SOURCE: Jamison, Andrew and Ron Eyerman. “The Reconceptualization of Culture: Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, Mary McCarthy.” In Seeds of the Sixties. pp. 141-77. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

[In the following excerpt, Jamison and Eyerman regard the role of radical politics on the work of Ginsberg, James Baldwin, and Mary McCarthy and deem the three authors “central actors in the reconceptualization of American culture that was taking place in the postwar period and, more important, in planting seeds that would sprout in the 1960s.”]

On a cold day in early spring 1943, Irwin Allen Ginsberg, the son of Russian immigrants who had settled in Paterson, stood on a New Jersey dock awaiting the ferry to New York. Not yet seventeen, he was on his way to take the entry examination at Columbia University. In a rush of youthful emotion, he solemnly vowed to himself that if accepted to that great institution he would study labor law and devote his life to helping the working class. This was a vow not taken lightly, since Ginsberg's parents were both active in the socialist movement and his early life had been colored by heated debates concerning the relative virtues of Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky and the importance of class solidarity. Although he would never receive a law degree, completing a degree in English instead, the categories that defined politics in the 1930s would remain important to him throughout his life, and through the poetry he created and the life-styles he experimented with, he would build a bridge from the cultural politics of the 1930s to the politics of the 1960s.

Mary McCarthy learned about Trotsky in quite another fashion. The daughter of devout Irish Catholic parents, McCarthy never heard the word “socialism” until she went to college. Her acquaintance with Trotsky came at the time of the Moscow trials in 1936, when James T. Farrell, celebrating the publication of his classic proletarian novel Studs Lonigan at a cocktail party, loudly asked the room, “Do you think Trotsky is entitled to a fair hearing?” Like most everyone else at the party, Mary McCarthy answered, “Yes.” Four days later, she discovered her name on the letterhead of the Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky. This anecdote comes from McCarthy's own fictionalized account and is reflective of both the style and aim of the writing that would make her famous. She wrote, for the most part, semiautobiographical tales about well-known people and places. Her style was ironic and biting; people hated her for it. They were always afraid to turn up in one of her stories. This sort of self-ironizing pleased neither friends nor enemies, for in exposing her own foibles, she also exposed theirs. What McCarthy created, however, was much more than interesting social satire; her writing developed a stance and a perspective that would help a new generation of women interpret their own place in society.

James Baldwin entered the American literary scene from Paris. He needed the distance permitted by the Atlantic Ocean to give him a clearer view of the country of his birth. In 1949, he published in the first number of a small Parisian magazine “Everybody's Protest Novel,” a review of American protest fiction from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Richard Wright's Native Son. In painting the world in simple black and white, with the normal meaning of these terms reversed, protest fiction, he wrote, created cardboard characters, who moved about with neither passion nor reason in acting out the author's moral message. Such fiction, even when it attempted to do good, was only sentimental and dishonest and left unanswered the only important question, What moves people to do what they do?

This essay at once announced the arrival of a new man on the scene and identified a literary project. By including Wright in his attack, the only black American novelist then acceptable to the white literary world, Baldwin was making room for himself. At the same time, he set himself squarely in the realist tradition in American literature. The realist program, of attempting to bear witness to the experience of real people, would color Baldwin's literary work until the early 1960s, when the civil rights movement again brought him home from Paris. His engagement in politics would change both his writing style and, for a time, his life-style as well. Throughout the 1960s, Baldwin approached literature more as spokesman for a cause than as a disinterested witness. His penchant for self-description found new expression in the essay form, where he combined personal reflection with moral message. Baldwin moved from being the white eye in the Negro world and the sexual avant-garde to giving voice to the unarticulated, from novelist to movement intellectual.

Allen Ginsberg, Mary McCarthy, and James Baldwin were central actors in the reconceptualization of American culture that was taking place in the postwar period and, more important, in planting seeds that would sprout in the 1960s. This reconceptualization can be understood in two interrelated ways. On the one hand, new frameworks for interpreting and evaluating culture were debated and developed. One outcome of this process was the idea of mass culture itself and the elaboration of criteria for its evaluation. Here, as with the development of the idea of mass society, small journals like the Partisan Review, Dissent, and Commentary and intellectuals like Dwight Macdonald, Irving Howe, and Phillip Rahv played a central part. Most studies of American intellectuals in this period focus on just these actors and issues. At another level and involving a different set of actors there occurred another reconceptualization.

On the other hand, rather than developing new criteria of critical judgment, a handful of writers and artists developed new forms of cultural practice, new ways of seeing, acting, and communicating thoughts. Ginsberg, McCarthy, and Baldwin were central to cultural reconceptualization at this level in postwar America. Through their writing, all three challenged the universal claims of the “official” American culture that was being packaged and distributed by a new culture industry, whose basic aim seemed to be the standardization of taste at the lowest possible level.

Allen Ginsberg, who helped shape the Beat alternative and then took active part in the counterculture of the 1960s, was a key actor in the process of creating an alternative to both high and mass culture. Like other radical artists before him—the sensualists, dadaists, and surrealists—Ginsberg turned the images and traditions of high culture against itself, and like the marketing man he trained to be, he used the tools of mass culture to spread the alternative he and his fellow Beats, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, were creating. As the official representative of an unofficial culture of resistance, Ginsberg helped to carve a path between the commercial products of the culture industry and the snobby elitism of high culture. In reaching out to the mass paperback audience, both Mary McCarthy and James Baldwin also participated in this process of cultural transformation. But it was more the content of their message and their style of writing that was important. McCarthy helped to identify a masculine way of seeing and being and, in the process, paved the way for the new feminism that would emerge a decade later. Similarly, Baldwin helped to identify a white way of seeing and thus contributed to the development of an explicit black way of seeing. All three made use of the mass media and mass distribution to spread their message. They refused to retreat into the moral high ground provided by the critics of mass culture and the ghetto that formed around serious journals. As such, they too took sides—in their case, for a popular culture, an alternative to the established modes of literary expression. In this way, they also brought the democratic American cultural tradition, which had been so influential in the 1930s, into the postwar era.

CULTURE IN AMERICA

Despite a short-lived dream of some early pioneers that a distinctly American way of life could be carved out of the wilderness, Americans have had difficulty replacing the European ideals about culture they inherited. The notion that culture was serious business came over on the Mayflower as part of the Puritan intellectual heritage and was associated with cultivation as such: that which symbolized the anointed and separated the civilized from the savage. The notion that culture implied work and discipline was given all the more force in the new world, where a new way of life had physically and visibly to be carved out of nature.

This particular conception of culture was eventually systematized and institutionalized in regimes of education that focused on uplifting the innocent and the fallen, whether children, natives, or newly arrived immigrants, into the spiritual realm of culture. Because it required discipline and practice, culture was approached with a seriousness and decorum that sharply distinguished it from the “natural” and spontaneous behavior of primitive peoples as well as from activities deemed playful or entertaining. These latter were considered common, even decadent, while culture was deemed the proper region of an elite, the civilized few rather than the masses.

Well into the nineteenth century the struggle over the transplantation, development, and distribution of culture in the new world raged among American intellectuals. On the one side were those who saw themselves as part of a genteel tradition, a cultured class, who took it as their task to uphold and defend a European—and in their eyes universal—tradition against degradation from all that was vulgar and commercial in America. This class and its idea of culture was seen as continually under threat by the territorial expansion of the country and by the waves of immigrants that arrived on its shores, each bringing with them their own culture. Lawrence W. Levine puts it this way, “These attitudes were part of a development that saw the very word ‘culture’ becoming synonymous with the Eurocentric products of the symphonic hall, the opera house, the museum, and the library, all of which, the American people were taught, must be approached with a disciplined, knowledgeable seriousness of purpose, and—most important of all—with feelings of reverence” (1988: 145-146). In this view, culture was an autonomous aesthetic realm of literature and art, which, although forced to pay attention to the material world of commerce, constituted a realm apart. On the other side were those who believed that a uniquely American, democratic culture could be constructed out of the waves of immigrants. After various, rather limited movements among intellectuals to develop more popular alternatives to elite culture in the nineteenth century, major challenges to the idea that culture existed only in bourgeois drawing rooms appeared in Greenwich Village and Harlem in the early years of the twentieth century.

THE MAKING OF A MASS CULTURE

The concept of the masses is an old battle-ax in the struggle to define cultural experience in America. One of the earliest organs to promote it was a journal of cultural radicalism called, appropriately enough, The Masses, started in 1910 by a Dutch immigrant, Piet Vlaag. The Masses set out to undermine the elitist, or genteel, notion of culture as uplifting and refined. Quoting William Morris, Vlaag expressed his aesthetic philosophy thus: “Sure, we need art. But not art that's for the few—not art that lives in pretty ivory towers built on golden quick sands. … Art must live with people—in the streets, in the slums” (quoted in Green 1988: 32). Reorganized in 1912 under the editorship of Max Eastman, with the help of a young Harvard graduate named John Reed, The Masses became the voice of Greenwich Village radicalism and the first American avant-garde in the period prior to World War I. Reed wrote its opening manifesto: “The broad purpose of The Masses is a social one; to everlastingly attack old systems, old morals, old prejudices—the whole weight of outworn thought that dead men have settled upon us. … We intend to be arrogant, impertinent, in bad taste” (quoted in Green 1988: 94). As the voice of American cultural radicalism, the journal attempted to combine a political and moral perspective with artistic innovation. The great silent majority of Americans were supposed to be its audience, not the cultural elite. Unfortunately, this was not to be the case. Like other small journals, before and after, The Masses was read by a very select few.

In the debates concerning culture and politics in the 1930s, heavily influenced by Marxism and socialism, the concept of the masses, and by implication the culture of the masses, carried positive connotations. The masses were seen by many writers as the bearers of the future and the hope of mankind. Social realism and proletarian literature aimed at portraying the life of the masses, a neglected object of artistic interest and imagination. European ideologies, rejuvenated first in the new Soviet Union under the banner of Bolshevism and later by the struggles between various factions of Stalinists and Trotskyists, also affected America's view of culture through the influence of such popular and innovative writers as Theodore Dreiser, Steinbeck, and Dos Passos, all of whom were drawn to left-wing causes and organizations. In the 1930s, debates about a particular proletarian literature would both inspire and divide intellectual circles, along aesthetic as well as political lines. Here again, the struggle between European culture and American particularism was reinvented in radical circles.

The European idea of culture as a realm apart was challenged, in the 1920s, from another direction by rapid developments in mass-produced popular entertainment. The development of a new industry, producing a commercialized, prepackaged culture for the masses, appeared to threaten the imported, European ideals of culture as well as the bohemian alternative. Up until the 1920s, the printed word dominated the distribution of culture in the United States. Newspapers were the prime source of information and books and magazines the source of more serious intellectual debate.

Around the turn of the century, for example, magazines like The Nation and Harper's were the main vehicles for defending the genteel ideal of culture against the growing influence of the masses. Even in the fields where the genteel mixed with more popular cultural practices, the printed word dominated. Popular as well as serious music was spread through sheet music up until the First World War, when advances in technology underwrote a great expansion in the production and sale of records. It was the perfection and mass production of a new invention, however, that radically changed the way culture was transmitted and experienced and brought about a new compromise between serious and popular forms of culture. For the first time, terms previously restricted to the sphere of commerce, terms like “packaging,” “production,” and “distribution,” could now be applied to culture as well.

In 1916, a visionary radio engineer, David Sarnoff, who had achieved considerable fame through spending three days and nights at the telegraph key decoding messages during the Titanic disaster, sent a now-famous memorandum to his superiors in the American Marconi Company. He wrote,

I have in mind a plan of development which would make radio a “household utility” in the same sense as the piano or phonograph. The idea is to bring music into the house by wireless. … The receiver can be designed in the form of a simple “Radio Music Box” and arranged for several different wavelengths, which should be changeable with the throwing of a single switch or button. … The box can be placed on a table in the parlor or living room, the switch set accordingly and transmitted music received.

(Quoted by Melvin L. De Fleur, “The Development of Radio,” in Wells 1972: 40)

Within ten years, Sarnoff's Radio Music Box would be found in over 27,540,000 American households. This was an almost unbelievable growth considering that between only 500 and 1,000 people heard the news over the air that Warren G. Harding had been elected president six years earlier, in 1920. After short-lived and feeble attempts to establish governmental control over the new mass medium, radio was defined as “an arena of business competition,” and by 1919, a new corporation, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), had gained control over almost the entire industry. That same year, Sarnoff was made its first commercial manager.

The 1930s and 1940s have been dubbed the golden age of radio. By the end of the 1930s, despite economic depression, there was more than one radio in every household in America; by 1950, this figure had doubled. Radio, it seemed, fit the needs of a nation pressed for time; its effortless way of producing sound and carefully planned programming made it possible to listen to music and work at the same time. The boundaries between work and play, between culture and production, were thus blurred. For those who believed in the distinctiveness of culture as a realm of human activity and the seriousness of cultural practices, this was a troublesome development.

Another troublesome development was the use made of radio for propaganda purposes during the war. Radio proved to be an effective way of spreading news to a dispersed population as well as a powerful means of influencing opinion. For critics and proponents alike, it did not go unnoticed that the spread of fascism in Europe had been greatly aided by the radio and other mass media. In the United States, the radio industry made itself available to the war effort, for everything from spreading information to selling war bonds.

The year 1939 marked not only the beginning of World War II in Europe but also the year that a new company called Pocket Books was founded in the United States. First plans called for the publication of ten books—complete and unabridged—in a cheap (25 cents) and small (4[frac14] × 6[frac12] in.) edition. The books sold more than 100,000 copies in the first three weeks in New York City alone (Davis 1984: 15). A cultural revolution had begun. The classics of serious literature were now available in cheap mass-produced editions and sold alongside the most popular crime and western pulp fiction.

Between 1905, when the first “nickelodeon” opened in Pittsburgh, showing movies to small groups of people, and 1947, when an estimated 80,000 motion picture theaters were serving a weekly audience of about 235,000,000 around the world, the cinema grew into a major source of popular entertainment. In the beginning, the cheap price and the silent pictures served a largely immigrant audience, as both price and silence suited the conditions of poor workers in search of relaxation after a long day of dull labor. From the nickelodeons in immigrant neighborhoods, the movies soon moved to more comfortable settings in middle-class neighborhoods. And movie houses began to compete with the stage for its public as well as its actors. One of the early innovators in motion pictures was an old stage actor named Larry Griffith, who would gain fame as D. W. Griffith, the director of the first feature film, The Birth of a Nation, in 1915. With the closing of European film production during World War I, the movies became an American art. By the time talking pictures were introduced in 1926, American companies and American “stars,” like Charlie Chaplin, were known the world over. American culture had found a new weapon in the struggle against European ideals.

The use of culture, particularly radio, as a tool in the war and the development of film and paperback books and other media for the masses gave new meaning to the relations between culture and society as well as the relations between intellectuals and the masses. Rationalization and standardization seemed now to be as applicable to the cultural realm as to the productive world of industry.

Dwight Macdonald's essay, “A Theory of Popular Culture,” in the first issue of his short-lived wartime journal, Politics, helped name the new phenomena. For Macdonald, popular culture, which he would later term “mass culture,” was something dangerous, a threat to civilization and indeed to thought itself. The distinguishing characteristic of mass culture was that it was “manufactured wholesale for the market” (Macdonald 1957: 59). It was “a parasitic, a cancerous growth on High Culture” (59) and was dangerous because it could be so easily consumed, without much effort from the reader or the viewer. It was produced in standardized packaged form and overwhelmed the market through its sheer quantity. It was everywhere, leaving no escape. “It absolutely refuses to discriminate against, or between, anything or anybody” and thus it “destroys all values, since value judgments imply discrimination” (62). And he went on,

There are theoretical reasons why Mass Culture is not and can never be any good. I take it as axiomatic that culture can only be produced by and for human beings. But in so far as people are organized (more strictly, disorganized) as masses, they lose their human identity and quality. For the masses are in historical time what a crowd is in space: a large quantity of people unable to express themselves as human beings because they are related to one another neither as individuals nor as members of communities—indeed, they are not related to each other at all, but only to something distant, abstract, nonhuman: a football game or bargain sale in the case of a crowd, a system of industrial production, a party or a State in the case of the masses. The mass man is the solitary atom, uniform with and undifferentiated from thousands and millions of other atoms who go to make up “the lonely crowd,” as David Riesman well calls American society.

(69)

One can easily understand how the postwar world looked entirely different to intellectuals whose categories of interpretation and action had been formed in the interwar years. All the assumptions and institutions around which their world revolved had been transformed. The great narratives of historical development, like socialism and communism, and even more modest ideologies, like liberalism, no longer seemed to make sense. More to the point, simple categorizations like high culture and popular culture no longer fit the complexity of the postwar world. The alternative to mass culture—a truly popular, or democratic, culture—would come from other voices than those that had been active in the thirties.

THE MAKING OF A COUNTERCULTURE: THE BEAT ALTERNATIVE

In the midst of the Second World War, three pilgrims from as different social backgrounds as one could probably find among white Americans met by chance in a Manhattan apartment. What drew William S. Burroughs, Jr., Irwin Allen Ginsberg, and Jean Louis (Jack) Kerouac together was a feeling of being outside the main drift of American society. All three were sitting out a popular war while their fellows rushed to participate; all three were alienated from the careers their families and American society had planned for them. In addition, they all shared a love of literature and a taste for life on the social margins.

The scion of a wealthy Protestant, St. Louis family and many years older than Ginsberg and Kerouac, Burroughs had already gathered a range of life and literary experience and a sophistication that enraptured the two younger men. He had taken a degree in English literature at Harvard and studied medicine in Vienna, before finding his way to the shadowy underworld of drug dealers and small-time thieves around Times Square in midtown Manhattan and in the bohemian community in Greenwich Village. These two sides of Burroughs—the educated snob and the low-life deviant—fascinated the middle-class Ginsberg more than the working-class Kerouac, who had come to Columbia on a football scholarship. Ginsberg came to Columbia and to New York City from nearby Paterson, New Jersey, where his father, a moderately well-known poet, worked as a high school English teacher. Ginsberg's mother moved in and out of mental hospitals. Both of his parents were first-generation immigrants, the children of Russian Jews who were also active in radical politics. Louis Ginsberg, Allen's father, had been a socialist and a supporter of Eugene Debs, while his mother, Naomi, attended Communist party meetings and defended Stalin against Louis's criticisms. The young Ginsberg grew up amid constant political squabbles as well as the anxiety surrounding his mother's mental health. In typical street socialist fashion, he mixed the immigrant desire for respectability and social mobility with political conscience, entering Columbia as a prelaw student. It was his older brother, however, who became the lawyer; Allen Ginsberg gravitated to the English department.

Located near Harlem in upper Manhattan, Columbia University and the promise of higher education provided the justification for the move into New York City for Ginsberg and thousands like him, including Kerouac and, for that matter, a young musician named Miles Davis. New York offered, as well, a variety of subcultures that could nourish the development of an alternative vision. Besides the Greenwich Village environment, the traditional home of cultural radicalism, where Burroughs and Ginsberg first met and to whose gay community they both continually returned, the proximity of Columbia to Harlem provided another essential linkage. Columbia students in search of adventure and a lively experience outside their normal, middle-class upbringing did not have to look very far. Both Kerouac and Ginsberg were soon under the spell of Harlem nightlife and especially its music.

Columbia's English department was at that time one of the most respected in the country. Ginsberg's first criticisms of American culture were formulated against the background of what he learned there, especially from faculty members Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren. Like C. Wright Mills, Ginsberg found both a source of inspiration and criticism in Trilling's work. Trilling's defense of American liberalism and support for the formalism of the so-called New Criticism provided a foil against which Ginsberg formulated his own views. Both Ginsberg and Kerouac took the formalism of the New Criticism as their main enemy, as they developed the spontaneous style of writing that was to become the characteristic trademark of the Beats. In their articulation of what they came to call the “New Vision,” they drew inspiration from romantic poets, especially Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Like Mills, Ginsberg opposed Trilling's political liberalism and cultural conservatism from the Left.

The New Vision set out to challenge the traditional view of American literature being taught at Columbia, taking its cue from the culture found on the streets of New York as interpreted through the spontaneous energy of the young artist. In his notebooks from the time, Ginsberg recorded the intended meaning of this vision: “Since art is merely and ultimately self-expressive, we conclude that the fullest art, the most individual, uninfluenced, unrepressed, uninhibited expression of art is true expression and the true art” (quoted in Miles 1990: 47). The attempt to seek refuge in art was, of course, not new. What was distinct about the New Vision was not only that it was formulated by dissidents in a time of national celebration rather than defeat but also that the emphasis was put on individual spontaneity and the rejection of all inhibition and repression.

Like their European predecessors, art was seen to express an entire form of life and thus should offer a guide to living. Their art was confessional as well as expressive: what they sought was not a pure art of sensuality but more nearly the very opposite, a raw art of an almost primitive nature, to be found among the outsiders and the outcasts of the mass society. Unconstrained by the elitist notions of their European predecessors, they could introduce a form of playfulness to their writings.

Pull my daisy
tip my cup
all my doors are open
Cut my thoughts
for coconuts
all my eggs are broken
Jack my Arden
gate my shades
woe my road is spoken
Silk my garden
rose my days
now my prayers awaken. …

(Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Cassady, “Pull My Daisy,” 1949)

In rebellion against middle-class respectability, they could open new areas of life to poetic expression.

What do I want in these rooms papered
with visions of money?
How much can I make by cutting my hair?
If I put new heels on my shoes,
bathe my body reeking of masturbation and
sweat, layer upon layer of excretement
dried in employment bureaus, magazine
hallways, statistical cubical, factory
stairways, …
what war I enter and for what prize! …

(Ginsberg, “Paterson,” 1949)

For the first time in its history, America seemed on the way toward developing a uniform national identity, an official culture based on middle-class notions of propriety and success. During the war, deviance in terms of ideas or life-style was little tolerated for fear of threatening the war effort. Now, with the organizational means of ensuring conformity still in place, a new threat was being discovered in communism, as the former ally against fascism, the Soviet Union, was now seen as the new menace to freedom.

The side streets and bars of New York City, with their ethnic subcultures and small-time criminals, kept the Beats in touch with another America, permitting the sense of being outside the mainstream and its drift to conformity. In this respect, too, the New Vision could trace its roots back to earlier periods of American cultural radicalism: Henry Miller and Ernest Hemingway in the 1920s and the proletarian writers of the 1930s rejected middle-class life-styles and sought out the downtrodden and the outsiders in a quest for authenticity and experience. By the 1940s, the political aspects of the quest had largely disappeared; what was left was the existential search for meaning and escape from the ever-growing encroachment of the official culture. Out of this search would eventually emerge the counterculture of the sixties.

A new sense of energy—as well as alienation—was expressed in Ginsberg's poems and Kerouac's novels. In Ginsberg's After Dead Souls (1951) and Kerouac's more famous On the Road (1957) the American mythology of the open road and the western frontier were reinvented for a new generation.

Where O America are you
going in your glorious
automobile, careening
down the highway
toward what crash
in the deep canyon
of the Western Rockies,
or racing the sunset
over Golden Gate
toward what wild city
jumping with jazz
on the Pacific Ocean!

(Ginsberg, “After Dead Souls,” 1951)

One of the cornerstones of the New Vision was that poetry should not only deal with the everyday experience of common people but should also speak in their language. Living alone in New York and working as a free-lance market researcher, Ginsberg began in 1951 to compose the poem that was to become the anthem of a new generation. The other central subterraneans, Kerouac and Burroughs, were each on their separate roads in search of new experience. Ginsberg was thus free to return to one of his earlier sources of inspiration, namely, William Carlos Williams, one of America's most famous poets who was from a neighboring New Jersey town. He also drew on his own outsider experience, both his mother's mental illness and his own meanderings through the streets of New York. He had also, through a chance encounter with a Chinese painting at the New York Public Library, become interested in Buddhism. As already noted, the nearness of Columbia to Harlem had put Ginsberg in touch with black culture, especially jazz. Eventually all these influences would congeal into “Howl,” which combined these various strands with a powerful sense of rhythm. It was poetry that was best heard, rather than read. It seemed to require a collective presence to be fully experienced. It began with the famous lines,

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 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 …

“Howl” was first read publicly in San Francisco in 1955, in an event that has since taken on mythical proportions. In a room packed with all the notables of the West Coast poetry revival, Ginsberg read to the cheers and shouts of an audience of about one hundred. He filled the room with the sounds and symbols of the New Vision. As Barry Miles describes it,

[Ginsberg] was nervous and had drunk a great deal of wine. He read with a small, intense voice, but the alcohol and the emotional intensity of the poem quickly took over, and he was soon swaying to its powerful rhythm, chanting like a Jewish cantor, sustaining his long breath length, savoring the outrageous language. Kerouac began cheering him on, yelling “Go!” at the end of each line, and soon the audience joined in. Allen was completely transported. At each line he took a deep breath, glanced at the manuscript, then delivered it, arms outstretched, eyes gleaming, swaying from one foot to the other with the rhythm of the words. … Allen continued to the last sob, the audience cheering him wildly at every line.

(Miles 1990: 196)

As Kenneth Rexroth, a well-known critic and central figure in San Francisco poetry circles, said directly afterward, the poem would make Ginsberg “famous from bridge to bridge.” The reading, as well as the poem itself, helped to catalyze the subterranean literary communities in New York and San Francisco. Something was indeed happening to counter the main drift in American culture. The mass media would soon help make it into a movement.

The Beats moved and drew inspiration from the marginal urban subcultural pockets and linked art and life-style together in a creative way. The underbelly of the consumer society sustained them in a material as well as a spiritual sense. But San Francisco and northern California added something else, a rural, pastoral sensibility that would connect the Beats to the ecology movement of the 1970s. Rexroth's ties with Western populism and anarchism provided an essential link to this intellectual and geographic side of America: the self-reliant frontier tradition, which was also threatened by the new mass society and its culture. While Rexroth kept his distance from the Beats, acting more as a benevolent elder statesman than participant, one of his younger followers, Gary Snyder, was both influenced by and came to exercise an influence on Allen Ginsberg.

Snyder read his poem, “A Berry Feast,” directly after “Howl” that October night in 1955. The stylistic contrast could not have been greater, yet both represented aspects of the same impulse. In quiet, somber tones Snyder's poem invoked the tale of the first-fruits festival of the Indians of Oregon, where Snyder had grown up. While Ginsberg excited and drew together the public with powerful rhythms and chants, Snyder's images encouraged quiet self-reflection and withdrawal. This was not surprising, as Snyder was to spend much of the next twelve years of his life at a Zen monastery in Japan.

Remarking on the religious references in Beat poetry, Michael Davidson has distinguished between the East Coast (Ginsberg, Kerouac) and the West Coast (Snyder, Philip Whalen) variants.

Using two concepts from Buddhism, we could divide the poets of the Beat movement into two camps; those who take the direction of karuna (compassion) and those who follow the direction of prajna (wisdom). … In more familiar terms, this division could be seen as that between Emersonian idealism with its belief in an unmediated relationship between phenomenal reality and spiritual life, and a more solitary, speculative form of transcendentalism like that practiced by Thoreau.

(Davidson 1989: 97)

In the former, the individual poet or writer attempts to become an empty vehicle through which “the currents of the universe” (Emerson) may flow. The musical rhythm of the poem, especially when read as a chant, is communal, aimed at bringing its audience into this universal current. Here the poet serves more as medium than midwife, in a process, common to oral cultures, in which community is re-created as the audience is drawn together under its spell. The second tradition is more intellectual, where self-reflection through meditation is the primary aim of the poem and its reading.

It was more than two techniques or paths to enlightenment that were united when East met West in San Francisco in the midfifties, however. The tensions that had been inherent in the Beat program from the outset, between the demand for extreme individual freedom of expression and the desire, at first unstated, to create a new sense of community in a society moving more and more in the opposite direction, were here brought out and, for the moment at least, resolved.

The New Vision formulated in a New York apartment in 1947 may have given first voice to an emerging subculture, but for many years it was an unheard cry in the wilderness. The more lasting name, “the beat generation,” would be anointed by the mass media. An article in the New York Times in 1952 with the headline “This Is the Beat Generation” gave them not only a name but visibility. Their new vision for the arts came more and more to stand for a whole style of life, a culture in the wider, rather than narrower, sense of the term. What had begun as a program of individual redemption and artistic creation was transformed by the media attention into an alternative way of life. As opposed to many more politically oriented intellectuals, the Beats did not resist this attention from the mass media. On the contrary, Ginsberg, who worked part-time in various advertising agencies, actively used the mass media to further the Beat program.

Ginsberg was especially active in seeking out the popular magazines, such as Time, Life, Esquire, and the New Yorker, to review or comment on their work. Their work was also popularized through the greatly expanding paperback book trade. The publisher of Howl, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was also the owner of the first paperback bookstore in America, City Lights, and the poem still remains under the imprint of City Lights Books. The great appeal of the Beats is unthinkable without the cheap paperback editions in which their works appeared and the mass-distribution newspapers and magazines that gave them both their name and their visibility. These were an essential part of the link between the coasts; like the new mass culture itself, the alternative went national.

The Beat culture for Ginsberg was essentially urban. It depended on the sights, the sounds, and the living conditions provided by city life. While the attempt to expand consciousness and the realms of personal experience demanded being on the road in search of new frontiers, the Beat writing and reflection was sustained in the city, amid the noise, the crowds, and, most important, the clubs and bars that brought the likes of Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs together in the first place. The road may have been the source of new experience, but the city was the crucible of creation. The city was where thoughts could be collected and where the small but sophisticated audiences could be found. San Francisco and New York, with stopovers in Denver and Tangiers, were the urban environments that cradled the Beat alternative to the mass culture. The San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, the West Coast link that gave the Beat alternative national recognition, is usually dated with that 1955 public reading of “Howl.” But it was New York's streets and bars, from Greenwich Village to Times Square to Harlem, that were the essential sources for Ginsberg's reconceptualization of culture. Drawing on the jazz rhythms of the small Harlem clubs and the pulsating sound of the streets, Ginsberg and his coconspirators helped shift the meaning of culture from its civilizing and rationalizing connotations to the more communal notion of collective experience. Ginsberg's poetry, as revealed in that reading of “Howl,” drew on premodern oral traditions, in which public performance was as important as, if not more important than, the meaning of the words or the representations they invoked. Rhythm, self-expression, and confession were central elements in the linking of the individual to the collective through the shared experience of poetry. This was something learned not only from Walt Whitman and American populism but also from black music, from blues and jazz, and from Eastern religion. It was not only the openness to mass culture and the alleged “destruction of the important barrier between mass culture and high art” (Davidson 1989: x) that worried critics of the Beat writers and poets; it was more that they threatened the very idea of culture that had dominated American intellectual life since the mid-nineteenth century.

As combination advance man and poet laureate, Allen Ginsberg carried the message of the Beat experience beyond the boundaries, both natural and artificially erected, of postwar American society. He carried the message of alternative culture and altered experience on the back roads of America from Boston to Tacoma and outside America from Havana to Prague. In 1965, in the midst of cold war tensions, Ginsberg was kicked out of Cuba for promoting “decadent” values. Put on a plane to Prague, he was greeted not by soldiers but by representatives of the Beat underground. And in a rollicking, alternative, May Day festival, he was elected Allen Kral Majalis, the King of May, by no less than 100,000 supporters. Back in the United States, Ginsberg was an important link across the generations, between the Beats and the hippies, and, less obviously, between the vague pacifism and antipolitics expressed in Beat culture and the new, direct-action politics of the 1960s. In 1963, Ginsberg took part in his first political demonstration, protesting against an appearance of Madame Nhu, the infamous Dragon Lady of Vietnam, whose fierce Catholicism and religious repression had contributed, among other things, to the self-immolation of Buddhist monks. In protest, Ginsberg sang mantras for fourteen hours on the streets of San Francisco. Later in the 1960s, he acted as the forty-year-old “elder-statesman” of the political wing of the counterculture. He spoke on “Consciousness and Practical Action” at a conference on the “dialectics of liberation” on a program that included black power spokesman Stokely Carmichael, Paul Goodman, and Gregory Bateson, and the Marxist theorists Paul Sweezy and Ernest Mandel. While the other key figures of the Beat generation followed a more nonpolitical road, Ginsberg helped to facilitate the transition to the new politics of the sixties. Allen Ginsberg was more than a seed of the 1960s: he was one of the most colorful flowers of the new generation. …

James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, and Mary McCarthy all brought previously excluded cultural perceptions and experiences into mainstream American literature. They broadened high culture without lowering its standards to a mass level. At the same time, they brought the masses out of their anonymity and homogenized “vulgarity” that was attributed to them by the defenders of “serious” culture; in so doing, they carved out spaces for new forms of cultural expression. Victims of oppression themselves—subtle or otherwise—they could better understand and articulate the victimization of the sexually deviant as well as of the racially or sexually oppressed.

In carefully mixing their own biographies in their artistic representations, each revealed the changes occurring in themselves as well as in society. This kind of public self-reflection or exposure, the kind that Mary McCarthy's friend Hannah Arendt identified as the essential characteristic of human action, would help others to reflect on their own lives and the changes that were possible to contemplate. In this way, their writings, as well as their lives, provided seeds for the social and cultural movements of the sixties and beyond.