How to explain this generation’s affinity for the Beat writers? Perhaps it’s
all we have in common: The Beats were taunted and written off by the older
generation as mindless and violent (see Beavis and Butt-head); they had
an appetite for travel and experimentation with drugs (drug use is on the rise
with today’s youth, while job security and home ownership are not); and no one
commonly associated with the Beats was involved in a major war (even our wars
suck; see the Persian Gulf). Then again, like Woodstock II or OK Soda, maybe
it’s just the clever way they’ve been marketed to us:
“Welcome to McBeatniks, sir. Could I interest you in a 99cents Big
Jack?”
“Well, what do you get with the Value Deal?”
“With that you get a Ginsberger with everything and a fleeting of sense
of having read a `serious’ book.”
“Sold – how much?”
Whatever it is, we are being asked to go out and spend our hard-earned
slacker dollars on a whole slew of new publications about the Beats, including
serious revisionist criticism, ambitious and extensive biographies, even
memoirs written by women survivors of the pre-hippie hip, who’ve come out of
the literary boys’ club to reveal secrets as only women can.
Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg by Michael Schumacher
(St. Martin’s Press, $18.95 paper) is an incredibly immense, “definitive”
chronicle of Allen Ginsberg and a large cast of peripheral characters. But oh,
those peripheral characters. The book begins with an insightful and amusing
anecdote about a poetry reading Ginsberg gave in his hometown of Paterson,
N.J., with his father, Louis (a well-respected, more traditional poet himself)
well after Allen’s reputation as a counterculture icon was established. After
Ginsberg made a reference to smoking pot, the backwards Paterson police
arrested him later that night. Problem was, it wasn’t really him, just a man
who bore a vague resemblance, and Ginsberg didn’t even hear of the incident
until he read about it later in New York. It seems everyone’s been arresting
the wrong Allen Ginsberg all these years, and this tome aims to set the record
straight.
After the opening section (which also includes stunning photographs of young
Beat figures, many taken by Ginsberg himself), we move into an engrossing, if
compressed, account of Ginsberg’s childhood. Some might question the necessity
of such detail, and indeed a discussion of Ginsberg’s high school grades seems
downright gratuitous. But his family life at the least provides a remarkable
study of the early intellectual/radical scene in Greenwich Village, as well as
a worthwhile recounting of Ginsberg’s mother’s bizarre descent into
schizophrenia, a drawn-out series of events that affected him tremendously and
later served as subject matter in Kaddish.
From there, the book shifts to an enthralling account of Ginsberg’s days at
Columbia and his first encounters with most of the major Beat writers. These
passages are handled competently and thoroughly, and nearly redeem the book’s
value in themselves. However, since Ginsberg was probably the least interesting
of the Beats at this point, as he struggled with his voice and sexuality, it
becomes exasperating when a fascinating anecdote about William Burroughs’
experiments with drugs or the scene at Joan Vollmer’s apartment is suddenly
bumped back to Ginsberg’s often-boring life. When Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac
take off on their infamous On the Road trip, you want to hop in the car
with them, not sit with Ginsberg in his grungy apartment listening to him whine
about his hopeless relationship with Cassady. Even the author seems distracted
from his subject, with long passages that don’t mention Ginsberg at all.
Underscoring all of this is the debatable question of Ginsberg’s status among
the pantheon of great poets. The author avoids making an argument directly,
preferring to gradually reinforce associations between the poet and his
literary forebears, notably Blake, William Carlos Williams, and Whitman.
Certainly he’s up there somewhere, but the nagging problem of his still being
alive makes any conclusion to this discussion incomplete, just as this book,
despite its length and breadth, is doomed to fall short of chronicling the
whole of Ginsberg’s active lifetime.
Still, the true value of this book lies not in its biography of Ginsberg, nor
even in its exciting descriptions of the birth of the Beat movement; the real
treasure is in the author’s attempts to relate the horrible struggles and
growing pains Ginsberg faced to reconcile his talent to his muse, even
including samples of his early, unsuccessful attempts at writing “New Poetry.”
His drug use, experiments with form, and mystical visions of Blake are all
taken seriously and detailed thoroughly. As for his ultimate status among
American poets, not to worry: After being paraphrased on no less an institution
than the Simpsons, Ginsberg’s reputation seems secure.
The first thing you should know
about The Beat Generation by Bruce Cook (Quill, $12 paper) is
that its cover will lie to you: burned over the requisite photo of Neal Cassady
and Jack Kerouac is the fluorescent orange legend “The Tumultuous ’50s Movement
and Its Impact on Today.” Yet this book was not written today, yesterday, or
the year before that; this book was first published in 1971, and was originally
meant as a kind of informal thesis propagating the Beats as immediate literary
and spiritual godparents to the hippies. While the “today” discrepancy is
easily cleared up by a look at the back cover, one can’t help but wonder if the
publishers weren’t half-hoping (hell, praying) we airhead
twentysomethings would hastily consume large quantities of this reprint,
scratch our heads later and say, “Wait a minute, Led Zeppelin wasn’t
released last year, was it?”
Aside, then, from being one of the first hippie-era attempts at considering
the Beats’ importance and recollecting them nostalgically, it’s certainly valid
to ask what relevance this book holds almost 25 years later, i.e., its
impact on today, beyond an attempt to cash in on renewed interest in all
things beatnik, and the book’s context as a Beat primer for hippies may be
reason enough for many to dismiss it. Also, this writer worships and wants to
emulate his subjects, but he’s too late; indeed, you’re forced to guiltily,
pathetically trudge along with Cook as he tracks down Kerouac in the den of his
decline, back living with his mother in Lowell, Massachusetts, to carefully
collect quips and bitter remembrances of all things Beat, such as the following
gem: “…I wasn’t trying to create any kind of new consciousness or anything
like that. We [Beats] didn’t have a whole lot of heavy abstract thoughts. We
were just a bunch of guys who were out trying to get laid.”
The ultimate failure of this book, however, is twofold, in its lack of any
real pretense about seriously discussing the movement’s importance in other
than scattershot fashion and quickly dissolving into little more than a
breathless recounting of key moments of the movement, and in the fact that its
descriptions of said events simply aren’t that good. In fact, Cook offers very
little information that isn’t rendered much more eloquently in his subjects’
writings themselves, provided one is willing to decode the aliases they
invented for each other. As the author himself points out in an updated
afterword, there are excellent memoirs available from people who were actually
there, which this book really wants to be, and on the other hand much more
competent, academically oriented biographies written by scholars, which this
book claims to be.
“Naturally we fell in love
with men who were rebels, we fell very quickly believing they would take us
on their journeys and adventures, we did not expect to be rebels all by
ourselves, we did not count on loneliness.“
– Minor Characters by Joyce Johnson
Carolyn Cassady, wife of mad driver Neal and author of Off the Road: My
Years With Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg (Penguin, $9.95 paper), and
Joyce Glassman (now Johnson), young girlfriend of Kerouac the aging hipster,
and author of Minor Characters (Anchor Books, $10.95 paper),
existed on opposite coasts separated only by the long miles of highway made
monumental by the roadtrips of their lovers. That and their ages – Joyce
Glassman was only 14 years old in 1947 when Carolyn met Neal for the first time
in San Francisco (she was 24, he was 21). But when Joyce met Jack Kerouac in
New York City almost a decade later, she unwittingly joined an exclusive club
of women who trailblazed a lifestyle despite the ear-ringing disapproval of
mothers, families, and sometimes their own consciences. On the road or off, the
trials they shared would forever set them apart from other women in their
generation.
Carolyn Cassady’s Off the Road is a detailed diary of her emotionally
taxing marriage to Neal and her longtime affair with Kerouac. Sparks that flew
on first sight of her true love burned again and again as Neal ran out, ignored
their problems, left her pregnant and with no money, and more than once made
her a party to bigamy. She convinces herself better than she does her readers
that the good times outweighed the bad. Her account of their life together is
sometimes unbearably bleak, but a collection of correspondences chronologically
included throughout make the book worthwhile. Letters were lifeblood to this
famous group, who saw each other infrequently and spent the rest of their time
at opposite ends of the country dreaming up adventures for when they were
together again.
The historical letters bring insight into the shy and compelling character of
Allen Ginsberg and his own romantic love for Carolyn’s husband, and to the
actual literary influence that Cassady had on Kerouac’s prose. Neal’s letters
are witty and philosophical, as much if not more than Kerouac’s replies. The
popular belief is that Kerouac molded his style of writing from jazz and the
inspiration of Cassady’s personality and wild behavior, but there are
indications that Cassady actually dictated Kerouac’s stream-of-consciousness
style.
“I have always held that when one writes, one should forget all rules,
literary styles and other such pretensions as large words, lordly clauses and
other phrases as such – rolling the words around in the mouth as one would
wine, and proper or not, putting them down because they sound so good…” Cassady writes.
Great for gossip but unlikable at times because of the author’s reluctance to
embrace the lifestyle that these men pursued, Off the Road is more
reasonable than romantic, and it is difficult to be wrenched from romance for
such long periods of pain and complaint. An understanding does arise, however,
that Carolyn Cassady withstood more than most could, and her character is
terminally softened when she gives in to herself in the form of a love affair
with Kerouac. She begins to command respect by attending to her desires in the
same manner her men do, which temporarily hinders the perception of her as a
shrewish doormat. Clearly, she is awakened by Kerouac (at least sexually; Neal
was apparently a lousy lover), and the excitement comes through in the writing,
impossible to conceal. Carolyn Cassady got more than she bargained for in
choosing a husband – an abrupt education on the ways of a Beatnik. In the case
of Joyce Johnson, however, this lifestyle had been calling, and Kerouac was a
merely a bonus.
Attending Barnard at 16, Joyce Glassman [Johnson] had already spent two years
sneaking down to Washington Square park and spending weekend afternoons at the
Waldorf, a cafe graced by hundreds of potential cultural heroes, literary and
otherwise (Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock frequented it, as did e.e.
cummings). She already had hopes of becoming a writer, and published a novel at
just 26. She meets Jack Kerouac groupie-style at Howard Johnson’s with a copy
of The Town and the City in hand; she buys him dinner and soon they
become lovers.
The writing in Minor Characters is much more accomplished and enjoyable
to read in the spirit of Beat literature. It has some of the rhythm expected in
this genre, and is less of a chronicle and more of an experience. While in
Cassady’s book there’s hardly a page without a cultural icon present, Johnson’s
is more low key. She doesn’t actually meet Jack ’til the middle of the book,
but the preceding chapters are mellifluous in their writing. Lessons learned
from events the author views through hindsight complement her coming of age
rather nicely, and the “minor” characters of Johnson’s own story are as
tragically interesting as the Beats if not more so, because they’re regular
joes with discernibly independent psyches. They don’t necessarily try to
emulate their heroes, but after having found the door left open, have chosen to
make their own difficult way through it.
The distinct time frames of these two books have much to do with their tones.
The direct approach of the Sixties in Minor Characters seems responsible
for the more possible yet still ill-received independence of young women. Joyce
moved out of her house, experimented with sex, and had a desire to write
without Kerouac’s influence. In fact, she probably did more for him by easing
the pain and confusion he faced just prior to his death.
Off the Road is a specific and factual sequence of events, with an
index that deserves noting. Ironically, Joyce Glassman isn’t mentioned, though
it’s easy to recognize where the two books cross paths. Johnson pays homage to
Mrs. Cassady on a couple of occasions in Minor Characters, once if only
to empathize with her plight: “Men [were] always disappearing on Carolyn into
the attic, leaving her with the dishes.” Each book celebrates these woman as
their own people, despite the fact that they can’t help but be overshadowed by
their famed lovers. These members of the “Beat orbit” each in their own time
and own way gave a would-be hero a reason to go on.
Both books are resolved sadly, and although Minor Characters is half
the sourcebook that Off the Road is, they each end with incidents that
lovers of the Beat genre of literature choose to forget – Kerouac deep into
alcohol and depression, and Cassady out of his mind on drugs with Kesey’s Merry
Pranksters. Lenny Bruce once said, in an act of self-prophecy, “There’s nothing
sadder than an old hipster,” and the final chapters of these two works are a
testament to that. Hopefully, substance abuse had more to do with their
downfall than the rootless lives they led, as it would be tragedy for the
escapades that inspired such poignantly beautiful and raw writing to be
responsible for the demise of their fragile creators. One thing’s for sure: A
woman who loves a man can remember every detail when he is gone. n
This article appears in May 26 • 1995 and May 26 • 1995 (Cover).