The Golden Age of Paperbacks

     Surely the nineteen-fifties, when I was setting out with the ambition of reading everything, was the golden age of paperback books, when most of the world’s classics were available for pocket change.  The first books I acquired, toward the latter end of elementary school, were all in soft covers: Walt Kelly’s Pogo collections, The Pocket Trashery of Ogden Nashery, Subways are for Sleeping which appealed to my taste for eccentricity, as did Auntie Mame.  I loved Čapek’s War with the Newts long before I knew who the author was, and read On the Beach before seeing Stanley Kramer’s movie.  I was a devotee of Judith Merrill’s annual collections of well-written science fiction.  By sixth grade my shelf held Hendrik Willem van Loon’s History of Mankind, an exemplary book for children which offers distinctive style, amusing drawings, and (in memory at least) no condescension whatever.  Fledgling literary interests were emerging, and I read and reread my volume of Poe’s stories and poems, or a little collection of American short stories, or one of the Untermeyer poetry anthologies --  each of these sold for 25 or 35 cents.  I had been entranced by my parent’s purchase of the Life book of The World’s Great Religions and considered my Mentor copy of The Way of Life: Lao Tzu translated by R. B. Blakney a revelation.  (Its rhythms run still in my mind, doubtless to my benefit.)

    But when I became somewhat older and able to go to Chicago by myself, my middle-class parents, though frugal about nearly everything else, let me buy paperbacks freely in the interest of education.  I could indulge myself with reckless intemperance and my paperback library mushroomed.  When I would visit the Loop over sixty years ago, I had several regular routes.  One of them culminated in a visit to “the world’s largest bookstore,” Kroch’s and Brentano’s.  But I would not go there directly.  First I would stop by the Rose Discount Record store on South Wabash to pick up classical sides and then proceed a few blocks further south to Seymour’s Record store  where Seymour Schwartz sold jazz and blues from a decidedly unglamorous (and thereby hip) shop.  He had heaps of old 78s in the back for maybe 25 cents each.   I would then stop by a few favorite dusty old used bookshops and, I confess, toward the end, I would also patronize also the Iwan Ries tobacconist (conveniently on Wabash as well) to pick up a pack of smokes from some exotic and thus sophisticated country, transforming me instantly from a callow youth to a cosmopolite.  Though the tobacco was foolish, in the books lay the very foundations of my education.  Through my teen-age years I was never without a pile of paperbacks on the floor by the head of the WWII army surplus cot on which I slept. (The stack persists all these years later, though now, as I share my bed, it rests on the table by the parlor sofa.).

     Most had been purchased at the climactic stop on my urban excursion when I entered the precincts of Kroch's, also on Wabash.  It was there that I spent by far the largest sums I spent anywhere in those days (modest as they were).  With the exception of a few volumes in German, I never bought books on the main floor.  Passing the carefully curated record selection at the top of the stairs, mainly folk music and blues but offering the old Caedmon spoken word albums as well, I would head down to the basement where the paperbacks were kept, arranged in shelves by publisher. 

     What a glorious new-found-land it was in which every region offered substantial rewards. From every side authors beckoned: Dante, Camus, Ben Jonson, Lady Murasaki, among hundreds of other worthies, a magnificent company! To this day I recall in which corner I would find the austere Penguins without cover art featuring reliable translations from a variety of languages, the cheap little Mentors and often rather ugly Signets for the general run of classics, the Doubleday Anchor books with their marvelous designs by the likes of Edward Gorey and Leo Lionni, the larger format grey-jacketed Scribner’s books for Hemingway and Fitzgerald, the wondrous old reprints in hardy well-bound Dover editions (including many of Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East), the New Directions with their black and white covers and avant-garde edge, even the Catholic Image books for Aquinas and Cardinal Newman.

     The bookstore staff seemed mostly composed of young men, perhaps working a while between undergraduate and graduate school or else ABDs too educated to find any other employment. At any rate, they seemed very knowledgeable about the arts, and were rather intriguing to an adolescent shopper from the suburbs, still living with his parents.  They had opinions.  I recall when my brother bought a copy of Naked Lunch against the advice of the clerk, who told him, “Don’t waste your money. For ten minutes you’ll be shocked, but it’ll be nothing but boredom after that.”

     It was surely due to the influence of these young workers that Kroch’s had a decent selection of small press books, not just City Lights, but Piet Hein’s Grooks and Botteghe Oscura, and many more obscure titles.  For years it seems they were trying to move the plain black copies of Norman Mailer’s Deaths for the Ladies, which, though I was an enthusiastic admirer of the author, struck me as aggressively off-hand.

     I may have lived in an insular little haut bourgeois suburb, but here was an entrance to a far greater realm, providing access to people of all times and places.  What could be more exhilarating than to read one’s way through the world’s greatest texts for the first time? I was quite serious, making systematic surveys or movement and periods, noting marginal comments, sometimes in German once I started learning the language. My granddaughter hears such things and affectionately says, “You were such a nerd,” but to me it was the epitome of cool. I wanted to read everything, though, of course, I had my favorites.

     Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry 1945-1960 was a revelation and a delight. I wrote to many of the small presses listed in the back to obtain books Kroch’s didn’t offer. During high school I ostentatiously carried the book around — I did the same with Spenser’s The Faerie Queene because I had read that he was “a poet’s poet” — and got my reward when some prankster put chewing gum in my anthology when I was away from my seat.  I became a missionary for Gary Snyder’s Cold Mountain Poems, translations of Han Shan, which I photocopied and gave to friends.  Apart from the Beats I tried to keep up with contemporary poetry, picking up paperbound volumes of Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, John Berryman, and John Ashbery. 

     In fat Mentor editions I worked my way through the turgid Russians – Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, though I preferred Gogol’s Evenings Near the Village of Dikanka published by political refugee Frederick Ungar whose company was strong in German translations (I had Lessing’s Nathan the Wise and Goethe’s Werther from them) but also included such odd works as Gladkov’s socialist realist novel with the dramatically uncompromising title of Cement.  Kleist’s stories fascinated me with their precise exacting weirdness in a Signet book.  I read Ovid’s Metamorphoses from Collier translated by Sir John Harington, the Elizabethan inventor of the water closet, and it never occurred to me to wonder how such a book could possibly be issued in a popular edition.  My Washington Square Press copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Songs, and Poems is dated 1960, cost thirty-five cents, and is yet today in serviceable condition.  I very nearly wore out my Muse’s Library edition of Thomas Wyatt’s poems while the Everyman’s paperback of Silver Poets of the Sixteenth Century added Surrey, Ralegh, and Davies.  I had, of course, Howl and Kaddish (as well as Ferlinghetti, Corso, and Jack Hirschman’s Artaud Anthology) from City Lights, while among my New Directions volumes from my high school days were a half shelf of Henry Miller, Pound’s Selected Poems, Williams’ Paterson and Pictures from Breughel, and novels by Louis Fernand Céline.  And, of course, I had Evergreens from Grove Press  as well.  I just reread Melville’s The Confidence Man (their first title), Lorca, Beckett, Aphra Behn and Crashaw as well as essays by D. T. Suzuki.  When I set out from home for university, I brought my Modern Library College edition paperback of Plato as a talisman.

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     If the golden age I am celebrating has passed, the change may be due less to changes in the publishing industry than to a decay in the public’s taste.  In my youth not only the professoriate but people in general (especially, but not exclusively, those with some bit of education), recognized the value of the liberal arts.  To many it was obvious that to glimpse the world through Plato’s eyes, even briefly, must surely broaden and enrich even a banker’s view of the present day.  Nor was this belief entirely a class attitude.  The Little Blue Books (an essay on the Blue Book phenomenon will soon be posted to this site) indicate that the American autodidact, exemplified by figures from Benjamin Franklin through Jack London and Malcom X, was a sociological fact in the ‘twenties and ‘thirties when workingmen might read Shelley’s poems or Will Durant on Aristotle in little booklets costing a nickel or a dime.  Meanwhile in the United Kingdom Penguin began selling quality books for two and a half (old) pence, advertised as “the price of ten cigarettes.”

     During World War II when the American government printed over a hundred million Armed Services Edition books to distribute to troops, a project headed by former Pocket Books executive Philip Van Doren Stern, the titles included bestsellers like Anthony Adverse and the Hornblower novels, but Shelley, Poe, Conrad, Maugham, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald as well.  By the nineteen-fifties there were plenty of trashy exploitation titles like those from Gold Medal on the racks in bus stations and drugstores, the descendants of the pulp magazine of the ‘thirties, but they were often accompanied by a few classier titles.  (Sometimes a French classic, Zola, say, or D. H. Lawrence, received a cover as though it were a potboiler, resulting, perhaps, in a mix of disappointed and delighted purchasers.) 

     What has become of these books, at once so good and so cheap?  Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, one of the first Pocket Books in the, now sells for over thirty times its ‘fifties price, and inflation accounts for only a third of the increase.  Wilder’s The Bridge at San Luis Rey, which had been a good seller in its Pocket Book form is presently available in editions costing between thirty and sixty times that price.  The price growth reflects the fact that these books are today bought almost entirely by students to whom they are a classroom assignment.  The casual purchaser has all but vanished; very little remains of what had been a cherished common cultural patrimony.  The allusions of filmmakers, poets, and composers alike are lost to those unfamiliar with the artists’ predecessors.     

     I fancy that there was then a lesser gap between low and high art, that the two could rub shoulders in the marketplace, but the mass base for the classics, such as it ever was, has largely evanesced as even most university students, even the cleverer ones, choose to focus solely on vocational training rather than the general intellectual practice – absorbing information, analyzing it, and generating new ideas – that provided the center of the old curriculum in which literature was essential and central.  The change has affected more than just reading.  A glance over a symphony audience will show a sea of white hair, and the classical percentage of recorded music sales has been declining for decades (as has the share of jazz).  Even theater attracts elders for the most part.  What was once a shared body of cultural information has become a territory visited primarily by specialist academics. 

     The younger generations has not, however, abandoned art by any means.  They listen to hours of mostly digitalized music, watch great amounts of television and a good number of movies and never feel as though confining themselves to popular forms is any constriction at all.  Critics will discuss a new pop album or Netflix series, on NPR and PBS, mind you, as though the potential of art had any scope in such productions, virtually none of which have proven other than forgettable.  The decline of the paperback, which played an important role in the democratization of learning, inevitably accompanies the abandonment of the liberal arts.

     When he founded Penguin in 1935 Sir Allen Lane declared that he “believed in the existence of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it.”  His intuition proved true (and profitable) both in the United Kingdom and the United States, but decades, now, of devotion to iPhones and iPads, to Roku and Hulu, Spotify and Apple Music, has eroded that market to insignificance.  People today can be educated through the graduate level while never acquiring cultural literacy and never, indeed, missing it. 

     If I rue the end of such cheap books of the very highest quality, still that loss is trivial compared to the loss of the readership that once welcomed those old paperbacks and with them came to take possession of their own literature, including poetry so beautiful as to make the reader weak in the knees, drama so sublime as to refresh the soul, and stories truer than the truth of everyday lived reality.  People who settle for an episode of Breaking Bad or a tune from Taylor Swift will never, I am afraid, know what they are missing.   

Poetry 1968

I delivered this talk to a general audience at a 1993 conference observing the passing of twenty-five years since that annus mirabilis (or was it an annus horribilis?) 1968. The occasion encouraged a sociological swerve in the discussion. Fifty years have now passed. I could not resist revisions.

     Just as language according to Saussure is a system of difference, literary history proceeds by contradiction and dialectic. Tradition and innovation are complements rather than opposites. A static code would be robotized and empty of information whereas one wholly free of convention would be unintelligible. As anyone who has witnessed an English department meeting is aware, literary people are fond of tossing words about endlessly, but this does not mean their disputes are meaningless. Just like the ancient Greek contention between the water-drinking poets and their wine-drinking colleagues or the eighteenth-century battle of the books, the 1968 “culture clash” in poetry represented real differences in values, literary practice, and culture generally.
     In fact ten years before 1968 the partisan lines were already well-defined. The fact is notorious that the two most prominent anthologies of new poetry in English – the 1957 New Poets of England and America edited by Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson and Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry 1945-1960 – did not contain a single poet in common. So there was fierce controversy on strictly poetic turf, and the war of the anthologies defines the principal factions usefully and far more precisely than the labels formalist and anti-academic. Still, other oppositions occurred simultaneously. Within the boundaries of Allen’s collection, one might, for instance, imagine the scrimmage of the projectivists against practitioners of the deep image or the bicoastal competition between the boys from Artnews against the team from City Lights.
     On this occasion, though, I prefer to emphasize the intersections of the sociological with the literary and to highlight some works from that period that exemplify significant changes in the location of poetry in the fabric of American culture.
     Today as in the sixties most Americans consume poetry in the form of advertising copy. The clever writers who sell beer and detergents use every trick in the Renaissance manuals of rhetoric, and they doi gain their audience. The verbal magic of their technical skills, alas, is directed only at charming money from the consumer to the corporation, not a theme likely to generate soul-stirring and enduring texts. A few subgenres still persist with vigor: bumper stickers, internet memes, greeting cards, and the more extravagant varieties of slang. But poetry proper, the longtime honorific queen of the arts, is also the neglected step-daughter – without readership, without a context beyond the universities which continue to shelter a few queer cranks.
     In 1968 poetry was reaching new audiences and experiencing a miniature surge in popularity which, though never fully realized in new masterpieces, still carries momentum today in a thousand open readings in bars and coffee houses. This efflorescence did not emerge, though, from the heart of American poetic tradition alone, but was stimulated by social, political, and economic conditions and movements far outside the realm of the aesthetic.
     Several of the new popular artists and audiences were directly spawned by the political trends of the day. Protest rallies often included poets and musicians on the same stage with orators. In what was really a fainter echo of the proletarian art of the thirties, the sixties brought new art arose to make concrete the radical sentiments of the day: the new muralist movement ornamented some of the bleakest walls of American cities, Newsreel set out to chronicle the revolution on film, R. Diggs of Rip Off Press and Aaron Fagen of Rising Up Angry drew cartoons that were fierce as well as funny. There were even countries where the politicians were poets, a peculiar thought for Americans: Mao and Ho, Leopold Senghor of Senegal and Agostinho Neto in Angola. Protest poetry had been building, cultivated by Robert Bly who founded American Writers against the Vietnam War in 1966 and the following year held the first anti-war poetry reading and Old Leftist Walter Lowenfels whose anthology Where is Vietnam? appeared in 1967. Books like Ed Dorn and Gordon Brotherston’s Our Word: Guerilla Poems from Latin America not only were published, but enjoyed a certain popularity. Diane di Prima published the first of her self-dramatizing Revolutionary Letters. For a time, as a generation earlier, it seemed that writers and artists were united in opposition to an oppressive government.
     Black literary consciousness had already the tradition of the Harlem Renaissance and the thirties engagement with socialism. During the Depression Langston Hughes performed to the sound of jazz as well as composing in jazz-influenced verbal rhythms, and in the fifities black poets were welcomed in the counter-culture. Writers like Ted Joans, Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), and Bob Kaufman read accompanied by small ensembles in bars, galleries, and coffee houses. On May 19 of 1968 (Malcolm X's birthday) Felipe Luciano, Gylan Kain and David Nelson formed The Last Poets in Marcus Garvey Park in East Harlem. That year Etheridge Knight went directly from prison to an appointment at the University of Pittsburgh on the strength of his Poems from Prison, and LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal came out with Black Fire, an anthology of African-American poetry which acknowledges, according to Neal’s “Afterword,” “History weighs down on all this literature,” and which thus seeks to represent , as Jones (Baraka) said in the “Foreward” “the striving of a nation coming back into focus.”
     The hip subculture, conceived at the time by some as the revolutionary youth movement, contributed to the radical critique of America. Though the Beat Generation was in fact a coterie of writers (Ginsberg liked to says it was simply himself and a few friends), by the late sixties it looked almost like a mass movement. The 1967 Human Be-in in San Francisco featured Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and Snyder as well as Lenore Kandel who insisted on the vatic as well as the political role of poetry, saying “Poetry is never compromise. It is the manifestation of a vision, an illumination, an experience.” (Allen and Tallman 450) The Diggers publishing arm, the Communications Company, had already ceased printing by 1968, but their example spawned countless others. Paul Carroll, the Chicago poet who had come to some prominence when the University of Chicago refused to publish a number of the Chicago Review he had edited which featured William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac and he reacted by printing it himself as the first issue of Big Table, saw that his time had come and he published an anthology titled The Young American Poets which featured writers who had emerged after Allen’s anthology.
     Oral performance of poetry had, of course, been widespread throughout history, but with differing forms in different eras. Earlier generations of Americans had made celebrities of poets like James Whitcomb Riley, Amy Lowell, and Vachel Lindsay based on their live shows, but for the second half of the twentieth century the spoken word model (apart from university readings) was the Beat coffee house scene. By 1968 readings were proliferating across the country in a trend that continues to the extent that poetry may well be the most widely practiced art today.
     Considerably more influential than even the burgeoning hip movement was the evolution of popular music. In a general way the often sappy lyrics of fifties rock and roll, many of them written by Tin Pan Alley professionals, were replaced by more original, subtle, and inventive lyrics. Led in sales by Bob Dylan and the Beatles, much popular music came to be more artisanal than corporate, with every garage band playing originals, and millions of people who never would have read a poem consumed these oral texts with devotion and understanding. Instead of the Leiber and Stoller songs expressing teen-age frustrations with school (“Charley Brown”) and Parents (“Yackety-yak”), bands began to express youth culture with a more radical disaffection. The leading edge of this trend was perhaps embodied by John Sinclair and the MC5 and their White Panther Party (later the Rainbow people’s Party) who literally proposed a program of “rock and roll, dope, and fucking in the streets.” Even among the most popular artists, 1968 was the year of the release of the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man” with its declarations “The time is right for a palace revolution” and “I’ll kill the king.” By contrast in 1968 the Beatles recorded “Revolution” which satirically maintained “if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao/ You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow.” (A few years later, in 1971 John Lennon was moved to announce a different reaction: “I really thought that love would save us all. But now I’m wearing a Chairman Mao badge, that’s where it’s at.” (Lennon Remembers) Meanwhile Mick Jagger was boasting that his father had been a working class Communist.
     The categories between the social, the political, and the artistic blur in Amiri Baraka’s comment on jazz: “The social consciousness displayed in that music . . . is more radical than sit-ins. We get to Feel-Ins, Know-Ins, Be-Ins.” (Black Music) In spite of the dated locutions, this might serve as a decent formulation of the Romantic definition of art.
     At the same time as poetry was influenced by the political and by popular art, experimental work continued in more purely artistic circles. The attacks on poetry written to order for New critical analysis continued on a variety of fronts: the confessional writers, the hip attempt to tap into pure consciousness, Bly’s “leaping poetry,” the search for the elusive breath unit, the exploration of oral literature by Snyder, Rothenburg, and others, to mention only a few.
     In terms of form itself the sixties represent a transition period during which the profoundly radical gestures which had originated earlier in the century when another war had estranged the artists and Dada had emerged were being integrated into established and academic journals, giving birth to a curiously sleek and prosperous avant-gardism. Before long, the very strategies which had been used to épater les bourgeoisie were receiving grants from major foundations founded by nineteenth century robber barons and even by the federal government without alarming an body except eventually in the nineties Jesse Helms and a few fundamentalists who had never before given a thought to art.
     Cage, MacLow, and Kaprow cultivated randomness and their attitudes were reflected in verse by writers like Ted Berrigan, Anselm Hollo, an d Lew Welch. The attempts to explode the text advanced, breaking first syntax (like Clark Coolidge) and proceeding to wholly non-verbal documents by people like Richard Kostelanetz very like to old-style Lautgedichte. Though such work was as much in a twentieth century tradition as it was experimental, it continued to attract practitioners in spite of its loss of the ability to surprise and shock.
     The concept of a “culture clash” moved from symbolic to physical described by Charles Simic in “On the Great Poets Brawl of 1968.” He recalls hostility to the old guard faction headed by longtime editor Henry Rago whom “lots of poets loathed” was sufficiently heated that fistfights erupted on the floor of the Stony Brook World Poetry Conference. Yet that same year Poetry published aging avant-gardists like Pablo Neruda, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan, political radicals like Muriel Rukeyser, and hip authors like Gary Snyder, as well as experimentalists of various schools such as Gerard Malanga, Ted Berrigan, and Larry Eigner.
     The proliferation of community poetry readings and the relative rise in popularity of readings by well-known authors is a lasting if limited effect of the tendency that, while it was hardly new, grew considerably in the late sixties. As M.F.A. programs have sprouted on all sides, the general poetic literacy has fallen precipitately. The poetic energy that for a time in the sixties bled into popular culture in a range of fresh and exciting directions, has, it seems to me, produced little promise of new work in our own time. Revolutionary political lyrics in rare survivals seem as robotized as the forgotten proletarian poetry of the thirties, though ethnic identity, gay, and feminist themes are prominent in prize-winning manuscripts. A solid advance is evident in the emergence of ranks of significant black writers, but political protest seems most vigorous in rap. The counter-culture, arguably already spent by 1968 – the Haight had observed “the death of hippie” toward the end of 1967 – is to most a somewhat silly memory rather than a renaissance. Its innovative forms have been coopted and digested by the marketplace. The sometimes witty, elegant, and outrageous head comics, it seems, served only to pave the way for Beavis and Butthead, the montage methods of the wildest underground movies appear in advertisements for underwear, and popular music has long returned to being a commodity. For my money, the present question is not in what direction the avant-garde will turn, but whether an avant-garde is possible at all in the twenty-first century.

The Legacy of the Beats

     Numerous times, I have heard people say, “Reading On the Road changed my life.” They go on to tell of going hitch-hiking, taking LSD, or changing majors from sociology to comparative religion. What have these alterations to do with literature? Might not similar changes have followed a new lover, or perhaps just failing a course? Though I avoided that particular confessional declaration as a cliché, like many clichés, it bears some truth, including in my own case. As an adolescent, though I was reading the range of English poetry as well as great gulps of others, I admit to having read the Beats with a special attention and excitement. To some extent, this may have arisen from the sensational dope/sex straight and gay/madness revelations, but I was reacting also to the style of my own time, a novel style, one that has had a major influence on American writing since. In his “Notes for Howl and Other Poems” Allen Ginsberg refers to his poetry as “angelical ravings,” an expression that enigmatically but precisely expresses the specific distinguishing hip sensibility associated with Beat writing.
     One must return to the scornful pop culture references to “beatniks” and dismissive reviews from not just the academy, but almost the entire literary establishment (which did extend beyond ivied walls), to realize the impact of Donald M. Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960 which created a new canon, a sort of canon of the anti-canonical. It is notorious that the more conventional major anthology New Poets of England and America edited by Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson (with an introduction by Robert Frost), though it was published only three years earlier, had not a single author in common with Allen’s. Today nearly all of Allen’s poets have become accepted; many are featured in standard textbooks.
     Norman Podhoretz’ claim in 1958 that the Beats embody a bitter anti-intellectualism – he even implicates them in the scourge of the fifties, the juvenile delinquent – now seems utterly misguided. [1] It is almost as though Podhoretz had developed his view from the reportage of Life Magazine rather than from the Beat literary output.
     His notions, though, coincided with the attitudes of most Americans to whom the poetry and fiction that emerged from the Beat scene was far less striking than their reputed lifestyle: high on dope of various sorts, ecstatic with a range of sexual activities, many transgressive, yet claiming insight into the heart of things and holy visions of the sort that had gone out of style in the church only to reappear among artists reclaiming their vatic role. Indeed, in the Romantic view of these writers the semi-criminal and the beatified were likely to coincide. Clellon Holmes write in 1952, “the problem of modern life is essentially a spiritual problem; and that capacity for sudden wisdom which people who live hard and go far possess, are assets and bear watching.” [2]
     Contrary to what Podhoretz had heard, the Beats gave traditional learning its due. Corso had read voraciously and then loitered about Harvard while Kerouac and Ginsberg were well-educated and took pains to establish their literary lineage. The counter-cultural tradition featured scholars like Rexroth, Blackburn, and Gary Snyder. Most of the Beats accepted professorial posts before their days were done, and for decades they have had their own university in Naropa. At best, the schema that balances the reserved academic against the Bohemian avant-garde polarity is reductive.
     Furthermore, the field of poetry in the late forties was by no means homogeneous. Perhaps the most clearly “academic” group was associated with the New Criticism: the reactionary Southern Fugitives or Agrarians, Yvor Winters (apart from his earliest poems), and a host of associate professors with chapbooks. For the most part, these writers rejected ideals of sincerity and self-expression, preferring exacting formal values. To the New Critics who dominated literary studies in my own undergraduate years, authorial intention and affect were irrelevant, as the poem was a purely aesthetic object, valued for its formal qualities.
     At the same time as apolitical or overtly reactionary views governed most small quarterlies and poetry journals, a rump faction remained of revolutionary more-or-less Marxist poets like Kenneth Fearing, Walter Lowenfels, and John Beecher who once sold stacks of books, then swelled enthusiastic anthologies, but who were already largely forgotten in the early days of McCarthyism.
     The experimental and avant-garde traditions continued in Surrealism, Jackson MacLow, Armand Schwerner, and a wide range of others as well as in High Modernism itself which employed experimental techniques such as fragmentation and field composition. Pound and Eliot were still writing in this vein, and Zukofsky and Charles Olson after them.
     Meanwhile the Confessional poets like Lowell and Berryman were setting out their grave self-revelations, albeit couched in tight rhyme and rhythm at first, and the New York poets associated with abstract expressionism wrote expressive and personal verses that could seem like spontaneous improvisation.
     By far the most popular English poet of the era during which the Beats emerged was Dylan Thomas. If the only choices are to be rebellion or tradition, his position is problematic. His Collected Poems, 1934–1952, elicited immense critical praise and Philip Toynbee was not out of step with many others when his review in The Observer declared Thomas “the greatest living poet in the English language.” Thomas’ demanding craftsmanship had calculated in detail the impact of each extraordinary rhythm and every plosive consonant. He had served his apprenticeship writing for the Ministry of Information during the war and for the notoriously staid BBC afterward.
     Yet this same writer was also associated with the New Apocalyptic group (though he disclaimed a connection) which owed much to Surrealism. He was a celebrity bad boy more famous for his drinking than his lyrics and known (like Hemingway) to millions who had never read a line of his work. Skilled at oral performance, he was a “personality” as much as an artist, at the time the only poet who could pack halls of every city and college town for readings.
     In his oddly ambivalent essay “Disengagement: The Art of the Beat Generation” Kenneth Rexroth focuses on “two great dead juvenile delinquents . . . Charlie Parker and Dylan Thomas” whom he portrays as desperately trying to save themselves with gestures of pure art, both ultimately overcome by “the horror of the world.” [3] To him both are virtuosos left without hope when they found that pure manipulation of form could not enlighten or liberate. His epithet of “disengaged” is not only startling when applied to two such apparently passionate artists; it is, in fact, a condemnation of Beat poetry by its own midwife, the producer of the 1955 Gallery Six reading.
     To simplify and avoid questions of definition, I shall take Rexroth at his word when he limits the Beats to Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Corso. [4] Far from being “know-nothing Bohemians,” the most likely descriptive category for this group is neo-Romantic. Their privileging of spontaneity, directness, sincerity, interest in the vernacular, sympathy for children and the underclass, looseness of form, visionary claims, revolutionary political views, even drug use; all are directly traceable to the circles around Wordsworth and Shelley. Corso actually managed to have his body buried in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery alongside Keats and Shelley. [5]
     Kerouac was arch-Romantic in citing as “an American masterpiece,” “the greatest piece of writing I ever saw,” and his literary model a very long December 17, 1950 letter from Neal Cassady sometimes called the Joan Anderson letter. “I got the idea for the spontaneous style of On the Road from seeing how good old Neal Cassady wrote his letters to me, all first person, fast, mad, confessional, completely serious, all detailed . . . I remembered also Goethe’s admonition, well Goethe’s prophecy that the future literature of the West would be confessional in nature . . . Cassady also began his early youthful writing with attempts at slow, painstaking, and all-that-crap craft business, but got sick of it like I did, seeing it wasn’t getting out his guts and heart the way it felt coming out . . . We also did so much fast talking between the two of us, on tape recorders, way back in 1952, and listened to them so much, we both got the secret of LINGO in telling a tale and figured that was the only way to express the speed and tension and ecstatic tomfoolery of the age.” [6]
     Ginsberg’s phrase “angelical ravings” combines two elements that might at first seem incompatible. He promises his poetry is “angelical,” renewing for his age the old prophetic role of the poet, dominant in all traditional and oral societies and recalled by medieval Christian apologists, then by the Romantics, Whitman, and fin-de-siècle aesthetes. The promise is that poetry provides access to a level of truth unavailable by other means. Whether the information the poet passes along is said to derive from a god or goddess, a muse, a shamanic journey, a vision, the unconscious, or another privileged source, it is thought to be revelation. All theories that literature can provide a unique storehouse of information must rest on some such claim of a specialized artistic insight.
     The second term in Ginsberg’s formula “ravings” emphasizes the gap between the the hip and the square. To the Romantic the artist is alienated, misunderstood, likely to appear “crazy” to most members of society. Of course, in a sense the marginalization of art means that one must forego the conventional rewards of salary and prestige to practice poetry, and, since the Romantic era, artists have increasingly embraced an identity as counter-cultural.
     The value of such a special perspective, varying from the norm, was recognized with the arrival of the twentieth century and Du Bois’ theory of double-consciousness. Even apart from issues of race, the last hundred years has seen the proliferation of a series of ironic aesthetic systems that likewise see phenomena both in the conventional way and in another: the camp, the kitsch, and the hip. Each assumes that most will decode the object in one way, but that some will have a more complex reaction, containing but not limited by that first concept.
     The hip cultivated a sort of double consciousness in which any experience can seem both utterly inconsequential and profoundly meaningful. This simultaneously detached and deeply engaged regard for everyday reality is also called goofing (see Philip Whalen’s Goof Book) or, using Heinlein’s term, grokking (used prominently in Wolfe’s fundamentally derisive The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test).
     Jack Kerouac’s story “The Time of the Geek” defines a sort of trinity of hoodlum, junkie, and poet. [7] Each of the three is a Romantic outsider, a nonconformist who has a vision that does not coincide with the received truth of his society. The poet Leon Levinsky – an Allen Ginsberg figure – relates his “mad description” of the Nickel-O, a Times Square amusement center where, at four in the morning, patrons enter solely to be “sheltered from the darkness.” They look “with that sightless stare that comes from too much horror.” “Everyone looks like a Zombie. . . seeking each other . . . but so stultified by their upbringings somehow, or by the disease of the age, that they can only stumble about and stare indignantly at one another.” “Everybody looks like a geek.” [8] The poet offers to demonstrate though his “subway experiment” that “the atomic disease has already made great headway.” [9] In the subway car Levinsky begins staring at a stuffy old gent through a hole in his newspaper and proceeds to tear long strips from the page with a look of serious concentration, galvanizing his fellow riders in self-consciousness with his “mad” display. The only ones who understand his gesture are the semi-enlightened ones: a child, a young student, a black man, and a lover (with a box of candy).
     In an insane world, one with Auschwitz and Hiroshima, ultimately one that includes one’s own most perilous and peculiar human existence, the most significant move will appear to be mad. (Salvador Dalí commented, “There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.”) The straight people in the subway car seek refuge in comforting (but in the end illusory) received ideas, and fidget uncomfortably in the face of irregular behavior, while the hip vision, available only to a few, revels in a direct confrontation with reality, what Burroughs called in his introduction to Naked Lunch “a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.”
     The essence of the hip perspective is the claim, annoying to squares, that one has a more accurate “inside” perspective, allowing apprehension of a greater part of the truth than is vouchsafed to others, perhaps even the Whole Truth. This need not occur wholly in the realm of the page. When Aldous Huxley visits the World’s Largest Drugstore, a Rexall’s at Beverley and La Cienega, tripping on mescaline during the early 1950s, the everyday banality of the scene contrasts dramatically with the vision of his altered consciousness. Coming upon a “large, pale-blue” late-model American car, he sees neither a useful tool nor a desirable possession. “At the sight of it, I was suddenly overcome with enormous merriment. What complacency, what an absurd self-satisfaction beamed from those bulging surfaces of glossiest enamel! Man had created the thing in his own image – or rather in the image of his favorite character in fiction.” [10]
     But the hip person’s double insight does not require such a popular target as the image of our most swollen consumerism, the American automobile, immense, wasteful, and showy. Gazing at a simple lawn chair, Huxley finds it “inexpressibly wonderful, wonderful to the point, almost, of being terrifying. And suddenly I had an inkling of what it must feel like to be mad.” [11] The disjunction between ordinary and altered consciousness registers as apparent madness, just as in the Beat formulae.
Ginsberg follows his Romantic forebears in the extravagance of his claims. To him the poet’s “angelical ravings” reveal “the secrets of individual imagination,” which are equivalent to “unconditioned Spirit” and thus to “the music of the Spheres.” “Who denies the music of the spheres denies poetry, denies man, & spits on Blake, Shelley, Christ, & Buddha.” [12] This assertion ignores the fact that language is itself entirely conventional, and just as there is no necessary link between signifier and signified, but only a code to be learned, similarly in literature the meaning of rhythms and sounds and associations does not arise spontaneously but rather is acquired through familiarity with a body of poetry. Literature’s codes are collectively constructed over time; the claim of utter self-revelation is an ancient rhetorical device.
     The corpus of work identified with the Beats did establish a new pattern for the poetic sensibility. The hip persona is defined by the distance between his vision and the dominant world-view of his time, claiming a superior insight, a prophetic vision which, for all its power, is always out of step with the commonplaces of his age. Though it mythologizes the man in the street, in the end the hip attitude insists on art’s marginalization since only a small coterie can be privy to the secrets of life. Once Kerouac’s prophecy in Dharma Bums “I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans” came more-or-less true ten years later or so, the populist Haight-Ashbury wave left virtually no literary remains. Even among the rock songs, most of the best were old blues numbers.
     The Beat claim to spontaneity and sincerity is in fact one of the oldest rhetorical devices. Kerouac advising “no pause to think of proper word,” “not ‘selectivity’ of expression but following free deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought, swimming in sea of English with no discipline” [13] or Ginsberg’s celebrated dictum from Chogyam Trungpa, “First thought, best thought,” are in fact identical to the after-dinner speaker who says “unaccustomed as I am to public speaking” or who pretends to discard the written speech to extemporize. Literary statements along these lines occur throughout poetry’s history. Wordsworth suggested something similar when he spoke of making poetry of “the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement,” though for him the poet has “a more comprehensive soul” than others. [14] When Sidney began his highly conventionalized Astrophel and Stella, saying “‘Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart, and write,’” he was striking a pose.
     What had seemed innovative in the early fifties now looks like another swing of the pendulum between classicism and romanticism. Social norms have altered so that virtually no content is forbidden or even capable of producing scandal. Furthermore, much of what had seemed not only startling in technique in the forties and fifties has now been assimilated. Not only has Kerouac’s image been used for advertisements for the Gap, On the Road is now assigned to reluctant high school classes, and footnotes bloom at the bottom of textbook reprintings of Howl. [15] The excitement with which my generation received Beat writing is unavailable today. Indeed, it seems to me that no new writing elicits a comparable response.



1.. According to his 1958 Partisan Review essay “The Know-Nothing Bohemians” Kerouac is handicapped by “his simple inability to express anything in words.” To him the Beat movement suffers from, of all things, “a pathetic poverty of feeling.” They are “young men who can’t think straight and so hate anyone who can.” The basic issue is whether one is “for or against intelligence itself.” His essay is so vituperative and wide of the mark that it reads today as pure bluster.
In fact many of the best more traditional poets such as Berryman, Roethke, and Lowell altered their practice and adopted the confessional content and the open forms of the counter-culture.

2. John Clellon Homes, “This is the Beat Generation,” New York Times Magazine, November 16, 1952.

3. See The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men, edited by Gene Feldman and Max Gartenberg (New York: Citadel) 1958, p. 323-338.

4. p. 12, The Sullen Art, interviews by David Ossman (New York: Corinth) 1963

5. Not only was Corso nominally Catholic, but the cemetery had been closed to new burials for fifty years, but Corso’s friends managed to make him an exception.

6. See Kerouac’s May 22, 1951 letter and his Paris Review interview, 1968. Kerouac complains about others having lost this marvelous letter, but a good piece of it may be read at http://staff.oswego.org/ephaneuf/web/Beat%20Miscellany/Cassady,%20Neal%20-%20Joan%20Anderson%20Letter.pdf

7. Apart from opium users Coleridge, Shelley, de Quincey, and Crabbe, great jazz artists had sanctified the sensitive heroin addict. See also the glorified hoodlum of Algren’s Chicago: City on the Make who, upon hearing his death sentence tells the judge “’I knew I’d never get to be twenty-one anyhow’ – and snapped his bubble-gum.” (p. 22 of the 1961 Contact edition). Even more remarkable is Norman Mailer’s “existential” justification in “The White Negro” for “two strong eighteen-year-old hoodlums” who conspire “to beat in the brains of a candy-store keeper.”

8. Page 87-88, The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men, edited by Gene Feldman and Max Gartenberg (New York: Citadel) 1958.  The meaning of geek that borders nerd has eclipsed the weird old usage Kerouac intended. Though in 1965 Dylan used the carnival meaning in "Highway 61 Revisited," it now requires a footnote to inform readers that a geek was a sort of degraded “wild man” who opened a freak show, biting the head off live chickens. As Leslie Fiedler noted in Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self, “But ANYONE, merely by altering consciousness can become a Geek, become for others the Freak he has always felt himself to be.” (346)

9. The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men, p. 93.

10. Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (New York and Evanston: Harper Colophon Edition, 1963), p. 59-60.

11. The Doors of Perception, p. 54

12. Allen Ginsberg, “Notes for Howl and Other Poems,” in The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, edited by Donald M. Allen, 417.

13. From “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” Black Mountain Review 1957.

14. “Preface to Lyrical Ballads.”

15. A teen-age fan of Kurt Cobain who had told me that he was forced to read “some boring book” by his English teacher eventually revealed that the title was On the Road. His teacher doubtless had his own enthusiasm and may have puzzled over the students’ indifference in precisely the same way that his own teacher a generation earlier had wondered why the youth did not properly appreciate Tennyson.

Baby Boomer Reads the Beats

     The term baby boomer has been stretched these days to include people born as late as even 1960, but when I was very young people said simply “post-war baby.” My brother was a “war baby,” which sounded considerably more dashing, while my birth date – August 13, 1946 -- came almost exactly nine months after my father’s return from a devastated Europe.
     My parents had come from the rural Midwest, but I grew up in an affluent suburb where my father and the fathers of all my friends donned suits with starched white shirts and fedoras to board commuter trains to travel to their desks in the city. A boy seemed destined in those Eisenhower years to take The Road to Miltown and become The Organization Man, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. The increasing prosperity that continued for twenty-five years after WWII and the dominant role the USA had come to play in the world allowed many Americans to feel life was good in spite of racism and the threat of nuclear holocaust.
     A number of us middle-class laddies had been instilled with a love of reading with the encouragement of mothers who figured education would guarantee us our place in the grand American sun. I was among the many of my generation who proceeded to discover fascinating realms, both revealing and transgressive, in recent American writing. Though I got into everything from Gilgamesh to Updike, from Zhuangzi to Achebe, I do recall the unique excitement of finding in Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Corso a sensibility in which I felt at home (though I would not say, and I hope I do not hear for yet another time “Reading On the Road changed my life”). When The New American Poetry, 1945-1960 came out, I discovered further new directions. I read and reread Allen’s anthology and wrote to the small presses listed in the back to buy texts that allowed even a suburban bourgeois to feel hip.
     I was excited not merely by seeing voices in print that supported my views of art, vision, revolution, sex and love, and altered consciousness. I loved the return to the performative in poetry, to readings, with or without music, sometimes using the loping declamatory line of Ginsberg’s great long poems. I was charmed by the use of the personal in poetry – poems that mentioned friends as Sappho, the troubadours, and the Dadaists had done. The new poets’ pure joy of language seemed to me the very foundation of the aesthetic utterance, and my friends and I reenacted “Poets Hitchhiking on the Highway” while wandering suburban streets where few pedestrians passed. I couldn’t get over the Whitmanic catalogues in “Canticle for the Waterbirds,” the Wolfean rhapsodies in Kerouac, or the stately cadences of Robert Duncan.
     At the age of twelve I read copies of Paul Krassner’s The Realist a subversive high school teacher risked firing by giving to my brother. I devoured Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself (1959) which included “The White Negro.” I listened to jazz and blues, but also to transparent red lp recordings from Fantasy in Berkeley featuring Ferlinghetti and Rexroth.
     Paul Carroll’s Big Table originated in the banned issue featuring Kerouac and Burroughs (1959 again) of the Chicago Review. Carroll proceeded not only to put out four more issues that maintained the high standards of the first, but also hosted a poetry reading series at the Second City on Monday evenings which the owners must have figured would be a small loss even if audiences were few. I attended these readings as a teenager, hearing some great writers while sipping the over-priced non-alcoholic beverages that bought the customer a table for the evening. (I recall several years later feeling similarly uneasy in Greenwich Village’s Gaslight.)
     I began my work in literary translation with a particular admiration for Kenneth Rexroth as an exemplar of a tradition at once scholarly and creative, erudite yet rebellious, descending from Ezra Pound and extending on to Paul Blackburn and, I felt, to me. Yet I have written almost nothing on the Beats; I always felt they were too intimate, too close to being me and my friends to analyze from the outside.
    Later, during the 70s, I was involved with with Kush (Steven Kushner), Artful Goodtimes (Bontempi) and others in the Cloud House group in San Francisco which maintained a poetry gallery storefront and practiced guerrilla poetry techniques, principally street readings. Cloud House also sought out old North Beach poets, some fallen into SRO hotel isolation, for the mutual benefit of two generations of the hip. In this way I met people like Kirby Doyle, who had appeared in both Allen’s anthology and Carroll’s banned Chicago Review and had published his own collection Sapphobones. As the earth’s turned, he gave work to the Haight’s Communications Company and lived in communes in Marin County. Michael McClure said of him in memoriam, “Kirby was the gentle, human lion and pater familias of this scene [speaking of 1958] which was as close to magic as anyone could get.”
     Bob Kaufman used to hang out at Cloud House as well, dear Bob Kaufman who eschewed publication and when young offered his poems in his original poet’s voice to drivers whose windows were, in those days without air-conditioning, open, whether their minds were or not. His vow of silence had ended by the time of Cloud House but he had little to say. He had, I suppose, become accustomed to spreading his beatitude silently. And there were others less celebrated. I recall an old amphetamine veteran who mumbled so that we often could not understand him, but we knew he had been through much, and understood.

      We drove up to Elymakee, Gary Snyder’s place in the Sierras above Nevada City, twenty miles off the nearest paved road, but neighbor to Allen Ginsberg’s property and the tracts belonging to various gurus, devotees, and literary hangers-on, where we read under the full moon and a Tibetan flag.
     The performance poetry scene is clear in its Beat lineage, and all of us who have striven to restore poetry to its traditional place in the air recognize what a dramatic shift it was in the 50s for poetry readings to appear apart from universities with their occasional literary stars and ongoing pin-striped faculty readings. In bars and cafes, book stores and living rooms, poetry became not only audible but also participatory. Everyone who had taken the trouble to chase after the words had a vision to relate. The open reading is an integral part of contemporary poetry series. The boorish sometimes arrive after the main reading is nearly done, and the slightly less boorish come on time but page through their own work while the featured reader is on. And all this surely happened during the 1950s as well. But everyone understands that we are all the children of the Beats; we remember how one after another, the practitioners of tight and intellectual verses like (Robert Lowell) were converted to free composition and to freer statement of what most needed to be said. It is difficult for younger people to whom the Beats are simply a literary chapter to realize the scorn and derision these writers attracted when they were themselves younger. Were they the last literary generation with the ability to shock?
     To me, a most engaged partisan especially in my callow years, the Beats were the most recent team fielded by the Dionysians whose competition with the Apollonians had always to be refought on the printed page as well as in our minds. Perhaps I am a typical sexagenarian in that I find myself these days reading more old books than new, but the Beat writers I encountered in my prepubescence have never lost their savor. I don’t doubt that the weakness is mine if I have found so little later writing that for me says as much as well.
     This reaction is not inevitable, though. I was visiting the home of a Southern California super-affluent cousin of my wife’s when the alienated teen-age son who secluded himself to listen to Kurt Cobain excused himself from going out for dinner by saying he had to do a report for English. Incommunicative as he had been, I though we might have a bit of common ground, and I asked his assigned topic. “Awww, it’s just some boring book my English teacher gave us,” he said. “What’s the title?” I pressed on. “Some stupid thing I’m supposed to read . . . it’s called On the Road.”