Best Minds of My Generation

by Allen Ginsberg

  [The Beat Generation] goes back to the 1880s when my grandfather Jean-Baptiste Kerouac used to go out on the porch in big thunderstorms and swing his kerosene lamp at the lightning and yell “Go ahead, go, if you’re more powerful than I am strike me and put the light out!” while the mother and the children cowered in the kitchen. And the light never went out.10

  I mean if you wanta talk of Beat as “beat down” the people who erased the crucifix . . .

  Oh, Kerouac had his photo taken for Mademoiselle or the New York Times magazine and when it was printed they erased the crucifix that had been put around his neck by Gregory Corso.

  As a matter of fact, who’s really beat around here, I mean if you wanta talk of Beat as “beat down” the people who erased the crucifix are really the “beat down” ones and not the New York Times, myself, and Gregory Corso the poet. I am not ashamed to wear the crucifix of my Lord. It is because I am Beat, that is, I believe in beatitude and that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son to it. I am sure no priest would’ve condemned me for wearing the crucifix outside my shirt everywhere no matter where I went, even to have my picture taken by Mademoiselle. So you people don’t believe in God? So you’re all big smart know-it-all Marxists and Freudians, hey? Why don’t you come back in a million years and tell me all about it, angels?

  Recently Ben Hecht said to me on TV, “Why are you afraid to speak out your mind, what’s wrong with this country, what is everybody afraid of?” Was he talking to me? All he wanted me to do was speak out my mind against people, he sneeringly brought up Dulles, Eisenhower, the Pope, all kinds of people like that and habitually he would sneer at with Drew Pearson, against the world he wanted, this is his idea of freedom, he calls it freedom. Who knows, my God, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty.11

  No, I want to speak for things, for the crucifix I speak out, for the Star of Israel I speak out, for the divinest man who ever lived who was a German (Bach) I speak out, for sweet Mohammed I speak out, for Buddha I speak out, for Lao-tse and Chuang-tse I speak out, for D. T. Suzuki I speak out.

  Suzuki in 1948 was giving lectures on Zen at Columbia and John Cage and a lot of artists and scholars [attended].

  . . . why should I attack what I love out of life. This is Beat. Live your lives out? Naw, love your lives out. When they come and stone you at least you won’t have a glass house, just your glassy flesh.12

  He was defining it as glee. Any of you who know Thomas Wolfe’s prose might remember that there’s a passage in which Wolfe speaks of a kind of joy or glee or enthusiasm or overflowing of feelings that sometimes occurs that makes him want to cry a high squealy note of pleasure. I think Kerouac picked up on that. He’s defining the Beat Generation in terms of images from American comic strips or personal experience.

  . . . the maniacal laugh of certain neighborhood madboys, the furious humor of whole gangs playing basketball till long after dark in the park, it goes back to those crazy days before World War II when teenagers drank beer on Friday nights at Lake ballrooms and worked off their hangovers playing baseball on Saturday afternoon followed by a dive in the brook—and our fathers wore straw hats like W. C. Fields. It goes back to the completely senseless babble of the Three Stooges, the ravings of the Marx Brothers (the tenderness of Angel Harpo at harp, too).13

  [It goes back] to train whistles of steam engines out above 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 oldtime waiters in line at the Brooklyn Bridge in Winterset, the funny spitelessness of old big-fisted America like Big Boy Williams saying “Hoo? Hee? Huh?” in a movie about Mack Trucks and sliding door lunchcarts. To Clark Gable, his certain smile, his confident leer. Like my grandfather this America was invested with wild self-believing 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.”14

  He was putting that kind of hot hipster talk, enthusiasm, in line with old-fashioned American individualistic Whitmanic enthusiasm, rather than beat or hip as it was interpreted by some journalists as retiring, cool, pathological, silent, slightly paranoid, pot-smoking paranoid. Then his version of the word “Beat.”

  Anyway, the hipsters, whose music was bop, they looked like criminals but they kept talking about the same things I liked {he’s talking about people that he met around Times Square and around Greenwich Village in the mid- and late 1940s}, long outlines of personal experience and vision {this is actually what this history is about, “long outlines of personal experience and vision”}, night-long confessions full of hope that had become illicit and repressed by the 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.15

  By 1948 the hipsters, or beatsters, were divided into cool and hot.

  This is actually quite funny and it relates to a pamphlet published by Norman Mailer called The White Negro, which defined the hipster as a white person who was in the position of alienation or outsiderness in relation to society or having undergone a sea change internally so that he’s ultimately black in the sense that he’s out of the majority culture and in another psychological world. The psychological world that Mailer defines was that of psychopathology basically. Someone who didn’t want to show emotion. His is a kind of hyper-intellectualized version, very different from Kerouac. Kerouac was making a very clear distinction.

  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 {he just made up a word} 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.16

  Walter Pater, an English essayist of exquisite manners and mind, referred to some artwork or some poem as “burning with a hard gemlike flame”17 and that became a standard buzz phrase for aesthetic judgments in small talk and novels, almost corny. Kerouac is citing this corny little phrase in a kind of traditional-sounding way assuming that the audience is literate enough to know who Walter Pater is and what the “hard gemlike flame” is. It was a subtle literary reference in the midst of this “hot” essay. Jack says this ethos or this sense of life is still

  . . . 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. {More, meaning social custom, social style, social ethos, norm.} “Beat Generation” has simply become the slogan or label for a revolution in manners in America. {That’s pretty sharp for 1959.} Marlon Brando was not really the first to portray it on the screen. Dane Clark {this is an old movie star} with his pinched Dostoyevskyan face and Brooklyn accent, and of course {John} Garfield, were first. The private eyes {Raymond Chandler and John O’Hara the early detective fiction of the 1930s and 1940s} were Beat. In M, Peter Lorre started a whole revival, I mean the slouchy street walk.18

  That’s really true today. You see those guys wearing baggy pants, descendants of the parachute pants, wearing an odd weird Frankenstein haircut. It all comes out of Peter Lorre. It’s a continuation of the same style as the murderer in the German movie M of the 1930s.

  . . . 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.19

  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. {See, he got pissed off.}

  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), St. 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. {Irish Republican Army} 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 1958 naturally to suddenly see “Beat” being taken up by everybody, press and TV and Hollywood borscht circuit to include the “juvenile delinquency” shot {shot meaning take} 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 home run 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!20

  He concludes with a statement on violence, because the main shot was that Beat groups were cruel psychopathic knife-wielding juvenile delinquent literary murderers, which is the take which continues. It was the proclamation of Norman Podhoretz in 1958 in Partisan Review as a literary critic attacking the Beat Generation group, particularly Kerouac, as “Know-Nothing Bohemians.”21

  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 {this is very witty}, starting with satires about girls in black and fellows in jeans with snapknives and sweatshirts and swastikas tattooed under their armpits {this all came true with the punk generation} it will come to respectable MCs {master of ceremonies} 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 living room 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 to 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 to 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 {That’s a little quote from Marxist rhetoric}, woe unto those who believe in conflict and horror and violence {and here he’s talking directly about Norman Podhoretz and Norman Mailer, they thrive in that atmosphere of cruelty, it’s their natural element} and fill our books and screens and living rooms 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.22

  He’s always got this little edge of letting go of his anger or letting go of his resentment. “Woe unto those who spit on the Beat Generation, the wind will blow it back.” Pretty good and quite prophetic. The Beat Generation is primarily a spiritual movement and so what I have put together are specimens of spiritual breakthroughs, or epiphanous experience, or illuminated experience, or alterations of consciousness, or psychedelic insight, articulated by people who were there from the beginning, part of the original group.

  CHAPTER 3

  Reading List

  The reading list I made up is mostly centered on the forties and fifties. The most interesting literary material begins in the forties. A lot of the most famous like On the Road and a lot of Kerouac’s great matters are done from the early fifties on. Actually the Beat Generation as it was known as a social phenomenon didn’t start until about 1958 or 1959 and so there’s all that literature when it surfaces and becomes public. Then there’s the continued work of Kerouac and Burroughs, flowering in the sixties. My own work comes toward some kind of climax with “Kaddish” in the early sixties. Whatever transformation socially took place in the sixties, [as well as the] development of Cassady’s work and transformation of that is in the sixties, or seventies, perhaps. A lot of Gregory Corso’s major work comes through in the mid-sixties also. Then there’s a whole period of re-consideration and re-creation and re-flowering in the seventies. What we’re involved in is something that is a consideration of a group of writers whose work continues on into the present.

  There is what may seem like a random list of writers from Shakespeare through André Gide as well. These were all people that Burroughs or Kerouac or myself or others read as part of the ethos of the forties and fifties and were determining influences on Beat writing, like Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot, Rimbaud’s Season in Hell, Wolfe’s American novels, Kafka’s Trial, so what I’m giving you in a sense is a reading list of the stuff we read in the forties, mostly [books] handed to Kerouac and myself by Burroughs, plus a
list of Beat writers of the present time.

  CHAPTER 4

  Visions

  What we started with in the forties was a preoccupation with the literary inquisitiveness as to the nature of consciousness. There were key phrases like “supreme reality,” or a “new vision,” or in Burroughs’s more laconic terminology, the last phrases of Junkie, “a final fix.” There were visions, actual visions, like Gary Snyder’s satori experience in 1948 in Portland, Oregon, or my own 1948 auditory hallucination of Blake’s voice. Kerouac in his Scripture of the Golden Eternity mentions falling backwards in a breath-faint and seeing with his eyes closed some golden ash left over from existence. Burroughs in the preface to Junkie talks about an early adolescent experience of seeing little men walking around on a plateau on the moon or something. Cassady was constantly talking about simultaneity of consciousness [whereby] our ordinary minds generally had six simultaneous levels of reference going on at the same time. Peter Orlovsky had had some solitary, tearful vision of his own when the trees bowed down and talked to him around 1955. Gregory Corso reported from Greece in 1960 some taste of skinless light—a pretty good phrase—that indicated some gap that put the word “skinless” next to the word “light.” The word “light” is always used in mystical experience, “skinless light” I never heard before, so that sounded authentic.

  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?