Best Minds of My Generation

by Allen Ginsberg

  This book is designed to give Ginsberg’s perspective and history of the Beat Generation, and therefore I have not included the comments of either the students or the various poets who visited his classroom. I believe that given the space restrictions of a single volume it is not critical to this history to give Corso’s interpretation or opinion about a particular poem. It is Ginsberg’s opinion that we’re presenting, even when Corso’s might be of equal interest.

  I took it upon myself to adjust certain basic facts that were stated incorrectly. In no instance did I change Ginsberg’s opinions or ideas about anything, but in some cases his memory was faulty, e.g., Joan Burroughs died in 1951, not 1950, as Allen stated in one lecture, and the title of the Burroughs’s book Allen discussed or noted at one point was The Exterminator, not Exterminator!, which was a different book with a very similar title. I have kept these corrections to a minimum but the changes were generally not noted.

  Finally, the usual scholarly footnotes and bibliography have been added, which is in keeping with the way Allen would have prepared the book for publication himself, but these notes are my own.

  The purpose of this book is to present Allen Ginsberg’s version of history. Perhaps this will lead to further interest and study of a group that remains among the most influential literary movements of the twentieth century.

  A Definition of

  the Beat Generation

  [edited transcript of a lecture by Allen Ginsberg]

  To begin with, the phrase “Beat Generation” rose out of a specific conversation with Jack Kerouac and John Clellon Holmes in 1950–51 when discussing the nature of generations, recollecting the glamour of the “lost generation.” Kerouac discouraged the notion of a coherent “generation” and said, “Ah, this is nothing but a beat generation!” They discussed whether it was a “found” generation, which Kerouac sometimes referred to, or “angelic” generation, or various other epithets. But Kerouac waved away the question and said “beat generation!” not meaning to name the generation but to un-name it.

  John Clellon Holmes then wrote an article in late 1952 in the New York Times magazine section with the headline title of the article, “This Is the Beat Generation.”1 And that caught on. Then Kerouac published anonymously a fragment of On the Road in New World Writing, a paperback anthology of the 1950s, called “Jazz of the Beat Generation,”2 and that caught on as a catchphrase, so that’s the history of the term.

  Secondly, Herbert Huncke, author of The Evening Sun Turned Crimson,3 who was a friend of Kerouac, Burroughs, and others of that literary circle from the 1940s, introduced them to what was then known as “hip language.” In that context, word “beat” is a carnival “subterranean,” subcultural, term, a term much used in Times Square in the 1940s. “Man, I’m beat . . .” meaning without money and without a place to stay. Could also mean “in the winter cold, shoes full of blood walking on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open up to a room full of steam heat . . .” Or, as in a conversation, “Would you like to go to the Bronx Zoo?” “Nah, man, I’m too beat, I was up all night.” So the original street usage meant exhausted, at the bottom of the world, looking up or out, sleepless, wide-eyed, perceptive, rejected by society, on your own, streetwise. Or, as it is now termed, fini in French, finished, undone, completed, in the dark night of the soul or the cloud of unknowing. “Open,” as in Whitmanic sense of “openness,” equivalent to humility, and so it was interpreted into various circles to mean both emptied out, exhausted, and at the same time wide open—perceptive and receptive to a vision.

  Then a third meaning of the term, as later modified by Kerouac, considering the abuse of the term in the media—the term being interpreted as being beaten completely, without the aspect of humble or humility, or “beat” as the beat of drums and “the beat goes on,” which are all mistakes of interpretation or etymology. Kerouac, in various lectures, interviews, and essays, tried to indicate the correct sense of the word by pointing out the root—be-at—as in beatitude, or beatific. In his essay “Origins of the Beat Generation”4 Kerouac defined it so. This is an early definition in the popular culture, though a late definition in the subculture: he clarified his intention, which was “beat” as beatific, as in “dark night of the soul,” or “cloud of unknowing,” the necessary beatness of darkness that proceeds opening up to light, egolessness, giving room for religious illumination.

  The fourth meaning that accumulated was “Beat Generation literary movement.” That was a group of friends who had worked together on poetry, prose, cultural conscience from the mid-forties until the term became popular nationally in the late fifties. The group consisting of Kerouac; William Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch and other books; Herbert Huncke; John Clellon Holmes, author of Go, The Horn, and other books, including memoirs, and other cultural essays; Allen Ginsberg, myself, member of the American Institute of Arts and Letters since 1976; then Philip Lamantia met in 1948; Gregory Corso met in 1950; and Peter Orlovsky encountered in 1954; and several other personages not as well known as writers were in this circle, particularly Neal Cassady and Carl Solomon. Neal Cassady was writing at the time, [but] his works weren’t published until posthumously.

  In the mid-1950s this smaller group, through natural affinities or modes of thought or literary style or planetary perspective, was augmented in friendship and literary endeavor by a number of writers in San Francisco, including Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Philip Lamantia, and a number of other lesser-known poets such as Jack Micheline, Ray Bremser, or the better-known black poet LeRoi Jones—all of whom accepted the term at one time or another, humorously or seriously, but sympathetically, and were included in a survey of Beat general manners, morals, and literature by Life magazine in a lead article in the late 1950s by one Paul O’Neil,5 and by the journalist Alfred Aronowitz in a large series on the Beat Generation in the New York Post.6

  Part of that literary circle, Kerouac, Whalen, Snyder, and, additionally, poet Lew Welch, Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg, and others, were interested in meditation and Buddhism. Relationship between Buddhism and the Beat Generation can be found in a scholarly survey of the development of Buddhism in America, How the Swans Came to the Lake, by Rick Fields.

  The fifth meaning of the phrase “Beat Generation” is the influence on the literary and artistic activities of poets, filmmakers, painters, and novelists who were working in concert in anthologies, publishing houses, independent filmmaking, and other media. The effect of the aforementioned groups—in film and still photography Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie; in music David Amram; in painting Larry Rivers; in poetry and publishing Don Allen, Barney Rosset, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti—extended to fellow artists; the bohemian culture, which was already a long tradition; to the youth movement of that day, which was also growing; and [to] the mass culture and middle-class culture of the late 1950s and early 1960s. These effects can be characterized in the following terms:

  •general liberation: Sexual “Revolution” or “Liberation,” Gay Liberation, Black Liberation, Women’s Liberation too;

  •liberation of the word from censorship;

  •decriminalization of some of the laws against marijuana and other drugs;

  •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 works of Burroughs, Huncke, Ginsberg, and Kerouac;

  •attention to what Kerouac called, after Spengler, “Second Religiousness” developing within an advanced civilization;

  •respect for land and indigenous peoples as proclaimed by Kerouac in his slogan from On the Road, “The earth is an Indian thing.�
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  The essence of the phrase “Beat Generation” can also be found in On the Road in another celebrated phrase, “Everything belongs to me because I am poor.”7

  CHAPTER 1

  Course Overview

  One thing I’ll try to do is talk sequentially in such a way that it will make sense for scholars as well as for ourselves and record what I’m doing because I’m getting senile and I don’t remember very much anymore. I can’t remember who fucked who, when, or who wrote what anymore, and this may be one of the last times I’ll actually be able to remember that and get it straight. My own tendency would be just to talk and talk and talk, assuming that you’ll understand what I’m talking about, but I found that sometimes the references that I make are my own private references that people don’t understand.

  [I’ll try] to summarize what I can remember of the literary aspect, or intellectual, or spiritual, as well as gossip, history of early meetings with William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, Herbert Huncke and Carl Solomon and Gregory Corso, among other people.8

  First, I want to run down the 1940s. What I’ll cover is a reading list, music of the forties, specific albums by Charlie Parker, King Pleasure, Thelonious Monk, Dexter Gordon, bebop of that time that influenced Kerouac’s rhythmic style. Musical phrasings that he imitated directly to get sentences and the prose for On the Road. I’ll talk about Symphony Sid who was the disc jockey who played all the great early bop classics from midnight till morn. That will bring up the idea of the relation between speech and music, as in “Salt Peanuts, Salt Peanuts,” which is [from] a Dizzy Gillespie classic. The music for that was literally lifted from speech phrasings, “salt peanuts, salt peanuts,” and Kerouac took it back from da-ta-da to his own prose.

  In other words, black musicians were imitating speech cadences and Kerouac was imitating the black musicians’ breath cadences on their horns and brought it back to speech. It always was speech rhythms or cadences as far as the ear that Kerouac was developing. All passed through black music. I’ll cover music as an influence to Kerouac and then a discussion of The Town and the City.

  The notion of fellaheen, which Kerouac got out of [Oswald] Spengler, fellaheen, a word that Kerouac uses a lot in On the Road. Spengler uses it to talk about the people who are not in the big city media scene, but are just dolts running around in their own cow pastures, living their own eternal lives throughout history. The people out in the provinces whose life is the same everywhere, oppressed, unnoticed, compared to the city people who are subject to constant hallucinations and empire transitoriness. Similar to Yeats’s idea, “turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer, things fall apart, the center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed on the world.”9 The center cannot hold, nobody knows what’s going on anymore. Everything is so complicated.

  A discussion of the minor but interesting writer called Herbert Huncke, whose book The Evening Sun Turned Crimson was originally written around that time. Huncke was a fellow that first turned Burroughs on to junk. Burroughs’s idea of the forties was “What if truth broke out? What if everybody started talking frankly.”

  [I will discuss] Times Square mid-1940s sociology and Dr. Alfred Kinsey who was hanging around and writing his book on human male sexuality in which we are all (Kerouac and Burroughs and Huncke and others) subjects. We entered into history that way first, before we started writing. A discussion of Benzedrine, which was the early speed, and its effect on the Times Square denizens of the forties. I’ll read a little bit out of Lonesome Traveler and Doctor Sax and talk about Kerouac’s idea of phantoms, human beings as phantoms in vast space. I’ll tell about my meeting with Kerouac and use the book Vanity of Duluoz, the vanity of Kerouac, as a retrospective autobiography by Kerouac, to cover that period of the forties. If you’re ever interested in checking back through the forties, Kerouac’s Vanity of Duluoz does that.

  We’ll talk about the mutual recognition of the transitoriness of existence, which is the basis of everybody’s tenderness. The realization that we were all sitting in a classroom like a bunch of meek-boned ghosts and we’re not going to be here very long. And so therefore there was a certain glimpse of the flowerness of the moment, as a basis of our literary understanding. I’ll talk about a poet named Mark Van Doren, who was a professor at Columbia and who was friends with Kerouac. Raymond Weaver, who first read Kerouac’s writings as a professor at Columbia. Weaver, a mystic who had discovered Herman Melville’s manuscript of Billy Budd in a trunk, was Kerouac’s first major literary connection. Raymond Weaver had taught in Japan and was the one professor at Columbia who had some sense of meditation and Zen and semantics and paradox, the first Gnostic professor we’d met. I’ll give an account of the circle of friends of 1945 around Columbia.

  We’ll cover my meeting with Gregory Corso in the 1950s and what was being read by everybody at the time. What Burroughs had recommended to us for reading, which was Spengler’s Decline of the West, Korzybski’s Science and Sanity to keep our language straight, Kafka’s Castle and Trial, Rimbaud’s Season in Hell and Illuminations, Jean Cocteau’s Opium, Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, William Butler Yeats’s A Vision, Raymond Chandler and John O’Hara detective stories. That was what we were all reading among ourselves.

  I’ll cover some of Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues. Describe Burroughs’s lifestyle, sitting around in a black, somewhat soup-stained vest, in a furnished room over Riordan’s Bar in New York, experimenting with drugs and [meeting] with local crooks on Times Square just to see what that sociology and mentality was like. I will talk a little bit about sitting down with William Burroughs, myself, and Kerouac, spending an hour a day for about a year with Burroughs psychoanalyzing me and doing the same with Kerouac. This at a time when Burroughs was being psychoanalyzed by a Dr. [Paul] Federn who had been analyzed by Freud. He was also working with a doctor, Lewis Wolberg, on hypnoanalysis.

  I’ll also talk about my early writing and Kerouac’s early writing around Columbia, and about Dostoyevsky, whom we all were reading, particularly The Idiot and The Possessed. I recommend for any basic course on the Beat Generation to familiarize yourself with The Idiot, Prince Myshkin. He was Dostoyevsky’s idea of the most beautiful human being he could imagine, the creation of a saint in literature. So the later writings of Dostoyevsky were everybody’s preoccupation, because they were full of totally heartfelt human beings confronting each other. I’ll talk about meeting Neal Cassady in 1946 and his influence on everybody, his energy, coming up from Denver.

  We encountered William Carlos Williams in 1948, adding some touch of influence and information from the twenties, from the great lineage of American poetry practice of Ezra Pound and the Imagists and Objectivists. Gregory Corso’s early poetry. First contacts with Zen Buddhism. Kerouac’s early ideas on spontaneous prose.

  What I’ll propose to do is read from the texts, read my favorite fragments or things that were important to us as a group at the time. Big sentences that knocked everybody out, that turned everybody on. Jack would write something and he’d send me a letter saying, “I just wrote this yesterday, what do you think of that?” Or I would send him a poem, or we’d get a letter from Burroughs with some amazing statement and I would copy it and send it to Kerouac. I’ll try and read those gists, which were historical epiphanies for us.

  CHAPTER 2

  Kerouac’s “Origins of the Beat Generation”

  I’ll begin with Jack Kerouac’s “Origins of the Beat Generation.” I’m skipping somewhat ten years, but as with my own little prefatory material and Kerouac’s essay, this is a general survey of the term “Beat” and its use and the ethos of what was called the Beat Generation. The most authoritative word obviously would be Kerouac’s. After On the Road was published in 1957 he was very famous and sought after. Much misunderstood for his sensitivity and taken to be somewhat of a juvenile delinquent. He was more of a recluse and so he stayed home, but there was one occasion
where he was invited out to Hunter College to give a lecture. Kerouac invited me to go along with him and when we arrived we found that the occasion was a debate of the Beat Generation with Kerouac set up to be attacked by James Wechsler, a liberal pundit, editor of the New York Post, Ashley Montagu, an anthropologist, and John Wain, a novelist from England [and a member] of a group called the “Angry Young Men.” The Angry Young Men didn’t have quite the genius that the Beat Generation would compose and didn’t have a spiritual agenda. It was more like a social protest group, not directly involved with the nature of consciousness.

  John Wain was more or less a conservative and thought of Kerouac as some boorish American and said so. Ashley Montagu dithered a bit but was basically sympathetic, speaking of it in terms of rebellion of the young against their parents, or the difficulty of living in speeded-up, mechanized society, the breakup of the family, etc. James Wechsler interpreted it as some sort of radical rebellion, but he felt that it was too passive and it didn’t involve itself in action. He actually got up on stage and shook his fist at Kerouac and said, “You gotta fight for peace.” Kerouac started laughing and picked up James Wechsler’s hat and put it on his head and walked around in a circle on stage instead of arguing with him. Wechsler got insulted and thought this was some kind of rude response instead of a rational tempered response to his proposition. Wechsler didn’t know about Zen masters and Zen answers. Jack just did it intuitively.

  Kerouac was also told that he wasn’t allowed to read the speech he had prepared, but Jack got up and read it, which was a document of considerable worth. It remains a beautiful classic prose essay, very surprising because what was expected was some kind of statement of rebellion against prevailing mores. Instead Kerouac wrote an enthusiastic prose poem, lyrically praising the things that he liked. I just want to point out some key passages which have stuck in my head all these years.