Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy ‘This is what I was born for’ Marketing and Fashioning the Beat Generation in Literary Interviews Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of “Master in de Taal- en Letterkunde: Nederlands - Supervisor: Engels” by Maarten Luyten Debora Van Durme August 2013 Maarten Luyten Master N-E UGent Master Thesis Academiejaar 2012-2013 Debora Van Durme ACKNOWLEGDEMENTS A music teacher of mine once told me: “for the first ten years of my career as a composer, I was shy, quiet and hoped people would like my music. Nobody liked it. For the next ten years, I started telling everybody I was a genius. Now, my music is performed in theaters all over Europe and I’m receiving awards for being a genius.” It got me thinking. I would like to thank my family, friends and girlfriend for their support. Most of all, I would like to thank my supervisor for her advice and revisions. 2 Maarten Luyten Master N-E UGent Master Thesis Academiejaar 2012-2013 Debora Van Durme TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION 4 1.1) Self-Fashioning and Marketing 7 1.2) The literary interview 9 1.3) The Beats in literary interviews 11 2. GINSBERG 15 2.1) The blatant raconteur 16 2.2) The Blake vision: Ginsberg as a poet-prophet 17 2.3) The Beat mystic 20 2.4) Drugs: mythologizing, legitimizing and demystifying 22 2.5) The nonconformist rebel 23 2.6) Fashioning his poetic stance and his poetry 26 2.7) The invocation of literary influences as self-fashioning 29 2.8) The Beat Generation 30 3. BURROUGHS 33 3.1) His cause: the nonconformist enemy of ‘agencies of control’ 35 3.2) His work: fashioning his literature 38 3.3) Burroughs the author: fashioning his literary stance 40 3.4) The Beat Generation 42 3.5) Burroughs the junkie 43 3.6) Burroughs the legend: the murderer of his wife 45 3.7) Fashioning and marketing by other Beats 46 3.8) The interviewer: mythologizing Burroughs 47 4. KEROUAC 50 4.1) Kerouac the raconteur: displaying his personality 51 4.2) Celebration of the ‘underculture’ 54 4.3) Sexuality 55 4.4) Drugs 56 4.5) Buddhism and religious comprehensiveness 57 4.6) Fashioning his literature and literary stance 59 4.7) The Beat Generation 62 5. CONCLUSION 68 3 Maarten Luyten Master N-E UGent Master Thesis Academiejaar 2012-2013 Debora Van Durme 1. INTRODUCTION The Beat Generation is generally perceived as one of the most influential literary movements of the second half of the twentieth century and has been at the center of literary discussions over the past fifty years. Since the legendary break-through publications Howl, On the Road and Naked Lunch, this group or ‘movement,’ which was primarily represented by the ‘Beat triumvirate’ (Belgrad 2004) Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs, has received plenty of media attention. Contemporary reactions to these authors and their literature expressed both ‘extravagant praise and hysterical denunciation’ (Hassan 1963). For instance, ‘in 1959 journalist Paul O’Neil proclaimed that the Beat Generation consisted mostly of “talkers, loafers, passive little con men,” a “bohemian cadre” of “writers who cannot write, painters who cannot paint”’ (Starr 2004). Similarly, Thomas Curley depicted Jack Kerouac as a talentless writer who, just like his morally deviant characters, would never be taken seriously (1957) and Alfred Chester dismissed Burroughs as an iconoclast who has ‘turned his back upon’ civilization and abandoned ‘the quest for a moral position’ (1963). On the other hand, in time these authors have been accepted as the progenitors of the beatnik- and hippie-movement (Watson 1995, 4) and are now widely recognized countercultural icons (Bennett 2005). In his Naked Angels: the Lives & Literature of the Beat Generation John Tytell describes the Beat movement as ‘a crystallization of a sweeping discontent with American “virtues” of progress and power. What began with an exploration of the bowels and entrails of the city – criminality, drugs, mental hospitals – evolved into an expression of the visionary sensibility’ (4). The Beat authors became known as nonconformist rebels and ‘naked angels’ on a quest for a ‘new vision’ (Chowka 1976) and their ‘writings (…) have long been seen as a space of cultural and political contestation’ (Haslam 2009). Holly George-Warren similarly evaluates their significance as follows: As a cultural phenomenon, the Beat Generation changed us more than any other Twentieth-Century movement; its effects are still being felt today. As a literary 4 Maarten Luyten Master N-E UGent Master Thesis Academiejaar 2012-2013 Debora Van Durme movement, the Beat Generation gave us a cacophony of fresh, new American voices; the common thread running through the work was this: to say what hadn’t been said in a language as unique as one’s own thumbprint (1999). As this remark implies, their influence appears to encompass all fields of culture and have determined the cultural evolution of the past century. Up to this day, their significance is apparent from film adaptations of Howl (Esptein & Friedman 2010) and On the Road (Salles 2012). Besides an unwavering fascination, we can discern a noteworthy surge in critical investigation. As the traditional understanding of the Beats has been extensively mined, it appears the time has come for revision and reinterpretation. Over the past decade, the Beats have repeatedly been revisited in a large body of studies and literary analyses that ‘complicate our conceptions of the Beat Generation’ (Theado 2004). Examples can be found in Ann Charters’ Beat Down to Your Soul: What Was the Beat Generation? (2001) and Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation (Johnson & Grace 2002). Especially Jenni Skerl’s Reconstructing the Beats (2004) and Manuel Luis Martinez’s Countering the Counterculture: Rereading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Tomás Rivera, signpost new assessments and new directions in Beat studies. Both publications share a similar goal, formulated in Skerl’s introduction: to ‘re-historicize, re-contextualize, and reinterpret’ the Beats. Their conclusions, however, ‘differ dramatically’ (Bennett, 2005). In Bennett’s assessment, Skerl’s publication mainly ‘advances a rather traditional sense of the Beats as countercultural rebels’ (2005). Martinez, on the other hand, ‘challenges [the] traditional interpretation of the Beat Generation as an unproblematic counter-hegemonic movement’ (2005). It becomes clear that present academic research is attempting to either refute or reinforce our traditional conception and understanding of the Beat Generation. In other words, we are still attempting to formulate a response to the question prompted in the title of Charters’ publication: what was the Beat Generation? If we aim to scrutinize and reassess the conventional interpretation of the Beats, we must also scrutinize how this traditional image was composed. Irrespective of which viewpoint one advocates, a crucial question in interpreting the Beat Generation and their customary reputation is how that repute was established. 5 Maarten Luyten Master N-E UGent Master Thesis Academiejaar 2012-2013 Debora Van Durme The controversy and sensationalism that the Beat Generation bathed in was undeniably, at least in part, a construction of the media (Watson 1995, Nash 2008). Nevertheless, the Beat Generation was, in the first instance, conceived and shaped in the minds of its authors. In this research I will investigate how the Beats shaped an image of themselves and transferred this to the public. According to Bruce Bawer and Jean Royer, the literary interview plays an essential role in this process, as they always establish a ‘character- portrait’ (Bawer 1988) and give the audience ‘the feeling of truth [and] close personal contact’ (Royer 1986, quoted in Rodden 2001). Hence, I will investigate how the Beat authors actively engaged in self-fashioning in literary interviews. Although their reputation has frequently been analyzed and critically evaluated, no academic research has exclusively and comprehensively investigated the construction of the Beats’ image. Interviews with the Beat authors have regularly served as substantial sources in Beat studies and biographies and have frequently been discussed in the context of the Beats. Nevertheless, to my knowledge these interviews have never been analyzed as instruments for promoting and constructing the image of the Beat Generation. Since this thesis is limited in space, I will only discuss Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac. My preference goes out to these three authors because they are still perceived as the primary authors of the Beat Generation and remain at the center of interest in Beat studies. Additionally, being the most renowned Beat authors, they contributed significantly to fashioning and advertising the Beat Generation. Most of all, I chose these authors because they were undeniable media-presences and frequently appeared in literary interviews. Hence, I believe them to be the most qualified Beat authors for this investigation. However, I must remark that other Beat authors ought to be interesting for this investigation as well. Fashioning the Beat Generation was not solely the merit of these three authors and this process extends vastly beyond actual encounters with journalists and interviewers. Besides in literary interviews, the Beats also shaped their image in 6 Maarten Luyten Master N-E UGent Master Thesis Academiejaar 2012-2013 Debora Van Durme literary essays and even in their literature – as exemplified in Oliver Harris’s ‘”Virus-X”: Kerouac’s Visions of Burroughs’ (2004). In addition, we must not neglect the passive construction of their image. Their portrayal in contemporary journalism and literary reviews – where the stereotypic and often even caricatural image of the Beats was formed – and even their current reception in academic publications and popular culture all contribute to our conception of the Beat Generation. I will begin this dissertation with some introductory notes concerning self-fashioning and marketing, self-fashioning in literary interviews, the Beats in literary interviews and my motivation for the selected interviews.