Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 21, 1993 TAG: 9402180007
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LEANNE WAXMAN ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
- Jack Kerouac, ``On the Road.''
\ Allen Ginsberg wiggles in his chair and belts ``Put Down Your Cigarette Rag,'' a biting critique of the tobacco industry and Jesse Helms.
He bangs together two sticks as he sings and reads to a club crowd buzzing from the opening act, the younger (than Ginsberg) Jim Carroll.
There were Carroll fans and there were Ginsberg fans packed into The Bottom Line that night. Carroll is beat, but Ginsberg is beater, forever a member of the boys' club that carved a new literary landscape out of stream of consciousness during the zipped-up '50s.
The decade was a negative jam. Some said the same about the '80s. Chastity and the New Chastity. The Eisenhower sleep and the Reagan sleep. The nuclear horror and the environmental threat. Benzedrine and Ecstasy.
Is it any wonder, then, that the ``nation's youth'' still are reading Ginsberg, who howled it, and Jack Kerouac, who did it on the road. What's the draw?
``It was a very powerful revision of what life was about, about what being an American was about,'' said Gerald Nicosia, a Kerouac biographer, of what became the Beat Generation.
``They were writing out of a real crisis, that their lives were seriously deranged after World War II,'' he said. ``They saw literature as being the lifeblood of society, the thing that could heal society. It was a very political, religious, revolutionary approach. It came out like dynamite.''
Ginsberg dubbed Kerouac's free-flow style ``spontaneous bop prosody'' (the art of poetic composition). Truman Capote called it ``typing.'' Other critics were harsher.
But one thing's for sure: The Beats still inspire readers, writers and moviemakers.
``I think the books provide a screen into which the reader, particularly the young reader who wants new experiences and wants to expand his awareness, can see himself and hear himself,'' Williams S. Burroughs said of his literary longevity.
They began on the fringe and struggled there for years, said Ann Charters, another Beats scholar. ``It was always ridiculed, found offensive. The books didn't sell at the time. It was a struggle.''
But since 1966, nine years after it was first published, Kerouac's ``On the Road'' has sold about 2.5 million copies; it sold 73,000 copies last year.
The Portable Beat Reader, edited by Charters as one in a series of anthologies by Viking, sold 25,000 copies in its first month in paperback this year.
With a boost from the movie of the same name, Burroughs' ``Naked Lunch'' sold about 60,000 copies in 1992, said Bryan Oettel, an editor at Grove Press. ``That's by far and away our best-selling paperback last year.''
Beat was a word in the Times Square streets and on the tongues of jazz musicians in the 1940s, when Ginsberg and Kerouac met Burroughs, and when they met Neal Cassady, the fast-talking, fast-moving Denver friend who put them on the road West.
Beat meant weary, worn out, at the bottom. To Kerouac and his friends, it came to symbolize their rejection of a rigid intellectualism in literature, a government capable of dropping the atomic bomb on Japan, the Cold War and its anti-communist madness.
In their hands, beat was an escape from conformity, a response to alienation, the first breath of the radical '60s. Kerouac said later that the word was intended to capture a ``special spirituality'' of ``solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization.'' Beat was a shout in the dark, bubbling in New York, melting into San Francisco's poetry scene and mirroring what others were doing in Europe and elsewhere.
``The essence of the whole Beat Generation was that it was a spiritual search for a new vision, widening the area of consciousness and deepening the field of compassion,'' Ginsberg said.
``We were able to be candid at a time when candor was not a feature of American life. It was that or lie to myself and everybody. I couldn't do that.''
The literary principle, Ginsberg said, was ``tapping the mind at its source on the spot'' in the style of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and other jazz musicians Kerouac admired.
``They were hearing the talk on the street and trying to use the rhythm with their horns,'' Ginsberg said.
The Beats wrote of their own experiences, embracing Arthur Rimbaud, Thomas Wolfe, William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth and Walt Whitman.
Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg, the jailkid-turned-poet Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and others were ``all looking toward greater awareness, new frontiers, but in very different ways,'' Burroughs said.
And that's the attraction now, Ginsberg said.
Today's ``narrow rigidity'' (censorship, abortion restrictions, the drug war, race prejudice, gay bashing, political correctness) feels a lot like the conundrum faced by the young Beats, who took up drugs and Buddhism to help make their way.
``I don't know what my generation stands for,'' said 22-year-old Ron Houghtaling, unemployed, leaning on a subway bench after listening to Carroll and Ginsberg at the Greenwich Village nightspot.
``I don't want to stand for the Yuppies and all of that. A lot of the interest in all of the Beats is just reaching for something, reaching for a voice, even if it's all men in their 70s,'' he said.
For the record: Ginsberg is 67. Burroughs is 79. Kerouac was 47 when he died a bloated drunk in St. Petersburg, Fla., in 1969. Cassady, who went on to drive the Merry Pranksters' bus ``Further,'' was 41 when he was found dead near some railroad tracks in Mexico in 1968.
``When a kid looks at Kerouac and Burroughs, they see men who have taken real risks,'' Charters said. ``They empower the young person to take risks also.''
By 1960, beat was beatnik, for hipster with beret and beard. Now, Kerouac stars in a Gap ad that notes that he, too, wore khakis.
``The world was illusion and at the same time real,'' Ginsberg said. ``There was no permanent hell and no permanent heaven. We have the whole tamale. Therefore, what we have here is sacred.''
Said Charters: ``Kerouac is a really accessible dream.''
Unlike Henry Miller, Henry James and Ernest Hemingway, the Beats didn't go into exile in Paris or London. Though Burroughs lived in Mexico, then elsewhere for awhile after accidentally shooting his wife to death in a game of William Tell, the Beats expressed a ``need to affirm America and to find some value in the experience of being American,'' Charters said.
``They were reacting against the proletarian political writers of the '30s. They didn't want to imitate Steinbeck or Hemingway,'' Charters said. ``They really wanted to discover America and the romanticism of writers like Whitman or Thoreau. The individualism of it. They wanted to encourage the American self.''
The spirit has precursors and it has inheritors.
Burroughs' mail regularly includes dozens of fan letters from teen-agers. Some, he said, are ``flatly insane'' and others simply want to know more.
Several box sets of old Beat recordings were released recently on CD, bringing those early years alive. New books by and about the Beats include journals from Ginsberg, letters put out by Burroughs, Cassady letters from prison and jail, mostly to his wife, and a Cassady biography.
And coffeehouse poetry is back in San Francisco and New York.
As for the road, there always will be people to go on it, because they have to.
``I think there's something bigger than the Beats,'' said poet-biographer Neeli Cherkovski. ``I just call it the ongoing underground bohemian express that's been going on since they used the chisel in rock in the cave.''
by CNB