The Beats, so long a totem of countercultural cool, now seem anomalous, even old-school: a clique of mostly Caucasian (apart from Amiri Baraka), mostly male (apart from Anne Waldman), outsider writers espousing a mish-mash of kicks, cars, restlessness, rootlessness, Buddhism, leftist politics and an unruly first-thought-best-thought aesthetic. Easy to skewer them sixty years on. Easy to skewer them at the time.
But the Beats were a cultural and style revolution as much as a literary movement, although Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac and Corso produced a significant enough canon between them. You can still feel their legacy in the slam poets and the protest generation – such kinetic energy seems downright insolent in an age of literature as bourgeois distraction.
Despite the bravado, the etymology of the term "Beat" was itself a reaction to the "Lost Generation" and 1950s consumer boomerism. As in downbeat. Minor key. Self-effacing, even. Hence the gnawing existential ennui at the heart of Kerouac's work, the nihilism in Burroughs's, the sense of national mourning in Ginsberg's America or Kaddish.
Rainbow coalition
Bill Morgan has culled The Best Minds of My Generation from two decades of lectures delivered by Ginsberg, the Beats' chief mouthpiece, lit hustler, chronicler and flame-keeper. Ginsberg was a great talker, and an eloquent exponent of literary technique. Just as well, because the Beats were a rainbow coalition of ideologies, from Kerouac's satori-in-nature and Zen-Blakean obsession with the breadth to Burroughs's interest in the psychology of the Raskolnikov-type psychopath, the act of murder as ultimate existential transgression (an idea repudiated by his compadres: this lot weren't afraid to argue).
Ginsberg is also strong on the influence of music on his and Kerouac's poetry and prose – Symphony Sid, Charlie Parker, Dizzy's Salt Peanuts Billie Holiday's I Cover the Waterfront – riffing at length on their conscious imitation of the rhythm, respiration and non-iambic line lengths in blues and bop. "The last one is interesting," Ginsberg says of Holiday's 1946 recording, "because symbolically that low-down trip to the waterfront, the docks in New York, that she describes, the blues of the docks, the blues under the bridges, was directly associated in Kerouac's mind with Hart Crane and Kerouac's own associations as a seaman."
For this reader, the talks on Burroughs are the most compelling. Burroughs’s prose could be hard work, but his squinty-eyed suspicion of all systems of authority and control cast him as one of the American century’s greatest cynics and soothsayers, like Ambrose Bierce or Mark Twain with a monkey on his back.
Ginsberg’s analysis of the cut-up method (which he regarded as, at best, a digression, at worst a folly) is a fascinating summation of Burroughs’s paranoia about neurolinguistic programming: “Burroughs suspected that the entire fabric of reality as we know it is completely conditioned and he began suspecting that the conditioners . . . were running the entire universe. It is somewhat like an engineer running a sound studio with lots of tape machines and film. It was a question of exploring along word lines and picture lines, in other words, tracing the words that you use and are implanted in your brain . . . to find [the source of] the image bank and who’s in control of it . . . This was a very serious political proposition. I remember once arriving in Tangier and having to undergo Burroughs’s interrogation as to who I was representing. He could detect certain parts of my father or certain parts of Columbia University in intonations of my voice and words and attitudes. It was interesting, but it was a little difficult to see my old friend Bill looking at me as if I were a robot sent to check him out.”
Further disquisitions on Cassady, Corso, Orlovsky, Kerouac and his own Howl are contrasts of plain-spoken writerly horse sense with near-mystical visions – heady stuff delivered in a conversational tone. The Best Minds of My Generation is a reminder that great writing is not always about good taste or approved schools of technique, but engagement, energy and revolt.
Peter Murphy is the author of the novels John the Revelator and Shall We Gather at the River
