The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God

by Watson, Peter

  Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, another leading Beat writer, had met at Columbia University in 1944, when the former was eighteen and the latter four years older. Kerouac had already quit college and Ginsberg would later be suspended. It was wartime, and Columbia, like many other universities, had embraced the military-industrial complex, an approach that would continue and intensify during the Cold War. Intellectually, as Ginsberg characterized it, life was narrowed and reduced by the “anxieties and rigidities of war corporatism,” in response to which the Beats regarded their marginal status not as a failing but as an asset.

  When Black Mountain College began to disintegrate in 1956, several of the faculty there, notably the poets, transferred to San Francisco, as did Ginsberg. The last issue of Black Mountain Review, in which Kerouac’s essay “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” was published, was put together in San Francisco. Other San Francisco poets—Kenneth Patchen, William Everson, Philip Lamantia, Jack Spicer—formed a particularly cohesive group, having spent the war years in a work camp for conscientious objectors in Waldport, Oregon.

  Ginsberg was the most aware of the Beats, in terms of the traditions and figures who would give rise to its approach, quite apart from his own debts to Lester Young and the jazz clubs of New York. He initiated correspondence with Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson. Olson’s seminal idea, published in an essay in 1950, was “projective verse,” a new kind of poetry, he said, “rooted in spontaneity.” It was “(projectile (percussive (prospective,” the unusual punctuation being part of his innovation. He intended a poem to be a projectile, something thrown by the poet (like the potter throws clay) in a transfer of energy to the reader-listener; it was percussive in being about sound, and prospective in the sense of the prospector or archaeologist unearthing he knew not what when he first set out.

  A convinced follower of Jung, Olson believed that the conscious mind was a gatekeeper that stopped many basic ideas from surfacing, or else falsified them; they could be released only through spontaneity, which offered unmediated access. He insisted that this poetic approach should be incorporated into everyday life, that we should lead speeded-up lives, without reflection, and just “get on with it.” He argued that logic forced a structure on syntax and that it was poetry’s duty to escape this. Form was ephemeral. Experimental forms communicated new visions of reality, and the best source of new visions was spontaneous verse “unfettered” by rules. As he put it: “Write carelessly so that nothing that is not green will survive.”25

  He also had the idea of what he called “proprioceptive immanence,” in which the body was the unifying locus of experience, which the art form must make use of. Ginsberg agreed and showed this in the famous first rendering of “Howl,” which he didn’t “read” or “speak” so much as intone. The occasion was a performance in which his whole body took part. Ginsberg also saw his poems as collages with the mind-body communicating spontaneous ideas through an energy field—it was the transfer of energy that counted rather than any specific idea, energy being the fundamental ingredient of a full life. “The first rule of the writer was, as in projective verse, to write only what created an empathic flow of energy in the reader.”26 Excitement, for the Beats, equaled authenticity. It was the meaning of both art and life.

  Aside from “Howl,” the most famous of the Beat writings is On the Road, Jack Kerouac’s novel. It began to take shape in April 1951 when, high on Benzedrine, he inserted a roll of paper into his typewriter, and over three weeks produced a 120-foot scroll of single-spaced typescript which became the raw material for his novel. He later explained his technique: the key was to avoid searching for words or imposing structure, but to let them emerge as one struggled “to keep in time with one’s thoughts. . . . Not selectivity of expression but following free deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought, swimming in seas of English with no discipline other than rhythms of rhetorical exhalation.” And he, too, compared the process to an improvised jazz solo.27 Kerouac also warned of the perils of “afterthought,” in which one might try to improve the original images. In so doing, “[y]ou think what you’re supposed to be thinking [italics added],” said Kerouac, and the point of Beat writing—one point, anyway—was to circumvent that.

  Performance was an important element of Beat poetry. In a sense, performance is an element in all poetry, but it was especially true of the Beats, with their concept of energy exchange. Readings circumvented the time lag involved in printing and publishing, and contributed to the idea that culture was happening—as Whitehead had said, the basic unit of the energy-field universe was the event. Readings also, of course, maximized spontaneity. Poems could be amended, or even created “on the hoof.” But the actual reading, the sounds, the body movements of the poet, the energy contained in those movements and sounds, were part of the exchange, part of what made it more like jazz.

  Finally, in a reading, the public was there, face-to-face with the poet, in the room, responding. This was intersubjectivity at its rawest. Performance both magnifies the indeterminacy of a poem and, paradoxically, at the same time adds meaning.

  • • •

  There was no shortage of critics of the culture of spontaneity, from Norman Mailer to Norman Podhoretz to Diana Trilling. People criticized the writers and painters for being educated beyond their intellectual level, for being charlatans, for being affected, for being pretentious. Nonetheless, by 1959 there were estimated to be more than three thousand Americans in the “bohemian enclaves” of Venice West, North Beach and Greenwich Village, all pursuing their own versions of the spontaneous lifestyle. Francis Rigney, a social psychologist who studied the North Beach community, concluded they were not as different from mainstream communities as the mainstream thought. But he also found that it was hard, for many, to maintain such a lifestyle—it was often possible only in fits and starts. This is one reason why, as the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, the Beats fragmented and disintegrated.

  NEGATIVE EXUBERANCE: THE INTENSITY OF THE INVERTED LIFE

  Philip Roth’s novels are in almost every way as bleak as Samuel Beckett’s novels and plays. They pick at the sores of life, especially as those sores concern American Jews living in the shadow of the Holocaust. First and foremost, however, Roth’s work is about intensity, intensity as the only form of meaning in an otherwise meaningless world.

  Roth, Jewish himself, argues that Jews in America have the best and the worst of worlds. In The Ghost Writer, he castigates his fellow Jews who have embraced the Holocaust as an aspect of their identity, when in reality many of them have led comfortable lives in leafy suburbs well away from the horrors of that episode. As may be imagined, it was not a popular message. Closer to our theme, in such books as Goodbye, Columbus and The Plot Against America he shows how assimilation of the Jews in those same leafy suburbs has entailed the abandonment of large parts of their religious identity. Assimilated Jews don’t give up a belief in their God entirely, perhaps, but they give up much of the ritual life entailed in being the observant faithful—and that poses risks.

  In identifying American Jews as what the sociologists call “marginal” figures in a modern democratic society, Roth spotlights assimilation not as a form of spiritual death, exactly, but as a diminution of identity. Thus, in most of his books the only pleasure in life lies in the realm of sin, and in a secular democracy the only way to be sinful is to go against the majority in the matter of agreed manners, and give offense—what the critic Harold Bloom called “negative exuberance.” Like Beckett, Roth thinks one should continually approach life in attack mode.

  In Sabbath’s Theater, for example, the main character, Morris “Mickey” Sabbath, is, as one critic put it, “a walking insult.”28 “Despite all my troubles,” he says, “I continue to know what matters in life. . . . All I know how to do is antagonize.” And he lives for sex. “You must devote yourself to fucking the way a monk devotes himself to God. Most men
have to fit fucking in around the edge of what they define as more pressing concerns. . . . But Sabbath had simplified his life and fit the other concerns in around fucking.” Sabbath delights in inverting life. Sex, for him, is innocent of higher meaning. This is so because “anyone with any brain understands that he is destined to lead a stupid life because there is no other kind. . . . A world without adultery is unthinkable.”

  Sabbath is minimalist enough not to expect any great lucidity from his behavior, nor a return to “the warm nervous conspiracy of family life.” He is defined by what he has been but no longer is—an ex-son, ex-husband, ex–puppet artist—and the only way he knows how to be alive is “to affront and affront and affront till there is no one on earth unaffronted.” He knows himself “well enough for judgment but not well enough for correction.”29 He is limned by his defeats; his blasphemy, his promiscuity, his effrontery are all designed to create an anti-theology theology, with the aim of spoiling life, to overturn it, to create a “counterlife” (the title of one of his books), but in an orgy of intensity (all Roth’s books are “noisy,” as one critic said, and all the sex is raucous). For Nathan Zuckerman, too, Roth’s other creation, and “the American authority on Jewish demons,” it is not easy to discern “between the heroic and the perverse.”30

  For Roth, for Roth’s characters like Mickey Sabbath and Nathan Zuckerman, all coherence in life is imaginary, and to achieve coherence we must violate the division of, say, life and art in ways that will offend the self-appointed arbiters of both.31 Like Beckett, Roth worried that art was a trap, a too-neat rejection of the messiness of life—there are always competing claims on our identity, and they remain so.

  In The Anatomy Lesson, Nathan Zuckerman gives himself over to unrestrained sensual pleasure, to escape the clutches of self-justification so as to lead a wholly indefensible, unjustified life—“and to learn to like it.”32 For Zuckerman, Sabbath and Roth himself life is full of deadly toxins, and in a novel like American Pastoral (1997) and The Dying Animal (2001), as well as those already mentioned, there is a “clamorous bleakness.” Here, too, the only way to avoid spiritual meltdown is rebellion, noise, blasphemy. In I Married a Communist, Roth cannot refrain from drawing attention to “a spiritual woman’s decolletage”; in another novel “infidelity comes with the marriage vows”; in another, “self-immolation is undertaken with gusto.” Life must press on with “a tincture of rancor,” “with the illicit pleasures of exposure and revenge.”33 Overscale eroticism is Roth’s trademark, and his characters’ way out.

  Whereas Beckett gives us silence, Roth gives us noise; whereas Beckett gives us the last hope of comradeship, Roth gives us the self-loathing promiscuity of the solitary offender; whereas Beckett gives us waiting, Roth gives us hyperactivity. In a world without God, we have to make the most of our doubt, and we can best do that by committing blasphemy, sleeping with our friends’ wives, giving offense. Because nobody knows anything, we can never know when we are right; we can never know, therefore, what is good. Only by being in the wrong can we know anything of ourselves, and that is the most intense way to be.

  And this, too, he shares with Beckett: he enjoys the same level of popularity and significance, but most people could no more live up (or down) to Roth’s philosophy than they could to Beckett’s. Its very extremeness, though, gives us pause, makes us reflect. Does knowing what is wrong help? The fact that his bleak message is laced with humor also links him to Beckett and makes what he has to say somewhat more palatable. Because of this, and despite all, we give him a hearing. As Harold Bloom put it, they both offer us “ordeal by laughter.”

  * * *

  I. “Bird” was short for “Yardbird,” the nickname given to the saxophonist after the young Parker found a couple of dead chickens on the road on his way to a performance. He had scooped them up and asked the landlady where he was boarding to cook them. No one ever forgot the incident.

  22

  A Visionary Commonwealth and the Size of Life

  I

  n September 1989, Boris Yeltsin, at that stage a member of the Russian parliament but not yet the country’s president, made a much-publicized visit to the United States. The visit was noteworthy for at least two reasons. One was Yeltsin’s drinking—he was drunk at a number of important engagements, including a visit to the White House. The other was his astonishment at the abundance of America—especially in food and housing—which he said had been hidden from him and his fellow Russians by Soviet propaganda. It was partly as a result of what he saw in America that he returned home a rebel against the Soviet system and successfully challenged Mikhail Gorbachev for the presidency just over a year later.

  But there was a third noteworthy aspect of Yeltsin’s visit, which has normally attracted little comment. This was the fact that it was sponsored by the Esalen Institute of Big Sur in California. Esalen had been chosen in preference to fifteen other possible organizations, including the Rockefeller and Ford foundations and the Council on Foreign Relations. The prior negotiations had been carried out on behalf of Esalen by Jim Garrison, the administrative director of the institute’s Soviet-American Exchange Program (Garrison’s book The Darkness of God: Theology after Hiroshima is discussed on p. 380).

  The prestige of Esalen, as revealed in this set of events, was all the more remarkable for the fact that, strictly speaking, its golden age was well over by then. In his book Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (2007), Jeffrey J. Kripal says that the late 1960s and the early ’70s were the golden age of Esalen. They were also the golden age of the counterculture.

  At its height the counterculture was probably the most sustained attempt there has ever been to fashion a way of living not just without traditional Western ideas of God, but also outside science, capitalism and conventional morality. And Esalen (named after the Esselen Indians of the area) was arguably the quintessence of the counterculture, the fullest and most perfect realization of its values and aspirations.

  • • •

  “We will never know how many people belonged to the counterculture,” says Theodore Roszak, the man who coined the term and wrote its definitive history. “It may be wrong to speak of it having a membership at all. Rather, it was a vision that, to one degree or another, drew the attention and fascination of passing many. More important than the size of the dissent was its depth. Never before had protest raised issues that went so philosophically deep, delving into the very meaning of reality, sanity, and human purpose.”1

  Three elements made up the backbone of the countercultural approach. These were, first, new techniques of therapy, what Roszak called “techniques of inner manipulation,” often organized via therapeutic communities; second, drugs, as the source of alternative forms of consciousness; and third, music, rock and roll. The only reason all this amounted to a counterculture, he said, was because “the culture it opposed—that of reductionist science, ecocidal industrialism, and corporate regimentation—was too small a vision of life to lift the spirit.”2

  The therapeutic approach was probably the most basic of the three. It was founded on the idea that “until the advent of psychoanalysis, the vocabulary of our society was woefully impoverished.” In the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson had installed—or hoped he had—what he called the Great Society. Basing itself on the civil rights movement but also incorporating several other social issues (feminism, poverty, the environment), it was essentially sociopolitical and designed to help the participants in its programs lead better lives. Many of those who advocated the counterculture, however, saw that building the good society “is not primarily a social, but a psychological task.” The therapeutic approach “strikes beyond ideology to the level of consciousness, seeking to transform our deepest sense of the self, the other, the environment.”3

  Political and social consciousness, as the Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary put it, gave way to “consciousness consciousness,” the overall aim being to dis
cover new types of community, new family patterns, new sexual mores, new kinds of livelihoods, new aesthetic forms, new personal identities that would bring new meanings to lives.4 It was essentially an anti-rational, anti-science stance, promoting a meaningful life of feeling.

  There was at that time, says Roszak, a sense in the air, especially among the young, that Marxism and liberalism had largely ceased to provide explanations of the world; that they were as much a part of the problem as of the solution. Also, survey figures showing that some 38 percent of Americans were unchurched suggested that the mainline churches had lost touch with the experiential basis of spirituality.5 Popular here was the German philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s notion of “surplus repression.” Some repression, basic repression, is normal, not unhealthy; it is bound to occur in any society, Marcuse said, simply as a consequence of people living together. Surplus repression, however, is that “which the invidious logic of domination demands.” Surplus repression is what “a particular group or individual” imposes on others “in order to maintain and enhance itself in a privileged position.” From this it followed, for Marcuse as for Marx, that “the shortening of the working day” was the fundamental premise out of which everything else flowed. We must set aside the “rationality of domination” in favor of “libidinal rationality, which takes the possibility of freedom and joy as axiomatic.”6