The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats

by Allen Ginsberg

  Everybody involved [in the Beat Generation] literarily had had some form of break in the ordinary nature of consciousness and experience or taste of a larger consciousness or satori of some sort. There always was, as the central preoccupation, concern with the very nature of consciousness and with what you could call visions or visionary experience. In the forties sometimes referred to by Yeats’s term “unity of being.” But how did we get cut off from natural mind? And was natural mind some kind of original Indian visionary state of consciousness?

  We saw literature as a noble means of investigation of our own minds and our own natures and our own emotions. The poem, as Gregory puts it, is a probe, a probe into whatever—death, hair, army, mom, clowns, a probe into reality or unreality. And through the fifties, there had been among ourselves a use of teaching aids, supplementary aids and sacraments relating to change of consciousness. There was a lot of grass from the forties on, and from 1952 peyote, yagé, mescaline, and acid, all before 1960.

  The word “rebellion” didn’t come up until politically involved people came on the scene and began interpreting it in terms of Marxian and non-Marxian modes. I think it was Lawrence Lipton, in his book The Holy Barbarians,23 who used the word “rebellion” and made a Marxian interpretation of what was going on, which completely missed the point. The notion of rebellion didn’t come in at all. It wasn’t a political or a social rebellion. There were social and political concomitants, or correlative applications, but the main thing was, what is the nature of hearing, smelling, tasting, seeing, thinking mind? What are the different modes of consciousness or modalities? What can you get out of a half-sleep or dream state in terms of writing or articulation? Kerouac kept books of dreams and I have enormous records of dreams going back to the forties, which are made into poems often.

  We were interested in areas of consciousness, psychoanalytic anthropology, Spengler. You might say a rebellion against social form, a dissatisfaction with the stereotypes, thought forms, and modes of thinking that we learned in grammar school or something. Burroughs’s constant preoccupation was: what was the consciousness of a psychopath? To find that out Burroughs tried to do second-story jobs or go down with robbers into the subway and roll drunks. I think he even prepared to hold up a store once, to find out what it felt like to be a psychopath, which he defined as someone without any kind of conscience at all. Somewhat like Raskolnikov with his murder in Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov murders in order to see what it feels like to contact reality in some ultimate way.

  In fact John Clellon Holmes wrote a long article, “This Is the Beat Generation,”24 in which he brought up that Raskolnikov element of violence. That offended Kerouac, because Kerouac thought that the probe was much more interesting and impersonal and intimate and gentle and it didn’t have to be involved with all that psychopathic nonsense, except in a very highly stylized, elegant, aristocratic way, perhaps like what Burroughs was investigating. But Burroughs is a special character, so that was all right. Because anything Bill did was intelligent and if he tried to hold up somebody in the subway it was sure that he’d fail and make a fool of himself anyway. It would turn into some sort of W. C. Fieldsian comedy, and he certainly wouldn’t hurt anybody. He might want to, but he wouldn’t be able to. He was too much of a Faustian coward.

  The motif of Beat Generation is basically misunderstood, a misinterpreted area. There’s this superimposition of the idea of a social rebellion, which was the communist interpretation through Lawrence Lipton. This was kind of single level and rationalistic. That’s the Time magazine view, that it could be interpreted as the psychopathy of millions of middle-class kids trying to kick their parents in the teeth, rebelling against wearing shoes, wanting to have dirty hair and bedbugs. Holmes interpreted it in a sociological, psychological way, not a Marxian way, as Raskolnik rebellion, acte gratuit, as Raskolnikov’s murder of the old lady is a gratuitous act, an unreasonable, accidental act, a chance act, an act that you do because it just doesn’t make any sense so it interrupts the normal common sense of life and confronts you with the blood of reality unto murder as in Dostoyevsky.

  My view was that that was very unsophisticated, that Raskolnikov was very stupid, very unhip. The acte gratuit seemed to be very square, because it was relying on a set of ideas, because he thought he didn’t contact reality and he thought theoretically he could contact by murder. It sounded like a totally square notion, unmellow, relying completely on some kind of upside-down school teacher logic. Burroughs had a certain interest in that from the point of view of chance, but I don’t think Burroughs ever got all the way into Raskolnik experiment for the sake of some moral contact with ultimate reality. We were subtle enough to realize that that was heavy-handed, obnoxious pushiness. Kerouac and Burroughs and I also had a sense of good manners, I mean, you just don’t go up to someone and murder them because you want to contact reality. It’s ridiculous, thinking you’re going to contact reality that way. Maybe you shouldn’t contact reality, if that’s the way you got to go.

  We had all had some vision of supreme reality, a break in the nature of ordinary consciousness, which revealed a vaster consciousness than any acte gratuit. The universe is bigger than mind, bigger than idea, bigger than category, bigger than our conceptions. We all appreciated that early. And so I always felt very timid about imposing my ideology on the universe. Nobody thought that ideas meant anything, quite rightly I think. Ideas were just formulations. To attempt to encounter or confront the vastness of all the shadows on every leaf on one single tree with some sentence of ideas is immeasurably stupid. The element of aggression, of ideological insistency, was considered unhip and by unhip I mean lacking in awareness.

  Our basic search for some kind of original mind, or heart-mind, was not in that sense rebellion at all, although in the search for a larger heart or larger mind, naturally some social conventions would be broken. The whole problem was to come to some original relationship with mind and with compassion and with sympathy, to come to a direct awareness rather than doing it because it said so here in a book or in society. Half of the rules of society are war rules anyway, uncompassionate. Even the good ones like “do unto others” very often are applied abusively, so social convention was no guideline for how to guide yourself out of your heart sympathies.

  There was a notion that if we could arrive at some condition of total sensory openness, eye, ear, taste, smell, touch, mind, if all senses were alert and open, then there would be a simultaneity of noticing of detail, some kind of scheme or web that would approximate visionary coherence. So we had some primitive notions like that, of total illumination. And we also had some experiences of it with a little peyote, a lot of grass, the experience of the daydream, and the dream labyrinth of opiates, which is a classical experience in Baudelaire and De Quincey and other writers going back probably to Asiatic philosophers.

  I want to emphasize that as the iron theme that runs through the forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies. The same theme was being pursued by various different tactics, methods, and explorations of different areas. By 1958 we had all concluded that drugs, peyote, psychedelics were interesting and were useful aids, but they weren’t supreme reality. They were maybe catalysts. Acid, grass might be a catalyst to some sort of a reminder of an eternal mind, but not a satisfactory conclusion to the search. [Mainly because] you have to keep taking drugs all the time. Certainly for people who are sitting around in a state of inertia, or in a state of stereotyped moralistic mentality, it’s a good thing to drop acid. That’s why during the sixties I was interested in acid as a way of getting everybody in America a little bit hip, for opening up mind. At least you get a sense of that relative nature.

  CHAPTER 5

  Jazz, Bebop, and Music

  There’s some music I’d like to recommend also. Listen to Brahms’s Trio No. 1 and Brahms’s Sextet, Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 with the “Frère Jacques” theme, some forties music, Thelonious Monk’s “Round About Mid
night,” one little tune and any of the early forties Thelonious Monk, some of the forties Dizzy Gillespie, like “Salt Peanuts,” “Opp Bop Sh’Bam.” They have those little funny bebop rhythm prosodies in them. “The Chase” by Dexter Gordon, and Wardell Gray. Lester Young of that era, “Lester Leaps In.” Billie Holiday’s “Don’t Explain,” “Fine and Mellow,” “I Cover the Waterfront,” and “Yesterdays.” If you get a chance at hearing some bass work by Slam Stewart and some of the mouthings, the bebop mouthings with words, by King Pleasure. And whatever early Lennie Tristano records you can find. Also a favorite inspirational tune that turned Cassady on to some ecstatic American mind, Charlie Barnet’s “Cherokee,” which is the thirties and then in the forties, The Honeydrippers and I think it was Louis Jordan’s version of “Open the Door, Richard.” And anything you find of Charlie Parker’s from the forties is fine.

  I’ve mentioned these people because these were specific totemistic pieces of music that either Kerouac, Cassady, Burroughs, or myself had inside our heads, 1943 to 1947. If you look at the liner notes on the albums or look it up in books, you can go on from there. King Pleasure was interesting because he was one of the few people who took Charlie Parker music and simply took syllables and by following each note he made actual sentences, poetic sentences. It promised to develop into a whole genre, but I don’t think it ever did, [maybe] because the bop itself got more and more complicated and was harder to speak, to sing as sentences.

  In a sense, Seymour Wyse, a friend of Jack Kerouac’s who taught Kerouac jazz, said that he thought that bop killed itself or jazz killed itself with bop. That was his vision then, because bop had gotten so complex that it had gotten out of the range of simple blues melody. It seemed at that time that King Pleasure was mouthing at the limit as Charlie Parker was making bird note–flighted melodic lines. King Pleasure seemed to be able to follow that and hear it, and syllable by syllable make poems out of it.

  CHAPTER 6

  Music, Kerouac, Wyse, and Newman

  We’re actually starting in 1938 or 1939 [when] Jack Kerouac’s best friend at Horace Mann High School was an English jazz fanatic, Seymour Wyse. In the late 1930s they went to Harlem to hear Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker playing at Minton’s. When I first came on to that scene about 1944, Kerouac introduced me to Wyse. Seymour was working down in the Village in the Chelsea Record Shop with Jerry Newman, a completely unknown personage of that time. Newman himself was central to the development of a lot of literary articulations later on. He and Wyse taught Kerouac about early bop and jazz, took him up to the clubs. Newman had a record company called Esoteric Records, which recorded Monk and Parker and Gillespie and Charlie Christian. He turned Kerouac on to uptown bop in an intimate way since Jerry knew the musicians well, and recorded them. They weren’t just Horace Mann kids going up and hanging around on the outside, they were involved with the musicians, often drinking and talking with them.

  Newman also contributed to Burroughs’s literary development. Burroughs credits Jerry Newman with the inspiration for his sense of routines and cut-ups. Newman had a fantastic collection of weird tapes, like the famous one that Burroughs picked up on, the drunken newscaster. A BBC newscaster was drunk and was reading the news, making a lot of slips, like “Princess Margaret spent a pleasant weekend inside her parents at Balmoral Castle.” That was the one sentence I remember which turned Burroughs on to the idea of what might happen if you said in public what you said in private. What if the private and unconscious broke through into the public and people wrote as they thought? What if truth broke out in the media, or even in the novel? So the drunken newscaster was one of Burroughs’s earliest turn-ons in his whole literary method. Doctor Benway comes out of that.

  Kerouac’s early education in New York was with Seymour Wyse and Jerry Newman. When I first met Kerouac we used to go down to talk to Seymour and he would play us whatever was around, newly issued records of Charlie Parker or Lester Young. We had access to a lot of music, actually a whole record store back in 1944. To the extent that Kerouac’s biography is involved with music and bop and to the extent that Kerouac’s prose is a reflection of his study of Charlie Parker’s rhythms and breath, to the extent that Kerouac’s prose style is derived from that, Seymour Wyse would be the big influence. Wyse and Kerouac used to riff together, verbally, and sing along with a lot of the records that Wyse played in the store.

  All that experience of the exhalation of breath spirit in bop music was, according to Kerouac, the determinant influence on his prose and poetry style, particularly in pieces like “Brakeman on the Railroad,” the first manuscript of On the Road, a lot of the long passages of Visions of Cody, and long passages of Old Angel Midnight. That was all determined by about 1943 or 1944, that is, his ear was determined by then. It wasn’t yet reflected in his writing. In The Town and the City he didn’t really use the long breath, variable noted line, that was later described as a bird flight, like Charlie Parker, until he started his spontaneous writing style with On the Road. There were evidences of it before in the later chapters about Times Square in The Town and the City. You get some echo of bebop consciousness and bebop paranoia and amphetamine and Benzedrine use in the city part of [that book].

  “Lester Leaps In” by Lester Young was the theme song of Symphony Sid, who was the all-night bebop radio disc jockey of the early forties. He had a funny professional bebop hippie tone of voice that enters into Kerouac’s prose. Kerouac [made] a recording in which he imitates Symphony Sid’s tone of voice as a professional announcer, announcing his latest novel or his latest vision.

  Dizzy Gillespie’s “Salt Peanuts” and “Opp Bop Sh’Bam” are important because that particular rhythm “salt peanuts, salt peanuts” runs through Kerouac’s prose. When I use the phrase “spontaneous bop prosody,” I’m thinking of “salt peanuts, salt peanuts,” or some squiggle of rhythm in Kerouac’s head that follows that odd accenting, the irregular accenting, the noniambic accenting of Gillespie.

  By then the drum and the bass, the rhythm instruments, had become solo instruments, so that instead of a metronomic rhythmic base, stereotyped and automatic as were iambic pentameter or even symmetrical count of stress, instead there was a new variable accenting, a new variable measure, a new variable beat. A new variable rhythm section rather than the traditional rhythm section in old-time Dixieland or jazz.

  It was precisely at that time that William Carlos Williams was introducing the notion of the variable measure of speech in poetics while saxophonists such as Lester Young and Charlie Parker and trumpeters such as Dizzy Gillespie and later Miles Davis were doing the same thing in jazz. The saxophone echoed the breath of speech and it was as if it was speaking in accents of conversation or excited rhapsodic talk. There was an element introduced into music of the actual voice as spoken through the saxophone or trumpet that echoed the oddities of rhythm of black speech. This was important to Kerouac because it influenced his prose line.

  It seemed to culminate in the sixties and seventies with Ornette Coleman, who extended the speech to include “Aee aee,” a completely open-throated mantric expression of black voice, or Don Cherry, who is blowing human voice through his trumpet. In other words, speech went into the saxophone rhythms and phrasings and long breath was manifested, a funny long sentence breath ending “moop” was manifested through the saxophone breath. That’s audible in Lester Young and Charlie Parker and somewhat in Gillespie’s horn. Kerouac then drew from those accents, phrasings, rhythms, and patterns of breath for his prose.

  Now William Carlos Williams wasn’t listening to this, he was listening to common pattern Rutherford speech, ordinary talk. People saying, “I’ve eaten the plums which you left in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast, forgive me, they were delicious, so sweet and so cold.” But the musicians were talking to each other on the street, so jazz is more like urban street talk with very stylized gestures and accents. They were getting it fr
om and feeding it into the music. This was Kerouac’s conscious theory beginning in the 1940s and he applied it in some passages of The Town and the City and consciously applied it later in Mexico City Blues. This was the basis of his style and these are key to all of his writings thenceforth, just little classic three-minute songs that went in and out of everybody’s ears including his.

  The musicians were imitating the humor of actual speech phrasing and transferring it right into the music and taking inspiration for the musical phrasing and rhythm from human speech. They refreshed the whole mainstream of American jazz with the rhythms of actual talk just as the mainstream of American poetry, through William Carlos Williams, was being refreshed, rhythmically, through the hearing and imitation of actual spoken speech. It was all going on simultaneously. There was nothing more American than jazz, and in American poetry nothing more American than Williams.

  There’s such a close parallel between the music and the poetics that I think you can hear it. At the time it was consciously commented on by the musicians themselves. This seems to lead up to someone vocalizing bebop lines, someone going around the other end and taking the bebop lines and putting them syllable by syllable to poetry. Which is what Mr. King Pleasure did.

  These records were almost instantaneously played and caught public attention, first by the cognoscenti of jazz, but pretty soon [everyone was saying] “ooo-bop sha-bam” and “google mop” was appearing in Dick Tracy. It introduced a whole new element of relaxed hip speech. Charlie Parker is probably the closest to Kerouac’s deep soul and sound, in the sense that he took this kind of variable rhythmic base, exhalation, breath inspiration into highly imaginative flights of rhythm. They rainbow-arced over the chorus in a birdlike flight, including anything the mind could think of that would be harmonically correct, or harmonically pretty or weird, like “oonk,” which he included in the saxophone sentence. At Kerouac’s best, he wanted his rhythm to be a long flighty sentence sounding like Parker’s “Ornithology” or [Gillespie’s] “Night in Tunisia.” Probably that very moment was for Kerouac the acme of bop and the acme of that kind of phrasing and statement. It was reflected in Kerouac’s “239th” and “241st Choruses” of Mexico City Blues, written eight or ten years later after he first heard it on Symphony Sid.