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

by Allen Ginsberg

  That’s an amazing passage, that “moth swarm of heaven.” This was the heart of Kerouac at that point in time and I think it’s the jewel center of interest in Kerouac. It is one of the earliest complete statements of his sense of “everything belongs to me because I am poor,” or total loss, earth loss. It’s the recognition of mortality as the main theme and the emotional poignancy of that flowerness of the moment. It relates to his vision of himself in relation to his mother, returning to his mother’s hash joint. It seemed to have been a constant theme in his mind, or thesis, the idea of him having been hanged in London for murdering one of his old girlfriends, maybe he was Jack the Ripper or something.

  “Mind essence” is straight out of Dwight Goddard’s Buddhist Bible, the classic Buddhist translation of that time. My question was whether he inserted it into On the Road when he was preparing a final manuscript or whether it was originally written in there? The “intrinsic mind” is probably a phrase that he’s taken from Goddard, “ripples of birth and death, like the action of wind on a sheet of serene, mirror-like water.” That sounds like some kind of paraphrase of a Zen commentary he might have gotten out of D. T. Suzuki quoted in Goddard. We didn’t know Alan Watts at the time.

  It amazed me when I read the manuscript that he knew so much. That kind of insight seemed frightening to me, frankly, because it meant that the whole of my own existence was insubstantial and I thought I was getting to be pretty substantial. Kerouac was already writing this immensely compassionate, sad, empty prose about existence turning into golden ash. My first reaction was that he was being negative and mean, coming on in favor of death or something. But he was waxing poetic and rhapsodic over the immensity of death and the immensity of life and their interpenetration.

  It’s this insight into pain and transitoriness and emptiness which is dominant in On the Road and of the subsequent writings, which later becomes the vanity of Kerouac, as seen in Vanity of Duluoz, or Vanity of Kerouac. It is the recognition of the emptiness of his ambitions, the emptiness of his graspings to be a solid, substantial novelist with fireplace and desk in the library, a house in the country and a picture window on a Connecticut lawn. The emptiness of his fantasy of that kind of karma for himself or for his friends.

  I didn’t know anybody in America writing who had that grasp on the great goof of existence, except Burroughs and Herbert Huncke, not that my acquaintance with letters was vast at the time. Later Norman Mailer came to get some glimpse of the apocalyptic nature of our times and the insubstantiality of time itself. Thomas Wolfe, of course, was a big inspiration. He wanted to get it back and go home. He never gave it up. Kerouac gave up utterly, I think, beginning with 1950 or so. He’d already written one monumental, well-received, middle-class bildungsroman novel, The Town and the City. He was already a cele­brated young novelist with a great deal of promise and the editors in New York were all in love with him. He was handsome and he was young, so he could have had a nice career as a novelist, but instead he decided to write directly out of his brains rather than fill out a form like he was supposed to, to be reviewed in the New York Times.

  There is a tradition, particularly in Herman Melville in The ­Confidence-Man and his later works. There’s the phantom tradition in Melville, the phantom nature of the universe, including the Great White Whale. You get little shudders of it in Tolstoy, when Prince Bolkonsky is lying wounded on the battlefield and Napoleon comes by and he looks up past Napoleon’s horse’s ass into blue sky and has a vision. And you get some psychological fetterings of that kind in Dostoyevsky.

  It seemed to me that the older traditional American middle-class novelists like Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser somewhat, still had either a hope for progress or a despair over progress, but the idea was still progress in a sense. [John] Dos Passos and [James T.] Farrell were still basically rooted in the world and dealing with the world as if it were real, permanent, in a sense Marxist. Most American writing was sociological or psychological. It was my impression that very few people had a grasp of the phantom, or samsaric, or elusory nature of existence. They didn’t have any idea of alternative modes of consciousness, to put it vulgarly. My impression was that there wasn’t anybody that had a visionary view piercing through mortal phenomena to something uncanny that everybody knew and had not revealed publically. It wasn’t spoken of as an ordinary part of our minds, but it was really a part of our lives.

  If there were religious experiences in novels, say in Evelyn Waugh, it was generally something erratic or extraneous or an intrusion of a deus ex machina. It was an odd and perhaps alien intrusion that was genuine but not part of this world. There were some Catholic novelists that had an idea of a vision of Christ. T. S. Eliot in The Cocktail Party made reference to one of the characters offstage who had a vision of Christ. He goes to Africa to become a saint and gets eaten by ants. It was always done in garish terms like that.

  In terms of the popular culture, Kerouac was preternaturally brilliant and penetrant. I think that’s why the whole Beat Generation, beginning in the mid-fifties, had so much power. Not that Kerouac was that smart, or Burroughs, but that what they were looking at was very basic and common sense. American cultural mentality, media consciousness, Hollywood, radio, TV, the new magazines that intellectuals nourished themselves on were so shallow in their spiritual ambition that any basic statement, even if couched in bohemian terms, was a revelation.

  I had a visionary experience in 1948, or what seemed to me a visionary experience. It probably was just an experience of what everybody is experiencing all the time, which is just being in this space, but I had been so tied up in a superstructure of mental constructions as a result of my Columbia college education that a moment’s relaxation of that whole set of references and preoccupations and a few moments opening my mind to see the space around me seemed to me to be supernatural. I thought I had seen God, when I was just seeing what everybody sees all the time. That drove me into a bughouse because I kept thinking I was seeing something special, that I had been gifted with seeing something special, not realizing that I was just seeing what any ordinary drunken Indian sees every five minutes. One touch of nature and you think you’re Santayana and William James all put together, rather than just realizing you’re seeing what the ice carrier gets all the time. The intellectual cadres in the forties and early fifties were locked up in a vast and systematized set of rationalizations, like Blake’s figure of Urizen bound down in the chains of his own rationalizations and the nets of his own mind, that the glimpse of original nature of the mind and of the world that Kerouac presented, or the glimpses of political humor that Burroughs presented, or even the glimpses of frankness that I presented in the mid-fifties broke through as prophetic statements, because everybody else was so dopey. Literally everybody else.

  There is such a disjunction between the consciousness cultivated in grammar school [and the real world] that a breakthrough from one to the other is a major miracle. I guess we all remember how we thought when we were in high school. With me there was a certain point when the bottom fell out of my mind, when everything that I had thought was true turned out to be not true. It was conditioning that [had] sustained my adolescent mentally. When I lost my mental cherry, I realized that everything was different from what I thought it was. There wasn’t a black and white, right and wrong, like I thought. The moral laws that I thought were taken for granted didn’t have anything to do with anything once you knew somebody who [had] killed somebody. Life was completely different than a newspaper or storybook idea.

  In the fifties there was a deep public mind-set among the middle class. That’s why it’s miraculous for Kerouac to come on (not merely radical leftist, because he wasn’t radical leftist at all, but cutting left and right), getting to the basis of mind itself as his preoccupation. He was not even interested in who was right and wrong, not even interested in whether the generals in America were good or bad, or whether automobiles were good or bad. He was interes
ted in what was the nature, the phenomenon, of mind. Whether it was grief and sorrow and death and loss, what was the reason for the feeling of phantomness and emptiness everywhere? Not a sociological reason, but an understanding based on experience of the taste of mortality. It seemed to me then that there was a universal public consciousness that everybody shared that was completely papier-mâché.

  At that time most novels that were reviewed in Time magazine were taken up with current events or plots having to do with getting ahead in the business world, the man in the gray flannel suit. A little bit of bitterness about it, bittersweet about success, maybe, but nothing reduced the whole thing to idiot’s dust and ashes, which it was.

  Something interesting comes up now.

  The last night Dean went mad and found Marylou somewhere downtown and we got in the car and drove all over Richmond across the bay, hitting Negro jazz shacks in the oil flats. Marylou went to sit down and a colored guy pulled the chair out from under her. The gals approached her in the john with propositions. I was approached too. Dean was sweating around. It was the end; I wanted to get out.

  At dawn I got my New York bus and said good-by to Dean and Marylou. They wanted some of my sandwiches. I told them no. It was a sullen moment. We were all thinking we’d never see one another again and we didn’t care.152

  On the next page there’s a very famous passage, which was much discussed in the late fifties when it came out.

  At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night. I stopped at a little shack where a man sold hot red chili in paper containers; I bought some and ate it, strolling in the dark mysterious streets. I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a “white man” disillusioned. All my life I’d had white ambitions; that was why I’d abandoned a good woman like Terry in the San Joaquin Valley. I passed the dark porches of Mexican and Negro homes; soft voices were there, occasionally the dusky knee of some mysterious sensual gal; and dark faces of the men behind rose arbors. Little children sat like sages in ancient rocking chairs. A gang of colored women came by, and one of the young ones detached herself from motherlike elders and came to me fast—“Hello Joe!”—and suddenly saw it wasn’t Joe, and ran back, blushing. I wished I were Joe. I was only myself, Sal Paradise, sad, strolling in this violet dark, this unbearably sweet night, wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America. The raggedy neighborhoods reminded me of Dean and Marylou, who knew these streets so well from childhood. How I wished I could find them.153

  Then later on the [next] page:

  Near me sat an old Negro who apparently watched the games every night. Next to him was an old white bum; then a Mexican family, then some girls, some boys—all humanity, the lot. Oh, the sadness of the lights that night! The young pitcher looked just like Dean. A pretty blonde in the seats looked just like Marylou. It was the Denver Night; all I did was die.

  Down in Denver, down in Denver

  All I did was die

  Across the street Negro families sat on their front steps, talking and looking up at the starry night through the trees and just relaxing in the softness and sometimes watching the game. Many cars passed in the street meanwhile, and stopped at the corner when the light turned red. There was excitement and the air was filled with the vibration of really joyous life that knows nothing of disappointment and “white sorrows” and all that. The old Negro man had a can of beer in his coat pocket, which he proceeded to open; and the old white man enviously eyed the can and groped in his pocket to see if he could buy a can too. How I died! I walked away from there.154

  It’s an odd passage, very lyrical. Norman Podhoretz said that this was some idealistic, romantic notion. Well, of course it’s idealistic and romantic, and it’s presented in precisely that way, but on the other hand it contains a germ of a truth, that blacks in America at that time had a more down-home existence than whites did. With all the suffering it involved, still they had more of a basic sense of reality and joy of common existence than whites. It’s not universal, it’s not one to one, but there was the basic cultural strength in the black community that it could produce the greatest art for America, namely jazz. Jazz was a kind of speech that went round the world and influenced every country. The only art form, the only cultural push, that came out of America that transformed the political structure of the world through the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and rock ’n’ roll and the youth culture.

  It was a basic truth that Kerouac was [talking about]. It was ambiguously put, but a lot of critics howled like stuck pigs when they read that. [They] thought it was something terribly irresponsible to say, just a simple appreciation of black culture that is charming and which everybody knows about. Kerouac was accused of being a false nigger and a dope and an idiot and a sentimentalist because he had appreciated it with a good heart. Ishmael Reed dug this passage, Reed being one of the bitterest and most critical black writers. Reed grew up on the book and thought [the passage] did represent some affirmative statement about their quality of life.

  Podhoretz said that “blacks ain’t happy, how dare you say they’re happy.” But Kerouac didn’t mean happy, like economically happy. He meant that there was some integrity in connection with their suffering, an integrity of awareness of it that was different from the white world that was more fake and plastic.

  Either way you take it, Kerouac doesn’t have to be right or wrong ideologically. Kerouac was saying, “I’m a white kid come from a sterile, middle-class, industrial background and I’m having an experience of another culture.” Which he does again, later in the book, when he gets to Mexico and experiences another culture. I remember the first time I went to Mexico and I suddenly realized that the world was not the United States of America, that the bigger part of the world simply wasn’t like this. The idea that America was the way the world was supposed to be was completely nuts. Jack was just having this little breakthrough, a little cross-cultural appreciation, put lyrically. It wasn’t a sociological survey of the suffering of blacks versus whites, it was just an appreciation of their suffering. Kerouac’s amazement was that there’s another world of art, rhythm, language outside of the regulation world he learned at Horace Mann. Kerouac had an open heart, he was trying to make sense, and his vision of blacks is openhearted, I think. He said, “Not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.”

  There are a couple more passages of heavenly whispers, or prophetic characters in the desert. There’s a whole panorama that goes on in a still moment.

  Out of the tenement next to Camille’s house filed eleven Greek men and women who instantly lined themselves up on the sunny pavement while another backed up across the narrow street and smiled at them over a camera. We gaped at these ancient people who were having a wedding party for one of their daughters, probably the thousandth in an unbroken dark generation of smiling in the sun. They were well dressed, and they were strange. Dean and I might have been in Cyprus for all of that. Gulls flew overhead in the sparkling air.

  “Well,” said Dean in a very shy and sweet voice, “shall we go?”

  “Yes,” I said, “let’s go to Italy.” And so we picked up our bags, he the trunk with his one good arm and I the rest, and staggered to the cable-car stop; in a moment rolled down the hill with our legs dangling to the sidewalk from the jiggling shelf, two broken-down heroes of the Western night.155

  That scene reminded me of the main thing that Kerouac got out of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the Russian novels we all read. This sole confrontation, as in The Idiot, was the key—just like our own experiences when we met each other and confronted and inquired inquisitively after each other’s soul. In Dostoyevsky the characters are consta
ntly rushing up to each other, as in The Possessed, “Nikolai, Nikolai, how can we forget you?” says character Nitkin, when Nikolai wants to quit the revolution. There are moments of intimacy between men and women and between men and men, soul to soul. I don’t find that represented in American writing much, except in Kerouac and a couple little moments between Ishmael and Queequeg, in Moby-Dick, that love between men. A frankly uttered thing like in Whitman with heartthrobs and thrills between men. Not necessarily sexual, even chaste, but nonetheless the thrill of recognition and thrill of feeling in the heart, which is an ache between men. It is not well known and not much written about except in Whitman, but I think it is probably universal.

  It’s a staple of the American character, but it isn’t very often presented. Whitman thought it was the salvation of the nation and that unless the nation were made up of comrades democracy couldn’t work. A bunch of macho competitors all hating each other, or indifferent to each other, or scared of each other emotionally, would leave no possibility of a cooperative, democratic, functioning political system. Only with basic friendliness would it be possible for a nation to create a political world that was livable. That was one of the breakthroughs that Kerouac presented. Of course you get it a little bit in movies, with Rebel Without a Cause and Marlon Brando’s Wild Ones. The softness inside the hero, the difficult hero with a soft tender center.