Chapter I
A Gospel of Emancipation
Weâll get you through your children.
âAllen Ginsberg, 1958
The core of the heresy of the Free Spirit lay in the adeptâs attitude towards himself: he believed that he had attained a perfection so absolute that he was incapable of sin.
Disclaiming book-learning and theological subtleties, they rejoiced in direct knowledge of God- indeed, they felt themselves united with the divine essence in a most intimate union. And this in turn liberated them from all restraints. Every impulse was experienced as a divine command; now they could surround themselves with worldly possessions ... now, too, they could lie or steal or fornicate without qualms of conscience. For since inwardly the soul was wholly absorbed into God, external acts were of no account.
âNorman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, 1957
A toxic cultural movement
In November 1995, an exhibition called âBeat Culture and the New America: 1950-1965â opened at The Whitney Museum of American Art. Considered as an art exhibition, this traveling melange of some two hundred objects hardly existed. In more ways than one, walking through the exhibition was like touring a junk shop.3 Forgettable and justly forgotten paintings, sculptures, and films were intermixed with innumerable books, photographs, magazines, and other literary detritus, all scattered about the Whitneyâs exhibition spaces while the drug-inspired jazz of Miles Davis droned on in the background: that is what âBeat Culture and the New Americaâ had to offer. The two or three objects of even minimal aesthetic accomplishment on viewâsome paintings by Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline âwere not products of the Beat sensibility at all but merely happened to be created at the same time that the Beats got going.
Although aesthetically nugatory, âBeat Culture and the New Americaâ was an exhibition of considerable significanceâbut not in quite the way that Lisa Phillips, its curator, intended. Casting a retrospective glance at the sordid world of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and other Beat icons, the exhibition unwittingly furnished a kind of pathologistâs report on one of the most toxic cultural movements in American history.
In this sense, at least, the Whitney deserved our gratitude for sponsoring âBeat Culture.â The romance that has surrounded the Beat generation since the mid-Sixties has acted as a kind of sentimental glaze, obscuring its fundamentally nihilistic impulse under a heap of bogus rhetoric about liberation, spontaneity, and âstartling oases of creativity.â Notwithstanding their recent media make-over, the Beats were not Promethean iconoclasts. They were drug-abusing sexual predators and infantilized narcissists whose shamelessness helped dupe a confused and gullible public into believing that their utterances were works of genius. We have to thank Lisa Phillips and the Whitney for inadvertently reminding us of this with such vividness. If nothing else, âBeat Culture and the New Americaâ showed that the Beats were not simply artistic charlatans; they wereâand, in the case of those who are still with us, they remainâmoral simpletons whose destructive influence helped fuel the cultural catastrophe with which we are now living.
Not, of course, that the folks at the Whitney saw it this way. But then the Whitney Museum has long been a splendid example of cultural breakdown. In his foreword to the catalogue, David Ross, at that time the Whitneyâs director, complained that the âdepth and seriousness of Beat cultureâ was insufficiently appreciated by many postwar journalists, whose âreactionaryâ response led them to dismiss the Beats as âloony beret-wearing weirdos, conspiratorial communists, amoral homosexuals, filthy drug-addicted hipsters, or merely pathetic wannabe artists.â
One nice thing about David Ross was his predictability. On the subject of Beat culture, one knew in advance that he would deplore âMcCarthyismâ and the Fifties generally, and that he would then trot out a number of clichĂ©s about race-class-gender, ending with a flourish about the importance of federal funding for the arts. And right on cue he told us that the Beats suffered from âpoliticians looking for convenient scapegoats,â that they âopened up a closed-down culture,â and that later âartists struggling with their emerging sexual identities found the Beat world a nurturing place, where desire could be freely expressed and pleasure openly extolled.â Finally, he registered his relief that he can âstill cite the National Endowment for the Arts as a public champion of important exhibitions such as this once.â
dp n="49" folio="40" ?Lisa Phillips sang a similar song, but waxed even more lyrical. In âBeat Culture: America Revisioned,â her essay for the catalogue, Phillips spoke of the âenduring achievementâ and ânow legendary literary accomplishmentsâ of the Beats, whose âvanguard and antimaterialistâ stance set them against the âconformity and consensus of official cultureâ and the âsmug optimism of the Eisenhower years.â In one remarkable passage, she explains how
during the Cold War, in the aftermath of World War II, a new generation emerged in America, known as the Beat generation. Disillusioned with the progress of science and Western technocracy, the Beats embarked on a quest for a new set of values out of which to build a new faith, [and] a new tribal ethic was born. Although once rejected by mainstream society as outlaws, rebels, and morally dangerous, today the Beats are recognized as icons of Americaâs counterculture and as one of the most influential cultural movements of the century. Their literary works, which aroused great controversy and academic disdain when first published in the fifties, are now part of the canon of American literature taught in universities around the country. Their archives are selling for vast sums, ... and first editions of their books are highly sought after. Perhaps most important, the Beats continue to inspire younger generations of artists with their directness, courage, and intensity of vision.
There is a great deal one could say about this paragraph, beginning with that supposed disillusionment with âthe progress of science and Western technocracyâ The Beats regularly denounced (in the words of that proto-Beat, Henry Miller) the âair-conditioned nightmare,â but they freely availed themselves of the fruits of modern science and technologyâelectricity, jet travel, penicillin, not to mention other drugs. Nevertheless, there is one frighteningly accurate statement in Phillipsâs inventory: namely, that the Beats âare now part of the canon of American literature taught in universities around the country.â As she later observed, âthe Beat rebellion gave form to an invisible turning point in American culture at mid-century.â
David Ross and Lisa Phillips celebrated this development as a giant step forward for freedom and creativity. In fact, the institutionalization of the Beat ethic has been a moral, aesthetic, and intellectual disaster of the first order. (It has also been a disaster for fashion and manners, but that is a separate subject.) We owe to the 1960s the ultimate institutionalization of immoralist radicalism: the institutionalization of drugs, pseudo-spirituality, promiscuous sex, virulent anti-Americanism, naĂŻve anti-capitalism, and the precipitous decline of artistic and intellectual standards. But the 1960s and 1970s only codified and extended into the middle class the radical spirit of the Beats, who, in more normal times, would have remained what they were in the beginning: members of a fringe movement that provided stand-up comics with material.
The church of the Beats
Looking back on it now, it seems peculiarly appropriate that the only real job that the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg ever hadâfor more than a few weeks, anywayâwas in market research. He clearly had a tremendous gift in that direction. For although he later ridiculed his time on Madison Avenue (âWe spent $150,000 to learn that most people didnât want furry teeth,â he scoffed)âas indeed he ridiculed every other aspect of middle-class, bourgeois lifeâhis own career as a poet and spiritual guru depended crucially on his talent as a tireless self-promoter. It was the one talent, in fact, that he indisputably possessed in great abundance.
Readers only vaguely familiar with Ginsbergâs life and work will doubtless find this surprising. When he died at seventy of liver cancer in April 1997, Allen Ginsberg was almost universally celebrated as a major literary figureâand one who, moreover, exercised a benign if sometimes âcontroversialâ influence on the cultural and ethical life of his times. A smiling, sybaritic hippie, lost in clouds of incense and marijuana, chanting mantras, seducing young men, he disparaged the United States while preaching nonviolence and love, and taking off his clothes in public at every opportunity. Among other things, Ginsberg was an active supporter of the North American Man Boy Love Alliance (NAMBLA), an organization devoted to encouraging homosexual pedophilia: âI donât know exactly how to define whatâs underage,â Ginsberg once saidâadding that he himself âhad never made it with anyone under fifteen.â It says a lot about our cultureâor perhaps it is one more testimony to Ginsbergâs marketing skillsâthat such a man should be exalted by the mainstream press as a beneficent or at least harmlessly amusing presence. As Norman Podhoretz noted in his recent memoir, âin later life, Ginsberg would adopt a sweet and gentle persona, but there was nothing either sweet or gentle about the Allen Ginsbergâ of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The few dissenting voices4 at the time of his death were drowned out in a chorusâone might say a âHowl,â after Ginsbergâs best-known poemâof fulsome eulogy. In a front-page obituary, The New York Times hailed Ginsberg as âthe poet laureate of the Beat Generation,â âone of Americaâs most celebrated poets,â whose âirrepressible personality ... provided a bridge between the Underground and the Transcendental.â An hour-long PBS television documentary paraded a long list of luminaries, from Joan Baez to Norman Mailer, to extol his âcourage,â his literary and spiritual daring, and (a favorite epithet) his âgentleness.â Not to be outdone, the well-known poetry critic and Harvard professor Helen Vendler wrote in the September-October 1997 issue of Harvard Magazine about Ginsbergâs âgreat gifts to world culture,â âthe moral base of his poetry,â and her âown profound gratitude for his work and the life out of which it came.â (âHe allowed me my own rage, social criticism, and coarseness,â she claimed, no doubt correctly.)
Ginsbergâs friend William S. Burroughs, II, Beat novelist and sometime heroin addict, whose paternal grandfather invented the adding machine, got a similarly enthusiastic send-off when he died at eighty-three in August 1997. No one spoke of his âgentleness,â of course. âGentlenessâ was definitely not part of Burroughsâs reputation as the author of Junkie, Naked Lunch, and other surrealistic hymns to violence, drug abuse, and extreme sexual degradation. âBill was never keen on the love-and-peace side of the sixties,â one fan noted. âThe only way Iâd like to see a policeman given a flower,â Burroughs sneered, âis in a flowerpot from a high window.â The first line of the obituary that appeared in The Village Voice summed up Burroughs: âAddict, killer, pederast.â Even so, a memorialist in New York magazine assured readers that, whatever his pathologies and fondness for guns, Burroughs was really âa sweet, funny, and lonely man. Just lovely.â And naturally there were plenty of encomia to Burroughsâs âcourage,â âcandor,â and âstrange genius,â his exalted place (in the words of the Los Angeles Times) as âa seminal figure of the Beat Generation.â âSeminalâ indeed: âHe spent years experimenting with drugs as well as with sexâ The New York Times cheerfully reported, âwhich he engaged in with men, women, and children.â
The enthusiastic praise that Ginsberg and Burroughs elicited on the occasion of their deaths was not just valedictory piffle, white lies that surround the dead like a second shroud. During his lifetime, Ginsberg was showered with just about every literary award and honor it was possible to win, short of the Nobel Prize, including the National Book Award, election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, even, in 1993, the Chevalier de lâOrdre des Arts et Lettres. This enemy of âmaterialismâ and the corporate culture of âAmerikaâ had his eight-hundred-page Collected Poems published by Harper & Row (now HarperCollins) and received more than one million dollars for his papers from Stanford University.
Burroughs, who lacked Ginsbergâs charm and craving for publicity, did not prosper to the same extent. As an heir to a fortune built by American ingenuity, he didnât need to. But Burroughs, too, lived to see himself lionized, both as an important literary figure and as a hero and role model for countless rock musicians, from The Beatles to David Bowie. Having begun as outlaws from the establishment, literary and otherwise, Ginsberg and Burroughs were taken up by a grateful academic establishment desperate to play a role in the countercultural carnival. Innumerable papers, monographs, and dissertations have appeared to praise and interpret their works, and both men were the subject of fawning biographies in the early 1990s.
The third celebrated member of the Beat triumvirate was Jack Kerouac. It was he who coined the phrase âBeat Generation,â and who, one is reminded again and again in the literature about the Beats, suggested the title of Naked Lunch to Burroughs. Kerouac managed to drink himself to death in 1969 at the age of forty-seven. Consequently, he missed out on a lot of what we might call the pre-posthumous adulation showered on his friends Ginsberg and Burroughs when the culture caught up with their radicalism in the 1970s. Moreover, Kerouac became an increasingly problematic figure for fans of the counterculture: by the end of his life he had returned to the Roman Catholic faith, espoused conservative political views, and supported the war in Vietnam.
Nevertheless Kerouac, too, was subsequently lionized by the establishment he once affected to scorn. Not only are all (or virtually all) his works still in print, but Viking recently honored him with a fat Portable Jack Kerouac, a tribute once reserved for genuinely accomplished writers. There is a scholarly edition of his letters from 1940-1956 (with no doubt more to come) and a special fortieth-anniversary reissue of Kerouacâs most famous book, On the Road, first published in 1957. There are also the usual academic studies and at least one star-struck biography His home city of Lowell, Massachusetts, even saw fit to name a new park after him in 1987.
About the Beats generally, an âAppreciationâ of Burroughs in The Washington Post admirably summed up the current state of received opinion. The obituarist quotes from a book of Burroughsâs dreams: âI attend a party and dinner at Columbia. Allen Ginsberg is there and rich. He has founded some sort of church.â The obituarist comments: âThis was no dream; this was reality.... [Today,] the church of the Beats is stronger than ever, unquestionably the most significant literary congregation in America since the Lost Generation of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.â
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Flirting with the underworld
Well, that is partly true. The Beats were tremendously significant, but chiefly in the way that they provided a preview in the 1950s of the cultural, intellectual, and moral disasters that would fully flower in the late 1960s. The ideas of the Beats, their sensibility, contained in ovo all the characteristics we think of as defining the cultural revolution of the Sixties and Seventies. The adolescent longing for liberation from conventional manners and intellectual standards; the polymorphous sexuality; the narcissism; the destructive absorption in drugs; the undercurrent of criminality; the irrationalism; the naĂŻve political radicalism and reflexive anti-Americanism; the adulation of pop music as a kind of spiritual weapon; the Romantic elevation of art as an alternative to rather than as an illumination of normal reality; the pseudo-spirituality, especially the spurious infatuation with Eastern religions: in all this and more the Beats provided a vivid glimpse of what was to come.
The chief difference between the Beat Generation and the Sixties was the ambient cultural climate: when the Beats first emerged, in the mid-Fifties, the culture still offered some resistance to the poisonous antinomianism the Beats advocated. But by the time the Si...