The Cool School

by Glenn O'Brien

  It goes back to the inky ditties of old cartoons (Krazy Kat with the irrational brick)—to Laurel and Hardy in the Foreign Legion—to Count Dracula and his smile to Count Dracula shivering and hissing back before the Cross—to the Golem horrifying the persecutors of the Ghetto-to the quiet sage in a movie about India, unconcerned about the plot—to the giggling old Tao Chinaman trotting down the sidewalk of old Clark Gable Shanghai—to the holy old Arab warning the hotbloods that Ramadan is near. To the Werewolf of London a distinguished doctor in his velour smoking jacket smoking his pipe over a lamplit tome on botany and suddenly hairs grown on his hands, his cat hisses, and he slips out into the night with a cape and a slanty cap like the caps of people in breadlines—to Lamont Cranston so cool and sure suddenly becoming the frantic Shadow going mwee hee hee ha ha in the alleys of New York imagination. To Popeye the sailor and the Sea Hag and the meaty gunwales of boats, to Cap’n Easy and Wash Tubbs screaming with ecstasy over canned peaches on a cannibal isle, to Wimpy looking X-eyed for a juicy hamburger such as they make no more. To Jiggs ducking before a household of furniture flying through the air, to Jiggs and the boys at the bar and the corned beef and cabbage of old woodfence noons—to King Kong his eyes looking into the hotel window with tender huge love for Fay Wray—nay, to Bruce Cabot in mate’s cap leaning over the rail of a fogbound ship saying “Come aboard.” It goes back to when grapefruits were thrown at crooners and harvestworkers at bar-rails slapped burlesque queens on the rump. To when fathers took their sons to the Twi League game. To the days of Babe Callahan on the waterfront, Dick Barthelmess camping under a London streetlamp. To dear old Basil Rathbone looking for the Hound of the Baskervilles (a dog big as the Gray Wolf who will destroy Odin)—to dear old bleary Doctor Watson with a brandy in his hand. To Joan Crawford her raw shanks in the fog, in striped blouse smoking a cigarette at sticky lips in the door of the waterfront dive. To train whistles of steam engines out above the moony pines. To Maw and Paw in the Model A clanking on to get a job in California selling used cars making a whole lotta money. To the glee of America, the honesty of America, the honesty of oldtime grafters in straw hats as well as the honesty of old time waiters in line at the Brooklyn Bridge in Winterset, the funny spitelessness of old bigfisted America like Big Boy Williams saying “Hoo? Hee? Huh?” in a movie about Mack Trucks and slidingdoor lunchcarts. To Clark Gable, his certain smile, his confident leer. Like my grandfather this America was invested with wild selfbelieving individuality and this had begun to disappear around the end of World War II with so many great guys dead (I can think of half a dozen from my own boyhood groups) when suddenly it began to emerge again, the hipsters began to appear gliding around saying “Crazy, man.”

  When I first saw the hipsters creeping around Times Square in 1944 I didn’t like them either. One of them, Huncke of Chicago, came up to me and said “Man, I’m beat.” I knew right away what he meant somehow. At that time I still didn’t like bop which was then being introduced by Bird Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and Bags Jackson (on vibes), the last of the great swing musicians was Don Byas who went to Spain right after, but then I began . . . but earlier I’d dug all my jazz in the old Minton Playhouse (Lester Young, Ben Webster, Joey Guy, Charlie Christian, others) and when I first heard Bird and Diz in the Three Deuces I knew they were serious musicians playing a goofy new sound and didn’t care what I thought, or what my friend Seymour thought. In fact I was leaning against the bar with a beer when Dizzy came over for a glass of water from the bartender, put himself right against me and reached both arms around both sides of my head to get the glass and danced away, as though knowing I’d be singing about him someday, or that one of his arrangements would be named after me someday by some goofy circumstance. Charlie Parker was spoken of in Harlem as the greatest new musician since Chu Berry and Louis Armstrong.

  Anyway, the hipsters, whose music was bop, they looked like criminals but they kept talking about the same things I liked, long outlines of personal experience and vision, nightlong confessions full of hope that had become illicit and repressed by War, stirrings, rumblings of a new soul (that same old human soul). And so Huncke appeared to us and said “I’m beat” with radiant light shining out of his despairing eyes . . . a word perhaps brought from some midwest carnival or junk cafeteria. It was a new language, actually spade (Negro) jargon but you soon learned it, like “hung up” couldn’t be a more economical term to mean so many things. Some of these hipsters were raving mad and talked continually. It was jazzy. Symphony Sid’s all-night modern jazz and bop show was always on. By 1948 it began to take shape. That was a wild vibrating year when a group of us would walk down the street and yell hello and even stop and talk to anybody that gave us a friendly look. The hipsters had eyes. That was the year I saw Montgomery Clift, unshaven, wearing a sloppy jacket, slouching down Madison Avenue with a companion. It was the year I saw Charley Bird Parker strolling down Eighth Avenue in a black turtleneck sweater with Babs Gonzales and a beautiful girl.

  By 1948 the hipsters, or beatsters, were divided into cool and hot. Much of the misunderstanding about hipsters and the Beat Generation in general today derives from the fact that there are two distinct styles of hipsterism: the cool today is your bearded laconic sage, or schlerm, before a hardly touched beer in a beatnik dive, whose speech is low and unfriendly, whose girls say nothing and wear black: the “hot” today is the crazy talkative shining eyed (often innocent and openhearted) nut who runs from bar to bar, pad to pad looking for everybody, shouting, restless, lushy, trying to “make it” with the subterranean beatniks who ignore him. Most Beat Generation artists belong to the hot school, naturally since that hard gemlike flame needs a little heat. In many cases the mixture is 50-50. It was a hot hipster like myself who finally cooled it in Buddhist meditation, though when I go in a jazz joint I still feel like yelling “Blow baby blow!” to the musicians though nowadays I’d get 86d for this. In 1948 the “hot hipsters” were racing around in cars like in On the Road looking for wild bawling jazz like Willis Jackson or Lucky Thompson (the early) or Chubby Jackson’s big band while the “cool hipsters” cooled it in dead silence before formal and excellent musical groups like Lennie Tristano or Miles Davis. It’s still just about the same, except that it has begun to grow into a national generation and the name “Beat” has stuck (though all hipsters hate the word).

  The word “beat” originally meant poor, down and out, deadbeat, on the bum, sad, sleeping in subways. Now that the word is belonging officially it is being made to stretch to include people who do not sleep in subways but have a certain new gesture, or attitude, which I can only describe as a new more. “Beat Generation” has simply become the slogan or label for a revolution in manners in America. Marlon Brando was not really first to portray it on the screen. Dane Clark with his pinched Dostoievskyan face and Brooklyn accent, and of course Garfield, were first. The private eyes were Beat, if you will recall. Bogart. Lorre was Beat. In M, Peter Lorre started a whole revival, I mean the slouchy street walk.

  I wrote On the Road in three weeks in the beautiful month of May 1941 while living in the Chelsea district of lower West Side Manhattan, on a 100-foot roll and put the Beat Generation in words in there, saying at the point where I am taking part in a wild kind of collegiate party with a bunch of kinds in an abandoned miner’s shack “These kids are great but where are Dean Moriarty and Carlo Marx? Oh well I guess they wouldn’t belong in this gang, they’re too dark, too strange, too subterranean and I am slowly beginning to join a new kind of beat generation.” The manuscript of Road was turned down on the grounds that it would displease the sales manager of my publisher at that time, though the editor, a very intelligent man, said “Jack this is just like Dostoievsky, but what can I do at this time?” It was too early. So for the next six years I was a bum, a brakeman, a seaman, a panhandler, a pseudo-Indian in Mexico, anything and everything, and went on writing because my hero was Goethe and I believed in art and hoped some day to write the third part of Faust, which
I have done in Doctor Sax. Then in 1952 an article was published in The New York Times Sunday magazine saying, the headline, “‘This is a Beat Generation’” (in quotes like that) and in the article it said that I had come up with the term first “when the face was harder to recognize,” the face of the generation. After that there was some talk of the Beat Generation but in 1955 I published an excerpt from Road (melling it with parts of Visions of Neal) under the pseudonym “Jean-Louis,” it was entitled Jazz of the Beat Generation and was copyrighted as being an excerpt from a novel-in-progress entitled Beat Generation (which I later changed to On the Road at the insistence of my new editor) and so then the term moved a little faster. The term and the cats. Everywhere began to appear strange hepcats and even college kids went around hep and cool and using the terms I’d heard on Times Square in the early Forties, it was growing somehow. But when the publishers finally took a dare and published On the Road in 1957 it burst open, it mushroomed, everybody began yelling about a Beat Generation. I was being interviewed everywhere I went for “what I meant” by such a thing. People began to call themselves beatniks, beats, jazzniks, bopniks, bugniks and finally I was called the “avatar” of all this.

  Yet it was as a Catholic, it was not at the insistence of any of these “niks” and certainly not with their approval either, that I went one afternoon to the church of my childhood (one of them), Ste. Jeanne d’Arc in Lowell, Mass., and suddenly with tears in my eyes and had a vision of what I must have really meant with “Beat” anyhow when I heard the holy silence in the church (I was the only one in there, it was five P.M., dogs were barking outside, children yelling, the fall leaves, the candles were flickering alone just for me), the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific . . . There’s the priest preaching on Sunday morning, all of a sudden through a side door of the church comes a group of Beat Generation characters in strapped raincoats like the I.R.A. coming in silently to “dig” the religion . . . I knew it then.

  But this was 1954, so then what horror I felt in 1957 and later in 1958 naturally to suddenly see “Beat” being taken up by everybody, press and TV and Hollywood borscht circuit to include the “juvenile delinquency” shot and the horrors of a mad teeming billyclub New York and L.A. and they began to call that Beat, that beatific . . . bunch of fools marching against the San Francisco Giants protesting baseball, as if (now) in my name and I, my childhood ambition to be a big league baseball star hitter like Ted Williams so that when Bobby Thomson hit that homerun in 1951 I trembled with joy and couldn’t get over it for days and wrote poems about how it is possible for the human spirit to win after all! Or, when a murder, a routine murder took place in North Beach, they labeled it a Beat Generation slaying although in my childhood I’d been famous as an eccentric in my block for stopping the younger kids from throwing rocks at the squirrels, for stopping them from frying snakes in cans or trying to blow up frogs with straws. Because my brother had died at the age of nine, his name was Gerard Kerouac, and he’d told me “Ti Jean never hurt any living being, all living beings whether it’s just a little cat or squirrel or whatever, all, are going to heaven straight into God’s snowy arms so never hurt anything and if you see anybody hurt anything stop them as best you can” and when he died a file of gloomy nuns in black from St. Louis de France parish had filed (1926) to his deathbed to hear his last words about Heaven. And my father too, Leo, had never lifted a hand to punish me, or to punish the little pets in our house, and this teaching was delivered to me by the men in my house and I have never had anything to do with violence, hatred, cruelty, and all that horrible nonsense which, nevertheless, because God is gracious beyond all human imagining, he will forgive in the long end . . . that million years I’m asking about you, America.

  And so now they have beatnik routines on TV, starting with satires about girls in black and fellows in jeans with snap-knives and sweatshirts and swastikas tattooed under their armpits, it will come to respectable m.c.s of spectaculars coming out nattily attired in Brooks Brothers jean-type tailoring and sweater-type pull-ons, in other words, it’s a simple change in fashion and manners, just a history crust—like from the Age of Reason, from old Voltaire in a chair to romantic Chatterton in the moonlight—from Teddy Roosevelt to Scott Fitzgerald . . . So there’s nothing to get excited about. Beat comes out, actually, of old American whoopee and it will only change a few dresses and pants and make chairs useless in the livingroom and pretty soon we’ll have Beat Secretaries of State and there will be instituted new tinsels, in fact new reasons for malice and new reasons for virtue and new reasons for forgiveness . . .

  But yet, but yet, woe, woe unto those who think that the Beat Generation means crime, delinquency, immorality, amorality . . . woe unto those who attack it on the grounds that they simply don’t understand history and the yearnings of human souls . . . woe unto those who don’t realize that America must, will, is, changing now, for the better I say. Woe unto those who believe in the atom bomb, who believe in hating mothers and fathers, who deny the most important of the Ten Commandments, woe unto those (though) who don’t believe in the unbelievable sweetness of sex love, woe unto those who are the standard bearers of death, woe unto those who believe in conflict and horror and violence and fill our books and screens and livingrooms with all that crap, woe in fact unto those who make evil movies about the Beat Generation where innocent housewives are raped by beatniks! Woe unto those who are the real dreary sinners that even God finds room to forgive . . . woe unto those who spit on the Beat Generation, the wind’ll blow it back.

  Playboy, June 1959

  Joyce Johnson

  (b. 1935)

  The Beats were not entirely a boys’ club, but their scene could pass for one most of the time. Joyce Johnson’s 1983 memoir Minor Characters provides an alternate take. Johnson tells of her first encounters as a Barnard student with what would be (courtesy of a magazine article by novelist John Clellon Holmes) called the Beat Generation. Set up on a blind date with Jack Kerouac, she began a long, turbulent, and intermittent romance that kept her near the center of that crazy cultural experiment. Johnson eloquently and meticulously describes that world through a woman’s eyes, providing a revealing perspective that cuts through the clichés and hype that accumulate around legends.

  from Minor Characters

  HE CAME back not because of me but because he was profoundly homesick. He wanted America, a bowl of Wheaties by a kitchen window; he wanted Lowell, not New York.

  Across the Atlantic he hadn’t found the Old World but a new one he was inadvertently helping to create. Through a perpetual haze of marijuana he’d viewed the international scene like a dismayed elder, noting a cool that was colder and deader than any hipster’s earned fatalism, a pose conveying nothing. He saw himself imitated, and hated what he saw. Was that bored indifference his? These new young people with their cultivated inertia, their laconic language (consisting mainly, he observed derisively, of the word like), seemed to have the uniformity of an army. They’d invaded Tangier, swarming around Burroughs; when Jack went to Paris, he found them there too. He left and went to London, but stayed less than a week. Just before he’d sailed, he’d found his family’s genealogy in the British Museum and read for the first time the emblematic motto of the Kerouacs: Aimer, travailler, souffrir.

  Five days after I sent the cable, he knocked on my door. He stood out in the hall, smiling rather shyly, the rucksack at his feet. Since early that morning I’d been waiting, calling the office to say I was sick, wanting to go down to the dock and actually see the ship come in, but what if I missed him there? Now he was here, and in that first moment I thought Who is he? But I kissed him in the doorway and he followed me inside. He left his rucksack on the floor and we lay down on the couch. The cat walked all over our bodies with utter disdain. “Ti Gris, Ti Gris,” Jack called to it coaxingly, and then I knew he was back.