ON THE ROAD: Defining the Beat Generation

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on August 31, 2007 at 3:22 PM, updated August 31, 2007 at 6:00 PM

William S. Burroughs.

What is the Beat Generation?

The question is, who is the Beat Generation?

William S. Burroughs, whose "Naked Lunch" was published in Europe in 1959 and in the United States in 1962, was the brains, a steely-eyed junkie-misanthrope, a gun-toting homosexual fond of science-fiction sex and viruses from outer space.

Allen Ginsberg, who first performed "Howl" in San Francisco in 1955, was the messy heart, a gushy sentimentalist, a sorrowful goofball Communist and soi-disant "queer" kicked out of Cuba for calling Che Guevara "cute," a lyricist to a generation in spiritual turmoil.

And Jack Kerouac -- whose "On the Road" slapped the zeitgeist upside the head 50 years ago Wednesday -- was the blazing spirit, up all night, drinking all day, a doe-eyed hipster-angel and knockabout.

Something throbbed deep inside these still-controversial but undeniably major American writers and a host of other scribes and hangers-on. They coalesced in New York at the wane of World War II and later drifted in and out of San Francisco, Colorado, Paris and Tangier.

The era also birthed the Angry Young Man in London, the Hells Angels in California and the stardom of Marlon Brando and James Dean on the silver screen.

Common to these cultural phenomena is a restlessness, principally among young males, at a time of widespread complacency, economic boom, suburban sprawl and Commie-hunting.

The Beats were rebels constantly in search of new causes, nephews to the Lost Generation of American expatriate writers (Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dos Passos) after World War I.

What does "beat" mean?

In 1948, Kerouac remarked to fellow writer John Clellon Holmes: "This is really a beat generation." Holmes, who wrote the first published Beat novel, "Go," made it official in a 1952 New York Times manifesto, "This is the Beat Generation."

Kerouac had picked up the term "beat" from Herbert Huncke, a hustler, petty thief and drug addict who toured the Beats to the Times Square underworld. It denotes down-and-out, but Kerouac added connotations: beatific, upbeat, jazz beat.

The Beats sought to embody the spontaneity, riffs, spirals and disorderly order of jazz.

You can hear it in the darkly comic routines in Burroughs' nightmarish non-narratives.

"He asked me what the American flag means to me," Burroughs wrote about a strung-out confrontation with a drug-rehab physician. "And I told him, soak it in heroin, Doc, and I'll suck it."

Allen Ginsberg.

You can hear it in Ginsberg's experiments with breath (not meter), as in "Howl":


And you can hear it in the runon sentences of "On the Road":

light pop, and everybody goes ahh ..."

Kerouac, who called it "Spontaneous Prose," gave Ginsberg writing tips, including: "Try never get drunk outside yr own house," "Visionary tics shivering in the chest," and "Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind."

Living (Ginsberg and Burroughs saw old age, both shuffling off in 1997) and dead (Kerouac went young, in 1969), they continued, and still continue, to influence succeeding counterculture insurgents, including Bob Dylan, the Beatles and the Clash.

Who is beatest of them all?

Ginsberg was the Walt Whitman of our time, a shape-shifter adopted by hippie and punk alike. He and Dylan will be remembered by posterity as the great American poets of the latter half of the 20th century.

Burroughs was the mad visionary who foresaw an AIDS-like epidemic, deeply influenced filmmakers (Gus Van Sant), musicians (Patti Smith), performance artists (Laurie Anderson), visual artists (Keith Haring) and writers.

But the Beat Generation will always be defined by its slouching poster boy, Jack Kerouac. And the publication on Sept. 5, 1957, of "On the Road" will always be the Beat movement's watershed moment.

The book's ongoing commercial success (Kerouac died penniless, but by 2004 his estate was worth $20 million) demonstrates that counterculture can be lucrative.

"On the Road" also marked the beginning of the end. The Times hailed the publication of "an authentic work of art" as "a historic occasion." Kerouac went on TV. Columnist Herb Caen coined the derisive epithet "beatnik."

Enter Maynard G. Krebs, with bongos.

Once the square media-machine gets hold of hip, it's unhip.

But the beat of a generation drums on in the roiling river of pages called "On the Road."

Editor's note: In the 1980s, Plain Dealer theater critic Tony Brown extensively interviewed and wrote about Burroughs, and interviewed and wrote about Ginsberg and Beat-
influenced counterculture leaders.