Were The Beats a Literary Movement?
I was watching a documentary about William Burroughs recently, A Man Within, and was struck by how sad and apart he always was. He was obviously brilliant, a visionary, but he couldn’t help himself from seeing all the way in, all the way down, right to the bones, the horror and bare bleak reality of existence. You are alone, and what’s around you sure ain’t pretty.
In most literary movements, there is a similarity between the writers. With the absurdist playwrights, Beckett, Ionesco, Jarry, for instance, if you saw a selection of plays, one each, one night, there would be a consistency of tone and ideas, the absurdity of existence, do you stay in it? Or going back to the Gothic writers, or Magical Realist writers, the Romantics, Harlem Renaissance, Stream of Consciousness writers - any literary movement, there’s always been a tight correlation between the movement and the literary style as well as ideas presented in the writing. That’s what makes it a literary movement, right?
But with The Beats, it wasn’t like that. It was three guys who were born around the same time who liked each other, admired one another’s work, encouraged each other, but wrote in three completely diverse styles, with different ideas and ideologies, each unrecognizable to the other. If you put On the Road, Naked Lunch and Howl on a table, managed to find someone who’d never heard of them, and asked them to read all three books then tell you what connected those books, the answer they’d come back with would be “Nothing.”
Burroughs is most notably a man apart from the others in his writing, but the similarity between Ginsberg and Kerouac’s work is also nearly non-existent. On the Road is a joyous and reckless journey through America, that actually exemplifies the true Beat Generation idea. Kerouac used the word “beat” to have a double meaning - both beaten down, therefore empathetic with others who were suffering, and beatific, a wandering mystic with a rucksack on his back, seeing a pure American divinity in every soul he met - even in, especially in - a fasttalking fastmoving huckster who’d leave you in the lurch every time, if it fit his needs, Neal Cassidy. I wrote a personal review/reassessment of On the Road, the scroll version, here.
Kerouac at 100, Re-examining the holy “On the Road” Scroll (substack.com)
Kerouac doesn’t condemn America, he’s apolitical. If he criticizes anything, it’s complacency, deadness.
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”
Ginsberg, in contrast, rails against absolutely everything American. From his first lines in his masterpiece poem, Howl, everything is finger pointing, at a rigid and unaccepting land where its emerging saints are being driven insane.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull
This is so starkly apart from Kerouac’s vision, the two can’t possibly be married. Some of the characters may be similar, but the perception of them is at opposite poles. What is similar is the influence each had. Youth coming out of the 50’s, students, writers, thinkers, musicians especially, were heavily influenced by both Kerouac and Ginsberg, with Dylan at the top of the musicians list. Kerouac’s sense of personal freedom and Ginsberg’s finger pointing, as well as hallucinatory, mind-bursting imagery, were both incorporated into Dylan’s lyrics from the very beginning. Look at “Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall.”
Kerouac and Ginsberg may be said to have ushered in a new sociological movement. However, it wasn’t a literary one.
Then you have Burroughs, who landed from a flying saucer and spoke in an alien language. The horrific drug induced scenarios of Naked Lunch, with men being hung so they’ll ejaculate for someone else’s pleasure, are not like anything previously seen in literature. The closest is Jean Genet, but there’s still no real comparison.
The Buyer takes on an ominous grey-green color. Fact is his body is making its own junk or equivalent. The Buyer has a steady connection. A Man Within you might say. Or so he thinks. ‘I’ll just set in my room,’ he says. ‘Fuck ’em all. Squares on both sides. I am the only complete man in the industry.’ But a yen comes on him like a great black wind through the bones. So the Buyer hunts up a young junky and gives him a paper to make it. ‘Oh all right,’ the boy says. ‘So what you want to make?’ ‘I just want to rub against you and get fixed.’ ‘Ugh … Well all right … But why cancha just get physical like a human?’ Later the boy is sitting in a Waldorf with two colleagues dunking pound cake. ‘Most distasteful thing I ever stand still for,’ he says. ‘Some way he make himself all soft like a blob of jelly and surround me so nasty. Then he gets well all over like with green slime. So I guess he come to some kinda awful climax … I come near wigging with that green stuff all over me, and he stink like a old rotten cantaloupe.’ ‘Well it’s still an easy score.’ The boy sighed resignedly; ‘Yes, I guess you can get used to anything. I’ve got a meet with him again tomorrow.’
From Naked Lunch
So what does this have to do with ‘pass the jug of wine poetry readings’ and Maynard G. Krebs? Nada. This is uncharted territory, taken up in a much more restrained way later on by Hunter S. Thompson, as far as writing about extreme drug experiences. To use the word restrained with Thompson seems humorously absurd, but it’s completely valid in comparison to Burroughs.
It terms of the writing itself, sentences on the page, scene construction, dialogue, description, the scope of ideas, the execution of a wild morphing of reality into sci-fi scenarios, the American corporate military industrial complex paranoia, Burroughs is absolutely brilliant. Accolades like Mailer’s “the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius,” and others, are well deserved. But it’s always a hard read. It helps to realize that much of it is pure dark humor, careening parody, graveyard laughs.
You can hear Burroughs’ gravely voice. 'Tain't no sin to take off your skin. And dance around in your bones.
Of the three writers, Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, Burroughs is the superior writer, though he was the last one in on the game, encouraged by Ginsberg to write Junky in the early 50’s. He and Kerouac collaborated on a book earlier, but Kerouac had already written his first novel by then. Burroughs later famously adopted Bryon Gysin’s cut-up technique, literally cutting up a manuscript and tossing it in the air, then reforming the fallen sentences into something new.
His viewpoint of life itself was one of a magical universe.
In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen. The dogma of science is that the will cannot possibly affect external forces, and I think that's just ridiculous. It's as bad as the church. My viewpoint is the exact contrary of the scientific viewpoint. I believe that if you run into somebody in the street it's for a reason. Among primitive people they say that if someone was bitten by a snake he was murdered. I believe that. Since the word "magic" tends to cause confused thinking, I would like to say exactly what I mean by "magic" and the magical interpretation of so-called reality. The underlying assumption of magic is the assertion of "will" as the primary moving force in this universe – the deep conviction that nothing happens unless somebody or some being wills it to happen. To me this has always seemed self evident ... From the viewpoint of magic, no death, no illness, no misfortune, accident, war or riot is accidental. There are no accidents in the world of magic.
Kerouac was a staunch Catholic turned Buddhist turned Catholic again. Kerouac was a classic mystic, and probably saw in much the way Burroughs describes. Ginsberg was essentially Buddhist, and like Burroughs believed in the connectivity of life. So the three could be said to be aligned in general metaphysical thinking.
Yet only in the very broadest of terms could one say that The Beats were in fact a literary movement. As a social movement, rejecting the shallow suburban conformity that had been embraced by America after World War II, yes. As a trend of literature, the three major players of the Beat movement each play a very different tune.