SOURCE: Honan, Park. “Ginsberg and Kerouac.” In Authors' Lives: On Literary Biography and the Arts of Language, pp. 231-46. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990.

[In the following essay, Honan traces Ginsberg's role in the development of the Beat Movement in American literature and discusses the influences on both Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.]

Slim, bearded, with slightly staring eyes but a pleasant face, Allen Ginsberg stood up in a San Francisco gallery in October 1955 to read “Howl.” This was the beginning of the Beat movement in American literature. The poet had been a wayward Columbia University student, but his poem was to be as famous as any since T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

England has often been more hospitable than America to twentieth-century American poetry (Robert Frost printed his first two volumes in London), and the first edition of “Howl” was printed in England by Villiers, passed through U.S. Customs and published late in 1956 by City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. However, Customs seized 520 copies of the second printing on March 25, 1957, and on April 3 the American Civil Liberties Union decided to contest the legality of the seizure, since it considered the poem not obscene. A California court finally agreed “Howl” had cultural value and meanwhile interest in the obscenity trial made Ginsberg and the Beats famous.

A few months later, when Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road was published by Viking Press in New York on September 5, interest in the Beats became frenzied, and Jack Kerouac was made to explain to the press or television what “Beat” meant. He remembered Herbert Huncke of Chicago saying “Man, I'm beat”—and “I knew right away what he meant somehow,” said Jack; but the word had the connotation of upbeat, and also, as Kerouac insisted, of beatific. “Beat is really saying beatific, see?” To one television interviewer who asked what he was looking for, Kerouac replied that he was waiting to see the face of God. With his enthusiasm for Thelonius Monk and Charlie Parker, he also insisted the word had a relation to jazz and bop. “And so Huncke appeared to us and said ‘I'm beat’ with radiant light shining out of his despairing eyes.” It was a word, Kerouac admitted, “perhaps brought from some midwest carnival or junk cafeteria. It was a new language, actually spade [black] jargon but you soon learned it.” In 1948 John Clellon Holmes had prodded him to characterize his attitude and Kerouac had spoken then of young hipsters in Times Square walking down the street, watchful, catlike, in the street but not of it, and he felt the hipsters expressed his own and his generation's “beatness—I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, because we really know where we are—and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world. … It's something like that. So I guess you might say we're a beat generation.” Holmes had picked up the term in writing “This is the Beat Generation” for The New York Times in 1952, and so the media had the word “Beat” to conjure with five years later when Ginsberg and Kerouac were being interviewed.

What had influenced Ginsberg and Kerouac?

Both young men at Columbia University had known two of the finest professors alive, Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren. A subtle, questing liberal humanist in the tradition of Matthew Arnold (the subject of his first book), Trilling in the 1940s was arguably the most skillful literary critic in America. He was touched and bewildered to have among his students a young Jewish homosexual, Allen Ginsberg, who struck up a personal relationship with him: Ginsberg would show his poems to Trilling, ask for advice, and boast of antics. Lionel and Diana Trilling as Jews were shocked and mystified, for example, when Allen got into trouble with the Dean by writing “Fuck the Jews” on his Hamilton Hall window. Allen claimed his cleaning lady disliked Jews, and he'd hoped the phrase would get his windows cleaned. Columbia's dean was not amused; nor were the Trillings.

Even odder than Allen Ginsberg of New Jersey (where he was born in 1926) was his lover, confederate, and fellow writer Jack Kerouac, a handsome young man born in 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts, to parents with French-Canadian roots in Quebec. Kerouac came to Columbia before the war on an athletic scholarship, drifted back, and was conceded to be the best student in Professor Mark Van Doren's Shakespeare course. Van Doren gave him an A, listened to him, read his typescripts, and told Harcourt Brace to publish his novel, The Town and the City. He was horrified, however, to find Kerouac banned from campus after his arrest as a material witness to a murder. Even so, when an official burst into Ginsberg's room in Hamilton Hall to complain about the window writing, he almost caught Kerouac in bed with Ginsberg.

English teachers should never have a Keats, Christopher Smart, Ginsberg, or Kerouac alive in class, and Diana Trilling's essay “The Other Night at Columbia” reminds us of the problem. Trilling and Van Doren were kindly and tolerant, but the nation's ethos was violent and fractured. In the Depression of the 1930s and during the war Americans had drawn together, but the war years had changed the social structure. In 1939 the United States had only four million taxpayers; in 1945 no less than 45 million were filing taxable returns (in a population of 140 million) as many laboring people had risen into the middle class. Suddenly these people lost their sense of cohesiveness and purpose that even the shortages, dislocations, and sacrifices of war had given. In the late 1940s vicious strikes began. Life became a nervous quest for status and security, whatever the cost, in a lonely crowd. Truman's Fair Deal seemed bumbling and unfair. One heard the pun “To err is Truman.” And, after forty-four months of anxieties of war, President Truman had released an untested uranium bomb (not even the implosion-type plutonium bomb tested at Alamogordo) experimentally on Japan and seemed to have little sense of what he had done. The New York Times of August 11, 1945, had found Truman's remarks on the bomb weird, incredible, disturbing, as if the President were stunned because “the gruesome fantasies of the ‘comic’ strips were actually coming true.”

Then, in a speech that The New York Times printed in full, Stalin, on the eve of Russian elections in February 1946, declared that the cause of the war had been “monopoly capitalism” and that the U.S.S.R. was encircled by enemies. A month later Churchill, in Fulton, Missouri, made his memorable comment that “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent” and that Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia were enslaved. “Last time I saw it all coming,” said Churchill as he compared the Soviet threat with Hitler, “and cried aloud to my own fellow countrymen and the world, but no one paid any attention.” Inside America, as the poet Archibald MacLeish wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in 1949, the Russian conquest of the American people had begun. MacLeish meant Americans were now guided by Russians in offering a bitter opposing policy, a mirror image, to nearly anything the Soviet Union did or proposed.

It was in this atmosphere that General Eisenhower, or Ike, became president of Columbia University and then of the nation. An ironical fate had sent him to a place where Ginsberg and Kerouac had been. When told there were exceptional physicists and chemists on his staff, Ike asked if they were also “exceptional Americans.” Don't send him a long note, people at Columbia said, or his lips will get tired. “Dear Eisenhower,” Kerouac wrote with a friend, “We love you—You're the great big white father. We'd like to fuck you.” Ferlinghetti wanted to impeach him (and wrote a poem on the subject), but Ginsberg and Kerouac wrote dream sketches with Eisenhower as the hero—and Kerouac explains that one must love Eisenhower if one is a child. However, if Ike's scorn for technocrats and love of America were appealing, his ineffectuality was more important. He took office as president in 1953 during Senator McCarthy's witch hunting of supposed Communists. When McCarthy attacked a teacher at Columbia University, Ike did nothing and indeed kept silent when McCarthy tried to defame Eisenhower's own friend and former companion at arms, General Zwicker. Army officers might have been seriously demoralized, but Ike stated that he would “remain aloof” since he would not compromise the nation's executive power. But what was that power, then, if it let a McCarthy with the instincts of a Hitler do what he wished to people? McCarthy was supported by Len Hall, chairman of the Republican party, and by senators such as Dirksen, Jenner, Knowland, and Bridges. And the great white father, formerly president of Columbia and then of the nation, did nothing and said nothing to check McCarthyism.

Eisenhower became a profound symbol for the Beat writers. A good and capable man, the invader of Europe, he presided over a smugly opportunistic, spiritually weak America which had lost its way and become mechanical and inhuman.

“Howl” was at once a roar of protest against Eisenhower's America and a deeply moving, loving poem, in tears and beyond tears and directed against an ethos that kills or outlaws the spirit. It was meant to be recited. Ginsberg, in his performances, said its lines with gusto, gesticulating, screaming, begging, urging, and at least once after taking off his clothes. His hipsters in their dreams and drugs, who “cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully” or who went to asylums—as his friend Carl Solomon did—were images of the soul in reaction to Hiroshima and the Cold War and the materialism of a modern, technological society. If Moloch possesses the “mind” and science turns nearly every creed or illumination into “bullshit,” then the beleaguered soul may thrive among the eccentric or crazed—or with Carl Solomon, the Jewish reader of Dostoevsky whom Ginsberg met in the Columbia Psychiatric Institute. Ginsberg was waiting to be assigned a bed when he heard Solomon mention “repentant mystics” and told him, “I'm Myshkin” (a reference to Dostoevsky's holy idiot) to which Solomon replied, “I'm Kirilov” (the nihilist in The Possessed).

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
                    where you're madder than I am.

Ginsberg and Kerouac saw themselves not as political agitators, but as writers devoted to art, to technique. Kerouac spent months with Stendhal's The Red and the Black and Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, studying methods scene by scene. When reading Hart Crane's The Bridge he and Ginsberg walked to the Brooklyn Bridge to compare its engineering with Crane's art. They discussed individual lines from Shakespeare, such as “This is the Forest of Arden”: where should the emphasis fall, what did it mean in dramatic context? With the wealthy, drug-taking William S. Burroughs they also explored the self. They had “Dostoevskian confrontations” in which they criticized their feeling and its expression. Kerouac, who was bisexual, lived in Manhattan apartments shared by six or fifteen other people, went to bed with two or three others at the same time. Though edgy about “love,” a commitment, and sometimes annoyed by Ginsberg's advances, he believed that bodies were to be used freely.

Burroughs had friends among con men and gangsters, who stored guns or stolen goods in Kerouac's flat, but he knew all sides of New York. Kerouac accepted Bill Burroughs as part of a Balzacian education in the city. Drugs and alcohol were to be used not just for kicks but to discover new weird states of consciousness, and indulgence was to be paid for by a steady battering at one's typewriter, whatever one's head felt like. Kerouac typed so fast his machine sounded like static on the radio, a blur of sound resulting in heaps of words that came too quickly for sheets of paper; he began to write on scrolls of teletype paper. His subject was America; he compared himself to Thomas Wolfe of Look Homeward, Angel and learned from Wolfe's sensuous gigantism. His subject was importantly America then, with its House Un-American Activities Committee witch hunts, regimentation of the average person, censorship of artists and filmmakers, and the Cold War (soon to be a hot war in Korea and Vietnam). “The Cold War is the imposition of a vast mental barrier on everybody,” Ginsberg later told the Paris Review. “A hardening, a shutting off to the perceptions of desire and tenderness which everybody knows,” and this makes for “a self-consciousness which is the substitute for communication with the outside” and a “fear of total feeling, really, total being.”

Ginsberg and Kerouac saw the worst obscenity as “God is dead,” and forgave friends for all faults but that of not being “serious.” They themselves wasted time on alcohol and drugs, and lacked sleep and quiet routines, but two benefits accrued from their behavior. Unlike many contemporary writers, including Lowell, Mailer, and Bellow, the Beats functioned as a group; Ginsberg and Kerouac prolonged their undergraduate days and benefited from mutual encouragement, intelligent talk, and debate. Since they were mild and receptive in manner—at least before fame made Kerouac uncharacteristically boastful some nights, though even then he alienated few of his friends—they added other writers to their informal group besides Burroughs. Out at Berkeley, Ginsberg attached himself to a circle of San Francisco poets. He met Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a Sorbonne-educated seaman and poet who ran City Lights Bookstore and had a good sense of French and American literature. Ginsberg also renewed his friendship with Philip Lamantia, a poet born in San Francisco, though he had moved to New York, where he helped to edit the surrealist magazine View. Lamantia brought Caribbean mambo, Afro-Cuban rhythms, and the importance of jazz fully into the reckonings of Beat writers, who imitated jazz in verse rhythms and in moods and patterns of their prose. Ginsberg met the poets Robert Duncan, Chris MacLaine, Gerd Stern, and Leonard Hall, the Tibetan Buddhist scholar, but more important to him was a run-in in New York with a young, cherubic, prankish Italian-American and ex-criminal, Gregory Corso, who had sheaves of poems. Corso at that time was twenty-one. (He had been an inept robber, it seems, too pleased with his plan to chat with his gang by walkie-talkie and had spent three years on a robbery charge in Clinton Prison—a blessing, as it gave him time to write.)

First, then, their easy camaraderie helped the Beats to know their nation. Second, it helped them to rid themselves of untested beliefs of that nation's culture. They tried to get outside America while living and observing in it, and studied the loving, detached Walt Whitman, Thoreau of Walden Pond, and Henry Miller alive at Big Sur. Nelson Algren, who was to telegraph his praise of On the Road to Kerouac, had shown in his own novels and stories an implicit patriotism with a severe criticism of city life and he had gone outside Chicago by diving into its drug-pushing lower depths (depicted in his novel The Man with the Golden Arm). When I published an essay on Algren in Chicago's New City in 1964, the novelist J. T. Farrell was furious: the article, he wrote, “seemed to me good until I thought about it. It is not criticism but a personal expression … about Nelson Algren,” and Algren furthermore was only a novelist with a “pretty good talent for blasting” (New City, March 1, 1964). But it was blasting in combination with his love for Chicago that made Algren palatable to the Beats, who valued writing that was clearly “personal expression” and who felt that all they wrote had to come from what they had lived through. Their works are autobiographical because the only trusted viewpoint in Beat writing is an “I.” No other voice can be honest enough to report the truth. Kerouac's heroes are not simply like Kerouac but, deeply, are Kerouac, as Sal Paradise is in On the Road. The voice speaking in Ginsberg's poems examines Ginsberg: he adopts no role, shelters behind no substitute, and examines himself directly or indirectly in every poem he writes. So too the language in Beat works includes four-letter words since the authors used these words in talk. They used images that had impressed themselves on their minds, and did not try to seek for artificial pictures.

All is to begin with the self and yet, as in Whitman and Emerson, the self is a point of religious raying-out. For the Beats each person is born to wonder, dream, guess, and hope, to relate to the cosmos through truths of ancestors; and Zen Buddhism, if a rich way, offers only one of the multiple interlacing truths of the spirit. Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, and Zen ideas confirm one another with interchangeable symbols, so that Ginsberg, the Jew, finds the cross valid. But the cross is a beckoning image. Beyond the cornices of New York buildings, as Ginsberg and Kerouac felt in Times Square when neon advertising signs suffused the night sky with red, there was a holy architecture out in space asking them for a “panoramic awareness”—but that implied looking at America itself. Though Beat writing is usually religious and mystical it is freed from any religious or mystical certainty in doctrine. It is Transcendental exactly in the New England sense of Emerson and Thoreau, since illuminations are to come from looking at the here and now, in this case, at the streets and geography of America. Fortunately in the 1950s, as a San Francisco renaissance in jazz and poetry overtook Greenwich Village in New York, Ginsberg and Kerouac had been having America interpreted for them by a young man who was “on the road” and one of the best drivers alive—Neal Cassady.

Young men bummed across America in the late 1940s and 1950s, as my brother and I did. We never met Neal Cassady, though we wish we had, but we met young thugs who talked about America's beauty out in the desert or at Denver near the Rockies. To be on the road as we were in a 1925 Dodge car, or riding in boxcars, was to see and hear about that beauty. Even old jailbirds on railway-repair gangs could wonder aloud over America's landscape, and Neal Cassady had a good feeling for landscape. Raised by a drunken father in Denver, Cassady had been in and out of reform school; starting at age fourteen he had stolen some five hundred cars, and had earned a reputation as Denver's greatest “cocksman.” When Kerouac met him in the 1940s Cassady had been reading Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dumas, and Proust to impress girls—but he wanted to write. He seemed as handsome as a movie cowboy, a Gene Autry, with a slim build and rugged but well-cut features. He talked to seduce and his comments on writing were good, as when he told Kerouac that one should write as if one were the first person on earth and was “humbly and sincerely” putting down what one felt and saw, with sorrows and desires and “passing thoughts.”

He was cool, easy, and generous, until he became restless; he let his wife Carolyn sleep with Kerouac for a time in a ménage-à-trois. And he was sublime behind a wheel. Swerving round a truck at 110 miles per hour and turning his head, smiling and exulting, Cassady as Dean Moriarity becomes in On the Road more than an archetypal American: he is a saint of freedom who values experience, movement, and the beauty of loose, easy readiness. He is on a quest back and forth across America, in which questing itself is the goal. Even in real life this man's actions seemed symbolic: as Cassady risked all in the flick of a finger on the steering wheel, so in the instant of quick spontaneous writing the Beat poet throws his life into a phrase. And, since Kerouac and Ginsberg kept drifting back to bohemian intellectual New York, Cassady blew through that “dragged-out end of the Columbia scene like a fresh wind from the West,” as Joyce Johnson remembers in Minor Characters. American academies were choked by intellect and science. Poetry and novel writing seemed to be in the hands of academically trained writers obsessed by taste, irony, innuendo, attenuated feeling and New Yorker niceties of style, so stifled they could not see how lifeless their own work was. (The only intellectual to be trusted, the Beats felt, was one who valued feeling over reason.) Cassady was saved by instinct, boyish grace, impulse—moving and free like a latterday Huck Finn. Kerouac saw himself and Ginsberg and Cassady as a creative triangle, with Cassady perhaps as its apex—its guide, at least, from the West. Rivers, plains, deserts—over three thousand miles of westwardness had made the American experience; the American mind responds to geography; and so Cassady (and On the Road) symbolized a terrain and its sources of renewal for the spirit.

Ginsberg recalls him best in “The Green Automobile,” and Kerouac, after On the Road, portrays him convincingly as Cody Pomeray in Big Sur, showing us a mellow hero after Cassady had served some time in prison on a minor drug charge. John Clellon Holmes, a New England novelist four years Kerouac's junior (their birthday, March 12, was the same), in turn depicts Cassady as Hart Kennedy in the Beat novel Go, although Holmes found Cassady's outlook less stimulating than Kerouac's “special view of the world.” But for all his excess of charm, Cassady lacked self-discipline to survive for long, as man or writer: in 1968 he died of exposure on the railway tracks. A year later Kerouac's self-indulgent love for drink killed him at forty-seven.

If Neal Cassady was the hero of the Beats, was there any place for a heroine? In attacking the Beat Generation in the late 1950s, Time, Life, and other American journals chiefly had males in mind. As Fred McDarrah in Saga (August 1960) noticed, for Time magazine Jack Kerouac was a depraved spokesman for young men, or the “latrine house laureate of Hobohemia.” Can women be hoboes even if bohemians? In a Negro magazine, America's typical “beatnik” (an unpatriotic word taking its suffix from the Russian Sputnik) is a “pseudo-intellectual” who smokes reefers and lives “in protest of something or other.” Had groups of women, since the suffragettes, often been known to “protest”? Life doubted that “pad-sharing” females could be many, but still some women, even nice, educated ones, were dropping out, going to live in Greenwich Village. The magazine looked into this phenomenon, and, to McDarrah's surprise, it ran a photo essay showing a “beat chick dressed in black” in her pad. Nearby were “naked light bulbs, a hot plate for warming [the] expresso coffee pot and bean cans, a coal stove for heating baby's milk” and “drying [the] chick's leotards.” To complete this forlornly truthful view, Life showed a “beat baby who has gone to sleep on the floor after playing with beer cans.”

This particular photo essay may have been faked, but women unquestionably were sharing their lives with bohemians. Artists and would-be's from San Francisco, attracted to New York because the scene was livelier and survival easier, had invaded Greenwich Village. They included poets, painters, photographers, dancers, and jazz musicians, living in the East Village near warehouses and factory lofts and Fourth Avenue bookshops. In her vivid memoir Minor Characters, Joyce Johnson—who was then Kerouac's young lover—recalls the women. Their men took no jobs but felt it was all right for a wife or girlfriend to work for wages since women had no creative endeavors to be distracted from; and, says Joyce, “women didn't mind, or, if they did, they never said—not until years later.”

Kerouac and Ginsberg had powerful, claiming mothers, despite the fact that Ginsberg's mother spent many years in an asylum; Kerouac's beloved “Mémère” took precedence over each of the three women he married. Beat women could be muses, angels, whores, or typists of the Great Male Work, but the only way they rose to fame was usually by spectacular death, as when Burroughs accidentally shot his wife, Joan, in Mexico City. Ginsberg in 1954 recorded a “dream letter” from Clellon Holmes with the words, “The social organization which is most true of itself to the artist is the boy gang,” to which Ginsberg added in his journal, “not society's perfum'd marriage.” For a woman, a relationship with a Beat writer was likely to be disastrous.

Joyce, in her black sweater, black skirt, and black stockings and hair hanging down over her shoulders, waited in her apartment for Jack Kerouac. After making love, he liked to sleep alone. He was “brotherly,” and she listened when Jack and his friends talked. Always the voices of men, only the men, would fall and rise as beer glasses collected, she recalls. Cassady's wife, Carolyn, who slept with her two men, similarly had been very grateful when a man asked her opinion. Mostly, “Beat” women were as useful as robots might be, as visible as nondescript furniture, obedient as collies. One night Jack took Joyce to a Bleecker Street poetry recital; in a coffee shop a neat, trim-bearded black man was reading an “academic” poem, with a few hip touches. Later he introduced himself: he was LeRoi Jones. Proud of Hetty Cohen, his girlfriend, he did the nicest possible thing and instead of talking about metaphors LeRoi graciously said, “This woman over here is Hetty. …” That was enough; Hetty and Joyce were noticed, and in public could expect little more.

Their impasse was that a woman's notion of her selfhood was fixed by what men thought, and Kerouac had not examined that sort of oppression. Yet the Beats encouraged a change in at least two ways. They greatly valued feeling and spontaneity or a full, easy voicing of the self, and opposed all notions of social rank and race and ideas of hierarchy, including the idea that God is somehow privileged or above us. If presidents and generals were to be seen as ridiculous and Eisenhower was only to be “fucked” (literally and perhaps joyfully), the next idol to topple might be the American male. Beat writing did speak for equality and honesty, and Jack did not mislead Joyce, though he hardly treated her well; he stumblingly tried to be her “friend” or “brother”; he did not try to shut her up. She behaved in his company as a nice Jewish girl from upper Manhattan might be expected to do in marriage, but was wiser when she left him.

Disliking marriage (though sometimes remarrying), Beat writers saw friendship as preferable—a way of relating without claims. They condemned all static relationships and felt that in a muddying, blinding world playing with war and nuclear bombs, social connections were suspect. The self, the soul of each person must be heard; the body tells us about ourselves; masturbation is truthful and pure, not obliging. One's sexual partner ought to be chosen casually. In denying notions of obligation, the Beat writer implies that women have as much to gain from a new truth to self as men do. The Beat discovers that we are truly tender and gentle, not beings of violence, which is caused by a social order (under capitalism or communism) which represses wonder and love and viciously exalts technology and material values. In emphasizing the holy nature of the body, the Beat is not especially “male” and would liberate us all; and a poet such as Sally Stern found it natural to write in a mode similar to that of other Beats. But although the Beat message was potentially liberating, in reality, the female hipster was not liberated. Most of her views were not greatly different from those of a Bronxville High School girl—and the suburban debutante became a “beat chick” often enough to face rather genteel poverty in the Village. Still, many years later, and after the insights of feminism, one feels that some Beat attitudes about the self anticipated the future.

The Beats were certainly to affect the literature of subsequent decades just as they had themselves drawn inspiration from earlier writers, especially from mainstreams in British and American poetry. Whitman above all is a beloved spirit for the Beats, as Ginsberg's “Supermarket in California” shows in content and form. Whitman's free-verse line, his generous egotism, moral sensuality, interest in colors, textures, surfaces, and sounds of New York all echo poignantly in the California poem. Emily Dickinson's spontaneity and delicacy set a mark for Corso. The deceptively casual “Autobiography” by Ferlinghetti—a poem for jazz accompaniment—is a fine, deft sketch of a man who is defined with the help of Twain, Melville, and Thoreau, as well of course as Pound, Yeats, Eliot, and others. Moreover, Ginsberg for one is attentive to the rhythms of English prophetic verse, so that, for example, the cadences of Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno

Let Noah and his company approach the throne of Grace, and do homage to the Ark of their Salvation …

may be heard faintly in “Howl”:

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
                    connection to the starry dynamo in the
                    machinery of night.

Ginsberg, indeed, says that he was influenced by Smart, Blake, and others, but that he wrote “Howl” mainly to satisfy Kerouac's sense of sound.

Kerouac's sound is determined by bop. In jazz a player improvises from the musical metrics of the instant; a syncopated melodic beat carries the musical improvisations up from level to level—as in Louis Armstrong's jazz. But bop, exemplified by Charlie Parker, frees jazz from the monotony of boring melodies, and moves up from level to level on sheer improvisations alone. Bop avoids meaning and fosters movement, free creation, and spontaneity. “I'm the Bop writer,” says Kerouac's hero in The Subterraneans, and for Ray Smith-as-Kerouac in The Dharma Bums Charlie Parker is king and “founder of the Bop generation.” As bop frees itself from theme and exists in improvisation, so On the Road departs from conventional “theme” and exists as movement, a movement between six cities or a mad tour with Sal Paradise saying “Yes, he's mad” or “Yes, he's my brother” as he clings to Dean Moriarty (Cassady) in a swing from New York to New Orleans, Mexico City, Denver, San Francisco, and back to Chicago and New York.

Ginsberg and other Beats also admired the spontaneity of bop improvising. Ginsberg battered out the first part of “Howl” in a mad rush to give it the flow “Kerouac would like the sound of”; he took peyote to write the “Moloch” passage. He drugged himself on amphetamines, morphine, and Dexadrine to write “Kaddish”—a failure—and left off drugs in despair, to return to them later. But Beat writers were not always high when they wrote, nor did they often compose whole works at one sitting. Good phrases such as “hydrogen jukebox” do not usually come easily. Most of the good Beat poems seem to have been composed on the principle of John Keats and Wilfred Owen: the draft is written quickly, perhaps with the help of notes, and then very carefully revised. But the bop inspiration is usually there.

Ginsberg's best poems have a strong, compelling social urgency, as though the fate of American society (perhaps of the globe) depended on whether one American, at last, could tell the truth about himself. An effect of improvised phrasing combines with delicacy in cadence in Ginsberg's “Under the World,” a poem as religious as Donne's Divine Sonnets or Hopkins's so-called Terrible Sonnets. Religious, too, is “The Lion for Real,” Ginsberg's tribute to his teacher Lionel Trilling. “Death to Van Gogh's Ear!” is an important poem in that it elucidates Ginsberg's views of the political and economic present and the cultural past, even if its technique is not as fine as that in “Supermarket,” “Under the World,” “Mescaline,” “The Green Automobile,” or his relatively early “Paterson.”

Gregory Corso's tonal range is greater, although his discoveries in sound are less important than Ginsberg's. He is almost conventionally lyrical in “Horses” and “Marriage”—good poems to read aloud to those new to the Beats—and even in these there is a “bop” quality of seemingly free improvisation. “The Thin Thin Line”—typically Beat in exploring a personal experience (the simple, humdrum, and yet bafflingly strange act of falling asleep)—and in contrast the wittily grand “Ode to Old England & its Language” together suggest Corso's suppleness and variety as a poet. “Columbia U Poesy Reading—1975” amusingly shows what time has given the Beats: fame, respect, less hair (at least in Ginsberg's case), self-doubt, perhaps more humility in thinking of forebears such as “Emily D,” Shelley, Southey, Chatterton, Coleridge, and De Quincey, and a wry (but not very serious) sense of failure with renewed self-love and pluck. Success hurts Beats—and its results are best explored in Kerouac's deeply honest Big Sur. (Ginsberg is badly served by his own Collected Poems, since he has written too many works in which sentiment and self-indulgence replace passion; only a small number of his poems are excellent.) Gary Snyder is the best poet of the lesser Beats, fresh and deft in exploring moods of his recollecting of recent experience, and Philip Lamantia is an authentic Beat in regarding the lyric as a means of spiritual quest.

Subsequent writers were influenced by these precedents. Through their jazz friends and poets such as LeRoi Jones, the Beats in the 1950s were in the vanguard of anti-racist feeling, which helped to spark off Civil Rights movements a decade later. They quickly influenced songwriting, and journalism. Protest songs carry the Beat note often. The New Journalism of Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test or Hunter Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has a “Beat” spontaneity in effect. Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance owes much to Kerouac's locating of meaning in movement. Journalism and semi-autobiographical works may respond much more quickly to influences than do the conservative genres of biography and history. But the Beat influence has helped us to question our reportage on, and accounting for, the human past. We no longer think it absolutely truthful to account for past lives or events in a wholly retrospective way, as though, in the past, the future were already known, fixed and settled, or as though unpredictability, emotional experience, and the “feeling” of anyone's living through a day ought not to concern any historian. It seems significant that journalism, which records history of the present, on occasion took a new form in reporting the Vietnam War: piece after piece on Vietnam brought home to Americans the moods and immediate sensations of patrols in combat, and often in a prose deeply indebted to Kerouac. The Beats have brought literature closer to the texture of life, and their influence has not ended.

Kerouac's unusual sensibility has become clearer to us over the years. We perceive, for example, how each of his heroes determines the syntax and tone of each novel. We feel the difference between the nervous lucidity of On the Road, the long meandering “bop”-style sentences in The Subterraneans that are attuned to its hero, Leo, the notes of wonder and quest in the manner of Dharma Bums with its splendid landscapes and dialogues, and the elegiac, graphic, troubled, and yet often lyric manner of Big Sur. At their best Kerouac and Ginsberg are as artful as any other writers of the 1950s and 1960s and so we may feel that just as the Beat movement has affected our ways of reporting on experience it has refreshed art itself, while producing more than one exciting American classic.