My first class in the "Beat Generation Revisited" course was given in the true Beat spirit of spontaneous improvisation. I went in there to tell a few stories about the origin of the Beat Generation, about some of the key persons involved - then zooming in on Kerouac and his writings, covering his manifestos for spontaneous prose and On the Road. I reminded the students of Kerouac and Ginsberg's belief in "first thought - best thought", and also in Ginsberg's re-enactment of a Dadaist approach to lecturing: if things get too boring feel free to take off your clothes and throw potato salad at the lecturer. Fortunately it didn't come to that, probably because no-one had thought to actually bring potato salad...
To start the lecture off on a proper note I played a track from the Beat Generation CD-box that came out on Rhino Records in 1992: "The Beat Generation" by the pseudonymous band 'Bob McFadden & Dor'. This track was originally the title song to one of several Beat-exploitation flicks of the late fifties and early sixties (this one starring Mamie Van Doren) - the most notorious of which may be the racially purified 1960 film based on Kerouac's novel The Subterreneans, whose black love interest was miraculously turned into a white chick by Hollywood. The publicity for The Beat Generation film is typically stereotypical for the way deviance was sold to a mainstream audience: "The wild, weird, world of the Beatniks! ...Sullen rebels, defiant chicks...searching for a life of their own! The pads...the jazz...the dives... those frantic "way-out" parties... beyond belief!" I made a point out of emphasizing that the course would explore those stereotypes and hopefully dig a bit deeper.
The performer actually hiding behind the faddish name of 'McFadden' is none other than Rod McKuen who went on to become one of the best selling poets of the late 60s and 70s, putting out more than a volume a year for a 20 year period from '67 to '86. In the liner notes to the CD-box he is dubbed the "poet laureate of the Silent Generation", and it is suggested that his training as a "psychological warfare script-writer" for the US army during the Korean War came in handy for his undercover work as a Beatnik... McKuen's poetry is somewhat mushy and lovey-dovey but had and continues to have a wide appeal, as the web-site linked to above indicates. The "Beat Generation" track has actually had an interesting afterlife in a later generation, when Richard Hell and the Voidoids recorded it under the title "Blank Generation" in the punk era of the late 1970s.
I won't try to reproduce my literary history of the Beats, nor the account I gave of the Beats as a social rebellion against post WW II conformity - all that you can read about from my course website - esp. in the chapter from my PhD on the construction of the Beats as a literary generation. But I do want to especially draw your attention to the literary manifesto Kerouac produced when he broke through the publishing barrier he had encountered when trying to get publishers to 'dig' his strange scroll manuscript of On the Road (see previous post for more on the scroll). In the list of 30 pithy tenets titled, "Belief and Technique for Modern Prose" (accessible online from University of Pennsylvania), Kerouac espouses not only a prescriptive ideal for prose writing, but also gives good, concrete advice for living: "3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house", perhaps less good, abstract advice: "6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind", and purified Catholic, long-suffering wisdom: "19. Accept loss forever 20. Believe in the holy contour of life". The point I wanted to make was that for Kerouac any distinction between life and the writing of that life was artificial. He desired more than anything to set his life in words, remembering it all: "17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself", gaining insights and visions ("9. The unspeakable visions of the individual") from the process, creating an uninhibited flow of words, as a jazzman blowing an interminable solo: "7. Blow as deep as you want to blow 8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind".
That led us to a discussion of the language of Beat writing and later of Beatniks and Hipsters trying to live a Beat life-style. For that purpose I dug out another track from the Beat Generation box-set, namely "Basic Hip" by John Brent and Del Close (which you can access here as an mp3-file from the über-cool website that borrows its title from that very track). The track is a hilarious riff on how lingo and subcultural argot always is slippery and tautological to outsiders, such as the "professor" on the track who tries to get "Geets Romo", the Beatnik, to define the key concept of "dig"...
Del Close as Romo
This gave us a good inroads into the thematic analysis of On the Road, which also draws on a limited set of key terms from the Beat lingo, all circularly defining one another: To 'blow', to 'go', to 'dig' - to be 'hip', to be 'beat', to be 'gone'... All activities that one had to engage in while being on the quest for the mysterious 'IT' that Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty desire to find throughout the novel. 'IT' is at various times defined as their lost or dead fathers, the original Fellaheen peoples of the Earth, sex, jazz, God ("Don't you know that God is Pooh Bear"), but mostly as all of the above rolled into one.
The controlling metaphor of the quest is the pearl: "Somewhere down the line the pearl would be handed to me", Sal Paradise (Lost) muses at the onset of his life on the road. This pearl is eventually handed, not to him, but to Dean Moriarty, by an innocent Mexican girl on the plateau the questers cross to get to Mexico City. It now takes the form of the purest mountain crystal the size of a berry plucked especially for them by the Mexican child... I pointed out how the reference to the pearl is an oblique reference to the old chestnut "the world is my oyster" (as we all know oysters are mothers of pearl), which of course, as Kerouac well knew, is from Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor: "Why, then the world's mine oyster, Which I with sword will open. "(2.2.3-4, Pistol to Falstaff)... For anyone who thinks like Truman Capote about On the Road: "That's not writing, that's typing", I recommend that you read the novel with Shakespeare and The Bible as companions because then you will then quickly get smarter than Capote was when he made his famous quip...
I closed the lecture with a few pictures of Kerouac to emphasize the several facets of his personality, which included not just the frenzied, drunken hep-cat of On the Road, but also more contemplative and homely personae. You can see some of those pictures here. BTW, should you have any Kerouac or Beat related collecting/shopping needs try this website...
I'd like to here also give the final word to Kerouac himself, whose distinct voice and diction gives new energy to the words of On the Road. Enjoy Jack riffing on themes from that book and Visions of Cody to Steve Allen's piano accompaniment in the YouTube clip below...
