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.
