The most cinematic way to begin a book about the Beats is with a murder. It’s easy enough to establish the scene by imagining upper Manhattan’s Riverside Park in the close and humid early hours of August 14, 1944. There and then, on the grassy banks of the Hudson, Lucien Carr, a Columbia University sophomore, found himself in a drunken argument with his friend David Kammerer. The men had known each other for years, and after Carr had matriculated at Columbia, the older Kammerer trailed him to New York, where they both fell into a social circle of students and others interested in art, literature, and culture – and the more carnal pleasures of drugs, alcohol, and sex. Whatever transpired between them that night, we remember it now because Carr wound up stabbing Kammerer in the chest with his old Boy Scout knife, and then dragged the body into the river, where it sank only with the help of stones found nearby. At a loss for what to do next, Carr went straight to others in the social circle, first to William Burroughs, who gave him some cash and advised him to seek legal counsel, and then to Jack Kerouac, who accompanied Carr on a surreal tour of the city before the latter eventually turned himself in to authorities. In the papers, the sensational story punctuated unending dispatches from the Pacific and European fronts, updating readers when Burroughs and Kerouac were arrested as material witnesses. Another close friend, Allen Ginsberg, managed to avoid legal entanglements but was as devastated as they all were, striking a plaintive note in his journal: “The libertine circle is destroyed with the death of Kammerer.”1 Although the killing did have the direct effect of busting up the circle and dispersing the friends to far-flung locales, at least temporarily, from our vantage it is historically significant because it draws together, in a most lurid and spectacular way, the Big Three writers of what was not yet called the Beat Generation. In fifteen years, Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs would all be famous avatars of literary iconoclasm, and so this early incident seems a natural starting point for understanding the movement they engendered.
Were it not for the later fame of those involved, Kammerer’s death would almost certainly have been lost to history as one among countless forgotten tragedies of the urban nightscape. From at least the mid-1970s, when critical work on the Beats began to appear with some regularity, the Carr–Kammerer confrontation provided a recognizable origin story, as in Aaron Latham’s gossipy New York Magazine piece, “The Columbia Murder That Gave Birth to the Beats” (1976), which dubs Carr the “founding father of the movement,” through to The Typewriter Is Holy (2010), Bill Morgan’s “complete, uncensored history” of the Beats, which declares that the murder is where “the story of the Beat Generation really begins.”2 In such cases, the seamy contours of real life are what captivate, and the desire to learn more about the details might drive inquisitive minds to the literature – Kill Your Darlings, a 2013 feature film about these events, virtually ignores writing to dramatize instead, as its tagline announced, “A True Story of Obsession and Murder.”3 Although many a reader has cracked a Beat book to discover the “true story” of its author’s turbulent life, so doing reinforces the widespread but erroneous notion that these writers merely wrote down what happened to them transparently and with little discrimination. This assumption is flawed, and leads to a fundamental misunderstanding of the Beats. Real-life events notwithstanding, they are of course relevant today – of interest to readers, enshrined at their own dedicated museum, subjects of admiring films and countless tribute songs, and paid serious attention in scholarly books, biographies, and at academic conferences – not for their exploits alone but for the force of their writing, which excelled at mythologizing and elevating such exploits. When thinking about the Beats, it is therefore essential to foreground questions of representation, to recognize that however much real life inspired and informed literary production, their achievement rests finally in the nature of this production, in the distinctive ways they explored and experimented with language.
I begin with a murder, then, not because writers later celebrated were embroiled in scandal, but because it was the first event that Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs collectively wrote about, which in turn made it a founding moment in and of Beat lore. A mere six weeks after Carr was sentenced for his crime, for example, eighteen-year-old Ginsberg began drafting a novel inspired by Kammerer’s murder called “The Bloodsong.” That manuscript didn’t get very far because the beset administration at Columbia asked Ginsberg to drop the project, but he would return to the incident more indirectly in later work, notably “Howl” (published 1956), which includes among its subterranean catalogues “great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion.”4 The “oblivion” here refers both to Kammerer’s literal death and to the way Ginsberg had moved from the quasi-ethnographic account in “The Bloodsong” to a lyrical though oblique reference in “Howl,” where Carr and Kammerer remain unnamed but “crowned with laurel” against the romantic wash of moonlight. Like many lines in “Howl,” the specifics of the “suicidal dramas” are purposively left unsaid, contributing to the event’s subsequent status as something only insiders really knew about.
While “The Bloodsong” was abandoned, in the immediate aftermath of the murder, Kerouac and Burroughs decided to collaborate on their own novel about the incident, so it is fair to say that if the killing “destroyed” the circle, it also provided these three writers with generative material (corresponding from jail that September, Carr told Ginsberg that he also wanted to lay claim to the event in an autobiographical novel he was planning).5 By the winter of 1944, Kerouac and Burroughs were making headway on their novel, ultimately called And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, which featured alternately written chapters narrated by fictionalized versions of themselves. The book was drafted by spring of 1945, and Kerouac for one thought highly of it, boasting to his sister that Columbia Pictures wanted movie rights, but that, despite its dramatic content, Hippos wasn’t really “movie material” so much as a “portrait of the ‘lost’ segment of our generation, hardboiled, honest, and sensationally real.”6 While both collaborators were interested in the commercial viability of the novel – perhaps explaining its “hardboiled” quality – it is telling that Kerouac frames the effort in terms of the “‘lost’ segment of our generation,” as this phrase draws a line from an earlier literary era, the Lost Generation, to his own “generation,” a word that would be famously attached to “Beat” in the coming years.7
Kerouac’s sense that there was a wider generational story to be told via the Carr–Kammerer affair was persistent enough that soon after Hippos was written, he reimagined the material in a new project called “I Wish I Were You.” Never published as a stand-alone book, “I Wish I Were You” focuses on social context rather than on the “sensationally real” murder – the plot is in fact all prelude to the killing, another telling change as it suggests it was the portrait of his “generation” which seemed most consequential to Kerouac on second thought.8 In rereading Kerouac’s body of work, one might indeed be struck by the way the killing indexes wider cultural discontent in a range of books, as when it appears, sanitized, in his first published novel, The Town and the City (1950) or when in his masterpiece Visions of Cody (1951–1952; published 1972), a fascinated Neal Cassady wants to know about the “novel … about the death.”9 A bookend to Hippos, Kerouac’s last substantive work, Vanity of Duluoz (1967), devotes a lengthy section to those months in 1944 not merely because of the murder but because his experiences with the legal system shaped his sensibility as a young writer.10 (Burroughs would likewise characterize the death as somehow symptomatic of his “generation,” as when he wrote in the mid-1950s, “Certainly I would be atypical of my generation if I didn’t die with my boots on. Dave Kammerer stabbed by his boy with a scout knife.”11)
The murder was thus significant not simply because of the obvious personal impact it had on the group but also because it seemed to Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs enigmatically indicative of shifting cultural winds, making it all but irresistible as subject matter. Thinking in terms of representation helps us see that the murder as such was immediately spun into a legible story, first by Burroughs, then by the media and by Carr’s lawyers – by the time Burroughs and Kerouac began to draft Hippos, such stories were practically impossible to sort out from the event itself. When Hippos was finally published in 2008, many readers assumed it was nothing more than a straightforward account of what had really happened, but in fact it turns on the very distances between real life and representation, an abiding interest of much Beat writing, as I show throughout this book.12 Put differently, Hippos unsettles the official story circulated in the media and maintained by Carr’s legal defense. This unsettling depends on an interplay of real life and fictional stories, meaning that one cannot read Hippos hermetically, by bracketing biographical and cultural contexts, a truism that applies to essentially all Beat literature. But even if one accepts this truism as such, it does not in turn follow that Hippos is naïve history, real life with the names changed, but it is rather an exploration of the problems that come with representing anything via language. For these reasons, Hippos is a useful entry point into Beat literature – while far from the finest example of this literature, the collaborative novel is a rich illustration of how the Beats have been handcuffed to both media accounts of their “generation” and to the perceptions of their most strident critics, and so I’ll linger over some of its details before describing the wider literary and cultural landscape from which Beat writing emerged.
1.1 Unsettling the Official Story
From a literary historian’s point of view, Hippos sutures New York in 1944 – a place and time in which the Beat Generation was embryonic and as-yet unnamed – to the post-“Howl,” post–On the Road (1957), post–Naked Lunch (1959) literary landscape in which Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, and others were characterized as Beat, which meant that they became somewhat infamous but widely misunderstood. This is because though completed in 1945, the manuscript remained unpublished until 2008, three years after Carr’s death. There are numerous reasons for this half-century interlude, not the least of which was Carr’s desire to disassociate himself from the Beats and their fascination with the murder – “Isn’t it enough that the past is there,” he said to Ginsberg in 1962, “without your returning again and again and again to nuzzle, smell, wallow, guzzle and paint yourself blue with it? … As far as it affects me, can’t you word bandiers stick to your own ghosts and leave mine alone?”13 Given the allure of such ghosts, it was perhaps inevitable that they would eventually be disturbed again, and Beat enthusiasts had long anticipated the manuscript’s publication, as it had been alluded to in biographies and other criticism, and evoked by Kerouac in one of his last interviews as a kind of buried treasure still “hidden under the floorboards.”14 When finally published, Hippos was accompanied by a lengthy afterword by James Grauerholz, Burroughs’s literary executor, who rightly pointed out: “For better or worse, Hippos comes to you now as a ‘framed’ work: The Columbia murder that gave birth to the Beats! A lost Kerouac book! A lost Burroughs book!”15 This observation was borne out by the novel’s reception, which tended to be lukewarm and focused on the intimate biographical details it supposedly provided.
To find a visible critical reaction we need look no further than Michiko Kakutani’s New York Times review, which panned Hippos for being little more than poorly written gossip. Calling Hippos a “flimsy piece of work,” Kakutani laments that none of its “one-dimensional slackers are remotely interesting as individuals,” but concedes that it captures “the seedy, artsy world Kerouac and Burroughs inhabited in New York … before they found their voices and became bohemian brand names.”16 Such a perspective certainly fulfills Grauerholz’s prediction that readers would be drawn to the novel because of the “brand names” attached to it, and Kakutani imagines these readers happily combing chapters for biographical and historical tidbits.
But Kakutani’s perspective assumes that Hippos is best understood as an historical relic, even though its very form evades claims to historical knowledge. Although inspired by the murder and featuring characters recognizably drawn from real life, Hippos exists in generic limbo somewhere between fiction, history, and autobiography, and is conspicuously coy about its central motivating plot point: Why did one friend kill another?
With respect to the real-life murder, the standard line for several decades was that Kammerer had a dangerous obsession with the much-younger Carr, who finally had no choice but to violently fend off unwelcome sexual advances. This is the story told, for instance, in John Tytell’s Naked Angels (1976), a groundbreaking and widely cited study of the Big Three Beat writers:
Using incorrigible deceptions, he [Kammerer] had relentlessly pursued Carr to New York, declaring his love and his desire to possess him exclusively. He would shadow Carr about the streets, haunt the bars that he frequented, ingratiate himself with his friends, and suddenly appear at parties. On August 13, 1944, after an evening of drinking at the West End, Kammarer [sic] accosted Carr in Riverside Park, insisting that they make love. Carr retaliated by stabbing his antagonist repeatedly in the chest with his scout knife.17
This general narrative is repeated in most subsequent accounts, which tend to emphasize both Kammerer’s “obsession” and “reckless” behavior, and that Carr was far younger and, as Ginsberg’s biographer puts it, “decisively heterosexual.”18 There is little doubt that Kammerer was romantically interested in Carr, but it is worth pointing out that while the scenario Tytell describes is plausible, it is not finally verifiable or really knowable. This is what Joyce Johnson notes in her study of Kerouac when she observes, “No one ever knew exactly what happened there, especially what went on in Lucien’s mind – not definitively.”19 As it turns out, it was this very epistemological uncertainty that Kerouac and Burroughs faced as they composed Hippos, which does not grant readers access to the moment of killing – as the authors themselves did not have access – but treats it instead in terms of the stories that were told about it. Rather than looking to Hippos to find out what “really happened,” then, we should read it for the ways it navigates those narratives that were immediately attached to the murder.
In Hippos, characters modeled on Carr and Kammerer are called Phillip Tourian and Ramsay Allen, respectively. Their story is told by two narrators, Mike Ryko, whose chapters are written by Kerouac, and Will Dennison, whose chapters are written by Burroughs. The story of the “libertine circle” is fictionalized, and details about the killing are changed so as to obscure the novel’s inspiration. One effect of having two first-person narrators is that crucial information depends on perspective and interpretation, which emphasizes the elusive nature of “truth” in the novel. Such elusiveness is underscored formally as readers are never taken to the scene of the crime, but only hear about it third-hand, as Dennison recounts the story as he remembers Tourian telling it.
In one of Dennison’s chapters, readers learn that directly after the murder, Tourian shows up to seek advice, and explains to Dennision what happened:
“I found a hatchet and broke some windows with it.
“Later we were up on the roof. Al [Allen] kept saying he wanted to ship out with me. I got mad and gave him a shove. He nearly went over. He looked at me and said, ‘I want to do the things you do. I want to write poetry and go to sea and all that.’” Phillip stopped and looked at me. “I can see you don’t believe me.”
“Go on,” I [Dennison] said.
“Well, so I said to him, ‘Do you want to die?’ and he said, ‘Yes.’ He made a couple of wisecracks and tried to put his arm around me. I still had the hatchet in my hand, so I hit him on the forehead. He fell down. He was dead.”20
Leaving aside for the moment the changes in murder weapon and venue, we might note that nowhere in Dennison’s account of Tourian’s story is Allen threatening or aggressive, and so the motive for his actions remains inexplicable. Far from seeming like a crime of passion or desperation, the killing appears in this telling markedly dispassionate and therefore markedly disturbing: we learn only that Allen “was dead,” not why he was killed.
In fact, it is Dennison who supplies the motive, and the accompanying details that will get Tourian a light sentence in the novel: “Do you know what happened to you, Phil?” Dennison says. “You were attacked. Al attacked you. He tried to rape you. You lost your head. Everything went black. You hit him. He stumbled back and fell off the roof. You were in a panic. Your only thought was to get away. Get a good lawyer, you’ll be out in two years” (163). Historically speaking, this is the story that was repeated in newspapers, accepted by the criminal justice system, and confirmed by biographers and literary critics (and Carr actually did get out of prison in two years).
In Hippos, however, the idea that Tourian was defending himself against Allen’s attempted “rape” is presented not as historical fact but as an invention by Dennison. His short, declarative sentences match those in Tourian’s own account, and Dennison’s opening question, “Do you know what happened to you, Phil?,” is immediately followed by authoritative answers that he himself supplies, casting doubt on their status as “real,” even in the world of the novel. Kerouac’s ensuing chapter also raises such doubts when Ryko notes that “Phillip gave me the story he’d told Dennison earlier in the morning” (169; my emphasis). Ryko then reassures the distraught Tourian by repeating the story once more, like a mantra: “Al was queer. He chased you over continents. He screwed up your life. The police will understand that” (170).
In real life, the police did indeed understand this story, as Carr doubled down on it to make the killing explicable and even justifiable to a largely homophobic culture.21 This was a culture in which homosexuality was a great taboo, seen by many as evidence not simply of immorality but of inhumanity. Consider, for instance, that in the very month of Kammerer’s death, San Francisco poet – and, in later years, Beat associate – Robert Duncan published a brief but significant piece in Politics titled “The Homosexual in Society.” This piece criticized both mainstream society for its homophobia and those living closeted gay lives, taking the latter to task for retreating into cliques rather than demanding human recognition and civil rights from dominant culture.22 In the course of his essay, Duncan refers to another sensational murder case concerning a man named Wayne Lonergan, who had been arrested for bludgeoning his heiress wife with a candelabra. Increasingly desperate during his trial, Lonergan disclosed homosexual relationships as part of his (failed) defense – one Daily News headline read: “Lonergan Alibi: Twisted Sex.”23 Duncan’s thoughts on the Lonergan case might as easily apply to Kammerer’s murder, and help us see those stories attached to it by the lights of mid-century homophobia:
The law has declared homosexuality secret, non-human, unnatural.… The law itself sees in it a crime, not in the sense that murder, thievery, seduction of children or rape is seen as a crime – but in an occult sense. In the recent Lonergan case it was clear that murder was a human crime, but homosexuality was non-human. It was not a crime against man but a crime against “the way of nature,” as defined in the Christian religion, a crime against God.24
If Duncan’s analysis is even broadly accurate, and I think it is, then the New York Times coverage of Kammerer’s death adheres perfectly to this cultural logic. The Times first established Carr as “a quiet, well-behaved, intellectual type” and Kammerer simply as “a homosexual,” then presented a version of the story much like the one Dennison suggests to Tourian in Hippos:
Carr said that several times during their acquaintance Kammerer had made improper advances toward him but that he had always rebuffed the older man.… [The night of the murder] Kammerer once more made an offensive proposal.… Carr said that he rejected it indignantly and that a fight ensued … [the] slight youth … [was] no match for the burly former physical education instructor … [and so] In desperation, Carr pulled out of his pocket his Boy Scout knife, a relic of his boyhood.25
This story was refined by Carr’s legal defense, who insisted that Kammerer had “hounded” Carr and overwhelmed him with “improper advances.”26 In real life, then, homosexuality – according to the logic Duncan describes a “secret, non-human, unnatural” crime against humanity – was invoked so as to make manslaughter understandable if not acceptable, and this story was repeated so often that it seemed, in the end, unvarnished truth. In its coverage of Carr’s sentencing that October, for instance, the Daily Mirror reported that the judge declared that a jury would likely have acquitted Carr, and that the Elmira Reformatory “may release him when he has entirely recovered from the evil influence to which he had been subjected.”27 In this narrative, Carr is fixed as the straight victim to Kammerer’s homosexual predation, which, bearing out Duncan’s theories, is construed as a crime far worse than murder.
But this is not the case in Hippos, where the truth refuses to be fixed so neatly. There are, for instance, numerous suggestions that Tourian’s sexuality is more fluid than Dennison’s cover story allows: Ryko observes that “a lot of people … looked at him suspiciously as if they thought he might be a dope fiend or a fag” (14), and wonders why, despite “necking with her for months” (128), Tourian and a girlfriend never actually have sex (43). Burroughs’s chapter echoes this fluidity, as when the pair frequent “queer place[s]” (101) or when Dennison tells a lovesick Allen that “Phillip isn’t queer. He might sleep with you, which I doubt altogether, but anything permanent is impossible” (28). This conversation proposes a distinction between one’s sexual behavior and being identified a “fag” or a “queer” (categories that Burroughs would explore more subtly in later work), with both Ryko and Dennison indicating that while Tourian “might sleep” with men, he isn’t “queer.”
The most striking challenge to the official narrative about the murder comes when Hippos offers the exact inverse of the cover story suggested by Dennison: that it was Tourian, not Allen, who was the sexual aggressor. Early in the novel, Allen comes to Dennison to tell him about another incident between Tourian and Allen that took place on a rooftop (thus implying a parallel to the rooftop murder); as Allen recounts to Dennison:
“Well, when we got up on the roof, Phillip rushed over to the edge like he was going to jump off, and I got worried and yelled at him, but he stopped suddenly and dropped a glass down. I went over and stood on the edge with him and said ‘What’s the matter?’ and started to put my arm around him. Then Phil turned around and kissed me very passionately, on the mouth, and dragged me down with him on the roof.”
I [Dennison] said, “It looks like you’re getting there, after four years. Well go on – what happened then?”
“He kissed me several times, then suddenly he pushed me away and got up.”
The novel never demonstrates – or even hints – that Allen is lying here, retaining the possibility that he and Tourian had a romantic relationship about which Tourian was conflicted, in turn suggesting that shame, not self-defense, could have been the true motive for the murder. In other words, unlike the official narrative of the real-life event, its fictionalization in Hippos introduces competing stories that account for Allen’s murder, but refuses to verify any of them, rendering it finally inexplicable.
1.2 The Beats, Evasion, and the Underground
The enigma at the heart of Hippos helps us see how the book and the circumstances of its composition draw together three threads that characterize Beat literature broadly imagined. First, we have a group of writers emphasizing the precarious relationship between language and “the real” in an attempt to define themselves against representations by the media, a mirror and mouthpiece of dominant culture. It is possible to trace this emphasis through much Beat writing, and as I explain throughout this book, in order to see Beat writers collectively, one has to account for popular representations of them as such, including by journalists and critics generally dismissive of them.
Second, there is the sense that these competing representations are not merely semantic squabbles, but rather that they have serious consequences in people’s lives: obviously, Carr himself was affected by the way his relationship with Kammerer was represented in public, but similar representations had wider impacts on various kinds of “underground” cultures that existed at the time. As the Carr–Kammerer story may suggest, there were from those early days blurred lines between underground queer culture and what would become the Beat underground, a notion that may surprise readers who see the avatar of the Beat Generation in On the Road’s womanizing protagonist. Maria Damon has framed these blurred lines like this: “What the Beats did for the gay community was goad it into visibility – a visibility that would eventually become politicized – by exemplifying flamboyant resistance to an oppressive norm. What the gay culture did for the Beats was to offer them a model for fluid relationships, outlaw culture and a high regard for the relatively apolitical politics of ‘lifestyle.’”28 As elaborated throughout this book, Damon’s final point about the politicizing of lifestyle is absolutely central to understanding the Beats and their contributions to US letters and culture. Their lives and literatures resisted hard distinctions among the personal and political, private and public, in ways that would shift the very meaning of what “politics” could mean or be – a shift that became in later decades very nearly mainstream.
Third, there is the sense that what made the Beats a group, whether a tight-knit “libertine circle” or seemingly diffuse generation or movement, was their evasions of dominant culture. But despite such evasions, it became difficult – probably impossible – to discuss the counterculture without discussing dominant culture, meaning that Beat counterculture became collectively visible when seen against dominant culture, even as this collectivity was never itself entirely cohesive or internally consistent.
In light of these three threads, we might see how Hippos is a prototypically Beat, underground book. For now, I’ll use the term “underground” broadly, and will wait until Part II to detail the historical specificities and shades of meaning necessary for understanding how the Beat sensibility emerged from the New York underground of the mid- to late 1940s. In the meantime, it suffices to think in terms reminiscent of those in Dick Hebdige’s influential account of postwar “youth subcultures,” which argues that in such subcultures, style – variously construed but always constitutive – “signals a Refusal” of “dominant ideologies.”29 For Hebdige, refusal is a hallmark of the various subcultures he discusses; in the case of the Beats specifically, I would suggest it was manifest in the particular evasions evinced in Hippos and in the more general evasions of social and cultural ideologies then dominant. After all, in the first public theorization of the Beats (1952), John Clellon Holmes claimed that even in “the wildest hipster, … there is no desire to shatter the ‘square’ society in which he lives, only to elude it.”30 We might then say that the epistemological unsettling staged in Hippos illustrates one of Beat literature’s fundamental premises: that one should approach dominant narratives or ideologies with skepticism, and privilege instead the messier truths of idiosyncratic, subjective experience. But as attention to the very concept of “subculture” reminds us, these individual experiences occurred in the context of a group or community: a “libertine circle” which became a literary coterie, which in time radiated out to a loosely associated movement of regional, then national, then international import. As I explain in the following pages, attending to figurations of community is therefore crucial for understanding the seeming paradox of the Beats as highly individualistic writers who nonetheless constituted a collective underground literary movement.
In popular imagination, mid-century America tends to be characterized by the national unity of the war years and the conformity and consumerism of the long 1950s – but most literary and cultural historians would agree that in the realms of literature and the arts, the postwar years were in fact subject to pretty radical changes.1 One way such change has been described is via the communities of writers and artists that emerged around the United States to mount collective assaults on what they perceived as the restrictive norms of ossified tradition. Alan Golding, for one, has encouraged readers to see “literary history not only as a history of individual careers, important books, and competing discourses but also as a history of writing communities.”2 As I explain below, thinking in terms of “writing communities” has been especially useful for mapping the terrain of postwar poetry deemed avant-garde, and in this respect critics have pointed not only to the Beats, but in particular to the poets associated with Black Mountain College, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the New York School, communities that all had important connections to the Beats.
When I use “community” in this context, I’m thinking of it in the sense articulated by Stephen Voyce, who takes the word “to mean the network of poets, cultural spaces, and institutional frameworks that enable a group’s collaborative work.”3 Voyce’s definition of community is a useful starting point, but embedded in this formulation is the premise that such networks applied only to poetic communities, a widespread critical assumption that has had the effect of obscuring the importance of community to other kinds of literary production. The Beats, of course, worked in a range of genres, from poetry and prose to plays, letters, and genre-smashing texts such as cut-ups; one reason I began with Hippos is to illustrate that the Beat literary community was hardly limited to poets. In fact, the chapters to follow will illustrate that Beat writing is purposively pugnacious and promiscuous when it comes to questions of genre, with many writers moving among different genres, redefining and repurposing those genres – or simply inventing their own.
Before exploring how the Beat movement emerged from a wider field of avant-garde literary communities, I want to register one other caveat, that it is reasonable to be skeptical of any literary community as a bounded, discrete phenomenon, especially when to say “community” is to name a collectivity of individualist iconoclasts.4 As suggested by Voyce’s use of the term, one way to think more capaciously about community is to do so in terms of “networks.” In this regard, I’m following the lead of Jimmy Fazzino, whose recent study of the “worlding” of Beat literature uses networks to think about community far beyond ones like the libertine circle to recognize “expression[s] of felt solidarity and mutual understanding” outside national bounds.5 For Fazzino, “subterranean” is a generative “image of creation and connectivity, where vast underground networks of influence and inspiration proliferate”; the term represents an “ever-expanding network … of hidden synchronicity and syncretism” (42). As he explains, “Where the subterranean is concerned, the multiple always trumps the singular, and a particular movement – literary, social, or otherwise – can be meaningful and effective only insofar as it can recognize and link up with an outside-of-itself” (47). Fazzino’s terms are useful for illuminating the underground as a space where creation and connectivity are watchwords, but where multiplicity means that varied sensibilities and forms of expression can proliferate simultaneously.6
Thinking about multiplicity in particular underscores the crucial point that when we talk about literary communities, we are not necessarily talking about a uniform aesthetic or unchanging sensibility even within those communities, but rather about social and ideological spaces that foster idiosyncratic expression, disagreement, and difference. Lytle Shaw characterizes poetic communities “as temporary, tactical social compositions based on contingent rather than organic bonds, dissipating and reforming themselves frequently … collectivity does not mean consensus.”7 Viewing poetic communities in this way means that were one to search for stable definitions of, say, Black Mountain poetry or New York School poetry, one might only discover axiomatic characteristics subject to complication or refinement when confronted with the particulars of work produced across time by different writers.
Thus although The Beats: A Literary History is of course predicated on the assumption that there is such a thing as a Beat literary movement, I want to stress that this thing is mutable and protean, and so part of my purpose is to track its various changes across time, text, and author to explore shifting though identifiable Beat sensibilities. In so doing, I won’t claim that the Beats were unique in their challenge to dominant culture or literary convention, as writers associated with the groups named above (and others) have claims on like challenges. That said, I do think it is useful to frame this study in terms of a diffuse Beat movement and its attendant sensibilities because doing so emphasizes the degree to which the Beats often had simultaneous audiences in mind: a small audience of intimates and a much broader, public audience – what we might call posterity – that could recognize these intimates as the successors to the Lost Generation.
2.1 The Dual Audiences for Beat Work
I didn’t put it in these terms earlier, but one way to understand the registers of meaning in Hippos is to recognize that the book plays on tensions between its intimate audience – those familiar with the murder and its principals prior to reading its fictionalization – and a broad or public audience – those who come to the fictionalization from positions outside the circle. The irony is that for those in the circle, the novel has the effect of unsettling the official narrative they knew to be incomplete, while for those in the broader audience (who probably cannot distinguish between what really happened and the way it is represented), the novel appears to draw readers into a circle of intimates by promising access to private truths. This performance of intimacy is one way scholars have tried to distinguish Beat literature as such; writing about Kerouac, for example, Ann Douglas has described what she calls his “poetics of intimacy,” his canny ability to pull “the reader inside the story as well.”8 Thinking about Beat writing in the context of postwar literary communities helps us see that while it was most intelligible at first to the inner circle, it was also often composed with an eye toward broader audiences who might identify these writers as a movement and believe them significant for their membership in same. Accordingly, throughout this book I explore how both familiar and lesser known Beat works navigate their intimate and broader audiences insofar as they describe underground spaces or heterodox attitudes only to invite – or seem to invite – outside readers into such spaces.
By 1950, communal intimacy not only was foundational to the libertine circle and groups such as Black Mountain, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the New York School, but had been proposed as a necessary condition for avant-garde literary and aesthetic production to occur at all. At the time, this claim was made most plainly by Paul Goodman, a poet, social critic, and polymath connected at various times to each of these communities as he had at different moments taught at Black Mountain College, run with the New York Intellectuals, and read with the Beats, even being counted among them in the formative anthology The Beat Scene (1960). He is probably best-known today for Growing Up Absurd, a series of social analyses of “problems of youth in the organized society” published the same year as The Beat Scene (and that singled out the Beats for special consideration).9
But I want take us back to an essay Goodman published almost a decade prior to Growing Up Absurd because it offers an influential articulation of how vital community could be to the development of an American avant-garde. The essay, “Advance-Guard Writing 1900–1950,” surveys the literary scene spanning those years, and culminates with a discussion of what Goodman considers unique about his contemporary moment, the years after World War II – the very ones when the libertine circle would be transfigured into the Beat Generation. True to the martial metaphor of the avant-garde or advance-guard, Goodman sees the most significant avant-garde movements as assaults on established norms – Naturalism, for example, aims “to attack and reform by letting the facts speak for themselves,” and the Modernist “revolution of the word” entails a “concentrated attack on the formal attitudes of literature, the vocabulary, syntax, genre, method of narration, judgment of what is real and what is fantasy.”10 Following this brief tour of the prior half-century, Goodman turns to his present moment and describes what he sees as the necessary conditions for a contemporary avant-garde. First, he notes, “serious writers … have more and more been describing marginal personalities – criminals, perverts, drunkards, underground people” (372). By way of illustration, he cites French writer and enfant terrible Jean Genet, great hero of the Beats, as one who “assert[s] the marginal and prove[s] its justification, thereby demolishing the norm” (373). Goodman then goes on to make what has become a well-known claim about the postwar avant-garde, that it is “the physical reestablishment of community”:
In literary terms this means: to write for them about them personally.… But such personal writing about the audience itself can occur only in a small community of acquaintances, where everybody knows and understands what is at stake.… The point is that the advance-guard action helps create such community, starting with the artist’s primary friends. The community comes to exist by having its culture.
This view not only underscores the importance of the intimate audience for groups of writers, but places it at the very center of avant-garde practice, so that the assurance of this audience is the very thing that encourages experimentation or innovation. Predicated as it is on the existence of common social spaces, webs of literary references, and entangled personal histories, Goodman’s theory also emphasizes the necessarily personal nature of the avant-garde writer’s subject matter, which helps to account for one of the broad shifts we find in postwar literature, toward what Mark McGurl calls “the increasingly widespread concern with the voice of the storyteller.”11
In Goodman’s model, the postwar avant-garde is inextricable from “a small community of acquaintances,” a suggestive connection for those interested in understanding how and why what are called literary “movements” or “schools” are often coupled with claims about experimentation or innovation. In the case of the Beats in particular, the question of how (or whether) to account for them collectively has been especially acute since they became famous precisely because they were characterized as a “generation” by detractors in the academy and the media who used this very sense of collectivity as pretext to ridicule them. As explained in the coming chapters, the Beats began the rise to national prominence in 1956 and 1957 thanks to an obscenity trial connected to Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems (1956) and then to the release of Kerouac’s On the Road, which was marketed as the bible of the younger, disaffected generation. As these books spawned a lifestyle movement concomitant with a literary one, amused critics were quick to point out the ironies inherent in asserting individualism collectively. By 1960, poet and longtime Saturday Review editor John Ciardi would have great fun claiming that “the Beat Generation is marked by an orthodoxy as rigid as the blue laws. The Beats wear identical uniforms.… They practice an identical aversion to soap and water. They live in the same drab dives listening to the same blaring jazz with identical blanked-out expressions on their identical faces.”12 While Beat literature may have initially sprung from the impulse to write “for them about them personally,” by the end of the 1950s, Ciardi and many other skeptics distorted this fact to cast this literature only in terms of its social symbolism, meaning that it tended to be read not for any potential literary or aesthetic merit but as one among many items in a list of rebellious or antiestablishment activities that included wearing sandals, listening to jazz, and neglecting personal hygiene. Michael Davidson zeroes in on this conflation when he notes that “subordination of actual literary practice to lifestyle is a standard pattern among literary historians” interested in the Beats.13 Davidson was writing in the late 1980s, and although the intervening years have produced a flowering of scholarship that explores Beat literary practice in depth, there remains a pervasive tendency to view writing as one among so many props of a bohemian lifestyle. This is of course a misperception, but a misperception crucial to understanding Beat writing and its reception.
This book aims to offer an account of individual writers in relation to others, but does so by focusing primarily on language rather than on biographies or social bonds – a differing focus that has, at times, served as a stand-in for textual analysis in critical work on the Beats. In order to do so, this book operates inductively, so that over the course of the following discussions and analyses, certain themes, aesthetic practices, and attitudes toward language will emerge that, when taken together, point toward identifiable, distinctive Beat sensibilities. This strategy means that while I discuss in depth a range of work by Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, I also take seriously work by many others, including their lesser known texts, because the very development of the libertine circle into a literary movement demands consideration of a wider array of figures. For the purposes of this book, then, I don’t view those beyond the inner circle as “latecomer[s]” or “pryer-intoer[s] of our genuine literary movement” – as Kerouac once grumbled about John Clellon Holmes, considered by virtually all scholars a significant Beat writer – but as progenitors in their own right. My hope is that by offering a wider-angle view, readers may discover a multivalent, sometimes contradictory sense of Beat writing that seems identifiable as such without being quarantined from other energies in mid-century aesthetics and politics.14 As suggested above, attending to this multiplicity requires that we do not seal Beat literature off from other schools or movements, and that we open ourselves to recognizing potential synergies among this writing and other literary, philosophical, or aesthetic developments in the postwar world. Such an openness might allow us to see the Beats not as a quirky social footnote in the story of postwar letters, but rather as a diffuse movement at the very center of the postwar avant-garde, for their writerly innovations and cultural postures had an incalculable influence on subsequent generations of writers.
2.2 Black Mountain College into Black Mountain Review
In the waning years of the 1940s and into the early 1950s, as Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs were finding the voices and techniques that would inform their most consequential works, they were also cultivating wider networks of friends and fellow travelers with whom they would enjoy reciprocal influence and inspiration. In this way, the story of the Beat emergence is really the story of multiple coteries that would at various moments come into contact with the Beats, who in turn learned from, incorporated, or challenged ideas or paradigms associated with these other coteries. This was the case, for example, with the writers associated with Black Mountain College. As Kaplan Harris has put it, the poets of the so-called Black Mountain School “have been packaged as a more or less coherent group” since their appearance together in Donald Allen’s field-defining anthology The New American Poetry (1960).15 Like the Beats, individual writers of the Black Mountain School shared broad sympathies but produced work less coherent than pat labeling allows, and yet – again like the Beats – they have nonetheless come to be discussed primarily in terms of their “membership” in this group. With a qualification about the poverty of labels in mind, it is nonetheless fair to say that Black Mountain played an important role in shaping – and distributing – the inchoate Beat sensibility.16
Black Mountain College was a small, experimental, arts school founded in North Carolina in 1933, and by the late 1940s could boast such luminous faculty as composer John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham, and painter Robert Rauschenberg. Poet Charles Olson began teaching there in 1948, and would be prove to be a singular influence on the small but surprisingly talented group of student-poets who came through the campus. As Martin Duberman has observed, the “wonder” is that “from a handful of students (from 1952 to 1956 the total winter enrollment at Black Mountain averaged about twenty) would emerge poets of the caliber of Joel Oppenheimer, John Wieners, Michael Rumaker, Ed Dorn, and Jonathan Williams.”17 There was also Robert Creeley, who after corresponding with Olson finally ventured to North Carolina in 1954 amid his work on a new magazine that would help advertise the insolvent college’s unique merits.
As befits Black Mountain as a “packaged” literary school, there is a manifesto encapsulating the college’s intervention in literary history, Olson’s highly influential essay, “Projective Verse vs. the Non-Projective,” published in 1950 (and later reprinted as a stand-alone pamphlet, Projective Verse, in 1959).18 For a younger generation of writers, including the proto-Beats, Olson’s concept of “Projective Verse” was like a shockwave through the literary establishment, challenging as it did what he calls the “closed form” then fashionable in venues like university quarterlies. In contrast to closed form, often embodied by T. S. Eliot and shorthand for mastery of older poetic forms, Olson favors “kinetic” poetry: “A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader.”19 He further argues that poets who are “open” may achieve such transfer by viewing the poem as like an extension of their body, meaning, for instance, that line length reflects the length of one’s breath. Olson insists continually on the “part that breath plays in verse,” concluding that “verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisitions of his ear and the pressure of his breath” (241). From this premise, Olson suggests that form and even syntax must submit to the “LAW OF THE LINE,” so that “the conventions which logic has forced on syntax must be broken open as quietly as must the too set feet of the old line” (244). Otherwise put, Olson was calling for a reenergizing of poetry that depended on a kind of immediacy associated with spontaneity and speed – “fast, there’s the dogma,” he insisted (240).
Those readers even passingly familiar with Beat aesthetics might note some affinities with Olson’s declarations, and again and again one finds a wide range of Beat-associated writers insisting on his essay’s importance, from Robert Duncan, who claimed to “carry it like people carried Pilgrim’s Progress,” to Michael McClure, who remarked, “When I found Charles’ essay on ‘Projective Verse,’ I found one of the bases of my own poetics,” to Joanne Kyger, who marveled at Olson’s emphasis on the poet’s body:
Olson’s PROJECTIVE VERSE hits me like a whallop. Poetry is true stuff the way he writes of it.
For some later critics, Kerouac’s “spontaneous prose” seems to have the most obvious synergy with Olson’s projective verse – Ginsberg would in fact later remark, “I don’t think Olson would claim that Kerouac was writing projective verse. I think that Olson would say that ‘projective verse’ is his terminology for this kind of writing.”21 I discuss Kerouac’s development of spontaneous prose in some detail later in this book, but I quote Ginsberg here to point both to the sometimes-overlapping aesthetic project of Black Mountain and the Beats and to Ginsberg’s willingness to obscure distinctions between “projective verse” and “spontaneous prose,” a move that underscores a shared avant-garde project more invested in invigorating language than in reifying labels (although Ginsberg was also canny about marketing the Beat Generation as such, as I also explain throughout this book).
As influential as Olson was – for Ginsberg he was “the head peer of the East Coast bohemian hipster-authors post-Pound” – it is tempting, though surely reductive, to see the 1956 folding of Black Mountain College as the moment when the torch was passed from Olson and his circle to the Beats, who would become far more visible embodiments of the literary avant-garde by the end of the 1950s.22 Those inclined toward such an argument could point to the fact that after Robert Creeley had come to Black Mountain, he did indeed start a little magazine, Black Mountain Review (BMR) which ran for only seven issues (1954–1957), but had an outsized impact on those hungry for a new poetics.23 During its run, BMR tended to print work by those associated with the College, and was seen as a venue for acolytes of projective verse, even as its contents were in fact always more varied.
The final issue of BMR is particularly illustrative of the connections among Black Mountain and the Beats, for it was produced after the College closed and Creeley had moved briefly to San Francisco, where he met Ginsberg and others. In fact, that issue, BMR 7 (1957), counted both Olson and Ginsberg among its contributing editors. The huge issue clocked in at over 240 pages, and while it boasted a variety of work, including by those associated with the College, it also presented what Creeley later called “unequivocally a shift and opening of the previous center.”24 Creeley meant the shift to Beat writing, which frames BMR 7 even as it was not explicitly labeled as such. For example, after an exchange of letters between Edward Dahlberg and Herbert Read, the first three pieces were Ginsberg’s “America,” excerpts from Kerouac’s “October in the Railroad Earth,” and Edward Marshall’s “Leave the Word Alone,” all key examples of Beat aesthetics. The issue featured also a contribution from William Burroughs (writing as William Lee) titled “from Naked Lunch, Book III: In Search of Yage,” as well as poetry by Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, and Gary Snyder. The last three pieces were Kerouac’s aesthetic manifesto “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” Michael Rumaker’s review of Howl and Other Poems, and a preface that William Carlos Williams had written in 1952 for Ginsberg’s book Empty Mirror, a collection of early poems that wasn’t in fact published until 1961.
Probably thanks to Ginsberg’s influence, these were hardly random choices, but rather showcased a range of Beat aesthetic practice. In “America,” included in Howl and Other Poems, Ginsberg evocatively indicts contemporary political and social mores, and for its publication in BMR, he added a new second part that declared, among other things, that “Walt Whitman alone of all American poets was completely hip” and that “Nowadays only teaheads have any idea what Democracy means.”25 “October in the Railroad Earth” is one of the finest examples of Kerouac’s spontaneous prose, proceeding as it does from what he calls in “Essentials” a “jewel center of interest,” eschewing linear plot to pursue vertical chains of associations (in this way, the piece is a prose illustration of Olson’s dictum in “Projective Verse” that “ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION”).26 While Edward Marshall is a less familiar name than Kerouac or Ginsberg, the latter called him “the best of the young poets” on the strength of his “long mad poem,” “Leave the Word Alone,” which like much Beat work wrestles with themes of institutionalization, particularly in asylums; the nature of self in an unsympathetic society; and what it means to write in the wake of various literary traditions (the speaker hears “a spoken word telling / me to read this and that – / Williams and Olson / I suppose that is the punishment”).27 Burroughs contributed a letter he wrote to Ginsberg from Peru in 1953, in which he recounts his experiences with the hallucinogenic root ayahuasca, or yagé, memorably calling it “space time travel.”28 In terms of Beat literary history, this letter also opens a window onto the chaotic and ever-shifting mass of text that would become Naked Lunch; although advertised as an excerpt from “Part III” of the as-yet unpublished novel, in fact this text wound up as part of another book, The Yage Letters (1963), with only a few lines making their way into the version of Naked Lunch finally published in 1959. The presence of McClure, Whalen, and Snyder in BMR 7 is also noteworthy because they were among the best of the younger writers associated with the Beat wing of the San Francisco Renaissance. One could reasonably say, then, that with BMR 7, Beat writing was given a kind of avant-garde imprimatur that not only would legitimate it in those circles moving forward, but also muddied distinctions among these purportedly divergent schools.29
2.3 Anarchy and Poetry in San Francisco
Just as Black Mountain was a major arts community that had a multifaceted and mutually generative relationship with the emerging Beat writers, so too did the poetic and artistic phenomenon that came to be dubbed the San Francisco Renaissance. The Beat sensibility would eventually saturate the San Francisco literary scene so completely that the caricature of the “beatnik” was born there in the late 1950s, and many subsequent readers have accordingly assumed that the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beat Generation, and even the image of the bongo-playing beatnik are one and the same. This widespread misperception is why the first thing Michael Davidson does in his definitive book on the San Francisco Renaissance is dispel the myth that the Renaissance “began” on October 7, 1955, when Ginsberg read “Howl” publicly for the first time at the 6 Gallery (a reading that also featured McClure, Snyder, Whalen, and Philip Lamantia). Davidson shows that despite the myth-building around this event, notably in Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums (1958), in fact “the San Francisco Renaissance was by no means unified, nor did it necessarily revolve around the figures who read at the Six Gallery … Sectarian rivalries among persons, manifestoes, and subgroups within the city fragmented the scene, and when journalists attempted to define some kind of common ground, they had to fall back on vague references to exotic religions and anti-establishment attitudes.”30 As suggested in the preceding pages, this insight could as well apply to the Beat movement, which Davidson notes is “only one strand in a much more diverse and eclectic movement” whose diversity means that it has claims on many of the figures he discusses, particularly Kenneth Rexroth, William Everson, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Joanne Kyger, Diane di Prima, and Lenore Kandel (60). The major figures Davidson leaves out of his discussion are Bob Kaufman and ruth weiss, both of whom I discuss in more detail later in this book, along with a range of Beat-associated writers working in the Bay Area by the late 1950s, including Ron Loewinsohn, Sheri Martinelli, C. V. J. Anderson, William J. Margolis, and David Meltzer. Merely listing these names gives, I think, a taste of the variety of Beat-associated energies in the city, and as I discuss them in more depth throughout this book, it will illustrate the widening of the movement into ever-expanding circles and networks of connection and collaboration.
Although a Beat scene wouldn’t develop in San Francisco until some ten years after Kammerer’s murder, there was a robust literary counterculture there long before Ginsberg, Kerouac, and others ever ventured west. The city had been a bohemian enclave for decades, but the dawning of World War II clarified for many writers and artists antiestablishment attitudes that would eventually influence the Beats. Some of these writers, notably William Everson and Kenneth Patchen, were even interned in conscientious-objector camps during the war, where they strengthened communal bonds that would persist in later years, when many settled around the Bay Area. In those years, the area’s literary scene came to be dominated by a “countercultural” ethos – insofar as that term can mean a literary and cultural sensibility informed by anarcho-pacifism, a stance Todd Tietchen has described as the belief that “militarized nation-states … posed a significant threat to the future of the planet … [that] mass culture and modern nationalism [should be viewed] as simultaneous events that had seriously eroded human potential … [and a] neo-Romantic call for new subjectivities and modes of collective life that were unsutured from wartime public culture and the formation of dutiful national subjects.”31
Such a position is exemplified by William Everson’s War Elegies (1944), a poetry collection published by Untide, a small press he and others started while interned at a conscientious-objector camp in Oregon. War Elegies announces the poet’s “vow not to wantonly ever take life,” and the final poem is particularly suggestive of Everson’s later connections to the Beats.32 Written amid “The Internment, Waldport, Oregon; January, 1943,” “War Elegy XI” provides the book with its final lines:
The final image, so redolent of the Beat Generation’s most famous poem, suggests in hindsight another meaning of a remark in the book’s headnote, that “all these elegies are merely a prelude” (n.p.). The sensibility articulated in War Elegies was indeed prelude to a Beat one, distinctive yet in some ways made possible by the elder countercultural generation. After the war, Kenneth Rexroth, Everson’s friend and collaborator, was widely held to be the center of San Francisco literary counterculture, so much so that when Ginsberg did finally arrive there in the mid-1950s, he presented Rexroth with a letter of introduction from William Carlos Williams, granting him access to a different community of writers that would stimulate his work in new ways.33
But in those immediate postwar years, when Kerouac was lighting out on the road, Ginsberg was in and out of Columbia, and Burroughs was trying his hand at gentleman farming in Texas, Rexroth and his circle were forging a literary ethos that would have a profound effect on the direction of Beat writing and politics. Such an effect is illustrated in The Ark, a little magazine that, like Black Mountain Review, encapsulates a critical and aesthetic posture the Beats would later appreciate and refine. An avowedly committed venue for work with an anarcho-pacifist cast, the first issue of The Ark appeared in spring 1947, and in addition to Rexroth and Everson, featured work by Kenneth Patchen, Robert Duncan, Paul Goodman, e. e. cummings, and William Carlos Williams, among others. Readers familiar with Beat literature might note also the inclusion of San Francisco native Philip Lamantia, a boy wonder who had already published his first book of poetry, Erotic Poems (1946) at age nineteen, and who would go on to recite his dead friend John Hoffman’s poems at the 6 Gallery reading; or Thomas Parkinson, poet and scholar who would assume a professorship at UC Berkeley and give some measure of academic credence to the Beats with the still-useful collection, A Casebook on the Beat (1961), the first sustained scholarly consideration of them.34 Ties to The Ark and its sensibility are thus even clearer in hindsight, and given the Beats’ unwarranted reputation for political apathy, the editorial statement that opens the first issue is particularly useful for contextualizing the literary field into which they would enter:
In direct opposition to the debasement of human values made flauntingly evident by the war, there is rising among writers in America, as elsewhere, a social consciousness which recognizes the integrity of the personality as the most substantial and considerable of values.…
Present day society, which is becoming more and more subject to the State with its many forms of corrupt power and oppression, has become the real enemy of individual liberty.…
We believe that social transformation must be the aim of any revolutionary viewpoint, but we recognize the organic, spontaneous revolt of individuals as presupposing such a transformation.35
The editors frame the ensuing work as oppositional, so it can therefore be viewed as broadly “antiestablishment” – but they are also much more pointed and specific than this. They charge “the State” with being inherently corrupt and anathema to “individual liberty,” envisioning, in contrast, “social transformation” effected by an “organic, spontaneous revolt of individuals.” In the context of The Ark as a whole, then, the individual contributions are claimed to “do” something by contributing to potential social transformation, a notion directly descended from the radical left tradition.36
Such a tradition was never entirely absent from even the earliest Beat texts and positions: part of the plot of Hippos concerns Ryko and Tourian trying to validate their cards at the National Maritime Union Hall, where, for instance, members can browse a bookstand stocked with “varied pamphlets of the left-wing type, and the Daily Worker” (66). Ginsberg was known even back in high school as the bookish kid who “hated dull teachers and Republicans.”37 And while it is true that radical politics tended to remain submerged in the earliest Beat writing, after their forays in the San Francisco scene, for many – though not all – writers, such politics became increasingly visible and explicit. In “America,” Ginsberg’s contribution to Black Mountain Review 7 (written in Berkeley in early 1956), the speaker describes youthful outings to “Communist Cell meetings,” which recall for him still deeper histories of radicalism, when the Party seemed to promise the sort of “social transformation” striven for by The Ark’s editors.38
This is all to suggest that noting the wider networks in and against which the Beats wrote allows us to recognize aspects of the literature sometimes obscured when viewed only in a bounded context often stained by popular misperceptions. As I explain throughout this book, for instance, while Beat writing is generally less overtly political than the work in The Ark, it is hardly apolitical, and one abiding argument advanced is that the Beats, informed by traditions like the one in The Ark’s editorial statement, were changing the very notion of what “politics” could look like. This is why, to take one example, in the mid-1950s, Michael McClure and James Harmon resurrected the sensibility of The Ark, a publication they considered “the first coherent expression of a new aesthetic and social freedom … of the post war II generation” (n.p.). Their new magazine, Ark II Moby I, became an important articulation of a Beat ethos just before it broke into the national consciousness, and showcases work certainly interested in social transformation, but in less strident terms than those of their forebears.39
Beyond incubating magazines like Ark II Moby I, San Francisco became an important center of Beat activity thanks in no small part to sympathetic publishers headquartered there, most importantly Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books. Originally from New York – he attended Columbia during the same years as the libertine circle, graduating in 1946 – Ferlinghetti came in the early 1950s via France to San Francisco. Deeply invested in the arts, he soon fell in with Rexroth and his circle, during which time he became, as Neeli Cherkovski puts it, “spiritual godson” of writers like Rexroth, Patchen, and Henry Miller.40 In the coming years, Ferlinghetti would prove himself an important poet in his own right, but his prominence in the Beat movement reaches far beyond his own work as he published and championed a number of seminal Beat texts. In 1953, Ferlinghetti co-founded City Lights Bookstore, and when he bought out his partner in 1955, he established a publishing enterprise that Todd Tietchen has characterized as “a bridge between the ideas of wartime anarcho-pacifists and the animating causes of the New Left and New Social movements to come.”41 This enterprise, City Lights Books, was launched with the Pocket Poets series (inexpensive paperbacks designed to fit in a back pocket), the first four titles of which were Ferlinghetti’s own Pictures of the Gone World (1955), Rexroth’s translations of Thirty Spanish Poems of Love and Exile (1956), Patchen’s Poems of Humor and Protest (1956), and, most enduringly, Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems (1956). While never restricted to Beat texts, City Lights and the Pocket Poets series in particular became firmly associated with them after 1957, when Ferlinghetti and bookseller Shigeyoshi Murao were hit with obscenity charges for selling Howl. City Lights also published inexpensive broadsides such as Gregory Corso’s “Bomb” and Bob Kaufman’s “Abomunist Manifesto,” which helped bring a sense of street immediacy to this work, as well as little magazines such as Journal for the Protection of All Beings (1961–1978) and City Lights Journal (first run: 1963–1966). The San Francisco area, then, became an ideal place for the flourishing of the Beat aesthetic in no small part because of the publishing outlets available there, not only City Lights but, as I explain later, even smaller but vital houses such as Dave Haselwood’s Auerhahn Press, and communal centers of energy such as the Bread & Wine Mission, which in 1959 was the staging ground for Beatitude, the most important Beat-associated little magazine out of San Francisco in the late 1950s.
2.4 Personism and the New York School
Returning to the original locus of Beatdom, New York City, in the late 1940s, we find one more literary community that, like Black Mountain and the San Francisco Renaissance, illuminates particular facets of the Beat movement. This community, what later came to be known as the New York School, was a circle of young poets including John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler. Critic David Lehman has characterized this circle in terms that would not be out of place in most accounts of the Beats: “The poets of the New York School were as heterodox, as belligerent toward the literary establishment and as loyal to each other, as their Parisian predecessors had been.”42 Although, like the Beats, those of the New York School weren’t characterized as a group until later years, Lehman dates the “school’s” putative launch to June 1948, when Ashbery mailed a poem, “The Painter,” to Koch (7). I find it suggestive that this foundational moment occurred within a few weeks of John Clellon Holmes’s introduction to Kerouac and Ginsberg, an event that represents an important widening of the Beat circle, since, as I mentioned earlier, virtually every critic considers Holmes a significant Beat writer (Ann and Samuel Charters have argued that Holmes’s first novel, Go [1952], is “still the most honest … [and] darkest portrayal of the Beat scene”).43
I won’t spend as much time on the New York School as Black Mountain and the San Francisco Renaissance because their ties to the Beat movement weren’t as deep and varied, partly because many New York School writers felt, as Lehman puts it, “the Beats were too provincial, unsophisticated, narcissistic, and self-mythologizing” (335). Despite such judgments, perhaps the most well-known New York School associate was also at times affiliated with the Beats: Frank O’Hara, a major twentieth-century American poet who revolutionized the use of the vernacular in poetry in ways broadly comparable to the Beats. Like Ginsberg, O’Hara was something of a bon vivant and social operator, and had a wide network of friends and aesthetic confidants in the New York scene – and his Beat connection again highlights the centrality of the personal in Beat writing.
Indeed, like Olson’s “Projective Verse” and The Ark’s inaugural editorial statement – which, as we have seen, suggest certain affinities among their respective literary communities and the Beats – O’Hara’s “Personism: A Manifesto” is a useful articulation of those dimensions of New York School poetics in conversation with the Beat project. Written at the end of the 1950s, “Personism: A Manifesto” was in fact born of O’Hara’s interactions with Beat writers, and so while he is generally discussed in connection with the New York School, “Personism” might be seen as a kind of crossover statement that emphasizes the importance of intimate coteries to the development of avant-garde poetics. Writing with particular reference to LeRoi Jones, whose editorial energies in New York in the late 1950s did much to promote and disseminate Beat literature, O’Hara proposes a half-serious poetic declaration about what coterie audiences might mean in terms of poems themselves, as one of Personism’s central tenets is to “address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet’s feelings towards the poem.”44 If this seems to return us to Paul Goodman’s claim that the contemporary avant-garde ought to write “for them about them personally,” it’s because O’Hara had read “Advance-Guard Writing” back when it first appeared, and was so impressed that he wrote to a friend: “I read Paul Goodman’s current manifesto in Kenyon Review and if you haven’t devoured its delicious little message, rush to your nearest newsstand!”45 Hardly surprising, then, that numerous critics have heard echoes of Goodman in “Personism”; Andrew Epstein glosses several who note in “Advance-Guard Writing” the “origins of O’Hara’s distinctive poetic stance: in particular, his penchant for writing poems to and about his friends, his preference for occasional poetry, and his notorious, controversial practice of nonchalantly citing his friends’ proper names in his poems, leaving some to wonder how the reader is supposed to have any idea who ‘Jane’ or ‘John’ are.”46 Although Epstein calls these features evidence of O’Hara’s “distinctive poetic stance,” they also apply to a range of Beat work – both poetry and prose – and it is also significant that while “Personism” is about intimate address to one other person, O’Hara also frames the essay in terms of a broader collective. While he invokes the term “movement” only half-seriously, playing on the critic’s impulse to label and categorize, “Personism” does gesture beyond O’Hara and his friends to imply wider aesthetic energies so that it becomes about both addressing “one person” and intervening in literary history. Like so much Beat writing, then, O’Hara’s poetics are predicated on intimate address with the awareness of a broader audience always present in the background.
We can clarify what O’Hara is doing with “Personism” by looking at “Personal Poem,” the piece that explains the circumstances of the “lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959” that inspired his aesthetic philosophy.47 In that poem – which appeared alongside Goodman’s work in The Beat Scene and then in O’Hara’s celebrated City Lights book Lunch Poems (1964) – O’Hara uses the mundane setting of lunch to explore his relationship with LeRoi Jones.48 This relationship is of course “personal,” but it indexes also shared literary and aesthetic principles: “we go eat some fish and some ale it’s / cool but crowded we don’t like Lionel Trilling / we decide, we like Don Allen we don’t like / Henry James so much we like Herman Melville.”49 Although the poem’s occasion is a private meeting over lunch, the discussion eventually veers toward the antagonism between competing literary traditions represented by conservative Columbia English professor Lionel Trilling in one camp, and progressive Grove Press editor Don Allen in the other (at the time this lunch took place, Allen was putting the finishing touches on The New American Poetry, an anthology that would blow open the literary world by collecting groupings of Black Mountain, San Francisco, and Beat poets). Thus if “Personal Poem” addresses itself to “one person,” it also keeps an eye on posterity, on those broader audiences who care more about shifts in poetic trends than the particular relationship between O’Hara and Jones, or between the speaker and the poem’s addressee, Vincent Warren, O’Hara’s love interest at the time.
In later years, “Personism” even became shorthand for the way some Beat writers thought about the broader literary import of the “poetics of intimacy.” For example, in a 1972 assessment of Kerouac’s achievement in Visions of Cody – a book all about wrestling with how to represent the personal – Ginsberg draws together several strands I’ve been discussing: “The style … [of Visions of Cody] was simultaneous and later much explored, exploited artfully & gracefully & embellished as in N.Y. school, & Projective verse.… [It was a] breakthru & historic first incidence of that later-universal American style of ‘Anything we do is art.’ Read Frank O’Hara on Personism.”50 Writing with some historical distance, Ginsberg emphasizes the links among the avant-garde poetics of the Beats (represented by Visions of Cody), Black Mountain (represented by Projective Verse), and the New York School (represented by “Personism”) to suggest that the shared project of forging new forms to better explore the personal and to recognize the embodied nature of writing itself was a “historic” literary development, so that speaking one person to another, as Kerouac literally does in Visions of Cody when he tape records conversations with Neal Cassady, can be understood as an intervention in literary history and thus of interest to readers beyond the circle.
This is all to say that thinking about the Beats in the context of postwar avant-garde communities allows us to see their affinities with these communities, affinities that can be obscured with the assumption that the Beats somehow materialized from thin air to explode the mores and minds of conservative America.51 This was the standard line on the Beats for decades, and although a robust body of criticism has overturned this notion, it lingers in the idea that the Beats’ primary importance lies in their social postures, a view that figures them first as rebels whose writing is only a tool of such rebellion. While I don’t want to diminish the Beats’ contribution to postwar social progress, in the pages to follow I want to focus primarily on the writing itself, on what these writers thought they were doing when they explored a “new consciousness” via styles, forms, and breakthroughs they believed would change the very notion of what “literature” could mean or be.
