In the 1950s, a new cultural and literary movement had secured a dominant role in the minds of Americans. The Beatnik movement was never as numerous as the Lost Generation or other movements, but its impact on cultural status was perhaps the most notable among competing groups. In the early years after World War II there was a dramatic shift in general social awareness. As America was swept by the postwar economic boom, many students began to question this unbridled pursuit of materialism. The beatnik movement was a product of these doubts. They saw in the then prevailing capitalism a threat to the human spirit and social equality. In addition to their dissatisfaction with consumer culture, the beatniks opposed the degrading bashfulness of their parents’ and grandparents’ generation. The taboo of openly discussing human sexuality was seen by them as unhealthy and even potentially harmful. In the world of literature and art, beatniks took sides in opposition to the impeccable, almost sterile, formalism of the modernist era. They enjoyed open, direct and expressive literature. Very often beatnik cultural creations crossed the line of what was allowed, and thus were often vetoed by the censors. Many people exclude beatnik literature from the category of serious art, but time has shown that the cultural legacy of the beat generation was more enduring and its influence was more widespread.
First Steps
The founders of the Beat Generation met at Columbia University in the early ’40s. Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg became the locomotives of that initial group of like-minded artists for many years to come, which also included Lucien Carr, John Clellon Holmes, and Neal Cassidy. Gregory Corso was the first beat poet that Ginsberg met. Despite their anti-scientific, or rather anti-academic, pretensions, the entire Beat Generation was well educated and came from the middle-income classes. Kerouac was the one who coined the name “Beat Generation,” and oddly enough, he got it right. William Burroughs was another writer of the Beatnik movement, though slightly older and more experienced than his contemporaries. Burroughs was declared unfit for military service during World War II, so he roamed the country aimlessly for several years, taking the oddest jobs. Probably some supreme force intervened in this state of affairs, and so the paths of Burroughs, Kerouac and Ginsberg were destined to be woven together. It was their creative quest that gave life to Beatnik literature.
The Beat Generation had to wade through many different styles, ideas and currents before they could create their own unique concept. There is a theory that Romanticism poetry had more of an influence on the minds of Beatniks, especially the work of such poets as Percy B. Shelley and William Blake. Surrealist and absurdist movements did not bypass them either. At the same time, 19th century American transcendentalism served as a powerful source of inspiration for the confrontational politics of the Beat movement. For example, Henry David Thoreau was elevated by it to the status of a symbol of its protests. In particular, the Beatnik movement was instrumental in restoring Thoreau’s reputation and elevating her to the position she now occupies. In the opposite direction, American modernism became the target to which all the scolding and abuse of beatniks was directed. Thomas Eliot’s formalism, for example, was rejected outright for its complete lack of connection to real life. Eliot had achieved recognition as a true scholar, while the Beat generation took him for just another elitist upstart with an ambition for greatness.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti is considered a late exponent of the Beat movement. The son of immigrants, Ferlinghetti became a Navy veteran who worked with the resistance forces in World War II. After the war, he settled in San Francisco, where he opened City Lights Bookstore. His bookstore quickly became a gathering place for many literati of the Beat Generation. Around the same time, Ferlinghetti began publishing, publishing the work of established poets, but he didn’t skimp on the young. In his own work, Ferlinghetti displays a jazz-inspired style and a spirit of improvisation. Ferlinghetti is known for his skillful combination of humor and darkness, as well as his poignant reflections on the state of America and the world in the middle of the last century. He denounced the decadence and pretense of American culture as well as the destructive potential of capitalism, but his main tool was mockery of all this absurdity. As it happens, Ferlinghetti’s poetics did not have such a firm place in Beatnik literature. His humor and satire make his work more universal, and therefore less drawn exclusively to one current.
Allen Ginsberg
The publication of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” in 1956 marked a turning point in the history of beat literature, if not in American literature as a whole. This poem was intended to be read aloud, thus bringing back an oral tradition in literature that had been neglected for generations. The freewheeling content of the work surprised everyone, and that would be an understatement, for its subject matter was indeed taken on trial as blatant pornography. But Ginsberg won this confrontation with the public, and as a result literature and the visual arts were given a special place outside the strict censorship that reigned at the time. With his “Howl,” Ginsberg urges the reader/listener to take a tour of the backside of America on which drug addicts, vagrants, prostitutes and crooks have found their place; a side in which an inner rage against the system lives and demands a supposed equality. Filthy speech and slang are elevated to the rank of commonplace on a par with drugs and crime. All these things shocked the public of the 1950s. But Ginsberg was only following the path of his own inspiration. He lovingly quotes Walt Whitman, whose echoes can be seen in Ginsberg’s writings with the naked eye.
As the chaos of the ’50s replaced the prosperity of the ’60s, Allen Ginsberg’s poetics also undergoes significant changes. His work has always been the epitome of inner turmoil and search for meaning. And when his persona found itself in a certain center of attention of the whole society, there was simply no more fuel inside that would have kept the engine of his work alive. No one said that Ginsberg had wandered off the beaten path, critics only argued that his work had become more “mature” and therefore less explosive. He spent most of his time in the ’60s as a scholar who was invited by various universities. Irony of fate, no less: the institutions to which his back was turned were waiting for him with open arms. But as fate would have it, Ginsberg himself certainly enjoyed being a mentor and tutor to others. Instilling faith in the human spirit in the next generation became a true calling for Ginsberg as a visionary writer.
Jack Kerouac
But Ginsberg is not alone! Probably no other writer in the beatnik movement has attracted more attention than Jack Kerouac. His life was full of conflict, confusion, and critical depression. In the end, dying of alcoholism, Kerouac could not reconcile himself with his role as the mouthpiece of an entire generation of beatniks. According to the recollections of those close to him, he was a shy person, and so he had a hard time during those periods when the public rejected his works. His only success was his novel On the Road, a philosophical travel parable that skillfully mingled streams of consciousness, drug addiction and profound observations of events with which generations still resonate to this day. This book made him famous literally on day one. Even members of the Beat Generation circle were unspeakably surprised at the passion and enthusiasm with which the seemingly quiet Jack Kerouac worked. In addition to novels and philosophy, he wrote in general about artistic craft, at least that’s what he called it. It was these semi-lucid and spatial reflections on literature that became a kind of window into the consciousness of beatniks. One can certainly find great potential in it, but often this potential is shattered by the reigning disorder and the negativity of idealism in the mind, despite the bitter reality of consumer culture in America. In a sense, Jack Kerouac was the most vulnerable figure of the whole beat movement. He succumbed to the pressures of fame and general attention. While Ginsberg shied away from the importance of mass expectation, Kerouac carried it on his own shoulders and eventually broke down.
William Burroughs
Even if Burroughs had written nothing but The Naked Breakfast, he would surely have remained in the pantheon of beatnik writers. He, perhaps more vividly than anyone else of the beat movement, embodied in his writings the spirit of recklessness for which his generation was known. One day in Mexico City, in an alcoholic stupor, he accidentally shot and killed his first wife, Jane Vollmer. The reason he ended up in Mexico was painfully prosaic: He was trying to escape justice in the States. Many of the gruesome features of his life, he carries on paper. It is impossible not to note Burroughs’ particular style. He clearly neglected descriptive elements, which directly reflects his emotional state, fueled by his struggle with alcohol and drug addiction. “Naked Breakfast” is a very complex and in some places intimidating work, but despite all the counterarguments this work still finds its readers.
Criticism of the Beat Generation came from absolutely different corners of the planet. Academic circles derided beatniks as rude and crude pseudo-intellectuals. The American public was frightened by their sexual deviance and overt drug addiction. The status writers of the day looked down on the writings of beatniks. Some politicians, like Joseph McCarthy, found elements of Communism and threats to national security in Beatnik ideology. The Beatniks listened to all these insults, but it was rather the other way around that brought them together. However, their relatively short tenure on the world literary scene can probably be attributed to the amount of negativity poured out on them during this time. The original name “Beat” implied people broken and unnecessary, and for the early 1950s such an interpretation was as good as it gets.
The Beat generation had a very significant impact on the structure of modern American society. With the publication of Ginsberg’s “Howl,” the view of what “acceptable” literature should be quickly spread. Censorship as a tool for shaping human consciousness, at least within the realm of fiction, was no longer so. Perhaps the main achievement of the beatniks is the active discussion of environmental problems. Before the 1950s, environmentalism did not exist in the form it does today. The ideological similarities between beatniks and Native Americans and Eastern culture gave rise to a modern environmental ethic. Modern poetics underwent a radical change in its structure and style that allowed anyone to openly express their opinions about a particular subject. Experimentation came to the fore, thereby relegating close formalism to the background. But the beat generation disappeared over the horizon as quickly as it rose above it.