The Beat Generation

1. The Beat Generation One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Intro Part One: The Beat Generation

2. Post-WWII America After the end of the Second World War in 1945, the United States stood alone as the world’s only economic and political superpower. The postwar economy was expanding. Automobiles and suburbs proliferated. The Baby Boom was on, with more than 65 million children born in the U.S. from 1944 to 1961. Returning WWII veterans took advantage of the G.I. Bill and other benefits to further their education, train for new careers, and start new families. The 1950s came to be seen as an age of advertising, television, and outward conformity, especially in terms of the strictness and rigidity of social and gender roles...

4. The “Golden Era” of the Fifties This seemingly tranquil era in American history has been the subject of nostalgia and controversy ever since. It has frequently been a go-to destination for popular culture:

5. The Tranquillized Fifties And yet even during this seemingly idyllic era, there were voices of objection and rebellion. Poet Robert Lowell called the decade “the tranquillized Fifties.” The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, a phrase taken from the title of a 1955 novel by Sloan Wilson, became emblematic of the lonely figure trying (and often failing) to navigate the crowded sea of societal conformity and expectations. The entire Western world lived in a constant state of anxiety about the possibility of a nuclear attack. American artists and writers were often the loudest and most eloquent voices speaking out about the places in 50s society where the polish started to crack and the stitching started to fray...

6. Visual art Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko redefined what paintings were supposed to look like and how they were made. Their work was often seen as the expression of intense (often painful) personal feelings.

7. Music The wild, unparalleled “noises” of rock’n’roll and jazz served as the soundtrack to many a disaffected young person’s quest for personal freedom in the 50s. Older listeners were often horrified --- Frank Sinatra said in 1957 that “[r]ock and roll is the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression - lewd, sly, in plain fact, dirty - a rancid-smelling aphrodisiac and the martial music of every side-burned delinquent on the face of the earth.”

8. Cinema In the movies, James Dean and Marlon Brando were tortured icons of anti-authoritarian cool in films like Rebel Without a Cause and The Wild One.

9. “What do you got?” The sometimes inarticulate and undefined nature of 50s youth rebellion is perhaps best captured in this famous clip from 1953’s The Wild One…

10. Literature Black writers like James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison pointed out the disparities and racial inequalities in a still mostly segregated nation. Works like Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) helped lay down some of the intellectual framework for the Civil Rights Movement of the next decade.

11. “I was surrounded by phonies.” Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of J.D. Salinger’s 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, famously railed against the phoniness of, well, practically everything that surrounded him and came to be seen as a representative voice of the era.

12. THE BEAT GENERATION Which brings us to the subject of this presentation. The Beat Generation refers to a literary movement centered around “a group of friends who had worked together on poetry, prose, cultural conscience from the mid-1940s until the term became popular nationally in the late 50s” (Ginsberg, 1982 lecture). These friends included most importantly the poet Allen Ginsberg, the novelist Jack Kerouac, and the novelist William S. Burroughs, all of whom met each other around Columbia University in New York City in 1944. Other important Beat writers were Gary Snyder, Neal Cassady, Michael McClure, and John Clellon Holmes. Starting in the mid-1950s, the Beat writers mostly relocated to San Francisco from NYC.

13. THEMES OF THE BEATS • Rejection of materialism and conformist values • Spiritual seeking, especially an interest in Eastern religions • Celebration of spontaneity and immediacy • Interest in society’s downtrodden, neglected, lost, and rejected • Celebration of motion, travel, and “road-going” • Honesty and candor about human condition and personal experiences • Exploration of psychedelic drugs • Sexual liberation and exploration, particularly the acceptance of homosexuality • Quest for personal and literary freedom • Opposition to what they saw as the forces of oppression in American society

14. ALLEN GINSBERG (1926-1997) • Poet • Most famous works include “Howl,” “Sunflower Sutra,” “A Supermarket in California,” “America,” and “Kaddish” • His 1956 volume Howl and Other Poems was the subject of one of the last major obscenity trials in the United States (it was found not to be obscene and to have redeeming literary value) • Later became a key figure in the 1960s counterculture and “hippie” movement • Chief spokesperson and promoter of the Beat writers • His poems are often written in epic free verse, with long lines recalling those of his literary ancestor Walt Whitman • Toured and recorded with Bob Dylan; recorded with punk band The Clash and Paul McCartney of the Beatles

15. Ginsberg and “Howl” “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, Dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, Angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly Connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery Of night…” - opening lines of the 1956 poem

16. “Howl” first read at the Six Gallery in San Francisco 10.7.55 The poet Michael McClure described the atmosphere the night of the reading this way: “We were locked in the Cold War and the first Asian debacle- the Korean War… We hated the war and the inhumanity and the coldness. The country had the feeling of martial law. An undeclared military state had leapt out of Daddy Warbucks’ tanks and sprawled over the landscape. As artists we were oppressed and indeed the people of the nation were oppressed… We knew that we were poets and we had to speak out as poets. We saw that the art of poetry was essentially dead - killed by war, by academics, by neglect, by lack of love, and by disinterest. We knew we could bring it back to life… We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it as we went into it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision.”

17. Ginsberg and psychiatry/institutions Ginsberg had briefly spent time at a psychiatric institution in New York in 1949 and dedicated his most famous poem, “Howl,” to Carl Solomon, a fellow patient he met there. Ginsberg’s mother Naomi suffered from psychological problems for her entire life and was eventually institutionalized until her death in 1956, the same year “Howl” was published. Part III of the poem includes the refrain that Ginsberg is with Solomon in “Rockland,” his fictional name for the institution they had spent time at together (actually the Columbia Presbyterian Psychological Institute). This dramatization of the first reading of the poem at the Six Gallery in 1955 is from the 2010 film Howl . James Franco plays the young Ginsberg.

18. From Howl (2010)

19. JACK KEROUAC (1922-1969) • Novelist • Most famous works are his “road novels,” including On the Road (1957), The Dharma Bums (1958), The Subterraneans (1958), and Big Sur (1962) • Referred to his style of writing as “spontaneous prose” inspired by the improvisatory riffs of jazz musicians • First draft of his most famous book On the Road was typed on a continuous, 120-foot typing scroll of sheets that he had taped together. It was single-spaced, with no margins or paragraph breaks, and it was written in three weeks time in 1951. • Deeply interested in Buddhism; also influenced by the Catholic tradition he was raised in

20. Kerouac reads from On the Road and Visions of Cody on the Steve Allen Show, 1959

21. WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS (1914-1997) • Novelist • Most famous works include Naked Lunch (1959), Junkie (1953), and Nova Express (1964) • Dominant themes of his writing include control, addiction, and homosexuality • Was from a prominent St. Louis family and attended Harvard University • Was a heroin addict for most of his life and used addiction as a key metaphor for the condition of modern man. In his eyes, everyone was addicted to something • Called by Norman Mailer “the only living American novelist conceivably possessed by genius” • Later works pioneered the “cut-up technique,” in which he would take finished, linear texts and physically cut them up and rearrange them to create new, nonlinear works

22. BURROUGHS, CONTINUED Burroughs: “I am attempting to create a new mythology for the space age. I feel that the old mythologies are definitely broken down and are not adequate at the present time.” He recorded a collaboration with Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain shortly before both artists died in the 1990s and read from his work on Saturday Night Live in 1981. He was even in a Nike commercial in 1994.

23. EFFECTS OF THE BEATS According to Allen Ginsberg from a lecture on the Beat Generation in 1982: • General liberation: Sexual “Revolution” or “Liberation,” Gay Liberation, Black Liberation, Women’s Liberation too; • Liberation of the word from censorship; • The evolution of rhythm and blues into rock and roll and rock and roll into high art form, as evidenced by the Beatles, Bob Dylan and other popular musicians who were influenced in the 1960s by the writings of Beat Generation poets and writers; • The spread of ecological consciousness, emphasized by Gary Snyder; • Opposition to the military-industrial machine civilization, as emphasized in the work of Burroughs, Huncke, Ginsberg, and Kerouac;

24. EFFECTS OF THE BEATS, CONTINUED • Attention to what Kerouac called, after Spengler, “Second Religiousness” developing within an advanced civilization; • Return to an appreciation of idiosyncrasy vs. state regimentation • Respect for land and indigenous peoples and creatures, as proclaimed by Kerouac in his slogan from On the Road, “The Earth is an Indian thing.” The 60s counterculture and hippie movements can trace most of their DNA to their spiritual predecessors, the Beats, as can most American bohemian movements since. You can even make a convincing argument that it was the Beats’ interest in popularizing Eastern religion that is partially why we all know what yoga, Zen, and meditation are today!

25. The “Beatnik” The fairly complex political, social, and cultural beliefs of the Beat writers were often reduced to the stereotype of the “Beatnik” character in the popular culture of the late 1950s, after writers like Kerouac and Burroughs had gained prominence. The stereotype of the “Beatnik” was (according to Wikipedia) “a man with a goatee and beard reciting nonsensical poetry and playing bongo drums while free-spirited women wearing black leotards dance.” He often wore a turtleneck and sandals, too! Tourists took bus tours to the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco in search of Beatniks, and there was even a “Rent-a-Beatnik” service in New York for a few years.

26. BEATNIKS IN THEIR NATIVE HABITAT (coffeehouses, mainly)

27. Maynard G. Krebs, Famous Beatnik The most famous of these Beatnik caricatures was the character Maynard G. Krebs on the TV show The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959-1963). In the clip on the next slide, he invokes the name of his “Beat” generation, by which Kerouac originally meant: down and out, exhausted, rejected by society, streetwise, open to experience, and even “beatific” - saintly! It’s unclear which of these meanings of the word “Beat” Maynard is referring to in the clip:

28. Clip from The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis

29. KEN KESEY (1935-2001) • Novelist • Lived most of his life in Oregon • Often considered a bridge between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s; he said in a 1999 interview, “I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a hippie.” • Most famous works include One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) and Sometime a Great Notion (1964) • Wrote an unpublished apprentice novel called Zoo about beatniks living in North Beach in San Francisco • Later associated with Beat figures like Ginsberg and Neal Cassady, although Kerouac declined to write a blurb of endorsement for the first edition of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

30. KESEY AND THE BEATS Kesey described seeing the Beat poet Bob Kaufman on the streets of San Francisco on a visit his parents made there with him in the 1950s: “I can remember driving down to North Beach with my parents and seeing Bob Kaufman out there on the street. I didn’t know he was Bob Kaufman at the time. He had little pieces of Band-Aid tape all over his face, about two inches wide, and little smaller ones like two inches long --- and all of them made into crosses. He came up to the cars, and he was babbling poetry into these cars. He came up to the car I was riding in, and my folks, and started jabbering this stuff into the car. I knew that this was exceptional use of the human voice and the human mind.” (Interview, 2000)

31. KESEY, DRUGS, AND PSYCHIATRIC INSTITUTES When he was a graduate student in the creative writing program at Stanford University in 1960, Kesey began volunteering for government-sponsored drug experiments at the nearby Menlo Park Veterans Hospital. He was paid $75 to take psychedelic drugs like LSD, Ditran, mescaline, and IT-290 and have his reactions monitored. The CIA was researching the drugs for their possible applications as truth serums, weapons in the Cold War, and as cures for psychological diseases like schizophrenia. Kesey began working as a night aide at the Menlo Park hospital where he participated in drug experiments, and his interactions with the patients there became the basis of his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Kesey believed that many of the patients he encountered weren’t actually insane but instead just didn’t fit into the strictures, roles, and expectations of the Cold War American society they lived in.