1 SIFTING THE SHIFTING SANDS: âHOWLâ AND THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE IN THE 1950s
On 7 October 1955 in the Six Gallery in downtown San Francisco, an emerging but little known poet called Allen Ginsberg stood to deliver a new, long poem he had been working on over the previous months. âHowlâ, read to a small, if packed, crowd of friends and supporters, would-be novelists and ambitious young poets, was an immediate sensation. The listeners greeted the piece, an impassioned statement touching upon issues as broad as the Cold War, homosexuality, Buddhism and jazz, drugs, the supernatural and suicide, with a huge and enthusiastic ovation. Said Jonah Raskin in his book American Scream: Allen Ginsbergâs âHowlâ and the Making of the Beat Generation: â[T]he audience was transformed [âŠ] indifferent spectators becoming energetic participants [âŠ] No one had been to a poetry reading that was so emotional and so catharticâ.1
Several of the writers in attendance would actually go away and write their own first-hand account of what had gone on that evening â Jack Kerouac would fictionalise the occasion in his 1958 novel The Dharma Bums, for example â a suggestion in itself that there was a strong sense a piece of history, a memorable literary moment, had been played out on that autumn night. âIn all of our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry beforeâ, wrote another poet Michael McClure after the reading. âWe had gone beyond a point of no return â and we were ready for it, for a point of no return. None of us wanted to go back to the grey, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellective void â to the land without poetry â to the spiritual drabness. We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it as we went into it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision.â2 An underground gathering of subterranean scribes and street philosophers, the so-called Beat Generation, had raised its head above the parapet.3
With âHowlâ, Ginsberg marked his arrival as a writer of profile and status. His previous decade, and more, of uncertain progress â acceptance then expulsion from the Ivy League campus of Columbia in New York, his involvement with the under-classes of Manhattan and his fringe contributions to their criminal activities, a period under the scrutiny of the asylum, his visionary episodes in which he believed he had heard the voice of William Blake, and his time as an employee of the Madison Avenue advertising industry â was behind him; his life as poet had commenced. The day after the Six Gallery reading, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the proprietor of City Lights bookshop and its emerging publishing operation, would acknowledge Ginsbergâs achievement with scant delay. Ferlinghetti, referencing words that Ralph Waldo Emerson had penned to Walt Whitman in praise of Leaves of Grass in 1855, exactly 100 years before, wrote to Ginsberg: âI greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript?â4
While this new era would not be without its accompanying difficulties â the acclaimed piece would indeed be published by City Lights the following year, as Howl and Other Poems, only to face obscenity charges and a high profile court case within months â the breakthrough that âHowlâ represented was enormous, not only for the writer of the poem but also those in Ginsbergâs circle. His friends Kerouac and William Burroughs would gain immensely from the poetâs national, then international, recognition. Ginsberg had been and remained a tireless promoter of his fellow writersâ novels. He had helped Burroughs to publish his debut book, Junkie, in 1953, and would continue to push his much more difficult, experimental works like The Naked Lunch as the 1950s turned into the 1960s. For Kerouac, âHowlâ was like the fanfare before the curtain rose and the stage illuminated, for Ginsberg made mention of his friendâs numerous unpublished novels in the preface to the poem and included him among several dedicatees. In 1957, On the Road, the major novel of this tight-knit gathering of writers, would appear and cause a sensation. The Beats, a community known essentially to its core members only before the mid-1950s, would swiftly become a literary grouping familiar to hundreds and thousands of readers around the globe in the months and years that would follow.
Yet, if writers and poets of a fresh vein were beginning to make their mark at this moment, there were other significant forces at play on a shifting American landscape. By the time Ginsberg premiered his soon-to-be published poem, a significant record was coming to the end of a six-month stay in the Top 40, the American Billboard chart which had become the standard weekly sales listing for pop songs from 1940. Bill Haley and His Cometsâ single â(Weâre Gonna) Rock Around the Clockâ â also widely described in its shortened version of âRock Around the Clockâ â had entered the chart on 15 April 1955 and would remain in that list for the next 24 weeks.5 During its stay it would also enjoy eight weeks in the number one position, a significant indicator that this record had entered and remained part of the national psyche for some considerable time.
Why was this of importance? This was not Haleyâs first chart entry: Palmer credits his 1953 release âCrazy Man Crazyâ as âthe first white rock and roll hitâ6 and, at the end of 1954, Ward states that âShake, Rattle and Rollâ, a bowdlerised version of a Big Joe Turner hit, âshot up the Top Ten â not only in the United States but also in England, where teenagers were apparently awaiting this blast of new music just as avidly as Americans wereâ.7 But â(Weâre Gonna) Rock Around the Clockâ left a deeper imprint because, not only was it heard on record players and radios, but had also been featured in an acclaimed and widely-seen movie of 1955, The Blackboard Jungle, a school-based drama starring Glenn Ford which had utilised music â jazz versus rock ânâ roll â as a metaphor for the generation gap. The film, based on a novel by Evan Hunter concerned âa new teacher at a high school in a âbadâ section of town [who] is taunted and abused by a group of his students (including a black one played by Sidney Poitier)â.8 A fellow teacher also endures the ignominy of having his jazz records smashed by members of his class.9
Why though should we attempt to elide these two works, âHowlâ and âRock Around the Clockâ, a piece of poetry and a song? Why should a connection be made between an un-minted poem, known to but a dedicated few, and a hugely successful pop record, familiar to millions across the States? This chapter will argue that both of these expressions were symptomatic of an America that was undergoing a period of dramatic transition. While Ginsbergâs verse and Haleyâs song were coming from different intellectual places, and appealing to different sections of society, they were symbols of that metamorphosis. These two distinct tributaries in Americaâs cultural stream gushed freely, and largely independently, during the latter 1950s and early 1960s yet, by the middle of the 1960s, appeared to find confluence. By then, the jump and jive innocence of rock ânâ roll had matured into the earnest exhorting of a new rock, no longer merely concerned with the boy-meets-girl obsessions of adolescent-oriented pop, but now spreading its creative net to embrace sex and psychosis, politics and pot, as the Beatles and Bob Dylan replaced the early heroes of rockâs pantheon. And, with that transformation, some of the key Beats would take the view that rock was something they could feed into and bounce off; the musicians and the poets could and would discover common ground. But that coming-together is a tale for another place in this volume. Here we will examine the US context in which Beat literature, with âHowlâ as its unravelling and uncompromising standard, and original rock ânâ roll, both symptom of, and cure for, post-war teen neurosis perhaps, were initially recognised.
Let us consider the national setting that applied in the middle of the 1950s and the kind of America that felt the psychological tremors that Ginsbergâs vociferous assault sent scurrying across the nation, first among the literati, then the media, then the courts and, with remarkable speed, among ordinary men and women in the street. What had been happening socially and politically prior this to thought-quake; what had been unfolding in the worlds of literature and popular music, art and art music? The decade after the end of the Second World War, concluded first in Europe then devastatingly under atomic clouds in the Far East, was a time of extraordinary contrast for the US. On the one hand, the economic troubles, that had so scarred the 1930s, troubles that had only been exorcised by a combination of Rooseveltâs Keynesian plans to rebuild America and the arrival of the war which had galvanised industry and seen off the last remnants of Depression, evaporated and by the early 1950s economic boom was bringing prosperity to large portions of the nation: the white middle classes, particularly, saw standards of living rise and the home become a haven for an abundance of newly available consumer goods â fridges and other kitchen appliances, radios and televisions. There was a sense, certainly among the advantaged sections of American society that the cruelty of war had at least been followed by the balm of material comfort, the cooling breeze of financial security. As Bradbury writes: â[R]eal incomes doubled, the rewards of a mass consumer society spread even further and America became a land of unprecedented affluence, an example to others.â But, he counsels, âthe age of affluence was also an age of materialism and conformityâ.10
However, we should be cautious of these broad brush-strokes; the picture was far from rosy in all aspects. The Civil War, that traumatic scarification of the American soul, was not yet a hundred years past and the promises the bloody conflict had intended to deliver â emancipation of the American Negro from the yoke of brutalised slavery, in particular â had only been partially fulfilled. If the barbarisms of plantation enslavement had legally ended with the warâs conclusion, even by the 1950s the lot of most black men and women was only marginally improved. Mass Negro emigration to the northern states from the 1930s and into the 1940s had seen cities like Chicago and Detroit, cradles of the US industrial recovery, employ large numbers of black workers on their production lines. In this ...