term to describe the new, younger generation

Was evidently coined by a San Francisco Examiner writer Michael Fallon and first used by him in a piece published on September 5, 1965. For a while it was used interchangeably with Beatnik, until gradually it supplanted the older word completely.137

The date of this article is the same as the date On the Road was published, only seven years earlier. But soon the word caught on and replaced the term Beat. It was a subject of common social and cultural discourse for a time to debate to what extent these two groups were similar and different. It is interesting to note that the origin of the word

Beatnik and the word Hippie was a San Francisco newspaper columnist (though not the

136 Bruce Cook. 211. 137 Bruce Cook. 200.

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same one). It was not only this geographical regional district shift, or name change, but also a new group of emergent writers who began to take over from the Beats. By 1967, the year of the “Great Migration,” it could be said that this replacement was complete.

Legislation had been passed by the San Francisco “council…urging them to keep away.

But they came anyway, most of them very young – runaways, drop-outs, or kids who had just taken to the road for the fun of going, as Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady had a decade and a half before.”138

The personal freedoms for which Kerouac and the Beats had evoked such controversy and attracted such widespread condemnation began to emerge as more acceptable the shock value wore away. Ginsberg wrote, in response to a questionnaire on the Beats in 1968, that

The label ‘beat; has become meaningless as the original institutions have become general in the nation. The startling ‘Yippie’ political movement, the poetry of Bob Dylan, even in some respects the Beatles themselves, the Hare Krishna chant & Mantra movement, Tim Leary & Psychedelic movement, even Eldridge Cleaver of the Panthers & Lerio Jones the Black singer and politician, have all at one time or another acknowledged one or another aspect of the ‘Beat’ vision, either of personal style or artistic articulation.139

This catalogue of other individuals and groups to which Kerouac’s influence has been directly traced is quite impressive. Ann Charters, foremost Beat historian, asks the question “What Put the Beat in Beatles”140 in one of her books.

Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters began to take over from the Beat writers as the dominant literary force in the cultural underground. While the Beats had, from at least

1957, been the main talk in terms of literary counterculture, the Merry Pranksters became

138 Bruce Cook. 202. 139 Elbert Lenrow. 63. 140 Ann Charters. Beat Down to Your Soul: What was the Beat Generation?. New York: Penguin, 2001. Rear cover.

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increasingly more so from the early 1960s. Part of their attraction was the overlap they had and association with the former group from whom they had obviously taken influence:

Number two Prankster, not so much the man they counted on to get things done (Cassady, after all, was never as dependable as all that), but the one who inspired them all with that demonic energy that so awed Kerouac.141

Number two Prankster was, of course, none other than Neal Cassady, the hero of

On the Road and countless other works of Kerouac’s, not least Visions of Cody. Cassady was the one in charge of driving the Prankster bus. The bus, named Destination Further, was the symbol of the Merry Pranksters in the same way that a car was of Kerouac and the Beats. Cassady’s presence validated the group’s existence to many who had been so used to Kerouac and the Beats being in the main discourse. Neal Cassady was immortalised as Dean Moriarty in On the Road and was best known in this capacity.

Cassady’s “presence…in the Merry Pranksters offered to those who might otherwise have looked with scepticism on the group some evidence of continuity. He was a link with the genuine Beat past.”142

The Beats received much criticism for their work which flouted normal American moral values which were now beginning to be taken for granted as time went on. The newly developing generation was able to take advantage of the fact that the Beats had pushed the boundaries of acceptance. What the Beats had possessed in shock value had been incorporated into cultural acceptance. The outcome of this was that subsequent generations would not come into so much criticism for being countercultural. The Beats had in many ways paved the way for their social freedoms which were now largely taken

141 Bruce Cook. 198. 142 Bruce Cook. 198.

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for granted. As a result the Beats began to drop out of major social and cultural discussions of the time. The new buzz words of the Hippies which came to be used were associated with the drug LSD, otherwise known as acid, and the music which this psychedelic drug inspired – acid rock. Kerouac once commented in interview upon the continuities between the groups that was obviously apparent that

of course the hippies followed us in certain ways, so yeah, I guess you could say they are descendant from the Beat Generation. Maybe what separates us from them is not so much age as acid.143

Kerouac had himself tried LSD following a request by Allen Ginsberg who recommended it after being given the drug by its chief exponent, the well-respected

Harvard Professor Timothy Leary. Leary had made a point of testing the drug on members of the artistic community to find out their response. The evangelical zeal with which Leary tested his psychedelic drugs on anyone and everyone he came into contact with was somewhat sapped by Kerouac’s response to the drug, the result of which was that

Leary experienced the first bad trip of his life – something to do, in all probability, with the fact that Jack’s own trip led him to confront the man from Harvard and shout: ‘Can your drugs absolve the mortal and venial sins which our beloved saviour, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, came down and sacrificed his life upon the cross to wash away?’144

Obviously nonplussed about the effects of the drug, Kerouac would later respond to Ginsberg on the effects of the drug: “walking on water wasn’t made in a day.”145 His response can be taken to represent his general disregard for the group which he was oftentimes associated with, much to his disdain. The fact that the people who were to emerge as the cultural icons of the 1960s saw to experiment these cultural appendages

143 Bruce Cook. 88. 144 David Sandison. Kerouac: An Illustrated Biography. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1999. 145. 145 David Sandison. 145.

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upon the older established countercultural icons is significant. It demonstrates the concern which these individuals had for recognition from the existing cultural figures. Alan

Harrington, who appeared pseudonymously in Clellon Holmes book Go, suggested that

Hippies were “no more than Beats plus drugs”146 and to a considerable degree he was correct in his description. The Hippies had taken their inspiration from the Beats and their general ideas and constitution too, whether they recognised it or not. The only difference was that the Beats seemed very tame in comparison – what they had worked hard to establish for themselves and their generation was swept aside in this new wave of personal freedoms. What the Beats had had in the first place, as they did all along, was their shock value. This meant that the Hippies who were coming along, guided by a new literary group, the Merry Pranksters and the psychedelic drug taking met less opposition.

Allen Ginsberg who was able, like Cassady, to pass into the 1960s free of problems described the new generation as a “sort of On the Road translated into Cosmic terms with

LSD & giant psychedelic-painted cross-country bus rides.”147 Something that endorses this perspective is visible in a comparison between the “covers for the first and seventh printings of the paperback edition of Kerouac’s fourth novel” The Dharma Bums, which is clearly “showing the change in marketing from the late 1950s to the 1960s.” On the cover one can see that “the Beat couple is replaced by a Hippie couple.” On the cover of the first edition is written “the sensational bestseller about two reckless wanderers out to scale the heights of love…and life” while on the cover of the seventh edition is written

146 Bruce Cook. 196. 147 Elbert Lenrow. 58.

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“by the man who launched the hippie world, the daddy of the swinging psychedelic generation, JACK KEROUAC author of ON THE ROAD.”148

Kerouac recounts the experience of his life at the head of such a counterculture in grisly detail in his 1965 publication Big Sur:

The publication of ‘Road’ the book that ‘made me famous’ and in fact so much so I’ve been driven mad for three years by endless telegrams, phonecalls, requests, mail, visitors, reporters, snoopers (a big voice in my basement window as I prepare to write a story:- ARE YOU BUSY?) or the time the reporter ran upstairs to my bedroom as I sat there trying to write down a dream – Teenagers jumping the six foot fence I’d had built around my yard for privacy – Parties with bottles yelling at my study window, ‘Come out and get drunk, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy!’149

Kerouac recounts the end of what he started in this novel in his experience of hitch hiking, ever the symbol of life on the road, after which he decides it is “the last time I ever hitch again.”150 He noted before embarking on the 14 miles hike that: “this is the first time

I’ve hitch hiked in years and I soon begin to see that things have changed in America, you cant get a ride anymore.”151

Gerald Nicosia, author of the largest published biography on Kerouac, discusses the subject of a misunderstood article which Kerouac wrote shortly after this time:

Under terrible stress and discomfort he completed a nationally syndicated article called ‘After Me, the Deluge.’ It was taken at the time to be a reactionary screed against the anti-war movement and hippies. Actually the tone was far more sad than angry. It was the lament of a great idealist who’d once seen America bound for glory and suddenly saw her fatally sidetracked. His complaint was basically that serious workers and artists like himself were no longer a focal point of the young.152

148 Matt Theado, ed. 125. 149 Jack Kerouac. Big Sur. New York: McGraw-Hill Co. 1965. 4. This page was such a good example of what the book was about, in essence Kerouac’s nervous breakdown that its editor Robert Giroux decided to place it on the rear cover of the published work. (Jack Kerouac to Robert Giroux, n.d. Box 18b, Papers of Jack Kerouac, NYPL). 150 Jack Kerouac. Big Sur. 48. 151 Jack Kerouac. Big Sur. 44. 152 Gerald Nicosia. 697.

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Though the youth of the 1960s had enjoyed the more personal freedoms they had, they did not necessarily appreciate the struggles which people like Kerouac had gone through to help obtain them. The generation of the 1960s replaced individuals such as

Kerouac with other models of rebellion who followed a similar format but used different means to voice their expression. In part the change came about due to changes in America at the time. The new president John F. Kennedy was far younger and more outgoing than the conservative Eisenhower which allowed more freedom for expression. If Eisenhower seemed the embodiment of his era – conservative and restrained – Kennedy appeared also the embodiment of his: confident, self assured and more assertive.

The changes in the media meant that there was a shift in attention. Whereas the

Beats had been given attention as the countercultural movement of the 1950s the Hippies began to take their place. This process was of course gradual and occurred with many overlaps in ideas and individuals. Ginsberg moved safely into this new era of personal liberties in much the same way that Cassady had. The young generation of the 1960s shared the similar disdain for straight living, opting for the same kinds of expression of individuality through their dress, manners, and sources of entertainment, but seemed to do so with a much greater confidence on the basis that this kind of action had been going on for a number of years previously, the result of which was that the Hippies attracted much less attention and condemnation in relative terms. The shock value of Hippies’ actions had been decreased because the Beats had paved the way for them.

The 1950s had passed very quickly as it was a decade of change and few, if any, of the younger generation would be able to remember a time without such freedom and lack of restraint. In the film The Wild One Marlon Brando’s character Johnny had

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responded to the question “What are you rebelling against?”153 with the somewhat outspoken “Waddya got?”154 If the same question had been grafted into a youth movie of the 1960s it would have been met with a far different response. That same character would have responded with a far greater sense of direction. This is due to the fact that the

Beats had paved the way for the personal freedoms which the Hippies revelled in.

The 1950s Beats and Beat Generation were brought up not to take things for granted, having experienced the failures of collective action throughout their upbringing as reflected in political actions of the decades of the 1930s, 40s and 50s. The generation which came of age in the 1960s did not share the same experiences as the generation which preceded them had. Continually and incrementally since the end of World War II, the people of the Beat Generation were quietly expressing their feelings and mutual sense of alienation in the underground subterranean existence. Following 1957, with the launching of the Beats into mainstream consciousness, these subterranean venues were no longer as subterranean and therefore lacked their former appeal. The Beats had broken new ground with their shock value but this value soon disappeared as it became the value most associated with the younger generation: a common denominator of countercultural activity.

Joyce Johnson, commenting in retrospect, noted that:

By the mid-1960s the culture had changed so much and so quickly that it is hard today for ahistorical young people to remember that there were transitional years before certain kinds of freedom we now take for granted could be fully achieved.155

153 David Halberstam. 269. 154 David Halberstam. 269. 155 Joyce Johnson and Jack Kerouac. Door Wide Open. xv.

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The Beats were the ones who occupied the “transitional years” she speaks of.

Hippies in the 1960s were far more confident, open and directed. More importantly, instead of expressing their individualism in the social and cultural context, they increasingly began to do so politically. What the Hippies do show is that “the public debates and private anxieties of the postwar years…persisted.”156 And thus, the Beats’

“significance…lies as much in their legacy to their successors as in the issues they raised in their own era.”157

The 1960s are more associated with the political activism that took place in the decade, remembered in the form of things such as the anti-Vietnam war rallies. Young people began to assert themselves more openly in the field of politics. These political rallies took on an ethnic feel with the advent of the Civil Rights movements which pressed for more rights for blacks. Martin Luther King Jr., who had risen to a high status through the church, one of the few places where blacks could at this time, was one of the main leaders in this movement. In the 1960s also, women became more assertive and take greater control over their lives, sexual and otherwise. These examples of expression were felt across the board and had their roots in the 1950s.

Kerouac has a strong literary legacy as well as the social and cultural one. His work On the Road still sells some 100,000 copies annually and there have been a number of works published following his death, such as Visions of Cody and Atop an Underwood.

In the six years that Kerouac spent in obscurity between 1951 and 1957, he wrote what were later published as ten full length novels which have formed the basis of his reputation. Though the Beat style in which he wrote died with him, the freedom of

156 Richard H. Pells. The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s. USA: Wesleyan University Press, 1989. xiii. 157Richard H. Pells. ix.

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expression which he espoused did not. In his method of writing, spontaneous prose, there has always been persistent interest. In 2002, Jim Isray the owner of the Indianapolis Colts bought the On the Road manuscript for a record $2.43 million in auction at Sotheby’s

New York.158 He has planned to take the manuscript on a 13 museum, four year tour beginning in 2004. Also in 2004 the long-awaited film version of On the Road is due to be released. The rights to the film, which was originally going to have Marlon Brando cast in one of the two main roles, was sold shortly after the book was published but has not been acted upon until recently. Other films have been produced which have touched on the individuals which formed the Beats but have yet to receive commercial treatment.

Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters who took over the literary limelight from

Kerouac and the Beats were more of a continuation of the Beats than a break from the past. It is important to emphasise that they were both countercultural movements with more similarities than differences. For the ways in which they found their expression, the

Beats are more commonly associated with the 1950s and the Hippies the 1960s. By the

1960s individuals had gained greater personal freedoms and enjoyed a far wider range of pursuits as a result of this, including both women and men. They were also attracted to things which appeared underground and against the standard of society. Increasingly they were attracted to Acid Rock as oppose to Jazz music, which by this time seemed tame.

The youngsters took part in experiments involving psychedelic drugs while the Beat’s drugs of choice had always been alcohol and marijuana, which by now also seemed tame.

The generation of the 1960s took away from the shock value of the generation of the

1950s by increasing in size, scale, and direction. The new groups of the 1960s found

158 Ryan Lenz, “Kerouac’s On the Road Hits The Road In Museum Tour,” The Seattle Times, 18 January 2004.

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expressing such personal freedoms could trace their roots quite easily to starting points in the 1950s and to a certain group of individuals who described themselves as either Beats or as being part of a Beat Generation.

Conclusion

Jack Kerouac is a very important figure to study when looking at the 1950s.

Being born in the 1920s he had experienced, like the fellow members of his generation, a series of large scale national and international events which had impacted upon the course and direction of the United States. The outcome of this was that the generation which was coming of age at the close of World War II shunned collective action in favour of individual expression. They had been beaten down in the sense that they had grown up expecting defeat. As a result this group of youngsters began to look inward and not outward for direction.

Kerouac’s fame is tied closely to the 1950s, as by the 1960s he had largely drifted out of the limelight of public media attention. In his outlook and viewpoints Kerouac remained firmly entrenched in the 1950s. His other writing companions and friends were able to pass into the next decade with relative ease, incorporating the new culture of the

1960s into their lifestyles. Kerouac, however, remained unable to change from his conservative ways and as a result did not pass into the cultural framework of the 1960s as other Beats did. Kerouac is significant as he came up with the term beat to describe his generation – a term which was readily adopted in contemporary discourse to describe the generation coming of age in the 1950s.

While the burgeoning middle class was actively finding its expression in the new consumerist wave taking pace in the post war era, this group was finding it in other ways.

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They found sanctuary in the underground, subterranean world of blacks and they readily adopted their outward cultural expressions such as jazz.

This young, beat generation was the first post war counterculture. It was led by people such as Kerouac. He appeared as a model of rebellion in culture at the time and did so as part of a small group, the New America Rebels. The other male figures which operated as icons of rebellion along with Kerouac were Marlon Brando, James Dean, and

Elvis Presley. Each shared a common principle of rebellion, but there was more to it than this. The icons served as role models for the younger generation because the younger generation could relate to what they were saying. They appeared the same on screen as off and were very natural in their performances. Males could attempt to copy the words of these individuals and women could aspire to being their girlfriends. They seemed to have this vulnerable side to them which made them appear more real life than others around them in popular culture. There was something appealing about this real life side that these characters possessed all the time, not merely in the limelight. They formed a group which were called the New American Rebels which was significant as each member of the group served not merely as a hero to the young but a new kind of hero. Kerouac was also a part of the Beat Generation writing group. At its core this group consisted of Jack Kerouac,

Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, three writers who changed dramatically the course and direction of American literature. This inner circle of writers could easily be expanded to include a large number of other affiliated authors and non-literary figures who influenced their work.

Their significance is that these individuals were exploring new, and un- chartered, territory in the period after the close of World War II. Not only this, but due to the changes in international status, America was increasingly becoming the standard by

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which other countries rated themselves. The audience that the icons of the Beat

Generation and the New American Rebels was able to reach was not merely national but international. This first post war counterculture impacted upon all nations around the world owing to the fact that American popular culture had been elevated to such a high status following the close of the war.

The establishment did not appreciate nor want an influence such as Kerouac upon culture and sought to condemn him and his group at every possible opportunity.

This group of individuals which associated with subterranean figures and with underground cultures was a threat to the contemporary values of American society. They associated with these groups for the purpose of avoiding mainstream society as it was not something this generation could relate to having been swept away in a tide of commercialism. Mainstream culture was increasingly mass orientated and this threat to individuality alienated this group. To avoid coming into contact with this society, which it felt so alienated from, this group chose to relocate itself at a distance from mainstream culture altogether.

In 1957 Kerouac published the long awaited On the Road which met with instant success; it was a great work not only for its literary merit but because it seemed to be the statement of his generation’s anxieties. The work was important to popular culture and society, and increasingly impacted upon the political and intellectual framework of the time. This book was very shocking to the establishment as it flaunted the conservative values upon which American society was built at this time. In its attempt to dismiss and condemn the Beats the intellectual community dressed the Beats up with political meaning that had never been a part of the group in the first place. In doing this the group was given subversive and negative connotations.

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The Beats challenged orthodox viewpoints and in the way they did this they appeared very shocking to contemporary society. From the perspective of today the actions of the Beats would not appear so outrageous. What gave them true character was the context in which they appeared. The 1950s were a characteristically conservative age and the Beats served their role as opponents of the standards of society. As the Beats became more institutionalised the group began to create more personal freedom for others who appeared in the period after they first emerged.

Kerouac was not able to bridge the cultural gap between the 1950s and the

1960s and as a result new countercultural icons took his place. The move between the

1950s and 1960s countercultures was more of a continuation than a break from the past and as a result the Hippies who are more commonly associated with the 1960s could be termed second generation Beats. The real shift between these two groups came in the form of a move of location in San Francisco. North Beach, the area most commonly associated with counterculture at this time, had been commercialised and therefore became too expensive for the younger generation to live in. The younger generation began to move elsewhere in San Francisco, namely to the area referred to as Haight-Ashbury.

This shift, which took place gradually, can be taken as the countercultural shift away from the Beats toward the Hippies as in this new location the group developed in a different way.

The next generation was able to enjoy far greater personal freedoms as a result of the actions of the Beats who had helped pave the way for these freedoms. The new generation was, like the previous one, a counterculture, diverging only from the Beats in terms of expression. This group became more political in direction and was far more confident and open than the previous generation. Kerouac died at the end of the 1960s,

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shortly after the Woodstock music festival, celebrated as one of the main Hippie events.

His legacy is far reaching, being one which has extended to the present, seen easily in the continuing interest in his life, work, and legacy. Kerouac has been immortalised as a rebellious countercultural icon of the 1950s. The 1950s was a decade of change in which people such as Kerouac helped break the constraints of conservatism and pave the way for more advanced freedom.

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Bibliography

Primary Sources

Books

Cassady, Carolyn. Off the Road: My Years With Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg. New York: William Morrow and Company Inc., 1990.

Charters, Ann, ed. Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940 – 1956. New York: Viking, 1995.

Charters, Ann, introduction to On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. New York: Penguin, 1991.

Cook, Bruce. The Beat Generation. New York: Scribners, 1971.

Gifford, Barry and Lee, Lawrence, ed. Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac. New York: St Martins Press, 1978.

Johnson, Joyce. Minor Characters: A Young Woman’s Coming-of-Age in the Beat Orbit of Jack Kerouac. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1983.

Johnson, Joyce and Kerouac, Jack. Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957 – 1958. New York: Penguin, 2001.

Kerouac, Jack. Big Sur. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962.

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Viking, 1957.

Kerouac, Jack. The Dharma Bums. New York: Penguin, 1958.

Kerouac, Jack. The Subterraneans. New York: Grove, 1958.

Theado, Matt. ed. The Beats: A Literary Reference. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003.

Articles

Clellon Holmes, John. “This is the Beat Generation,” The New York Times, 16 November 1952.

Iorio, Paul. “A Howl That Still Echoes: Ginsberg Poem Recalled,” The San Francisco Chronicle, 28 October 2000.

Kerouac, Jack. “The Origins of the Beat Generation,” Playboy Magazine, June 1959.

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Lenz, Ryan. “Kerouac’s On the Road Hits the Road in Museum Tour,” The Seattle Times, 18 January 2004.

Millstein, Gilbert. “Books of the Times,” The New York Times, 5 September 1957.

McClintock, Jack. “This is How the Ride Ends,” Esquire Magazine, March 1970.

O Neil, Paul. “The Only Rebellion Around,” Life Magazine, 30 November 1959.

Podhoretz, Norman. “The Know-Nothing Bohemians,” Partisan Review, Spring 1958.

Schleifer, Marc D. “The Beats Debated: Is it or Is it Not?,” The Village Voice, 19 November 1958.

Trilling, Diana. “The Other Night at Columbia: A Report from the Academy,” Partisan Review, Spring 1959.

Manuscripts

New York Public Library: NYPL

Sketchbook one of ten, “Passing Through,” Box 18c, Papers of Jack Kerouac, NYPL.

Sketchbook three of ten, “Passing Through,” Box 18c, Papers of Jack Kerouac, NYPL.

Sketchbook seven of ten, “Passing Through,” Box 18c, Papers of Jack Kerouac, NYPL.

Sketchbook eight of ten, “Passing Through,” Box 18c, Papers of Jack Kerouac, NYPL.

Sketchbook nine of ten, “Passing Through,” Box 18c, Papers of Jack Kerouac, NYPL.

Burroughs, William S. to Charters, Ann. n.d. Box 18g, Papers of Jack Kerouac, NYPL.

Kerouac, Jack to Lord, Sterling. 23 January 1956, Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940 – 1956, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Viking, 1995), 446 – 468.

Kerouac, Jack to Blake Jr., Paul. 20 October 1969. Box 18b, Papers of Jack Kerouac, NYPL.

Kerouac, Jack to Giroux, Robert. 18 April 1963. Box 43, Papers of Jack Kerouac, NYPL.

Kerouac, Jack to Giroux, Robert. n.d. Box 18b, Papers of Jack Kerouac, NYPL

Kerouac, Jack to Lenrow, Elbert. Winter 1957. Elbert Lenrow, Kerouac Ascending.

Lenrow, Elbert. Kerouac Ascending: Memorabilia of the Decade of On the Road. New York: Columbia University, 1984. Box 61, Papers of Jack Kerouac, NYPL.

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Secondary Sources

Books

Amburn, Ellis. Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac. New York: St Martins, 1998.

Campbell, James. This is the Beat Generation: New York – San Francisco – Paris. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, Ltd., 2001.

Charters, Ann. Beat Down to Your Soul: What was the Beat Generation?. New York: Penguin, 2001.

Feldman, Gene, ed. The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men. New York: Citadel Press, 1958.

French, Warren. Jack Kerouac. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986.

Halberstam, David. The Fifties. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993.

Holton, Robert. On the Road: Kerouac’s Ragged American Journey. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1999.

Jones, James T., A Map of Mexico City Blues: Jack Kerouac as Poet. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Press, 1992.

Jones, Jim. Jack Kerouac’s Nine Lives. Boulder, Co.: Elbow / Cityful Press, 2001. Victor Levi-Beaulieau. Jack Kerouac: A Chicken Essay. Quebec: The Coach House Press, 1975.

Nicosia, Gerald. Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. New York: Grove, 1983.

Pells, Richard H. The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1989.

Sandison, David. Kerouac: An Illustrated Biography. Chicago: Chicago Press Review Inc., 1999.

Watson, Steve. The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944 – 1960. New York: Pantheon, 1995.

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